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Cecil sits beside the first man he is completely sure would never hurt him.
“Before we continue, there’s something you should know about me.”
.
He’s fourteen and it’s the summer after his mom leaves. He’s sneaking out to see his friends and he does it so often that eventually he just starts walking out the front door and Abby, passed out on the couch between dirty dishes and homework, doesn’t notice. He and his friends go to the home of some rich kid a few grades ahead of them, and she has a portal in her backyard that leads to a beach. It’s a strange beach. It’s one that seems to stretch on forever in either direction with no clear ending or beginning, nothing except for the glowing portal at the peak of a sand dune and the endless ocean that is blue forever. He grew up in a desert of endless sand but no water. He has never learned how to swim. Instead he sits in his scraped knees and bony elbows, at the edge of the ocean with his feet in the water, and watches the friends he doesn’t remember the names of rub coconut suntan lotion onto each other’s backs. The girls are wearing bikinis, and he feels absolutely nothing about that, but the other boys are mostly wearing swim trunks, bare chested, or loose tank tops that blow across their slick bodies in the sea breeze. As for the boy, he doesn’t have a swim suit. He couldn’t afford one now, and he never had the need before this, but he did steal a cool pair of sunglasses from the drugstore. He wears them with cutoff shorts and a too-big t shirt and hopes that the snickers he thinks he hears from the water aren’t directed at him.
The sun is hot and the water is lukewarm. He thinks it is the bluest thing anyone has ever seen. The girl whose house they’re at has an older sister who plies them with booze, and the fourteen year old boy mixes it together at random; gin into tequila with raspberry soda, rosé with coke and pickle brine, beer with floor cleaner and pencil shavings. At some point it all starts tasting the same and someone is talking to him eagerly as he passes cups back and forth with the bodies splashing around him. It’s a guy Abby went to school with, so he must be nineteen. So many people were nineteen back then, and so many still are to this day.
People chase each other up the beach, splashing water. They go back through the portal. Only one boy, that redhead from Boy Scouts, asks him what he thought of the beach. Abby’s classmate, though, asks him if he wants a ride to the party.
He’s lying sideways in the backseat of someone’s mom’s station wagon. He can feel the voice of Leonard Burton reverberating in the speaker by his head; “see you, Night Vale, see you,” and through the windows the stars and satellites are coming out.
Abby’s classmate is cute and flirtatious and helping him out of the car and into a different house, which has a pool table. Every crack of the cue on the balls makes the pool spiders skitter across the table. Most of the people at this party are older. The high schoolers look around in awe, mostly freshmen like the boy, at all the cool seniors and college students welcoming them into their world. Someone is playing Duran Duran. Someone else is suggesting they play spin the bottle. The guy from Abby’s class hands him a shot. He is friendly, and very close, and nineteen. The boy sips his shot slowly while Abby’s classmate spins the bottle. And eventually his tongue is down his throat and everyone else is cheering and saying something; everyone’s saying something, like,
“Isn’t that Abby’s younger brother?” “Hey sweetheart, you feeling okay?” “Another one! I’ve got it here!” “Want to try some of this?” “So is it true your mom was able to leave town?” “Come here, baby, drink some water.” “ I don’t know about his mom, but yours is definitely a hoe.” “Shots!” “Cecil?” “Cecil?” “I have shots!” “I have k!” “Hey, that kid really doesn’t look so good.” “Let’s get you somewhere more quiet.”
“Where are you going?” Shouts a girl he doesn’t know to the guy from Abby’s class, who is holding him up so he can’t fall to the floor like a rag doll. The boy can’t seem to stop giggling. He thinks that he babbles something about the guy’s muscles, how he’s so strong and it’s so hot, but it’s hard to hear much over the sound of birds chirping behind his ear drums. “We just packed a bowl!” the girl says. Abby’s classmate waves her off and leads the boy towards a staircase.
“I’m gonna take him to lie down.”
“Okay. Probably a good idea.”
The arm around his waist is very insistent. “Let’s go somewhere more quiet.” He stumbles up the stairs and is led down a dark hallway, feeling his way with the carpet on the floor. Here, the music is muffled. A door is closed. A bed rises to meet him. He’s still giggling. “That’s it. Here, take your shoes off.” He has his arms loosely wrapped around the guy who used to be in his sister’s class. Embarrassment rises to his face in a dark purple flush, and he admits, grossed out,
“I spilled something on my shirt.”
“Well, take that off, too.”
He does. He stops giggling.
The window is partially open, blowing hot desert air through the room. Abby’s classmate says something as he undoes his belt, but the boy isn’t sure what. The boy makes eye contact with the bedspread.
He remembers the sweat most of all. A lock clicking, and a lot of sweat. If you asked him then he would have sworn there was sweat in places it shouldn’t be, underneath his fingernails, behind his eyelids, inside his organs. At first it was exciting but at some point it turns scary. He hears music from the other room and thinks, the weather, Leonard is playing the weather, and he holds onto that thought even though Leonard’s show is over by now. Even the pillow under his cheek feels like a damp sponge, and it reeks like the locker room and salt. The weather isn’t very good. It’s raining outside.
Time blurs and everything feels very confusing. He can’t tell if he’s feeling a hand around his throat or hearing glass break. The two things should be totally different, they don’t even use the same sense. But really, no matter what, he can’t tell the difference. All he knows is that either there’s a hand around his throat or someone is smashing glass, and it’s either one or the other. His neck hurts. He thinks he might have died.
He doesn’t have a dry shirt. The guy from Abby’s class says, “so, were you a virgin before this?” as he hands over the button up from around his waist.
And the answer comes, honestly, “No.”
He gets dressed in the bathroom and discovers that he’s bleeding. Someone is banging on the door. He can hear his friends through the walls talking about how much fun the beach was, how they’re thinking about leaving Night Vale to see if the town will let them drive east to the coastline and they’ll spend a few days in Cally for Nya on the boardwalk. The boy splashes on some cold water, fixes smudged makeup in a broken mirror. Bathrooms at parties always have the shittiest lighting. The drugstore has cheap mascara and sticky glosses, easy to hide in a pocket or a wallet. He spent all his allowance money on blank cassettes, so he had to steal this stuff, but now no matter how much mascara he puts on, it doesn’t seem to be enough. He swipes on more and more and more. It streaks down his face. He’s swiping it away with one hand and trying to put it back on with the other. God, he hates that person in the mirror so much, that repeating fraction of his own face haggard and drawn and smeared. No wonder his mom left. He wouldn’t want a kid like him, either.
His reflection looks at him sadly from the mirror. It says,
“Why are you crying when you don’t even exist?”
The party goes late. They play more games. Truth or dare. Scream and hide. Drinking contests. One in the morning keeps repeating itself over and over, turning one hour into three, or maybe it’s three hundred. The boy doesn’t know how late he stays. Everything’s blurry. Someone’s dancing with him. Someone’s holding his head up. Someone’s passing him another shot. Everyone smells like coconut oil and lotions. He can’t find his shitty drugstore sunglasses.
He gets home somehow. He has no idea how he gets there. The house is dark on the outside, but inside, there’s a light on in the living room. It’s not visible through the dark curtains on the outside. He opens the door and puts his bag down and is trying to stumble into the house when he trips and something breaks and wakes up his sister.
“Cecil? Jesus, what time is it?” The sound of her feet comes from behind him, and the clink of broken things clattering. “Where the fuck have you been!” Another light turns on. Abby stands over him. “What did I tell you about staying - Cecil? What’s wrong?”
He doesn’t know.
“Where were you? Speak up, I can’t hear you. A house party? You were at someone’s house? Whose?”
She’s patting his face, holding it between her hands. Everything is blurry. Oh, how blurry everything is! He starts giggling and shuts up where he sees her - why is the light above him all of a sudden so vivid, so violent a yellow glow, and why does it feel like his eyes are stinging?
“Cecil!” Abby calls from underwater. “Wake up! Did you do any drugs? Just nod or shake your head.”
He doesn’t know.
“How much did you have to drink?”
He doesn’t know.
“Who were you with?”
He doesn’t know and he doesn’t get why she’s asking him all these questions when the floor is so comfortable and he really wants to sleep. But he can’t because his shirt is wet again. Oh, this isn’t his shirt. It’s that guy’s, and there’s vomit down the front.
Abby pulls him to the bathroom. She tries to help him take his shirt off and he flinches, but she’s already undone one of the buttons. He watches her look at the marks on his neck that feel like broken glass sounds. All he can think is, this is only the second-worst thing to happen to me this summer.
“Oh, Christ,” Abby whispers. “Oh, fuck. Cecie, what?”
There’s water in the tub and he can’t hold himself up anymore. He drops into the basin with a weak splash, still dressed, and looks at his reflection in the water. Abby is sobbing somewhere behind him. She tries to coax the wet clothes off, but he can’t lift his arms; and anyway, he wants to wear them forever, keeping them wet just like this, so he can have that shield.
Soap. Water. Shirt. Abby. Bruise. Bite mark. Hand. Shudder. Sweat. A question. His class? His friends? Older siblings. Some strangers. Age range. Abby gets up. Abby is leaving. Abby coming back. Holding a picture. Pointing to faces. “Him? You’re sure?” He’s not sure. He is sure. He is dying. He has drowned. He’s already dead. He won’t remember any of this in the morning.
She brings him dry clothes and a washcloth. Closes the door halfway. Somewhere there’s water churning in his ears. He hears a wall mounted phone being picked up and slammed. He sees Abby through the bathroom door, pushing the hair back from her forehead, clutching her high school yearbook in the other hand, the phone held in place between her ear and shoulder. He tastes bile. Abby seems to have found the right number. She’s screaming. “My brother? My fucking brother?!”
Time passes or maybe it’s just one o clock again. He’s being carried to bed and tucked in like a child. With shut eyes and a sleeping body and an awake mind, sounds surround him. More phone calls. The front door opens with a squeak. A cane thuds against floorboards. The neighbor lady’s gentle tone. She speaks to Abby in hushed voices. Then he hears the front door open again and Abby’s car start. In this room, Neighbor Josie eases herself into a chair by the bed. “Hello, honey. I’ll just be right here knitting if you need me. Anything I can get for you? Anything you want?”
Her face is so kind, even through his hazy vision, and he can’t stand it. He pulls an arm across his eyes. His head is spinning, and his guts are churning; he realizes that this might just be a dream, Abby and Josie and his house, and maybe he’ll wake up and still be in that house at that party with that guy. Maybe he always has been.
“I want my mom,” he whispers.