“Um. Hell yeah!”
“That’s what I’m talking about.” He smiled and passed me what I discovered was beer.
I immediately poured its warm contents into the grass before handing it back empty.
“Not cool, Doodle. Not. Cool.”
“Oh, whatever. You don’t even drink!”
“I know, because that shit is expensive, and you just wasted it!”
I shrugged. “I can live with that. Now, scoot.”
“Okay, but you don’t belong in purgatory, so you can only stay for a few minutes.”
“Why exactly is the flowerbed under my window purgatory?” I asked as he lazily moved over a few inches.
Using a finger, he pointed over his head to my window. “Heaven.” Then he motioned to everything in front of us. “Hell.” And finally, he pointed to the dirt where he was sitting. “Purgatory.”
I gave him a confused look that made him fall over in laughter. I wasn’t sure if he was laughing at me or at his own joke. I’d never seen Till drunk before, but I knew right then I preferred him sober.
I sat next to him and patted my lap and handed him the sketchpad. “Here. Hold this and lie down.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Look at you going all old school on me. You must be really worried,” he teased, but he didn’t waste any time getting situated so his head rested in my lap.
It wasn’t the most ideal position, with his legs wedged crookedly between two of the overgrown bushes, but he didn’t complain. He opened the sketchpad and handed me the pencil.
I began scratching his head with one hand and drawing his eyes with my other. I didn’t say anything for several minutes, and eventually, I felt his shoulders relax as he let out a content sigh.
“I’m going to assume it didn’t go well at the doctor today,” I said quietly.
His eyes snapped to mine. “What?”
“I said, ‘I’m going assume it didn’t go well at the doctor today’.”
He slightly shook his head. “I’m still hearing at about seventy percent.”
I stopped drawing and looked down at him. “That’s good, right? It’s only gone down, like, ten percent in six years. It’s fading slowly. That means you have years before you have any real issues, right?”
“He couldn’t predict that. He said everyone’s different. Sometimes, it’s slow. Sometimes, it’s rapid.” He didn’t seem too thrilled, but I felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
Later. We could deal with this later. Many, many years later.
I went back to drawing in an attempt to downplay my enthusiasm. This should have been good news, but with his lips sealed tight, I couldn’t figure out what exactly was going on with him.
“So, why were you drinking, then? I thought Slate had a strict no-drinking policy.”
“That’s only for the kids. I’m twenty-one. He can’t stop me from having a drink if I want one. Besides, are you planning to rat me out?” He reached up and tugged on a piece of hair that had fallen free of my ponytail.
“Maybe.” I shrugged, filling in his long, black eyelashes on the paper. “Now, tell me what’s really going on.”
Till avoided my question by glancing down at the paper. “You always make me look like a chick when you draw my eyes.”
“No, I don’t. And who said those were your eyes?”
“Okay, then whose eyes are they?”
“My ugly, old accounting teacher.”
“Well, he has some seriously sexy eyes, then.”
“She really does, doesn’t she?” I smirked, and Till burst out laughing.
He suddenly sat up, causing my sketchpad to fall to the ground. His laughs were silenced as he dragged me onto his lap and buried his head in my neck.
“Oh, God, Doodle.” The agony in his voice shredded me.
“Talk to me,” I said louder than necessary since he wasn’t looking at me.
“The doctor I saw today thinks it’s genetic,” he confessed against my neck. “He wants to test Flint and Quarry.”
My stomach twisted.
“What am I supposed to tell them? If they have this too . . . I . . . Fuck! I can’t do this.”
“Okay. Let’s stop for a second.” I crawled off his lap so I could see him. “What exactly did the doctor say? He thinks it’s genetic, so he doesn’t know for sure?”
“He’s pretty positive. He said he couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t fit into any one category of sensorineural hearing loss, so he’s assuming it was some combination that was passed down.”
“All right. What did he say were the chances of Flint and Q having it? They haven’t shown any symptoms, have they? I mean, you were already at eighty percent by the time you were thirteen, right? Surely, we would have noticed something, at least in Flint. What type of test would he want to run on them? And when does he want to do it? The sooner the better, right?” If I just kept talking, I felt like I could sort it out. But the more questions I asked, the more it seemed to piss Till off.
“I don’t know!” He jumped to his feet and drunkenly stumbled.