Chapter Text
Billy learned he was ugly when he was six years old.
He’d never really thought of it, before. Beauty was an intangible thing: a thing, perhaps, for mothers, but not for him. His mother never called anyone ugly, not outright. There were comments, here and there, about his friend Scott’s mother. Scott’s mother let her hair hang long and flat and later joined the women’s rights movement. But Billy had never thought of the concept of ugliness in relation to himself. He always considered himself a sort of an immutable being. Thoughts in space. Words, conjured up from some vast astronomical vaults, gathered as sand in a bucket. Poured out his mouth, into the world, through which his consciousness moved. His body was incidental to this entire process.
He confronted it, full-faced, at age six, in his kitchen. It was his father who introduced him to the concept, as he did so many things. He was fighting with Billy’s mother over dinner, a common enough occurrence that Billy didn’t feel the need to rise from his seat. It wasn’t really dinner anymore; although the plates were still on the table, green beans half eaten, Billy knew better than to touch them, to scrape metal fork against ceramic plate and draw attention to himself. Instead, he counted the lines of the table’s wood grain and found faces in the swirls.
“You’re an ugly bitch, just like that kid of yours,” Billy’s dad had said.
It was curious. Whenever he got mad, Neil always phrased it like Billy wasn’t his son, too. Billy didn’t get it. Whose was he? His mother’s? His father’s? Surely not his own.
Billy did get the word bitch. He said it three days later to a girl at school that kept chewing with her mouth open, because the sound made him feel like there were things crawling under his skin and he wanted her to feel a little bad about it. The school sent him home and Neil slapped him across the face.
Billy didn’t think his mom was ugly. He got upset sometimes, actually, because he thought she was so perfect that when he grew up he’d never be able to marry anyone as good as her. But he hadn’t put much thought into his own corporeality, other than that it got him around places and that he was a little shorter than the boys at school and that meant he had to ask Connor Mayhew to get books for him from the high shelf.
That night, after the fighting and the inevitable snap, the hit that Billy almost, not really but almost, looked forward to, because it meant the fight would end and his dad would be so sorry and everyone would cry and then he could breathe again, after all that and after his parents went to bed and he stayed up doing the dishes and scraping the green beans into the disposal, Billy dragged a stool into the bathroom and stood on it and looked at himself in the mirror.
He poked at his nose. Sort of broad, with an end like a bubble, like a lollipop. Rounded. Lips that were all points, the slightest downturn at the corners. He smiled and he still looked sad. Big chin. Eyes just the wrong side of the close. Small ears. He wasn’t skinny, like some of the boys. Not as fat as a few of them. He was sort of average in a lot of ways.
Billy knew that his dad said things he didn’t mean sometimes, but when he did say something untrue he’d admit it. The next morning, when the sun would stream in through the window and the day would still feel fresh and expansive: “You aren’t stupid, Billy.” His dad would say, “You just need to put the work in. You should be able to do anything you want. You aren’t stupid, so you don’t have an excuse to quit.”
But Neil never took this one back. So Billy figured it must be true. He couldn’t tell on his own if he was ugly. He was hard-pressed to conjure up many people at all that he thought were ugly. He didn’t think any of the boys at school were. Maybe one girl? There was one with a particularly mean face. But mostly, they just looked like themselves. Buck teeth, gap teeth, hair that stuck up funny. He wished he could ask his dad which ones were ugly. Then he’d have a frame of reference.
It was confusing, because his mom often called him beautiful. She told him he looked like a little angel, or a little knight of the round table. She played with his curls and read him Le Morte d’Arthur, translating as she went. Billy loved to listen to her French. He never really absorbed the language the way he thought she wanted him to, because he was too focused on the sounds and the melody and the care with which she pronounced it. She called him Galahad, perfect Galahad who never sinned and found the Holy Grail where no one else could.
But Billy knew, deep down, someplace in those astronomical vaults, someplace immutable, that he was not Galahad, that he could never be Galahad. Billy knew that if he was sent by his King to find the grail, he would fail, would fall, would be unworthy. Because there was something wrong about him.
People called him pretty. He got older, his hair got longer, his back got California sun-kissed. He walked barefoot down to the beach and older girls giggled at him. He hit his growth spurt. Everybody called him pretty. The issue was that, although Billy’s dad didn’t say it often, Billy could see him thinking it. Seeing it. The ugliness. Billy’s dad knew him awfully and knew him better than anyone. So Billy put two and two together. Reconciled the compliments, the appraisals, and the invariable fact of ugliness discerned even from early childhood by the man closest to him.
He came to realize that this ugliness must come not from the expanse of his cheek or the set of his eyes, distasteful as they were for him to look at– Billy began to obsessively stare at himself in the mirror at nights, count the mistakes– no, that wasn’t the ugliness his father had seen. It was something inside him, in his personality, in that immutable being that had lived and thought before speech. It wasn’t the Billy that people saw that was ugly. It was the Billy that people got to know.
So Billy stopped letting people get to know him. Except his mom. And then his mom got called an ugly bitch one too many times and left. After the first few weeks, Billy only really let himself think about that very late at night, when there was no one around to see him cry. And then it was just Billy and his dad, his dad who knew him, who helped Billy learn that no one else should ever be allowed that close.
After mom left, Billy switched schools. He missed people, but he was pretty sure they weren’t going to miss him for long, so he got over it. He had a new house, further from the beach, from the waves, from the footprints of his mother buried somewhere deep beneath layers of sand, and closer to his dad’s new job. Billy made friends with boys who wore boots even in the summer and gave each other stick and poke tattoos and offered Billy cigarettes from little packs they stole from the convenience stores. One boy named Sean liked to wear a tee and roll up a pack in one sleeve so it jutted out, a hard rectangle on the curve of his shoulder.
He didn’t let them tattoo him, but he did let himself come home smelling like smoke and, worse, cheap beer. He was twelve. His dad hit him harder than he ever had. Billy knew some of those boys whose dads were always on their cases, one whose dad was a drunk, a mean drunk. Neil wasn’t a drunk. Neil was a man of discipline.
Billy was weak, and he went to school with a black eye and dodged out the back at lunchtime to smoke again with those boys. It tasted good. It burned on the way down. Billy thought about the Knights of the Round Table and Lancelot’s weakness and sin in laying with Guinevere, the King’s wife. He thought about how, because of that weakness, Lancelot was never allowed to see the grail, to hold it, to touch something divine. He thought about his mom calling him beautiful and inhaled smoke until he coughed and his eyes screwed up with tears, and then dropped the butt on the asphalt and crushed it beneath his shoe.
Neil met Susan when Billy was thirteen. Neil was a security guard at a bank, Susan was a teller. He brought her a different little gift every week until she agreed to marry him. Billy remembered the story of how Neil had met mom, buying a book in the bookstore she worked at, how they had talked and she had charmed him with all the authors she could quote. How he had loved to hear her speak French. How she had loved the way he smiled, how she convinced him to shave off that stupid mustache.
With Susan, Neil grew the mustache back. He gave her presents. He gave her a little rabbit figure that had been meticulously carved from a block of wood. The day he gave it to her was the day she said yes. Neil had taken the rabbit from Billy’s room. Billy’s mom had made it for Billy the week after he was born. Neil told him, when he took the rabbit, that Billy was too old for toys. Billy knew what he really meant: Billy did not deserve something so lovable. It should go to someone who knows how to love.
It did. She did. Neil and Billy moved to a house by the beach. A house that was Susan’s. Susan’s, and Max’s.
Max was nine years old. Just a child, really, but a child that Billy hated more than anything. More than his friends, the ones who stopped being his friends sometime last year, who had called him crazy after he’d very nearly knocked out Sean’s teeth in a drunken fist fight. Billy hated her so much– more, sometimes, than he hated his dad.
Because Max was… a child. And nobody expected her not to be. She didn’t know the rules, didn’t follow them. Always needed telling twice. Billy didn’t understand it, didn’t understand the game, because Neil would tell her to turn her lights off and go to bed and she would promise to do it, and Neil would have to come back in ten minutes later and tell her again, and she still wouldn’t do it. She wasn’t scared. She should be scared.
And the thing was that Max was nine, four years older than Billy had been when he’d learned he was ugly. Billy couldn’t remember the first time his dad hit him, the first time he saw his dad back his mother into a wall. He could remember the first time his dad had thrown a plate at him, and that was still two years younger than Max was right now. Max wasn’t too young. And Max certainly wasn’t better behaved.
The reasonable conclusion was that in whatever way Billy was awful, was ugly, Max was whole. Neil didn’t have to go so hard on her because she wasn’t as broken. This made sense to Billy, in an abstract way. It was harder to hold onto in practicality.
They were sitting around the dining table, a new practice they’d picked up since they had moved into the house, and one that Neil hadn’t facilitated since Billy’s mom had gone. Max was pushing her beans around her plate, poking at them with a little click, click, click of tines against ceramic.
Billy tightened his hand into a fist on his thigh. “You not like the food?”
“I’m not hungry.” She turned those eyes on him. Those soulful, sunken eyes. Even then, she was so angry. Billy thought: what for? With what right?
“Can’t leave the table until you clear the plate,” Billy shot back. This was true. Unless it was a night like one of the old nights, the ones with abandoned green beans and faces in the table wood, plates had to be cleared. And those nights, the dark nights, never happened here with Susan. Not once.
“I ate as much as I could.” Max narrowed her eyes.
Billy could feel his blood boiling. He pressed his fist hard into his leg, wondered if he could bruise through pressure alone. “Finish the fucking beans, Maxine.”
“Billy, enough.” His dad’s tone was sharp, and Billy went cold. Released the fist. Looked up, from dad to Max to Susan to dad. Looked down at his plate.
They’d been quiet a moment, and then Susan had started chattering about some sort of bake sale. She was good at that. Billy had never been good at defusing situations. Mostly because it never worked. The only way to get through it was to brace for impact, take the hit, go to bed. At least the pain made sense. It was honest.
They finished dinner, Max scraped her uneaten beans into the disposal, and she went to her room. Neil looked at Susan, Susan looked at Billy, Susan left the room. Billy didn’t know what that was. His mom had never looked at his dad like that. Like she was asking for permission. Like she was deferring.
Maybe, Billy thought, that’s why his dad never hit Susan.
Billy sat there, dumbly, with Neil just looking at him, not saying anything. He never wanted to get up out of the seat. Or he wanted to run out the front door, run to the beach, run into the ocean until it overtook him. He stood, picked up his own plate, then, perilously, like sticking his hand into the jaws of the lion, reached for his dad’s.
Neil’s hand fastened around Billy’s wrist, already tight, tight enough to bruise. He wasn’t playing. “You don’t talk back to your sister, Billy,” Neil said.
“She talked back to me, dad.” Billy didn’t argue– he’d learned not to argue– that was one of the rules, the rules that no one said out loud but that he had learned in watercolor black and blues– but he didn’t understand. The rules changed. The game changed. There was something he wasn’t getting. “She wasn’t eating, I was trying to get her to eat–”
The grip tightened, and his father yanked him in closer. The edge of the table pressed hard into Billy’s hip as he was tilted down at an awkward angel. “You don’t curse at your sister.”
“What did you want me to do? What am I supposed to do?” And it was a real question, one he needed to know the answer to, but he also couldn’t help himself: “And she’s not my sister.”
Sharp movement. A slap upside the head. It was quick, snapped his head forward, but didn’t really hurt as much as Billy knew it could have. Just a warning. “Whose house is this?”
Susan’s, Billy wanted to say. This is Susan’s house. And where the hell is she? In her room, not listening, not knowing, plausible deniability. And it was also Max’s house. Her room was her room, had always been her room, since she and Susan had packed up and left Mr. Mayfield and got this place for themselves. This wasn’t Billy’s home. Billy hadn’t had a home in years.
Too late. Hadn’t answered. Neil squeezed and squeezed on his wrist, and Billy began to panic, began to think about bones snapping, about breaking inwards, and he instinctively tried to pull away, which only made it worse. “Whose house is this?” Neil repeated. Waited. “Say it. Say it!”
“Yours,” Billy gasped, quietly, because they were being quiet. He wasn’t sure who they were being quiet for. That was a new phenomenon. Susan, he supposed. Susan’s peace of mind. Or maybe Max. Billy didn’t know what Neil thought Max would learn if she didn’t hear this, see this, see what happens.
“Right.” And Neil let go. And his expression was casual again, normal, and Billy thought stupidly that this must not have been as big of a deal as he thought it was. His wrist was already purpling, and that panicked little flutter in his chest was still sure that they’d been hairs away from something breaking, but… it hadn’t broken, had it? And now Neil was standing and telling him to do the dishes and not even looking at him, not even looking at him as he left the room.
Billy did the dishes. He supposed it hadn’t been a big deal. He was fine. But he did get it, now, the way in which this had become Neil’s house, with all the swiftness of a guillotine.
He didn’t call Max out in front of his dad again, after that. Sometimes she would complain or talk back and Billy would begin to see that hardening in Neil’s eyes, and Billy would kick her under the table. Max never got it. Sometimes she would say “Ow!” out loud and Billy would remember how stupid she was.
She must be stupid, Billy thought. Months turned into a year; somewhere in there was the wedding, which Billy mostly checked out during to stop from going crazy. It was pretty and white and Lutheran, and Neil promised to respect, trust, help, and care for Susan. Billy stood behind his father and let his eyes glaze over and tried not to laugh. Max looked entirely uncomfortable in her dress, ten years old and still so tomboyish. That was one of the only things Billy respected about her.
He respected it because Neil had taken issue with Max’s personal stylings and bought her a few dresses. They looked kind of expensive, for them. Billy knew how much money they had. His dad yelled about it enough. There was yelling, then, after the wedding. That was it, though. But Neil gave her these awful little dresses, in yellow and plaid with frills and stupid collars, and Billy had truly laughed out loud when he saw them. Max didn’t laugh.
Max didn’t wear them, either. It was one of the only times that her obstinacy, that resolute set to her jaw that meant she was not going to budge, was for a good reason. Neil made that kind of under his breath but just loud enough to hear little comment: “Got a girl who thinks she’s a boy and a boy who thinks he’s a girl.” He meant Billy’s hair. Billy was growing it out, liking the way it curled on the nape of his neck, liked the way it felt like something of his own.
Susan had said nothing at all, Max had stormed out of the room, and Billy had been the only one to be smart about it. He stayed, watched football with his dad in silence, then, later, when Max was brushing her teeth, he had taken the Zeppelin tour shirt he’d gotten from Sean back when they were still friends, and left it folded on the end of Max’s bed. It was big on her, but she wore it the next three days in a row until he had to poke her in the head and tell her it stank and she had to wash it.
See, that, he could respect. But he figured that she must just be stupid. Because if she wasn’t stupid, then she didn’t have an excuse. Years passed, and Billy was in high school, and Max wasn’t a little kid anymore, and she’d been around long enough to learn. It was about four months after the wedding that Neil first hit Billy in front of Susan. And then it sort of just unraveled. No more quiet. No more pretense. Back to business as usual. Respect and responsibility lessons doled out the way they were before.
Billy had actually begun to wonder, for a second there, if the reason that Neil was letting up was that Billy was getting better. That he had adjusted, done the work, fixed himself. That maybe some things weren’t so immutable, after all.
It was a stupid thought, and Billy was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t let himself think like that again.
Max heard it. The walls weren’t that thick. After a while, she started turning music on in her room when the shouting would start. That way, she wouldn’t have to hear it. Billy hated her for that, too. When he had been a kid and it had been his mom with the hands on her neck, Billy at least had the decency to stay in the room. To watch, to learn. He was weak in a lot of ways, but at least he hadn’t left his mom alone out there.
Max didn’t have to hear, and Max didn’t get the lessons, and Max went about with her rebellious, angry little pre-teen existence. Angry at some far, distant injustice of the world. She would fume after watching riots on the news. “It isn’t right!” she’d say. And Billy would sit there and hate her, because her anger was so abstract and yet so loud, and his was personal, real, right there in the cigarette burns up his arm, and he couldn’t say a thing about it.
Not at home, anyways. When he moved up to high school at the school by Susan’s house, Billy decided he would become notorious. It was a conscious decision, and it was a challenge. School itself wasn’t a challenge. They gave him Silas Marner and The Scarlet Letter and Billy had to pretend like he didn’t finish the work in half the time it took everyone else. He joined the basketball team; he was tall, then. His body had become something very integral. In shirts and skins, he almost always volunteered to play skins. He liked the way it made people look at him. Like he was worth something. The only days he didn’t were the ones with purpling, the ones where he knew that if he showed himself, the world would understand the break, the breaking, the brokenness.
Billy wasn’t stupid, and he had learned from the best how to command respect. So he garnered– not friends, exactly. Followers? Not the nice kids, the rich kids with daddies in L.A., the ones who paid Billy’s friends to take tests for them. But even those ones knew him. Were scared of him, even just in a physical sense, although they still often did that thing his dad did where they talked loudly about him for his benefit.
He could deal with them. When they tried to raise a hand to him, he was big enough and strong enough and brave enough to hit them right back. Neil bristled slightly when Billy came home with bruises, but Billy didn’t think it was about the fighting itself. In fact, he got the sense that Neil thought more highly of Billy fighting than of Billy getting good grades. It was more that these bruises were Billy’s own. Neil didn’t own his skin anymore.
Sometimes, when Neil would snap and leave a mark, Billy would go pick a fight the next day. With anyone, really, for no good reason at all. He got very good at knowing exactly what to say to make someone hit him. And then the fight. And the bruises. And the winning. When Billy could lick his teeth and taste blood, he knew it had been a good day.
The purpose was twofold. Firstly, no one asked questions when Billy walked around with a black eye. Because Billy was notorious. But then, it was also because, for the first time in his life, Billy had something he could win.
So, no. Not many friends. But everybody sure knew him. And who needs friends anyways, Billy thought, in this world? It was the other worlds, the ones with knights and magic and verse and the sweet melody of words on words on words– it was those worlds that counted. That couldn’t let you down. So Billy fought, and he read, and when Max asked to borrow a book he never let her. Because other than his dad, those books were the only things in the world that were constant.
Sid was not a friend, per say. Sid was certainly not a constant. But, for a time, Sid was… there. He moved to California from New York, and he had ways about him, new ways, strange ways. The first day he came to school, Billy tried to pick a fight with him, and Sid just laughed it off.
“Are you stupid?” Billy had growled into his ear, hands on his chest, Sid against a locker. Small crowd around.
A lopsided grin. Sid’s teeth were all crooked. Billy found it strangely endearing, and thought of his first grade classmates: is this one supposed to be ugly? Sid defied any frame of reference. “I’m not known for being particularly smart, no.”
Billy narrowed his eyes. Trying to parse him, analyze him, get the CliffsNotes. “You think you’re hot shit?”
“No, not really,” Sid said, “but your hands are getting pretty toasty there on my chest, buddy.”
Billy looked down, let go, looked back up. Sid was smiling. Easy. Non-confrontational. And then, just like that, they were fine.
For his sixteenth birthday, Billy bought himself a slightly beat-up 1979 Chevrolet Camaro, with all the pennies he’d been saving up for the past two years. He fixed it up himself, washed it weekly, never let Max in with anything spillable. When Sid saw it, he laughed, and pointed to the license plate hanging way over on the left side, like someone had tacked it on as an afterthought.
“Hey. You’re not allowed to laugh at the car,” Billy said.
“Shut me up, why don’t you?” Sid raised an eyebrow.
They drove out together to a hill that overlooked the city. It was beautiful at night, and Billy wanted Sid to see it, to understand. He parked on the grass, and they were alone, and Sid got out of the car first. Walked around to lean back on the hood and stare out. Billy didn’t let anyone sit on that car, but there, that night, with Sid, they sat, shoulder to shoulder, in a vast and twinkling silence.
“Alright,” Sid finally said.
Billy looked over to him. “What?”
“I’m not laughing.” Sid smiled back at him. “I get it. I get the car.”
“Oh, you think you get it?” But Billy was smiling too. He was looking at Sid’s profile. Sid had an aquiline nose, like Caesar. Dark eyebrows. One bit of hair poking up when it should be poking down. Billy wanted so badly to reach out and fix it.
“I do. Back in New York, we didn’t have a car. Didn’t need a car. We all just used the subway. Mom could take it right downtown to her job. I could take it to school. Way cheap.”
“Way cheap,” Billy echoed, thinking about Caesar, about portents, about knives.
“But here, you don’t have all that. If you want to get around, I mean really get around, you need this thing.” Sid patted the blue of the Camaro. “It’s not a car. It’s freedom.”
Billy thought about knives, about hair, about dying.
“Billy?”
Billy blinked. Sid was looking at him funny, head cocked to the side. “Oh,” Billy said. “Right. But, I mean, it’s also a car. A really cool car.”
“Yeah,” Sid laughed. “Yeah. You know, you care entirely too much what people think of you.”
“Is that right?”
“You want everyone to know how cool you are all the time.”
I’m not cool, Billy thought. I’m ugly. He looked at Sid and wanted to throw up, wanted to scream. There was something wrong with him. “You think I’m cool?”
“No, Billy.” Sid was very quiet. Billy had never felt so still, so jack-hammer anxious. Sid looked out over the city, the brilliant lights of the city, and sighed. “I think if you were really as cool as you pretend you are, you wouldn’t have been staring at me all night.”
Billy came unstuck from his position on the hood. He popped off, quick as his reflexes had ever been, to do– what? Hit him? Run away? Jump off the hill, tumble down into the city?
Sid caught Billy by the wrist, and all at once Billy couldn’t breathe. It was caught there, somewhere between his chest and his throat, and all he could feel was the tightness around the wrist, and thought of breaking, breaking, broken things–
“Billy.” Sid’s voice cut through.
Billy blinked at him. Stuck.
“Don’t leave because you’re scared,” Sid said. “Leave because you want to leave. If you want to leave. But don’t leave unless you mean it.” He let go of Billy’s wrist and looked up at him, all easy eyes, like this was the simplest thing in the world.
And then, just like that, they were in it. Warmth, a strangled breathlessness, and it felt nothing and everything like fighting. Billy’s skin was not his own in a different way than it had ever been before. It wasn’t a bad thing.
“I thought you’d been with girls,” Sid breathed onto Billy’s neck, and Billy shook his head.
“I don’t– I don’t know–”
“It’s okay,” Sid said, and it was.
After that, it was like Neil could tell that Billy had a secret. Maybe he always acted that way and this time was just the first that Billy really felt guilty. Maybe he could just tell that Billy was happy, in a furtive, far-off way that he couldn’t touch. He slammed Billy’s head back against the kitchen cabinets until the wood splintered and Billy grinned in his father’s face. Max was there for that one. When Billy started laughing, laughing with the blood coming from his lips, she looked at him like he was the terrifying one.
The first time Neil brought up moving, it was as a kind of warning. Billy thought it was a joke, but he should have known better. Neil said, “If you can’t get a handle on yourself, we’ll just have to leave town.” He had been playing it up a lot lately, talking about how Billy was acting crazy. Billy wasn’t sure quite when that became the narrative. Billy didn’t think he’d been any crazier than usual, not around them.
He had more energy, sure. He turned his music up loud. He seemed to have grasped something that he should have figured out a long time ago, if he was so smart, which was that Neil was going to blame him for things whether he actually did them, or not. It wasn’t about that. It was about power and control. It was about getting out the burning, awful thing inside. Billy knew because he did that, too. So Billy stopped learning so much from the lessons. He already knew the rules. He was allowed to break them sometimes. Talk back. He took a page from Max’s playbook.
And then came the worst thing. The night that afterwards was just darkness, flashes of red, of panic, waves of nausea. Him getting reckless, stealing away at night in the Camaro, the hill with Sid, the leather seats that smelled of sweat and care. Sid looking in his eyes, Billy knowing what he was going to say before he said it, Sid’s lips moving, “I love–”
And the minutes after. Blinding headlights. The scrambling. The sheer, utter panic. Footsteps crunching against grass, heavy boots, and a tearing away. Neil’s boot on Sid’s chest, Sid in the dirt now, Billy tearing into his dad’s arm with claws like some frenzied animal. Neil turning on Billy, and Billy had never felt so scared, not since he was a little kid, not since he’d learned– not since the night he’d gotten his mom’s note, reckoned with what that meant, the aloneness, realized that she must have seen that ugly thing in him, after all. That all the times she’d called him beautiful were out of a wretched pity, but that she must have known the whole time. And that’s why she left, left him alone with his dad, because she couldn’t stand to love something so ugly anymore.
Neil curled fingers around Billy’s throat and held him out, out over the hell, above a tumbling slope. Sid was on the ground. Billy tried to rasp out that he was sorry– not to his dad, but to Sid, to what he thought might have been something like a grail– but Sid didn’t look at him. Sid got up and stumbled away. Billy didn’t know how Sid got home that night.
He never got to find out, because the next morning Neil told everyone that they were moving to Hawkins, Indiana. He didn’t find out until a few weeks later that it had been Max who had woken up in the night to get herself a glass of water, seen Billy’s car gone and found his room empty. She said that she had been scared, later, when she tried to explain it, to justify. She said she thought he could be in danger. Max had told Susan, Susan had told Neil, Neil had brought the danger.
So Billy hated Max. And Billy was alone. And California receded from his rear-view mirror. It was bright, and sunny, and with the windows down it smelled of sea salt. Billy was pretty sure it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever be that close to.