part 2
Grant falls asleep in Brandon's bed, not on the couch, but Brandon's mother never comes down to retrieve him. Brandon is blissed out with gratitude, and he sleeps deeply, wrapped around Grant even after they've both begun to sweat.
Sometime after three o'clock in the morning, he wakes up. Not suddenly or uncomfortably, he simply rolls over and tries to decide if he needs to pee badly enough to get out of bed or if it can wait until morning. He sees the black figure as he's turning around, just out of the corner of his eye, but it's enough to make his heart clench. He keeps a night light in the little hallway that leads to the stairs so that he'll be able to navigate his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and it's only because of its glow that he's able to see that the black shape at the end of the bed is human-sized.
He stares at it, sitting up on his elbow and unable to move or look away. When his eyes adjust to the darkness, he curses in relief and annoyance when he realizes it's just Grant, standing at the end of the bed and staring at him.
The shape and heat of Grant, still beside him in bed, and the murderous glint in the eyes of the Grant at the end of the bed register at the exact same moment, and the intersection of these two observations hits him like someone has reached into his back and ripped all of his organs out in one swift motion.
He screams so loud that he breaks his voice; it comes up like a knife and ruins his throat. He scrambles under the covers as if they'll protect him, and the Grant who is beside him in bed wakes up with a shout. Brandon tries to scream again, but he can't make any sound come up, his throat raw and his mind blanked. Grant flicks the lamp by the bed on so frantically that it crashes to the floor. Brandon hears his mother's footsteps racing across the hallway upstairs.
"What's wrong?" Grant asks, trying to pull back the blankets that Brandon has clawed into his fists. "Brandon? What happened? What's the matter?"
"Is he there?” Brandon doesn't recognize his own scratched-apart voice. “Is he there?”
"Who?"
Brandon's mother thunders down the stairs just as Grant has finally worked the covers down to look into his face. The lamp is still on, despite lying on the floor with its shade bent, and Brandon watches the light drain from Grant's face when he sees Brandon's saucer-shaped eyes and trembling lips. He knows what this is about. They're not safe, even here.
"What happened?" his mother shouts. She comes to the other side of the bed and grabs Brandon's arm. "What's the matter? Who screamed?"
"I saw it." Brandon breaks into tears, humiliated and hopeless. That thing wanted to kill him. It looked like Grant, and it wanted to kill them both. Its desire to see them dead and ability to make it happen clogged up the whole room like fog. Brandon can still smell it, and feel it in his lungs.
"Saw what?" His mother looks at Grant, savage and ready for a fight. "What happened?"
"I don't know," Grant stammers. "I think he had a nightmare."
"Why don't you go upstairs?" Brandon's mother says to Grant. She doesn't look very charmed anymore.
"No!" Brandon grabs Grant's hand. "He can't. Mom, Mom. Something's happening." He tries to stop crying, knows that he's scaring them both.
"It looked like you," he says to Grant, his shoulders bouncing with sobs even when he swallows them. "It was you."
"Alright." His mother pulls back the sheets, and Brandon's sanity begins to resurface: he's glad they didn't fool around before bed and leave their clothes in a heap on the floor. "Everybody out. I want you both upstairs, now."
Grant is crying now, too, though he's mostly silent, just sniffing and blinking rapidly. They all climb the stairs, and Brandon's mother ushers them into the kitchen. Brandon and Grant sit at the kitchen table, wiping their eyes and awaiting their punishment. They're haunted. No one will believe them. Grant puts his foot over Brandon's under the table, and takes it away when he flinches.
"First of all, I want to know if either of you have brought drugs into this house." Brandon's mother is facing away from them, making a pot of coffee. It's twelve past three in the morning.
"No, Mom," Brandon says. He takes a deep breath and wipes his face clear. "Grant has this ghost, or spirit, or something. I know you won't believe me, but I don't know what else to tell you. It was following him around, trying to hurt him, and now -- now. It's trying to hurt me, too."
"If this is a joke, it's not funny," his mother says.
"Mom! It's not. It's, it's. It's bad, though." Brandon looks at Grant. "We don't know what to do."
She pours them all coffee and adds the milk and sugar as if she already knows how they like it. She sits with them at the table, and they wrap their hands around the steaming mugs, staring off into space, glancing at each other, checking the windows.
"Honey," Brandon's mother finally says, speaking to Grant. "You need to go home."
"No!" Brandon jumps out of his seat. "Even if we're wrong or stupid or delusional or whatever, Mom, please, he can't go back to that house."
"I'll die," Grant says. He sounds so sincerely wounded that Brandon doesn't know how she could doubt him. "It'll kill me."
Brandon's mother rubs her face and makes a noise that he can't interpret, something sad but also angry. She looks at the wall for awhile, her head in her hand, then at Brandon. He's already wishing that he'd just told her it was a nightmare, but he wants his mother's help, as pathetic as that makes him. The thought occurs to him, after they've all been silent for almost two full minutes, that it might have actually been only a vivid nightmare. Maybe Grant is driving him out of his mind.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Grant asks, going to his back pocket for his pack.
“Are you insane?” Brandon's mother asks. She sighs when Grant freezes, his hand on his back pocket, the cigarettes under his fingertips.
“Let me have one,” she says. Brandon scoffs in disbelief. Grant hands her a cigarette cautiously, as if this might be a trick. She puts it between her lips and lets Grant light it for her.
“Since when do you smoke?” Brandon asks, incredibly annoyed with both of them.
“Since before you were born,” she says. “I haven't had one in seventeen years, I guess. I was never a chain smoker or anything like that, but your dad and I used to have a cup of coffee and a cigarette before bed. When we watched Saturday Night Live,” she adds, as if she'd forgotten that part until now. She takes a long drag and blows the smoke up toward the ceiling, shuts one eye.
“Are you okay?” Grant asks Brandon, his own cigarette bobbing between his lips.
“Yes,” Brandon says. “No.”
*
They adjourn to the living room, Brandon and Grant on the love seat and Brandon's mother on the couch. There is no more talk of the ghost or Grant going home. Grant smokes two more cigarettes and they watch part of a Vincent Price movie marathon. All of them are asleep before the end of Theater of Blood.
In the morning, Brandon is sore and disoriented. He goes to the hall bathroom for a long overdue piss and thinks about the night before. In bed, he'd been so certain that what he saw was real, and that he and Grant were being hunted, running out of time. In the gray-blue light of morning, his fear that Grant is crazy and doomed feels much more legitimate.
“What the fuck is going on?” he mutters, looking into the mirror. He leaves the bathroom quickly, afraid that he'll hear a gravelly voice answer from the sink drain or some other, equally horrifying thing.
His mother doesn't say much as the three of them putter around the kitchen getting breakfast. It's another cold, gray day, and Brandon loans Grant a sweater and a coat along with fresh boxers and socks.
“Well,” his mother says before they leave for school. “I don't know what to tell you boys.”
“That's okay,” Grant says. “Thanks for letting me stay.” He says so like he's never going to see her again. When they're half a mile from the house, Brandon reaches over to hold his freezing hand.
“What's the plan?” he asks, hoping Grant won't talk again about burning his house down. If this thing is real, it's clearly not confined to Grant's house. If it's not, Grant has enough problems without adding arson to the list.
“I don't have a plan,” Grant says. “I can't believe it's after you now, too. It's my fault. I wanted someone to help me. I shouldn't have gotten you involved.”
“Shut up.” Brandon squeezes his hand. “I'm glad you got me involved.” It's true, somehow.
First period goes by as usual, with pointless group work and twenty minutes of a movie that is based on one of the books they're reading. Brandon looks for Grant in the hallway on the way to second, and he's not worried when he doesn't see him. Grant has Biology on the other side of the building.
“Where've you been?” his friend Tim asks when he's seated at his desk in second period Calculus. “You didn't come to D&D at Kurt's last weekend,” he says, as if Brandon hasn't realized this.
“Some shit's going on, okay?” Brandon says irritably. Tim makes a face.
“Uh. What shit?”
“Some serious shit, Tim. Remember when we would do those fucking seances all the time, and go pissing around the graveyard looking for ghosts?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it's that kind of shit.”
Tim's eyes get huge, either with envy or concern. Class starts before Brandon can explain, mercifully. He settles in for the usual zone-out session that is math class; it's easy for him, and he doesn't need to listen to the answers to his classmates' endless questions. He sneaks a spirit guide out of his book bag and opens it between the pages of his Calculus book. He's reading a passage about poltergeists when someone pounds on the classroom door.
He looks up, along with everyone else in the class, to see Grant standing behind the long, rectangular window on the door. He looks so far beyond panic and fear that for a second Brandon thinks it's the Grant lookalike he saw standing at the foot of the bed. Grant takes off running, and Brandon gets up from his desk. He leaves his book bag behind, taking only the spirit guide as he sprints for the door.
“Excuse me?” his Calculus teacher barks. “What's going on?”
“Sorry!” Brandon shouts before throwing the door open and running out of the room. Grant is almost to the end of the hall, by the yearbook room and the freshman lockers.
“Wait!” Brandon looks back to make sure no one from class is following him. His teacher is standing at the door watching him, but he hasn't given chase.
“Hurry!” Grant screams, and he turns the corner. He peeks back around to look at Brandon. “It's right behind you!”
Brandon doesn't look back, only runs as hard as he can, until Grant catches his arm and pulls him forward, panting and gaping up at the ceiling. They catapult themselves toward the nearest door that leads out of the building, and fly across the empty blacktop where the buses will pull in later. Brandon finally looks back when they're nearly to the football field. He doesn't see anything.
“Oh, God!” Grant sounds close to having an asthma attack, and Brandon pulls him over by the locked-up concession stand so he can catch his breath. Grant doesn't resist, just collapses against Brandon.
“I was sitting in class,” he starts to say, but Brandon puts a finger over his lips. He doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to know.
“It's okay,” Brandon says, trying to keep the shake out of his voice. He's in love with a crazy, probably schizophrenic boy. He tried to believe him; it would have been easier to be haunted by something as straightforward as an evil spirit. He was willing to interpret the unexpected slam of a door and a particularly bad dream to Grant's ghost, but running from invisible monsters at school is just too much. It's now too clearly Grant's invention. “It's okay.” He pets Grant's hair while he steadies his breath, his arms tight around Brandon's back. “It's gonna be okay.”
“Maybe we should go see that witch,” Grant says. He lifts his face, and Brandon doesn't think he's ever seen someone so young look so tired. “Like you said.”
Brandon agrees, because he doesn't know what else to do. Maybe they'll get lost in the woods behind the hiking trail and starve to death. It's better than doing the responsible thing, telling an adult what's really going on here, if his mother hasn't already guessed. Grant will be committed. What's left of him, the good parts, will be ruined. But maybe that's already happening. Maybe Brandon is letting it happen.
They walk to Grant's house to get his car, and drive up to the park. Brandon thinks with crippling sadness of the first day they came here together, when Grant touched him without warning and Brandon kissed him like he'd asked out loud. That day was so beautiful, bright and clear. This one is muddy, the leaves wet under their feet and the trees dripping overhead. Brandon takes Grant's hand once they've started on the trail, and Grant looks at him like he knows what he's thinking.
“We don't have to do this if you don't want to,” Grant says.
“I want to.” They both know it's a lie, but this isn't about what Brandon wants anymore.
They walk for a long time, not speaking and not letting go of each other's hands. Brandon hears strange noises from time to time, but whenever he looks over his shoulder, equally terrified and hopeful that he'll see Grant's doppelganger stalking them through the woods, he never sees anything, not even a squirrel.
“Do you smell that?” Grant whispers when the sky has darkened as if it's going to rain again. Brandon is about to take this as another bad sign, but then he does smell something, like a chimney fire.
“Yeah,” he says. “Are we almost to the other side of the woods?”
“No.” Grant nods at something in the distance. “Look.”
Brandon can just barely make out a structure up ahead; it strikes him at first as a sort of log cabin, but as they move closer they can see that it's made out of stone. Grant bounds toward it, unafraid, and Brandon lets Grant pull him along. There is a thin stream of smoke coming from the house's crooked chimney. Someone is home.
“This is it,” Grant whispers, as if their heavy footsteps haven't already announced their approach. “This is the place Mary Hutch told me about -“
“Stop where you are,” someone says before he can continue. The voice seems to be coming from all around them, as if there is a loudspeaker system installed in the trees, but then a stout old woman steps out from around the side of the little stone house. She's holding a rifle and pointing it at Grant.
“Shit!” Brandon grabs Grant's arm and pulls him back. He holds his hands up.
“Hey,” he says, as if the woman has offered them cookies.
“I always load my gun the week before Halloween,” the woman says. “You can pass that along to any friends of yours who are thinking of coming up here to celebrate.”
“We're not here to bother you,” Grant says.
“Grant, let's go,” Brandon begs, tugging on the sleeve of his jacket. Grant sets his feet, won't budge.
“I just need to ask you a question,” Grant says. “Please.”
The woman narrows her eyes, and her brow knits in unhappy surprise. She walks forward with the gun, slowly lowering it as she approaches. She's doughy and pale, wearing a sweater and jeans with filthy sneakers.
“You!” she says when she's standing just a few feet from Grant. She drops the gun and takes five steps backward, covers her mouth with her hand.
“What?” Grant is trembling, still holding his hands up. “What's wrong?”
“You know him?” Brandon asks. The woman glances at him and then quickly back to Grant.
“How did you find me?” she asks.
“My friends told me about this place,” Grant says. “They said you were a witch, or something.”
The woman walks forward cautiously to retrieve her rifle. She holds it at her side and stares at Grant for a long time. Brandon holds onto his arm. He's pretty sure they're both as good as dead.
“You don't recognize me?” she asks. Grant laughs, then frowns.
“What?” he says. “I've never seen you before in my life.”
“Oh, God.” She rubs a hand across her face as if she's hoping Grant and Brandon will have disappeared when she reopens her eyes. “Oh my God in heaven.”
“How do you know him?” Brandon bellows, the force of his heartbeat nearly knocking him over. He's holding Grant's arm so tightly he's afraid he'll hurt him, but he's not letting go.
“Why have you come looking for me if you don't know who I am?” the woman asks.
“I heard you were a witch, like I said. And I've - been having some. Problems.”
“What sort of problems?”
“Seeing stuff. Black stuff, like cobwebs. And my friend, he saw someone who looks like me, some kind of spirit.”
“Oh, God,” the woman says again. She mops her brow with the sleeve of her shirt and looks around the woods as if she's searching for assistance. “You poor child.”
“How the fuck do you know me?” Grant asks, not unkindly.
“Come inside.” She turns for her house, and scowls at them when they don't follow. “Come!”
Grant walks ahead, and Brandon catches his hand.
“What if it's a trick?” he says.
“What else am I going to do?” Grant asks. “I'm going out of my mind, and it gets worse every day. I can't even get through the morning anymore without seeing something that wants to eat me alive.”
“Are you sure you've never seen her before?”
“Yeah, Brandon.” Grant looks annoyed; Brandon is sure that he's noticed his growing doubt. He tromps along behind him, and ducks into the dark stone cottage while the old woman holds the door open. She shuts it behind them, and uses a match to light a kerosene lamp on a small wooden table. The cottage has only one room, and it smells like a butcher's shop. There is a twin bed pushed against the back right wall, and a kitchen area by the fireplace, herbs hanging upside down near the cottage's single window.
“People think I'm a witch because I live up here alone,” the woman says. “But I've seen enough of my fellow human beings for one lifetime, and I guess I am a witch, because here you are.” She's looking at Grant like she still thinks maybe he's going to kill her.
“What do you mean?” Grant sits at the wooden table, makes himself at home as if this is a normal house. Brandon stands behind him, his arms crossed over his chest.
“My name is Kerry Baker,” she says. “Nurse Baker,” she adds, giving Grant a long, dark look. “You don't remember?”
“Nurse? What, were you there when I was born?”
“No. I was there when you died.”
The words go through Brandon like angry mice, chewing him apart. He grabs Grant's shoulders reflexively; he still feels solid and warm. Grant just laughs.
“I'm not dead,” he says.
“I know that now,” Kerry says. “I never had any reason to believe that it worked, but it must have.”
“What worked?”
Kerry sighs and sits down across from Grant. She has black hair, greasy and streaked with gray, and it's pulled back into a tiny bun at the back of her head. Brandon doesn't like the look of her, and he wishes Grant would give up on this and make a run for it, but he's staring at the witch like she's a harmless library storyteller.
“In the early sixties I worked at Glenview, out by the lake," she says. "They shut it down a few years after I left, much too late. It was a children's hospital. We only dealt with "incurables," which is what they called any variety of unhappy foster children back then. We had kids from all over the state, because we dealt with these cases in the most - inexpensive fashion possible, usually within the limits of the law. I was coming from another state hospital and I thought I could do some good, but the place wore on me so fast. Nobody was ever going to adopt these kids, though they were technically in the system. They - well, I won't get into the details. All you need to know that is we had one boy who had been there since he was a toddler. His name was Andrew. Such a sweet-faced little thing.” She looks at Grant, her eyes dampening, but quickly recovers.
“They diagnosed him with early onset schizophrenia, which is extremely rare, but they didn't know what else to call what was happening to that boy. Poor Andrew lived in a never-ending nightmare. He saw things - darkness, he told the doctors it “ate him” whenever they left him alone. They tried everything, but he was allergic to almost all of the anti-psychotics on the market, and he would just get violently ill when we tried to treat him with pills. He was - a handful when he had his episodes, and a lot of the orderlies hated him. He made the doctors feel like failures, and these were state doctors, underpaid babysitters for hopeless cases, so they weren't the most charitable people on the planet. It culminated in this experimental version of electroshock for "critical" cases that one of the doctors came up with as a last resort. Andrew was suffering, and we couldn't even drug him until he went numb. It was this or much more expensive brain surgery that would take years to clear the budget and would probably just kill him anyway, considering how he reacted to anesthetics. He was terrified - he was a smart kid, and he knew they were coming in for the mercy kill. Well, it worked. When he died on the table, the staff could barely hide their relief. I left the hospital, the profession, the world the next morning.”
“What does this have to do with me?” Grant asks. Kerry sighs.
“I've been fooling around with witchcraft since I was a girl,” she says. “I never knew if it was really doing anything or if I was only assigning meaning to coincidences. It seemed like whenever I used spellwork to pass classes or take petty revenge, something bad would happen to me afterward, usually a physical illness. I took it as a sign from God that I shouldn't be messing with the stuff, and I stopped for awhile, but after I started working at Glenview, I was so disenchanted with life that I thought I had nothing to lose. I gave kids suffering from untreatable illnesses little charms and herbal remedies, and sometimes it seemed to help, particularly with children who had mental problems and wanted to believe in magic. It was highly illegal, of course, and I would be facing jail time if I got caught, but I had to do something for those children. Andrew tugged especially hard at my heart. He seemed as if he'd never had a moment's peace in his life, and when he looked up at me, pleading, on that gurney before they - well, before they put him out of his misery - I used a spell I'd been considering trying on him for some time.”
“What was it?” Grant asks when she doesn't continue. She looks frightened, not now of Grant but of something else. Grant is sitting forward on his seat, his back arched and his chest jammed into the edge of the table.
“It was a transference spell,” Kerry says. “Used on a dying person whose life has been wasted. It's supposed to send their soul into another body, to give them another chance at life, a guarantee that they'll get a fair shake next time. I said it mostly to comfort myself. I didn't think it would work. We were killing that child, and I couldn't decide if letting him live would be the humane thing to do, or if carrying through with the shock 'treatment' would.”
“I still don't understand what this has to do with me,” Grant says.
“Grant.” Brandon is holding his shoulders, his eyes stinging. His skin feels scratchy, like there are bugs crawling all over him. “She's saying that she thinks that boy is you.” He glares at Kerry, and tries to tell Grant with the pressure of his fingers, let's go, let's go, let's get the fuck out of here.
Grant opens his mouth to contest this, but Kerry is staring at him in a way that confirms Brandon's interpretation.
“That doesn't make sense,” Grant says.
“You're seeing things?” Kerry says. “Black things - cobwebs - you feel they're going to do you harm? Your friend has seen your double?”
“Yeah, but.” Grant scoffs. "If you did this in the sixties, I mean. I was born in 1992."
"Transference isn't an instant process," Kerry says. "Not theoretically, anyway. A soul searches for the right vessel. It's not as if there are plenty of them lying around and waiting to be claimed. It can take hundreds of years to find a juncture of time and place where a battered soul feels comfortable being reborn. It's no coincidence that Andrew stayed close to the only home he ever knew."
“But why now? It just started happening-“
“You're sixteen years old?” Kerry asks.
“Yeah.”
“Andrew was eight when he died. The spell doubles the life of the person who dies when it's cast - but only that. It just doubles the years, nothing beyond.”
“So - so what, I'm going to die?” Grant's voice is full of disbelief and indignation, as if all of his previous fears about dying were insincere.
“No,” Kerry says. “But you'll become Andrew again when the spell wears off. You'll suffer from his schizophrenic delusions - it sounds like they've already found you.”
Grant jumps out of his chair and turns to look at Brandon, who just shakes his head. This woman, this fucking witch, if that's what she wants to call herself. She's only going to fuel Grant's descent into madness. She's clearly sicker than he is, which shouldn't come as a surprise to Grant, considering where she lives, but he looks as if he's swallowed every word she said.
“Wait,” Kerry says as Grant's shoulders begin to shake with his hyperventilation. “Let me research the spell. I've - worried about this in the past. It was rash of me to even try something so complex, and I have read about methods of undoing the transference, just in case anything like this ever - came to my attention.”
“This is impossible,” Grant says, staring at Brandon. “Impossible.”
Brandon steps forward and hugs him, lightly, as if he might break. He's trembling like a bird; his bones feel hollow and fragile in Brandon's arms.
“Don't listen to her,” Brandon whispers. Grant exhales wordlessly, his arms still at his sides.
“You'll have to resolve this before the Day of the Dead,” Kerry says. She's up from the table and searching a squat bookshelf by her bed. “Andrew, if he's the one who's trying to reclaim you, will be ten times as powerful that day. You won't have any chance of recovering unless you find a way before then.”
“Shut up,” Brandon snaps. “Just stop talking. I don't who the hell you think you are, I'm sorry that you killed someone and you feel guilty about it, but we're leaving.”
“I'm not going to sugarcoat this for him,” Kerry says sharply. “The whole thing's my fault, and I would give my life to fix it if I could, but I doubt it will be that simple.”
“What do I have to do?” Grant asks, turning from Brandon, stepping out of his arms. “Just tell me what I have to do.”
“Let's go,” Brandon says, pulling him toward the door.
“Wait,” Kerry says, thumbing through her books. “Just wait a moment. I know how this must sound. I can hardly believe it myself, but that's him. He doesn't even look much like Andrew, but it's him, his soul, I can feel it.”
“Lady,” Brandon barks. “Stop talking.”
“Or what?” she asks, her eyes suddenly glittering with something lively and dangerous.
“Grant!” Brandon shouts, ignoring her. “We should go. Let's go, okay, please Grant, this is crazy.”
Grant looks at him like he just said what he's really thinking: Grant, you're crazy, you've been crazy all along.
“You can go if you want to,” Grant says.
“Grant, she's-“
“I can't live like this!” Grant says. “Okay? I'll try anything, fucking anything, and this actually makes a weird kind of sense, and I'm not going to be able to explain why, so you can just go, Brandon, and let me deal with it.”
Brandon stays only because he's afraid to wander through the woods alone, and even if he made it back to Grant's car, how would he get home? It's a fifteen mile walk. He sits heavily at the table and lets his eyes go unfocused.
“Here,” Kerry says, a book open in her hands. “Reversal of the transference spell. It's easy, actually, but I can't promise that you'll be the one who is saved.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Grant asks.
“It'll restore one of you. You're two halves - Andrew, the poisoned half, and - Grant, is it? - the ideal half, the soul that has been freed. You'll either lose the half of you that is poisoned, or Andrew will gain the half that is free.”
“Grant,” Brandon begs, but he won't even turn.
“How do I know which will happen?” Grant asks.
“You don't,” Kerry says. “You've got to go back to the site of the original transference. That's Glenview, room 186, if they haven't already torn the building down.”
“That's it?”
“Supposedly. But like I said, you'll have to do it before the Day of the Dead. Andrew might be half-alive in you, but the half that died will reclaim you if it gets the chance, and then you'll both be lost to the misery that he suffered before the spell. This is all just theoretical, of course,” she says when Grant stares at her in disbelief. “It's not like I've done this before.”
“Grant,” Brandon tries again. This time he does walk to the door, and he leaves without looking back. Brandon hurries to follow him. He can barely keep up. Thunder is rumbling overhead, and the skies have grown darker.
“She's crazy,” Brandon says, out of breath as they jog along the trail.
“Either she is or I am."
“That's not -“
“Stop it!” Grant whirls around, and Brandon almost falls backward. “Stop pretending you know what this is like.”
“I do know! I saw that thing, at the end of the bed -“
“You saw me. Something was trying to tell you to get away from me.”
“Well, fuck that, because I won't!
“I don't know why. I mean, shit, Brandon! I'm ruining your life.”
“You are not.”
Grant scoffs. “I don't know why you think I can't tell when you're lying.”
They walk the rest of the way in silence. It starts raining when they're a few steps away from the car, but neither of them hurries to reach it. They're soaked by the time they climb inside, and Grant drives slowly back toward Thousand Trees.
“You're not going to do it, are you?” Brandon asks. “Go to that stupid hospital? You know nothing would happen.”
“I don't know anything anymore,” Grant says.
*
Grant drops Brandon off at his house, and he slams the car door without saying goodbye. He takes a shower and goes to bed without dinner, doesn't answer when his mother comes knocking after she gets off of work. He doesn't even want to think about that bullshit with the woman in the woods, and sure as hell doesn't want to talk about it.
When Grant doesn't show up for school on Wednesday, Brandon isn't surprised, and he spends most of the day trying to convince himself that he isn't worried. He has imaginary fights with Grant in his head, tells him that he probably made up the whole thing and hired that old bat in the woods to conspire with him. You're trying to drive me crazy, Brandon screams at him in his fantasies. Maybe he was never even attracted to Grant, or any other guys, for that matter. It's a comforting thought, though not as comforting as the ones that help him get to sleep at night, memories of Grant pressed close to him and kissing him lazily, like a reflex, his hand curled warm around Brandon's side.
“What are you doing for Mischief Night tomorrow?” Tim asks Brandon in Calculus. It's a tradition for Brandon and his friends to get together on the night before Halloween and talk about toilet-papering the houses of their jock enemies or spray-painting giant cocks on their most hated teachers' cars, though usually they just end up watching old monster movies and sneaking candy from the stashes their moms bought for trick-or-treaters.
“Nothing,” Brandon says. “Why? You want to hang out?” He's been craving some contact with the normal world.
“Yeah, sure,” Tim says. “If your serious spiritual crisis, or whatever the fuck, isn't going to interfere.”
“No.” Brandon stares down at his Calculus book. “That was just - I thought, uh. But it was just someone pranking me.”
“You always were a gullible bitch. Was it Grant Wheeler?”
“Huh?” Heat spreads across Brandon's face. He keeps his eyes on his book.
“That was kind of fucked up when you ran after him yesterday.”
“He's a dick,” Brandon mutters. It hurts to say, drags through his chest like nails.
“I could have told you that, man.”
Brandon walks home with Tim and his girlfriend Stacey after school, and they play Guitar Hero, which he hates. Tim has started smoking pot, apparently, and Brandon takes a hit when he offers, but mostly just coughs it up. Later, some of their other D&D buddies come over, and Ryan Thomas brings a fifth of Captain Morgan. They watch Army of Darkness on TNT and pass the bottle around.
“What's with you?” Stacey asks Brandon when he's coming out of the bathroom. She's been waiting out in the hall; she seems to need to pee roughly every thirty seconds.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“You look depressed,” she says.
“I'm just stoned.”
He's more drunk than stoned, having found the rum much easier to ingest, but he's too inexperienced to really know the difference. By the time the movie ends, Tim and Stacey are dry humping on Tim's bed and Ryan and Cody Marshal are so drunk that they're close to doing the same on the couch. Brandon leaves without saying goodbye to anyone. He walks through the dark streets of Chestnut Grove, the far-off shouts of a few premature mischief-makers echoing faintly in the distance. Without really thinking about where he's going, he ends up in Hickory Pines.
The streets of Grant's neighborhood are much quieter, in an unsettling way. A pickup truck rolls by slowly, and Brandon pushes his shoulders up to his chin and keeps his eyes down until it speeds away. When he finally comes to Grant's house, it's dark except for the porch light. Grant's car is gone, so he doesn't bother going to the front door. Maybe Grant has already gone to Glenview, a place Brandon's friends once talked about visiting for ghost hunting purposes but ended up avoiding because of rumors that the cops patrolled the abandoned building. Maybe Grant has already killed himself up there, thinking that he's working a spell.
Brandon chokes down tears on the walk to his house, and the wind blows hard against him, the trees loud with it like waves crashing. Jack-o-lanterns flicker on his neighbors' porches, and paper ghosts wave wildly in the trees, spinning in circles. Brandon walks through patches of silly string and two smashed pumpkins, and he's glad to see the lights on inside his house, though it's well after midnight. His mother is on the couch watching Pet Sematary when he comes in, and she pats the spot beside her. Brandon makes a sound of annoyance but joins her on the couch.
“Grant hasn't come by or anything, has he?” he asks when the movie is almost over, though he knows she would have said something if he had.
“Nope. You want to tell me what's really going on with him?”
“I'll let you know when I figure it out.” Brandon reaches into the bowl of Halloween candy on the coffee table and opens a box of Red Hot Dollars.
“Well, is he okay?” his mother asks.
Brandon shrugs, and she pretends not to notice that his eyes are wet.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Not really.”
“Alright. Well. Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” Brandon shakes the rest of the Red Hot Dollars into his mouth and throws the empty box onto the table. “I mean, but. Thanks for trying.”
“You smell like a drunk, by the way.”
“It's not like I was driving," he says, as if he otherwise has the right to as much rum as he wants.
“You're freaking me out, Bubby.”
Brandon rolls his eyes at his stupid childhood nickname. He says goodnight, and doesn't realize until he's in bed that she hasn't called him that since his father died. It was his dad, mostly, who thought of him as Bubby. Brandon turns onto his back and looks at the ceiling.
“Help,” he says. The word just floats through the darkness like it's lonely.
He dreams that he's running through the woods, and he gets to Grant's house just in time to see it go up in flames, exploding in an action movie fireball. Grant is standing on the curb in his pajamas, staring at the blaze with gleeful fascination. Brandon falls against his arm, and he barely notices.
“What are you doing?” Brandon cries. “They'll arrest you! They'll lock you up! Grant, we have to run, we have to go!”
“It's okay.” Grant keeps his wide eyes on the fire. “It doesn't matter.”
Brandon looks down and sees that the cuffs of Grant's pajama pants are on fire. He's standing in a pile of hot coals. Brandon stomps on the flames in vain; they don't spread but won't extinguish. When he tries to drag Grant off of the coals he can't move him an inch, as if he weighs a thousand pounds.
"It's okay," Grant keeps saying, not taking his eyes off of the fire. "I've figured it out now."
Brandon wakes up feeling sluggish and nauseous, and puts on the same jeans and sweater he wore the day before, though they both stink of pot now. His mother makes him eat breakfast, two blueberry Eggos.
“It's the only thing that will make you feel better,” she says when Brandon scowls at them. “And if you come home drunk again I'll - I don't know. Take the television out of your room? Don't make me have to start inventing punishments, Brandon. Don't stop being a good kid.”
“I'm still a good kid,” he mutters into his plate, though it feels like a lie. He abandoned Grant. Things got too weird. Even if he's still a good kid, apparently he's not a very good person.
The school day passes in a blur. Tim blathers the usual bullshit plans for Mischief Night and Brandon agrees to join in, because the prospect of sitting on the couch with his mother and absorbing her sympathy for yet another evening is too depressing. He goes to the stall in the bathroom near the gym where he used to meet Grant before lunch, leans against the cinderblock and tries to remember what it was like: he'd usually get here first, and would worry every time that Grant wouldn't show, but just before he started thinking about leaving, Grant would yank the unlocked door open and grin at him. Brandon would always attempt to make some whispered conversation, and Grant would half-answer a few questions before falling onto him. Brandon puts his hands around his face the way Grant used to, feeling pathetic. He would tip Brandon's chin up with his thumbs and hold him like that while he kissed him, like he was some sacred thing.
When seventh period lets out, Brandon meets Tim by the art room and walks with him out to the parking lot, where they'll get a ride home with Ryan. This year's plan for Mischief Night includes some crap about crashing a party thrown by a girl who picks on Stacey in Chorus. Brandon couldn't possibly be less enthusiastic about it, but he needs something to distract him from his thoughts about Grant. Tomorrow is All Hallow's Eve, his last chance before the Day of the Dead to follow that crazy hermit's instructions.
“Hey.”
Brandon is so used to hearing Grant's voice in his head that he almost doesn't look up, but then he feels him standing at the bottom of the front stairs even before he sees him, and when their eyes meet his knees almost buckle. In the past few days he's done a pretty good job of convincing himself that Grant Wheeler isn't worth the trouble, but he's wearing a t-shirt and mud-spattered gray pants, his eyes insanely blue in the glow of the late afternoon light, and he looks, at the moment, like something worth dying for.
“Hey.” Brandon stops walking, and Tim stares at him. Grant glances at Tim like he wants him to get lost.
“What the fuck?” Tim says. “Are you two, like, dating?”
“Yeah, actually, we are,” Brandon says, glaring at him. Tim rolls his eyes and walks off, waving his hand dismissively.
“See you later, fucker,” he calls. “Or should I say butt fucker?” he adds as an afterthought. He jogs across the parking lot, laughing.
“Sorry,” Brandon says. “He's an idiot.”
“I just wanted to say goodbye to you,” Grant says, as if he didn't even notice Tim. “I'm - I guess I'm going to try. You know. Tonight.”
“I'll come with you,” Brandon gushes, and he waits to regret the offer but doesn't. Grant smiles.
“Okay,” he says. He doesn't exactly look surprised that Brandon is willing. "Let's go."
*
Continued