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I whipped my wrist to check my antique Philip Patek. “I think we’ve played house enough for today. I’m going to be late for school.” My chair scraped the travertine tiles as I abruptly stood up. “Is James ready?”
“Uh yes, he should be out front,” Reginald said.
“Have a good first day,” Mags said.
“Yep.” I pushed in my chair, that stupid remorse nagging at me like a toothache. “Thanks for the coffee,” I mumbled. “And the gym and the guesthouse and…everything else.”
Their surprised, touched smiles made my chest tight, and I turned to make an escape go before anyone said another word. Beatriz stopped me, pressing a small brown paper bag into my hands.
“What’s this?”
She gave a confused smile, warm and gentle. “It is lunch, meu doce garoto.”
Lunch, my sweet boy.
I stared. Beatriz had made me a sack lunch, like mothers had been doing for their kids since time immemorial. My heart clenched tighter, and my jaw worked soundlessly—for once my chattering brain had nothing to say.
She patted my cheek. “Have a good day, Mr. Holden.”
“Right. Thanks.”
I hurried out of the kitchen, seeking the reassuring weight of the flask in my coat pocket. Before I reached the front door, I took a deep, fortifying pull. The unsettling feeling in my chest drowned in the vodka that burned a path down my throat, the sharp edges of reality blurring slightly.
That’s enough of that, thanks very much.
Kindness, I’d come to know in my seventeen-and-a half-million years on this planet, had only been ever used as a tool to get something out of me. The docs at the sanitarium used it to encourage me to spill my guts in therapy, and my parents…
Charles and Estelle Parish had turned on the warmth just before sending me to conversion therapy. They shocked me with their sudden care and concern so that my naïve fifteen-year-old-self tearfully agreed to let a sadist who called himself Coach Braun take me to Alaska where he and his “counselors” reached into my chest with cold hands and tried to rip out a fundamental piece of me. A part of me that was as essential as my blood and bones but a “reckless lifestyle choice” to my parents. That night, after they explained the camp, Mom actually cried and Dad touched me, right on the cheek, for the first time in years. So I agreed. Anything to have more of that.
“Fool me once,” I muttered as I walked down the driveway and away from that awful night.
I took another pull from my flask, but the day was annoyingly brilliant. Ocean salt laced the air, and mountains draped in forest cradled this city by the sea, forcing me to acknowledge its beauty. Mags and Reg were stuffy and sort of ridiculous, but they were also trying their best to take care of me. And Beatriz and her goddamn mothering… What the hell was that about? I’d fallen through the looking glass from a cold, loveless wasteland into a world of sack lunches and parental figures wishing me a good day.
It won’t last. Give it a month before they try to get rid of you.
The driver my parents had hired for the year lounged against the side of a sleek black Cadillac in a black suit and white shirt, smoking a cigarette.
“Morning, James. Got a light?”
“Good morning, Mr. Parish. Of course.”
James Costa was pushing fifty with salt and pepper hair and a tough mobster look about him. We’d been getting weird looks all summer as he shuttled me around to explore the city and its tourist-packed Boardwalk. I imagined how the two of us would look, rolling up to Santa Cruz Central High School in this black sedan.
I lit a Djarum off his lighter and inhaled. “They’re going to think we’re mafia, James. I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing.”
“If I may say, sir, I wasn’t under the impression you gave a fuck about what anyone thinks.”
“Too true, my good man.”
When we finished our cigarettes, I ground mine out under my boot and James opened the back door for me.
“Welp. High school awaits. Can you see it, James? Me? In high school, like a normal guy?”
“Not especially, sir. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said, climbing in. “I’m rather curious about it myself.”
It only took until first break to know that I’d never fit in at Santa Cruz Central High.
