24
The Dreaded Heart-to-Heart
POTENTIAL LIAM HOOPER REVELATIONS TO BRACE FOR:
“My parents are going through a divorce.”
“I have a crippling porn addiction.”
“I’ve been having an affair with Mrs. Kolb.”
“I’ve been having an affair with Mr. Goade.”
“So, you know squirrels? I kind of find them sexy. Always have.”
Norris found Liam in the driver’s seat of his car, in the back of the Bone Yard’s parking lot. After knocking on the glass, he was granted a seat in the car, where Liam was apparently content to sit in silence, which to Norris was a very specific trapdoor at the bottom of hell. He would rather plan fifteen dates for Aarti or mud wrestle Ian than deal with this level of guilt and awkwardness.
“Maddie is going to drive Patrick home,” he said, settling into the car. “His car is still at the warehouse, so that’s one less hassle for us.”
Why was he so bad at this? Norris wanted to apologize, but he also felt as though Liam had gotten too close, grabbed his hand, and shoved it deep into his guts. This was all way too close for comfort.
Even under controlled laboratory circumstances, Norris was known to occasionally say something that left people wide-eyed and stunned. Or, in the worst cases, always accidental, genuinely hurt. Only afterward, in that awkward silence that would stretch from minutes to days, would he realize what had happened. Sometimes it came weeks later, when Norris would notice that a social media contact had unfriended him after some perceived slight he himself barely remembered. And at that point, it was better for everyone to just move on rather than go into flailing damage control for people who no longer wanted anything to do with him. After all, Norris couldn’t control their feelings.
But somehow making up with Liam felt more important than all that.
“Look, I’m really sorry,” Norris finally blurted out. “My mouth . . . I flap it sometimes. It’s a thing. You’ve been nothing but nice to me since I got here, and that was a dickish thing to say. Truly. I didn’t mean it.”
“I know,” Liam answered calmly.
“Oh.” Norris frowned.
“What?”
“N-n-nothing,” Norris stuttered. “I just thought we were going to do the thing where you pretend not to know what I’m talking about for a while before, y’know, delving into it.”
“Oh,” Liam noted. “Did you want me to?”
“No, no, no.” Norris grimaced. “Let’s just wax this patch of chest hair.”
“Well, I assume you’re talking about the Prozac-popper comment.”
“That was . . . incredibly insensitive, and I’m sorry.” Norris sighed. “I really didn’t mean to make light of the whole . . . situation.”
“I know.” Liam nodded.
“And let’s not forget that Patrick was really the one being the throbbing dick on this one. I was more . . .”
“Flaccid?” Liam chuckled.
“You know what I mean! Mine was accidental. No intent to cause harm, man.”
Liam was still looking forward, head leaned back. “The people who cause the most harm never really intend to,” he offered.
“Fair enough.” Norris shook his head.
“Look, I didn’t expect you never to hear about it. . . . I guess maybe part of hanging out with the new kid—no offense—was the fact that you weren’t looking at me like a mental patient, which was . . . nice.”
“I don’t think of you that way, dude. You’re, like, an aggressively chill human being,” Norris assured him. Although he had more questions about Liam’s past, Norris knew they were irrelevant to the friend sitting next to him right now. Petty curiosity he did not need to indulge in.
“So, um, what happened exactly?”
Liam turned to him. “I still don’t know,” he admitted. “I broke up with this girl, Laynie. She went to Trinity, but . . .”
Norris mentally thumbed through the Rolodex of names he had heard at Meredith’s house, the faces he’d seen and maybe been introduced to, but no Laynie popped up.
“. . . I got over the breakup. That part was fine, I wasn’t heartbroken or anything,” Liam continued. “But after that, it just got harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. School, parties, constantly imagining what people were thinking about you. Not wearing the same shirt two days in a row because someone might notice and tell someone else. Even though you could probably wear a burlap sack, considering how little people actually pay attention to each other. . . .”
Norris kept his eyes on the glove box in front of him, as if to look directly at Liam would be to break whatever bond they were making.
“Anyway. I would get up, eat breakfast with my family, and pretend to stay back to take a dump or something, then just go back to bed. And then eventually, anywhere that wasn’t my bed felt like it was some disappointment waiting to happen. School, even showering . . .” He turned to Norris. “Like, what was the point of any of it, y’know?”
Oh God. Please don’t be an actual question. Please don’t be an actual question. Please don’t be an actual question. . . .
“Don’t worry.” Liam chuckled. “Even Dr. Leidwinger doesn’t have the answer to that one. I’m told there isn’t one.”
“So . . .” Norris began, stretching the word with the carefulness of someone stepping over a quivering bear trap. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and snap the bear trap closed, but this whole thing—talking about feelings—was new for him. Back home, he and his friends usually talked about hockey, school gossip, television, movies, end of list. Even he and Eric had rarely ventured into this kind of territory before.
“So. Pills.” Liam exhaled, picking at the leather on his steering wheel. “Lots and lots of pills. I was brushing my teeth, I think for the first time in days, and I saw a bottle of aspirin. My mom has sleep issues, so I just imagined what her bathroom pharmacy had to look like. . . . And then, I really couldn’t stop imagining it. Her pharmacy. The answer to all this bull . . . I felt like a dick after since she blamed herself so hard.”
Liam shook his head as if to shake away the thought.
“Anyway, my little sister found me. She’d left her clarinet, so the nanny drove her back during lunch hour. Apparently, there was a puddle of puke at the bottom of my bed, which was the only way she . . . Well, anyway. The gist of it is that I have my own row of prescriptions now.” He smiled wryly. “But not Prozac.”
Well. Fuck.
“Is that what your semicolon is about?” Norris nodded over to Liam’s forearm, currently covered by a plaid shirt.
“Yeah,” Liam said, pulling his sleeve up to reveal the tattoo in full. A beam of streetlight appropriately fell right onto it, highlighting the fuzz on his arm. It was upside down from this perspective but could be read correctly from Liam’s, which, he supposed, was actually the point. It was also much bigger than Norris had originally thought.
“I wanted a reminder. It kind of signifies ‘new chapter,’” Liam explained. “Sort of putting all that other stuff behind you while still acknowledging what happened. Saw it online and it just kind of made sense. I didn’t think my mom would sign the release for me to get it, but she did.”
Liam was looking at him expectantly.
“Jesus, dude” was all Norris could muster. He didn’t quite know how to approach any of this.
“I really don’t mean to put any of that on you, by the way,” Liam said. “I wanted to pick up where I left off and come back to Anderson, but then . . . Well, there’s really no starting over. By the time I came back after winter break, everyone had heard. People I never even talked to. Middle schoolers stepping into high school for the first time. Teachers. The coach didn’t think it was a good idea for me to join a varsity team ‘in my state’ and that I should focus on healing, whatever that means.”
“That’s . . . intense,” Norris admitted weakly. His brain was out of witty repartee by this point.
“Everyone’s face falls when they hear my name. Yours didn’t. I mean, you were still looking at me like I was a freak, but for entirely different reasons.” Liam smiled.
“Well, you did have a flyer with my face on it,” Norris reminded him.
“True.”
Neither of them said anything for a moment. It was an unspoken half time in this emotional relay race Norris had been drafted into without notice. Norris couldn’t relate, but he could remember all the eyes that had been on his Habs T-shirt on the way to Austin. It was small and silly by comparison, but he still hated the feeling of being looked at, being judged. People he’d never seen before coming to their own conclusions about who he was. He imagined all those people knowing something intimate and personal about him.
“How are you doing now? Are you still . . . depressed?” Norris asked.
“Yeah.” Liam shrugged, eyes back on the Bone Yard. “It’s not as bad as it used to be.”
Norris had been waiting for the happy ending. The high five that would put this Very Special Episode behind them, so they could never talk about it ever again.
“But you still struggle with it?”
“Sometimes.” Liam shrugged again noncommittally, leaning back in the driver’s seat and staring at nothing in particular. “Not enough to try that again—therapy actually helps there—but yeah, sure. I don’t know if it will ever completely go away. Anyway, if it all freaks you out, we don’t need to be friends. You don’t have to feel bad for me or anything.”
“I’m not your friend out of charity,” Norris eventually said. “I think you’re cool. And weird. Like, fifty-fifty.”
“I’m glad to hear that. But you also don’t have to start acting like being my friend is some sort of, I don’t know, responsibility. You’re not my support system or whatever. Just a dude I like hanging out with. I get why you might not want to, that’s totally your choice, but it’s important that you know that.”
There was a firm openness to his voice that Norris thought would make Liam a good father one day. Where that thought came from, he couldn’t say.
“Why?” Norris wanted to know. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m kind of a big headache.” Eric and his mother aside, most people eventually came to notice that.
“I guess mostly because you’re never not yourself,” Liam explained. “For better or worse, there’s something about that that’s, I don’t know, refreshing?”
Norris had absolutely no idea what that meant. For all he knew, Liam had dropped some serious hallucinogens before he got to the car, but at least there was no longer a huge invisible vise around their two heads. Liam was just Liam again. Eric would like this guy, he thought.
“Do we hug?” Norris asked after gathering his stuff. “This feels like a huggy moment.”
Liam smiled but seemed hesitant. “I would say yes, but . . .”
“But . . .”
“You’re a very sweaty person, and you haven’t showered since practice, so . . .”
“Oh my God. Fuck you,” Norris hissed as he pulled Liam in for an admittedly gross, sweaty sideways hug anyway.