Ember Boys - Gregory Ashe Page 0,4

the beach.

“You can do the sticks,” she said.

So I got my pocketknife, found two decent sticks, and whittled the ends to points. I hadn’t noticed the cold in twenty-five years, but I knew everyone else still felt it. Rosie leaned toward the blaze, hands cupped as though she could gather the heat and carry it with her. I thought of the way I had held my hands a few hours before. I thought of Emmett, his hand, the red circle that was doubtless going to blister.

“Thinking about your boy?”

It had been easier not to try to explain. In some ways, maybe it had been truer.

I nodded.

“That stuff messes you up,” Rosie said. “Time I was in the hospital, I told them no thank you. None of that stuff for me.”

“Smart.”

“He’ll be ok. They got him on methadone or buprenorphine?”

She had gone to Yale, she had told me, weeks after we first met. She had graduated in chemistry, but today, her classes probably would have been called biochemistry. She lived now by drawing in the sand and accepting tips, a kind of busking without the high energy.

“Buprenorphine and naltrexone.”

“That’s good, that’s good. Might be they could get him off it completely. How old is he?”

“Seventeen. No, eighteen.”

“Plenty young. He’ll be all right.”

They called it opioid use disorder; Emmett came from a family with so much money that nobody had addictions or problems. They had issues. They had disorders. I’d seen the track marks on the inside of his arm; one time, on an October day so hot that the world had shimmered like a gong, Emmett had held out his arm and asked me to count them. I don’t know why, but I did, and before I finished, he was crying so hard that I had to stop. He spent the rest of the day draped across me, sweat sticking us together, even after he’d stopped crying. Disorder was a pale fucking word for what heroin had done to that kid.

“He’ll be all right,” she said again, sliding the wieners onto the roasting sticks and passing one to me.

“He’s not all right, though. The addiction is one thing; they can treat the addiction, manage it. But inside . . .”

“He’ll be all right.”

“Screw all right. I don’t want him to just be all right.”

The smell of searing meat made my stomach grumble; fat dripped from the roasting dogs, and the flames leapt up to lick it.

“He’s got you, don’t he?” She patted my arm and then turned her attention back to the wiener, rotating it slowly, like she might be serving it to a king. “Whatever else, that means he’ll be all right.”

Long after I crawled in the tent, I thought about what she’d said. Emmett had me. I looked at the polyester lining, the curve of the tent pole, the way the slight knobbiness reminded me of Emmett’s spine. I had seen him without his shirt; the thought lay at the edge of consciousness, lighting and then lifting away, a butterfly thought. Another hot day, what my parents had called Indian summer. The garden. The grass rippling in the breeze off the sea. The sun cutting everything into lines of light and shadow. He had slipped out of the shirt like he was alone, stretching out on the grass, eyes closed.

When I stood, he said, “Don’t go.”

I tried everything. I watched the ocean, which never ended. I stared up at the sky, until the reflected light on the clouds made my eyes water. Then, when I couldn’t anymore, I looked down. I counted ribs. I traced, with my gaze, the hollow of one shoulder. He shifted, and a tuft of dark hair peaked out from under one arm, and then, like he knew, he strummed his abs like he was playing the guitar.

That’s what Emmett had in his life, I thought now, the darkness and the polyester suffocating me. A pervert. An old man who likes to watch. I used to be a teacher. I used to help kids. I had packed up all the shit in my life. I was finally moving forward. I was even dating again, although I knew, deep down, I could never make anything serious work.

Now I was nothing. And Emmett needed more than nothing.

3 | EMMETT

In group, Jonas was sleeping on me. Again. He was nineteen, a year older than me, although you couldn’t tell it by the boxcar pajamas and the staticky nimbus of hair. I shifted in my seat, trying to get