Chapter 2

Two

Josh

December 25, 2018

I sit up on the trestle bridge for almost an hour, but I don’t call. That’s a victory, at least.

Since he left a month ago, I’ve called dozens of times. I bet I’ve left at least fifteen or sixteen voice mails.

I don't do that anymore—the voicemails. I just can't.

I don't think I've called in...eight days?

It's not because I don't want to. I do. I want to call him every minute of the day, every day of the week. Not knowing what happened—not knowing where things went wrong—is like having an itch that I can never scratch.

When I think about it too long, my chest feels like it's being pried open, like something's ripping at me from the inside out.

I want him like a drug. I want him like nothing I've wanted before. In a way I didn't even know people could want things. I feel like I've lost a body part. That feeling in my chest—the painful, something's-breaking one—is with me almost all the time.

In the first few days, Mom and Carl treated me with kid gloves. I think Carl didn't quite believe that Ezra really left like that, so he talked to Ezra's mom and demanded to talk to Ezra. I was listening from the bottom of the staircase as Carl asked some questions. Just knowing Ez was around and capable of speaking, but not speaking to me, had me jogging up the stairs to my room.

Mom told me later that night that Ez told Carl he was feeling depressed and needed space, because that's what works best for him. That he was seeing an old therapist near his house in Richmond.

He was depressed. I can’t deny he never really seemed okay.But I thought I was helping him. That being with me made things easier. What a fucking idiot I was.

I thought we were in love. I did. I walk over the train tracks, back toward the Isabella mansion, where I parked.

We were in love. I thought how I felt, how he felt, was real.

But it wasn't.

Turns out it was only real for me. I try to tell myself, as I step from slat to slat on the tracks, that maybe that's not even right.

Maybe it wasn't real for me either.

But that's a lie. A coward's lie. I'm not a coward.

Ezra was a coward. He showed me all his cards when we first met, but I ignored them. I let him make me think we had something. Did he ever really even think we did, or was it always just a game to him, something to do in his spare time?

I ask myself this fifty times a day, and I think I can't answer.

I remember how he'd wrap me up against him, and for that reason—if nothing else—I think he must have felt real feelings for me. The way he'd fucking squeeze me. And his eyes. Sometimes when he looked at me, I swear—

I swallow before tears blur my eyes and try to fix my attention on the woods behind the derelict house. They're not really woods, I guess. Just...vines and grass and these big, mossy trees. It feels like another life when we sat under one of them, the weight of his torso on my lap.

It's quiet and cold out today. Kind of wet and humid, like it might rain. I get into my car and rest my forehead on the wheel before cranking it up. Then I reach into my glove box, turn the car off, get back out, and go sit on the steps of the house. Pull the last cigarette out of his pack and light the thing up.

I smoked the second-to-last one the day after he left. Just like that one, this tastes like shit and makes me cough like crazy. I don't want to do it anymore after the one-fourth mark, but I keep going.I don't even know why. I guess because I need something to make me feel like he was here. Like that shit really happened.

I feel sick when I'm finished with it. Maybe that's what I deserve—for not doing...whatever I should have done. To keep him here. To make him happy.

I wipe my eyes when I get into the car. Mom and Carl went to Carl's Dad's place in Mobile; dude is almost 80 and has Parkinson's, so he lives in a care facility. If Mom knew I was driving, she'd be pissed off, but I don't give a shit. I'm not gonna die at twenty miles an hour on the mostly empty streets of Fairplay.

Back home, I watch some TV on the couch, pick at some turkey and potatoes, and walk upstairs. Mom and Carl are supposed to be home now. Since they're not, though...

I walk through my room into the bathroom. His stuff was in here, but my mom moved it all. She put it in a drawer on his side of the bathroom. I don't open the drawer. I don't want to smell that stuff right now.

I turn the knob and open the door to his room slowly, like he's in there on the bed and I don't want to wake him.

He's not on the bed. Sometime in the week after he left, my mom made the bed. I go sit on it, look around the room. I've been in here two times before this. Checked his drawers. He left lots of what my mom bought. His clothes. Sometimes I want to wear them. Want to smell them.

I lie back on the bed, thinking of the one thing that he didn't leave.The one thing that makes no sense, that keeps me up at night, confused as hell, wanting to drink myself stupid so I don’t have to keep obsessing over this one weird fact: He didn't leave the football pillow that I made him.