Roger was the third person to know. Lucy was the fourth, but Roger was the third. Technically Roger would be fourth, she would be fifth, and Lucas would be third if he even understood his current state. Oh, and there was the man that saw him when we were walking down the sidewalk that same night.

It was Amber’s idea, actually.

“We could talk to Roger.”

I was sitting on the end of my bed, with Lucas still in bed, laying as though he had been ill for quite some time. The covers were over his face, the two of us could only see his hair poking out.

“‘We could talk to Roger’?” I was definitely mocking her. To me, it seemed idiotic. There was no one else in the world that needed to know that he was alive. The three of us did not need to go public. No reason at all, it was incredibly risky, so risky in fact that I would have thought perhaps one of us would have gotten our heads cut off in the end.

“We could talk to Roger, yes. Ask him what he thinks.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, Mark.” Sarcasm. She was back, she was herself again. “It’s not like there’s something that you did—.”

“We did.”

“No Mark.” Amber refused to join me in the blame—and it wasn’t even really blame, I don’t think that there was anything to be blamed for. “I’m not the one taking the blame for this, this is all you're doing. I’ve already said that.”

“You’re an accomplice.”

Her glare burnt straight through me. “I’m as much of an accomplice as a fly on the wall in that garage. I did nothing—.”

“You helped me dig up his body. You helped me pull his body out of his grave. You helped me put his body in the truck.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” She was doing what I was great at: lying to herself. “I’m absolving myself of this.”

“You said you’re going to wash your hands of this a bit again and you have yet to do that.”

She was pushing against my cognitively and mentally, I swear that she was trying to be as abstinent as possible. “What, do you want me to go and cover my hands in soap and wash it all down the sink? There’s no blood on these things,” Amber said to me, bitterly, showing off her hands and lanky fingers.

Once before she had already called her my accomplice, and in this situation she was my Bonny, minus all of the gunshots and intimacy. And all of the thievery, we didn’t do any of that sort of thing.

“You have blood on your hands now for sure, with that cheater.”

“Why do you keep saying that he was cheating? He didn’t do anything, you killed him—.”

“Hey,” I barked. I was getting just as bitter as she was, my hands started to grip at the covers. Raising my voice could wake Lucas up but for some reason I didn’t care. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Mark, yes you did. You killed him. You hit him over the head and buried him in the treeline.”

“He cheated on his wife anyways.”

Apparently, me saying that tipped her balance. “Mark, you stupid bastard! No he didn’t, I was joking. How did you expect me to make light of such a terrible situation? You’ve trapped me in this sin, okay?”

“You don’t believe in sin.” I was right, she didn’t. I’ve already established her school of thought before—I bet that I hold the ability to explain it better than she ever would be able to.

She was looking at me, she hadn’t stopped looking at me for ten minutes. It was that eyeliner, mascara. I don’t know what you call it. Whatever it was, that’s what it was, that’s what burned through me. That’s what ripped the innocence out of her eyes that I remember she had when we were in the library so long ago, the eyes that had fear in them whenever one of the sisters would come by.

“I swear to god.” And she mocked me even before I could take a breath to speak, saying, “‘You don’t believe in god.’ Well you know what Mark, people just say these sorts of things, they’re called phrases. It’s how I express my feelings when I talk. I get that they contradict what are my core beliefs but god damn it do I think that they add a little something to my speech.”

“It’s simply ironic.”

I was an asshole. “You’re an asshole. I’m calling Roger and you can’t do anything about it, he knows some stuff about magic too. He’ll be able to help.” Amber didn’t know about the crack in the phone—but that didn’t matter anyways, it didn’t stop it from being used.

Roger came at six in the morning, October the 5th, I believe. He didn’t drive, I never heard him say that he had any interest at all in driving; he had a bike, that’s all that he needed. That’s how he got around the majority of the time, either that or by walking like a normal person. And, well, he didn’t live that far away from me in the first place, so it wasn’t a bother for him—she hadn’t told him why he was coming over, only asked if he wanted to do something. It was a monday, not a thought crossed my mind as to why he instantly picked up, why he thought that there wasn’t an issue with coming over to someone’s house at six ante meridiem, before school. That was right, we had school; we had yet to figure out what we were to do with Lucas when we were off at school. Other than my bedroom there was no other place to hide him. I didn’t know if he liked being in there, but it was going to have to be the best option other than the shed or the basement—and there was too much that he could possibly get into in the basement.

I had always considered Roger to be that of a free spirit—I’d bet that he thought the same thing of himself as well. If you asked him something along the lines of, “Where are you going?”, he might have responded with, “Wherever the wind takes me”. He smoked a lot of marijuana too, which Amber herself had expressed to me a few times that she had a deep interest in. What did I know, it was entirely possible that she had already smoked it and she was simply trying to drop subtle hints about it so that I eventually would be turned to her side.

“That’s not for me, Amber.”

“I’m not saying that you would do it, I haven’t done it yet.” I doubted that, the way she had such a quick response as though she was keeping it in a holster at her hip is what tipped me off. “Perhaps I’ll do it in the future, you never know.”

“You have great judgment skills, don’t you?”

I had almost fallen asleep, sitting upright at the end of my bed, as Amber had gone somewhere in the house to partake in something that I knew nothing of. Awoken by a doorbell ringing, and I wasn’t the only one that was jolted out of a pseudo-slumber.

“Victor.”

I was the first one that he called. That very well could have been because I was the first one that he saw when he sat up, the covers falling down and onto his thighs.

“That was a loud noise, I know—I didn’t know that it was going to happen all of a sudden, I hope that it didn’t—.”

“Door.”

There was something about the way he talked, like he understood what he wanted to say, like he understood what he was thinking yet, instead of a well thought out sentence, the only thing that came out of his mouth when he constricted his vocal chords the most primordial form of any kind of sentence he would be able to string together.

“That door.”

It was the door, he was right. “Door—yes, that’s the door. That was the doorbell. The bell that goes with the door.” I was patronizing him; I didn’t want to patronize him, that didn’t feel right, but I had no other way of speaking to him without him being confused. No, he wasn’t an infant, but he wasn’t—.

“Get the door Mark!”

I jumped off my bottom, standing upright, all muscles taught. That was Amber, her voice cut through the hair like a knife. I still had no idea what she was doing elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, it was the guest that she invited—I caught a glimpse of him standing outfront on the porch as I passed by the sitting room window. He had propped his bicycle up somewhere where it was obscured, its current location completely unknown to me; I greeted him with the utmost kindness at the door, whether it be real or not.

“Roger, how nice it is for you to join us this fine evening.” I felt like I was greeting a guest to a dinner party, like I was less of the host and more of the chauffeur—butler, that was the word.

“Dude, it’s six in the mañana.” His hair was unkempt; he had the long kind of hair that my father feared I would obtain if I didn’t cut mine soon, however there was no desire within me to replicate such a style.

I peaked at an invisible watch, I’d forgotten mine on my nightstand. “You’re right, it is.”

Yet to invite him into my house, he made his way in. Of course, he’d been to my house a handful of times before—that is it was four or so years before. I, originally, believed that level of formality to longer exist and to now be once again earned, but he apparently thought nothing of that. Not a single thought was put to that sort of thing.

“Just how I remembered it,” he said, tossing his things to the side, narrowly missing the couch and instead bumping into a side table. Thankfully there was nothing on the side table but an ashtray that my dad never used and a coaster that he also never used.

“Roger, there’s a reason why—.”

I was completely and utterly cut off. Apparently, that was so common to me that I hadn’t even given it a second thought. “Did you ever take Spanish my amigo?”

“Italian. But wouldn’t it be mi amigo?”

“Amigo, ashmigo.”

“That doesn’t make sense at all.” There, standing in my living room, I started to come to the realization that this is why I did my best to oftentimes avoid holding any kind of conversation with Roger. It wasn’t that I disliked him, it was that I was dumbfounded by everything he said 1-hundred percent of the time.

“The latter isn’t even a word.”

“‘Ladder’? Where is there a ladder?”

If I were to abandon him, now sitting comfortably on my couch, I ran the risk of him getting distracted by some outside-force and wandering to a part of my house that I wished for him to see. That’s why, instead, I screamed for Amber.

“What do you want?” Clearly, she was upset, and clearly, I had no care.

“Roger’s here!”

Everything within me, every single bone, muscle, strand of tissue, cell—everything wanted me to tell Roger that we had second guessed our plans for the morning and that it would be best for him to leave.

He paled now. Amber was tending to Roger in the sitting room while I looked at Lucas, still sitting within the bed, once looking straight forward as if there was nothing within his mind, but now he stared at me, upon my flesh. I thought for a mere second that perhaps his eyes had changed a different color, that perhaps they had regained the original color that he had had in life—I was wrong, of course, that wouldn’t make any sense. No sense at all. And even if it did I don’t know what I would exactly do.

“Roger’s here.”

I doubted if he knew who Roger was, even when he was in highschool. Maybe he did, maybe he had passed by him in the hallway a fair enough amount of times that he had at least become accustomed to his appearance. Or maybe he had actually talked to him before, shared a few jokes here and there or even spent lunch or an hour-after-school with him. Perhaps there was a friendship there that I had no idea about, one that was severed through his death and the eventual funeral. Lucas had always been great like that; I don’t recall a time where Lucas explicitly expressed that he genuinely hated someone with his heart, mind, and soul. He, instead, at least tolerated everyone to some variable degree, some more than others. But the name didn’t prompt a response.

“Do you know Roger?”

Nothing. Nothing at all. I could describe him and then maybe he would know what I was talking about—who I was talking about, rather.

“Long brown hair, I can’t remember the eye color. He’s kind of a nerd, but not like me; and he used to do that thing where he would stand on the hood of his car in the parking lot and act like he was from Kiss. Or was that Poison? Hellsing?” That last one wasn’t even a band, actually. I don’t know where I got that name from. “I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons with him before. Him and a few other friends. It’s really fun, we should play with them sometime.”

Nothing emotionally or verbally, but physical. He stood up, out of the bed, in his incredibly rigid manner, eyes continuing to stay locked upon me. The morning had finally come, the sun had finally risen from where it was hiding itself—my room was now greatly illuminated, to the point that there might as well have been a floodlight directly outside of my window.

“You can talk to me if you want to, Lucas.” What was I doing? He could talk, we knew that, we had already established that. I guess I thought that there was a chance that he was refraining from telling me everything, for some reason he might have been scared. Who knows if that made any sense. Something within me told me that yes, he was trying to hold himself back. He wanted to say things, he wanted to go on and on, he wanted to be able to tell me whatever was on his mind—whatever was on that rotten mind of his. I feared that he was rotting, perhaps he was going stale from the humid air. But he wasn’t food, he wasn’t anything like that, he was a human being. He was flesh and blood, like me. Do they take out the blood during the embalming process? His hair was still a mess, he was kind of a mess—I’d call it bed head, that’s what he had. The first night I fixed him up, both before he got into the shower and after he came out. I was the one that had to dry his hair, I got to make sure that it looked the way that it was supposed to; it was like a test of my mind as I maintained my temperance. Yes, I desired to run my fingers through his hair, I’ve said this multiple times too, but that would take away from him the respect that the two of us shared. He deserved that, of course. That was his.

☠ ☠ ☠

He’d been there for about twenty-thirty minutes—Roger, that is—and he sat at my kitchen table. My father’s kitchen table, technically. Actually, it was more of my mother’s kitchen table, as she had gotten it at a flea market somewhen time ago. There were teeth marks on it from me, so it definitely was either before or during when I was a toddler. That house has a lot of my scars. Not many of them were that deep, all subsurface ones I would say. I remember at one point my mother talked to me about how I struggled to talk when I was little—she said that I tripped over my words. When I was a teenager she would always get upset at me about the things that I would wear, saying that I dressed as though I were trying to make people think that I was a girl. That wasn’t it, no. It was better the way that my dad put it, saying that I wore clothes that were more or less risqué, sometimes even provocative. I would have thought that my dad would be the one that would reprimand me for that but I guess it makes sense that it was my mother instead.

“Your t-shirt is too short.”

“No it’s not.”

“You need to change it. You can see your naval.” Why did she call it like that? And no, you couldn’t; she said that because I tried reaching for an item in one of the upper cupboards and for a second you could see both my waistband and my stomach.

“Just call it my belly button.”

She had this look that she would give me, one that I knew was disapproving yet she refused to voice her opinion.

“It’s New Wave, Martha.”

Somehow my dad was always there for me. That was until he got his new job, of course—around now he has barely ever been there for me, both physically and emotionally. Doesn’t matter though, I’ve got my own things to do and so does he. As a matter of fact, I have Amber and Lucas, and that’s all that really matters.

“Whatever it is, I don’t like it. I want you to take it off.”

I followed her orders, taking it off in front of it and throwing it on the ground; I was trying for the kitchen counter, missing by about a foot or so. Could have tried to focus on my throw more.

“I meant in your room, not here.”

Couldn’t see what I looked like but I’d bet that I had some sort of scowl on my face. She knew that this sort of thing was a long time coming—I don’t get it, it doesn’t make sense why I can’t just dress the way I want to dress or do the things that I want to be able to do. “It doesn’t make sense, can’t I just dress the way I want to dress and do the things that I want to be able to do? Why do you always have to treat me like I’m a baby, I’m almost an adult, I’m almost able to vote. I’m almost 18, it’s been that way since 1971.”

“And I’m sure you’ll know what you're talking about when you have the ballot sitting in front of you.”

Was she saying I shouldn’t have the ability to do that? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Giving kids like you the right to vote. You don’t know anything about the world around you.” She was cutting up carrots, making a food that I can’t even begin to remember. Probably chicken noodle, she knew I hated soup. “Making assumptions. Wrong assumptions.” It was rhythmic the way that she cut.

Dad didn’t try to step in, he had already tried to put in his two-cents and it didn’t work. Maybe he should have doubled it, tried four-cents, maybe even eight-cents. Try a whole dollar.

She fixed her feathered hair. How I hated it, and she dyed it too. I found the bottles in the trash. She lied to me about that. “You’re sixteen Martin.”

“That’s not my name.”

“Since the day you were born,” she said, collecting the fragments in her hands and dropping them in the bowl.

I boiled inside.

“I held you in my arms and I looked down at your tiny little face and said, ‘He’s a Martin’. Dad wanted Dean.” The singer.

I stripped my pants. “You wanted it off, let’s try the whole outfit off.” As embarrassing as it was for me to struggle with the zipper for about five seconds, I dropped them to the floor.

“Oh—for heaven’s sake Martin.” As she winced her face she turned away from me, putting up the hand that she didn’t hold the knife with. “Martin, go to your room and put some clothes on!”

“You said for me to take it off,” I said. Then I muttered to myself under my breath, “You said for me to take it off, so I took it off.”

“Martin.”

“Mark.”

“Martin, go.”

I refused to look away from her, in contrast to how she refused to look at me. But she broke that, slamming her hand on the counter in order to make a sort of stance, almost flipping up the cutting board as she did so. My dad peeked at the two of us, I saw him look over the back of his chair to then look back at the television as if all hell was not about to break loose on the kitchen tile.

“Go.”

Refusal to respond now.

“Go.”

My arms stretched out, like I was accepting the cross. Maybe I was trying to act like I was bowing on the stage, waiting for the applause and flowers to be thrown up to me, for the curtain to fall down. There was no curtain.

She hated my music. She hated the way I dressed. She hated what I read. I snuck in a copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, she burnt it—it was the library’s, it wasn’t mine. But I wish it was mine. And it would have hurt even more if it was my personal copy. She hated my hair (dad disliked it but he didn’t hate it). She hated my real name, what I wanted to be called. And she hated me. I tried to dress as James Dean for All Hallows Eve. “It’s All Saints Day.” No, it’s Samhain, it’s All Hallows Eve. It’s Halloween. “James Dean isn’t good, he’s in Hollywood, you know the type. Dress as St. Bartholomew.” St. Bartholomew, the patron saint of leatherworking, who was skinned alive—creepy, eerie, metal even. But I wanted to be James Dean, Jim Stark. I watched it when I had mono.

“For the love of God, Martin, put on a shirt, your scars—.”

Of course that’s what she cared about. The scars that were caused because I was a kid that would get into so much trouble and she wouldn’t do anything about it. The scars that showed that I liked to get too mischievous, that I would swing on the monkey bars and fall, the scars that I got from all the surgeries when I broke my left arm twice, my right arm thrice, my left leg once, and my right leg fourfold. How I used to get cut up by the rocks when I would run in my underwear through the creek and trip, how I would scrape up my stomach when I would try my best to do a backflip off of the swings. Or when I ran into a light pole (two times) and a basketball hoop. How I got hit on my tricycle by a car going 30-five miles per hour in a school zone and by “the grace of God” I survived.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

“Now.”

Then would have been a great time for dad to interject; then would have been a great time for him to say, “Listen to your mother”, or, alternatively, “Let the boy do what he wants”. But he wouldn’t do that, he didn’t like to pick sides. Not yet, at least.

Sure, I was obstinate. Sure, I was disobedient, I was defiant. I don’t know though—I burned. “Make me.” And I smirked even more.

And she pulled it out at me: the blade.

“Martha!”

Now he was paying attention. Now he thought that it would finally be a good time to step in, to put a wall between the two of us. He tried his best to make an armistice.

I chickened out. Call me a cry baby or what have you but I didn’t think that me, bare hands, would be able to contend at all with my mother wielding a kitchen knife.

“Fuck—.” I slipped in my speech, stumbling over the words, and at the same time, I slipped on the floor. An ice cube, unnoticed, had melted. One moment I was standing, the next I was down on the floor—I thought that I broke my shoulder, I didn’t, only displaced it. Relocation is what was needed. And I couldn’t get away fast enough. She didn’t cut me, I drew no blood. But apparently my dad didn’t have the ability to hold her back—she slapped me, straight across the face. Martha (Taylor, maiden name) Hancock slapped her son. Claimed that it was because of foul language. I think that she didn’t cut me because my dad, thankfully, was able to slap the knife out of her hand. It almost cut off my toe, but at least she didn’t have it.

In the aftermath he didn’t look at me, he didn’t say anything. She talked to him, though, of course. She was his wife, I was his son. I suppose she was the first in the pecking order. And so I was the first one that he would give up, she was the first one that he would choose. I guess that’s why they never had another kid, why I didn’t get a sibling; because, if they did, they’d have to deal with another one of me.

What other choice did I have but to die a martyr?

“She would have settled for Dean Martin,” he said to me, standing in my doorway.

I knew that. Well, it was more that I assumed it would have been easier for her to have been swayed for me to dress as Dean Martin. It wasn’t too long after she had reprimanded me for my costume. “I know, of course I know.”

“I wish that the two of you could get along.”

I didn’t because I knew that there was nothing that we could do about it. I had tried so hard and for so long to see eye to eye with her, but the passing months—the passing weeks, hours, the passing days—all had led up to this tragic event. That chicken noodle never got finished, it was thrown into the trash. “Me too.” It was easier to lie, to not tell him the truth, to maybe tell him half the truth so that I only had to explain half of myself.

“You could have talked to her better.” His words didn’t make sense, he acknowledged that with his expression and his second attempt. “You could have not raised your voice.”

“I had to.”

“No you didn’t.”

Yes I did. I’d like to say that it was even required of me to do so. I had to or else she wouldn’t listen to me—and furthermore, I barely raised my voice. I stripped, yes, but I didn’t raise my voice. I knew her, I knew how she would have reacted, I didn’t even dare to do anything close to raising my voice. The thing that I got to be the best at was walking on eggshells around her, being able to know exactly what I needed to say and what I needed to do in order for her to not give me a weird look or a curt, verbal jibe.

“You could’ve—.”

“I could’ve what, dad? I could've kept acting like I wasn’t her son?”

“You are her son and you know that. Even if you don’t want to be you are. And you’re my son too.” Perhaps he could read me in a way that I wished he couldn’t. “She said she’ll be gone by midnight.”

“Cinderella.”

“If that’s what you want to call her. But please, at least still call her mom.”

Not at all, not after this. That wasn’t something that a mother would do to her son, that wasn’t something that someone deserving of the title of “mom” would do. And that wasn’t something—.

“You could try talking to her again.”

That was a horrible idea and he knew it. He knew that it would only rekindle the argument and the three of us would be in an even worse situation than we already were. It would fan the fire.

“No.”

I think he gave up. Deep inside of me I desired for him to give up, just as I had given up half a year beforehand. That was post Lucy, around when I really started to think about that rosary that she gave me, when I still prayed in the morning, at the table, and in my tired drowsiness—that was when I called upon God to fix something in my life, anything that he could do to make my life easier. So I guess, in the end, I got my wish.

Dad could have taught me guitar, he could have taught me how to throw a spiral. Now that I think about it, he really could have taught me a lot of things—but he didn’t. So it wasn’t my fault. I got into playing the guitar in my freshman year, around the time when Amber and I had the shortest falling out that there probably was possible.

And I remember when my mother saw my first hickey, one that Lucy gave me that I didn’t even dare to ask for. That wasn’t my thing, I didn’t want to ask for her to give me something. She was the one that would always initiate that sort of thing, she was the one that made all of the moves—and, as you know, she was the one that gave us a title. I think it would have made more sense for her to have given it to me when I was in her bedroom, in that terribly pink room. But she didn’t. We were on her roof; somehow we had gotten up there, most likely via an old tree that was practically growing into the western wall of her house. I always knew how to climb trees, that’s how I broke my arm the first time. This all happened long before I ended up leaving her room, when I leapt out of her bathroom window and onto that same tree—I would have thought that I’d slip and fall, not being able to grab onto one of the thicker branches, falling to my death. If that hickey made me so uncomfortable, it didn’t make sense as to why I was so comfortable with kissing her so much in her bedroom that time.

Lucy smoked. Not as much as Amber, but she definitely smoked. I learned that the day she started talking to me—I could smell it on her breadth. Not as much as Amber, but I could definitely smell it. She was smoking when we were on her roof, looking at the stars above us, wondering if those little lights were staring back at us and thinking the same exact thing. Her parents didn’t care that she smoked, her dad was the one that provided her with the cigarettes. What month exactly escapes me, thought it was rather cold, incredibly chilly actually—but it was a summer night, I knew that much.

“I’m glad you’re here with me,” she said to me. She wasn’t ever open about her emotions, so I feared that she would all of the sudden begin to spill out her emotions and thoughts then and there. Her dad’s ashtray sat in between us, I huddled my knees to my chest.

“Yeah.” That wasn’t the greatest response.

“It’s cold, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Stamped out her cigarette—and for a second I thought she would do it on my leg. “Why don’t you smoke?”

“I don’t like nicotine. Don’t like tobacco. And it stinks.”

“Have you ever tried?”

“It’s putrid.”

“But have you ever tried?”

“No.” I don’t even know if I haven’t tried, really. I know that Amber tried to make me smoke.

“But you drink, isn’t alcohol just another drug?”

She was right, it was. “It’s different.”

She nudged my shoulder. “Different? How?” Now she displaced the ashtray, put it to her left so that she could get closer to me. I didn’t want her to—I didn’t fight it though.

“Tastes different.”

“Well that’s for sure.”

Whenever she spoke to me I always felt like I struggled to figure out what I was supposed to say. I had to find a way to balance what I wanted to say with the thing that was required of me, and I just barely slipped up about every single time.

“You’re odd, you know that?”

So are you. “I guess so.” Other than me being her forced boyfriend, why did that matter to her? My oddities shouldn’t be any concern of hers.

“I got you something, Mark.”

I didn’t know that. It wasn’t anywhere near my birthday, why would she get me a gift. “Oh, thanks.”

“Don’t say thanks when I haven’t even shown you it yet.” She departed for a second, climbing down that tree that felt so uncomfortably close to the house, just like her to I. For a second I could hear her call out from the house, from her bathroom window, but I couldn’t make out anything that she said—it could have been that I didn’t want to hear what she said, I didn’t want to try. Nothing inside of me wanted to try.

She brought me a gift in a hatbox; I thought that those sorts of things didn’t exist anymore, would have made more sense for it to be in a shoebox, a shoebox would have been easier to get. “Open it.”

“I didn’t ask for anything.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she said, trying to get close to me once again since the ashtray was gone. “I thought I might as well get something for my boyfriend.”

I winced, tried to make it look like it wasn’t in response to that last word. “Yeah, thanks.”

“You still haven’t opened it, come on.” Lucy took it out of my hands, she was going to be the one to do it since I refused to. “I would’ve thought you would be excited that I got you something.”

“I am.” I hate how she could read me sometimes. I hated that about anyone, actually.

It was a puffer jacket. It was my puffer jacket, the one that I wear all the time now—the navy one, with the silver zipper and that small logo on the leftmost part of the chest that I still forgot about. If anyone, at any time, asked me what brand it was I would not be able to answer.

“Thank you.” I honestly did like it, so much so that I put it on immediately.

No longer looking at the box, she was staring at me as I attempted to equip it; it was massive, I was drowning in it, but it was comfortable. She muttered to herself, “Third times the charm.”

“I heard that.”

“I hoped you would.”

There was a lean in for a kiss, not from my party, and I could feel myself pull in the opposite direction, towards the northern star. “I—.”

“You what?” She halted, her hair falling in front of her face, her almost slipping and falling off the roof yet catching herself.

“I don’t know.”

That didn’t satisfy her, but she went back to her attempt. I froze, still somewhat leaning to the side, for her to put a peck on my mouth—I coughed in my mouth when she pulled away, breaking my statue-like stance to grip at the sides of my jacket.

“Was that what you thought it would be like?”

I didn’t want to respond—if I did she might take it as a kind of confirmation even if my words read as the complete contrast. “It wasn’t.”

She returned to her main goal, or I would at least think that was her main goal. Her arm now creeped over and to my leg, and though I kicked lightly she didn’t budge, she didn’t stop at what she was trying to do. But we were dating, that’s what it was, it made sense that she would try to do this sort of thing—and still, I didn’t want her to.

“Would you just be normal for once, Mark?”

“I—.”

“Please.”

That’s when she gave me the hickey.

So I had to try to hide it from my mother. When I showed it to Amber there was no need for her to ask where it came from—she told me that I should use a whisk to get rid of it. “Hopefully,” she told me, “it will get rid of it, that way your mom doesn’t say anything.” But that’s how I got caught, when I was sitting on the couch with the kitchen’s whisk in my hand, breaking up the blood clots or whatever it is that caused hickies.

“What’re you doing?” she asked me. I froze, like when I was with Lucy the night before.

“Nothing.” Maybe hiding the whisk in the couch cushion was the best idea—it was either that or throwing it across the room, through the window, into the flowerbed outside.

Grounded for a month. No going out, no Atari. And the only game that I was good at was Space Invaders, Missile Command on a good day.

☠ ☠ ☠

“Can you bring back the dead?”

He thought for a second, possibly for even a minute. Again, he sat at my father’s kitchen table, me across from him, Amber to the left of me, Lucas in my room.

“Of course you can. You’d be talking about Animate Dead, it’s for the third level. You have to roll a D4 to figure out the amount of skeletons, or zombies I think too. Also has to do with your level, I can’t remember exactly how.” Nonchalant about everything else, Roger knew what he was talking about when it came to Dungeons and Dragons—it was his bread and butter, it was almost at his core. Two Christmases before he had gotten the rule book, he knew it front to back, back to front, upside down, whichever orientation you ask for. “It has a whole school of magic dedicated to it: Necromancy. Things like Finger of Death, Summon Dead, Vampiric Touch, Raise Dead—.”

“What’s that?” Amber asked. I thought that I was the proctor of the conversation, not her.\

“The last one?”

“Yeah, the last one.”

He thought for another second-minute. “Essentially, if someone died a day or two beforehand, you can bring them back.”

“What’s the limit on that?” Most likely it was a better idea for her to be the one that asked all the questions as I might spill out what we had done. I found myself not even looking at Roger and, instead, the doorway to the hall that held within it my bedroom door, sometimes maybe staring at the hanging fan above us.

“When you bring them back there’s a limit that’s set to their Constitution. If I was running it I’d make it three points.”

Amber had never played Dungeons and Dragons, she said it wasn’t exactly her thing, while I would have argued that she’d love it. Doesn’t matter. “Constitution, explain that.”

“It’s the main thing that determines your amount of Hit Points. It’s kind of like the amount of damage you can take. Sometimes it can help with poison, disease, and magical attacks.”

“How so?”

“Resistance.”

I rejoined the conversation, no longer an observer. “So when you use Raise Dead, the person is a lot weaker than they were when they were—when they were, well, alive?” For some unknown reason I was struggling to understand what he was saying.

“Exactly.” I would have bet that he was high. “Is she wanting to start playing?”

I shrugged him off immediately. Again, never had she expressed an interest. “No, she’s not interested. Our questions have something to do with real life.” That sounded so stupid but I had no other way to frame it, it was the truth. We were discussing something real, something tangible, something that may have felt like a dream—a nightmare, even—but was real. Incredibly real.

“I’m not following.” And I could have been wrong about him being high, he was gaining coherence the longer we talked.

“I don’t expect you to.” She was demeaning in the way she talked. I feared that she would make Roger upset and end up pushing him out of the house with her words. I was wrong, though—he couldn’t care any less.

“We did something.” My voice quivered; it didn’t do that normally.

“You did something?”

“I had no part in it.” She was still trying to deny her involvement. Too much of a hassle to berate her about it, though.

“Something very, very, very—.”

“Crazy. Let’s call it crazy,” Amber cut me off.

I cleared my throat—was it out of nervousness, anxiety, confusion? Why would I clear my throat if I was confused, did people do that normally? “Wild, even. Obtuse. Odd. Queer,” I said.

“Queer.” It was directed towards me, she directed that towards me and not Roger.

Didn’t break the stance of my eyes, set now on Roger. “I did something. Something that I didn’t think I would be able to do. I thought of it as a joke, maybe a crazy dream or a fantasy that I didn’t think would have been able to actually manifest itself. In the real world, that is.”

“Get to it then, man.” There it was, the dialect of the Roger that I knew, the way that he rolled out the word “man”, making it sound like it was worth the three seconds. It wasn’t all that often that I spent time with him outside of school, yet I still knew how he acted in most situations, or I’d like to think that I did.

“Lucas.”

“Beaumont? Tall kid, brown hair, football?” He knew exactly who we were talking about, he was seeking clarification.

Amber gave him the affirmation. “Yes.”

He was still utterly confused. “He’s dead.”

“We know that,” Amber responded.

“We know that—we knew that.” I said.

“Is.” He was contradicting what I was saying.

“Was.”

“Is.” Now he was contradicting me.

“He was dead.”

“The hell do you mean?” His hands were originally folded but now they lay flat on the table, his pointer finger stretched out in my direction as if he was an attorney trying to accuse me of something yet he didn’t know exactly what just yet.

“Allow me to show you.” My hands were unrealistically sweaty—the feeling of anxiety or nervousness that I knew all too well, that I would get when I heard a knock at my bedroom door, knowing that it was my mother. It was always my mother, dad never came to the door. Hardly ever. And my heart started to see if it could beat the ticking of my dead grandfather’s grandfather clock in some race that hadn’t even started.

I brought him to the door of my room, a make-shift cell that held within it Lucas. As I walked my feet dragged across the carpeted floors; I debated whether or not I should open it, whether or not I should expose Roger to a subject matter that could deeply disturb him, that would enlighten him in such a way that perhaps he would lead the village on a witch hunt not for Amber, but for me.

“You trust me Roger, correct?”

“Haven’t talked with you in a while, but I’d say kind of.” He looked like the spitting image of some rocker that one might see on the television, someone that my mother would disapprove of existing in the first place.

It would have been better if Shel Silverstein presented it in a poem, if that was the way that Roger was introduced to Lucas. Of course, Roger already knew who Lucas was, they had a few conversations I think. And even if they didn’t, Roger would have at least definitely known who Lucas was; who didn’t? He was on the football team. Maybe I could try and write it as a poem:

Joe McGee was six feet down,

The finest fella in our town.

They buried him in his Sunday best,

And laid poor Joe to final rest.

But late one night, a hand poked through,

All wrapped in mud and midnight dew,

And Joe stood up, with a mighty groan,

"Guess I’m done bein' on my own!"

Back to town he slowly strolled,

Folks screamed loud, young and old,

But Joe just laughed, his eyes aglow,

"Just wanted to say a friendly ‘hello’!"

One would just have to have Lucas Beaumont be a stand in for Joe McGee. Perhaps getting away from poetry was the best decision I ever made in my life.

I struggled to open the door, I struggled to turn the fated door knob that stood as the access to the threshold between knowing and unknowing—if I didn’t open it then Roger would never know and, therefore, he would be completely innocent to the situation. But I did open it, and I did show him what I kept in there.

Nothing; there was nothing. It was my room, the covers on the ground, the bed a mess, my window open—there was no one there. There was no one there. It was empty.

He was gone.

“It looks like maybe I was wrong about this all along.” I could have come up with something better to say, but I was put on the spot. “It looks like you should be going home now so you can get ready for school, right?”

“Aren’t you going too?” Roger skipped a lot.

“We’ll see.”

And I guess that Amber had gone against her judgment, appearing behind the two of us to peer into my silent room. “Where is he?’

“Who’s he?’ Roger asked.

“No one.”

Amber refused to agree with me. “Someone.”

“It’s no one.”

“It’s definitely someone.” We obviously had peeked Roger’s interest—he chose right there, right then that he wouldn’t be going to school. And we had decided that as well far before he even came over. “I want to know this someone.”

“You know him.”

“No he doesn’t.”

“He sure as hell does, Mark. We weren’t the only one’s in his life.”

“Is this a joke that I’m not in on? Are you guys yanking my chain?” Obviously, Roger wasn’t understanding what we were getting at—and why would he? He had no knowledge of me and Amber’s endeavors over the weekend. He could have been high, again I went back and forth with myself.

“I thought he would have smashed the window.” Amber wasn’t helping at all. “I guess he was courteous enough to open it—not enough to close it, though.”

I wasn’t even aware that it was a Schrödinger sort of situation. If I opened the door I would have learned that he was gone, beginning a completely new quest of having to track him down in the morning, in a busy suburb; and if I didn’t open it, then I would have never known that he escaped until hours later. Or even a day, who was to say that would get seen by someone before wandering off into the unknown. But he was more likely to walk down the sidewalk or the street and be spotted by neighborhood kids waiting for the bus. He would have been the monster that the city would hunt down. And he’d be killed.

Four hours—we hunted for four hours. We walked down roads, past missing dog posters (border collie, six years old, responds to “Dixie”, may or may not limp on right paw), searched two parks that I hadn’t been to since I was about eleven, passed the highschool twice and the elementary thrice. Not the Catholic elementary, the public. We didn’t find him out in the streets, we didn’t find him out where the public would be able to easily distinguish him—no, we found him in my backyard, laying in the flowerbed, about five feet away from a patch of marigolds that always came around every fall. His head was next to six Chanterelles.

Roger was definitely high, no doubt about it; I finally came to that conclusion when he didn’t realize the implications of Lucas, alive, on my mulch. “Hey man, long time no see.” He attended the funeral.

“Lucas,” I uttered, not too loud. “What are you doing?”

No answer. He turned his head slightly, gaze flicking from the flowers to me. It was a look that carried something behind it—a memory, maybe, or an instinct—but not a single word. I don’t know why I expected him to be able to form a full sentence.

He was staring at the flowers. Amber acted as if she was more relieved than I was—I was the one that would have to be yelled at by my father, not her.

“The shed locks, we should have put him in there,” I said, rather mundanely, I remember.

Amber instantly bit back at what I said. “I thought that was the plan from the beginning.”

“That was pre resurrection.”

“So we’re acting like he’s Jesus?”

“I never said that he was Jesus.”

“I think me and Jesus would be tight.” Roger still was looking at Lucas—he put his hands on his knees and leaned forward to get a better look at him, tilting his head, making Lucas then break away from the marigolds and look up at the curious Roger, cocking his head in the same fashion. “Woah, it’s like looking in a mirror.”

“Let’s get him up, he can’t lay here the entire time.”

Amber was right, though I had already come to that conclusion in my head, I just hadn’t told her yet. “You take one arm, I’ll take the other—how’s that sound?”

“I’m not touching him.”

“I’ll help you, Mark.” Since Roger was blatantly unaware of Lucas’s status, he didn’t bat an eye at helping me—rather, he was stepping up to the plate.

Roger was stronger than me so the majority of the lifting came from him; that isn’t saying much, though, as he was scrawny in the first place.

“On three—one, two, three—!”

I pulled, he pulled, and he popped; that is, Lucas’s arm popped. Out of its socket. Out of its sinew.

The expression that Roger made was one of pure disgust, confusion, comedic response, and a second layer of confusion. One would think that that sort of thing would have brought him back into sobriety, but it didn’t; instead, it only seemed to enhance his current “trip” into a psychotic, anxious breakdown. That’s what it appeared to be as a bystander, that is. Though his realization of what happened didn’t take place until after about ten seconds of laying on his back, thrown down to the ground by his own force upon the arm being removed.

“Woah—that’s crazy.” His dreary, dog-like eyes looked at the bent, now almost boomerang shaped arm, as he lightly flailed it about for it to bend a few times at the elbow. It came out at the shoulder. “That’s—that’s an arm.” There, the realization began. “That’s an arm. That’s an arm, this is his arm—arms aren’t supposed to do that, are they?” He looked to me for conformation—and I didn’t look at him back, I was trying my best to not throw up. And I don’t know if I wanted to empty my stomach because of the scene before me or because of the implication that Lucas’s arm had been removed and, unfortunately, that would complicate our relationship further. Amber didn’t realize what happened until she came back, as she had left us to go inside to get something before we tried to bring him up.

I turned back in the direction of Roger, though I covered my face so I couldn’t see the horrible scene before me. There was no blood, there was no vitriol, there was only an excised arm, a dazed and one-armed Lucas, and a muddled and rather horrified Roger.

She screamed when she came upon the scene. It didn’t help at all.