Yet a Stranger (The First Quarto #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,68
of screeching brakes. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Umm, gee, well, I don’t know, maybe because I’d rather be hit by a truck and then be chopped up for circus-animal food.”
“You helped me with Cart,” Theo said.
“Please let’s jump over Dylan. I don’t want to talk about him with you.”
“Ok. If you change your mind, I promise I will try to be less of a prick than normal.”
“Wow.”
“I know. It’ll be hard.” Theo grinned, and it felt like a foreign expression after all those months. Then the grin dropped away. “Tell me about Chuy and Fer.”
And Auggie told him—about break, about how things had been getting worse.
“It’s not your fault,” Theo said, “and you can’t carry it. I know you’re going to think it’s easy for me to say, but you’ve got to let it go.”
“Let it go? Theo, he’s my brother, and he’s going to OD one time and nobody will have Narcan, and then he’ll be dead.”
“I’m not saying you can’t love him or care about him or worry about him. But the thing you’ve got to understand about addicts is that they’ll always be addicts, and they’re the only ones who can make the choice to get clean. Fer can bail him out as many times as he wants. You guys can send him to rehab. You could lock him up in a box. I did all of it with Luke. I’m not lying, Auggie. I locked him in the cellar at the end. I thought he was going to have a come-to-Jesus moment. I mean, I’m not a monster—he was comfortable, he had everything he needed. We got through the detox and all the puking. He looked and sounded like Luke again. God, I really thought I’d figured it out. He cried. We both cried. My parents cried. My brothers came by, and they cried. And Luke knew all the right things to say. I opened the door, and he went upstairs, and it was like I had a brother again. That night, he went to bed, and he was still there in the morning. And the next day. And then the third day, I found him in the loft. The dumbshit hadn’t used in weeks, and his tolerance had dropped.”
Auggie was crying again. “That’ll kill Fer. You don’t know him. It’ll kill him.”
“It just about killed me.”
“But I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you: you can’t do anything. That’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth, and I wish I could tell you something else.”
“Ok,” Auggie said. “Ok, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop trying.”
His cheeks were red. His nose was a little snotty. But his eyes were bright, and there was a hardness in his face, a determination in the way he compressed his lips, that Theo had noticed once or twice before.
“No,” Theo said. “But you’re going to get hurt. That’s probably all you’ll get.”
“If it were Jacob or Abel or Meshie, would you just shrug and say, ‘Eh, I learned my lesson with Luke, I’m going to stay out of this one’?”
Theo shook his head. “But I’m a dumbass hoosier, as Cart likes to point out.”
“You’re not,” Auggie said. “You’re the smartest man I know.”
“Not smart enough,” Theo said with a smile, “to handle my own shit, apparently. Do you want to talk about Fer?”
“There’s nothing to talk about. I’m this huge drain on him: his money, his time, his energy. It’s not fair to him. He’s never gotten to have his own life because he’s spent it taking care of me, and that’s not right, but I’m still making him do it. I’m a fucking adult, but I swipe his credit card when I go out to eat, I send the tuition bills to his house, I drive a car he paid for.”
Something kicked on in the car, and a belt in the Civic whined in agreement.
“You know, there are a lot of ways to do college on your own,” Theo said carefully. “I’m trying really hard not to dad out on you, but there are scholarships, student loans.” Then, testing the ice, “You could get a job.”
Auggie flopped back in the seat, arms and legs akimbo, and groaned. “Oh my God, you’re going to make me work at Frozen King, and I’ll have to wear one of those paper crowns.”
“That’s not the worst option.”
“I’d honestly rather be dead.”
Theo caught himself before responding to that. The whumping sound in the Civic had gotten louder, even though they were