Yet a Stranger (The First Quarto #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,77

had written back a single line in an email: A. Extenuating circumstances. Theo had sworn a blue streak when Auggie told him; Auggie found the whole thing funny.

Theo was the problem. One of the problems. Theo was with Auggie for as much time as Auggie would allow. At first, it was comforting. Then, by degrees, less so. Theo didn’t eat, as far as Auggie could tell. After a week, his face was hollow, his eyes marked with dark patches. He’d go home and shower and change his clothes, but when he’d come back, he’d be worse in some ways: his attention wandering, his pupils dilated, his words trailing off in the middle of conversations. When Auggie permitted it, Theo slept on the spare bed. Theo tried to laugh. Theo tried to make conversation. Theo tried to be Theo. But by the end of finals week, Auggie felt like he was being haunted by Theo’s ghost, and it was a relief to get on the shuttle and pretend he didn’t see Theo standing there, watching as he drove away.

Another problem, although in a different way, were the four weeks at home. Fer alternated between overly busy and having nothing to do. Chuy slept away the days and disappeared at night. Auggie’s mom had spent the first forty-five minutes after he got home cooing over him, calling him her baby, making an ice pack for his bruises—“It happened weeks ago, Mom. I don’t need an ice pack.”—and then Birch called, and she left, giving air kisses as she backed out the door.

“He’s twenty-two fucking years old,” Fer said after he and Auggie had burned through half a joint together. “If I have to pay for that fucker to have braces, I’m going to fucking kill myself.”

When they were well on their way with the second joint, Fer came back from his room with a gun.

“What the hell?” Auggie said.

“Who did that to you?”

“What?”

“I’m going to kill whoever did that to you.”

“Fer, Jesus, I told you: I got mugged. I don’t know who did it. Wait, when did you get a gun?”

“When our shit-bucket brother decided to become a junkie.” Fer set the gun on the coffee table and hit the joint hard, staring at the weapon’s dull metal plating. Passing back the joint, he exhaled and wiped his eyes. “I want to kill them, Augustus. I want to do to them everything they did to you and then perforate their anal cavity with this fucking gun, and I’m not talking about using bullets.”

That was the first night of the dreams, although dreams might have been too strong of a word. There was nothing visual to them, only the sense of being trapped, the memory of the blows that wouldn’t stop, the helplessness of it. He jolted out of sleep, crying so hard that he had to bite the blanket because he was afraid he’d wake someone up. That’s why he was awake when Chuy got home. That’s why he was awake when he heard the sound of gagging in the next room. He found Chuy passed out on his back, trying to breathe through his own vomit. Auggie screamed for Fer, flipped Chuy onto his stomach, and pounded on his back. By the time Fer got there, the gun in one hand, Chuy was breathing somewhat normally again.

“What are we supposed to do?” Auggie said.

“Nothing. It’s his mess; let him clean it up.”

“Fer—”

“And I’m not just talking about the puke.”

Fer went to bed without saying another word. After that, Auggie woke up at night to check that Chuy was home and breathing. He slept fitfully in the day. He smoked more weed with Fer on the days Fer seemed at a breaking point. The day, for example, the medical bills from Missouri started coming in. Fer had smoked down three joints that night, shuffling papers at the kitchen table long after Auggie tried to go to bed. When Auggie did sleep, and when he woke screaming, he was somehow unsurprised when the door opened and Fer was there, the way Fer was always there. He stretched out on the bed next to Auggie, smelling skunky, his voice distant and dopey as he told Auggie to go back to sleep.

“You did this when I was a kid,” Auggie said as the black tide rolled in, the memory startling in its reappearance, something he hadn’t thought about in years. Men coming over. Strange men. Frightening men. His mother’s friends, who were loud and laughed