Marmalade #19, Wintergreen #8
Author: winebabe
Title: Losing Touch
Story: The Gemini Occurrence ( Poverty Club 'Verse)
Rating: R (gratuitous swearing, mentions of sex)
Flavor(s): Marmalade #19: aspirin; Wintergreen #8: like there’s no tomorrow
Extra(s)/Topping(s): Malt [Truth or Dare Game, courtesy of roisin_farrell: “I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming.”]
Word Count: 3,354
Summary: October 2020. Vic goes off the deep end.
Notes: Previous: Take It as a Sign. Victor Eastman, Casey Calhoun, Ruby Eastman. (Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a place to stop the angst, so here's more of me ruining my characters' lives.)
For the brief period of time he was actually able to be in therapy, Vic can only remember a few of the things his therapist had told him. He was young at the time, 14, and the school had ordered him to go see someone on the condition that if he didn’t, he would be expelled. He can’t even remember why at this point, just that Ruby lost her shit and found the one therapist in a 30 mile radius who would take government-assistance health insurance and wouldn’t make them pay anything out of pocket. Ruby had just turned 18; Vic is still amazed how quickly she was able to grow up and take care of him and Isaac.
The school required written proof of four sessions. Vic attended the four and never went back. The graying middle-aged woman with the glasses low on her nose knew nothing about what life was like for him and he only went to therapy for Ruby’s benefit, so she wouldn’t have an aneurysm about her brother being kicked out after only a few months in high school. It didn’t help him. He didn’t care.
He does remember, though, that she’d looked straight at him when she spoke to him. She always made eye contact, and he had found himself dropping his gaze, looking away instead of staring at her head-on, aggressive and challenging. After that first visit, she told him he needed to see someone, get a real diagnosis. “Diagnoses,” she’d corrected herself, and Vic didn’t understand until she tacked on, “I believe there’s going to be more than just one.”
He’s been fine, though. Aside from what he’d consider to be ‘normal Eastman behavior’--the underage drinking, getting into fights, breaking the law--the only strange and out of character thing had been his sudden drop into full-blown puppy love. And he’s not stupid or homophobic; he knows that, apparently for him, having feelings for a guy is normal, too. It’s having such strong feelings that he knows is his one apparent flaw--but that’s not something you go to a psychiatrist for. He didn’t care, because the intensity was good. It was good as long as he and Casey were together.
Vic drops Mona off first, and when he pulls into Cara’s driveway, Isaac gets out with her. He just watches the two of them walk across the lawn together and then disappear into the house.
Vic’s face is still throbbing and the dull pain lulls him into a trance. Casey is in the back; Mona had been sitting up front with him after Casey climbed in the back seat with Cara and Isaac. No one had asked any questions after Isaac’s initial outburst, but it was readily apparent that something had happened between him and Casey.
As much as he wishes Casey was up there next to him, he doesn’t want to talk about what happened. Casey said he wanted out, and unless he takes it back, Vic doesn’t want to hear anything out of his mouth.
“Vic,” Casey snaps, and Vic jolts to attention. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Vic keeps quiet, but he puts the car in reverse and lets it roll back down the driveway. There’s a tightness in his throat that he can’t swallow away, and every time he catches sight of Casey’s light hair in the rearview mirror, he feels choked up. His brain can’t even form an accurate expression of how he’s feeling; like a broken record, his thoughts keep skipping: It’s not-- I can’t-- He couldn’t-- I thought maybe-- but not this. Not this.
They drive in silence to Casey’s house, and when they finally pull up outside, Vic is paralyzed at the wheel--terrified Casey will speak to him, and terrified he won’t.
Casey doesn’t waste any time, though, and shoves open the car door without so much as a goodbye. He slams it behind him and Vic sits there, the sound reverberating through his body. He can hear the sound of the front door slamming behind Casey, and in the silence that follows, he realizes how entirely he aches. His nose isn’t the only part of him that’s broken.
The house is quiet when Vic finally gets inside. Ruby’s either at work or over at Cheyenne’s, and it’s late enough in the day that Clarence has finally woken up from his liquor crash and headed back out to find more.
In the kitchen, he pops some aspirin and washes it down with a shot of whiskey, and while he can still feel the burn down his throat, he pulls his phone out of his pocket, just to check. There’s nothing from Casey, but he has a text from Gina, asking where the hell everyone ran off to after they’d gotten to school that morning.
Vic has to think before he responds, because he’s not in the mood to talk and Gina is hit-or-miss; either she’s way too nosy, or she doesn’t give a shit about anything. had to go be a eastman, he finally decides on, and he sees that she’s read his text but doesn’t respond.
“Thank you,” he says to no one in particular as he pockets his cell phone again. The less he tells her, the better. The less they talk, the better. Vic figures Mona will give her the details, since girls like to gossip, and everything that happened between him and Casey will stay a secret until the day they die. If he can’t handle the mere concept of a relationship, he won’t be going around letting anyone know they broke up.
The aspirin doesn’t do anything, so Vic sneaks into Ruby’s bedroom and finds her stash of old prescription medication--stuff that she hoards to avoid doctor visits when their insurance won’t cover it. He knows there’s a bottle of vicodin in there from Isaac’s emergency oral surgery--the balance of which Ruby will be spending decades paying off--and he doesn’t even feel guilty popping a couple of pills. After all, he’s legitimately injured, and probably enough to actually go see a doctor.
The bottle warns of dizziness, drowsiness, and the sparkly-looking martini glass sticker tells him alcohol will heighten the side effects. Vic knows he’s going to be spending the rest of the night drinking, but he doesn’t care. The Eastmans were born with liquor in their veins and he’s been drinking since before he hit double digits. A couple vicodin don’t scare him.
Vic leaves the vicodin bottle where he found it and heads back into the living room, stopping in the kitchen to pick up the bottle of whiskey. He sits down on the floor in front of the TV, using the sofa as a backrest, and considers turning on his game console to play some shooting games. It might get out some of his anger, some of his frustration, he thinks, but as soon as he opens the whiskey bottle and takes a gulp of it, he realizes there really isn’t any anger.
Casey could have obliterated his face and he still wouldn’t be angry. The only thing he can feel is the cold weight of sadness drag his shoulders down, like being covered in a sopping wet blanket. It’s all-encompassing, freezing out the pain in his face. Even the whiskey burn can’t warm him, no matter how much he drinks, and he watches the line of the liquor on the glass dip lower and lower.
Men aren’t supposed to feel heartbreak. It’s a woman’s emotion, for weak people who put too much stock into relationships. Men don’t care. Men don’t worry. They mourn the loss of sex, not companionship.
Except Casey is so much more than sex. Casey is smart, and resourceful, and those rare moments when he lets his mask slip, when he’s gentle and affectionate and caring--Vic could die happy, he thinks, if Casey would just come over and cup his face in his hands, kiss him lightly on his nose and tell him, I’m sorry.
He can’t believe Casey would end it with him. No matter how cold he was, or how much he seemed to be against a relationship, Vic had never imagined Casey would end it. There were too many signs--Casey fell asleep with his arm around Vic every time he stayed over, he bought Vic lunch when they ran low on food, he actually helped Vic with his math homework instead of just letting him cheat--that led Vic to believe that Casey had to feel the same about him. He was kind in ways that didn’t require the softness he didn’t like to show. And sometimes, when Vic needed it, Casey would be soft.
He wasn’t a terrible boyfriend. In spite of everything, Casey wasn’t. And Vic doesn’t blame him for anything, except the breakup.
“Vic? Hey, Vic? C’mon, buddy, open your eyes.”
When Vic’s eyes do flutter open, they fall on Ruby’s face. She’s crouched down in front of him, where he’s still propped up against the couch with the bottle of whiskey on the ground beside him. He watches her lips spread into a smile.
“Hey. You okay? Had a little too much?”
“‘m fine,” he slurs, his mouth dry and uncooperative. “Go away.”
“Vic,” Ruby says, and then again, with more concern in her voice, “Vic, what happened to your face?”
“Wha’do you think?” Vic hiccups and closes his eyes. He hasn’t been out long enough to sober up at all, and the room is still spinning around him. “Aw, fuck.”
“Victor Samuel Eastman,” she growls, venom in her voice, and Vic whines. “What the fuck is going on with you? I know you skipped school again. They call me every goddamn time!”
“Gonna puke,” Vic chokes out, and his drunken observation is that one minute, he’s sitting on the living room floor, and the next, he’s draped over the toilet bowl.
“You deserve this,” Ruby grumbles, just as Vic violently retches, splattering the toilet bowl with little more than the liquid he’d been drinking since he got home. “What did you do, speed-drink on an empty stomach?”
Vic vomits until he’s doing little more than painfully dry-heaving over the toilet, and with Ruby’s watchful eye on him, his retching quickly turns to breathless sobbing. He clings to the toilet with white knuckles, gasping for air as he shakes and cries, eyes closed to block out the nausea.
“Damn it, Vic.” Ruby hops off the sink and kneels beside him, carefully pulling him away from the toilet and propping him up against the wall. She drops the lid and flushes the toilet, and grabs a handful of toilet paper to run underneath the sink. “What happened, honey?” she asks as she begins wiping around Vic’s mouth, careful to avoid the bruise blossoming across his face.
He can’t stop. He can’t stop crying, and slowly moves his hands from the floor so he can wrap his arms around himself. It feels like he has to hold himself together, pressing on his sore ribs to try and stop the trembling.
“You are so drunk, Vic,” Ruby murmurs, affectionately running a hand down the side of his face. “Just tell me what’s going on. You probably won’t even remember this tomorrow. It’s just us, no one else is home.”
“I’m gay!” Vic blurts out, and if he’d had his eyes open, he would have seen Ruby’s face soften into a knowing smile. “There, okay? I’ve been--I didn’t need to hide it from you, but if Clarence knew--”
“I know, honey. It’s okay. I already knew, and I’ll never let Clarence find out. It’s our secret.” She pauses, just for a moment, and then asks, “Is that what this is about?”
“No!” Vic coughs and swallows hard; he’s crying so hard and the inside of his nose is so swollen that it’s running down the back of his throat, choking him. “Casey--” he starts to say and coughs again.
“Hey, hold on,” Ruby says and pats his knee. She’s gone for what feels like barely a millisecond and then she’s back, putting a glass of water into his hand and closing his fingers around it. “Drink.”
Vic sips the water slowly, afraid it’ll go down wrong. He opens his eyes long enough to see Ruby staring at him, worry apparent on her face. He has to close his eyes again.
“I know about you and Casey, too,” Ruby tells him quietly, “if that’s what you were trying to say. I saw you two sleeping together when I’d go to wake you up for school. I’ve known for weeks now.”
Vic sets the glass down beside him, taking in ragged breaths. “Fuck,” he says, and Ruby laughs.
“You can’t keep secrets from me, Vic.”
“Casey ended it,” Vic admits, his voice wavering pathetically around the words.
“Oh, damn. I’m sorry, honey.”
There’s silence as Ruby watches tears well up in Vic’s half-open eyes and slowly spill over onto his cheeks. He keeps his eyes focused on the tile floor beneath them, his arms wrapped around his waist again.
“So that’s what this is about. He really hurt you, huh.”
Vic slowly raises one hand to point to his face. “In more ways than one.”
“He hit you?” Ruby shrieks, and whispers an apology when Vic’s face shifts into a grimace. “Why?”
“I hit him first,” he admits. “We got into a fight, okay? Because he’s like...ashamed of me, or of being gay, or whatever. I got mad. I hit him, and he hit me back, and he tried to apologize but I wouldn’t let him because he just kept saying stupid shit, and then when I asked if he wanted to break up he said yes. Just like that.”
“You fucking idiot,” she mutters. “You perfect pair of fucking idiots.”
“I love him,” Vic says, and fails to stifle the sob that follows. “I think I love him.”
“But it doesn’t seem like he loves you,” Ruby replies, trying to reason with him.
“It does, though! I mean--not now, not right now but he--he does stuff for me and I thought that--”
“You need to go to bed, Vic,” she gently tells him. “Go to bed and you can talk to him at school tomorrow, alright? It’ll be fine.”
Vic doesn’t protest when she hauls him to his feet and has to semi-drag him to his bedroom, but he spends the night staring out his bedroom window until the sun rises.
“Get up, Vic,” Ruby says from the doorway, and Vic rolls over.
“Never slept,” he mutters, and he watches her roll her eyes and sigh.
“So I guess you’re gonna tell me you’re not going to school today?” she sounds tired, too, and he figures she’s not going to fight him too hard that morning, so he just answers with a quiet “yep.” Ruby drums her fingers on the wall for a moment, before finally nodding. “Fine, stay home. I’ll call in for you.” She turns around and disappears down the hallway, and then Vic can hear her on the phone, leaving a message on the school’s answering machine.
He should probably get up and go, because the alternative is spending the day at home, probably with Clarence, but he can’t move. His entire body aches, not least of all his face, and Vic knows he’s gotta look like hell.
Maybe Casey would care if he saw him, if he saw the state he was in, but Vic is oddly self-conscious at the thought. It’s not like Casey hasn’t seen it before, Vic bruised, bloodied, half-dead and disgusting under fluorescent lights. Casey’s seen him puking in public restrooms, licking his own blood from his lips, covered in mud and puke and any other number of questionable substances, and never once has he made more than a teasing remark.
Casey hasn’t seen him cry, though, and Vic is terrified that it’s written all over his face. He’s seen his sister cry, and he knows the aftermath is swollen eyelids, blotchy skin, a heaviness that seemed to drag her features down. Between the crying, vomiting, and the fist to his nose, Vic knows his face has to be an ungodly swollen mess. He might even be so messed up that no one could tell the difference between eyes swollen from crying and and just a ripple effect from the injury.
The thought of Casey noticing scares him, but what scares him more is the thought of Casey not noticing. Because if he doesn’t notice, it means he doesn’t care, and all Vic wants is for Casey to care.
He thinks that maybe, just maybe, if he stays home, Casey will worry. He’ll call, or text, or maybe even come over. He’ll spend the day at school wondering if Vic’s okay, if he hurt him too badly, if something else happened. And then he’d have to talk to him, because he’d need to know Vic was alright.
At least, that’s what Vic hopes as he rolls back over, pulling his comforter tightly around himself. He sinks down into the warmth of his bed and finally closes his eyes, content to sleep the day away, feeling lighter with the thought of waking up to a text message from Casey.
It’s dark outside when Vic finally opens his eyes, and the first thing he does is fumble for his phone, knocking it off of his nightstand before he’s finally able to grab it. He does have unread text messages, but none of them are from Casey, and the disappointment hits him like an icy wave.
He couldn’t just stop caring, not like that. No one can flip a switch and move on without a second thought, and Vic feels sick just thinking about it. He’d told him, he’d told him to go find a girl if he was so insistent about not wanting to be gay, and he can’t help thinking that maybe Casey did.
Where are you??? Gina’s text says. Casey isn’t talking to us and he’s hanging out with his AP friends, and I think Mona knows what’s going on but she won’t tell me! What the fuck Vic!!
It’s like being stabbed through the heart. Vic closes his eyes and drops his phone down on his mattress; Casey’s AP classmates have loomed like ominous figures since he’d started taking those stupid classes, and no matter how hard he tried, he was never able to push away the jealous rage that seemed to bubble up when Casey mentioned any of them.
Alicia Logan is the worst of them, pretty and blonde and so ambitious. Casey’s probably already taken her home, Vic thinks. He’s probably already introduced her to his parents and sat with her at the dinner table, and maybe she slid her hand up his thigh while he stuffed his mouth full to keep from moaning. Maybe he didn’t even need to close his eyes and pretend she was someone else. Maybe he really isn’t gay.
But what does that make him? What did it make them?
Vic forces himself to get out of bed and stagger to the bathroom, because he’s afraid he may vomit. The reflection in the mirror is grotesque; the bruise across his face has darkened, so purple it’s almost black, and his eyes are bloodshot and crazed. Blood has crusted over where his bottom lip cracked, and he can still see dried blood stuck in his hairline.
Of course, Casey could never love someone like him. He has a future. He has potential. Vic has maybe another decade before his liver fails and little more than the hope that he can get a job doing manual labor sometime after graduation, if graduation ever happens.
But it won’t. Casey gets to graduate that year, but Vic has another English class to make up. He won’t get to walk with his classmates, and if he has to stay stuck in the Ditch while Casey runs off to college, what’s the point?
Vic decides, staring himself in the eye in front of the bathroom mirror, that he’s going to drop out of high school.
Title: Losing Touch
Story: The Gemini Occurrence ( Poverty Club 'Verse)
Rating: R (gratuitous swearing, mentions of sex)
Flavor(s): Marmalade #19: aspirin; Wintergreen #8: like there’s no tomorrow
Extra(s)/Topping(s): Malt [Truth or Dare Game, courtesy of roisin_farrell: “I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming.”]
Word Count: 3,354
Summary: October 2020. Vic goes off the deep end.
Notes: Previous: Take It as a Sign. Victor Eastman, Casey Calhoun, Ruby Eastman. (Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a place to stop the angst, so here's more of me ruining my characters' lives.)
For the brief period of time he was actually able to be in therapy, Vic can only remember a few of the things his therapist had told him. He was young at the time, 14, and the school had ordered him to go see someone on the condition that if he didn’t, he would be expelled. He can’t even remember why at this point, just that Ruby lost her shit and found the one therapist in a 30 mile radius who would take government-assistance health insurance and wouldn’t make them pay anything out of pocket. Ruby had just turned 18; Vic is still amazed how quickly she was able to grow up and take care of him and Isaac.
The school required written proof of four sessions. Vic attended the four and never went back. The graying middle-aged woman with the glasses low on her nose knew nothing about what life was like for him and he only went to therapy for Ruby’s benefit, so she wouldn’t have an aneurysm about her brother being kicked out after only a few months in high school. It didn’t help him. He didn’t care.
He does remember, though, that she’d looked straight at him when she spoke to him. She always made eye contact, and he had found himself dropping his gaze, looking away instead of staring at her head-on, aggressive and challenging. After that first visit, she told him he needed to see someone, get a real diagnosis. “Diagnoses,” she’d corrected herself, and Vic didn’t understand until she tacked on, “I believe there’s going to be more than just one.”
He’s been fine, though. Aside from what he’d consider to be ‘normal Eastman behavior’--the underage drinking, getting into fights, breaking the law--the only strange and out of character thing had been his sudden drop into full-blown puppy love. And he’s not stupid or homophobic; he knows that, apparently for him, having feelings for a guy is normal, too. It’s having such strong feelings that he knows is his one apparent flaw--but that’s not something you go to a psychiatrist for. He didn’t care, because the intensity was good. It was good as long as he and Casey were together.
Vic drops Mona off first, and when he pulls into Cara’s driveway, Isaac gets out with her. He just watches the two of them walk across the lawn together and then disappear into the house.
Vic’s face is still throbbing and the dull pain lulls him into a trance. Casey is in the back; Mona had been sitting up front with him after Casey climbed in the back seat with Cara and Isaac. No one had asked any questions after Isaac’s initial outburst, but it was readily apparent that something had happened between him and Casey.
As much as he wishes Casey was up there next to him, he doesn’t want to talk about what happened. Casey said he wanted out, and unless he takes it back, Vic doesn’t want to hear anything out of his mouth.
“Vic,” Casey snaps, and Vic jolts to attention. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Vic keeps quiet, but he puts the car in reverse and lets it roll back down the driveway. There’s a tightness in his throat that he can’t swallow away, and every time he catches sight of Casey’s light hair in the rearview mirror, he feels choked up. His brain can’t even form an accurate expression of how he’s feeling; like a broken record, his thoughts keep skipping: It’s not-- I can’t-- He couldn’t-- I thought maybe-- but not this. Not this.
They drive in silence to Casey’s house, and when they finally pull up outside, Vic is paralyzed at the wheel--terrified Casey will speak to him, and terrified he won’t.
Casey doesn’t waste any time, though, and shoves open the car door without so much as a goodbye. He slams it behind him and Vic sits there, the sound reverberating through his body. He can hear the sound of the front door slamming behind Casey, and in the silence that follows, he realizes how entirely he aches. His nose isn’t the only part of him that’s broken.
The house is quiet when Vic finally gets inside. Ruby’s either at work or over at Cheyenne’s, and it’s late enough in the day that Clarence has finally woken up from his liquor crash and headed back out to find more.
In the kitchen, he pops some aspirin and washes it down with a shot of whiskey, and while he can still feel the burn down his throat, he pulls his phone out of his pocket, just to check. There’s nothing from Casey, but he has a text from Gina, asking where the hell everyone ran off to after they’d gotten to school that morning.
Vic has to think before he responds, because he’s not in the mood to talk and Gina is hit-or-miss; either she’s way too nosy, or she doesn’t give a shit about anything. had to go be a eastman, he finally decides on, and he sees that she’s read his text but doesn’t respond.
“Thank you,” he says to no one in particular as he pockets his cell phone again. The less he tells her, the better. The less they talk, the better. Vic figures Mona will give her the details, since girls like to gossip, and everything that happened between him and Casey will stay a secret until the day they die. If he can’t handle the mere concept of a relationship, he won’t be going around letting anyone know they broke up.
The aspirin doesn’t do anything, so Vic sneaks into Ruby’s bedroom and finds her stash of old prescription medication--stuff that she hoards to avoid doctor visits when their insurance won’t cover it. He knows there’s a bottle of vicodin in there from Isaac’s emergency oral surgery--the balance of which Ruby will be spending decades paying off--and he doesn’t even feel guilty popping a couple of pills. After all, he’s legitimately injured, and probably enough to actually go see a doctor.
The bottle warns of dizziness, drowsiness, and the sparkly-looking martini glass sticker tells him alcohol will heighten the side effects. Vic knows he’s going to be spending the rest of the night drinking, but he doesn’t care. The Eastmans were born with liquor in their veins and he’s been drinking since before he hit double digits. A couple vicodin don’t scare him.
Vic leaves the vicodin bottle where he found it and heads back into the living room, stopping in the kitchen to pick up the bottle of whiskey. He sits down on the floor in front of the TV, using the sofa as a backrest, and considers turning on his game console to play some shooting games. It might get out some of his anger, some of his frustration, he thinks, but as soon as he opens the whiskey bottle and takes a gulp of it, he realizes there really isn’t any anger.
Casey could have obliterated his face and he still wouldn’t be angry. The only thing he can feel is the cold weight of sadness drag his shoulders down, like being covered in a sopping wet blanket. It’s all-encompassing, freezing out the pain in his face. Even the whiskey burn can’t warm him, no matter how much he drinks, and he watches the line of the liquor on the glass dip lower and lower.
Men aren’t supposed to feel heartbreak. It’s a woman’s emotion, for weak people who put too much stock into relationships. Men don’t care. Men don’t worry. They mourn the loss of sex, not companionship.
Except Casey is so much more than sex. Casey is smart, and resourceful, and those rare moments when he lets his mask slip, when he’s gentle and affectionate and caring--Vic could die happy, he thinks, if Casey would just come over and cup his face in his hands, kiss him lightly on his nose and tell him, I’m sorry.
He can’t believe Casey would end it with him. No matter how cold he was, or how much he seemed to be against a relationship, Vic had never imagined Casey would end it. There were too many signs--Casey fell asleep with his arm around Vic every time he stayed over, he bought Vic lunch when they ran low on food, he actually helped Vic with his math homework instead of just letting him cheat--that led Vic to believe that Casey had to feel the same about him. He was kind in ways that didn’t require the softness he didn’t like to show. And sometimes, when Vic needed it, Casey would be soft.
He wasn’t a terrible boyfriend. In spite of everything, Casey wasn’t. And Vic doesn’t blame him for anything, except the breakup.
“Vic? Hey, Vic? C’mon, buddy, open your eyes.”
When Vic’s eyes do flutter open, they fall on Ruby’s face. She’s crouched down in front of him, where he’s still propped up against the couch with the bottle of whiskey on the ground beside him. He watches her lips spread into a smile.
“Hey. You okay? Had a little too much?”
“‘m fine,” he slurs, his mouth dry and uncooperative. “Go away.”
“Vic,” Ruby says, and then again, with more concern in her voice, “Vic, what happened to your face?”
“Wha’do you think?” Vic hiccups and closes his eyes. He hasn’t been out long enough to sober up at all, and the room is still spinning around him. “Aw, fuck.”
“Victor Samuel Eastman,” she growls, venom in her voice, and Vic whines. “What the fuck is going on with you? I know you skipped school again. They call me every goddamn time!”
“Gonna puke,” Vic chokes out, and his drunken observation is that one minute, he’s sitting on the living room floor, and the next, he’s draped over the toilet bowl.
“You deserve this,” Ruby grumbles, just as Vic violently retches, splattering the toilet bowl with little more than the liquid he’d been drinking since he got home. “What did you do, speed-drink on an empty stomach?”
Vic vomits until he’s doing little more than painfully dry-heaving over the toilet, and with Ruby’s watchful eye on him, his retching quickly turns to breathless sobbing. He clings to the toilet with white knuckles, gasping for air as he shakes and cries, eyes closed to block out the nausea.
“Damn it, Vic.” Ruby hops off the sink and kneels beside him, carefully pulling him away from the toilet and propping him up against the wall. She drops the lid and flushes the toilet, and grabs a handful of toilet paper to run underneath the sink. “What happened, honey?” she asks as she begins wiping around Vic’s mouth, careful to avoid the bruise blossoming across his face.
He can’t stop. He can’t stop crying, and slowly moves his hands from the floor so he can wrap his arms around himself. It feels like he has to hold himself together, pressing on his sore ribs to try and stop the trembling.
“You are so drunk, Vic,” Ruby murmurs, affectionately running a hand down the side of his face. “Just tell me what’s going on. You probably won’t even remember this tomorrow. It’s just us, no one else is home.”
“I’m gay!” Vic blurts out, and if he’d had his eyes open, he would have seen Ruby’s face soften into a knowing smile. “There, okay? I’ve been--I didn’t need to hide it from you, but if Clarence knew--”
“I know, honey. It’s okay. I already knew, and I’ll never let Clarence find out. It’s our secret.” She pauses, just for a moment, and then asks, “Is that what this is about?”
“No!” Vic coughs and swallows hard; he’s crying so hard and the inside of his nose is so swollen that it’s running down the back of his throat, choking him. “Casey--” he starts to say and coughs again.
“Hey, hold on,” Ruby says and pats his knee. She’s gone for what feels like barely a millisecond and then she’s back, putting a glass of water into his hand and closing his fingers around it. “Drink.”
Vic sips the water slowly, afraid it’ll go down wrong. He opens his eyes long enough to see Ruby staring at him, worry apparent on her face. He has to close his eyes again.
“I know about you and Casey, too,” Ruby tells him quietly, “if that’s what you were trying to say. I saw you two sleeping together when I’d go to wake you up for school. I’ve known for weeks now.”
Vic sets the glass down beside him, taking in ragged breaths. “Fuck,” he says, and Ruby laughs.
“You can’t keep secrets from me, Vic.”
“Casey ended it,” Vic admits, his voice wavering pathetically around the words.
“Oh, damn. I’m sorry, honey.”
There’s silence as Ruby watches tears well up in Vic’s half-open eyes and slowly spill over onto his cheeks. He keeps his eyes focused on the tile floor beneath them, his arms wrapped around his waist again.
“So that’s what this is about. He really hurt you, huh.”
Vic slowly raises one hand to point to his face. “In more ways than one.”
“He hit you?” Ruby shrieks, and whispers an apology when Vic’s face shifts into a grimace. “Why?”
“I hit him first,” he admits. “We got into a fight, okay? Because he’s like...ashamed of me, or of being gay, or whatever. I got mad. I hit him, and he hit me back, and he tried to apologize but I wouldn’t let him because he just kept saying stupid shit, and then when I asked if he wanted to break up he said yes. Just like that.”
“You fucking idiot,” she mutters. “You perfect pair of fucking idiots.”
“I love him,” Vic says, and fails to stifle the sob that follows. “I think I love him.”
“But it doesn’t seem like he loves you,” Ruby replies, trying to reason with him.
“It does, though! I mean--not now, not right now but he--he does stuff for me and I thought that--”
“You need to go to bed, Vic,” she gently tells him. “Go to bed and you can talk to him at school tomorrow, alright? It’ll be fine.”
Vic doesn’t protest when she hauls him to his feet and has to semi-drag him to his bedroom, but he spends the night staring out his bedroom window until the sun rises.
“Get up, Vic,” Ruby says from the doorway, and Vic rolls over.
“Never slept,” he mutters, and he watches her roll her eyes and sigh.
“So I guess you’re gonna tell me you’re not going to school today?” she sounds tired, too, and he figures she’s not going to fight him too hard that morning, so he just answers with a quiet “yep.” Ruby drums her fingers on the wall for a moment, before finally nodding. “Fine, stay home. I’ll call in for you.” She turns around and disappears down the hallway, and then Vic can hear her on the phone, leaving a message on the school’s answering machine.
He should probably get up and go, because the alternative is spending the day at home, probably with Clarence, but he can’t move. His entire body aches, not least of all his face, and Vic knows he’s gotta look like hell.
Maybe Casey would care if he saw him, if he saw the state he was in, but Vic is oddly self-conscious at the thought. It’s not like Casey hasn’t seen it before, Vic bruised, bloodied, half-dead and disgusting under fluorescent lights. Casey’s seen him puking in public restrooms, licking his own blood from his lips, covered in mud and puke and any other number of questionable substances, and never once has he made more than a teasing remark.
Casey hasn’t seen him cry, though, and Vic is terrified that it’s written all over his face. He’s seen his sister cry, and he knows the aftermath is swollen eyelids, blotchy skin, a heaviness that seemed to drag her features down. Between the crying, vomiting, and the fist to his nose, Vic knows his face has to be an ungodly swollen mess. He might even be so messed up that no one could tell the difference between eyes swollen from crying and and just a ripple effect from the injury.
The thought of Casey noticing scares him, but what scares him more is the thought of Casey not noticing. Because if he doesn’t notice, it means he doesn’t care, and all Vic wants is for Casey to care.
He thinks that maybe, just maybe, if he stays home, Casey will worry. He’ll call, or text, or maybe even come over. He’ll spend the day at school wondering if Vic’s okay, if he hurt him too badly, if something else happened. And then he’d have to talk to him, because he’d need to know Vic was alright.
At least, that’s what Vic hopes as he rolls back over, pulling his comforter tightly around himself. He sinks down into the warmth of his bed and finally closes his eyes, content to sleep the day away, feeling lighter with the thought of waking up to a text message from Casey.
It’s dark outside when Vic finally opens his eyes, and the first thing he does is fumble for his phone, knocking it off of his nightstand before he’s finally able to grab it. He does have unread text messages, but none of them are from Casey, and the disappointment hits him like an icy wave.
He couldn’t just stop caring, not like that. No one can flip a switch and move on without a second thought, and Vic feels sick just thinking about it. He’d told him, he’d told him to go find a girl if he was so insistent about not wanting to be gay, and he can’t help thinking that maybe Casey did.
Where are you??? Gina’s text says. Casey isn’t talking to us and he’s hanging out with his AP friends, and I think Mona knows what’s going on but she won’t tell me! What the fuck Vic!!
It’s like being stabbed through the heart. Vic closes his eyes and drops his phone down on his mattress; Casey’s AP classmates have loomed like ominous figures since he’d started taking those stupid classes, and no matter how hard he tried, he was never able to push away the jealous rage that seemed to bubble up when Casey mentioned any of them.
Alicia Logan is the worst of them, pretty and blonde and so ambitious. Casey’s probably already taken her home, Vic thinks. He’s probably already introduced her to his parents and sat with her at the dinner table, and maybe she slid her hand up his thigh while he stuffed his mouth full to keep from moaning. Maybe he didn’t even need to close his eyes and pretend she was someone else. Maybe he really isn’t gay.
But what does that make him? What did it make them?
Vic forces himself to get out of bed and stagger to the bathroom, because he’s afraid he may vomit. The reflection in the mirror is grotesque; the bruise across his face has darkened, so purple it’s almost black, and his eyes are bloodshot and crazed. Blood has crusted over where his bottom lip cracked, and he can still see dried blood stuck in his hairline.
Of course, Casey could never love someone like him. He has a future. He has potential. Vic has maybe another decade before his liver fails and little more than the hope that he can get a job doing manual labor sometime after graduation, if graduation ever happens.
But it won’t. Casey gets to graduate that year, but Vic has another English class to make up. He won’t get to walk with his classmates, and if he has to stay stuck in the Ditch while Casey runs off to college, what’s the point?
Vic decides, staring himself in the eye in front of the bathroom mirror, that he’s going to drop out of high school.