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“Tell me about Leon Purdue,” Theo said.
Dalton twisted around, clawing at Theo’s arm now, squealing, “Let me go, let me go!”
The key was to use your knees to control their body, to collapse their elbows if they tried to brace themselves. That had been another lesson from the bad old days.
Water splashed. Dalton thrashed. His feet drummed against the tile.
The pull, when it came, was so much stronger than Theo expected that it moved his whole body. He came off balance, lost his grip on Dalton, and thudded into the side of the stall. The toilet paper holder dug into his hip. Pain didn’t make its way down to the deep-dark place, but it registered as a distant red light.
Auggie’s face was inches from Theo’s, and in a whisper shout, he demanded, “Are you out of your mind? You’re going to kill him!”
Theo reacted without thinking. He broke Auggie’s hold. Auggie stumbled into the stall partition, and at first, the only thing on his face was surprise. Then it closed, folding hurt and rage into smaller and smaller parcels until there was nothing left. And from that place inside himself, deep down at the bottom of that hole, Theo tried to say he was sorry.
But what he heard himself say was “I told you to wait outside.”
Auggie’s eyes looked liquid, but he didn’t cry. He pushed off from the partition, and his steps splashed away. A moment later, the door breathed shut on its closer.
Dalton was sputtering and crying. Water dripped. It was like waking, like someone had turned a switch and Theo was back at the front of his brain again. The world pressed in on Theo: the faint hint of urine, the echoes coming back from the tile, the ache in Theo’s knee, in his hand. He’d need to ice it. Auggie was always kind about packing the ice; he knew just how Theo liked it when his knee was acting up.
Theo dragged himself back from those thoughts. He turned his attention to Dalton, who was starting to cry in earnest—humiliation and fear working on him now as the initial shock wore off.
“This is the second time,” Theo said, and he tried to make the words hard, but what he felt was tired and old and sick of himself. “There won’t be a third. Tell me about Leon Purdue.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Dalton said, crying harder. “I didn’t even touch him. He needed a place, that’s all. I swear to God! I didn’t do anything!”
“He needed a place to stay.”
“His parents divorced. He was emancipated. He wouldn’t stay with his mom, wouldn’t tell me why, so he was staying with Merlin and Ambyr. Then they got into a huge fight, and Merlin threw him out.”
Merlin, the wizard of shitty dads, Theo thought. And Ambyr, dealer and part-time influencer.
“And?” Theo asked.
“He was at the Pretty Pretty one night. I knew he was underage; I wasn’t going to mess with that. Plus, he’d been a student, and you never know. But he came up to me. He wanted to talk, that’s all. He told me.” Dalton wiped his face. “I’d had a few drinks. I thought I was being nice. And he was so sweet.”
“And it was the perfect setup: your live-in twink, on demand.”
“No! I didn’t—I wouldn’t have done that.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
Dalton looked up at him. With his hair lying in scraggly strands against his scalp, and his concealer ruined by the water, he looked old. “He’s a child!”
“What happened?”
“He left.”
“Come on, you’re going to have to do better than that.”
“I swear. I swear to God! I came home from school one day, and he was gone. All his stuff was gone. He packed up and left.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right,” Theo said.
When he started to move, Dalton squeaked and drew back, trying to wedge himself between the toilet and the side of the stall. “I’m telling you I don’t know! His dad! Merlin!”
