Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It has been months since the incident happened and I have been enraged every second going forward. My anger has manifested in a sort of mania and everyone (and I mean everyone) around me has suffered as a result. And I do not care. In my worst moments, I think about seagulls and hungry, stray dogs tearing apart the flesh of all these rich schoolboys. I think perhaps that is too good a fate for whoever did this to Patroclus. When I find his murderer--I know he did not slip--he will wish it was seagulls plucking his flesh from bones. I will unhinge my jaw and swallow his heart whole; I will peel his skin, coat myself in his blood, watch the life fade from his eyes, and it will still not be enough. By the time I am done, they will have to use a magnifying glass to find my last shreds of humanity. The best of me died with him. The rest will soon follow, I think.

Some days I wonder if I was always this flawed. Surely, surely I was not. Perhaps the flaws lay dormant--Patroclus’s death the lit match tossed atop so much kindling. Perhaps I underwent a transformation when he died. Perhaps this, perhaps that.

When I really look at myself, I realize the only difference is that Patroclus had given me a sense of shame. Of course I wouldn’t tell Mr. Phoenix to fuck off--even though I badly wanted to when he caught me red-handed stealing Lucky Strikes from the pack he kept in his desk drawer--Patroclus would be disappointed if I did. Of course I didn’t tell everyone that Deidamia was a snot-nosed, lying little bitch and I never slept with her. Patroclus knew the truth, and that’s all that mattered. And of course I didn’t use my family’s wealth, or who my dad was, or who my mom was for that matter, for my personal gain. I couldn’t even imagine the look Patroclus would have given me if I’d used the same line favored by Agamemnon: do you know who my father is?

I suppose it’s obvious, but passion and rage are two sides of the same coin. In that regard, I sometimes wonder what Patroclus felt for me. My love burned, consumed, hurt. But he seemed to love me like a balm on that burn. I could not imagine him going mad, as I have gone mad, in the event of my death. What would he have done? And yet I’m convinced he loved me more than I did him. He had a talent for love, a talent for forgiveness and gentleness and grace. In many ways, he was my antithesis.

That’s what I thought (albeit less kindly and less articulately) when he first came into my life. I was twelve and quite cruel--the sort of kid who fried ants in the driveway and asked timid girls out at school as a joke--when Patroclus came to stay at our house.

My father--fiftysomething when I was born--was an old man. Once a famous movie actor, he now used his royalty checks to support various charities and take on philanthropic endeavors. Such an endeavor was Patroclus. I could sense, even as a boy, that the adults were leaving things out. The official story was that his mother had come down with some sort of mystery illness and his father--an old theater buddy of my dad’s--needed to devote his full attention to tending to her. This was, of course, not true by any stretch of the imagination. At the time, though I knew I was being lied to, I did not care.

It is only in retrospect that I find him lovely--pouty, red lips, long eyelashes, skin dark like baked clay and freckled still, huge, brown eyes and loose, dark curls. At the time, I just saw a boy. My father was out of town when he arrived. Only Mr. Phoenix and the house staff were there to watch me, and my father had given me the responsibility of greeting him.

Little asshole that I was, I practiced my violin (a Stradivarius my father had gifted me a few days prior--I learned later that it had belonged to Patroclus’s mother) while waiting for him, and did not stop my piece when he arrived. I arched an eyebrow at him when I was done. What a picture I must have made--still in my school uniform (why hadn’t I changed out of it?), couldn’t bother to lower the instrument which by rights belonged to him as I greeted him, mean look in my eye.

He said nothing. I got the distinct feeling that he was not at all impressed with me.

“I’m Achilles Pelides,” I said, breaking the silence.

“Patroclus,” he said.

“No last name?” I asked coolly. I knew it, of course. My father had said, Patroclus Menoetides is coming to stay with us. You’ll be a good boy, won’t you?

I had decided I wouldn’t.

“No last name,” he affirmed.

“Well, dinner will be at seven. If you don’t mind--” I said, looking down at my sheet music.

Patroclus was enrolled at my school for our seventh year--a private institution that my father had donated over $1 million to--but we did not speak much at first. I was popular and he was not. Boys crowded around me and girls sighed over me.

We were a month into the term when I got called to the principal’s office. A few days prior, I’d orchestrated a savage “prank” which showcased both my impressive leadership skills and what a twisted little psychopath I was: I had managed to convince all the boys in my gym class to gang up on one particular boy. I don’t remember what offense this boy had committed to deserve this, but I continued to escalate things, and before I knew it, the boy had sustained a concussion in the locker room and (and I’d hoped the boy would be too embarrassed to admit this part) we’d joked that we should shove a stick of deodorant up his ass before one boy stopped us by calling it “too gay.”

But, as it turned out, the principal had not wanted to talk about me. In fact, no one ever sought to punish me over the whole affair. Whether it was because of my father’s steady donations or because bullies tend to win in the end, I do not know. What the principal had wanted to talk about was Patroclus’s apparent truancy. In those days, I did not share any classes with him, and this was news to me.

“I was hoping you could say something encouraging to him before I have to get your father involved,” the principal had said to me, and I set out to do something of the sort.

I found him, eventually, behind the bleachers. “Heard you haven’t been to any of your classes,” I said by way of greeting.

“Yeah, well,” he answered. Something about the way he spoke to me, brushed me off easily, drove me crazy. He was smaller than me back then, but he squared his shoulders and looked me in the eye.

“You’re going to get in trouble if you just hide here all day,” I said.

“Just get your dad to write a check,” he answered.

The bell rang. “Come with me to class. We could get your schedule switched around so you’re with me,” I said, fully aware that I sounded pathetic and desperate.

“Or what? You’ll shove Old Spice up my ass?” he drawled, and I did not miss the hostile look in his eye.

I could feel my cheeks redden. Of course it was all anyone could talk about, and of course Patroclus had heard about it. None of that was surprising. What was surprising was that I felt bad about it. Oh sure, on the way over to the principal’s I’d been working up some crocodile tears and prepared a litany of excuses, but I hadn’t meant any of it.

Here, alone in the bleachers in front of the first boy to ever show me contempt, I could have died of shame.

“Come on,” I choked out, grabbing his wrist and pulling him to class.

I suppose I should have realized that Patroclus had not been hiding simply out of disinterest in his studies. I noticed bruises on his arms, his hair disheveled. I’d reach for his shoulder or his wrist and find him flinching away from it as if I had meant to hit him.

It wasn’t a secret that the school had a bullying problem--rich, entitled boys will be rich, entitled boys, after all. It was just unusual that I wasn’t at the helm of it. I suppose I could have made it obvious that Patroclus was off-limits from the start, but it hadn’t occurred to me. Initially, I had foolishly thought that his defiant stare affected the other boys just as it had me. But I thought wrong.

It took me embarrassingly long to connect the dots. There were times I almost noticed, like when Patroclus took the hairdryer (left long ago by one of my father’s romantic conquests) to his bedroom while sneakily laundering his backpack late at night when the household had gone to sleep, his books smelling vaguely of ammonia the next morning. Two of the boys, I learned much, much later, had taken turns pissing in his backpack while a third boy distracted him.

It wasn’t until someone fucked with him in front of me that I was snapped out of whatever oblivious daze I’d been in.

I was speaking to Patroclus, leaning on the wall across the hall while Pat was searching through his locker. I was hidden by a column, casually looking through my flip-phone. The final bell had rung. The hall was empty.

“You know, the problem with Deidamia is that she wants everyone to think she’s the smartest person in the room,” I said, playing Snake on the phone, ignoring several text messages. “Someone mentioned Twilight and she made this huge show of being all--” I used a high-pitched Valley girl voice for this next part--“I would never read something so puerile. She said that--puerile. I had to fucking Google what it meant. Yesterday, she tried to talk to me about The Old Man and the Sea. She told me she liked Hemmingway’s sparse style. She’s pretentious.”

He laughed, which I loved. “You’re pretentious. That’s not the problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“You don’t like her as a person,” he said, still shuffling through his belongings.

I heard heavy steps but didn’t bother to look up from my game until I heard an angry slam. Patroclus, clearly dazed, leaned further into his locker as the door swung back and forth. I saw Ajax, walking towards the bathroom casually as though nothing happened.

“Ajax?” I said, and his back stiffened. Ajax was an ugly, brutish boy with a snub nose and very little intelligence.

“Achilles,” he said, turning around, overly-friendly. “Didn’t see you there, buddy.”

I had been a violent kid with a penchant for sadism so sophisticated that I sometimes thought teachers admired it at least a little under their scolding. That makes sense, in retrospect, since bullies who stay bullies into adulthood seem to have three career paths: teachers, nurses, and cops. This sophistication evaporated into thin air and I saw red. I tasted the rage in my mouth, felt it tearing away at my insides, pressurizing inside my skull. It was all-consuming, terrible, and, perversely, it was pleasurable, too. I threw myself on top of Ajax. I gave myself over to rage and in exchange, I became a god; my fists could not miss, punches that Ajax landed did not hurt. I was laughing, and, though at that point in my life I’d never been drunk, I realize now that that is what I felt. I was drunk with violence, and, like an alcoholic, could not be sated.

When a teacher finally pulled me off of Ajax, it was like breaching the surface of the ocean after being underwater for a very long time. Though I know all three of us were paraded before the principal, I only remember looking at my hands, not so damaged as you’d think if you saw Ajax’s face, and then glancing at Patroclus who looked shell-shocked, the unlikely catalyst that set me off.

I did not let him out of my sight much after that. Whatever problem I’d had with the boy in gym class had been entirely forgotten, and Ajax avoided me like the plague. I could not bear the thought of Patroclus looking at me with such contempt nor such horrified disbelief ever again, so I behaved myself.

Or at least, I tried. My insensitivity to anyone but Patroclus could border on the cruel, and that was readily apparent by the time the spring dance rolled around. It had not yet been decided whether my father was going to ship me--and only me, my father made it clear that one tuition was all he cared to pay for--off to boarding school in the fall and, as a result, some of the girls made weepy confessions of love which embarrassed me on my good days and annoyed me on the bad ones.

“Are you going to the spring dance?” one girl in particular asked before science class.

“No,” I answered, examining my nail bed, bored with the conversation before it even began.

“Why not?” she asked.

I disdained the idea of being around so many people, for one thing. I would have to dance with girls, whom I also disdained. And here’s where my stomach got twisted up and things were a little confusing: I did not want to watch Patroclus dancing with any girls, either.

“Doesn’t interest me,” I said.

“Well, if you change your mind, I’ll save a dance for you,” the girl replied, and went back to her own desk.

“I think she was trying to ask you to go with her,” Patroclus, next to me, whispered into my ear. My entire body jolted at his nearness, and I said nothing.

After class, he followed close behind me. “Why didn’t you want to go with her? She’s pretty.”

“Oh? Maybe you should ask her instead,” I nearly snarled.

“That’s not what I was getting at,” he said. “I’m just saying… you shouldn’t feel like you have to turn down girls just because no one is asking me to go with them.”

I don’t know what came over me, but I shoved him into the wall of lockers beside us. Pinned against the wall by my arms and just an inch or two away, his large eyes grew somehow wider. I almost closed the gap between us. I was dangerously close to his mouth and felt his breath, hot and sweet-smelling, against my face. “I don’t want to talk about girls,” I said, my voice coming out low and gravelly.

He nodded and stammered, “A-alright.”

If you asked my father, my mother was a seductress of the most devastating sort. She knew exactly what she was doing, getting pregnant with me, and damn near ruined his life in the process.

I was not a particularly smart child, but I wasn’t an idiot, either. My mother was twenty-seven when I was twelve, and by God, that expensive private school had at least taught me subtraction.

I pieced the story together much later, and my mother had confirmed it when I’d finally gotten the courage to ask. My mother was from a much richer, more famous family than my father. Her lineage was East Coast money, the kind that has Chippendale in their sitting room and Mulberry silk in their closet and can trace their ancestors to the protestants who settled in New England, but my father, the lowly action hero whose net worth was only in the low millions, had something on my maternal grandfather--a bargaining chip, blackmail, whathaveyou. So my grandfather offered a night with his daughter for his silence.

My mother was a ferocious bitch. I say that with admiration--I inherited that ferocity from her. She put up a fight, clawing the fuck out of him and biting a chunk out of his shoulder. He had told me and anyone else who asked that the scar above his clavicle was from a motorcycle accident shortly before I was born. But, upon close examination, the teeth marks were unmistakable. He knocked her out and fucked her anyway, probably more out of anger than anything. This according to my mother, who woke up the next morning bruised and unsure what to do. She had not spared me the details, including how she spent a week at the Hotel Bel-Air after the incident, notably catching the X-Files premiere on television, which she stared at without comprehension, and refusing to look in the mirror.

“The worst part,” she’d said, and I think she took a little pleasure in watching me detest my father, “was that when his shoulder healed two months later, he’d gotten barbiturates fed to me and had another round. That’s when you were conceived.”

All famous families have stories like this. Most sweep it under the rug. Think Rosemary Kennedy. But my mother was born too late to be lobotomized, not that she cared what they did to her. She managed to keep her pregnancy and my birth a secret (a coordinated effort of several wronged women living vicariously through my mother) and sold the story, complete with a corroborating DNA test scrounged from one of my father’s cigarette butts, to the New York Times.

My father’s law team and publicists responded in the typical way: “Mr. Pelides believed the accuser to be eighteen at the time of the interaction” and “Mr. Pelides remains firm that the incident was consensual.” My mother did not tell me this part, but it came up on the first page when I Googled myself at school. Interestingly, it did not come up when I did the same at home. I only later realized my father had put some sort of child locks on our internet.

My father was given guardianship over me with consent from my mother’s legal guardian at the time, as she was still a minor. Keep in mind, this was only three years after Clarence Thomas had been nominated for the supreme court nomination and we all know how well that went for Anita Hill. Only a few years after my birth, Monica Lewinsky, a fresh-out-of-college unpaid intern, was tricked into believing that the most powerful man in the world was in love with her and ridiculed nearly to death for it. It’s shocking that worse didn’t happen to my mother, is what I’m saying.

I cannot explain to you how I reconciled the father who adored me with the man I know tortured my mother. I certainly could not do it as I aged and discovered more of the truth. Sometimes I wonder how I reconcile the vicious bully I was with the boy who was loved by the best man to ever live. I suppose saying that I didn’t know is no excuse, because I knew enough. Nor is my reasoning that very few of us have innocent fathers satisfactory. I would have done a lot of things differently, in retrospect.

My mother came to visit me just as Patroclus was becoming Mine in a way that I recognized as crossing several boundaries. We were closer than friends, certainly closer than siblings. Two months before, I’d asked if we could share a room.

“It’ll be like a sleepover every night,” I’d reasoned, and I’d watched conflict roll through his eyes. I could guess several reasons for this: Patroclus seemed to like being alone. We were at the age where we were boys first discovered jacking off, and doing so is difficult if there’s always someone in the same room. I could be moody and difficult to read. And there was something else, too: one day in late winter, we’d been roughhousing in the woods around my father’s estate. Swinging from a tree, Patroclus had grabbed me around my midsection and pulled me to the ground. The wind was knocked out of both of us, and, breathless, somehow there was no distance between our mouths. My stomach lurched. My skin pricked. My heart raced. I felt my cheeks, already flushed with the cold, grow even redder. I did not move, nor did he, and I did not know if this was an accident or not. And then I was on my feet, thinking about all those stupid love confessions from girls I’d been on the receiving end of and knowing I must look exactly like they had--flushed, embarrassed. Swooning. I was swooning. It was enough to make me sprint as fast as I could away from the scene. I avoided him for the rest of the day and we had not talked about it since.

But the conflict passed like storm clouds rolling over the sky but not breaking, and Patroclus had repeated my words in agreement: “Like a sleepover every night.”

Presently, my mother was taking me out to get frozen yogurt in a sporty, vintage convertible. I had only met her a few times in my life before this, and that was when I was too little to really remember. She was young enough that she knew what I was into; she’d dated a guy who worked on a few Disney shows popular with girls--“He’d give you a tour of the studios if you want, introduce you to some of the stars.” She knew about some of the video games I played: Fallout and Diablo (of the latter she said, ”I prefer to play as the witch doctor,” and I thought she was the coolest person alive).

“This place wasn’t self-serve when I was a girl,” she said when we arrived at the shop, located in a shitty little strip mall, and I carelessly piled my yogurt to towering heights. She didn’t stop me, as adults usually did, when I poured toppings onto the pint-sized cup like a mad scientist.

The cashier raised an eyebrow as I placed the exceedingly heavy thing on the scale. “Your total is $55.37,” she said.

I expected my mother to complain. I was a shitheel, and, despite the fact that she’d impressed me, I was still trying to see what I could get away with. But she didn’t even blink as she handed her card over.

“I do not like this,” I said, tasting the monstrosity when I sat down. Again, this was to test her limits. Children will eat anything sugary you put in front of them, after all.

“Get something you do like,” she said, tossing me her credit card.

I smiled devilishly at her and strode out the door of the shop. Her mouth quirked up, amused, but she did not follow me.

In those days, pet stores--the kind where you could buy kittens and puppies, not the ones where you can just get gerbils and goldfish--were more common. In the sad little strip mall, there was such a store called Pet’s! (apostrophe and exclamation point, both). I stood for a moment, staring at the glass boxes holding the dogs, trying to decide between the handsome golden retriever and the brindle mastiff before I realized that I did not have to decide.

“I’ll take these two,” I said, pointing at one then the other.

“I’m sure you will,” chuckled the teenager working there. “Is your mommy or daddy around? We can’t make sales to minors.”

I rolled my eyes and walked out. My mother, having finished her yogurt (or maybe having tossed it in the trash the second I was out of sight) was leaning against her car and smoking a Gauloise. She looked like a model--stylishly dressed, all bent angles, sleek and beautiful and terrible.

“Mother!” I shouted at her.

She did not look at me, but stubbed out her cigarette and began walking in my direction. I half-expected her to drag me away from the pet shop, but she ducked under the door (6’1 and wearing heels), and said, “What seems to be the problem?”

“I want the retriever and the mastiff, but it seems I need your signature,” I said. Something interesting happened, then. My mother and I seemed to read each other’s thoughts. We were like starving wolves circling a fat cow, and our viciousness was intoxicating to me. This connection was inexplicable. It felt like it was always there, and yet I barely knew my mother before.

“Is that all?” she said casually, and I laughed.

“W-we need your driver’s license, ma’am,” the teenager, who seemed equal parts scared and entranced by my mother, stammered.

She walked to the counter and slapped her ID on the counter. Her voice was melodic as she said, “Now, what did my boy want?”

“These two,” I said, pointing to the pups.

“Are you sure? I quite like this little one,” she said, running her manicured finger over the glass in front of a tiny Maltese’s cage.

“So get him,” I said, not interested in something so tiny, so shivery, with its disgusting eye stains and its yappy little mouth.

“I shall,” she said. “Why don’t you go pick out some toys and things for your new friends, Achilles?”

I went and gathered every dog treat, leash, collar, and dog toy in the store, as well as one of every dog bed. I brought them to the front in heaps in my arms.

“Covering all your bases. Smart,” she said, nodding at the pile of mostly useless shit I’d put on the counter.

Returns at Pet’s! were not accepted, and we sped around with three puppies walking back and forth between our laps and $2,000 worth of shit in the backseat.

“We could take them to a park,” my mother said.

“Can we get Patroclus first? He’d love this,” I said.

“But of course,” my mother said. Her mood shifted, though, as she drove recklessly back to my father’s estate.

My father was home and gaped at the sight of my arms full with two squirming puppies.

“Is there a more lovely sight than a boy with a dog?” my mother said poisonously to him, leaning against the door frame as I raced to find Patroclus.

“You just made the decision for my household to have two dogs?” my father asked, his acting skills not quite good enough to cover up his annoyance. I did not worry about my father rehoming the dogs. He wanted to be the good guy. He wanted my mother to be the villain.

“You dislike unilateral decisions made on your behalf without your consent?” I heard her ask innocently. I did not hear the rest of the conversation.

“Your mother does not like Patroclus,” my father said to me two days later.

“Oh?” I asked. In fact, this was not news to me. She had been that wolf I’d so admired at Pet’s! the rest of her visit and Patroclus was like a trembling lamb watching her close in on him.

But I did not understand just how nuanced my mother’s feelings truly were. My mother hated my father, and by extension, my father’s associates, and my father’s associates’s children. However, when Patroclus died, it was not my father who dropped everything and flew to the east coast, it was my mother. Though it is difficult for me to remember entirely--those first few days before they found his body were frantic, and then, when I was too exhausted for franticness, they were confusing--I don’t think my father even called me. And he certainly didn’t fork over any money when I’d had the idea to offer a reward for information or when I wanted to hire a PI to do some investigating where I thought the police were lacking. That, too, was all my mother. I try to keep that in mind when I think about how she behaved when Patroclus was alive. Because my mother loved me, and by extension, she loved who I loved. And I loved Patroclus.

“She arranged that you spend your summers under the tutelage of Dr. Chiron. You’ve heard of him?”

I had. He’d written a best-seller the year before which had something to do with childhood trauma or sustainability or divorce or whatever had been trendy to write about that year and I’d seen him on a couple of talk shows promoting it. What I couldn’t figure out was if he was a doctor like how my pediatrician was a doctor or if he was a doctor like how Dr. Phil was a doctor.

“Yes,” I answered, uncomfortable with his line of questioning and suddenly panicked that I’d never see Patroclus again.

He took a healthy sip of his whiskey. We were in his study, just the two of us, and he spent some time looking over a few papers on his desk before he continued.

“What your mother doesn’t realize,” he said, a twinge of malice in his voice, “is that Dr. Chiron and I have the same publisher. Remember the memoir I wrote last year?”

Saying that my father wrote a memoir would be like saying Milli Vanilli had sung their own songs. What had actually happened was that my father had drank a lot of whiskey (and, I suspected, did drugs of the powdered variety that go up your nose) and told his life story to some poor woman who’d just graduated from a liberal arts college with a degree in English. This woman, bless her, tried to sift through the cocaethylene-infused exaggerations and managed to ghost-write a coherent story.

“I remember,” I said.

“She thinks she’s only sending one boy to Dr. Chiron, but I’ve arranged for two.”

Relief flooded through me. I did not care that my father was using Patroclus as a tool to annoy my mother. In fact, something occurred to me.

“And have you given any thought to Ilion Academy?” I asked. My impending shipment off to boarding school had been hanging over my head, and I’d been dreading it.

I watched his brows knit. Perhaps there is a time when every young person thinks they’re cleverer than their parents. In the case of my father, I often think I was.

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, why stop at just the summer?” I asked casually. “She doesn’t want Patroclus to go to Ilion, and the $55,000 extra per year is just a drop in the bucket. Bet he could even get a scholarship with his grades.”

He beamed. “You might be onto something, son.”