In Over My Head -- Final Chapter Is Up!

So here's chapter 5. It's a bit shorter than normal, but hey, I can only do so much at a time, right. This is where the angst wagon really gets rolling so be prepared for it! Read, love, review, thanks!

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The walk to Anna’s house was way too short, so Lucas went around the stretch of woods that separated their homes, instead of cutting through it. He needed time to think, to sort through what he was going to say to her once they were face to face. By the time he was walking up her front stairs and knocking on the door, he’d pretty much figure it all out.

Her father answered, grunted at him, and sent him up to her room. As he climbed them wearily, he thought about how long this day had been so far, and how much longer he had to go. He wanted nothing more than to simply ignore his moral obligation to his friend, go home, and climb back into bed with David.

He knocked on her bedroom door, waited until she responded, and then went in.

She was lying on her bed, her eyes bloodshot, staring blankly up at the ceiling. “What do you want, Lucas?’ she sat up, her hair a tangled mess, and glared at him. He suddenly felt terribly sorry for her, and realized that he really had no idea what to say to her at all.

Luckily for him, she kept true to herself, and couldn’t manage to keep her mouth shut for longer than a few minutes. Her voice was full of spite and hurt and viciousness, and she clambered off the bed as she began to shout at him. “You’ve been lying to me! All these years, and you’ve been lying through your teeth, and now your stand there like you have some right?!” she marched across the room, her eyes angry and full of unshed tears. She stopped just before she was within arms reach of him. “All this time, I thought I knew you, but it turns out you’re just a fucking liar.”

Her words hurt, and that made him angry. “I never lied to you.” He told her.

“Yes, you did!” she shrieked. “About who you are! About the most important thing in your life!”

His anger flared out at her. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he snapped. “Anna, just because I’m gay doesn’t mean that it defines who I am as a person. I’ve always shown you who I am. Are you honestly this hurt because I never told you I think about guys when I-“

“Stop it.” She snarled.

“Seriously, Anna, there was nothing to tell you before.” He said, and looked down at his shoes. “David was my first, okay? With all of it.” He sighed and shook his head. “Listen, I’d never kissed someone before-“ he had lifted his head to look at her again, but he stopped abruptly, startled. She was halfway hunched over, her arms wrapped around her midsection, crying her eyes out without making a single sound. “Anna?” he took a step towards her. “I know you’re mad at me, but-“

“Don’t fucking touch me.” She hissed at him, and he backed up again. “He took you away from me, Lucas.” She sobbed and lifted her hand to wipe at her face. “All this time, I thought you and I would…” she broke off, trying to calm down, then lifted her head to glare at him. “He stole you.”

He was completely confused. That was why she was so upset? He sighed. “Anna, honey, you’re still my best friend.” This, of course, was not entirely true, but he supposed it was what she needed to hear.

Apparently, however, it was the complete wrong thing to say.

Anna lunged forward and slapped him in the face. Hard. “You stupid, selfish bastard!” her breath acme in high, screaming gasps, and she was shaking from head to toe. “You ignorant, blind…” she shoed him, and he almost tripped over his own feet. He looked at her like she was insane, the whole side of his face on fire. “I don’t want to be your friendship, Lucas, I want you!” she stopped crying so abruptly it scared him. “I always have.” She whispered.

For a minute his tired, overstressed mind blatantly refused to process what she had said. Surely he had misunderstood her. Anna could not have said that, there was just no way. He embarrassed her. She wouldn’t even talk to him in public half the time. She made fun of him constantly.

Anna had moved to sit back down on her bed, but she was watching him, and he realized he needed to say something, anything, to make the situation seem a little less of a complete disaster. But when he opened his mouth, nothing good came out of it.

“I want David, Anna. I’m sorry.” His feet turned him around and got him the hell out of there, but he still heard her crying.
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When he got home, David was awake and sitting at his computer. He smiled at the sight of him hunched over, studying the screen carefully. “Hey, you.” Lucas greeted, toeing off his sneakers. “What’re you up to?”

David turned around in the office chair, and his face was a perfectly blank mask. “I could ask you the same thing, Lucas.” He said calmly, and moved so that Lucas could see the file displayed on the screen. It was an open folder. Lucas’s stomach rolled. David stood up. “You went behind my back.”

The folder was full of newspaper scans, online articles, and public record files he’d dug up about Johnson, David Ryan. He looked from the computer screen to David’s face and back again, once again at a total loss for words. He wondered vaguely how this day could get any fucking worse.

“David, listen, I wasn’t trying to go behind your back.” He took a step towards him, but David moved away, his head shaking, that mask of calm started to crack. Lucas saw the blind, red rage in his eyes and was suddenly scared. David knew he’d read those reports, about why David had been kicked out of one foster home after another, what had happened to get him expelled from his school when he was only thirteen. David knew that Lucas had read the public records about his parents. Lucas was beginning to wonder just how quickly David could kill someone with his bare hands.

“Why did you even bother to come up with that bullshit story about wanting to get to know me?” David asked him, and there was a thread of something in his otherwise flat, cool voice that made Lucas want to turn and run. “You already knew everything. You’d already made up your mind about me.”

“Do you really believe that?” Lucas asked him. “Why would you think I’d already judged you, considering what happened between us earlier? You think I would do that with someone I thought was-“ he stopped himself there, but David caught it anyway.

“Someone you thought was what?” he asked, way too sweetly. “Criminally insane? Physiologically damaged by his traumatized childhood?”

“I never thought any of that.” Lucas insisted. “I swear. Look, I shouldn’t have done it, okay? I’m sorry.”

David shook his head, smiling in a strange, crooked sort of way that was somehow even worse than his anger. “Lucas, you haven’t even begun to understand how sorry you’re going to be.” He moved towards the door, and Lucas couldn’t make himself stop him. He stood by the foot of the bed, his head lowered, until he heard the front door slam. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, put his face in his hands, and cried.
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Lucas and his father ended up face to face the next morning over breakfast. His father must’ve have noticed the sick, miserable look on his son’s face, because he actually plucked up the courage to ask what the matter was.

Lucas looked at his father, his head pounding and his eyes sore. “I ruined my entire life in one fell swoop, Dad.” He said simply. “The only two people I’ve ever been able to call friends, and guess what? They both hate my fucking guts.”

His father was astonished at his language, but he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, he leaned over and patted the back of Lucas’s hand. “I want you to tell me about it. Please.” He tried to convey wordlessly that he was trying, and Lucas must have picked it up, before after a very long moment of guarded silence, he began to talk.

He told his father almost everything. The fight with Anna, what she’d said, how she’d taken it, and then the argument with David about what he’d done. His father seemed concerned about this part.

“I don’t get it. David comes from a bad home life?” he asked, and Lucas snorted.

“You could say that, I guess. His parents were drug addicts, abusive, you know? He ended up a ward of the state when he was eleven. They shuffled him around a lot, foster homes and stuff. A lot of the time the foster parents couldn’t keep him longer than a week. He was violent a lot.”

“Of course he was. A lot of kids deal with that kind of thing violently. If it’s all they know, how could anyone expect them to behave differently?” Lucas smiled at his father after that little speech, and his father smiled back. After a moment Lucas went on.

“Anyway, when he was thirteen, he apparently stabbed a kid in the school bathrooms with a pocket knife. The kid almost died. They put David in a mental hospital for a little while, but eventually he just got rotated back out into the system. Ended up here, and now he lives with an older guy who only bothers to pay attention to him when he’s too loud around the house.” Lucas sighed. “He’s still violent, I guess. Last year he got suspended for punching a teacher in the face.” Lucas barely contained a grin. “The teacher was a Hemmingway fan.”

“I would’ve punched him, too.” His father muttered, and they both laughed. “That poor kid.” He studied his son for a while. “Well, I wont’ tell you that you were right to do what you did, but I won’t say you were wrong either. On one hand, you should’ve trusted him. On the other, he’s got a reputation, and you were trying to protect yourself.” He stood up. “I leave tonight.” He said. “So I’m going to get some sleep now.” He came around the table and gave his son a clumsy, one armed hug. Lucas buried his face against his father’s arm and felt his father kiss the top of his head. “I love you, kiddo.”

“I love you, too, Dad.” Lucas let go and watched his father disappear into the back of the house. He sat at the table, staring at his half eaten breakfast. After a long time, he got up and started cleaning up the kitchen. He moved in short, jerky spurts, as though he was a badly oiled machine, but after a bit he relaxed, and he let his mind wander to something that didn’t make him feel like a total asshole.

When it was time, he walked to school. He spoke to no one, and saw neither of his friends.

He wasn’t really surprised.
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Two Weeks Later

Lucas loaded the film into the projector, focused it, and sat down on the couch. The movie started, big black and white monsters kicking over cardboard replicas of cities, but his mind wasn’t really on it. It was arguing furiously with itself over what to do.

When he’d come into the lab today, the place had smelled strange. Like something had burned. He immediately panicked and checked the projector, but it seemed to be in fine order. It didn’t dawn on him that the smell was cigarette smoke until he found the crushed out butt on the floor beside the table. He noticed that the brand was David’s, and immediately the desperate, miserable said of his mind insisted that David had been here.

The other half of his mind, the stubborn, angry part of him, tried to shout down the desperate part of him, insisting in his turn that he was simply connecting pieces that weren’t there to make himself feel better.

“No one comes in here.” Desperate and Miserable pointed out. “Ever. Only David knows where the key is. And that’s his brand of cigarettes.”

“Don’t get worked up over nothing.” Stubborn and Angry warned. “Anyone could’ve found that key and come in here, it’s not like its well hidden. And plenty of kids in this school smoke those. You’re making something out of nothing.”

Lucas lay down on the couch, bringing his knees up to his chest, and buried his face in the cushions. That familiar, heartbreaking smell, soap and grass and metal, assaulted him, and Desperate and Miserable shrieked with joy while Stubborn and Angry cursed the world in general. David had been here, today. Why? Lucas sat up, wiping at the tears that welled up, despite his best efforts. He missed David terribly. The only consolation, the only difference in his absence this time, was that Lucas seemed to sleep all the time now. It seemed like his body and mind had both decided that if his life was going to suck, he was going to unconscious for as much of as possible.

He got up, unable to spend another second in the lab. He flipped the projector off, but didn’t bother to unload or pack away the film. He simply grabbed his stuff and got out of there.

On his way home, he cursed himself for acting like a lovesick virgin. A little voice in the back of his mind, the one that over the last few weeks had learned how to twist the knife with merciless precision, pointed out that he was a lovesick virgin. That David had somehow carved a space for himself inside of Lucas’s chest, and without him, the space was a gaping, agonizing hole in him.

When he got home, curled upon the couch without bothering to take his shoes off. He fell asleep almost instantly. He didn’t wake up for the knock on the door, or the three phone calls. He didn’t hear anyone calling his name through the half open kitchen window. He didn’t hear the roar of old but well maintained engine as it roared away from his house.

He didn’t dream.