Page 29 of The Corruption of Hollis Brown

Onerous

The disgust was too overwhelming for Hollis to continue his instinctual scream; he was shocked into silence as Walt walked his body up the stairs.

Walt took a few steps toward Hollis’s parents’ bedroom, then paused, turned Hollis’s body around, and chose the correct door. He shut it behind them, placed the mug on Hollis’s desk, and took off his coat.

Then Walt closed Hollis’s eyes and breathed in deeply.

This room doesn’t smell nearly as rank as most other guys’ rooms. Could be cleaner though. Your ma seems nice.

Spend a lot of time in teenage boys’ rooms, you pedo? Hollis couldn’t control his mouth.

I’m seventeen, Walt replied. Kind of. Choosing people around the age I feel is more comfortable. So yeah, I’ve endured a lot of rank-smelling rooms. And I can’t just immediately clean them; people get suspicious.

Walt took a sip of the hot sweet milk and ran a curious finger over some of the books in Hollis’s cheap Walmart bookshelf.

You seem calmer. That’s good.

It will pass, Hollis snapped.

Hollis could feel the muscles of his face shifting into a smile again, and it made his skin crawl.

I hate you. I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you.

Walt scrubbed a hand over the back of Hollis’s neck and stopped talking to him. He just sat in Hollis’s desk chair and finished his milk as Hollis shouted obscenities at him inside.

Then he stood up and took a deep breath.

“Here we go.”

He left Hollis’s room and headed for the bathroom.

Grunt

Walt shut the bathroom door, turned on the light, then looked in the mirror.

He ran his hands over every inch of Hollis’s face. Touched his bushy eyebrows, the freckles that covered his cheeks and chin, ran his fingertip down the curve of his nose, tapped the bump on its slope gently.

He pressed a thumb to Hollis’s lips, dragged across them in a burst of sensation. Hollis began to weep, overwhelmed.

Walt made a soft hush noise, but Hollis cried harder. He couldn’t help it.

Walt looked inside Hollis’s mouth at his teeth, lifted his tongue, fingered the back of his throat to test his gag reflex. He swiped along the edge of Hollis’s ear—a thing Hollis had never done on purpose—and his knees involuntarily buckled. Walt caught him and stood again.

He tilted Hollis’s head back and clasped the full arch of his neck, drummed against the jut of his collarbone, then dragged his hands through Hollis’s thin, limp brown hair.

Everything about this was so horrifying and intense that it took Hollis a moment to notice that his eyes were the wrong color.

They were brown.

Walt’s eyes.

Hollis’s had always been green.

Hollis stared at them, hard. He had only ever seen Walt at night, by streetlamp, with winter shadows crossing his face. Or whoever’s face that was.

He’d thought it was strange for someone who was colored so light in every other way to have such dark eyes.

In a wave of despair, he knew it would take a while for anyone in his life to notice: his green wasn’t bright; it was close enough to brown. But Hollis knew his own face, and a change was a change. Mercifully, Walt let him lean them a bit closer to look.