PHIL

TAPPING WINDOWS WITH stones has never been among my favorite clichés.

But Gus said he would text me, and he has not done so, and an hour has passed.

The stone is not a large one. Yet I have the aim you’d expect of a Dungeon Master who has been eternally excused from PE thanks to the machinations of his school-employed father.

There is no reason this stone should hit Gus’s window on the first attempt. There is especially no reason why this stone should shatter the glass of said window, rousing every fiend within the neighborhood, doubtless alerting Gus’s mother to my presence.

Another person might have tried the front door. Before I made this foolhardy rescue attempt, I contacted Tamara.

Gus is home, I messaged. But not replying to messages.

Her reply arrived, quick and confounding: I’m not there. had an argument with B. can you please check on him??

Finally Gus appears beyond the curtain. I see the shoulders of his silhouette clench. Here I stand in the rain and dark, my face obscured from view. For all Gus knows, I am a serial killer. Cool droplets strike my brow and slide down the back of my neck. “ ‘Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon!’ ”

“Phil? You broke my window!”

“That was not my intention.”

I scarce hear him over the downpour, but I see a sundering within him. Gus is never truly steady, but now he shakes from bow to stern.

“Mom . . . took . . . locked . . . in . . . room.” He shouts and whispers every other word.

“Would that you could throw down your hair. Those curls are useless.”

Gus retreats. I fear myself abandoned. I dislike the admission, but this story does not gain momentum with Phil Wheeler at the helm. When you are an empty person, you need others to occupy you.

I don’t know what I will become if I am not reflecting Gus. It angers me to think of myself in the rain, trying to be human, while Gus in his tower wallows in humanity.

Gus reappears. He drops a duffel bag from his ivory tower. I pluck it from the earth before too much mud can seep into the fabric.

Gus thrusts a desk lamp through the window, popping the screen loose. He pulls himself halfway across the frame. His good leg seeks purchase on damp roof tiles.

There is no piece of media in which this endeavor ends well, and most media does not bother to depict such struggles from the perspective of those with spastic muscles. Gus is doomed to snap his neck. By now his mother may have heard the ruckus.

Perhaps this thought propels Gus forward. He drags himself outside. His shoes brace against sloping tiles. I see him scrutinize the trellis—he’s abandoned his glasses during this quest—but unlike convenient fictional trellises, this one is swamped in ivy and much shorter than the roof. Nevertheless, Gus inches sideways, bobbing as he goes.

His lopsidedness betrays him, and it is only by falling onto his stomach and allowing his body to drag that Gus spares himself sliding off the rooftop. He lodges his one foot in the gutter, sending up a mighty splash.

“Don’t let go,” I advise, and duck beneath the porch’s overhang.

I free a cushion from the swinging chair, heedless of the tearing Velcro. I heave it down the ramp and onto the lawn. It is no trampoline, but it will suffice.

By the time I look toward the overhang again—Gus is no longer dangling.

I scan the ground for his body.

But Gus has reached the trellis. After a few jarring jabs of his foot during his descent, Gus falls from the height of only a yard.

“Well done.” I hoist him to his feet.

Gus finds his unusual balance. He is breathless and slack faced. Exhaustion makes his eyes gleam under the porch light. He doesn’t wipe the mud from his body.

“Do you think your mother heard us?”

Gus shakes his head. “She’s vacuuming the g-g-guest room.”

“How convenient!” I pull his duffel bag over my shoulder.

“Why are you whistling?” Gus asks as we near the Death Van.

I am having entirely too much fun. I suspect it’s wrong to say so. “Am I?”

Gus pauses beside his mailbox. He treats me to a look. I’m not sure what it signifies. Perhaps he simply cannot see, but his prescription is not strong.

“Did you try the classic dummy-in-bed ruse?”

“No. But I blocked the door. With my, um, tabs. My desk.”

“If only you’d had a filing cabinet to tip in front of it.” I wipe water from my glasses. “In a sense, we’ve trained all our lives for scenes such as this.”

Gus looks at his home. “Let’s j-just go.”

I hope for a chase scene, but the lights in Gus’s home remain devoid of matronly silhouettes. The wipers squeak in double-time, matching my escalated heartbeat.

“What’s the matter, Gus?” I ask after several blocks of irksome silence.

“You didn’t ask me if I was hurt.”

“When?”

“When I fell.”

“You aren’t hurt.”

Gus doesn’t reply. His eyes are larger without the boxy frames of his glasses. They are undeniably buggy organs. Nonsensically, he stares at me as Tam would.

Can it be that he’s seeing me more clearly now?

John is unimpressed with our escapades. He fails to comprehend why Gus and I must climb inside through the minuscule basement window.

John scowls from his post on the sectional, watching our entrance with arms folded over his rotund stomach. He greets Gus with a smile and “Hey, man” before pushing Gus toward the downstairs shower, passing him a Star Trek towel, and shutting the door behind him.

John rounds on me. “Come on, Phil. Don’t you think Dad heard the van pull in? What’s the point of the dramatic entrance?”

“Gus isn’t supposed to be here.” I’m less concerned about the point, and more concerned about dramatics.

“You could have sent Gus through here and gone in through the front door yourself!” We listen to the pipes groan overhead as water starts spitting in the bathroom. “Or you could have come up with a scheme that didn’t force Gus to do acrobatics!”

“Gus is capable.”

“It’s not about that.” John tugs on his beard. “I wouldn’t ask any guest to come in through the window!”

“You never have any guests. You don’t have friends.”

“You’re grinning like an absolute jackass, and Gus looks like he’s just been run over. I’m not the one who should be worried about losing friends tonight.”

Before Gus came into my life, it was John who tried to raise me human. Before he had a beard, it was his hair that he tugged whenever he caught me drowning chipmunks or setting furniture aflame. John introduced me to D&D thusly: “Phil, you’ll be playing a cleric who cares about everyone, okay? Can you try that?”

“The whole town’s going nuts over the retrial thing. If Gus is caught in the middle of that, Phil, you’ve got to step up for a change.”

“How do you know the town’s ‘going nuts’? You never leave the cellar.”

John pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Do whatever you want. As you wish.”

“Aaaaas, youuuu, wissssh!” I echo, paying homage to a mutual favorite film.

“Philip. Look at my face. Try, for once, to read what my expression is saying. Listen to what my mouth is saying: If you can’t care about Gus? Gus Peake, of all people? A kid who loses to you on purpose no matter how many games of Betrayal at House on the Hill we play? Who else is going to care about you?”

This expends whatever energy John can spare toward my betterment. He settles behind his figurine-cluttered desk, downs a swig of Vault, pulls headphones over his ears, and immerses himself in a computer game.

I do not appreciate the atmosphere in this basement.

I climb the stairs. Alas, this is no time for a soliloquy: an audience awaits me at the kitchen table, huddled over another screen.

Dad launches to his feet. He’s still wearing his work lanyard. There are marks on the bridge of his nose. Like John, he habitually pinches that place.

“Phil! When did you get home?”

“I’ve been home for a while.” What constitutes “a while”?

“Must’ve dozed off before Matt left for work.” Dad leans forward. “Dark happenings in Samsboro today, huh?”

“Dark happenings indeed.”

“So . . . dare I ask? How was Gus today?”

“He didn’t come to school.” This is a truth.

Dad is no imbecile. “But did you speak to him on the phone?”

“No, in fact.” Another truth.

“Maybe Beth’s got the house on lockdown. I wouldn’t blame her . . .” He doesn’t end that thought with “this time,” because he does not want to be seen judging another parent. The implication remains.

I retrieve a SunnyD from the refrigerator.

“I spoke to his SLP. She says Gus hasn’t gone to his speech appointments.”

“Should she have told you that? You aren’t Gus’s parent.”

“Anything you’d care to tell me, Phil?”

I slam the fridge door. “I’d care to tell you he wasn’t with me, Dad.”

Dad’s face creases. “Have you two had a falling out?”

More a falling off rooftops.

“I have homework.”

“You have tried to check on him, haven’t you, Phil? To see if he’s okay? You’re his best friend. Good to show a little empathy.”

I pause, hand on the basement doorknob. How could I fail to develop a conscience in this household? Can I not belong to a story as what I am, holes and all?

“I’ll do that, Dad. I’ll ask Gus whether he’s okay.”

Dad stares, all-knowing. “Good, Phil. Be sure that you do.”

When I reach the bottom of the stairs, Gus has emerged from his steam chamber. He’s wedged on the sectional sofa, coiled up with his head resting against the cushions. He opens his eyes when I sit down across from him.

“Thanks,” he says, seeing the SunnyD in my grip, “but I’m not thirsty.”

“It wasn’t for you.” I peel the tab and empty the vessel in three swallows. My father’s words, John’s, Kalyn’s: they infest my skull. I cannot help but wonder whether my “empathy” has any merit when others force it upon me.

Gus’s large eyes are glazing. He may as well be another murder victim.

“What fate will tomorrow bring us, Gus Peake?”

He shudders. “I don’t know. I just want to sleep.”

“Ah, but will you?”

Gus shakes his head. It frustrates me immensely.

“Gus, this is the juncture in the story where you must rally and—”

“Phil.”

I do not know how to proceed. So I ask what’s expected. “Gus. Are you okay?”

“I’m tired.” He holds his bad arm tight against his chest, fingers curled.

“Yes. But are you, ah, okay?”

“No. But I’m going to school tomorrow.” Gus speaks as clear as a bell. He is wont to do that when he is tired. Often it is his own awareness of speech that makes Gus falter.

“I’ll go to school tomorrow, too.” Gus may misinterpret this as loyalty.

Gus snorts. “We both know your dad won’t, um. Let you go. Let you skip.”

Perhaps Gus hasn’t misinterpreted me. Perhaps he sees the hole where my heart should be. Perhaps he always has. If so, why has Gus tolerated me?

I consider Kalyn’s words: “Aren’t you grateful?”

Gus squeezes my shoulder. How? If you take the fiction from me, what is there left to hold? I never touch Gus if it can be avoided. I don’t touch anyone.

“You really hit Garth hard yesterday,” Gus ponders, pointing out the exception.

“My knuckles still twinge most profoundly.”

“Do you really think it might have been a drifter who killed him?”

I answer the question he isn’t asking. “Not really, but I doubt it was your mother.”

His voice grows faint. Anxiety is no match for true exhaustion. “Yeah . . .”

He doesn’t finish the thought. He doesn’t have to, for I know Gus, or at least what he shows himself to be. As my father says, he’s my best friend.

At what point does mimicking goodness make it so?

I know something Gus will never know, a great and tiny nothing: I did not grab the SunnyD for myself. I grabbed it for him, with nothing to gain from the effort.

When his breathing becomes slow and deep and even, the sure signs of slumber, I tug the duffel bag from his grip and replace it with a cushion. No phone is within.

A change of clothes, a bizarre pair of socks. The yearbook, old and worn.

“You’re digging through his stuff?” John glares from afar.

“I’m digging for clues.” It isn’t a lie.

I open the yearbook and flip through its pages, absorbing the faces of strangers, looking for bruises on knuckles, seeking expressions inhuman and familiar.