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It’s January, two months later; and Andrew Minyard, despite everything, is standing in Abby’s office, choosing to take his life back. Wanting to.
“I need a prescription,” he says, and the word doesn’t break in his throat. It catches against the noiseless void of the sterile atmosphere and it makes the world falter. There’s no one here – no one but them, and something bad happened, all over and over again.
Abby knows this, knows what happened in November.
She looks the same as she did after the hospital, after reading the report, after watching Andrew waltz through the house with a disgusting, manic smile across his face while simultaneously being unable to sit down. Even now, she’s so agonisingly serious that Andrew wants to turn straight back around and walk out the door as if nothing had ever happened at all. Everything makes him sick.
Abby says, “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I'm telling you what I need.”
Abby crosses her arms, speaking not unkindly, “I can’t give you something without looking at you first. I need to know what’s wrong.”
Andrew stares and stares and stares, waiting out the unbearable silence until Abby breaks and can’t take it anymore. She says, a little more carefully, “I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to help you, and you wouldn’t have wanted me here if you didn’t think I could. I promise you I can, but you have to let me.” Abby doesn’t move any closer, doesn’t dare go to touch, but there’s an awful softness to her voice that makes her seem to believe Abby thinks she knows what’s wrong. She doesn’t. She asks, “Why did you want to come to me?”
Want.
Andrew wanted to because –
Well?
After everything, there it is, the crux of it all: just fucking because.
Andrew Minyard doesn’t know how to want, it’s just not what he is. To want is an insanity that Andrew has never had the privilege of understanding, of having. He’s known this ever since he was seven-years-old, with a stomach of moths festering inside his paper-skin organs and a man’s much larger hands on his body like true fucking love. It doesn’t matter that it made him feel unclean, or that he used to throw up when he thought about it, or that he told everyone in truth-or-dare that he lost his virginity in elementary school because they wouldn’t leave. him. alone. It doesn’t matter that it happened all over again, thirteen years after the first time, because now, it’s all just so terribly mundane it hurts.
He doesn’t want because the concept of hoping things will be better – be enough – is such a horrifically unattainable lunacy that it makes him want to die. Despite everything and the unchanging popular belief, Andrew Minyard isn’t crazy. He’s a realist.
Because if he didn’t want to be here he would be anywhere at all.
But after all this time, he’s tired.
For the first time, he is condemning himself with the grace of wanting, and Andrew Minyard wants this. He tells Abby, “I will tell you what I need, and you will not talk to me after I tell you. You will not talk to anyone. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Abby tells him, lying.
It would be funny to laugh in the face of Abby’s horror when Andrew says his next words, but Andrew doesn’t.
“Mifepristone,” he says instead, and there the world goes, breaking its own neck, faltering out of orbit. The atmosphere of this sterile, white room is choking itself, and Abby and Andrew will seemingly die here. Neither of them move, breathe. Andrew stays content watching Abby’s face drown with the cataclysm of all things awful and bad and sickening. Again, Andrew tells her, “Write me a prescription for mifepristone and misoprostol.”
“I'm pregnant.”
The words stay in the air like smoke, like the embers of his cigarette still clinging to their life, undying, despite the fact he hasn’t had the thought to take a drag. He forgets about the feeling of it in between his fingers unlike anything he had decided to forget before. It’s like deja vu, but the opposite; muscle memory in reverse.
“Okay,” Neil says. Breathes. It’s easy, as if it’s the worst thing he’s ever had to say and that doesn’t even matter to him. He’s an anomaly here, the only person who cared enough to stay by him, standing in this hysterically awful liminal cluster fuck of spacetime and their dormitory’s bathroom. Andrew wants to kill him.
“I'm pregnant,” he says again, because maybe Neil is so condemningly stupid that he didn’t hear him properly. There’s vomit climbing up his throat. He has the hilariously pathetic urge to scream. And here, his fucking – whatever Neil thinks he is – is looking at Andrew like this hasn’t just murdered all the smithereens of himself that didn’t die in November.
Disgusting, thick panic burns from his lungs as Andrew holds the test in his hand, the cigarette in the other. Whatever this is, whatever he’s become in the wake of those November sheets and next to Drake’s body, has left him in old, festering agonies. The glass is breaking, the stars are colliding, the wound never healed because he had dragged his knife across it every time his flesh tried to fix itself. Everything he couldn’t feel is suddenly all he is and it’s killing him.
Drake is dead and dead and dead, and yet –
He left something behind.
Andrew laughs.
“Andrew,” Neil says, and there it is. His name, as if he’d forgotten it despite everything. “Talk to me.”
He’s not listening. Instead, he’s thinking about how insanely awful it is that his ghosts don’t have the decency of staying dead when they died; how annoying the thing that calls himself Neil Josten is condemned in this bathroom with him because he’d asked him to; how funny it would be if he murdered him for it because Andrew wouldn’t know how to do anything else.
Somewhere, somehow, a whiskey bottle shatters against the headboard, against his skull, and liquor drowns whatever is left of his sanity. The shards embed him as he lays, tearing his skin up and down and inside out like kitchen knives. The promise of a baby screaming inside his dorm room. The idea of Andrew Minyard being a mother. The pieces of whatever it is that he is now lie in the wake of everything else because –
– Because they can. His corpse will be left to rot and decay over the weeks in those sheets, this bathroom, California; and –
He doesn’t fucking care.
“What do you want to do?” Neil asks, standing there, refusing to look away. He seems to think he’s that of an anchor that’s destined to drown alongside Andrew. He’s too stupid to realise there are some things simply just not worth holding onto.
And maybe Neil hates Andrew too. Maybe he hates Andrew’s unfeeling towards all the things that were done to him, and the festering psychosis to save anyone but himself. Maybe he hates the infinite promises Andrew makes to hold onto the people he cannot lose, but cannot bring himself to love either – all up until his own hands are bloodied and deformed and showing bone. Maybe Andrew makes Neil sick too, all the same.
All Andrew knows of himself is: everything he is made from is built from the things and people and ruins he had been before, and maybe when they laid him to bed and fucked him into his mattress and whispered all the wrong words, they made him this, too. Interchanging their insanities along with their spit and semen and his baby teeth. He doesn’t feel anything, and that’s bad. It’s so bad, it’s not human, you are not human, you do not get to feel nothing when you find out your rapist got you pregnant.
But what-the-fuck-ever. Feeling. An unimportant concept, one that Andrew doesn’t partake in because he decided he wouldn’t. Andrew hasn’t felt pain since he told himself at twelve-years-old that he couldn’t, and so: it has become a concept that of paradoxes and finite spacetime and language he never cared to decipher. It is refusing. There are worse insanities to be condemned with than choosing to unfeel everything. Maybe it’s psychosis, but it’s safe.
He tells Neil, “Maybe your little rabbit brain is still condemningly forgetful of this secret, so I must remind you.” He throws the plastic text into the waste bin, and takes a deliberate drag of his cigarette, blowing all the smoke into Neil’s face as he stares and stares and stares. “I want nothing.”
Unblinkingly, Neil says, “You wanted me here with you.”
Oh. The rabbit thinks he is funny.
Andrew shrugs easily, and says, “I want you to make me forget. This is a sickness, nothing more. I've been unwell before, I've been hurt before, I've been lied to before. And here is a promise that’s kept me alive through all of it: I cannot feel anything if I tell myself I don’t want to.”
“Mifepristone.” The word hangs there in the air like a noose. There’s an understanding in Abby’s eyes, a comprehension that’s finally dawning on her in an awful, terrifying clarity. Again, Andrew says, “Write me a prescription for mifepristone and misoprostol.”
Abby doesn’t say anything for a long time, and when she does, it’s a pathetic noise, a waste of all the oxygen that’s dissipated from the room. She whispers, “Oh, Andrew.”
“No,” Andrew interrupts. “You do not get to speak to me.”
Abby, with that disgusting, pained look on her face, tells Andrew, “I have to.” How sickening it must be for Andrew of all Abby’s Foxes – if not the first – to come to her, needing an abortion. Foxes are damned, demented children condemned by their necks with the world's rope, needing Wymack and Abby and Bee’s salvation like dying things. Look at these adults in their deluded insanities: giving unchanging lost causes a second, third, infinite chance to redo all of their faults and make something of them. And here it is, the crux of everything: their Foxes will never know what it is to be powerless again.
Except that’s bullshit. Andrew does. Despite everything they made him to be, how desperately he had severed the faultlines, how deluded they were into believing he could be something other than this – Andrew ended up here. In that bedroom. In that hospital. In this office asking for a fucking abortion.
“I'm not asking again, and I’m not going anywhere else,” he says. “If you won’t help me, I'll remain indifferent to make use of ill-advised methods and amend this mess myself. You should know me better than to assume I'm not beyond hurting myself.”
“Are you thinking about–” Abby goes to say, but Andrew doesn’t let her finish. Abby knows better than to believe Andrew would lie.
“If I stay ‘sick’, you see,” Andrew promises. “Then we might have a problem.”
The past is smoke, coming down from the open window, through the cracks in the walls, and it is standing over everything as Andrew lies here asleep on the carpet, as if he were twelve-years-old and nothing bad had ever happened. This is just a dream, but –
He is in a room with drawn curtains, burning sunlight filtering through. It gives the air a dingy sienna tinge. If he breathes too deeply, he’ll die. A man (one of them, any of them) stands by the window, a lit cigarette in his hand. His features are dark against the shades and his silhouette makes Andrew feel so. fucking. small.
He comes over.
There’s someone else.
The little girl is seven or ten or thirteen years old, and this is a man who pretends to be her father, her brother. This man tells her lovely, sweet butterfly lies. He loves her. He does. Just as all the others had. He loves her so much that he comes into this little girl’s bed and –
– and suffocates her until she cannot scream, and the man’s sweaty fingers touch up and down her chest, her stomach, her thighs until they leave behind finite watercolour bruises that will stay forever and ever and ever.
This man loves her! They all do! They love her with tainted hands and bourbon kisses and the weight of their entire body on top of her own. They love her so much they make her private parts hurt! And hey! Why would they do that?! They’re called private parts for a reason! But whatever, who fucking gives a shit? Andrew is seven-years-old, so what would he know about love?
But oh. The Andrew, who has just turned twenty, is different. He watches and watches and watches as the little girl writhes, as she says please, please, please, please, please; as the man with all these ever-changing faces does – does that.
The clarity and lucidity of everything makes his head pound agonies each time Andrew tries to comprehend the absurdity of how he ended up here. Love is an inhumane monster that rips his skull to shreds. It bleeds through every sense of his mind, leaving brain matter rotting from inside his skull like Drake’s whiskey in the sheets. He’s been taught that love is not love if it does not make him want to die.
But either way, Andrew wouldn’t know the difference, and it wouldn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter because the insanity of love is everywhere – the mattress with the stained Sleeping Beauty sheets, the bed made for him and Drake in Columbia, the insides of his arms that lay in a bathroom sink somewhere. Everything is breaking apart at the seams and collapsing into grey dust all around him, because of him, and Andrew cannot bring himself to care anymore.
The man (any of them, all of them, who fucking cares) is gone. The little girl lies there, left behind on her bed, and Andrew steps closer. The child blinks, catatonic and absent, staring up at Andrew, and –
Instead of lying beside her, holding the girl’s body and telling her that it'll get better than this, Andrew leans in until they’re breathing the same disgusting air. His hands find the girl’s neck amidst the Disney blankets, and then, right over the marks that look like bites, he pushes his thumbs in, hard. He’s not weak. He’s not her – this. Andrew pushes himself into the girl, into the mattress, a glass doll, a marionette with tendons and ligaments and a brain stem that Andrew could cut away until the smithereens of this child’s corpse lie on the floor with him.
He hates her, this stupid little girl, the one who let everything happen. He hates that she’s not struggling, not moving, just lying there limp on this bed like a dead thing already.
He wonders if the child rotting inside of him will be destined for this as well. It would be somehow apt, fitting.
“I cannot feel anything if I tell myself I don’t want to.”
Neil looks at him and doesn’t stop. Everything is undone. “Is that working out for you now?”
“It was,” he says. “The only thing to ever defy that is you.”
Another secret: Andrew Minyard hadn’t known how to live for someone else, until he did. The feeling of falling into this was an insanity he’d never had the privilege of understanding, of knowing; but in all the times he hadn’t been watching, during all their in-betweens and finite truths and staring staring staring, things had changed. Neil was just another nobody in this incurable team of fuckups, a pathological liar that was a nuisance more than he was intriguing. He was a runaway hellbent on leaving the rest of the team to save himself even if it meant damning them to rot behind him.
But then he stayed. He protected them. He was the only person to ever get close enough to Andrew to try – to want – to save him.
It’s not fair. It had all happened so slowly that he hadn’t comprehended the depth of it until now, standing opposite from the only thing he’d ever been wrong about. It’s a different kind of agony, only because it isn’t. And maybe Neil can get up and walk away from their anomaly of space and time and place they’ve created in this fucking bathroom together, but Andrew can’t.
“Fuck you,” Andrew says, because Neil did this: made him into something that thinks it has the capability to love another person despite everything.
“I’m not sorry,” Neil says back, in turn, needing Andrew more than Andrew has the capability to be needed, more than Andrew had ever promised he could be and –
– for that, Andrew hates him. If he didn’t, he’d have to love him and what an awful thing to do to himself. And Neil knows it. He can see it, Andrew’s sure, just by looking at him – taking him apart, making Andrew undone. All that indifference has bleed away from his bones. All of Andrew’s careful un-feelings have bled down through the drain into the pipelines of the earth somewhere. Andrew claims his apathy like his own name; but not now, not when it comes to Neil.
And so, when Andrew speaks, something breaks in his voice, something significant, something that couldn’t stay so carefully buried. “It was a mistake to want you here with me when a fucking plastic test confirmed what I should’ve expected. So leave. Goodbye, Neil. I’m done with this and I’m done with you.”
“And now who's the rabbit? Denial looks terrible on you.”
“Or the morning sickness,” Andrew smiles – actually smiles – what the fuck? He stares at Neil, looking at him long enough to make them both uncomfortable, and says, “See? I'm not denying it. I just don’t care.”
“You’re lying,” Neil says instead, and oh. That’s funny coming from the man who is as unreal as he is stupid. A lie from head to foot. A rabid rabbit runaway running from himself. The rabbit ignores Andrew’s smile and says, “You know that’s not how this works. You asked me to stay with you. You wanted me here. You can change your mind, you can let me go, you can tell me to never walk through that door again, but you won’t. I scare you because I make you feel, and this,” he points to the discarded trash in the waste bin that upended everything; “scares you because it does too, all the same.”
“I don’t need you giving me the grace of my own agency,” Andrew says, wanting to laugh again. So absurd, needing a man to tell him he has autonomy. “Such irony.”
“That is not what I’m doing, and you know it,” Neil says, and yeah. Andrew does. He doesn’t need Neil’s permission, but maybe –
Maybe he needs his comfort. Neil Josten has never made Andrew do anything he doesn’t want to. Another fucking exception to everything Andrew thought he knew. How interesting, how awful. Neil tells him, “You wanted me here because you needed me to keep you from spiralling when the wave of all that you didn’t feel before, drowns you now. And I will not let it.”
They sit there within the nothingness for too long again, willing the other to give up, to turn away, to walk out, and for the first time, both of them seem to realise they can’t. They’re stuck here, with each other, and the unkind faults of the unkind people in this unkind world on their floor like old piles of dust and bones for them to fix. Maybe they’ll rot together, maybe they’ll want to. Andrew does not deserve this, but maybe he and Neil deserve each other. It’s madness, but Andrew knows Neil feels safe with him and their mortifying, unspoken ‘this’ because he is satisfied in knowing that Andrew wouldn’t care to feel anything at all when Neil’s past finally killed him. But Andrew, in that impossibly agonising fashion, defied the things people assumed him to be. Neil had misjudged him, and made Andrew a liar.
Neil is the thing for him to keep coming back to, and that terrifies Andrew. He stayed when he wasn’t supposed to. Someone Andrew had damned himself to, impossibly, infinitely wants to be, and Andrew isn’t made for that. Neil will just simply watch him come undone and apart and fall at the thought of someone needing him for something other than the things he could’ve ever promised them, and that breaks Andrew. Andrew has condemned himself to be needed a thousand times over, but he hasn’t ever known what it is to be wanted, and yet, Neil cannot stop doing so.
He may as well have handed Andrew a loaded gun and aimed it at his chest when he’d told Neil to stay; and it wasn’t fair. Andrew moves across the empty space of the bathroom, pressing the bodies together and tells Neil, “I hate you so terribly it makes me want to die. Maybe I wanted you to tell me I was wrong about you; about this.”
This. The pregnancy test in the waste bin. The awful sunkenness in his stomach that something was wrong. The thought that what had happened in November was over and dead and forgettable, wasn’t.
Neil doesn’t falter. He’s still and unwavering and when he speaks, his breath catches on Andrew’s lips. “But you weren’t, I can't. I won't lie to you.”
“I don’t believe that,” Andrew says. “It’s muscle memory for you, no?”
“I'm not standing here with you to watch you fall apart. I'm not letting you and you’re not going to let me let you.”
“Oh, you’re so stupid,” Andrew says. If he were anyone else, a promise like that would have mattered, and maybe, if he were the kind of young he never was, he would have felt sorry for Neil. He’s surprised at how angry he feels when he says, “You’re standing here watching me because I am not masochistic enough to want to be alone in my gallows, but selfish enough to let you watch.”
He can imagine it, sometimes. When he doesn’t try hard enough to remember he shouldn’t. It’s always hazy; always in the abstract.
There’s a bassinet in the dorm room. New scars on his stomach, human ones. A helpless, insignificant thing that doesn’t look so much as Drake as it does him. A baby screaming and screaming and screaming; and maybe Andrew would cry with it. Maybe he’d bring it to practice just to have a reason not to play. Maybe he wouldn’t say anything to anyone until it came just to laugh at his horrified fellow Foxes when they saw Andrew Minyard standing there with a baby.
Or maybe he wouldn’t do anything at all, staying content to watch Neil or Abby or Bee stand between its crib and Andrew’s bunk bed, half-baby-talking to the infant and half-screaming at Andrew to get up and hold his child. Catatonia would sound very, very appealing.
He’s heard of mothers going crazy after giving birth, even with babies they’d wanted. Given the universe’s way with ironic tragedies, Andrew doesn’t have much hope he would remain sane once everything was over. All the things anyone had ever said about him wouldn’t be lies anymore, and he’d bask in his own psychosis until he’d forget to remember he wasn’t always like that. He’d drown his baby in the sink, or shake it until its ears bled, or – or get desperate enough and decide to give it up, just so it would grow up like he did. Become just like him.
He knows himself of what it is to be unwanted by his mother. Kept one twin, not the other, and in the end, they both lost horribly. While he was left to rot in a corrupted child protection institution that failed him in every house he was ever condemned to –
– Aaron, on the other hand, had loved and loved and loved his mother. He was so deluded into needing her that he still wanted her, even when she decided she didn’t want to parent him either. She’d put her fists through his eye sockets, or left him starving for days, or let him choke on her oxycodone until he overdosed on it because only then, would he ever be quiet enough.
Perhaps it’s a familial disease, passing down the bloodline a curse: children that no one chose to want, and therefore they must suffer for it. It’s their birthright, their penance. If he did the same as his mother before him, maybe his baby would get stuck in the same system. Maybe it would grow up with the same men.
It’s not fair – to either of them. Andrew can’t take that chance.
“Andrew,” Abby tries again and Andrew lets her. Her words are careful, steady. “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?”
Andrew knows how this works, knows how he has to answer.
Andrew just happens to know the taste of other teeth, and what it is to exist from the atrocities committed by the people who should have taken care of him. It just happens to be that the only way he knows how to love is with shards of glass in both hands, positioned to attack, and all of that is synonymous with wanting to kill himself
But that doesn’t mean everything is static.
They made him into this, and maybe living is a disease all the same, but Andrew has decided he will live for a very, very long time. It’s only fair.
With that meaningless voice that’s breaking at the seams the longer he and Abby rot together in this room, he tells her, “Do not waste my time nor your breath asking stupid questions that will amount to nothing and get us nowhere. If I wanted to die, I would have, and I certainly wouldn’t have ended up here with you.”
Abby looks at him, deeply, for a few moments. It isn’t a very long stretch of time, but it’s unbearable regardless. Andrew isn’t used to being on this side of things: putting himself in a position of needing something from someone, asking for help, wanting to. At last, Andrew makes himself say, “I’m fixing this. Let me.”
Abby’s words are careful, concrete. Easily, so terribly easily, she says, “I wasn't lying when I promised I would help you.”
It’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too much. Nothing about any of this has ever been easy. “Forgive me, I've heard such lies before.”
And Abby (in an echo, or rather the first of the same words Neil will tell Andrew once this is all over and they're months away from where they are now), promises him back, “I won't be like them.”
Aaron finds out the morning after Andrew did. After Abby. Neil is out getting tylenol and pads and it – and Andrew does not have it in him to grace Aaron with coddling and hand holding and shh, shh I’m okay, it’s not what it looks like, brother. He can’t bring himself to ignore him either.
He’s not sure how Aaron knows, only that does, and that his face is so god-awfully red and revolted that it looks nauseating to see back on his own. A brother who he hadn’t known until he had. It’s a terrifying funhouse mirror that Andrew stares back at, blankly. They shouldn’t look as similar as they do with who Andrew used to be and what Aaron was when he was still his mother’s son, but they’ve grown up, and now, they match. Andrew wonders if Aaron sees all that is terrible when he looks at Andrew, too. He wonders when Aaron will decide he’s finally had enough of looking at the ruins of it all, now that he knows everything so undeniably unapologetically. Andrew wonders if he can.
“Did he do this to you?” Aaron demands, and pulls out the pregnancy test. Naughty. Andrew hid that well.
But whatever, this doesn’t change anything. What’s done is done, and what Aaron knows will stay there between them like a wound refusing to heal. It’s somewhat fitting, having something else rotting there with all their other graves that Aaron and Andrew will never talk about. Perhaps Aaron inherited his conversational catatonia from their mother, while Andrew was bestowed with her wonderfully viable feminine fertility.
Alas –
“Neil didn’t do anything to me,” Andrew says, bored. He looks up from his book (from the pamphlet hidden inside) from where he’s nestled himself into the corner of the couch. Before Aaron can respond again, he presses back, cutting and awful. Andrew almost smirks. “But you’d hate that so much more than the truth. You were there after all.”
Aaron falters. He recoils from where he is standing, eyes unable to leave Andrew’s, and he takes that like a challenge. Like children in a contest, daring each other to break away, to give up, to lose.
Neither of them do.
“And he–” Aaron seethes, his scornful facade breaking at the seams just enough for Andrew to see the way he slips before he can mend himself. “He still wants to fucking touch you,” he says before he recovers and is able to piece the parts of himself back together enough to remember to be angry, to be hateful, to be just. They’re not fourteen-years-old anymore, looking at each other through a visitation screen, plastic landline phones in their hands and never saying a fucking word, even if they forget that sometimes. Andrew doesn’t let himself back down.
“You already killed the man who did this, and now you want to do so to another.” Andrew snaps the book shut, the sound ricocheting of the walls in the dead, awful stillness. He feels his breathing grow harsh, his blood flooding through his veins. There’s anger bleeding through his chest, rich and suffocating, and fuck, Andrew doesn’t know what to do with it. He bites out, “Tell me, Aaron, at what point after being raped do you grant me the sanity to comprehend that my own agency belongs to me? Or will I always be too stupid and too sodomised to understand such things?”
“You’re not choosing him,” Aaron says back. “He’s taking it from you. He’s a perverted fuck that didn’t swing until he saw you assaulted in front of him. You’re too damaged to see he is taking advantage of you, especially after find out that you’re… you’re–”
Oh? Is that so? In that case, Aaron should’ve said something sooner! Or he should’ve done what Andrew would’ve done and stuck a blade between Neil’s ribs; or smashed his skull open with a racket for a second time; or severed his body into thousands of tiny pieces, so whatever the rabbit is running from won’t have to! Because apparently Aaron knows everything.
Well, here’s what Andrew knows:
Andrew had given Neil a promise, and then he had given him more, piece after piece of himself until he was everything but a body that didn’t know how to exist, because suddenly – or not so suddenly – Neil Josten had the fucking ability to make Andrew Minyard feel real, feel human, feel at all again and again and again.
Neil is dangerous, but not in the way Aaron thought so. He is dangerous in the way letting someone in was dangerous. It’s a different kind of danger that he’d never felt before – sickeningly sweet cough syrup coating his tongue, rich oxygen filling his lungs, an impossible entity that Andrew didn’t know how to forget. Neil had become the gritty earth embedded underneath his fingernails, nestled in between his flesh like the scars that condemn his forearms broken. He’s become this insufferable, everlasting headache that Andrew wants for the rest of her life. Maybe Aaron can delude himself into thinking Andrew is this pathetic, agentless thing stuck in the inertia of it all, incapable of realising he needs to be saved before it kills him, but he’s wrong.
Aaron is a terrified child who needs someone to blame for all of it. Drake is dead but that’s not good enough. He needs the rape victim to act as perfectly as a rape victim should. How dare Andrew have the want to be with someone after everything, and how dare Neil want him back?
To Andrew, the cosmical collection of contradictions that is Neil Josten has never been more easy to unravel. It’s taken almost everything to get here, but Andrew has and he cannot unknow him. He shouldn’t make as much sense as he does: Neil is awful and beautiful and sickeningly different because he is the only one to make a promise and keep it. He’s the only one who’s made him feel, and for the first time, he’s wanted to. Andrew wants him. He wants to heal. He wants something better than this.
He pulls himself up from the couch, standing close enough into his brother’s space. They breathe the same unbearable, sweltering air. Andrew whispers, “You are so condemningly ignorant. It is astounding how badly you make me want to kill you despite everything, Aaron.”
“I’m protecting you,” Aaron says back, all the same. And suddenly, here they are, two foils of each other, again.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Andrew says.
Aaron looks at him, swallows. It’s such a sudden, awfully change when his voice drops low, quiet. “You’re not keeping it, are you?” he whispers, the words so incredibly hollow, as if this is the most terrible thing he’s ever had to say. Worse than attempting a ‘hello’ when they’d met. Worse than begging Andrew for his drugs back. Worse than smashing open Drake’s skull with a racket and asking his brother if – if it had happened before.
“That is none of your fucking business,” Andrew says, and walks away; leaving Aaron to linger with the festering remains of the longest conversation they’d ever had.
Abby doesn’t talk about alternative options. She doesn’t talk Andrew out of it. Andrew knows all the ways in which this could have gone, what he could have chosen, all of what he could do instead, but he doesn’t want that. Abby gives him the grace of respecting his decision and that he’d already made it in the same moment he’d found out he was pregnant.
“You’ll take five tablets in total,” Abby says, handing him the little piece of pink prescription paper. “Take the mifepristone first, orally like a regular tablet. Then 24 hours afterward, take the misoprostol. Put four underneath your tongue and leave them there for thirty minutes to dissolve. Swallow the remaining fragments with water.” She pauses, breathes. “It'll be like a heavy period.”
“I’m not fucking stupid,” Andrew bites out, taking the paper.
“I know,” Abby says. This is the part where Andrew has got what he’d come for and should leave this revolting office before Abby can get another word in. For some reason though, he’s frozen. He can’t move, can’t breathe all of a sudden, and Abby must catch on instantly. Abby looks at him, refusing to look away, and it makes Andrew’s chest hurt. How stupid, of all things, would it be to die of a heart attack after everything? Softly, Abby tells him, “I want you to call me if something’s wrong – excessive heavy bleeding, severe pain, fist-sized clots–”
“Stop talking,” he interrupts. Andrew tries desperately to avoid the words catching in his throat. It’s not grief or regret, not quite, but something? Something there that shouldn’t be, and Andrew is not okay. Everything he didn’t let himself tolerate before, is here, basking in the room, waiting for him. “You tell anyone why I was here today and I promise you won’t live to say another word at all, everything else be damned.”
Abby ignores his threat easily, seemingly understanding everything that Andrew won't tell her even now, and says, “I think you should have someone with you. Just for the next few days.”
“I have someone,” Andrew says, and goes.
“Are you in pain?” Neil asks quietly.
Everything is sticky. Sticky like honey and sap and marrow, and Andrew is having a hard time seeing straight. There’s saliva on his lips, maybe vomit, maybe the remnants of the misoprostol dissolving into whatever it is that it needs to be, and his – his Neil is wiping it away, running the cloth down his skin, making him clean. He places the cool rag into the bowl on the floor beside Andrew’s bed – Neil’s bed – and waits for Andrew to piece himself back together again. Watching Neil be gentle of all things, should be hilariously and unbelievably pathetic, but instead, it’s just – whatever it is.
It’s been a day since he’d taken the first medication, an hour since the second and it’s all just – mundane, really, compared to every other unkind thing that had happened before this one. There’s remnants of old dysphoria and what it is to be experiencing something so unrepentantly feminine, scars lying here in the bed somewhere amongst everything else, but it’s all so exhausting to care about so he doesn’t. He’s nauseous and dizzy and doesn’t want to do anything but lie here and let it happen until it stops.
He tells Neil, “No. I'm tired.”
“You can sleep,” Neil says, and because he knows Andrew more than he should, he adds, “I'll keep watch.”
“Come lie with me,” he says, and –
Neil does. Andrew doesn’t move, so Neil climbs onto the bed, over the sheets, and lies with his back against the wall. Andrew, facing away from Neil, lies with his back against Neil’s chest, almost. Some would call it spooning, he supposes. They aren’t touching, Andrew didn’t say and Neil didn’t ask, but –
They fit together, they do. They fit together like identically scarred hands that they hold for each other, or broken pieces of shattered glass that have fused together after existing apart for so very, very long. Together, they have the same flesh, the same mouth, the same sickness of belonging to the other as two children who had never known what it is to have.
And then…
There’s something else. Neil knows more than he should. Understands more. It’s terrifying as much as it is familiar. Neil’s never said anything and Andrew will never ask, but, like historians, they can both piece together enough of the past to comprehend it all so awfully.
(Andrew won't know this until later, until all their ghosts have been buried and until all the dust has settled. Until this story is over; but he –
He will learn that the Wesninskis’s marriage is of the transactional kind, Mary Hatford akin to a business commodity, and Nathaniel – a child the product of rape. It’s not something to talk about, to think about, but – it’s there, in his eyes sometimes, when he lies with Andrew now, when he makes the choice to stay again and again and again.)
Neil is a paradox that will never stop not making sense, and Andrew hates and hates and hates him for it. Before, he had been something of pipedreams and ever-changing memories and the conditional unconditional promises Andrew would’ve held onto until it killed him. The feeling used to be an impossible buzz of light in the absence of space, a stupid star that had fallen out of orbit, disrupting the deafening black hole that was Andrew’s life –
– But now, he’s changed. Neil’s the entire fucking galaxy and everything in between it, and yes, that thought had been terrifying to realise all the same, but it had stopped being so scary once Andrew had realised he wasn’t so afraid of the height of outer space. He’s not afraid of anything.
They’re not talking about that, but they are.
“It tastes bad,” Andrew says, because for the first time in his life, he doesn’t know how to say anything else. “Like chalk.”
“I’ll make you something,” Neil promises. “When it’s over.”
‘When it’s over’ sounds so optimistic, so undeniably easy that after the medicine has done what it’s done, the world will be perfect again, the scars will fade, and neither of them will ever have to think about November again. Like it’s something Andrew can step aside and ignore but healthily this time – and sure, maybe he can. He does want to heal, he does want to get better. He wants to believe Neil. He deserves to.
But, for now, his thoughts won’t translate in ways to say them; and instead, Andrew just tells him, “You can’t make shit,” and hopes Neil can understand all that he isn’t.
He does. Of course he does. He asks Andrew, playing along, “What do you want?”
“Stay here. Hold me,” Andrew says, giving in, holding on, being better than what he’d been before. “Make this feel ordinary.”
“You don’t want to die,” Neil says, like he’s sure of it. Like he knows Andrew.
Andrew laughs again, and the sound ricochets off the bathroom like gunfire. This is all so terribly funny. He pretends as if he’s actually thinking about it when he tells Neil, “I'm not opposed to the concept.” It’s an old, buried thought, but a familiar one.
But Neil is Neil. At least, when it comes to Andrew. He says, “Want something else instead. You were hurt, you were abused, and now you’re pregnant. It’s not fair that you’re all kinds of awfully and cosmically fucked; but you don’t have to be. You can choose what it is that you want to become in spite of everything that has been done to you. You wanted me here because you needed me to promise you that. You spent all your life fighting for the lives of everyone else, so fight for yourself for once. Andrew. What do you want to do?”
Andrew Minyard doesn’t want anything but –
– but he does.
“I want it gone.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Neil asks. Neil knows Andrew is awake now. He’d been pretending to be asleep for the last ten minutes, chest rising and falling a beat quicker than it had a moment before, with eyes flickering dizzyingly as he’d first oriented himself. Neil had been politely pretending not to notice.
“What is there to talk about?” Andrew mumbles. Neil’s arms are wrapped around his middle, his back pressed into Neil’s chest. Neil’s body is a solid weight against Andrew’s skin, enough for him to remember everything about the person he is lying next to. The touch of rough, scarred skin, of Neil – like everything – isn’t something Andrew can forget. Something Andrew can recognise in his bones, something to know and know and know.
They could talk about how they’re falling in love. How they’re too stubborn to admit it. How neither of them will ever say it; but they’ll find solace in themselves and each other anyway. They could talk about staying here forever – not South Carolina, not Palmetto, not this bed in their dorm, but wherever the other is, making a home for the first time in their lives. They could talk about one day (many, many futures from now) fostering a child of their own. They could give someone all the things the universe never gave them, and they would be good at it. They would do better. They would be everything.
But it’s only four o’clock on a Tuesday, and they have time.
Andrew can feel Neil’s breath against his neck when he talks. “Homework. The championships. Truths I’ll give away for free. There are secrets I need to tell you when you want them. But it doesn’t have to be now. We can talk about the insignificant things. Anything that doesn’t matter.”
Andrew turns his head slightly to look back and Neil’s eyes are soft – bare – as if Neil had just given away all of his secrets anyway.
“What is happening to me right now is an insignificant thing,” Andrew decides. “I won’t allow him and this to be anything more to me than an inconvenience. I deserve to make it so. Bee would disagree with such a philosophy, I know, but I can’t care. Maybe later, it’ll be different; but I’m tired.”
“This is your body healing itself,” Neil amends. “If only a little late. The act of what is happening and where it came from may be unimportant to you, but the choice to save yourself isn’t nothing, Andrew.”
The air is still. The pain has become dull. He doesn’t think it’ll ever quite leave, but it’s an okay-pain, an I-lived-pain, an I-am-taking-my-life-back pain. He breathes together with Neil, again and again and again.
“I know,” Andrew says, and he does.