Where All Paths Meet, page 18
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
Holmes hesitated. Then he rose. If you didn’t know him, it would have looked a little stiff, a little slow. If you’d seen him move before, though, it was a rusty, creaking imitation of Holloway Holmes.
“You need to rest—” I began.
“I will, Jack. I promise. But this comes first.”
“This?” I shot up from the couch. “Them? After what just happened? They—” I stopped myself in time, barely. They knew, I wanted to say. They knew what he was doing to you, and they let it happen.
But Holmes must have heard some of it because his spine stiffened, his shoulders straightened, and he sounded a little posher when he said, “They are my family.”
“Yeah, I know, but—”
“Have I ever interfered with your relationship with your father?”
“That’s not the same—”
“When you planned on running away last year, when you were determined never to talk to him again, did I intervene?”
“As a matter of fact, you couldn’t stop telling me it was such a bad idea.” My volume slipped, and the words were louder than I’d intended. “You’re hurt, and I’m not going to let you—”
“You’re not going to let me,” Holmes said.
I stopped. My voice was tight, buckled down, when I said, “I didn’t mean—”
“Enough.”
A shimmering sound filled my ears.
“Go home, Jack. This is a family matter now; I will handle it with my family.” He stepped back, watching my face, and turned. A moment later, he and Noneley had disappeared down the hall. I couldn’t even hear them because, of course, they were fucking Holmeses.
I started walking because it was either move or kick something, and I figured if I kicked something, I’d break it, and I’d spend the next forty years trying to earn enough money to replace it. I did a couple of laps around the room, my breathing getting faster and faster, and then I charged toward the French doors. Outside, the air was warmer than I expected, the sun dazzling me for the first few steps, my steps ringing out against the deck. I went all the way to the rail, leaned over it, and screamed down into the valley. I did that until I ran out of air, and then I sagged across the rail, staring down at the drop. There wasn’t even a dramatic echo.
Noise behind me made me turn, and for a moment, I thought Tom had come back. Maybe he was going to help me out, push me over the rail, get it over with. But instead, it was Yazzie. She watched me for a moment, took off her glasses, cleaned them on her shirttail.
“Save it,” I said. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”
She seemed to think about that for a while. She put the glasses back on, shrugged, and said, “You can’t be here, not while we’re executing the warrant.”
“Fine.”
“Do you want a ride?”
“I said fine.”
She straightened her jacket. The wind pushed through my hair.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Let’s get you a ride home.”
That meant Deputy Utley, he of the pouchy eyes and the plastic fork stuck behind his ear. I didn’t understand why he did that. Maybe in case of emergency. Maybe all of a sudden, he’d need to eat something with a fork, so he had to be prepared. Instead of having him take me home, though, I asked him to drive me back to Zodiac. The truck was still there, and Utley was nice enough to wait while I made sure it started. Then he rolled out of the lot, and I drove home.
Home, because this was a family matter now, and for Holmes, family didn’t include me.
I tried not to think about it. I tried to think about anything else. Spring in Utah is beautiful. I mean, I guess I’m biased, but it really is. The valley and the canyons and the sides of the mountain all turn green. The peaks are still furry with snow. The sky, a perfect blue, goes on forever. Spring can’t do anything about how junky I-15 looks—the car dealerships and the light industrial zoning and the commercial lots and the low-rent apartments crowding the freeway, so much concrete and asphalt and bare, whitish-brown earth. But it’s still better than I-15 in the winter.
Across Orem, up the canyon.
The Provo was running high with snowmelt, and a trout jumped and broke the water like the slice of a knife. Early, I thought. He must be a go-getter. The bald faces of granite contrasted with the dense vegetation that bloomed wherever water ran: the green of cottonwood leaves, the purple of lupine, the red of Indian paintbrush.
When I got back to campus, I waffled. Instead of taking the turn to go back to the cottage, I let the truck go straight. Maybe I’d do a quick tour of campus before I went home to face the music. Maybe I’d get lucky and find a serial killer who specialized in guys who can never get their hair to look right and who constantly, with the best of intentions, manage to fuck everything up with the most important people in their lives. Hell, maybe I’d find a cliff and drive off it.
Instead, I ended up at the boathouse. My dealing days were done, so I hadn’t been here in the last few months except for the occasional odd job—sweeping down the spider webs, opening things up for spring, a complaint about stiff hinges. But I’d spent a lot of time here before. A lot of quiet nights, waiting, listening to the water. I let the truck die and rolled down the window and listened now.
It wasn’t just the water, though. There was laughter. There was the wind in the grass. A group of kids emerged, and two boys started playing frisbee while a cluster of girls sat and talked and pretended not to watch. It took all of five minutes for the boys’ shirts to fall off. The rest of us didn’t mind: muscles moved pleasantly under smooth skin, everything easy, natural looking. Before Holmes, I would have said they were graceful.
I thought of the bruises on his body, the angry red marks of violence, what he’d borne for me to keep me safe—even knowing it was only temporary, that eventually, he would fail, and his father would have me. It had been stupid, I wanted to tell him. It had been a waste. He wouldn’t have hurt me, not physically. Well, he might have killed me. But not today. Not right then. You could have let him scare me or shout at me or threaten me, whatever it was, and spared yourself the pain and the humiliation and, what I knew had cost Holmes the most, the failure. To be pushed to the end of his strength, cornered, pressed to his limits. And to find, in the end, it wasn’t enough. For Holmes, who expected the impossible of himself, it was worse than any blow from a cane, worse than torn stitches, worse than bruised ribs. You could have saved yourself all of that, and it would have been the smart thing to do.
But he hadn’t.
And then, when I thought I knew why, when I realized how stupid I’d been for months and months, he’d told me to go home. Because this was a family matter.
My phone buzzed in my lap. Figuring it was Dad wanting to chew my ass, I reached to silence it. But it was from Rowe. One of the dozens of messages he’d been sending me all day. There were a lot of Where are you? And Your dad is pissed. And Jack, everybody’s worried. And then there were the other ones—the ones I thought of as authentic Rowe texts. I found a chair in the dumpster behind Butters. It looks lonely. And Are ass cramps a thing? Not like diarrhea. On the outside of your ass. And Dude, remember that fluffy toilet paper I was telling you about? It’s back.
This most recent one was a fist bump and a heart, and I wanted to send a petition to the universe to explain Rowe because I just couldn’t.
I sent the text before I had time to consider what I was doing: Almost back. Where are you guys?
Approximately a million texts came back: a surprised face emoji, a dog emoji, a fireworks emoji, a Bitmoji Rowe who was eating shrimp cocktail. Mixed in were the pertinent details like Library and Dude, are you ok?
I drove to the library and parked in one of the service spots behind it, and I let myself in through the back door—not normally open to students—with one of the spare Walker keys I’d kept. Hand to God, I only kept them now so I wouldn’t have to bother Dad when I helped cover a shift.
Mostly.
Inside, the library was cool, and it smelled like recycled air and old paper and the carpet that Dad and I were going to rip out over the summer. My eyes adjusted to the dim lighting as I moved along the stacks. I hadn’t spent much time here, not even since I’d become a student at Walker. I had this weird thing about someone almost trying to kill me, and it made me avoid the library if I wasn’t doing something for Dad. But I knew the layout, and I figured Rowe wouldn’t be in the main area of the library. Trying to keep Rowe from talking was like trying to stop the Provo with your bare hands. They’d be in one of the study rooms with the door closed.
The first room I checked had Danny Cabell in it, his frizzy mop of hair bent over his phone, and he was definitely watching porn. He turned bright red when he looked up, and I smiled an apology and yanked the door shut. The second room I checked had Alonna Flores, who was studying like always. She was three years into her four-year plan to crush every academic record at Walker, and she glared at me for the interruption. This time, I was the one who turned red as I backed out of the room.
Rowe, Emma, Glo, and Ariana were in the third room, and they were laughing when I stepped inside. Ariana and I locked eyes for a moment, and she broke our gaze first, laughing harder. It was still awkward seeing her—we’d broken up a few months ago, for a lot of reasons. She still looked great: dark brown skin, great curves, hair spilling to the small of her back. She’d ditched the coppery highlights, and it made her look more mature. She and Emma and Glo had hit it off when I’d brought Ariana to a party in December, and they’d stayed friends in spite of the breakup.
“Jack,” Rowe said—well, it was Rowe, so it was almost a shout, library be damned. “Holy shit, man, that’s hilarious!”
I got as far as “What’s hil—” before Emma and Glo spotted me and dissolved into fresh gales of laughter.
The girls were a study in contrasts: Emma tall, dark, an umber cast to her skin. She wore cat-eye glasses, and she moved like an athlete. Glo was petite, with golden skin, and she almost always had a book. Today looked like no exception, although the book was facedown, so I couldn’t see the cover. Rowe, Emma, and Glo were—well, not exactly a throuple, but something like that. They loved each other fiercely, and while Rowe and Glo were romantically involved, I hardly ever saw them without Emma.
Even Ariana had glanced back at me, eyes widening.
Then I remembered the ripped jeans, the shirt that said ZADDY.
“It’s not a joke,” Glo squealed as she laughed harder. “Oh my God, he was serious.”
“They’re not mine,” I said.
“Look at his face,” Emma said before collapsing against Glo. She was laughing so hard she was crying.
“I had to borrow—no, you know what? I’m not going to defend myself.” I finished moving into the study room and shut the door behind me. “Could you dumbasses keep it down? We’re in a library.”
“It’s ok, dude,” Rowe said, stretching his arm out for a fist bump. I obliged because Rowe was an exception to my general rule against fist bumps. “You look hot.”
“You look like a SoundCloud rapper,” Ariana said with a grin.
I couldn’t help the betrayed “Ariana!” that escaped me.
She shrugged, and her grin got bigger.
“And his hair,” Glo was saying to Emma, both of them laughing harder.
I fixed my hair. Tried to fix it. Couldn’t remember what it looked like and reached for my phone to check. Ariana was hiding her amusement behind one hand. Rowe, on the other hand, was staring at me with that earnest devotion people commonly associate with puppies.
“Your hair is fire, dude. Don’t listen to them.”
“Oh my God,” I said under my breath.
“His little spikes,” Emma was saying. She looked like she and Glo were about to laugh themselves under the table.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m leaving. You jackasses can fuck around without me.”
“He’s very sensitive,” Ariana said. “You’re hurting his feelings.”
“Don’t go,” Emma said through her laughter.
“We’ll stop,” Glo said, but she spoiled it by giggling and wiping her eyes.
“Please don’t be mad, Zaddy,” Rowe said, and the little shit’s expression of pure, trusting, innocent dedication didn’t waver for a moment, not even a tiny bit.
“I hate all of you,” I said. “I have no friends. You’re dead to me.”
But they were starting to pull themselves back together by that point, and I let them convince me to stay, although I grumped about it and made them work a little harder than usual before I sat at the table.
“And I do not look like a SoundCloud rapper,” I snapped at Ariana. “Whatever that means.”
She met me with a flat look. “You know exactly what it means.”
I had to bite the inside of my mouth not to grin because, as usual, she was exactly right.
“Dude,” Rowe asked, lowering his voice to slightly-lower-than-deafening—a Rowe whisper, in other words. “Is he back?”
“That’s all we’ve been talking about,” Emma said as she took Glo’s hand.
“Holloway,” Glo said. “That’s why you disappeared again, right?”
Ariana stood. She was wearing this cute crop top with booty shorts, and her dad would have killed her if he’d seen it, and her mom would have had a stroke. I looked; sue me, we used to do a lot more than looking, and it was hard to break old habits.
“I’ve got to go,” she said as she grabbed her phone.
“No, wait—” Glo said.
Emma shushed her, and Glo subsided unhappily.
“You don’t have to go,” I said. “It’s not—that wasn’t why—”
“I’ve got work,” Ariana said, and she squeezed my nape as she passed behind me. “Bye, SoundCloud.”
She shut the door quietly behind her.
The three of them shared an unhappy silence. It was Rowe, of course, who broke it, shaking those messy bangs as he leaned toward me. “But dude, for real: is he back?”
I nodded.
“Holy crap, man. That’s—” He checked me. “That’s good, right?”
I saw the skepticism on Emma’s and Glo’s faces. They’d been there for me in the months after Holmes had disappeared. They’d seen what it had done to me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Glo asked.
I thought the answer was no. But then I started talking, and it all spilled out. Not the scary stuff. Not the whole truth. But enough. The outline.
“He’s in love with you,” Rowe said. “And he’s sorry, and he’s trying to make things right.”
“Maybe,” Glo said.
“What do you mean, maybe? He told Jack straight out. And he stood up to his dad for Jack. And you know H; he’s not good at talking about his feelings, so you know he’s, like, making this extra effort for Jack.”
“I don’t think any of us know Holloway,” Emma said quietly.
“I mean,” Glo said to Rowe, “not everything adds up. He’s been back in Utah for how long? We don’t know. Long enough to be living in a condo with an older guy. He didn’t contact Jack. He didn’t tell Jack he was here. Jack never would have known if they hadn’t bumped into each other at that party.”
“Ok, but maybe H was embarrassed.” Rowe sat up straighter, glancing at me for confirmation. “Maybe he didn’t know how to have that conversation, but he wanted to, and then they bumped into each other.”
“But we don’t know that. We don’t know anything about why he didn’t contact Jack.”
“Dude,” Rowe said to me, “help me out.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What H has said, the way he’s acted—what he went through for me today, I mean, I don’t want to tell you the details, but it was awful. And there are these moments when I know, or I think I know, what he’s feeling.”
“But,” Glo prompted.
“But you’re right. Why didn’t he call me? Why didn’t he tell me he was back?”
“Why did he leave?” Glo said softly.
I shrugged. My face felt hot, and I looked down at the table. Chair legs whispered against the carpet, and a moment later, Rowe was squeezing onto my chair, wrapping an arm around me. I didn’t cry. But I did have to blink a lot. He smelled like warm teenage boy and deodorant, and it was nice.
“It’s ok, dude. It’s going to be ok.”
I shrugged again because I didn’t have anything better to do. By degrees, I realized Emma was not-looking at me so intently that it had become a kind of presence. Rowe and Glo both seemed aware of it too. I forced myself to look at Emma, but she still didn’t meet my gaze, so I asked, “What do you think?”
“I don’t think I’m the right person to ask.”
“You’re my friend.”
“But I’m not—I don’t, you know, want—” Finally she blurted, “I’m ace.”
“Maybe that’s better,” Glo said. “Maybe you’ve got a different insight than the rest of us.”
Emma sat still for a moment. Then she raised her head, and behind the cat-eye glasses, her eyes were wet. “Jack, I’ve never seen somebody hurting the way you were after Holloway left. I don’t want that to happen to you again.”
I nodded.
“You—you were pretty hard on yourself right now, telling us all the good things he did for you, telling us how you feel when you’re around him, and how you told him you hate him, and how that makes you a shitty person. But I think maybe part of you does hate him, a little. Still.” She seemed to hear herself and rushed to add, “I don’t know. I shouldn’t have said that. But I thought you were going to die, Jack, and we love you, and—and you deserve to be happy.”
My throat was scratchy. I dredged up a watery smile. “So, one yes, one maybe, one no.”
“We’re not voting, dude,” Rowe said, squeezing me. Somehow, amazingly, no ribs popped out of my chest. “Whatever you do, we’ll support you. Em’s right: we love you.”
Glo was clutching Seriously MOUSE-taken: A Friendly Feline Mystery to her chest, and her dark eyes shimmered. “Of course we love you. We want you to be happy, that’s all.”
