Chapter Text
It’s a treacherous road
With a desolated view
There’s distant lights
But here they’re far and few
The sun don’t shine
Even when it’s day
Gotta drive all night
Just to feel like you’re okay
—The Golden Age, Beck
Billy had plans that night, but then his dad came home, announced that he had a date with a woman named Susan he met earlier in the week, and Billy was going to stay home while they were out and keep an eye on the woman’s twelve year old daughter. He didn’t ask if Billy had plans, he didn’t bother to tell him about his date before the day of it even though he’d asked Susan out three days prior. No, of course not, that wasn’t Neil Hargrove’s style. He said Billy would do it, so Billy would do it.
It was stupid, Billy didn’t even care that much about the party he’d been invited to that night or the girl who asked him to come. He shouldn’t have said anything, but he said, “I can’t. I’m going out later. Besides, she’s twelve? Does she really need a babysitter?” It popped out of his mouth before he realized what he was doing, and he couldn’t take it back then.
Neil hit him, a fist across the face, bruised his cheek and broke open his lip. Billy fell into the counter, then sagged down to the floor and tried to disappear as Neil kicked him.
At some point, Neil’s boot connected with Billy’s nose and broke it. At some point, while he was lying on the floor with his head tucked and his knees drawn up to protect himself, the toe of his boot slammed into the back of Billy’s head and knocked him out.
When he woke up, it was a little later and he was alone on the floor. His face hurt and his head was pounding. He’d bitten through his bottom lip after he fell unconscious and the taste of blood was strong and sour in his mouth.
They lived near the beach and Billy had a sudden, deep desire to be there, so he got up from the floor, didn’t bother to clean the blood from his face or try to set his broken nose, and left the house. He knew if his father came back and he was gone, if he had left the house and not cleaned up the blood he had left behind on the floor first especially, he would be angry. He would hit him, tell him how worthless he was, how disrespectful, how he didn’t value anything because he didn’t work his ass off to support an ungrateful piece of shit like Billy.
Billy left anyway.
He had learned a long time ago that it didn’t matter what he did. Neil would find a reason. He would make up a reason. He would set a trap and give himself a reason. What it came down to really was that Billy’s dad wanted to hurt him, so it didn’t matter. He could try to do everything right. He could be as good as he knew how to be. In the end, he’d still end up beaten down to the floor.
His car was outside, he thought about getting in it and driving down the beach, finding a place where he could be alone where Neil wouldn’t find him. He thought about things like that a lot. He daydreamed sometimes about getting into that five year old Camaro, picking a random direction and driving until he ran out of gas or money or both. He’d worked hard for over a year at the auto shop to save and buy that car—or any car, really, but he’d fallen in love with the Camaro—and it hadn’t been easy because Neil expected Billy to pitch in. By “pitch in”, he usually meant he had already spent most of Billy’s paycheck before he ever even saw it on payday. Billy had been forced to find other sources of less than legal income, which he, of course, kept to himself. Dreaming about driving away, putting his father in his rear-view and spinning dust in his face as he left him behind, that was the only thing that kept him going until he’d saved every penny. But it was just a fantasy.
So was driving down the beach to escape, even for the night. If he did that, if he made Neil miss out on his date with whatever desperate idiot woman had said yes to him, Billy would be missing a lot of school the first week because of the bruises and cuts he couldn’t hide.
He left the house and walked. It was going dark already, but there was a sunset glow on everything still. People saw his face, the blood, his broken nose at an unnatural angle, his split lip, the bruise turning his cheek purple, and they did a double-take, but they didn’t stop him or ask him about it. Mostly they pretended they didn’t see it or they shied away from him as he passed like he was the dangerous one.
And he was sometimes. He was full of a bottomless rage. The rage of helplessness. Of hopelessness. Rage like that of a trapped animal that would bite you for trying to stop it from chewing its own foot off to get away.
There was a place he liked to go that wasn’t that far away because tourists either didn’t like it or didn’t know about it. He could usually sit or stand on the dock alone.
There was a sloping drop to the beach from there and Billy started down, then stopped when he heard an animal growl somewhere in the dark behind him. Thinking it was just a dog, he glanced around, but there was nothing there, so he went down the drop to the sand below and forgot about it. He took his shoes off and sank his toes into the fine white sand. It was still sun-kissed and warm and he smiled at the sensation, forgetting his aching head and his bruises and broken face.
He’d lost count of how many times his nose had been broken. He’d gotten pretty damn good at setting it by now. Most people couldn’t even tell that it had ever been broken once, and he was oddly proud of that fact because it was so, so wrong.
Another low growling sound on his left had Billy looking around again. He didn’t see anything. There was some scrub grass, rocks, above that there was sidewalk and road and manicured green grass. For what seemed miles to either side of him, there was beach. Sand and shells and water kissing the shore. There was a beach umbrella about fifty feet down the strand, tilted like it had been caught in the wind that afternoon and nearly blown away.
Growling again, closer than before, and Billy whipped around to look.
Two gleaming chatoyant eyes flared at him out of the darkness like they were full of fire. Billy backed up so quickly, he tripped over his own discarded shoes, but he didn’t notice them except to scramble over them, backwards in the sand away from those glowing eyes. They were eyes, and maybe they were nothing, some asshole living on the beach with a dog he hadn’t leashed or kenneled, but they didn’t look like the eyes of a dog. The dread sending ice cold frost straight to his stomach and pooling in his groin, making his tongue dry up like it was coated in chalk, was animal instinct, and he trusted it a lot more than the logical little nagging voice in his mind trying to tell him it was nothing because terrifying things that wanted to hurt him were never just nothing.
“Fuck, fuck,” he hissed, panicked as he kicked himself a few feet down the sand away from it.
The eyes drew closer. The thing they belonged to drew closer and he had the hysterical realization that it was stalking him. The light was almost gone, it was nearly full dark, but there was just enough orange glow peaking over the horizon that Billy got a look at the creature. Tall and upright like a man, thickly muscled, covered in dark hair, with arms and legs that were a little too long to seem natural, hands with impossible claws and pads like a dog’s feet, and its face. Its head was the head of a giant canine. Billy had never seen a wolf before except on TV, in movies and in photographs, and it seemed insane, it even sounded insane as he thought it, but the thing before him slinking toward him over the sand like a demon was a werewolf. Not a costume or horror movie werewolf, a thing unlike anything he’d ever seen or imagined. Impossible and savage, its tongue lolling from its parted jaws, over glittering teeth as long as steak knives, which it bared at him as it drew near and Billy found himself frozen.
Inside, he was screaming, shouting at himself to move to run, and his survival instincts were more finely tuned than most people his age because he was a goddamn survivor, but this thing had struck him cold as stone still with prey-like panic. It was like being hypnotized. He told himself to move, but he couldn’t. His heart felt like it was going to explode, fly right out of his chest, and there was a surge of adrenaline running through him that made his muscles quiver, but he couldn’t move. He could barely breathe.
Then the spell broke and he was up from the ground and running down the beach. He ran toward the stupid crooked beach umbrella because it was the only thing there, the only marker to focus on. For one blinding, terrified moment, a thought skittered through his mind that if he could just make it there, to that umbrella, and touch it, he would be safe. Like it was some kind of game.
The creature was faster than him. A lot faster. It circled around him and cut him off. Billy skidded in the sand to a stop, tried to redirect his body without slowing and slid to the ground. He leapt up again and ran blindly away, but the wolf thing was on him then. It pounced, knocked him to the sand, and sank its vicious teeth into his right shoulder.
Billy screamed then. He hadn’t before, but the pain lanced through him like a sword and it erupted from him, loud and terrified, and yes, angry. He was so pissed off that this was even happening. It was insane, it was the stuff of campfire stories and stupid horror movies with bad scripts and behind-the-scenes puppeteers. He was going to die on the beach like this? Eaten by a goddamn werewolf for the unpardonable sin of being in the wrong place at the wrong time while bleeding.
No fucking way.
Billy threw his head back sharply and heard a crunch as his already pounding skull connected with the creature’s sensitive nose. It released a high pitched yelp and Billy threw his elbow back blindly to hit it. The blow connected, he had no idea where, but it was enough that he got a little space. Its hold on him loosened just enough.
He twisted and kicked it, then scrabbled at the sandy ground for purchase to haul himself to his feet and run.
He ran toward the water then. He couldn’t outrun a werewolf on the beach in the dark, but the ocean was right there and he could swim and maybe… Hell, he didn’t know. Werewolves could probably swim too, right? He’d never seen anything about it in the movies, but he was thinking movies were a pretty dumb survival guide for shit like this.
Still, it was all he could think to do, so he ran out into the water. He could feel the monster’s breath on the back of his neck, or else he just imagined that he could, and it spurred him on faster. He hit the water, ran out through the shallows and dived in.
It occurred to him that he was bleeding a lot more now than he had been when he left the house and there were sometimes sharks in the water that time of year, but he was out of options. His choices were possibly get mistaken for a sea lion and have his arm ripped off by a shark or definitely, absolutely, 100% guaranteed get his entire ass eaten by a fucking werewolf.
He swam out into the water against the waves until he started to feel the way his right shoulder and arm were on fire from where the wolf thing had bitten him. Then he stopped to tread water because he was worried he might not be able to make it back if he went farther. Which wouldn’t matter if the thing had followed him into the water, but he hadn’t heard a splash after he hit the water himself. He didn’t think it had.
Turning back toward shore, he could barely see the beach in the dark, but the streetlights and porch lights of the people in the nearby houses and condos were just enough he could make it out. Dark grey against the black water and night sky. There was nothing there. No one near the area where he had gone into the water. Nothing except the umbrella, which had finally fallen over and lay like a turtle on its back.
Billy treaded water for a while longer, watching the shoreline, but the creature had disappeared. It took him a lot longer and what seemed a lot more effort to swim back to shore. He’d ran into the ocean and swam as far as he could, pushed by an adrenaline high, but once he realized the danger of the monster that was after him was gone, the high faded and the come-down was like a weight deep in the pit of his stomach.
Neil was going to be so pissed, was the first thing Billy thought when he made it to shore and climbed out of the water. He hadn’t meant to be gone so long, only half an hour at the most, but it was dark and it had been over an hour.
It was hard to get too worked up over what Neil would do to him though when he’d damn near had his arm bitten clean through by a werewolf, of all things. Neil scared him—hell, Neil terrified him—but he wasn’t as scary as an honest to god, real-life werewolf.
His shoes were in the sand where he’d taken them off and Billy picked them up, but he carried them instead of putting them back on. The pain in his shoulder had expanded, it now engulfed his entire right arm and ran down his back like the burning bites of fire ants. He wanted to look at it, clean it, and he wanted to pray to God that this part of the legends and movie lore was as much bullshit as everything else, but Billy didn’t believe in God and he wasn’t that lucky. He couldn’t do anything about it until he got home, so he tried to ignore it and walked as fast as he could, moving with purpose in a way that let people who saw him know he had somewhere to be. So they got out of his way.
Of course, that might have had more to do with the fact his shirt was soaked in blood and his face was bruised and mangled than because he looked like a guy with places to be.
There was a strange car in the driveway and a girl he’d never seen before sitting on the front steps when Billy got home. He paused beside his car to reach in and grab a brown leather jacket he’d left in the back seat and put it on to help hide the worst of the blood. Maybe if Neil only saw the front of his shirt and his face, he’d believe that Billy’s nose had bled a hell of a lot and he wouldn’t need to explain (make up a believable lie about) what had happened to him. Not that Neil gave a shit, he didn’t, but he was nosy and anything could be twisted into something that was Billy’s fault; something he needed to be taught a lesson over.
The girl on the steps stood up when Billy got his jacket out of the car. As he approached, she backed up them onto the top landing under the porch light and he could see her face and her expression. She was cute in an elfin, tomboy sort of way, with bright red hair and freckles scattered over her face. Her eyes were clear, bright topaz blue, and they were wide with shock at the sight of him.
“What?” he said. His voice was rough from screaming. It annoyed him and he scowled at the girl and tried again. “Who the hell are you?”
“Max. I’m Max,” she said. She tilted her head back and met his eyes defiantly. “I think you’re supposed to be watching me, but you look more like you should go to the hospital.”
He rolled his eyes and pushed by her. “Not going to the fucking hospital. Move, girl,” he said.
He wouldn’t have gone to the hospital even if the monster had taken a chunk out of him because Neil would lose his mind. He had insurance through his work and it extended to Billy, but there was always a co-pay amount, and there were always questions, and sometimes it wasn’t possible to blame Billy’s injuries on him being clumsy or not being careful, though Neil always found a way to put them at ease and assuage their curiosity. He wasn’t that bright, at least Billy didn’t think so, but he was cunning and clever and he’d had an awful lot of time to learn how to hide what he did. On Billy’s mother once, then on Billy all through his childhood; and they did say practice made perfect. Still, Billy would get mutant monster rabies and deal with that shit before he sought out a hospital for this.
Max stepped out of his way, then followed him through the door into the house. “They’ve been waiting for you to come back,” she said softly behind him. “Your dad seems really… pissed.”
“I bet,” Billy said, unsurprised by this news. It did surprise him a little that she had bothered to tell him. To warn him. This girl he didn’t know, who seemed kind of bratty, had no reason to care whether his asshole father was mad at him or not.
He turned his head and looked down at her, considering his situation. Deciding to see if she really was a brat, he asked, “You want to go tell them I’m home? Tell my dad I got a bloody nose. I’m taking a shower. I’ll be out in ten minutes.”
If Neil really wanted to go on his date with Max’s mother, he would be gone by the time Billy finished in the bathroom. By the time he got home, even if he was pissed, he might have cooled down at least a little. Besides, Billy didn’t think Neil would do anything with the woman he was hoping to bang and her twelve year old daughter there to witness it. Not when he hadn’t even had a first date yet. No, he’d leave. That would give Billy the time he needed to check his wound and get cleaned up so he could hide it later.
Max ran her eyes over him, her gaze taking in his bloody face, his broken nose, his bloody shirt, and the jacket over it that hardly did anything but emphasize the blood it was supposed to be hiding. The look said very clearly that he was a liar and she didn’t for one second believe all of that had come from a bloody nose, but all she said was, “Okay. I’ll tell them I’m going to watch TV, okay? And they’ll leave.”
Billy went into the bathroom, closed the door and locked it, then he stood leaning back against it while he braced himself for what he had to do next.
His nose had been broken almost two hours ago and he hadn’t set it, so it had swelled. He could feel it in the way his face pulsed hotly, and see it in the way his lower eyelids had pushed up into his vision from the puffiness.
This was going to fucking hurt and he didn’t dare scream in case Neil and Susan were still out there. If she overheard that, she would ask questions. If she asked questions, Billy would have more shit from Neil to deal with later.
The sight of himself in the mirror above the sink was a shock. He had seen himself in the mirror many times after being hurt, but this was something else. Worse. He was almost definitely going to miss school on Monday, probably Tuesday, too.
There was a small towel over the rod to the left of the sink and Billy took it and blew his nose into it. It hurt like hell and the towel was full of half-coagulated blood and mucus when he was finished. He folded it over and wiped his face, then put it aside to throw away later.
Now came the really fun part. He was going to have to sit down for this.
Making a triangle out of his hands, pads of his fingers together, he took a deep breath through his mouth. He brought his hands together tightly around his nose as he exhaled the same way, then pulled down. His entire face felt like it was a bruise. A deep, bad hematoma full of dark, pooled blood. A scream rose in his throat, but he gritted his teeth and bit it back. Because of the swelling, he had to repeat the process before he felt it, through the pain and grinding, slip into place.
This time, he might end up with a bump or something that told people his nose had been broken. This time, it might show.
He was almost sad about that, but after everything that had happened that evening, he was lucky to be alive and not some kind of monster dog’s Alpo. A broken nose was nothing he hadn’t dealt with before.
With that taken care of, he stripped his jacket and shirt off and turned to get a better look in the mirror at the back of his shoulder. The wolf thing had bitten him in a way that some of the punctures from its teeth were set in the top of his deltoid muscle, and it was like looking at one of those connect-the-dots pictures they had in those kid’s activity books. It made a skewed kind of oval shape that curved over the front of his right shoulder, dropped down over the back of his shoulder blade and came around the very top like some kind of morbid ruby necklace made of holes. Some of the holes weren’t round, though. The ones on the front of his shoulder were round and those looked like the deepest. He twisted to look at it over his shoulder in the mirror and found two more, about equally spaced apart, low on his shoulder blade.
Canine teeth.
Fangs.
Billy suddenly felt like he was going to throw up. His head spun and his mouth watered.
He sat down on the lid of the toilet seat and breathed deep and slow.
There was a tentative knock at the door. “Uh… Billy, are you okay?”
“Go away,” he said.
“They left, so you can come out if you want to.”
Max thought Billy was hiding in the bathroom from their parents. He huffed a soft laugh. “Go away!” he repeated, louder.
After a minute, he heard her footsteps retreating from the doorway back down the hall.
When she was gone, he stood up and stripped the rest of his clothes off, then got in the shower. The water was cold when he first turned it on, but he stood under it anyway and let the cold soothe the places where he was bruised. When it turned hot, it stung in his open wounds, but Billy washed them with the bar of Ivory soap on the edge of the bathtub anyway.
He used gauze and paper tape to cover the bite, but it bled through in dark red spots. It was all he had though, so he left it. He didn’t have any clothes to change into so he wrapped a towel around his waist and went down the hallway to his room. As he passed the doorway that went into the rest of the house, Max spotted him and peered around the door frame at him.
“Holy shit,” she said. “What happened to you?”
Billy glanced around at her, saw her wide-eyed expression, her blue, blue eyes and her freckles standing out starkly in her blanched face, and he closed the door on her.
He got dressed in loose clothes he could lounge or sleep in, got a beer out of the fridge, then went to the living room where he found Max on the sofa watching Conan the Barbarian.
“You eat yet, kid?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not since lunch. Which was gross. Leftover meat loaf.” She made a face and it made him smile.
He sipped his beer and picked up the phone receiver on the little table by the sofa. “How do you like your pizza?”
“They didn’t leave us any money for pizza,” Max said, but she sat up on her knees on the sofa and watched him over the back of it. “Pepperoni.”
“Extra cheese?” he asked.
She grinned. “Yes.”
He ordered them pizza, then sat down on the sofa with her and drank his beer while they watched the movie. During a commercial, he noticed her casting glances at him and the can in his hand. Impulsively, he offered it to her.
“You want a drink?”
“I’m twelve,” she said, like he was an idiot for even asking.
“Yeah, and?”
“And I’m twelve.”
“So, you don’t want a drink?”
She rolled her eyes and took the can from him, tipped it up and took a small—very small—drink of it. She grimaced in disgust at the flavor and passed it back to him. “Ew. That tastes like… ew.”
He grinned and drank the rest of it. “Don’t go tattling to your mom,” he warned.
“As if,” Max said dismissively. She glanced away from the TV, saw that he was serious and said, “I won’t. I wouldn’t.”
He believed her.
There was a knock on the front door while he was getting another beer. Billy opened it, paid for the pizza and carried it into the living room to set it on the sofa between them to eat while they watched the rest of the movie. He ate three slices and Max was on her second when he fell asleep.
Exhausted and sick feeling, he was sleeping pretty deeply when he was forced awake by the burning pain in his left earlobe. He jerked upright, pinched his earlobe between his fingers and thumb and got burned again. With a wild, pained yell, he pulled at it, got his fingers around his earring and the back and yanked it free, only to throw it when the silver metal burned his fingers on contact.
“Whoa, what the hell happened?” Max asked, moving over to his side of the sofa like she thought she could help.
“Nothing,” Billy muttered, rubbing his ear.
It was sore and weeping exactly like a real burn. It was like someone had stabbed him with a hot poker or held the flame of a lighter under his earlobe. He looked at the earring lying on the carpet by the coffee table and frowned.
“Pick that up and throw it away,” he told Max, pointing to it.
She chewed her bottom lip and eyed him with confusion, but she picked it up. The back was a couple of feet away from it and she went to get that too. “You really want me to throw it away?” she asked doubtfully.
“Or keep it. I don’t care,” he said.
Max put the earring in her pocket. “In case you change your mind,” she said.
“I won’t,” he said.
He got up and went to get another beer. In the kitchen, he cracked the can open and stood leaning against the counter by the stove with only the stove hood light on casting a yellowish glow on the room. He drank that beer slowly, in the silence of the kitchen, listening to the muffled sounds from the living room of Max watching The Dukes of Hazard. When she laughed at something on the TV, it made him smile and he didn’t even know why. He didn’t know this girl at all; her laughter shouldn’t have affected him one way or the other. But here he was, standing alone in the kitchen, staring at his reflection in the window over the sink, smiling to himself because she had laughed at a joke he wasn’t in on.
Feeling in the pocket of his sweats, he found a half-squished pack of his cigarettes and a lighter. He finished his beer and lit one.
Immediately, his mouth was watering again and nausea spiked through his middle, from the pit of his stomach right through his chest and right to the back of his throat. He dropped the cigarette and grabbed for the edge of the counter, caught it and immediately began to heave.
He vomited and tried to stop, but it wouldn’t be stopped. The world narrowed to the waves of sickness overtaking him, the hard, cold stone sensation in the pit of his stomach, the excruciating pounding in his head that was making his eyes feel like they were burning in his skull, and the way vomiting everything up made his throat hurt and his head pound more than ever, but it also felt like a great relief.
Billy sank to the floor on his knees, pushing himself back against the cabinets so he wouldn’t end up kneeling in his own vomit. Shuddering and panting and hoping to hell he wasn’t going to start puking again, he opened his eyes.
The first thing he saw was Max standing on the other side of the kitchen by the dining table, staring, with her hands over her mouth and her eyes enormous again. This was turning out to be one hell of a night full of disgusting shit and weird surprises for her, too, Billy thought with rueful amusement. Then he saw the floor and just stared.
There was the normal kind of vomit—disgusting, chewed up and undigested food mixed with beer sludge—but there was a lot of it. Too much. And it wasn’t all normal. There was blood in it. A lot of blood. When he stared at it long enough, he was still unable to convince himself some of it wasn’t skin and tissue as well.
What the fuck was happening to him?
“What’s wrong with you?” Max asked.
Her voice sounded small and distant beneath the pounding of his heart and the throbbing of his skull. Under the rising panic at the sight of the mess because it was everywhere. He shook his head, started to get up, then felt how shaky he was and settled back, just breathing and trying not to completely lose it.
“Billy? What’s actually wrong with you?”
Oh, so many things, girl, he thought. What he said softly was, “I might have a little concussion.”
She took a couple more steps into the room, carefully going around the puke to reach him, and crouched down by him on her heels to look at his face. “Jesus, that is not a little anything,” she said. “You look like you got in a fight with like… a forklift or something. And lost. Now you’re puking blood? You need to go to the hospital.”
She started to stand and his hand shot out and caught her wrist, stopping her. If she called 9-1-1 for him, if an ambulance came and took him to the hospital, it would be so much worse for him than if he had just gone himself when he was thinking about it earlier. “No.”
She twisted her wrist out of his grasp and he let her go because he didn’t want to hurt her.
“No!” he shouted.
She froze with her back to him.
“I can’t. I can’t go to the hospital,” Billy said, almost pleading with her.
He was shaky and didn’t know if he could stand. If she went to the phone and called for help, he probably wouldn’t be able to stop her, at least not before she dialed the number. He didn’t want to tell her why he couldn’t either, because it was humiliating and she was basically a stranger to him. He wasn’t an open and trusting person. He didn’t know her and that gave her the power in this situation and he hated that and how weak it made him feel. But he had to do something because he couldn’t let her call 9-1-1.
“He—my dad—would be so pissed and there would be questions I can’t answer. They might do X-rays or scans and that’s expensive, but it also leads to more fucking questions because—”
Max turned back to him and shook her head sadly. “I was just going to get some towels to clean it up,” she said.
He stared at her, uncomprehending for a moment. Then he said, “Oh.”
That made Max smile, but she still looked sad. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She got towels from the linen closet and together they cleaned up the worst of the mess with them. Billy started to feel better after about ten minutes and got up to carry the nasty towels to the laundry room to wash. While he was doing that, Max found Pine-Sol under the kitchen sink and started to mop the rest of the mess up.
He came back to the kitchen once the laundry was going and took over mopping the floor. “Thanks,” he said to Max.
It was a little thing, his gratitude, but it was genuine and it mattered. His first instinctive response to offers of help when he was in distress was usually to lash out and drive the other person away. It was humiliating and shameful, but Neil also wasn’t above turning on others who might interfere. It was private and horrible, but it was Billy’s life, his cross to bear. He wouldn’t hoist it onto someone else or let them get in the way any more than he wanted them to see him at his lowest. He did not thank people for helping him, but this was a little different anyway. This wasn’t about Neil. This wasn’t him lying curled in a fetal position on the floor while his dad whipped him. This was something else—something much weirder.
“Sure,” Max said. “Do you feel better?”
“Yeah, actually,” Billy said. He finished with the mop and the floor looked good. The anxiety that had been threatening to turn into outright panic had subsided and he was calm. It would be fine. Neil didn’t see it, he wouldn’t know.
There was a tiny voice in his mind that pointed out how little that mattered. That he might somehow find out or figure it out anyway.
Billy silenced that paranoid little voice and went to dump the mop water.
When the kitchen was clean again and he had put everything away, they returned to the living room to watch TV on the couch. They caught the end of Knight Rider and when it was over, Max changed the channel to watch Fantasy Island. Billy fell asleep shortly after the opening credits.