(no subject)
Title: Bane
Type: Gen
Genre: ANGST
Characters: Kevin, David, assorted family
Rating: R
Warnings: Language, drugs and alcohol, character death, and ANGST.
Prompts: "Why do the socks never match?"
Word Count: 3,395 (don't ask me how, but it HAPPENED.)
Summary: The stereotype does say that suicide rates skyrocket around Christmas.
Disclaimer: Mine, except a few obvious pop culture references. Don't do drugs and don't kill yourself. Both are bad ideas.
A/N: Written for this week's AWDT prompt.
David’s new haircut was abrupt, at best, and he said his parents had nothing to do with it. It was still wispy and death from a bottle black, making his pale skin that much more noticeable, and he could still hide in it, but now it ended at his jaw line, not his ass. That was the most noticeable aspect of the transformation, really. It wasn’t that his scrawny face was overemphasized. It wasn’t that his sunken, sleep-deprived eyes looked moreso because of the melodramatic air doubled by his hair’s newfound shortness. It wasn’t that he’d lost a ton of weight while Kevin had been at school - and he’d been thin enough already when Kevin left; Kevin had noticed that second to the hair. It wasn’t even that, at seventeen, he looked tired of everything and had the hungry look of someone daring death to move. No - it was the haircut. It was too short for him, and it didn’t look right.
Sighing and strumming air guitar to the song on the stereo (“Comfortably Numb,” a classic), he leaned back, putting his head on Kevin’s mattress. Neither of them were high, yet, but both of them were headed there - Kevin, the younger, through smoke and fire, and David, not much older, through what most doctors would have described as “a slight pinch.” For being only cousins and having siblings of their own (Kevin’s were all half- and step-siblings, but they were annoying nonetheless), their thought processes were nearly identical: as David forced his head and arms, heavy with need, up and tightened the brown rubber just above his elbow, Kevin huddled his lighter lover-close to the end of his joint. As Kevin sucked in desperately, nearly fumbling his choice poison, David tapped the skin rhythmically, foraging for the perfect vein. And, as David gave himself a grunting injection, Kevin counted the motions of the second hand on his Pink Floyd wall clock, waiting for the perfect thirty before letting his swamp gas fill the room with its miasma.
He didn’t question why he knew that word, knowing full well that it wasn’t likely that he’d remember knowing it later and that, overall, it really didn’t matter.
The drugs were different - THC and opiates, respectively - but they chased the same star, and, as their toxins took effect, hitting their brains and bloodstreams with the care and delicacy of a malfunctioning exhaust pipe, they had the same beatific smile.
The song ended and Kevin put a different record on; as John Lennon’s voice proclaimed the plight of the “Working Class Hero,” both boys sunk warmly into their highs and their piles of pillows. With an occasional scoffing noise, David twirled the empty syringe in his fingers. Smiling ruefully, he turned his head to meet eyes with Kevin.
“You know, Kev,” he sighed. “There are days… not even days, there are times, usually when I’m coming down and fucking crazy for another hit…”
Kevin nodded with an, “Uh huh.” He was, in fact, unfamiliar with the exact sensation, but knew the familiar itching to get stoned.
“And, in these moments, I just… pause. Everything’s going nuts, right, but then I just stop… everything slows down, and I’m painfully sober, and I think, ‘Fuck. I’m eighteen’-”
“Seventeen,” Kevin interjected.
“Are you failing math, or has the pot just killed your short-term memory?”
“You’re eighteen tomorrow…”
David smirked. “Can’t get shit past you, can I? …Anyway, I think, ‘God damn it. I’m almost eighteen, I’m a junkie, I don’t think I’ve eaten in three days, but don’t know and really don’t care’-”
“Shit, man, I could so go for something sugary right now…”
“Am I ever going to get to finish this goddamn story? Anyway, there’s a pack of M&M’s in my backpack, and I am not going to eat them.”
Scrambling ineffectively, Kevin shoved himself up and ambled over to David’s black canvas backpack. He fumbled with the zippers and the safety-pinned Cure and Day of Silence 2005 patches. After a few stray curses at his lazy fingers and the slippery zippers, he finally got the front pocket open and pulled out the promised pack of candy. For some reason, making his way back across the books, laundry, and David’s skinny, black jean-clad legs was easier than it was to get the candy, but Kevin didn’t think about it too hard; he had the sugar he was unreasonably craving and, out of a huge, obnoxious family, he had one cousin who actually gave a shit. Placated for the moment, he used his free hand to dump some of the M&M’s from the bag into his mouth.
“So, I was saying,” David chuckled grimly.
“You were,” Kevin said. He’d traded in real emotion for warm air in his chest and chocolate in his mouth.
“So yeah… I’m an eighteen- seventeen-year-old, appetite-less junky. The only two people I love in this world… well, one’s you and the other one left me for the ex-gay camp after my parents found out, and… for all that, I’m probably still going to get into all the Ivy League schools I applied to simply because I can’t stop trying to please them.”
If he hadn’t been entirely serious, it could’ve been funny, but, as it was, his electric blue eyes were charged with an uncommon solemness. He was the only junkie Kevin had ever known outside of William S. Burroughs books, but this brazen honesty was new every time. Newer than the haircut and the perfected, dejected apathy of his “heroin chic” look - in all honesty, it completely lacked chic, but it was the only way Kevin could think to describe the hollowed cheeks, baggy clothes, and visibly pointy, curving elbows - anyway. The “them,” as always, was implicitly understood to be David’s parents, Kevin’s Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Joe. Like all good, American Catholics, or, at least, the ones Kevin knew, the only clue they had into who David really was that he was gay, and they hadn’t even figured that out until the empirical evidence was undeniable. They walked in on him kissing his secret boyfriend.
The two of them had smoked pot together and, from what Kevin knew of the sequence of events, David had begun substituting him with heroin shortly thereafter.
“I don’t even know why I do it,” David pressed on. “I mean… it’s so obvious that it’s not doing anything… it never has, and it never will, and I still keep going. Perfect grades aren’t good enough… I can get them while I’m fucked up and they’re still not good enough.”
“You’re better than them,” Kevin murmured earnestly, exhaling a long drag.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Kev.” The smile was weak, and half-hearted, and completely forced, but it was there. “But still. Even worse, everything - and I mean everything - is, in some way, my fault. If it isn’t, it’s still my fault and they’ll nag me about it anyway.”
“Shit…”
“I mean, what do they think I am? A robot? ‘David, why won’t your brother’s computer get Internet?’ ‘David, why is your sister’s cell-phone broken?’ ‘David, why is Law and Order on?’ ‘David, why is the DVD player skipping?’ ‘David, why won’t you at least give this girl a chance’-”
“No fucking way.”
“Yes fucking way! I get that one at least twice a week, it’s sinister. ‘David, you don’t really know you’re gay until you’ve tried out girls, so why won’t you give this one a chance? She’s a nice, sensitive type; we swear you’ll like her!’ And if it’s not that, it’s… it’s… god fuck it, ‘David, why do the socks never match’?”
Kevin couldn’t help snickering, which earned him a reproachful glare; he quickly silenced himself. In repentance, he got up again, went over to David, and hugged him around the shoulders, careful not to let his joint near David’s hair. They were sharply angled and stuck in his chest, but it was David. Such things were small prices.
“I’m serious,” David huffed.
“I know,” Kevin sighed, finally sitting down again, this time right next to his cousin. “But it’s a funny image.”
“…I guess so. They’re pretty serious about the socks, though.”
“They bitch at you if they don’t match?”
“My mom’s compulsive… you know that.”
“It’s not something I think about too much…”
“It’s why my room’s a mess, and my car…”
“Why you buy patterned socks and never match them?”
“Fuck yes.”
“…Are you jealous? …Because I don’t have to put up with that?”
“No, Kev, no. Between us, I think you have it worse. I mean… my parents nag, and I’m never good enough for them, but… but yours. They kicked you out into the world and said, ‘Good luck, kiddo.’ Fucking pricks.”
“…Wanna go ride the elevator at my dad’s office? Push all the buttons, be annoying as we fucking can?”
“Indeed. Helluva lot better than this sorry ass attempt at a family Christmas.”
David’s left sock had a Halloween print of pumpkins and ghosts; the right one had individual toes, shamrocks, and rainbows; and, soon enough, both were wrapped in his black leather combat boots. With the methodical care necessary to cover their tracks, David pulled the long sleeves of his sweater down while Kevin applied eye drops, breath mints, and spray on deodorant. He was taller than David now, just barely, but David had his trusty Matrix trench coat and his sullen, junky look that came together to make him the more intimidating one. Kevin’s blue and gray ski jacket was habitually unimpressive, as if to make up for how striking David was, but before they left, he changed one sock.
“I’ve got something for you when we get back,” David said simply, forcefully turning his car on.
“What is it?” Kevin slinked in and helped himself to the passenger seat.
“It’s a surprise, that’s what it is.”
“Can I have a hint?”
“Okay. I stayed up until 4 AM on eBay, out bid some jackass from Australia, and used my dad’s credit card to get it.”
Kevin let his other questions linger and didn’t try to figure out what it was. With a hint like that, it had to be good, and ruining the surprise was too cruel.
Christmas Day was four days later and Kevin was completely, arduously sober. Not that he wanted to be completely, arduously sober, or anywhere close to it, but David bet him fifty bucks that he couldn’t go the entire day, midnight to midnight without lighting up and that was probably going to be all the money Kevin saw for a while. Even with a clear head, David’s talk about socks stayed with him and it was one thing about the day he wasn’t arguing, even if it made him look at everyone’s feet. Frankly, the feet were boring as hell, but they were overwhelmingly better than the people they were attached to.
Dinner was supposed to be at five; it was six-thirty, and stragglers were still popping in or running out and back again on errands. Mom and Jason’s little brats were running around with Greg and Sheila’s terrors, playing GI Joe, or Monsters - whatever it was, it was making too much noise to be allowed and no one told them to shut the hell up. Kevin wanted to, but any time he got involved with The Kids, he was instantly the villain, and Christmas was his break from that. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, grandma and Sandy, Uncle Joe’s first wife who, for some reason, still came around whenever she felt like it, argued over how long to reheat the potatoes; patient in a way he usually wasn’t, Joe just cut up vegetables and tuned them out. Around Kevin’s feet, David’s youngest sister, Josie, had created a mountain of clothes for all her new Barbies and was busy mix-and-matching them; across from them, Aunt Elizabeth slowly got drunk on the Cabernet - her own Christmas tradition, which usually ended in David holding her hair back, or her getting more sick on him than on herself. At least Sarah, Sheila’s younger sister, was there to entertain her inebriation this time.
David had begged off twenty minutes earlier, followed up the stairs by his youngest brother’s oh so intelligent shouts of “queer” - a fucking annoying habit, picked up from their father, only Benny didn’t know what it meant, so he couldn’t brush it off with, “Just kidding.” Every time either of them said that, David bent his head just so, staring into a deep abyss in the antique hardwood floor, waiting for it to stare back like Nietzsche said it would; to Kevin’s knowledge, it never had. Just how he looked made Kevin wish he could stop them, but they never would have listened if he’d tried.
“So I was saying to this woman,” Elizabeth droned in her faux-aristocratic sigh of a voice. “I was saying that… those jewels were decidedly fake and, at that, they weren’t even good fakes, and they looked completely tacky, like something Elizabeth Taylor or one of those other wealth-flaunting good-for-nothings would wear.”
Sarah nodded, but rolled her eyes when Kevin looked at her. It was all too clear that this story was headed straight up Elizabeth’s ass.
“Now, of course, she wants to make a sale, so she says that I must be crazy to pass up such an opportunity, because they’re real, you know, and I’ll never see this price anywhere else. And maybe that works on all her other clientele, but no, no, not on me. So she brings out these gaudy-looking opal earrings, or fake opal earrings, either way, they looked enough like the real thing, which is more than I can say for the rest of the trash she was shoving at me. But, that said… they looked like something Liza Minnelli would wear!
“Picture me… in that. It just doesn’t work!”
“Not at all.” Sarah shook her head.
“So, do you know what I did? I told her… I-”
An abrupt, cracking noise cut her off and made Kevin jump out of his seat, narrowly missing one of Josie’s dolls with his foot.
“Well I never,” Elizabeth huffed into her wineglass.
“Kevin,” Sarah sighed exhaustedly, putting a hand on his arm. “Would you be a dear and please tell your uncle Mark that we don’t want to see his Mexican fireworks until after dinner?”
“I wasn’t setting any off,” Mark’s voice said from behind them.
The three of them turned their heads and, in the kitchen, Joe’s perked up. Mark, a tall man with the rangy, weathered look of a truck driver (he was one), stood in the doorway into the Christmas-cluttered living room, wearing an obnoxiously red Santa sweater and a snow-covered brown jacket. He had a case under each arm, one of the baked goods he always brought down from some Polish market he frequented in Michigan and the other of the illegal fireworks he brought up from Mexico for Christmas and the Fourth of July. Though he looked completely baffled, and not yet with the cheap beer he was so fond of, Kevin felt his own face slip further into confusion, and choked as it donned a triplet expression of realization, shared between Sarah and Elizabeth. Joe and Mark stared at the three of them as though they were looking in on a sacred rite, and they might have been. Ever the vocal one, Sarah spoke first.
“Elizabeth,” she whispered, her voice quavering with the same thoughts as Kevin, brainchildren that neither wanted. “Don’t you keep a gun in the house?”
“…Yes.” Elizabeth’s voice came from far off, as though she were on a widow’s peak, instead of one being on her receding hairline.
“Kevin… how long has David been gone?”
“I… I…” He knew, but he couldn’t say anything.
Elizabeth said it for him: “Oh my God!”
Being an old high school and college athlete, Joe was the first to bolt for the stairs. Without pot slowing him down, Kevin snapped around and followed him, but wasn’t even halfway up the curving stairs before he felt the force of Elizabeth pulling on him while Sarah pulled on her. Barely thinking of the consequences, he slipped his arms out of his jacket’s sleeves and continued the mad dash. He wasn’t running hard, but blood pounded savagely in his ears out of sheer terror. David wouldn’t. David couldn’t. …He was just a fresh eighteen and, depressed junky or not, there was no way in Hell he’d… no. No, he wouldn’t…
But Joe was hunching into the room and his breathing was strained when Kevin reached David’s room. He was a large man, taller and broader in the shoulders than Kevin, which made seeing around him nigh on impossible. It was even harder when, white and shaking, he turned around to shove Kevin back.
“Uncle Joe-”
“Kevin…” Even his voice was white.
“Let me see-”
“Kevin! For the love of God, stay-”
“Joe!” Elizabeth had made it up the stairs. Her voice wasn’t panicked; it was panic. It was mania. “Joe, what happened?!”
She shoved past Kevin (he hit the wall, if lightly), but Joe tried to force her back. Alcohol and delirium had reddened her face and reduced her breathing to shallow whimpering. When her Spartan insistence grew too much, Joe gave way, allowing her a full view and Kevin a peek; he was not, however, allowed to think about it. It took her exactly six seconds from when Joe let her see to collapse completely, sobbing into and only supported by Kevin’s shoulder. He hadn’t seen it all, but he’d seen enough: a completely limp hand, splayed feet, the smallest hint of silver or something that looked just like it…
One sock was bright blue, but made up for its tedium with individual toes; there were faces on the bottom of each one. The other was one of David’s rainbow stripe knee socks. He used to say he wanted to die in them…
There were reasons to not stay sober.
The funeral was December 28th, after Kevin sat through two days of visitation, getting stoned out of his mind whenever he could. Every couple hours, he went out back for a joint, but no one ever picked up on it: David had taught him to cover his tracks well and they’d been close enough that no one thought it right to come up to him with fake condolences. It was, in a way David would have described it, sinister. Worse than that, even. He wasn’t really sure he wanted to be on the outside, but he didn’t mind that they forced him into it; what he minded was that they kept staring. Some of them had pants that were too short, which provided the perfect excuse to not look at their eyes, aside from the all too obvious grief. He hadn’t been able to stop looking at people’s socks since Christmas.
When his parents, the other adults, and the brats left the home to get food, he stayed and kept the corpse company. They brought him food, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat most of it; every time he tried, he saw it all again: the limp hand, the splayed feet, the small hint of silver or something that looked just like it… but, for whatever reason, the corpse didn’t do that to him. No matter how much he wanted to say that it was David, it wasn’t. It was in David’s only suit (a black number that he’d worn to every dance in his high school career, it was now too big for his body, and was similarly huge in his last homecoming photo), and it had his appearance, but it wasn’t him. It was too full of preservatives to be him. It couldn’t spout philosophy and angst like he used to, and its hands were folded respectfully over its groin, and it just looked too dead, it was unreal, which was far worse than sinister. The ominous, ever-present They had even cleaned up the blood and mess caused by a bullet wound to the head.
And, once, on the second day, while everyone else was out for dinner and the janitor was in the bathrooms, Kevin sneaked a peek at the body’s ankles, delicately lifting up the trousers, just to see…
They fucking matched his socks.
Type: Gen
Genre: ANGST
Characters: Kevin, David, assorted family
Rating: R
Warnings: Language, drugs and alcohol, character death, and ANGST.
Prompts: "Why do the socks never match?"
Word Count: 3,395 (don't ask me how, but it HAPPENED.)
Summary: The stereotype does say that suicide rates skyrocket around Christmas.
Disclaimer: Mine, except a few obvious pop culture references. Don't do drugs and don't kill yourself. Both are bad ideas.
A/N: Written for this week's AWDT prompt.
David’s new haircut was abrupt, at best, and he said his parents had nothing to do with it. It was still wispy and death from a bottle black, making his pale skin that much more noticeable, and he could still hide in it, but now it ended at his jaw line, not his ass. That was the most noticeable aspect of the transformation, really. It wasn’t that his scrawny face was overemphasized. It wasn’t that his sunken, sleep-deprived eyes looked moreso because of the melodramatic air doubled by his hair’s newfound shortness. It wasn’t that he’d lost a ton of weight while Kevin had been at school - and he’d been thin enough already when Kevin left; Kevin had noticed that second to the hair. It wasn’t even that, at seventeen, he looked tired of everything and had the hungry look of someone daring death to move. No - it was the haircut. It was too short for him, and it didn’t look right.
Sighing and strumming air guitar to the song on the stereo (“Comfortably Numb,” a classic), he leaned back, putting his head on Kevin’s mattress. Neither of them were high, yet, but both of them were headed there - Kevin, the younger, through smoke and fire, and David, not much older, through what most doctors would have described as “a slight pinch.” For being only cousins and having siblings of their own (Kevin’s were all half- and step-siblings, but they were annoying nonetheless), their thought processes were nearly identical: as David forced his head and arms, heavy with need, up and tightened the brown rubber just above his elbow, Kevin huddled his lighter lover-close to the end of his joint. As Kevin sucked in desperately, nearly fumbling his choice poison, David tapped the skin rhythmically, foraging for the perfect vein. And, as David gave himself a grunting injection, Kevin counted the motions of the second hand on his Pink Floyd wall clock, waiting for the perfect thirty before letting his swamp gas fill the room with its miasma.
He didn’t question why he knew that word, knowing full well that it wasn’t likely that he’d remember knowing it later and that, overall, it really didn’t matter.
The drugs were different - THC and opiates, respectively - but they chased the same star, and, as their toxins took effect, hitting their brains and bloodstreams with the care and delicacy of a malfunctioning exhaust pipe, they had the same beatific smile.
The song ended and Kevin put a different record on; as John Lennon’s voice proclaimed the plight of the “Working Class Hero,” both boys sunk warmly into their highs and their piles of pillows. With an occasional scoffing noise, David twirled the empty syringe in his fingers. Smiling ruefully, he turned his head to meet eyes with Kevin.
“You know, Kev,” he sighed. “There are days… not even days, there are times, usually when I’m coming down and fucking crazy for another hit…”
Kevin nodded with an, “Uh huh.” He was, in fact, unfamiliar with the exact sensation, but knew the familiar itching to get stoned.
“And, in these moments, I just… pause. Everything’s going nuts, right, but then I just stop… everything slows down, and I’m painfully sober, and I think, ‘Fuck. I’m eighteen’-”
“Seventeen,” Kevin interjected.
“Are you failing math, or has the pot just killed your short-term memory?”
“You’re eighteen tomorrow…”
David smirked. “Can’t get shit past you, can I? …Anyway, I think, ‘God damn it. I’m almost eighteen, I’m a junkie, I don’t think I’ve eaten in three days, but don’t know and really don’t care’-”
“Shit, man, I could so go for something sugary right now…”
“Am I ever going to get to finish this goddamn story? Anyway, there’s a pack of M&M’s in my backpack, and I am not going to eat them.”
Scrambling ineffectively, Kevin shoved himself up and ambled over to David’s black canvas backpack. He fumbled with the zippers and the safety-pinned Cure and Day of Silence 2005 patches. After a few stray curses at his lazy fingers and the slippery zippers, he finally got the front pocket open and pulled out the promised pack of candy. For some reason, making his way back across the books, laundry, and David’s skinny, black jean-clad legs was easier than it was to get the candy, but Kevin didn’t think about it too hard; he had the sugar he was unreasonably craving and, out of a huge, obnoxious family, he had one cousin who actually gave a shit. Placated for the moment, he used his free hand to dump some of the M&M’s from the bag into his mouth.
“So, I was saying,” David chuckled grimly.
“You were,” Kevin said. He’d traded in real emotion for warm air in his chest and chocolate in his mouth.
“So yeah… I’m an eighteen- seventeen-year-old, appetite-less junky. The only two people I love in this world… well, one’s you and the other one left me for the ex-gay camp after my parents found out, and… for all that, I’m probably still going to get into all the Ivy League schools I applied to simply because I can’t stop trying to please them.”
If he hadn’t been entirely serious, it could’ve been funny, but, as it was, his electric blue eyes were charged with an uncommon solemness. He was the only junkie Kevin had ever known outside of William S. Burroughs books, but this brazen honesty was new every time. Newer than the haircut and the perfected, dejected apathy of his “heroin chic” look - in all honesty, it completely lacked chic, but it was the only way Kevin could think to describe the hollowed cheeks, baggy clothes, and visibly pointy, curving elbows - anyway. The “them,” as always, was implicitly understood to be David’s parents, Kevin’s Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Joe. Like all good, American Catholics, or, at least, the ones Kevin knew, the only clue they had into who David really was that he was gay, and they hadn’t even figured that out until the empirical evidence was undeniable. They walked in on him kissing his secret boyfriend.
The two of them had smoked pot together and, from what Kevin knew of the sequence of events, David had begun substituting him with heroin shortly thereafter.
“I don’t even know why I do it,” David pressed on. “I mean… it’s so obvious that it’s not doing anything… it never has, and it never will, and I still keep going. Perfect grades aren’t good enough… I can get them while I’m fucked up and they’re still not good enough.”
“You’re better than them,” Kevin murmured earnestly, exhaling a long drag.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Kev.” The smile was weak, and half-hearted, and completely forced, but it was there. “But still. Even worse, everything - and I mean everything - is, in some way, my fault. If it isn’t, it’s still my fault and they’ll nag me about it anyway.”
“Shit…”
“I mean, what do they think I am? A robot? ‘David, why won’t your brother’s computer get Internet?’ ‘David, why is your sister’s cell-phone broken?’ ‘David, why is Law and Order on?’ ‘David, why is the DVD player skipping?’ ‘David, why won’t you at least give this girl a chance’-”
“No fucking way.”
“Yes fucking way! I get that one at least twice a week, it’s sinister. ‘David, you don’t really know you’re gay until you’ve tried out girls, so why won’t you give this one a chance? She’s a nice, sensitive type; we swear you’ll like her!’ And if it’s not that, it’s… it’s… god fuck it, ‘David, why do the socks never match’?”
Kevin couldn’t help snickering, which earned him a reproachful glare; he quickly silenced himself. In repentance, he got up again, went over to David, and hugged him around the shoulders, careful not to let his joint near David’s hair. They were sharply angled and stuck in his chest, but it was David. Such things were small prices.
“I’m serious,” David huffed.
“I know,” Kevin sighed, finally sitting down again, this time right next to his cousin. “But it’s a funny image.”
“…I guess so. They’re pretty serious about the socks, though.”
“They bitch at you if they don’t match?”
“My mom’s compulsive… you know that.”
“It’s not something I think about too much…”
“It’s why my room’s a mess, and my car…”
“Why you buy patterned socks and never match them?”
“Fuck yes.”
“…Are you jealous? …Because I don’t have to put up with that?”
“No, Kev, no. Between us, I think you have it worse. I mean… my parents nag, and I’m never good enough for them, but… but yours. They kicked you out into the world and said, ‘Good luck, kiddo.’ Fucking pricks.”
“…Wanna go ride the elevator at my dad’s office? Push all the buttons, be annoying as we fucking can?”
“Indeed. Helluva lot better than this sorry ass attempt at a family Christmas.”
David’s left sock had a Halloween print of pumpkins and ghosts; the right one had individual toes, shamrocks, and rainbows; and, soon enough, both were wrapped in his black leather combat boots. With the methodical care necessary to cover their tracks, David pulled the long sleeves of his sweater down while Kevin applied eye drops, breath mints, and spray on deodorant. He was taller than David now, just barely, but David had his trusty Matrix trench coat and his sullen, junky look that came together to make him the more intimidating one. Kevin’s blue and gray ski jacket was habitually unimpressive, as if to make up for how striking David was, but before they left, he changed one sock.
“I’ve got something for you when we get back,” David said simply, forcefully turning his car on.
“What is it?” Kevin slinked in and helped himself to the passenger seat.
“It’s a surprise, that’s what it is.”
“Can I have a hint?”
“Okay. I stayed up until 4 AM on eBay, out bid some jackass from Australia, and used my dad’s credit card to get it.”
Kevin let his other questions linger and didn’t try to figure out what it was. With a hint like that, it had to be good, and ruining the surprise was too cruel.
Christmas Day was four days later and Kevin was completely, arduously sober. Not that he wanted to be completely, arduously sober, or anywhere close to it, but David bet him fifty bucks that he couldn’t go the entire day, midnight to midnight without lighting up and that was probably going to be all the money Kevin saw for a while. Even with a clear head, David’s talk about socks stayed with him and it was one thing about the day he wasn’t arguing, even if it made him look at everyone’s feet. Frankly, the feet were boring as hell, but they were overwhelmingly better than the people they were attached to.
Dinner was supposed to be at five; it was six-thirty, and stragglers were still popping in or running out and back again on errands. Mom and Jason’s little brats were running around with Greg and Sheila’s terrors, playing GI Joe, or Monsters - whatever it was, it was making too much noise to be allowed and no one told them to shut the hell up. Kevin wanted to, but any time he got involved with The Kids, he was instantly the villain, and Christmas was his break from that. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, grandma and Sandy, Uncle Joe’s first wife who, for some reason, still came around whenever she felt like it, argued over how long to reheat the potatoes; patient in a way he usually wasn’t, Joe just cut up vegetables and tuned them out. Around Kevin’s feet, David’s youngest sister, Josie, had created a mountain of clothes for all her new Barbies and was busy mix-and-matching them; across from them, Aunt Elizabeth slowly got drunk on the Cabernet - her own Christmas tradition, which usually ended in David holding her hair back, or her getting more sick on him than on herself. At least Sarah, Sheila’s younger sister, was there to entertain her inebriation this time.
David had begged off twenty minutes earlier, followed up the stairs by his youngest brother’s oh so intelligent shouts of “queer” - a fucking annoying habit, picked up from their father, only Benny didn’t know what it meant, so he couldn’t brush it off with, “Just kidding.” Every time either of them said that, David bent his head just so, staring into a deep abyss in the antique hardwood floor, waiting for it to stare back like Nietzsche said it would; to Kevin’s knowledge, it never had. Just how he looked made Kevin wish he could stop them, but they never would have listened if he’d tried.
“So I was saying to this woman,” Elizabeth droned in her faux-aristocratic sigh of a voice. “I was saying that… those jewels were decidedly fake and, at that, they weren’t even good fakes, and they looked completely tacky, like something Elizabeth Taylor or one of those other wealth-flaunting good-for-nothings would wear.”
Sarah nodded, but rolled her eyes when Kevin looked at her. It was all too clear that this story was headed straight up Elizabeth’s ass.
“Now, of course, she wants to make a sale, so she says that I must be crazy to pass up such an opportunity, because they’re real, you know, and I’ll never see this price anywhere else. And maybe that works on all her other clientele, but no, no, not on me. So she brings out these gaudy-looking opal earrings, or fake opal earrings, either way, they looked enough like the real thing, which is more than I can say for the rest of the trash she was shoving at me. But, that said… they looked like something Liza Minnelli would wear!
“Picture me… in that. It just doesn’t work!”
“Not at all.” Sarah shook her head.
“So, do you know what I did? I told her… I-”
An abrupt, cracking noise cut her off and made Kevin jump out of his seat, narrowly missing one of Josie’s dolls with his foot.
“Well I never,” Elizabeth huffed into her wineglass.
“Kevin,” Sarah sighed exhaustedly, putting a hand on his arm. “Would you be a dear and please tell your uncle Mark that we don’t want to see his Mexican fireworks until after dinner?”
“I wasn’t setting any off,” Mark’s voice said from behind them.
The three of them turned their heads and, in the kitchen, Joe’s perked up. Mark, a tall man with the rangy, weathered look of a truck driver (he was one), stood in the doorway into the Christmas-cluttered living room, wearing an obnoxiously red Santa sweater and a snow-covered brown jacket. He had a case under each arm, one of the baked goods he always brought down from some Polish market he frequented in Michigan and the other of the illegal fireworks he brought up from Mexico for Christmas and the Fourth of July. Though he looked completely baffled, and not yet with the cheap beer he was so fond of, Kevin felt his own face slip further into confusion, and choked as it donned a triplet expression of realization, shared between Sarah and Elizabeth. Joe and Mark stared at the three of them as though they were looking in on a sacred rite, and they might have been. Ever the vocal one, Sarah spoke first.
“Elizabeth,” she whispered, her voice quavering with the same thoughts as Kevin, brainchildren that neither wanted. “Don’t you keep a gun in the house?”
“…Yes.” Elizabeth’s voice came from far off, as though she were on a widow’s peak, instead of one being on her receding hairline.
“Kevin… how long has David been gone?”
“I… I…” He knew, but he couldn’t say anything.
Elizabeth said it for him: “Oh my God!”
Being an old high school and college athlete, Joe was the first to bolt for the stairs. Without pot slowing him down, Kevin snapped around and followed him, but wasn’t even halfway up the curving stairs before he felt the force of Elizabeth pulling on him while Sarah pulled on her. Barely thinking of the consequences, he slipped his arms out of his jacket’s sleeves and continued the mad dash. He wasn’t running hard, but blood pounded savagely in his ears out of sheer terror. David wouldn’t. David couldn’t. …He was just a fresh eighteen and, depressed junky or not, there was no way in Hell he’d… no. No, he wouldn’t…
But Joe was hunching into the room and his breathing was strained when Kevin reached David’s room. He was a large man, taller and broader in the shoulders than Kevin, which made seeing around him nigh on impossible. It was even harder when, white and shaking, he turned around to shove Kevin back.
“Uncle Joe-”
“Kevin…” Even his voice was white.
“Let me see-”
“Kevin! For the love of God, stay-”
“Joe!” Elizabeth had made it up the stairs. Her voice wasn’t panicked; it was panic. It was mania. “Joe, what happened?!”
She shoved past Kevin (he hit the wall, if lightly), but Joe tried to force her back. Alcohol and delirium had reddened her face and reduced her breathing to shallow whimpering. When her Spartan insistence grew too much, Joe gave way, allowing her a full view and Kevin a peek; he was not, however, allowed to think about it. It took her exactly six seconds from when Joe let her see to collapse completely, sobbing into and only supported by Kevin’s shoulder. He hadn’t seen it all, but he’d seen enough: a completely limp hand, splayed feet, the smallest hint of silver or something that looked just like it…
One sock was bright blue, but made up for its tedium with individual toes; there were faces on the bottom of each one. The other was one of David’s rainbow stripe knee socks. He used to say he wanted to die in them…
There were reasons to not stay sober.
The funeral was December 28th, after Kevin sat through two days of visitation, getting stoned out of his mind whenever he could. Every couple hours, he went out back for a joint, but no one ever picked up on it: David had taught him to cover his tracks well and they’d been close enough that no one thought it right to come up to him with fake condolences. It was, in a way David would have described it, sinister. Worse than that, even. He wasn’t really sure he wanted to be on the outside, but he didn’t mind that they forced him into it; what he minded was that they kept staring. Some of them had pants that were too short, which provided the perfect excuse to not look at their eyes, aside from the all too obvious grief. He hadn’t been able to stop looking at people’s socks since Christmas.
When his parents, the other adults, and the brats left the home to get food, he stayed and kept the corpse company. They brought him food, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat most of it; every time he tried, he saw it all again: the limp hand, the splayed feet, the small hint of silver or something that looked just like it… but, for whatever reason, the corpse didn’t do that to him. No matter how much he wanted to say that it was David, it wasn’t. It was in David’s only suit (a black number that he’d worn to every dance in his high school career, it was now too big for his body, and was similarly huge in his last homecoming photo), and it had his appearance, but it wasn’t him. It was too full of preservatives to be him. It couldn’t spout philosophy and angst like he used to, and its hands were folded respectfully over its groin, and it just looked too dead, it was unreal, which was far worse than sinister. The ominous, ever-present They had even cleaned up the blood and mess caused by a bullet wound to the head.
And, once, on the second day, while everyone else was out for dinner and the janitor was in the bathrooms, Kevin sneaked a peek at the body’s ankles, delicately lifting up the trousers, just to see…
They fucking matched his socks.