Post by Robin on Jul 5, 2006 23:32:29 GMT -8
This comes just after Kit's mom left his dad and Kit pretty much is all pissed and goes to the park, but then some fool gets into a fight with a dude in the park and the fool can't shoot a gun and so Kit got grazed by a bullet and passed out. It's a lot cooler than it sounds. Well. Maybe not. But I haven't written that part all the way yet and this one's done so nyeh.
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How I got to Marty’s house when I woke up, groggy and aching, sprawled next to the dingy old fountain with blood caked on my face and shirt, I don’t know. But I made it, and though my first thoughts upon awakening had been that his parents could at least drive me home or to the hospital or whatever it was that I needed to do, I was, for some reason, relieved to find that both their cars were absent from the driveway and all the lights were on in the house, Marty-style. And when I stumbled up to the door and found it unlocked, I didn’t hesitate to go inside, even though he wasn’t expecting me and would probably, with my luck, hit me on the head with a frying pan or something ridiculous like that. But he didn’t. He must have heard the door open and had crept into the entryway, and he saw me before I saw him.
“Oh, Jesus, Kit,” he said, and rushed over to me, looking me over with a friend’s franticness and a mother’s critical eye. “There’s blood all over your shirt,” he muttered, almost to himself, and ushered me into the kitchen, where he forced me down in a chair. He turned to bustle around in the cabinets and then back to me with his arms full of bottles of antiseptics and aspirin and God knows what else.
He set the armload on the table and knelt down next to me, pushing my hair aside to look at the damage. When I hissed and drew back he pulled my face straight with his free hand, dabbing at the graze with some paper in his other.
“Hold still,” he said, not unkindly. “It’s all matted and clumped. Somebody clopped you good, huh?” He didn’t ask me what had happened, and for that I was exceedingly grateful. If it had been anybody else, even somebody that I valued almost as much as Marty like Chris or Sid, there would have been the questions, and though getting brushed by a wild bullet wasn’t anything that most people would be reluctant to relate to others, the questions themselves would be awkward and uncomfortable and that was something that I didn’t want from Marty. It was part of the reason that I was so close to Marty; his intuition. He could chatter like a talk-show host if he felt that whoever he was in the company of at the time wanted him to chatter like a talk-show host, but if he felt – no, knew, Marty didn’t just feel things, he knew them – that a person didn’t want to talk, he could remain quiet for as long as was necessary. In the silence broken only occasionally by the rattle of boxes or bottles as he dug around for this or that, I could hear music playing faintly somewhere, probably from his bedroom. It was the new Semisonic CD he’d bought – Pleasure EP, it was called – and it was playing the Gift. Normally, Marty made me listen to his Semisonic music so often that I could almost recite whole albums by heart, a phenomenon which generally came about the third day of listening to the album straight through, but he’d had Pleasure EP for two weeks already and hadn’t made me listen to it at all. I only knew the snippets that I had picked up as he listened to it on his headphones, or listened to it without urging me to ‘heed the music, young Skywalker.’ I knew a good deal of the Gift, though. He listened to it most often out of the songs on the album, and second most often of his Semisonic music overall, right under Sunshine and Chocolate. By the time I started paying attention to the fact that the music was there, the song had progressed to the chorus, and by the time I started to amuse myself by puzzling out the lyrics, it was on the second verse.
I went on a mission to the town where you lived, dark, dusty places you've not seen in a while. Certainly Marty’s childhood had been some dark, rheumy, arcane thing, growing up before his father gave up the rituals of Catholicism and before they moved too far away from their family to attend regular Mass or anything like that, some mystical place that I had little understanding of and could never hope to understand better.
I want to seek the basements where you hid, I want to see your face as a little child. What had Marty been like as a kid? He’d moved to our town when we were ten, and though we’d been friends for almost the whole time he’d lived in our town, I couldn’t remember what he’d been like then. My other friends were the same as they’d been then; maybe a little starey around the eyes, a little dirtier around the mouth, but in essence the same boys who’d jumped out of trees and played video games with me five years ago. He must have been the same, too, only I probably wouldn’t know. I had only really started to look at Marty as a fluctuating person in the past few years, always just accepting the traits about him that were extraordinary in the same way that Sid, Chris, Wyatt, Sam, Robert, and the rest of the gang just accepted that Marty and I were gay. It was like the way a boy will regard a girl as only his playmate and best friend until they hit that stage in their life when chests begin to bloom and hair begins to grow in the places where it’s least wanted, except then the boy will start to want the girl sexually, whether he feels that way about her or not, and I didn’t notice Marty’s quirks because I wanted him that way. I noticed them because I loved him, and until then, until Pleasure EP and a wild bullet in the park, I had never questioned that, either.
‘Questioning never was your style,’ Sid would have told me in one of his rare lucid, useful moments. ‘You, my dear Kit, are Roland Deschain’s real-life counterpart. You only start to pick at a scab if it presents an immediate problem.’ He’d never said that, of course; such moments of lucidity weren’t beyond Sid, but when he did have them he wasn’t likely to waste them analyzing my psyche. Roni’s, maybe. Wyatt’s, probably. But not mine. Sid got me. He didn’t quite understand Roni or Wyatt. He wouldn’t want to screw up that understanding by trying to complicate things. That was the difference between Sid and me. I thought things over too much once I got it on my mind, but I wouldn’t actively look for something to think over. If Sid got the itch, he brushed it off and moved on, but he was always looking for something that he could use to tangle everything up with.
I had been staring rather pleasantly at nothing as these thoughts ran through my head, and then Marty cursed and startled me out of my reverie.
“Somebody clopped you a damn good one,” he said, almost marveling. “It looks like a bullet track.”
“That’s ‘cause it is,” I said, and was surprised to find my voice came out as a crackling husk, and cleared my throat discreetly.
He frowned, and looked at my face as though he could see what had gone on in the park by looking into my eyes like some crazy TV psychic. “Are you involved in the mafia, Kit?” he asked, slowly, as though it was a serious question, but unable to control the corners of his mouth from quirking upwards.
I laughed, a weak, somewhat screamy sound, and shook my head. “It was a stray bullet. Some idiot was having a fight and didn’t know how to shoot a gun.”
“How long were you out?” he asked, suddenly professional.
“Out?”
“You passed out. I know you, Kit. I’d expect Chris or Sid to stumble around dizzy for awhile, but you’d just black out and stay out until you’d adjusted to the shock of it.”
“I don’t know,” I said lamely. “It wasn’t all the way dark when I got hit, so maybe four hours?”
“Next you’ll tell me that you spent that time in a puddle,” he said, amiably enough, and tugged jokingly at the back of my shirt as if testing to see if it was wet. Then he sighed, and got to his feet. “Do you want me to drive you home, or something? My mom’s car is in the garage.”
“Yes…” I began, and then faltered. “No. Marty, can I stay here for the night? I don’t really want to go home right now.”
He must not have had time to curb his impulses before he blurted out “Why?” It was such an un-Marty-like thing to do, to bring up things that were so delicate without first consulting his instincts to see if it wouldn’t be too painful for the other party in the conversation.
“My mom left,” I said, and the bluntness of my reply seemed to startle him into a more normal state. He shook his head, glanced at my face, and then looked at the ground.
“And your dad…”
“Wouldn’t touch me,” I finished. “But he’ll be up all night crashing around and crying. I don’t want to be there for that.” I kept most of the disgust out of my voice, but it was difficult when I kept comparing my old man to Chris’s dad, who wouldn’t think twice about sucker-punching his son if his beer wasn’t cold enough or his pot wasn’t sweet enough. I didn’t like to admit it, even to myself, but I was jealous of Chris. It seemed like he had a reason to complain (he never did, but he would have a reason if he ever wanted to), and I didn’t have jack shit to justify the drugs and the alcohol and everything else. For a few moments there, I was afraid Marty would figure that out with his bloodhound nose and knack for something akin to mind-reading, but he only nodded sagely, and, as far as I know, mistook the disgust to be directed at my mom for leaving my dad and making him such a wreck.
“Come on,” he said. “You can sleep in the guest room. My parents won’t care.” I stood up from the chair and stumbled a little, and he was there with his arm around my waist, steadying me, and there was just the slim but steady and reassuring weight of Marty supporting me, the warm and clean smell of him – like the pages of a book not yet old but not new, either – and it was good.
I slept better in his guest room than I had since my mom first began to talk about leaving.
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How I got to Marty’s house when I woke up, groggy and aching, sprawled next to the dingy old fountain with blood caked on my face and shirt, I don’t know. But I made it, and though my first thoughts upon awakening had been that his parents could at least drive me home or to the hospital or whatever it was that I needed to do, I was, for some reason, relieved to find that both their cars were absent from the driveway and all the lights were on in the house, Marty-style. And when I stumbled up to the door and found it unlocked, I didn’t hesitate to go inside, even though he wasn’t expecting me and would probably, with my luck, hit me on the head with a frying pan or something ridiculous like that. But he didn’t. He must have heard the door open and had crept into the entryway, and he saw me before I saw him.
“Oh, Jesus, Kit,” he said, and rushed over to me, looking me over with a friend’s franticness and a mother’s critical eye. “There’s blood all over your shirt,” he muttered, almost to himself, and ushered me into the kitchen, where he forced me down in a chair. He turned to bustle around in the cabinets and then back to me with his arms full of bottles of antiseptics and aspirin and God knows what else.
He set the armload on the table and knelt down next to me, pushing my hair aside to look at the damage. When I hissed and drew back he pulled my face straight with his free hand, dabbing at the graze with some paper in his other.
“Hold still,” he said, not unkindly. “It’s all matted and clumped. Somebody clopped you good, huh?” He didn’t ask me what had happened, and for that I was exceedingly grateful. If it had been anybody else, even somebody that I valued almost as much as Marty like Chris or Sid, there would have been the questions, and though getting brushed by a wild bullet wasn’t anything that most people would be reluctant to relate to others, the questions themselves would be awkward and uncomfortable and that was something that I didn’t want from Marty. It was part of the reason that I was so close to Marty; his intuition. He could chatter like a talk-show host if he felt that whoever he was in the company of at the time wanted him to chatter like a talk-show host, but if he felt – no, knew, Marty didn’t just feel things, he knew them – that a person didn’t want to talk, he could remain quiet for as long as was necessary. In the silence broken only occasionally by the rattle of boxes or bottles as he dug around for this or that, I could hear music playing faintly somewhere, probably from his bedroom. It was the new Semisonic CD he’d bought – Pleasure EP, it was called – and it was playing the Gift. Normally, Marty made me listen to his Semisonic music so often that I could almost recite whole albums by heart, a phenomenon which generally came about the third day of listening to the album straight through, but he’d had Pleasure EP for two weeks already and hadn’t made me listen to it at all. I only knew the snippets that I had picked up as he listened to it on his headphones, or listened to it without urging me to ‘heed the music, young Skywalker.’ I knew a good deal of the Gift, though. He listened to it most often out of the songs on the album, and second most often of his Semisonic music overall, right under Sunshine and Chocolate. By the time I started paying attention to the fact that the music was there, the song had progressed to the chorus, and by the time I started to amuse myself by puzzling out the lyrics, it was on the second verse.
I went on a mission to the town where you lived, dark, dusty places you've not seen in a while. Certainly Marty’s childhood had been some dark, rheumy, arcane thing, growing up before his father gave up the rituals of Catholicism and before they moved too far away from their family to attend regular Mass or anything like that, some mystical place that I had little understanding of and could never hope to understand better.
I want to seek the basements where you hid, I want to see your face as a little child. What had Marty been like as a kid? He’d moved to our town when we were ten, and though we’d been friends for almost the whole time he’d lived in our town, I couldn’t remember what he’d been like then. My other friends were the same as they’d been then; maybe a little starey around the eyes, a little dirtier around the mouth, but in essence the same boys who’d jumped out of trees and played video games with me five years ago. He must have been the same, too, only I probably wouldn’t know. I had only really started to look at Marty as a fluctuating person in the past few years, always just accepting the traits about him that were extraordinary in the same way that Sid, Chris, Wyatt, Sam, Robert, and the rest of the gang just accepted that Marty and I were gay. It was like the way a boy will regard a girl as only his playmate and best friend until they hit that stage in their life when chests begin to bloom and hair begins to grow in the places where it’s least wanted, except then the boy will start to want the girl sexually, whether he feels that way about her or not, and I didn’t notice Marty’s quirks because I wanted him that way. I noticed them because I loved him, and until then, until Pleasure EP and a wild bullet in the park, I had never questioned that, either.
‘Questioning never was your style,’ Sid would have told me in one of his rare lucid, useful moments. ‘You, my dear Kit, are Roland Deschain’s real-life counterpart. You only start to pick at a scab if it presents an immediate problem.’ He’d never said that, of course; such moments of lucidity weren’t beyond Sid, but when he did have them he wasn’t likely to waste them analyzing my psyche. Roni’s, maybe. Wyatt’s, probably. But not mine. Sid got me. He didn’t quite understand Roni or Wyatt. He wouldn’t want to screw up that understanding by trying to complicate things. That was the difference between Sid and me. I thought things over too much once I got it on my mind, but I wouldn’t actively look for something to think over. If Sid got the itch, he brushed it off and moved on, but he was always looking for something that he could use to tangle everything up with.
I had been staring rather pleasantly at nothing as these thoughts ran through my head, and then Marty cursed and startled me out of my reverie.
“Somebody clopped you a damn good one,” he said, almost marveling. “It looks like a bullet track.”
“That’s ‘cause it is,” I said, and was surprised to find my voice came out as a crackling husk, and cleared my throat discreetly.
He frowned, and looked at my face as though he could see what had gone on in the park by looking into my eyes like some crazy TV psychic. “Are you involved in the mafia, Kit?” he asked, slowly, as though it was a serious question, but unable to control the corners of his mouth from quirking upwards.
I laughed, a weak, somewhat screamy sound, and shook my head. “It was a stray bullet. Some idiot was having a fight and didn’t know how to shoot a gun.”
“How long were you out?” he asked, suddenly professional.
“Out?”
“You passed out. I know you, Kit. I’d expect Chris or Sid to stumble around dizzy for awhile, but you’d just black out and stay out until you’d adjusted to the shock of it.”
“I don’t know,” I said lamely. “It wasn’t all the way dark when I got hit, so maybe four hours?”
“Next you’ll tell me that you spent that time in a puddle,” he said, amiably enough, and tugged jokingly at the back of my shirt as if testing to see if it was wet. Then he sighed, and got to his feet. “Do you want me to drive you home, or something? My mom’s car is in the garage.”
“Yes…” I began, and then faltered. “No. Marty, can I stay here for the night? I don’t really want to go home right now.”
He must not have had time to curb his impulses before he blurted out “Why?” It was such an un-Marty-like thing to do, to bring up things that were so delicate without first consulting his instincts to see if it wouldn’t be too painful for the other party in the conversation.
“My mom left,” I said, and the bluntness of my reply seemed to startle him into a more normal state. He shook his head, glanced at my face, and then looked at the ground.
“And your dad…”
“Wouldn’t touch me,” I finished. “But he’ll be up all night crashing around and crying. I don’t want to be there for that.” I kept most of the disgust out of my voice, but it was difficult when I kept comparing my old man to Chris’s dad, who wouldn’t think twice about sucker-punching his son if his beer wasn’t cold enough or his pot wasn’t sweet enough. I didn’t like to admit it, even to myself, but I was jealous of Chris. It seemed like he had a reason to complain (he never did, but he would have a reason if he ever wanted to), and I didn’t have jack shit to justify the drugs and the alcohol and everything else. For a few moments there, I was afraid Marty would figure that out with his bloodhound nose and knack for something akin to mind-reading, but he only nodded sagely, and, as far as I know, mistook the disgust to be directed at my mom for leaving my dad and making him such a wreck.
“Come on,” he said. “You can sleep in the guest room. My parents won’t care.” I stood up from the chair and stumbled a little, and he was there with his arm around my waist, steadying me, and there was just the slim but steady and reassuring weight of Marty supporting me, the warm and clean smell of him – like the pages of a book not yet old but not new, either – and it was good.
I slept better in his guest room than I had since my mom first began to talk about leaving.
