Yet a Stranger (The First Quarto #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,115
neck, alternating between brisk and gentle.
“Tell me all of it, Augustus. And for the love of God, help me understand why.”
So Auggie told him. Not all of it, although he tried. He kept to the clearest reasons: Orlando’s plea for help last semester, and then Auggie’s own involvement once he had raced after the shooter at Nia’s demonstration. The fear that he and Theo were both targets, and the need to find the shooter before the shooter found them.
“Why the hell would you get involved in something like this?” Fer asked.
“It just happened.”
“I know that line, Augustus. That’s what you’re going to tell me when you’re squirting babies out of your little boy pussy. But nothing just happens. You let a guy put a dick up there, cause and effect.”
Auggie shoved him off the bed and wiped his face. “You’re such a homophobe.”
“Christ knows I’m not going to put your little bastards in diapers and formula. They can suck on your tits until the milk runs dry.”
“What happened to you when you were a kid? What messed you up so severely in the head?”
“You,” Fer said, and his grin appeared and vanished like a card trick.
“Fer, please don’t make me come home.”
“What am I supposed to do? Less than a month ago—less than a month ago, Augustus—you called me and told me you’d gotten mugged. Then, yesterday, I got a call telling me you were unconscious in the hospital, beaten within an inch of your life. And if you open your mouth and tell me those things weren’t connected, I’m going to flip you over and spank your ass raw. Those rent boys you keep hiring with my money are going to think they’re plowing into a pair of traffic lights. Do you understand me?”
“Oh my God. This is actually worse than being dead. Do you understand that?”
“Augustus!”
“Ok, yes. I . . . I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Of course I worry! All I do is worry about you! Jesus fucking Christ, I worry about you getting your heart broken again, I worry about you getting gay bashed in this state that is the geographic equivalent of America’s pucker, I worry about your grades, I worry about your major, I worry about you getting a job when you graduate, I worry about you making the right kind of friends, I worry that you aren’t having enough fun, I worry that you’re having too much fun, I worry about you finding a nice guy that’ll get your tummy packed full of babies, I worry about you so much that I don’t sleep sometimes. I love you, you stupid drip of cocksnot. How the fuck am I not going to worry about you?”
Auggie cried some more. Fer cooled down after round two. Things got better, and they split the Jell-o that came with Auggie’s dinner and watched Wheel of Fortune on the CRT mounted in the corner.
“Fer,” Auggie said when Fer was getting ready to leave for his hotel. “Please don’t make me go home.”
Fer grunted.
“Please. I promise things will be different.”
“If,” Fer said as he pulled on an old barn coat that Auggie hadn’t even known he owned. “If you do not get sent to prison, where your asshole will be converted into a receptacle for toilet wine—if!” He held up a finger. “We can discuss maybe the possibility that you could be allowed provisionally to finish the semester.”
“Jesus Christ,” Fer muttered as he left. “What the fuck did I do to deserve this?”
18
Theo spent two days in the county jail before a lawyer named Aniya Thompson bailed him out. The first day was bad. His hands hurt from the punches he’d landed, and the nurse wouldn’t give him anything stronger than Tylenol. He kept seeing flashes of the fight: the punch connecting with Auggie’s head; that drunken half-step; Auggie on the ground; the blizzard that had whited out his vision. Not since Luke, he would think to himself in sudden bursts of clarity. Not since Luke had he done anything like that, felt anything like that. And in other moments, with a vividness that made his guts twist, he would count all the pills he knew he still had stashed around the house. He would walk himself through each room: four behind that electrical outlet; one inside that burned-out lightbulb; a strip of Scotch tape with six where the jamb was loose. It was better than going to the movies.