Yet a Stranger by Gregory Ashe

Author:Gregory Ashe [Ashe, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: smashwords
Publisher: Gregory Ashe
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2

The Sunday night before spring semester began, Theo finished the Percocet with the last of the Christmas ale. It wasn’t anything serious. It wasn’t anything like an attempt. It was more like what Theo remembered with his brothers growing up. Jacob, the oldest, had been a carbon copy of their father: a lover of rules, a drawer of lines. At eleven, Jacob had been literal about the lines, once chalking a boundary down the middle of the room he had briefly shared with Theo. And although Theo couldn’t put it into words—wouldn’t be able to put it into words until he was in therapy—he had resented Jacob, resented his father, hated how easily they seemed to fit into the world they had outlined, and how Theo sensed but couldn’t name all the ways he fell outside their lines. So Theo had made a game of it, edging up to that skinny chalk stripe while Jacob read Leviticus, his big toe threatening to cross over. It always ended in a fight, usually with Theo’s ear puffy and aching, maybe his jaw throbbing, maybe a bloody nose. With the Percocet, it was like that: getting right up to the line, waiting for somebody to come along and clock him so he’d get back in place.

For the time being, Cart seemed the most likely candidate to do the clocking. The first few weeks after that day, Theo and Cart had seen each other only once, the night after Auggie was home from the hospital. They had fought—Theo wasn’t clear about what because he’d been exceptionally drunk—and after that, they had avoided each other, with Cart sending brittle messages asking if Theo was ok, and with Theo answering only when his guilt about Cart briefly overwhelmed his guilt about Auggie.

Then Auggie had left, not even glancing back from the shuttle, on an overexposed December day. The sun rode on the shuttle’s panels, gleaming so brightly that the afterimage lingered in Theo’s vision, and he had to bike home with the purple ghost of the shuttle floating ahead of him. That night had been another big fight, another one that Theo didn’t remember.

He remembered that day with Lender very clearly, but he took great pains not to remember anything after the hospital. Everything up to the hospital—the ambulance ride with Auggie, squeezing Auggie’s ankle, biting his own lip so hard that one of the paramedics made him tilt his head back and pinched his lip with gauze to check if it needed stitches—was clear. And then the emergency room, the tiny examination cubicle, the papery texture of the privacy curtain, the smell of disinfectant. Even the semi-private room where Auggie lay, stoned, in a hospital gown and sporting a woody that defied whatever narcotics the doctor had given him. Then Theo had decided he couldn’t do this anymore, not and keep himself straight at the same time, and after that the days and weeks became a blur.

After Auggie left, though, Cart came over more often. They traded blowjobs.

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