The Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, Youth Services, is a crucial resource for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other queer and questioning youth. From providing free meals for those in need to readying students for a career through job counseling and volunteer work, we do everything we can to offer opportunities to those who need them.
—Acheson LGBTQ+ Center official website
It took Nick a long time to learn to lie.
If he was going to be honest, it took him a long time to learn most of the things that seemed to come naturally to everyone else. Like realizing someone meant “Fuck off” when they pretended he wasn’t there, or how to speak without rehearsing the wording of a sentence a dozen times, or figuring out that sometimes it was better to make up something that wasn’t true and pretend it was. He’d gotten good at compensating for it over the years. He’d had to. Being autistic was just another thing his parents could hold over his head, could carve into his skin as they reminded him what a failure he was.
But lying was different. Because once Nick learned to lie, he became disturbingly good at it.
He’d spent so long memorizing the rules of interacting with people that he could twist them to his advantage. There are scripts people don’t even realize they follow, and if you fit that script, or tweak it just enough to throw them off, they drop their guard. There are certain ways to say things, and if you get them right, you can say whatever you want. People hear what they want to and fill in the gaps themselves. There are patterns. There are tells. It is embarrassingly easy.
That’s why lying is his job and not Erin’s. Erin’s job is to make the truth palatable, and if she can’t do that, then it’s Nick’s job to hide it.
Speaking of Erin, Nick has just woken up and is looking for her when something happens in the kitchen. Nick sticks his head in to see if Erin is there, which she is not, just in time for Calvin to shove Aisha against the sink and scream, “Fucking liar!”
Sadaf and Carly jump up from their breakfast so quickly, it sends their chairs screeching back on the tile. The sound feels like worms crawling up Nick’s spine, but there’s no time to do anything about it because Calvin has his hands on Aisha and no, no, absolutely not. Nick bolts across the room and grabs Calvin in a headlock, one arm under the jaw and one on the back of the head.
Calvin twists in his grasp as Nick drags him away. He spits, curses, and claws at Nick’s sleeves. “Liar! Goddamn fucking liar—let me go!”
Aisha braces herself on the counter, gulping down air. Sadaf tucks against her side while Carly stands in front, one hand on Aisha’s shoulder to keep her steady.
“Stop,” Nick snarls. Calvin’s back is flush against his chest, and the heat and pressure is suffocating. “Stop.”
Calvin jams an elbow into Nick’s ribs. Nick grabs the elbow and wrenches it back until Calvin howls.
Nick says, “Cut the shit.”
He drops Calvin to the floor, where the boy coughs and chokes, pounding his fist on the tile. The first thing Nick wants to do is shake himself out, get the awful feeling off his skin, but Aisha is trembling, which means Nick has to keep it together. Okay. He can do that for her.
Calvin whines from the floor, “You almost broke my arm.”
“You’re right.” Nick does not say that the move would have simply dislocated it. “I almost did. If you have a problem, you come to me. Not my people. Me. Am I clear?”
“Your people,” Calvin spits. He flings a hand at the skeletal pantry. Aisha flinches. “Fuck you. Where the hell is our food?”
Nick’s throat slams shut. Of course it’s about food. When one person finally snaps, it means everyone is thinking it, at least a little bit. Seraph was right; they’re going to starve out by summer if they don’t do something drastic, and soon. The mental image of losing people to a lack of water when the rains stop coming, to heatstroke when summer breaks, to starvation when the animals begin hiding from the heat and the Vanguard turns their back—it hits like an iron pipe to the back of his skull, every time.
But nobody gets to put a hand on his people.
“There is enough,” Nick says. “And we will be getting more.” Every word is careful. Every word is perfect. He doesn’t know if he’s lying, so he has to pretend that he is. Lying keeps Aisha safe—it keeps them all safe. “If you touch her again, we’re going to have a lot more problems than a broken arm.”
Calvin says nothing to that, so Nick turns to Aisha. “Are you okay?”
“I guess,” Aisha manages, which is also a lie, but Nick doesn’t press. He just nods.
“If he does this again, you come tell me immediately.”
Aisha’s voice hitches when she speaks. “Can I go back to my room?”
“Of course. Sadaf, Carly, go with her.”
Then it’s just him and Calvin. Calvin’s face is wrinkled in anger and pain.
“That was a bad decision you just made,” Nick notes. “You won’t make it again.”
That’s when Erin comes running in, still in the silk scarf she sleeps in, her mask lopsided on her face. “I just saw Aisha crying,” she says. “What happened?”
Nick spends a lot of time being grateful to Erin, and this is why. She sits on the office floor with him, silent and un-pitying, while he pulls himself together.
His lizard isn’t enough, so he digs his palms into the rough carpet until his skin stops trying to crawl off his body. The Vanguard, the Grace, then Calvin. He has to keep it together. His job is to keep it together. He scrapes his palms red on the carpet, shakes them out, and presses them against his temples, right where he can feel the heartbeat pounding in his skull.
“Can you talk?” Erin asks.
Nick shakes his head. He can, technically, but the idea of it, God, the idea of it. He wants to hide his whole face behind a mask, not just everything below the eyes. Cover the eyes too. Cover everything.
Erin says, “Okay.”
It takes a while for the vice to loosen its stranglehold on him. It happens slowly, the threat of a shutdown fading like shadows come noon: still there, technically, but not nearly as noticeable. His breathing slows. He doesn’t feel like he’s drowning anymore. His leg is still bouncing, but it always does that.
Nick says, “All right.”
Erin says, “Aisha’s okay. Faith offered to buddy up for a few days, keep an eye on her. Sadaf offered too, but we’ve been keeping her busy lately.”
That makes sense. Faith has been glued to Aisha’s side since Trevor died. She wouldn’t even leave her long enough to go out to the Vanguard—she had been his first pick, but she refused to budge. A sudden knot presents itself: Are they dating? Not that he particularly cares about the details, but he needs to know for strategic reasons. As soon as he tries to inspect the tangle, though, it fizzles out. It’ll be easier to ask Salvador. Xe knows a lot about these things.
“Good,” Nick finally says. He puts his work voice on, the low one that never wavers or cracks. If he can’t cover his whole face with a mask, this is the next best thing. “I’ll keep an eye on Calvin.”
Erin leans against the desk, studying him. She’s picking at the ends of her braids, which is never good. Nick knows how delicate her hair is. She must be really stressed. “You have better things to keep an eye on. Like Benji.”
Seraph. That’s why Nick was looking for Erin in the first place. The whole reason he crawled out of bed this early in the morning, even after he spent half the night out in the city.
“Seraph will be joining the Watch today,” he says. “And it’ll be going to the church.” Erin cringes at the word it, but they’d had this argument already and agreed to hate the other’s opinion on the topic in silence. “Just wanted to keep you updated.”
“I was wondering when you…,” she mumbles, then stops. “Wait, where?”
“The church. Next week.”
“I know that,” Erin says. “What I mean is, why?”
The way she’s looking at him, like he’s a child missing something obvious, makes him hate himself a little more, so he pulls the lizard from his pocket to play with. It’s the least rude of his stimming options in the middle of a conversation, and even with Erin, he finds himself trying not to be too autistic.
And the thing is, there are a lot of ways to answer her question. Because Seraph is desperate to prove itself loyal. Because it wants to be helpful and offering it the opportunity would twist it around their finger. Because there’s no reason not to use Seraph while they have it.
Because they might not have Seraph forever.
He decides on, “I’ve seen what it can do.” The memory of the abomination pressing its face to his bubbles up, all the teeth and skin and stench. “It’ll make the church survivable.”
Erin doesn’t respond. Nick looks up from the lizard—which has fourteen blue beads and thirty-six yellow beads, which he knows because he’s counted them a thousand times—to find her staring at nothing.
“We shouldn’t have done this,” she finally says. “This was a bad idea.”
A heavy weight settles in Nick’s stomach. “Explain.”
“Him,” Erin says, and the pronoun feels pointed. “Benji. Seraph. This whole mess.” She shakes her hands helplessly; not the way Nick shakes his hands, but the way non-autistic people do, like she’s trying to conjure something out of thin air. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You don’t have to lie to it,” Nick says. That must be what she’s upset about. All he has to do is reassure her. “That’s my job.”
She breaks out the patient tone of voice that means he’s missing something. “And I’m grateful, but that’s not what I mean.”
It hits. Again. The iron pipe to the back of the head.
He says, “You feel bad for it.”
It’s an awful thing to say. Saying it out loud means the words are going to stick. The words are going to stay there in his head, and he’s going to keep thinking about them, and he can’t let himself do that.
“I feel like shit,” Erin says. “It’s cruel!” Nick doesn’t flinch, only because he’s been called cruel before. “Asking Benji to risk his life when he’s practically dying? When we’re wondering if his dead body will convince the Vanguard not to abandon us? There has to be some other way. Something else we can do.”
Nick told her it would be difficult. He said that Seraph would play at being human, and they couldn’t let themselves be weak. They’ve spent the past year killing Angels. This one should be no different.
It can’t be different.
“This is our best chance.” Nick jams his finger into the carpet. “Do you want to let everybody starve?”
“No, I don’t!” Her chest heaves. “Nick, look. Logically, I understand. I do. Don’t pretend like I don’t understand exactly where you’re coming from because I do. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who is fine with sacrificing a kid.”
Nick’s face is doing that thing where he can’t figure out how to move it, and he is so grateful for his mask because she can’t see the way he’s sucking on his teeth and chewing on his lips as if that will help, which it doesn’t.
“You get me,” she says. “Right?”
Deep breaths. “I do. But this is different. Seraph isn’t a person.”
The words snag on the way out. He tamps down how Seraph looked at him under the pavilion, the way it sagged in relief when Nick offered a little bit of himself in return—I’m autistic—to ease the tension in its shoulders. It looks like a teenager, it sounds like a teenager, it acts like a boy exactly his age, reflecting his worst nightmare back at him, desperately grasping for a friend, and Nick cannot be that.
Nick can be anything else. He can be cruel. He can build an entire personality out of violence and disconnection, convince everyone that he is unfeeling and uncaring, but he will not betray a friend. He has never gone that low, and he never will. The moment he does, he will be no better than the sons of bitches that burned this world to the ground.
Therefore, Seraph cannot be human.
Erin sniffles. Nick never knows what to do when people cry. It scares him.
She says, “He reminds me of you.”
No.
“You see it,” she says. “Right?”
Absolutely not. He refuses to listen to this from himself, and he absolutely will not hear it from her. He wants to beg her not to say things like this, because it will only make it harder for everyone, it will only make it harder for him, and he’ll be the one pulling the trigger if it comes to it, because he always is.
Nick says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You have to see it. It’s right there.”
He has seen it. How could he not? Under the pavilion, Nick almost kept talking. He wanted to tell Seraph everything. He wanted to say that it would be okay, that he’d been through it too. He understood the wild look in its eyes when it saw something it could protect, because he feels the same way every time someone comes to him for help. He understands, and if he so much as acknowledges it he will never forgive himself.
Why did he give it those bobby pins? Why did he reach out like that? What was he thinking?
“No,” he says.
“Nick—”
She reaches out to take him by the shoulder, but he jerks away and slams into the office door. She knows to ask before touching him. She knows that.
“Please,” she whispers.
Nick is silent. His jaw is locked, and there are no words in his head, just a storm of anger and gritting teeth and bones grinding in his knuckles. He tries to speak three times and fails, each time the thought burning away into ash before it can form the right shape. He counts the beads on the lizard without looking. Eventually, he pieces a sentence together word by word, bit by bit. The feathers tattooed on his back sear like a cattle brand. Like hellfire.
“Seraph will go to the church,” Nick manages, “and if it comes to it, it will be given to the Vanguard.”
That is his job. He will do his job.
