The Golden Age by Eve Morton

Author:Eve Morton [Morton, Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LGBTQIA+, family drama, arts/performance, arts/visual, coming of age, friends to lovers, nerds, contemporary, trans, bi, gay
Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
Published: 2021-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

The night before Brad’s trial, Garrison invited everyone over to the Nolan house for a game of D&D. Team building, he’d explained with a crooked grin. A way to relax before real life and its burdens crept back into the house and made everything seem too serious—which meant all too silent. The Nolan house was never a silent place, always full of raucous jabber, a loud television, or the glug-glug of an always-on coffee machine. But the weeks and days before the trial date shocked the life out of the house’s walls. Marta came around regularly to cook the boys’ meals—only to have them sit in the fridge, uneaten, while her sons ate out at the restaurant they managed instead.

“We’re bursting at the seams with casseroles.” Garrison rolled his eyes in an overzealous way. “So this is also about cleaning out the fridge. Not just embarrassing myself with my D&D knowledge.”

All of this took place one night while Emily, Sara, and I were in my empty pool, reading tarot cards by sunlight, then candlelight. Garrison stuck his head over the edge, a faint sign of disappointment on his face before he launched into his invite. “Sorry to break up your coven meeting, but I must enlist your help.”

He was all bravado and cocksure expressions; he played up his own embarrassment at divulging these details and scoffed when Emily teased him. A practiced game, almost as much as the practiced ease with which he flicked between identities. I wanted to marvel, but I was only disappointed. I wanted to believe he’d only wanted to see me at the bottom of the pool, a bent copy of his last book against my knees as I read. I wanted to believe he only wanted to speak to me and about something far more real than casseroles or experience points. It took ten minutes of him droning on about crafting the perfect character sheet to realize this was real. It had to be real. Brad’s trial needed to be minimized on the horizon, forced into a speck so we could flick it from our view.

And he needed to be Garrison in order for us all to get through it.

He crawled into the pool with us and slid his legs over the slope for the deep end. Along with thick D&D books, he’d brought over beers, which we indulged in as he expanded on his plan to create a one-night D&D campaign for all of us—Brad, me, Emily, Sara, and the other two band members. When I said I’d never played, something I’d confessed to in my letters but never aloud, Garrison acted as surprised as he’d been when his eyes darted over my words. I took his cue as if we were both on a stage together, our lines already rehearsed and stories already told. We laughed and joked at the right times. Our letters lifted from the page and became a show that Sara and Emily didn’t know they were witnessing. The

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