Chapter Text
He doesn’t remember the dream, but reverberations of it linger in his stomach, in his chest as he wakes. It’s a heavy feeling, a sort of dread he’s never felt before; like getting out of bed the morning after losing the Championships and waiting for the first person to say “There’s always next year, pal,” but about a million times worse.
Harvey curls up tighter, pulling the blanket close around his shoulders.
Today is going to be a bad day.
Someone knocks gently on the bedroom door.
“Michael? Are you awake?”
No, Harvey wants to say. No, I’m not awake, but I don’t know how I know that because I’m asleep and when you’re asleep you always dream that you’re awake, and also who’s Michael?
“Yeah,” he calls in a too-high voice not his own that makes him clutch with too-long fingers at his too-thin throat. The door opens and an old woman sticks her head into the room; she has a sympathetic expression on her face, and the heavy feeling gets heavier.
“Trevor was asking after you,” the old woman says. “He called last night after you’d gone to bed.”
Harvey pulls the blanket up over his head, and the old woman sighs.
(Who are you?)
“He wanted to know if you were going to be free this afternoon,” she goes on. “I told him I didn’t know if you had any plans, but he could ask you when he saw you at school.”
(Where am I?)
Something is wrong, something is terribly, disgustingly wrong. Doesn’t she know that? And she wants him to go to school?
“I don’t wanna go,” Harvey mutters, pushing his face into the pillows.
He hears footsteps as the old woman comes into the room and sits beside him on the bed. Placing her hand on his back, she strokes lightly down his spine; whatever the heaviness is, she feels it too. He knows she does.
“I know,” she says. “I don’t blame you. But I think it might help to see your friends, and to get out of the house for a little while; if you don’t feel well, you can come right back here, but I think you should try.”
Harvey sniffs (the pillow doesn’t smell right, doesn’t smell like him) and looks up, out of his cocoon. The old woman is smiling sadly; she seems nice.
(What am I doing here?)
“Will you walk me to the bus stop?” he asks, and she pets his shoulder.
“Of course. But you have to get dressed if you’re going to catch the bus, come on now.”
Shoving the blanket down, Harvey shuffles to his knees, accidentally kicking the old woman, but she only pats his shin and gets up, leaving him alone.
The bed is soft, pillows piled along the wall to form a nest, a little couch to make up for the room’s smallness. Harvey puts his feet on the floor—carpet, worn flat—and looks out the window across the way, but it’s not much of a view. All he sees is a brick wall with a little window, the side of another house or something. Maybe an apartment building.
Beside the window is a desk, that cheap honey-colored wood with rounded edges that everyone seems to have even though Harvey’s never seen it in any stores. Textbooks are piled off to the side, the pages still crisp, and one called Common Core Math Workouts Grade 6 is wrapped in plastic. Michael must be smart if he doesn’t need to study, or stupid if he needs to and doesn’t.
Harvey walks over to the dresser at the foot of the bed, the same rounded honey wood as the desk (maybe part of a set), and opens the drawer closest to his eye level. The topmost shirt, stuffed in unfolded, is a grey tee; Harvey puts it on and hunts through the other drawers for underwear and maybe some jeans.
He spies a pair of black Converse in the corner.
Harvey knows Michael’s type.
Michael is a slacker. Michael isn't the star of his school’s baseball team, like Harvey is, and he isn’t hoping to get into some great college on a big shiny scholarship, even though he could use it, probably; he’d get one if his parents told him to, but he wouldn’t brag about it or tell his friends. He likes to wear plain shirts and common sneakers and blend into the background, to slip under the radar, to coast.
Coasting is lazy.
Harvey hates people who coast.
He’s not going to fix Michael’s life for him; Michael doesn’t deserve it.
Picking up a backpack by the desk, he slides it over his shoulders and, at the last second, picks up a spiral notebook—blank, he realizes as he flips through it—and shoves a cheap Bic into his pocket. Hopefully Michael doesn’t have some kind of reputation for Harvey to ruin by not paying attention in class; even if he has, it isn’t Harvey’s responsibility to keep it up.
None of this is real, after all.
He goes out of the room and turns to the left. Downstairs, beside the front door, the old woman waits, looking out the window.
Harvey steps up beside her; the light in the hall is a little yellow, and outside a little grey. The front yard is small but well-kept, recently mown and relatively free of weeds except for a few dandelions. A girl with dark blonde hair dawdles at the end of the walk, chancing a look every now and again toward the house.
Harvey reaches up to clutch the straps of his backpack.
“Am I dreaming?”
The old woman closes her eyes and Harvey watches as a few tears drip down her cheeks. He didn’t think it was such a sad question.
She sighs.
“Let’s get going.”
Harvey follows her out the door; when the blonde girl waves at him, he waves back, but she keeps her distance.
On the bus, there are six other kids who look about his age, and none of them will look him in the eye.
In the schoolyard, Harvey leans against the red double doors and watches his classmates walk past; finally, a boy he doesn’t recognize thumps him on the back and smiles as though everything is going to be alright in the future, even though it isn’t now. Harvey didn’t know there was a specific smile for that, but the boy has it.
“Wanna ditch?” the boy asks, and this must be Trevor.
Harvey nods, so Trevor jerks his head out toward the road and points with his thumb; Harvey follows him down the street and around the corner, and they walk a long road with a sign that reads “77 Av.”
The houses look sort of funny; none of them are quite the same, not even the ones that seem to be attached.
“Dude,” Trevor says awkwardly, shoving his hands in his pockets and raising his shoulders almost to his ears.
Harvey looks at him askance; whatever’s going on, whatever this awful thing is, Trevor isn’t dealing with it well.
He doesn’t like Trevor. If Michael knows what’s good for him, they won’t be friends after middle school.
Trevor puffs out his cheeks. “Uh…”
“What?” Harvey asks coldly, and Trevor drops his shoulders.
“I mean.”
Harvey watches as Trevor looks away and chews on his lip.
“I’m sorry, man.”
Maybe Michael would appreciate hearing that, but Harvey’s so frustrated that he wants to deck him. He grunts in response, a terse noise that could read either indignant or accepting, and he just knows that Trevor will take it the wrong way.
Trevor smiles, and Harvey walks faster.
“Dude,” Trevor calls, jogging to catch up. “Hey, I wanted—uh, I wanted to ask you, you know, do you want me to… Uh, can I go to the funeral?” He frowns, glaring at his feet. “I mean, do you want me to? Like, would that be cool?”
That’s not what he meant.
Harvey wonders who died; Michael's grandpa, maybe.
“No,” he says.
If Trevor had to ask, then he doesn’t have any reason to assume the answer should be anything else, unless he thinks he’s entitled to it.
“Oh,” Trevor says quietly; he was expecting something different.
Harvey really doesn’t like him.
They walk on in silence until they reach an overpass, and Trevor turns to wander through the prop fixtures to a set of train tracks. Harvey wonders what would happen if he pushed Trevor onto them, if he would really die or just pretend.
“Is it ‘cause your grandma doesn’t like me?” Trevor asks.
Harvey wants to say no, wants to end this guy’s friendship with Michael even though he doesn’t have the right, even though Trevor and Michael probably go way back and Harvey would probably hate Michael himself if he met him in real life. He wants to say it’s because he doesn’t like Trevor, because Trevor is trying to insert himself somewhere Harvey doesn’t think he belongs and he won’t listen when Harvey tells him no and he asked if going to a funeral would be “cool” and he called Harvey “Dude.”
“Yeah,” Harvey says, and Trevor laughs under his breath.
“Figures,” he mutters.
Harvey leans against a prop fixture and sticks his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans.
“I wanna go home,” he mumbles, staring off into the distance and hoping it’s something Michael would do so no one will suspect. Trevor nods, and Harvey figures he’s getting by okay.
“Yeah,” Trevor says, “sure. You want me to go with you?”
Harvey doesn’t remember how to get back to the bus stop.
“Okay,” he says.
This time he walks a few paces behind Trevor, who does the smart thing and doesn’t point it out.
Finally, they reach the bus stop, and instead of leaving, Trevor looks down the street into traffic for any sign of the next oncoming Q29 (according to the schedule posted on the wooden utility pole advertising the stop). Harvey doesn’t tell him to go, but he leans against the pole and pulls the blank notebook out of his backpack.
“Hey,” Trevor offers then, turning around to look at Harvey sincerely. “Your parents were, like…really cool. I mean. Really nice people.”
Oh. Okay then.
“Leave me alone,” Harvey bites out, clutching the pen in his pocket.
Trevor doesn’t look hurt or offended so much as angry, like he’s the one who’s been wronged here, and Harvey doesn’t have it in him to care.
“Whatever, man,” Trevor brushes him off; he only hangs around for another few seconds before this isn’t worth his time anymore and he walks back up the street toward the train tracks.
Asshole.
When the bus arrives, Harvey sits on the long bench in the back and stares down at the blank page before him, clutching the pen between his teeth. This is Michael’s notebook, Michael’s pen, Michael’s life and school and bus route. Michael’s recently deceased parents. Harvey should say something to him, something nice. Nicer than Trevor.
Hi Michael, he writes across the top of the third page. I heard about your parents. I’m really sorry.
It’s not much, but it’s something.
Harvey wonders if Michael will ever read it. Probably not, so he might as well speak his mind.
Trevor is a moron, he writes next. He wanted to come to the funeral and I said no. Your grandma seems nice though. I think she doesn’t like Trevor either, so I think she’s smart.
The bus stops, and Harvey looks out the window; there’s an ad outside that says “SUNY Be Part of Something Bigger.” So he’s probably somewhere in New York; he could ask Michael’s grandma, but then she would ask him questions he doesn’t have the answers to.
The bus starts moving again, and he taps the pen against the page.
Do you like baseball? I do. I’m the starting pitcher on my school’s team. I’m going to be a proffesional professional when I grow up.
The bus rounds a corner and keeps driving; Harvey thinks he recognizes the funny-looking houses and he should probably get off soon.
He sighs and doodles a little square in the lower corner of the page.
My name is Harvey.
That’s enough for now.
None of this is real, after all.
---
There’s a book open on Mike’s desk; he doesn’t remember which one it is, the first thing he grabbed off the shelf. He’s read it before, it doesn’t matter.
There are so many bouquets of flowers in the living room, so many casseroles and brownie pans in the kitchen. Why does everyone think those things will help? Why is that all anyone knows how to do?
Tears begin to well up in his eyes, again, and he bites his tongue, hard, trying to will them back. He has to be strong. He’s gotta look out for Grammy because there’s no one else, no one left to do it. It’s gotta be him.
Well, but this is his room, with the lights off and the door closed. This is private.
Mike bites his lip and starts to cry.
Tomorrow, he’ll wake up and find out that none of this was real. It was just a terrible, terrible nightmare, a bad joke his brain is playing on him, a nasty idea someone planted.
Not really.
Mike presses his fists into his eyes and wishes harder than he’s ever wished before that everything was different.
I don’t want to be here anymore.
Please?