For Thanksgiving, Auggie flew home. The airports were a madhouse, his flights delayed, and the planes fully booked. By the time he got home, it was after one in the morning. Fer was smoking when he pulled up in the Escalade. He was in shorts and a Ramones tee, and his eyes were bloodshot and half closed.
“Are you stoned?” Auggie asked as he got in the SUV.
“I’m fucking exhausted is what I am,” Fer said.
“I could have taken an Uber.”
“Great. Great fucking idea. I’ll go home, and you take an Uber.”
“Jesus, Fer. I’m sorry.”
They didn’t talk the rest of the ride home, but the next day, Fer thawed. Things felt normal. Only they weren’t normal. Everything was different, and everything was worse.
On Wednesday, Auggie got together with Devin and Logan, and they did a reunion video. Auggie had thought it’d be fun to redo one of their early videos with a twist. They agreed, and they shot a version of the too-small shirt gag, only this time, they used their college t-shirts. It was a lot of fun until the end, when Logan threw a fit because, according to him, Auggie always got the best parts, and Devin just made a face like they’d already talked about this a hundred times. Auggie tried to point out all the times he’d written parts just for Devin and Logan. Then, when he got angry, he pointed out that he was the one doing all the creative work. The fight got so bad that Auggie finally left without any of it being resolved, and instead of going to a party with more of his high school friends, he went to bed early. In the middle of the night, he woke up and stared at the ceiling for over an hour. Then he rolled onto his side and deleted the video without posting it.
Thanksgiving started off all right. Chuy was in his room all day, sleeping off whatever shit he’d done the night before. Their mom was in the living room with her boy toy. Auggie and Fer picked up the premade meal, and they worked together in the kitchen to make the dishes that they hadn’t purchased: mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. Fer smoked a joint while they worked, and he looked more tired than ever, but at least he was talking and laughing and giving Auggie the usual amount of shit.
“I don’t get it, Augustus. Why this boner bro who’s like ten years older than you?”
“Dylan isn’t ten years older than me. He’s a senior. That’s, like, three years. Tops.”
“So what do you like about him? Does he have a huge dick or something?”
Auggie flicked mashed potatoes at him.
Laughing, Fer wiped his cheek clean. “Or is he your pussy boy? Auggie,” he moaned, “Auggie, yeah, pull my hair, Auggie!” He ended with a shrill scream.
In the other room, the sound of conversation cut off for a moment, then their mom started speaking again. This week’s flavor was named Carlos. When he laughed at something their mom said, Auggie made a face.
“If that’s what you sound like in bed,” Auggie told Fer, “no wonder you can’t keep a girlfriend.”
“Ha ha,” Fer said, which was so unlike him that Auggie looked up and was surprised to see the hurt in Fer’s face.
“Hey, wait, I was joking.”
“Fuck it. I know; just a little too close to home.” He gave the green bean gloop a giant stir. When Carlos laughed again, Fer stabbed the spoon into the mixture with vicious jabs.
“So, um,” Auggie said. “How are you?”
Instead of answering immediately, Fer picked up the stub of his joint and lit it. “I’m fine, Augustus. Tell me about this boy you like. You sound serious about him.”
“No, I want to hear—”
“Right this goddamn minute,” Fer said, “so I know whether or not I have to buy you a chastity cage.”
Auggie rolled his eyes, but he found himself telling Fer everything, even the things he hadn’t known how to put into words with Orlando: how he’d felt something right away when he met Dylan, and how he very rarely felt anything that strong, especially with guys his age; how that feeling had magnified every time they got close; how Dylan pushed him to be better, forced him to grow, challenged him; how he’d watched Dylan at parties, laughing when Dylan was goofy, but mostly just observing because Dylan was cool, Dylan was reserved, Dylan moved through crowds and stood out because he had that indefinable quality that made him seem like an adult in a room full of children; how he worried that something was wrong with him because he didn’t want to go on dates with guys his age.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Fer said. “Well, you’re a total fuckup and probably nothing more than a frat house cum bucket, but there’s nothing wrong with liking older guys. Jesus, Augustus, think about it. Who in their right mind would want to date most eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds? They’re kids; you’re light years ahead of them. Besides, you’ve obviously got a major daddy kink.”
“Jesus Christ, Fer! I don’t—you can’t—what the hell is wrong with you?”
Fer grinned, but it didn’t really make it to his eyes. “Just be careful, ok? It’s not just getting pressured into doing something you’re not ready for, although I’m worried about that too. A lot of guys, the ones interested in someone younger, they do it because they like the control it gives them.”
“Dylan’s not like that.”
Fer mimed jerking off.
“He’s not!”
“Whatever. Tell me again when he’s got his whole hand up your chute and you’re thanking him.”
“I honestly think you need to see a shrink. You are the weirdest person I have ever met.”
This time, Fer’s smile looked a little closer to real.
For a moment, Auggie wanted to tell him everything about Theo too. About watching the back of Theo’s neck in class and knowing the exact instant Wagner said something that Theo disagreed with. About the times he’d walked outside and headed toward Theo’s house without even realizing it. About the weirdest things that would remind him of Theo: the weave of the upholstery on the couches in the third-floor lounge; peanut butter toast; the sound of a page being turned in a quiet room. Mostly he wanted to tell Fer that he didn’t know what to do to stop hurting all the time.
Carlos’s laughter, loud and honking, broke the stillness. Fer made that face again.
“Fer,” Auggie said, “are you ok?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, really ok? Because I don’t think you are.”
Fer shrugged and spooned the green bean mixture into a casserole dish.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“What’s there to talk about, Augustus?”
“Why you’re smoking so much weed. Why you’re so tired. Why I think you’re really sad and maybe feeling helpless or scared or something. I don’t know. But it’s freaking me out a little.”
“The night before you got here,” Fer said, leaning on the counter with both hands, head down, “I had to drive to a rave and pick up Chuy because he’d OD’d again. Again. I make him carry that Narcan shit because if I didn’t, he’d be dead. And the week before that, he stole some fucking Gucci purse that Carlos gave Mom, and I had to track it down in Costa Mesa and haggle, fucking haggle, to buy it back because she was so sad she wouldn’t get out of bed. And if it’s not Chuy doing something messed up, it’s her, because she’s buying Carlos jewelry or she’s taking him on a cruise, or it’s Owen or Hayden or whoever it is that week, or she’s out of Xanax, or she’s just had a breakup and needs to go to a spa in Sedona. And if it’s not Mom—” He cut himself off.
“It’s me.”
“No.”
“It’s ok. I know I’m—I know I’m a lot for you to handle. I know I really annoy you, and I know you’re paying for everything, and I’m not responsible, and—”
“August Paul Lopez,” Fer said, looking up, then considering him, then pulling him into a hug. “You have donkey shit for brains.”
“Fer, why didn’t you tell me?”
Fer hadn’t let him go; he was holding on to Auggie with the kind of desperation that made Auggie think of a drowning man. “What was I going to say? Things have gone to shit since you left? They were already shit, but now Mom doesn’t even have to pretend to be responsible anymore, and Chuy—I mean, we both knew the way he was going. And I am apparently the most dislikable ass crumb ever to fall out of God’s pucker, because I can’t get a fucking second date to save my life.”
“Maybe it’s not you. Maybe it’s bad luck. It’s a numbers game, and you’ve got to keep trying.”
Fer just let out a slow breath.
“Although,” Auggie said, “you might want to ease up on the ass crumbs and puckers and chutes and cum guzzlers. On the first date, I mean.”
Fer hugged him tighter.
“Fer, I can’t breathe.”
Fer hugged him even tighter.
“Jesus, dummy, put me down.”
“You’re a good kid,” Fer said, squeezing even harder. “You deserve better than this fucktastrophe of a family. I hope you get boned like crazy by that way-too-old-for-you big-dicked bro you’re crushing on. I hope he lets you scarf down his ball hairs.”
For some reason, that made Auggie laugh so hard he started to cry, and then Fer was laughing too, and then both of them ended up lying on the tile, laughing until their mom came to see what was wrong. That just made them laugh harder.
After dinner, Chuy disappeared, and Auggie’s mom and Carlos left not much later. Fer and Auggie watched TV, both of them in sweats, Auggie with a blanket. Fer rolled a new joint, and when Auggie asked, he shrugged and passed it over. It must have been pretty strong because it hit Auggie quickly. They passed the joint back and forth until they had smoked it down to a roach and Auggie was stoned out of his mind. The TV was still on, but he was having a hard time tracking what he was seeing. Mostly, he just enjoyed the lights and colors, and then he was past even that, and he woke up in the middle of the night, in bed, and realized Fer had carried him there.
“Because I want to have a fucking life too, you fucking sperm-bank reject,” Fer shouted in the front room. “I’m sick as fuck of pulling your ass out of the fire.”
Chuy answered in a low voice, the words lost to Auggie.
“Get the fuck out of my sight,” Fer said. “I can’t even look at you right now.”
Quiet steps moved along the hall, past Auggie’s room, and then the next door closed.
It took a long time for Auggie to fall asleep after that.
When he woke, he checked his phone. For months now, he’d been trying to find someone in the Ozark Volunteers who could give him a lead on Cal’s dealer. To Auggie, it seemed like simple logic: the Volunteers controlled all the drug trade, and therefore, they ought to be able to identify who was selling to Cal. Even if the dealer hadn’t had anything to do with Cal’s death, he might still be able to fill in some of the holes in the days and weeks before the murder. If nothing else, he could give Auggie a more accurate sense of how deeply Cal was involved in drugs, and why the killer had tried to stage it to look like a deal gone bad.
Unfortunately, no matter how many usernames Auggie tried, no matter how well he parroted the language on the forums and social media groups that he visited, no one had taken the bait. Either they sensed the trap, or Auggie was simply targeting the wrong sectors.
Today wasn’t any different: no responses to his requests. Nothing that might point him in the right direction.
After snapping a quick wake-up selfie, Auggie rolled out of bed and made his way to the next room. The house was silent. Fer didn’t have work, so he was either still asleep or had already left for some other reason. Their mom—well, who the hell knew anymore.
Auggie didn’t bother knocking. He let himself into the room, which had a faint smell like burnt electrical components and, of course, weed. Chuy was bundled up in a blanket. His dad—they all had different dads—had been white, and he was much lighter skinned than either Auggie or Fer. He looked awful, his skin greasy, muscle and fat wasted away until he was skeletal. But his face was still Chuy’s face, although his lank brown hair was longer than Auggie remembered.
“Chuy,” Auggie said, sitting on the mattress and shaking his brother.
Chuy groaned.
“Wake up,” Auggie said.
After some more groaning, Chuy opened one eye. “Hey, Gus-Gus. What’s up?”
“I need you to teach me how to buy drugs.”
“Cool,” Chuy said and closed his eye again.