BBHR: 03 - Night Wanderings
Beyond Back Harlow Road: 03 - Night Wanderings
Rating: 12A (UK), PG-13 (US)
Summary: Three years after the events in 'Stand By Me', Chris Chambers and Gordie Lachance are still standing by each other. What will face them as they journey even further beyond childhood?
Gordie's POV. Chris/Gordie Slash.
Warning: Contains strong language, male-male relationships, mature content
¤
I had asked for extra portions at dinner that night. Neither my mother nor my father noticed that I didn’t actually eat half of what I was given. More than three years since my older brother Denny’s death hadn’t changed much in my family. I had grown a few inches in height and my parents had grown more and more tired, wrinkles etching deeper in their skin as time worn on. But three years had at least given me some time to get used to it all. It was not like I minded missing out on the father-son ballgames my school sometimes held because my old man’s knee was acting up again. Chris always missed them out with me.
Chris was the reason I had asked for the extra portions, three miniature roast potatoes and a thick slice of meatloaf. Skipping lunch was all well and good for me; I was the one who would have the hot meal ready on the dinner table at six o’clock sharp. Chris wasn’t quite so lucky. He’d be hungry when he came over to study.
I never knew exactly what time he would arrive. Sometimes he’d appear early and I’d hear the tapping of pebbles on my window at around half-six in the afternoon, just after I finished eating. Other times he’d show up well into the evening, though never long after sundown. Once the sun had set and true night had risen then I knew he wouldn’t be coming. It was like an unwritten rule.
An hour passed by and the food I’d smuggled for him had gotten cold; the potatoes no longer glistening with butter and the meatloaf less like a loaf and more like a rock.
Another hour passed and I went to my bedroom window, hoping to see his figure walking down the street. There was nothing. I half expected a piece of tumbleweed to drift past like in the cowboy movies. But of course Castle Rock wasn’t in the Wild West.
He had said he would come, hadn’t he? That was the thing. It’d have been fine if Chris hadn’t said so. It was his way, sometimes he’d show and sometimes he wouldn’t. But he had said! Chris Chambers kept his word, especially with me.
There was little denying it now. The sun was doing the limbo under the horizon, painting the sky red and orange as it fell. I could already see the white crescent moon as well as a few stars popping into existence. Anxiety twisted inside of me; like a snake it had begun to wrap around my throat and my stomach, tighter and tighter. I looked at my watch just as the hour struck nine.
Imagination is both a gift and a curse. You can use it to get yourself lost in a fictional world when the real one is bearing down too hard for you to handle. You can use it to make up stories, for yourself, for your friends or for the general public in exchange for money. However it can also run riot and make the worst thoughts appear in your head. Thoughts about why Chris hadn’t shown. Was he hurt? Was his father on a mean streak again? Old man Chambers could be shit-faced drunk, even more so than he was usually. Chris could be at his little shack-of-a-home, getting the life beaten out of him. Or maybe it was his jackass brother, Eyeball, doing the beating. For all I knew, it could even be both.
At fifteen I could control my imagination better than I could when I was twelve. Back then I used to see things that scared me to the core, dead bodies hanging limp from coat-hooks, their faces pale and their eyes as blank as a china doll’s. However my imagination, although at times controlled, could never be tamed. This was one of the times it was going wild.
I sat at my windowsill, staring out into the empty and darkening streets as I breathed deep and slow so as to calm myself down. It didn’t work. I began to count to ten but that didn’t help much either. I had stopped when I realised I counted seven twice and missed out eight completely.
There was no way I was going to sit there all night.
I stood up fast, so fast I had to lean on the wall and close my eyes to shake the woozy feeling from my head. Once the head rush had subsided I searched my room for my sneakers, finding them lying by the side of my bed next to a heap of clothing. I shoved them on and contemplated for a moment whether I should attempt to put spare pillows under my blanket to make it look like a sleeping figure. I quickly pushed that thought aside. There was no point; my parents usually never entered my room anyway. As I opened my window, just wide enough to slip myself through, I hoped they would continue on with that tradition.
Just outside my bedroom window stood a large tree, its branches strong enough to support the weight of a human being. I climbed onto one of these branches from my window ledge and used it to swing myself down to the bottom ones and then, eventually, onto the ground. I wasn’t as graceful as Chris at it, or as quick. He had had more practice after all.
Night-time had truly hit. In those days there weren’t streetlamps to guide you-in big cities, yes, but not in small towns like Castle Rock. There were, however, a billion stars and one heck of a large moon to provide an ample amount of lighting.
I made my way down the deserted street. I had decided to head for Chris’s house first, although I had no idea what I’d do when I got there. Knock on the door perhaps. Come up with some harebrained fabrication as to why I was there.
‘Hey Mr Chambers,’ I could say. ‘Is your son about? He left his books at my place.’
As if that would work. What logic was there in a teenage kid going over to some guy’s house at night to return a couple of schoolbooks? Hell, I hadn’t even brought any books along with me to uphold the lie if I ever attempted it.
‘Yeah he left his books at my place, and they’re still at my place. I just thought I’d come over to your house and tell you that he left them there but not actually bring them with me because he can just go get them himself. It’ll teach him a lesson about forgetting books at other people’s house.’
I wondered how a conversation like that would pan out. It would have been funny if I weren’t so fucking desperate to find Chris.
Halfway between my place and Chris’s was an elm tree and in it was a tree house made of scavenged planks of wood. A corrugated tin sheet made do as its roof. Teddy, Vern, Chris and I had hawked that tin sheet from Milo Pressman’s junkyard back when we were about ten or eleven years old. Us four had built the tree house together and we were damn proud of the result. Yeah it was no mansion; when it rained the tin roof made it sound like you were sat in a Jamaican steel drum and half the walls were covered in duct tape from the number of holes and splinters, but it belonged to us. It was our creation and our masterpiece.
Over the years though, it stopped being ‘ours’ and started being Teddy and Vern’s and a number of other guys we didn’t know. It was not like they kicked Chris and me out of it. We just went less and less once the tree house had begun to teem with new faces, each of them younger than we were. As the days-and years-went by we just never went back there. Every now and then we would get the urge to, until we saw all the preteen kids throwing cigarette butts out the window and ogling at dirty magazines. Even though we were the same at that age it just didn’t feel as right anymore. The tree house was no longer ours but everybody else’s.
I was walking past that tree house when I heard the noise of wood scraping against wood and the shuffling of feet. It could have been anyone, Teddy, Vern, or one of their goons from the lower grades, but something told me it wasn’t them. Maybe it was the fact that-although I heard the noises-the sound was muffled and almost cautious, as if the person in the tree house was trying to make as little noise as possible. Teddy wouldn’t have cared about things like that; he would have woken up the whole neighbourhood if need be. Vern too would have done the same, though it would have been his own clumsiness and not his lack of social propriety-of which he had an almost negligible amount anyway-that would have been the reason. The goons I didn’t know about, but instinct said it wasn’t them either. Instinct said it was someone else.
I walked over to the ladder and quickly climbed up its rungs. Once I reached the trapdoor I lifted it open. I had hoped to be quiet but the tree house wouldn’t allow it. The trapdoor croaked like a dying bullfrog as it opened and I grimaced at the loudness of it in the silent night.
‘Hey Gordie,’ I heard a voice say and I breathed a sigh of relief. Instinct had been right after all, and a good thing too. Looking over my shoulder I saw Chris slouched languidly in the corner of the tree house, the area around him shoved clear of boxes and a number of other junk.
I lifted myself fully from the trapdoor and let it fall shut behind me. ‘Hey to you too,’ I replied, turning to face him properly.
It was then that I truly saw Chris. Looking at him head on and not over my shoulder. His left eye was puffy and bruised and there was a reddish-brown blob on his bottom lip that I could only identify as blood. He looked like a numerous number of fist-shaped cars had hit him.
‘Fucking hell!’ I exclaimed, rushing over to where he sat and kneeling before him so as to get a better look at the damage. When I was younger I would’ve asked him what had happened but I no longer needed to; I knew the answer well enough, he had been beaten again.
Reaching over I touched the swollen area around his eye and Chris immediately flinched away, turning his head to look in the opposite direction.
I sucked in a deep breath. ‘Anything broken?’ I asked. I saw Chris’s shoulders shrug.
‘I dunno,’ he mumbled, his face still turned away.
‘Come on,’ I said and I began to lift the bottom of his shirt up. Chris started and looked at me, his eyes wide and confused.
‘I want to check if you broke anything,’ I explained, my hands still clutching the bottom of his shirt.
‘I didn’t break anything, okay?’ He pushed my hands down, shaking his head.
I didn’t release my grip. ‘You didn’t seem so sure before.’
‘Well I am! It doesn’t hurt when I breathe so nothin’s broken there, right? And I can move my limbs just fine so nothin’s broken their neither.’
Sighing I let go of his shirt and moved so I was beside him, sliding my back down the wall into a sitting position. ‘Fine,’ I muttered.
‘Fine,’ he said, his tone of voice matching my own.
We sat there in silence, neither of us looking at the other and both of us staring straight ahead. It was Chris who spoke up again.
‘Sorry.’
‘What for?’ I asked, glancing over at him.
‘I dunno,’ he replied. He let out a laughing breath and shook his head. ‘What you here for anyway?’
‘Looking for you,’ I said and told him about what had gotten me there, though I had dimmed down how worried I had been, making it seem more like I was curious about his whereabouts than anything else. I even told him about what my plans had been when I got to the Chambers Household, including my lame lie with the books. Chris laughed properly at that and I smiled.
‘Good thing I heard you up here instead,’ I finished.
Chris nodded. ‘Fuck knows what my old man would’ve done if you did that.’
‘Was it your old man or was it Eyeball?’ I asked suddenly, unable to stop myself. My question would have seemed out of the blue and completely nonsensical to anybody else but Chris knew what I meant straight away.
‘It wasn’t Eyeball,’ he said finally after a silence I thought would have lasted for eternity. I noted how he didn’t say that it was his father, just that it wasn’t his brother. Chris always did that. Never confirming and only ever denying when pushed.
I leant further back against the wall and decided for a subject change. ‘Going to school tomorrow?’
‘Yeah,’ Chris said and motioned almost invisibly to his face, ‘this ain’t too bad.’ Ever the optimist was Chris Chambers. I had no idea how he did it. What his dad had done to his face-in my opinion-definitely counted as ‘bad’.
‘You should’ve come to my place then,’ I said, ‘I saved you some food.’
Chris shrugged, a gesture he had begun to do more often. ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
I sat bolt upright and turned sharply to stare at him, my chest was rising and falling as I took in angry breaths. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ I half-yelled. ‘I was fucking worried because you didn’t show, you asshole!’
Chris stared right back at me, then brought a hand to message his temple. He always looked ancient whenever he did that. ‘Screw you, Lachance,’ he said, his voice sounded exhausted and unable to carry the simple threat. ‘How was I supposed to know?’
‘Just don’t do it again,’ I said, ignoring his question. I knew that if I answered it I’d just end up sounding like a pussy.
‘I won’t, I promise.’ He kissed his pinkie finger and held it up like had done when we were kids.
I rolled my eyes just as my lips quirked up into a small smile. With a flump I slumped back against the wall beside him, jabbing his side lightly with my elbow. It was a light jab, except I had forgotten Chris’s current fragile state. He winced, but only for a fraction of a second, attempting to hide the wince by looking down at the floor. I pretended not to notice, not being in the mood for another miniature dispute. Sometimes it was best just to let things go.
The night wore on and we talked about other things. Chris asked me a few questions about Algebra and I tried to answer them to the best of my ability without the use of pens and paper. It took quite a bit of effort and a lot of random hand gestures in the air. He understood me though, like he always did.
We also talked about things of no consequence, like that new episode of The Twilight Zone and random other shit. How bored the ancient Greeks must have been to work out pi (‘They didn’t have Twilight Zone,’ I had said and Chris had laughed) and why, if all those stupid ACME inventions kept backfiring, did Wile E. Coyote keep on buying them.
After a while, though, we just sat there in silence. Not the silence of before-a more peaceful sort of silence, the comfortable sort of silence that only two close friends could share. Chris was again the one who broke it.
‘Thanks, man.’
I looked at him and smiled. ‘Don’t sweat it,’ I replied. ‘I always said I’d help with school stuff.’
‘Nah,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t mean that.’ I looked at him curiously and he carried on, though a little bit hesitantly. ‘I mean, thanks for lookin’ for me tonight. I’m glad you did.’
My smile grew and I shook my head just like he had done. ‘I said, “Don’t sweat it”, didn’t I?’
He grinned, although the grin soon turned to a yawn, one that seemed to catch him by surprise. His yawn made me glance at the watch on my wrist, squinting in the dark to read the hands. It was heading towards midnight.
‘You better get back,’ I heard Chris say. I turned my eyes back to him, expecting him to be leaning over to look at my watch as well. He wasn’t, he was looking straight at me. Chris didn’t have to look at my watch to read the time; all he had to do was read me.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘Staying here.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘No way.’
‘Yes way.’ He reached over into the pile of junk he had pushed into the opposite corner of the tree house and pulled out a tattered old blanket from the middle of it. He held it up to me as if to say, ‘See?’
‘I’m staying too then,’ I told him. I could see his mouth open to protest but I spoke up before he could. ‘It’ll be like camping out or something.’
Chris looked at me suspiciously. ‘There’s only one blanket.’
‘You call that shit-rag a blanket?’ I laughed. ‘I think I’ll manage without it Chambers, it’s a warm night.’
I saw his uncertainty cave and he nodded, giving in. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘Just don’t cry come cryin’ to me when you wake shivering like a cold pussy.’
‘You wish,’ I said and lay myself on the wooden floor of the tree house. Chris did the same opposite me, letting the torn blanket fall over him.
I think it was at around two in the morning when I woke up shivering like a cold pussy. Gently I nudged Chris’s side. He made a noise that was somewhere in between a groan and a splutter of laughter, and with a tired hand he lifted up the corner of the blanket. I didn’t move.
‘Jesus, Gordie,’ I heard him mutter from under the blanket’s folds. ‘I’m not giving you the whole thing. Just get the fuck in, you retard.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ I whispered and crawled over to where he lay, taking the corner of the blanket from Chris’s hand and shuffling under it. When it fell on top of me I was surprised at the warmth, though I didn’t know whether most of the heat was coming from the blanket itself or the fact that Chris’s body was right beside me. I moved slightly away from him, uncomfortable with our near proximity, and closed my eyes and fell asleep.
My dream was in a haze of red and gold. I was standing at a door I recognised as the front door to Chris’s house. It was ajar. I pushed it open and took what-in my dream-I had thought was my first ever step into the Chambers household. The door creaked as I opened it, a loud and piercing noise that I shoved my hands over my ears. Of course in a dream doing things like that did little to help. The creak carried on even after the door stopped moving; soon it turned into a scream. It was the scream I had heard that night in the woods when Chris, Teddy, Vern and I had gone in search of Ray Brower’s body, the scream of a wildcat.
‘Or dying woman,’ Teddy said from behind me. I turned around sharply but he wasn’t there.
‘No, it’s that Brower kid’s ghost.’ This time it was Vern’s voice, though he too was nowhere to be seen.
The screaming stopped suddenly and I ventured further past the door. It slammed shut behind me. I was now in a long corridor, the walls peeling with dried paint. Over at the end of the corridor I saw a figure slouched in the corner.
‘Chris?’ I called but he didn’t answer. The corridor was long, real long; I thought he probably hadn’t heard me. I hurried over to him, calling his name again at intervals. Halfway to him I saw a pair of battered Keds lying on the floor. I ignored them and kept on running.
When I reached him I was exhausted, hunching over myself and taking in wheezy breath after wheezy breath of the dream air.
‘Chris?’ I said, my voice hoarse. I looked at his feet and saw he wasn’t wearing any shoes. ‘Where are your shoes?’ I wondered whether the Keds I had seen were his, until I remembered that Chris didn’t own any Keds.
He didn’t answer me yet again and this time I looked up at his face. The bruises and cuts were gone, his skin flawless and perfectly unmarred. His eyes were closed and it seemed like he was sleeping… sleeping or dead.
I started awake, eyelids jerking open to see a blurry face above my own. I blinked and saw the face belonged to Chris; his brows were knitted together in concern.
‘You’re awake,’ he said, sounding relieved.
‘And you’re not dead,’ I wanted to say but stopped myself.
‘Was it Denny?’ he asked and at first I was confused. Was what Denny? Then I realised he must have meant my dream. He knew I dreamt about Denny’s death, even more than three years after it happened I still did.
‘Yeah,’ I lied. I didn’t think it was appropriate to say that no, it wasn’t Denny-it was you. Chris would have freaked, or at least I sure as hell would have if someone had said the same to me.
‘You okay?’
I mumbled some sort of confirmation and saw his face relax. He smiled at me and whispered, ‘Get back to sleep.’ I nodded.
With a shuffle Chris lay back down next to me. Except this time he was closer than he had been before, and this time I didn’t move away from him as I had done earlier. I was just content to feel the heat of his body there alongside mine and not someplace distant I couldn’t reach. I edged up a little nearer and closed my eyes, drifting off easily into a dreamless sleep.
Rating: 12A (UK), PG-13 (US)
Summary: Three years after the events in 'Stand By Me', Chris Chambers and Gordie Lachance are still standing by each other. What will face them as they journey even further beyond childhood?
Gordie's POV. Chris/Gordie Slash.
Warning: Contains strong language, male-male relationships, mature content
¤
I had asked for extra portions at dinner that night. Neither my mother nor my father noticed that I didn’t actually eat half of what I was given. More than three years since my older brother Denny’s death hadn’t changed much in my family. I had grown a few inches in height and my parents had grown more and more tired, wrinkles etching deeper in their skin as time worn on. But three years had at least given me some time to get used to it all. It was not like I minded missing out on the father-son ballgames my school sometimes held because my old man’s knee was acting up again. Chris always missed them out with me.
Chris was the reason I had asked for the extra portions, three miniature roast potatoes and a thick slice of meatloaf. Skipping lunch was all well and good for me; I was the one who would have the hot meal ready on the dinner table at six o’clock sharp. Chris wasn’t quite so lucky. He’d be hungry when he came over to study.
I never knew exactly what time he would arrive. Sometimes he’d appear early and I’d hear the tapping of pebbles on my window at around half-six in the afternoon, just after I finished eating. Other times he’d show up well into the evening, though never long after sundown. Once the sun had set and true night had risen then I knew he wouldn’t be coming. It was like an unwritten rule.
An hour passed by and the food I’d smuggled for him had gotten cold; the potatoes no longer glistening with butter and the meatloaf less like a loaf and more like a rock.
Another hour passed and I went to my bedroom window, hoping to see his figure walking down the street. There was nothing. I half expected a piece of tumbleweed to drift past like in the cowboy movies. But of course Castle Rock wasn’t in the Wild West.
He had said he would come, hadn’t he? That was the thing. It’d have been fine if Chris hadn’t said so. It was his way, sometimes he’d show and sometimes he wouldn’t. But he had said! Chris Chambers kept his word, especially with me.
There was little denying it now. The sun was doing the limbo under the horizon, painting the sky red and orange as it fell. I could already see the white crescent moon as well as a few stars popping into existence. Anxiety twisted inside of me; like a snake it had begun to wrap around my throat and my stomach, tighter and tighter. I looked at my watch just as the hour struck nine.
Imagination is both a gift and a curse. You can use it to get yourself lost in a fictional world when the real one is bearing down too hard for you to handle. You can use it to make up stories, for yourself, for your friends or for the general public in exchange for money. However it can also run riot and make the worst thoughts appear in your head. Thoughts about why Chris hadn’t shown. Was he hurt? Was his father on a mean streak again? Old man Chambers could be shit-faced drunk, even more so than he was usually. Chris could be at his little shack-of-a-home, getting the life beaten out of him. Or maybe it was his jackass brother, Eyeball, doing the beating. For all I knew, it could even be both.
At fifteen I could control my imagination better than I could when I was twelve. Back then I used to see things that scared me to the core, dead bodies hanging limp from coat-hooks, their faces pale and their eyes as blank as a china doll’s. However my imagination, although at times controlled, could never be tamed. This was one of the times it was going wild.
I sat at my windowsill, staring out into the empty and darkening streets as I breathed deep and slow so as to calm myself down. It didn’t work. I began to count to ten but that didn’t help much either. I had stopped when I realised I counted seven twice and missed out eight completely.
There was no way I was going to sit there all night.
I stood up fast, so fast I had to lean on the wall and close my eyes to shake the woozy feeling from my head. Once the head rush had subsided I searched my room for my sneakers, finding them lying by the side of my bed next to a heap of clothing. I shoved them on and contemplated for a moment whether I should attempt to put spare pillows under my blanket to make it look like a sleeping figure. I quickly pushed that thought aside. There was no point; my parents usually never entered my room anyway. As I opened my window, just wide enough to slip myself through, I hoped they would continue on with that tradition.
Just outside my bedroom window stood a large tree, its branches strong enough to support the weight of a human being. I climbed onto one of these branches from my window ledge and used it to swing myself down to the bottom ones and then, eventually, onto the ground. I wasn’t as graceful as Chris at it, or as quick. He had had more practice after all.
Night-time had truly hit. In those days there weren’t streetlamps to guide you-in big cities, yes, but not in small towns like Castle Rock. There were, however, a billion stars and one heck of a large moon to provide an ample amount of lighting.
I made my way down the deserted street. I had decided to head for Chris’s house first, although I had no idea what I’d do when I got there. Knock on the door perhaps. Come up with some harebrained fabrication as to why I was there.
‘Hey Mr Chambers,’ I could say. ‘Is your son about? He left his books at my place.’
As if that would work. What logic was there in a teenage kid going over to some guy’s house at night to return a couple of schoolbooks? Hell, I hadn’t even brought any books along with me to uphold the lie if I ever attempted it.
‘Yeah he left his books at my place, and they’re still at my place. I just thought I’d come over to your house and tell you that he left them there but not actually bring them with me because he can just go get them himself. It’ll teach him a lesson about forgetting books at other people’s house.’
I wondered how a conversation like that would pan out. It would have been funny if I weren’t so fucking desperate to find Chris.
Halfway between my place and Chris’s was an elm tree and in it was a tree house made of scavenged planks of wood. A corrugated tin sheet made do as its roof. Teddy, Vern, Chris and I had hawked that tin sheet from Milo Pressman’s junkyard back when we were about ten or eleven years old. Us four had built the tree house together and we were damn proud of the result. Yeah it was no mansion; when it rained the tin roof made it sound like you were sat in a Jamaican steel drum and half the walls were covered in duct tape from the number of holes and splinters, but it belonged to us. It was our creation and our masterpiece.
Over the years though, it stopped being ‘ours’ and started being Teddy and Vern’s and a number of other guys we didn’t know. It was not like they kicked Chris and me out of it. We just went less and less once the tree house had begun to teem with new faces, each of them younger than we were. As the days-and years-went by we just never went back there. Every now and then we would get the urge to, until we saw all the preteen kids throwing cigarette butts out the window and ogling at dirty magazines. Even though we were the same at that age it just didn’t feel as right anymore. The tree house was no longer ours but everybody else’s.
I was walking past that tree house when I heard the noise of wood scraping against wood and the shuffling of feet. It could have been anyone, Teddy, Vern, or one of their goons from the lower grades, but something told me it wasn’t them. Maybe it was the fact that-although I heard the noises-the sound was muffled and almost cautious, as if the person in the tree house was trying to make as little noise as possible. Teddy wouldn’t have cared about things like that; he would have woken up the whole neighbourhood if need be. Vern too would have done the same, though it would have been his own clumsiness and not his lack of social propriety-of which he had an almost negligible amount anyway-that would have been the reason. The goons I didn’t know about, but instinct said it wasn’t them either. Instinct said it was someone else.
I walked over to the ladder and quickly climbed up its rungs. Once I reached the trapdoor I lifted it open. I had hoped to be quiet but the tree house wouldn’t allow it. The trapdoor croaked like a dying bullfrog as it opened and I grimaced at the loudness of it in the silent night.
‘Hey Gordie,’ I heard a voice say and I breathed a sigh of relief. Instinct had been right after all, and a good thing too. Looking over my shoulder I saw Chris slouched languidly in the corner of the tree house, the area around him shoved clear of boxes and a number of other junk.
I lifted myself fully from the trapdoor and let it fall shut behind me. ‘Hey to you too,’ I replied, turning to face him properly.
It was then that I truly saw Chris. Looking at him head on and not over my shoulder. His left eye was puffy and bruised and there was a reddish-brown blob on his bottom lip that I could only identify as blood. He looked like a numerous number of fist-shaped cars had hit him.
‘Fucking hell!’ I exclaimed, rushing over to where he sat and kneeling before him so as to get a better look at the damage. When I was younger I would’ve asked him what had happened but I no longer needed to; I knew the answer well enough, he had been beaten again.
Reaching over I touched the swollen area around his eye and Chris immediately flinched away, turning his head to look in the opposite direction.
I sucked in a deep breath. ‘Anything broken?’ I asked. I saw Chris’s shoulders shrug.
‘I dunno,’ he mumbled, his face still turned away.
‘Come on,’ I said and I began to lift the bottom of his shirt up. Chris started and looked at me, his eyes wide and confused.
‘I want to check if you broke anything,’ I explained, my hands still clutching the bottom of his shirt.
‘I didn’t break anything, okay?’ He pushed my hands down, shaking his head.
I didn’t release my grip. ‘You didn’t seem so sure before.’
‘Well I am! It doesn’t hurt when I breathe so nothin’s broken there, right? And I can move my limbs just fine so nothin’s broken their neither.’
Sighing I let go of his shirt and moved so I was beside him, sliding my back down the wall into a sitting position. ‘Fine,’ I muttered.
‘Fine,’ he said, his tone of voice matching my own.
We sat there in silence, neither of us looking at the other and both of us staring straight ahead. It was Chris who spoke up again.
‘Sorry.’
‘What for?’ I asked, glancing over at him.
‘I dunno,’ he replied. He let out a laughing breath and shook his head. ‘What you here for anyway?’
‘Looking for you,’ I said and told him about what had gotten me there, though I had dimmed down how worried I had been, making it seem more like I was curious about his whereabouts than anything else. I even told him about what my plans had been when I got to the Chambers Household, including my lame lie with the books. Chris laughed properly at that and I smiled.
‘Good thing I heard you up here instead,’ I finished.
Chris nodded. ‘Fuck knows what my old man would’ve done if you did that.’
‘Was it your old man or was it Eyeball?’ I asked suddenly, unable to stop myself. My question would have seemed out of the blue and completely nonsensical to anybody else but Chris knew what I meant straight away.
‘It wasn’t Eyeball,’ he said finally after a silence I thought would have lasted for eternity. I noted how he didn’t say that it was his father, just that it wasn’t his brother. Chris always did that. Never confirming and only ever denying when pushed.
I leant further back against the wall and decided for a subject change. ‘Going to school tomorrow?’
‘Yeah,’ Chris said and motioned almost invisibly to his face, ‘this ain’t too bad.’ Ever the optimist was Chris Chambers. I had no idea how he did it. What his dad had done to his face-in my opinion-definitely counted as ‘bad’.
‘You should’ve come to my place then,’ I said, ‘I saved you some food.’
Chris shrugged, a gesture he had begun to do more often. ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
I sat bolt upright and turned sharply to stare at him, my chest was rising and falling as I took in angry breaths. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ I half-yelled. ‘I was fucking worried because you didn’t show, you asshole!’
Chris stared right back at me, then brought a hand to message his temple. He always looked ancient whenever he did that. ‘Screw you, Lachance,’ he said, his voice sounded exhausted and unable to carry the simple threat. ‘How was I supposed to know?’
‘Just don’t do it again,’ I said, ignoring his question. I knew that if I answered it I’d just end up sounding like a pussy.
‘I won’t, I promise.’ He kissed his pinkie finger and held it up like had done when we were kids.
I rolled my eyes just as my lips quirked up into a small smile. With a flump I slumped back against the wall beside him, jabbing his side lightly with my elbow. It was a light jab, except I had forgotten Chris’s current fragile state. He winced, but only for a fraction of a second, attempting to hide the wince by looking down at the floor. I pretended not to notice, not being in the mood for another miniature dispute. Sometimes it was best just to let things go.
The night wore on and we talked about other things. Chris asked me a few questions about Algebra and I tried to answer them to the best of my ability without the use of pens and paper. It took quite a bit of effort and a lot of random hand gestures in the air. He understood me though, like he always did.
We also talked about things of no consequence, like that new episode of The Twilight Zone and random other shit. How bored the ancient Greeks must have been to work out pi (‘They didn’t have Twilight Zone,’ I had said and Chris had laughed) and why, if all those stupid ACME inventions kept backfiring, did Wile E. Coyote keep on buying them.
After a while, though, we just sat there in silence. Not the silence of before-a more peaceful sort of silence, the comfortable sort of silence that only two close friends could share. Chris was again the one who broke it.
‘Thanks, man.’
I looked at him and smiled. ‘Don’t sweat it,’ I replied. ‘I always said I’d help with school stuff.’
‘Nah,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t mean that.’ I looked at him curiously and he carried on, though a little bit hesitantly. ‘I mean, thanks for lookin’ for me tonight. I’m glad you did.’
My smile grew and I shook my head just like he had done. ‘I said, “Don’t sweat it”, didn’t I?’
He grinned, although the grin soon turned to a yawn, one that seemed to catch him by surprise. His yawn made me glance at the watch on my wrist, squinting in the dark to read the hands. It was heading towards midnight.
‘You better get back,’ I heard Chris say. I turned my eyes back to him, expecting him to be leaning over to look at my watch as well. He wasn’t, he was looking straight at me. Chris didn’t have to look at my watch to read the time; all he had to do was read me.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘Staying here.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘No way.’
‘Yes way.’ He reached over into the pile of junk he had pushed into the opposite corner of the tree house and pulled out a tattered old blanket from the middle of it. He held it up to me as if to say, ‘See?’
‘I’m staying too then,’ I told him. I could see his mouth open to protest but I spoke up before he could. ‘It’ll be like camping out or something.’
Chris looked at me suspiciously. ‘There’s only one blanket.’
‘You call that shit-rag a blanket?’ I laughed. ‘I think I’ll manage without it Chambers, it’s a warm night.’
I saw his uncertainty cave and he nodded, giving in. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘Just don’t cry come cryin’ to me when you wake shivering like a cold pussy.’
‘You wish,’ I said and lay myself on the wooden floor of the tree house. Chris did the same opposite me, letting the torn blanket fall over him.
I think it was at around two in the morning when I woke up shivering like a cold pussy. Gently I nudged Chris’s side. He made a noise that was somewhere in between a groan and a splutter of laughter, and with a tired hand he lifted up the corner of the blanket. I didn’t move.
‘Jesus, Gordie,’ I heard him mutter from under the blanket’s folds. ‘I’m not giving you the whole thing. Just get the fuck in, you retard.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ I whispered and crawled over to where he lay, taking the corner of the blanket from Chris’s hand and shuffling under it. When it fell on top of me I was surprised at the warmth, though I didn’t know whether most of the heat was coming from the blanket itself or the fact that Chris’s body was right beside me. I moved slightly away from him, uncomfortable with our near proximity, and closed my eyes and fell asleep.
My dream was in a haze of red and gold. I was standing at a door I recognised as the front door to Chris’s house. It was ajar. I pushed it open and took what-in my dream-I had thought was my first ever step into the Chambers household. The door creaked as I opened it, a loud and piercing noise that I shoved my hands over my ears. Of course in a dream doing things like that did little to help. The creak carried on even after the door stopped moving; soon it turned into a scream. It was the scream I had heard that night in the woods when Chris, Teddy, Vern and I had gone in search of Ray Brower’s body, the scream of a wildcat.
‘Or dying woman,’ Teddy said from behind me. I turned around sharply but he wasn’t there.
‘No, it’s that Brower kid’s ghost.’ This time it was Vern’s voice, though he too was nowhere to be seen.
The screaming stopped suddenly and I ventured further past the door. It slammed shut behind me. I was now in a long corridor, the walls peeling with dried paint. Over at the end of the corridor I saw a figure slouched in the corner.
‘Chris?’ I called but he didn’t answer. The corridor was long, real long; I thought he probably hadn’t heard me. I hurried over to him, calling his name again at intervals. Halfway to him I saw a pair of battered Keds lying on the floor. I ignored them and kept on running.
When I reached him I was exhausted, hunching over myself and taking in wheezy breath after wheezy breath of the dream air.
‘Chris?’ I said, my voice hoarse. I looked at his feet and saw he wasn’t wearing any shoes. ‘Where are your shoes?’ I wondered whether the Keds I had seen were his, until I remembered that Chris didn’t own any Keds.
He didn’t answer me yet again and this time I looked up at his face. The bruises and cuts were gone, his skin flawless and perfectly unmarred. His eyes were closed and it seemed like he was sleeping… sleeping or dead.
I started awake, eyelids jerking open to see a blurry face above my own. I blinked and saw the face belonged to Chris; his brows were knitted together in concern.
‘You’re awake,’ he said, sounding relieved.
‘And you’re not dead,’ I wanted to say but stopped myself.
‘Was it Denny?’ he asked and at first I was confused. Was what Denny? Then I realised he must have meant my dream. He knew I dreamt about Denny’s death, even more than three years after it happened I still did.
‘Yeah,’ I lied. I didn’t think it was appropriate to say that no, it wasn’t Denny-it was you. Chris would have freaked, or at least I sure as hell would have if someone had said the same to me.
‘You okay?’
I mumbled some sort of confirmation and saw his face relax. He smiled at me and whispered, ‘Get back to sleep.’ I nodded.
With a shuffle Chris lay back down next to me. Except this time he was closer than he had been before, and this time I didn’t move away from him as I had done earlier. I was just content to feel the heat of his body there alongside mine and not someplace distant I couldn’t reach. I edged up a little nearer and closed my eyes, drifting off easily into a dreamless sleep.