He didn’t have an answer, and he did not have it in him to face Serene and Luke right now. He tried to distract himself with a more cheerful thought.
He’d already figured out that he definitely was not made for a life of tragic celibacy. He was so lonely, and obviously no good at friendship. He hoped, with an embarrassed hope mingled with fear, that he was all right in bed. He thought he could pay attention, and see what the next girl wanted and try to give it to her. He thought that quite possibly his previous experience meant he would be uniquely qualified to understand how difficult it could be, being someone’s girlfriend, all the small indignities that you suffered when you were trying to be intimate with someone trained to believe you were not altogether their equal. He could be careful not to hurt her, and careful to be fair with her. He thought that he might manage to be really great with his next girlfriend.
Later Elliot was to think this was typical of the way his plans usually went. He had not planned at all for what actually happened next: that instead, he got a boyfriend.
IV
Elliot, Age Sixteen
After a week at home, Elliot was more miserable than he had ever been in his life.
The kids down the road—and they could hardly be kids now, any more than he was—were on holiday with their parents, their whole house shut up. Elliot felt as if his house were shut up, too: there was dust in his bedroom, layer upon layer of it. Nobody had come inside it all year.
The first day he was home, his dad did not speak to him or look at him. The second day, he looked up from the meal the latest housekeeper had prepared and said, “Oh, you’re back,” in a tone of mild surprise.
It was halfway through dinner.
“Of course I’m back,” Elliot said in a small, furious voice.
Everyone else noticed him. Nobody could help but notice him. He didn’t know how to get people to love him, but he knew how to bang on the door of people’s attention, lean on their bell until they answered in the vain hope he would go away. He knew how to be inescapably irritating. But the one person he had learned it for was the one person it didn’t work on. He barely existed to his father, insubstantial as the dust in his room, only there because nobody cared he was.
He threw his fork down on the table and stormed out. When he came down later to clean up the plates, he saw through the open door his father sitting in his usual chair. Elliot doubted he’d noticed the door slamming or his son being gone, any more than he noticed Elliot being here.
He had lain awake at night and felt alone for years and years, but it was much worse now that he knew about waking up with Serene, how it felt to reach across the bed automatically and have someone warm there, have someone happy you were there. At least when he was in his horrible unheated cabin he had his idiot roommates for company.
Sometimes he woke up happy and reached for Serene, only to grasp a fistful of cold sheets. Sometimes he hardly slept, cataloguing all the ways he’d got it wrong with Serene, not been good enough or lovable enough, thinking of all the ways he could have done better now it was too late to do anything.
The days were unhappy and lonely too, but more than that, he found he was restless. He, who had always been happy being indoors before, was bouncing off the walls of the house, tapping the arms of his chair and kicking table legs and walls. He took several trips to the music store, where old Joe who worked there said he’d grown and was kind enough that Elliot stayed until closing time every time. He went down to the library, where no elves yelled at him for being immodest.
On the fifth day he got up from the window seat in his room, where he was tucked up much less comfortably than he used to be—he could stop growing any time now—and drumming his feet against the glass. He flicked the photo of Serene and Luke he had tucked up under the frame of his mirror.
“Thanks for ruining my life, jerkface,” he said, and went for a run.
He raced through the streets of the town, under telephone lines that looked like alien, spidery things menacing the clouds, down hard gray roads with cars running alongside. He jumped whenever anyone leaned on the horn, at every screech of tires, but he kept running until his lungs burned and his head was finally empty.
He went home long after it was dark, peeled off his sweat-soaked clothes, and got into the shower. Usually hot running water cheered him up, but he was all alone and his own body had become a strange and treacherous thing.
What had he been thinking, imagining staying here? He wasn’t fit for this world. He wanted to go back to where there was one person at least who really liked him, even if she didn’t love him. He didn’t know if he could last the summer, let alone live here.
Maybe he didn’t have to, he thought. If he just showed up at Luke’s house, he would probably be allowed to stay.
You didn’t have to come running because of an invitation I didn’t mean, Luke had said. Elliot did not have to be more pathetic than he already was.
On Saturday, his father was home. It was so much worse to be silent and alone in company. Elliot bore it for a couple of hours, and then went down to the music store. The little shop was dim, but Elliot pushed at the door and found it unlocked.
“Joe?” he called out.
No answer. He figured Joe was in the bathroom or taking a cigarette break, and knew he was welcome anyway.
“Hi, Joe!” he called out. “I’m trespassing! I’m shoplifting! I’m a teen delinquent and I must be stopped!”
He wandered in and over to the corner where you could play songs in privacy, fitted the giant headphones over his ears, and selected an album called Goodbye Blues. There was an electronic guitar near the station: Elliot only knew how to play piano, but he picked it up and played with it as he sang along.
The shop only stayed open until four on Saturdays. Elliot was going to have to go back to his house and his father.
Maybe he could go to Luke’s after all. Maybe Luke wouldn’t really mind.
Elliot shook his head at himself, and switched songs. The next was good, jaunty, with a clapping, swinging beat: Elliot vigorously strummed the guitar and sang at his own dumb feelings.
He looked down automatically at the touch of a hand on his: not in alarm, as Joe had tried to teach him the basics of guitar before.
When he looked down, the hand was definitely not Joe’s. Joe did not have barbed-wire tattoos on his knuckles.
Elliot squawked, twisted around, and brandished the electronic guitar in a threatening manner at a total stranger, some blond guy with a goatee and a few more tattoos.
“Whoa,” said the stranger. “Hi. Don’t worry, I work here.”
“What do you mean, you work here?” Elliot asked. “Nobody works here! Where’s Joe?”
“He’s having a cigarette break,” said the stranger. “He’s my uncle.”
Elliot lowered the guitar as his blood pressure lowered on its own. “Oh. You’re Jason.”