Work Text:
TEAR DOWN THE HOUSE THAT I GREW UP IN
(I'LL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN)
tear down the house
that i grew up in;
i'll never be the same again.
take everything that I used to own,
and burn it in a pile.
and bulldoze the woods
that I ran through;
carry the pictures of me and you.
i have no memory of who i once was,
and i don't remember your name.
--the avett brothers
The kitchen is quiet, except for the demure hum of various appliances. The white counter-tops gleam. Everything about his parents’ house is exactly as he left it, but somehow John feels out of place; he tries to confine his mess to one corner of the table. When the doorbell rings, he pauses for a moment, mustard-covered knife hovering over his roast beef sandwich, but then he hears the shuffling sound of his mother walking across the carpeted living room to the door, and he returns to the all-important task of constructing his lunch.
“Can I help you?” Mom’s voice carries through the doorless entryway into the kitchen.
“Uh, yes, ma’am. I’m lookin’ for PFC Christeson?” John would know that voice anywhere, but it’s strange to hear it here, in the domestic stillness of Lebanon, Illinois. Strange, but entirely welcome. John is grinning like a lunatic as he sprints out of the kitchen and to the front door.
Q-tip pretty much dresses like Eminem when he’s off duty. He’s wearing a baggy white t-shirt, baggier jeans, Reeboks, and a ghetto-fabulous, unbent Yankees baseball cap over his maroon do-rag. The overall effect is ridiculous.
“I hope you at least washed that do-rag, you fucking wigger,” John beams.
“John!” his mother exclaims, scandalized. “What have I told you about using that language in my house?”
“Yeah, PFC Christeson,” Q-tip agrees. “Go inside and wash your mouth out with soap.”
John hugs him instead, fast and hard. Q-tip smells clean, which is weird. In Iraq, they all smelled fucking awful. When they part, John’s mom is looking at him expectantly.
“Mom, this is Corporal Stafford,” he explains. “He’s in my platoon. He rode in the command vehicle with me.” John’s mother looks pleased but confused.
“He means we was in the same Humvee as the LT, ma’am,” Q-tip offers. “We sat up the back and covered with our guns while Gunny drove and the LT dealt with the radios and all that.” This is already more than John has told either of his parents about what he did in Iraq.
“Well,” Mom says. “It’s nice to meet you, Corporal—“
“You can call me Evan, ma’am,” Q-tip says, shaking her hand firmly.
It’s strange to see Q-tip being so courteous, but it’s not exactly incongruous, either. John realizes with a start that he’s barely ever seen Q-tip interact with women. Before they shipped out to Kuwait, he’d only seen him on base during work hours, and in Iraq the only women they spoke to were refugees who came up to them to shove sick babies into their arms or to scream at them for bombing the shit out of their country. John supposes Q-tip called them all “ma’am.” He held the babies, too, when asked. He was good at that. John wasn’t.
“Why don’t you come inside, Evan?” John’s mom is giving him a pointed look, which clearly says, get out of the doorway and mind your manners. John does.
John is a little embarrassed to show Q-tip his room. It hasn’t changed at all since John left for training just a few days after his high school graduation, and, accordingly, it looks like a sixteen year old still lives in it. The walls are covered in posters of sports teams and rock bands that John knows Q-tip doesn’t like-- the St. Louis Cardinals and Rams, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Smashing Pumpkins, the White Stripes. His desk is still cluttered with textbooks from his last semester of school—Calculus, AP Physics, AP Spanish Language, paperbacks of Shakespeare plays. His crowded bookshelf still houses a few Star Wars Lego creations. The comforters on his bunk beds have a ridiculous football pattern that he thought was cool at age twelve, when he picked them out.
Q-tip, though, does not seem fazed. He throws his mostly empty rucksack on the top bunk, knowing without asking that John always sleeps on the bottom. Then he turns to the CDs piled neatly around the boom box on the floor under the window. He rifles through and makes faces until he finds Jay-Z, Nelly, and Ludacris. He takes his time studying the albums before him before popping in Country Grammar.
“No Ice Cube?” he bitches.
“Nope.”
“I know what I’m getting you for your birthday,” Q-tip resolves. Then he starts going through all of the drawers in John’s desk.
“That’s some subtle recon you’re doing there,” John comments.
Q-tip turns around and graces him with a devious grin. “I’m swift, silent, and deadly,” he informs John. John rolls his eyes.
“Not that I’m not thrilled to see your ugly mug again,” John says, after a few minutes of Q-tip tearing through his stuff. “But what the fuck are you doing here?”
Q-tip drops a water pistol and a yellow notepad back into the bottom drawer of the desk and shrugs. “Home was weird, man. Thought I’d see what you were up to.” He doesn’t turn around.
“It’s kind of weird here, too,” John confesses.
Q-tip closes the drawer slowly. He scratches the back of his neck and looks at the rug. “Naw, man,” he says. “I mean, look at this shit.” He turns and gestures at the ridiculous room they are standing in.
“Yeah,” John says. “Well, I haven’t spent much time in here since high school.”
“Exactly, man!” Q-tip says. “My mom packed up all my shit and put it in the garage. She needed my room for the new baby. I slept on the living room couch when I went home to visit.”
John knows that Q-tip’s mom re-married when he was in high school, and then had two more kids. It’s one of the things Q-tip told him when they were in Iraq. “That sucks, man,” John offers. It feels inadequate.
“Naw, man,” Q-tip says. “It was all good. Better than a ranger grave. But I was hangin’ with some of my old friends from high school, and they all workin’ crappy jobs, at, like, auto repair and restaurants and shit. Nothin’s really changed for them. Except I think one of them is dealin’. And I just thought, you know, I’d rather be hangin’ with Christeson. So I came here. Your town is kinda a shithole, huh?”
This little speech is so typical of Q-tip’s profane-yet-straightforward thought process that John can’t help but laugh. “Yeah, I guess it’s pretty boring,” he agrees.
“I guess boring is better than getting shot at,” Q-tip muses.
John isn’t sure he agrees, but he says, “For sure,” anyway. Q-tip resumes snooping through the sum total of John’s possessions.
By the time John’s dad gets home at oh-six-hundred hours, they have moved on to Jay-Z, John is lounging on the floor with one of his football-covered pillows, reading an Isaac Asimov novel, and Q-tip has found a sketchpad and a Sharpie. He is cheerfully doodling creepy little cartoon Marines and writing all sorts of nonsense in elaborate block letters. (Q-tip is excellent at block letters. He wrote “CHRISTESON” in block letters on John’s Kevlar one day at Matilda, when he was bored. He didn’t ask John’s permission first, but it looked cool, so John didn’t bitch him out for it. John privately suspects that Q-tip developed this skill by practicing with spray paint in public places, but he hasn’t called him on this.)
John’s dad knocks, but doesn’t wait for an answer before opening the door. That used to drive John crazy in high school, but now it’s weirdly reassuring. John’s dad has treated him differently since he got back from Iraq, and John isn’t sure why, or if he deserves it—it’s kind of comforting that this one thing hasn’t changed.
Q-tip jumps up to shake his hand, instantly courteous again. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Christeson,” he says. Dad’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline as he shakes Q-tip’s hand. Evidently Mom didn’t warn him that Corporal Stafford looks like the Real Slim Shady.
Dad doesn’t miss a beat, though. “Nice to meet you, too, Corporal.” He turns to John. “Mom and I thought we should go out for dinner. Get a proper steak into you boys.” John still hasn’t gained back the weight he lost in Iraq; from the looks of it, Q-tip hasn’t either. “We’re leaving in an hour. Mom says you need to look presentable.” He throws John a significant look.
Presentable is John’s mom’s favorite word. In John’s experience it mostly means, no jeans or t-shirts. Q-tip, predictably, has only brought a few spare boxers, socks, and t-shirts. John throws him a pair of khakis and a white button-down from his dresser. Then he goes to take a shower.
Q-tip showers after him, and when he’s finished, he finds John drinking a glass of water in the kitchen. John sprays a mouthful all over the counter when he sees him.
“John!” scolds his mother. “Clean that up before we leave, please. Honestly.”
John doesn’t even know where to begin. “You know how I think your do-rag is ridiculous?” he starts.
Q-tip glares. He obviously knows where this is going. “Yeah…”
“Well, this is much worse. This is just plain wrong.”
John’s mother joins Q-tip in glaring at him. “I think you look very nice, Evan,” she says.
“I think you look like you just walked out of a J. Crew catalogue, Evan,” John says. “Sixta would be so proud.”
Q-tip waits until John’s mom leaves the kitchen, and then he flips John off. John punches him in the shoulder. Q-tip hauls John into a headlock. John tries to elbow him in the sternum.
“Boys,” John’s dad says from the doorway. Q-tip hurriedly releases John, and looks vaguely guilty. “Time to go.”
At the restaurant, John’s dad orders steaks for everyone. John briefly considers telling his parents about the time when Q-tip caught that sketchy animal in Iraq and then they roasted it on a spit and ate it, but he can’t tell if it’s the sort of thing that’s funny to everyone or the sort of thing that’s funny to Marines and vaguely horrifying to everyone else, so he keeps his mouth shut.
John’s dad pours wine for everyone as well, which surprises John. His parents have always been strict about enforcing the drinking age, and he and Q-tip are, respectively, nineteen and twenty. But when he looks questioningly at his dad, he just says, “As far as I’m concerned, if you boys are old enough to go to war for your country, you’re old enough to drink.”
John agrees.
Mom spends most of the meal extracting from Q-tip all of the information that John has been reluctant to share with her. Q-tip is careful not to tell her anything disturbing. Mostly he just describes the guys in their platoon—Gunny, the LT, Doc Bryan, Ray Person, Sergeants Colbert, Espera, Patrick, and Lovell, Fruity Rudy. He even throws in a few anecdotes about John’s competence for good measure, and tells John’s mom that the LT recommended John for a combat-meritorious promotion that he expects will be approved. John hasn’t gotten around to mentioning that yet, either.
Q-tip is doing an excellent job of censoring his language, and John thinks that his particular brand of accented slang sounds bizarre absent the swear words, but John’s mother seems utterly taken with him. Q-tip does a good parent; who would have guessed?
It’s easier to sleep with the familiar sounds of Q-tip’s shifting and snoring filling his quiet bedroom. John drifts off in the first hour of trying for the first time since returning stateside. He wakes three hours later, though, in desperate need of the toilet. He hurries down the hall to the bathroom, wishing he’d had less wine.
When he stumbles back into his bedroom, it takes him a moment to notice that the timbre of Q-tip’s sleep-sounds has changed. He’s thrashing about in the top bunk, making distressed little choking noises. The football-covered comforter has been kicked to the floor. John shakes his ankle-- it’s how they woke each other up in Iraq. “Q-tip,” he hisses. “Wake up, man, you’re having a nightmare.”
Q-tip sits straight up so quickly that John leaps back in surprise. “I can’t find my gun!” he half-yells, looking straight at John. John grabs his ankle again. “Q-tip. Wake the fuck up, man! You’re in Illinois. You don’t need your gun.”
It takes him a minute of heavy breathing before he seems to get it.
“Are you okay, man?” John asks.
“I’m fine,” Q-tip says tersely. “Go back to sleep, Christeson.”
The next time John wakes, sun is streaming through his window and cold water is trickling down his face.
“What the fuck?” he splutters, sitting up. Q-tip is sitting on his bed, slowly pouring the contents of a glass of water onto his face. The do-rag has made a triumphant return.
“Rise and shine, princess!” he says cheekily.
Q-tip has dark circles under his eyes. In the bright morning light, they make the hollows of his cheeks look particularly pronounced. Q-tip lost even more weight than John in Iraq. He looks like shit. John tells him this.
“Up and at ‘em, Private,” Q-tip insists. “Time for PT.”
“What the fuck time is it?”
“Oh-six-hundred.”
“Can’t this wait till a reasonable hour?” John moans.
“One week of leave, and already you’ve gone soft.” Q-tip shakes his head in mock disappointment. John allows himself to be hauled out of bed.
“I can’t believe this place is for real,” Q-tip says. They are standing in the shady veranda of one of the shops in downtown Lebanon. They walked from John’s house, because John’s parents have taken their respective cars to work, and John’s car now resides in Oceanside.
“Oh, it’s for real,” John says. “I am assured of this.” He shoots Q-tip a conspiring grin. The two of them started this contest, after they left Baghdad and were bored for weeks at that stupid base, to see who could say “I am assured of this” more in casual conversation with the LT, without him calling them out for mocking him. John won easily, mostly because whenever Q-tip uses words like “assured,” he is immediately suspect.
“You grew up here?” Q-tip is evidently still struggling with the picturesque historical downtown area of Lebanon, Illinois.
“Born and raised,” John answers.
“All of the houses look like gingerbread houses. But with more colors,” Q-tip continues, wonderingly.
“Pretty much,” John agrees.
“Okay, man. Be straight with me. Did you used to tip cows in high school?”
That night, John’s parents have a dinner date with some friends. His mom leaves them money for pizza; John orders it with all the toppings.
“It’s weird,” John says, as they settle in for a Star Wars marathon. “It just feels like I’m back in high school, you know? Her giving me money for pizza, and telling me not to stay up too late. Whenever I come back here, it’s like nothing’s changed. But I’ve changed. I mean, I think I have. I feel like I have.”
“Dawg,” says Q-tip. “If you had turned down free food to prove you’re a fuckin’ grown up, I woulda kicked your dumb ass.” Q-tip is diligently picking all of the mushrooms off of his pizza.
“You don’t like mushrooms?” John asks, feeling stupid.
Q-tip makes a face.
“How did I not know you didn’t like mushrooms? You’re my best friend, and I don’t even know what foods you hate.” John feels self-conscious as soon as he says it, so he hurriedly stuffs his mouth with pizza.
“It’s not like they give us mushrooms in MREs,” Q-tip points out. “And, if they had, I woulda eaten them. I was so fuckin’ hungry in Iraq, man.”
“I know,” John says. “I was there when you ate a wild dog.”
“You ate it, too! And don’t even pretend like that shit wasn’t delicious.” Q-tip makes an obscene slurping noise. “Mmmm, wild dog.”
John snorts.
“Anyway,” Q-tip continues. He’s finished clearing his slice of all offensive mushrooms, so he takes a huge bite, and continues to speak rudely through his chewing. “You’re my best friend, too, and I don’t know what food you hate. Of course, I have now seen the faggoty gingerbread-house town where you grew up, so. I think I’m winning.”
“Fuck you, my town is quaint and charming,” John replies.
“The fuck does quaint mean?” Q-tip asks around a sip of beer.
“It means you’re a fucking illiterate moron. Also, I hate tomatoes,” John shares.
“Tomatoes?” Q-tip asks.
“Yeah, they’re these round, red fruits with lots of little seeds.”
“There’s tomatoes in pizza,” Q-tip says. “You like pizza.”
“Well, they’re all squished up in the sauce. I don’t mind that. It’s the texture I object to.”
Q-tip regards him incredulously. “You object to the texture of tomatoes? That is the most retarded shit I’ve ever heard, dawg.”
John throws a mushroom at his head.
John supposes he passes out at some point during The Empire Strikes Back, because the last thing he remembers is Cloud City, and then, all of a sudden, there is sunlight streaming through the living room window. Q-tip is drooling on his chest. His grandmother’s homemade quilt is thrown over both of them.
“Q-tip. Wake up.”
Q-tip does not wake up. John removes Q-tip’s do-rag and throws it across the room. Q-tip continues to snore into John’s pectoral muscles. John sticks his finger into his mouth to get it all spitty, and then jams it into Q-tip’s ear. Q-tip yowls. Mission accomplished.
“You were cuddling with me,” John accuses.
“Well,” Q-tip sounds sleepy and comfortable. “Good thing Ray Person’s not here to tell us how gay this is, then.”
“I don’t think we need Ray Person to figure out that this is really gay.”
“That’s cool, dawg. I’m going back to sleep now. Keep your fingers away from my ears.”
“You are not going back to sleep on my chest. Q-tip. Come on.”
Q-tip’s eyes are already closed. “Shut the fuck up. Pillows don’t talk.”
“What happened to PT? I’m going to get all soft and civilian-y if you don’t make me run through cornfields and shit,” John prods.
Q-tip lifts his head slightly and opens his eyes like it hurts to do so. They are a light blue in the dawn light. Now deprived of his do-rag, his hair is white-blond and tousled. Suddenly, he looks about sixteen years old, and impossibly innocent. “Christeson,” he says, and the familiar teasing tone is missing from his voice. “This is the first time I’ve slept through the night since I got back from Iraq. Just leave it, man, okay? We’ll do PT later. We’ll do extra push ups.”
“Yeah, okay.” John’s voice sounds strangely breathy. “You’ve got another two hours. Then my parents will be up, and I’m going to get out of here so they don’t decide we’re secret lovers or some shit, okay?”
Q-tip just nods blearily, before collapsing against John’s chest again. It only takes him three minutes to fall back asleep; John knows because he lies awake, watching. He watches Q-tip’s rib cage expand and contract beneath his white cotton t-shirt, he watches Q-tip drool a little more on his chest (and, strangely, doesn’t mind), he watches as the light in the living room becomes less orange and more white. He waits breathlessly while his parents shuffle and thump around their upstairs bedroom, turning the shower on and off. He waits until he hears footsteps steadily descending the stairs, and then he moves to wake Q-tip. His hand can’t reach Q-tip’s ankle from this position, so he snakes his own ankle around Q-tip’s, and kicks insistently until Q-tip starts to shift, and then he shakes his shoulder with his hand.
“Wake up!” he hisses.
Q-tip stumbles off the couch and into the downstairs bathroom. John half-runs into the kitchen to pretend he’s been eating breakfast for a while.
The thing about living in Lebanon, Illinois is... well, there isn’t a hell of a lot to do.
“I’m sorry it’s so boring,” he says to Q-tip. They are lying in John’s backyard. They did a longer run and extra push-ups to make up for Q-tip’s lie-in this morning, and now they are lazily basking in the sun.
“It’s not so bad,” Q-tip says. He is trying to whistle with a blade of grass. It’s not working out so well. John can’t believe no one has ever taught Q-tip how to do this before.
“I can’t believe no one’s ever taught you how to do this before,” he says.
“Fuck off,” Q-tip says cheerfully. “We didn’t all grow up in a God damn corn field.”
“You don’t need to blow so hard. That just messes you up.”
Q-tip’s face is flushed. He flips John off.
“Fine. Don’t take my excellent advice. Even though I am clearly the resident expert on how to amuse yourself in a boring field of grass.”
Q-tip abandons his now hopelessly ripped blade of grass. “Seriously though. While I am here, I expect to tip at least one cow. Get on that, Christeson.”
“We’re not tipping any cows, Q-tip.”
“The fuck not? I’ve never tipped a cow before!”
“Because they can’t get up, fucknuts.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
John sits up. He’s been staring idly up at the cotton-ball clouds, but now he looks straight at Q-tip. “It’s sad, man. I don’t like it.”
This shuts Q-tip up for a good three minutes. John lies back down and closes his eyes, though the daylight still seeps redly through his eyelids.
“Okay,” Q-tip says, at last. “No tipping cows. What the fuck else did you do in high school, anyway?”
“I don’t know, man,” John says. “I was always busy in high school. I played a lot of sports. And I did student government, and all that bullshit. I was even in a Shakespeare play.”
“You for real?”
“Yeah. I mean, I sucked. Obviously.”
“So. What sports did you do, man?”
“Football. Hockey. Baseball.”
“That’s a lot of sports, dawg.”
“One per season. There wasn’t a lot else to do around here.”
“I didn’t do no sports,” Q-tip confides.
“Seriously?” John sits up again to look at him.
“Naw, man. I wasn’t such a team player. I was always in trouble and shit.”
“But you are a team player,” John points out. “You’re in the Corps. And you’re really athletic.” John can’t see much beneath Q-tip’s baggy t-shirt, but that doesn’t matter; he’s seen it before. Q-tip is all lean muscle, and he’s more an asset than a hindrance in a game of pick-up football.
“Well,” Q-tip concedes. “I did spend a lot of time runnin’. Away from the cops.”
John wonders if something might be up when Q-tip, unsolicited, removes his do-rag and baseball cap for dinner. When Q-tip offers to help with the dishes, John is sure something is up. Then Q-tip starts aggressively scrubbing down every surface in the kitchen with Lysol and a sponge, and John can’t hold his tongue any longer.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asks. He is eating a popsicle. It is grape flavored. It is dripping sugary, purple goop all over the counter that Q-tip just sterilized. Q-tip seems very distressed by this.
“I’m cleaning the kitchen, asshole,” Q-tip informs him. “Stop dripping on my hard work.”
“I can see that you’re cleaning the kitchen.” John’s popsicle drips some more on the white counter-top. Q-tip clutches his sponge a little tighter. “My question is why on earth would you do that? It’s already clean. And my mom always cleans it.”
Q-tip grabs the popsicle out of John’s hand and hurls it viciously into the garbage can. “I’m cleaning the kitchen to be helpful, Christeson, because I am a guest.”
John gapes at him for a good minute. “Jesus Christ, who died and made you Emily Post?”
“Who the fuck is Emily Post?”
“It doesn’t even matter. I’m calling Chaffin and telling him that you left both of your nuts in Iraq.” John shouts this last over his shoulder as he walks out the kitchen and up the stairs, which earns him a “John! Language!” from the living room.
John’s sister shows up at noon on Wednesday. John and Q-tip are in the kitchen engaged in a sandwich-making contest. The contest is to see who can make a more disgusting sandwich. Both competitors have free reign in the fridge and pantry, and ten minutes to construct their masterpieces. Then they are going to switch sandwiches and eat. First to vomit loses.
Sarah shaves precious seconds off of the sandwich construction portion of the competition by dropping her laundry-filled duffel on the kitchen table and saying, “Oh my God, what is that smell?”
The smell is mostly anchovies and pickles, which Q-tip has jammed into the sandwich he is constructing for John. Along with a whiff of seriously dubious hard boiled egg, which John is slicing up to throw into the sandwich he is preparing for Q-tip.
“It’s food, genius,” John says, turning around to tell her to get lost. He doesn’t get the chance; Sarah has already thrown her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder. She is squeezing him really hard.
“Um,” John says awkwardly. “Sarah? You’re crushing vital organs.”
“Shut up, John,” she says. It sounds like she is crying. Q-tip slinks out the screened door that leads from the kitchen to the porch. “I was so fucking worried about you.” John awkwardly pats the back of her head. He doesn’t know what else to do.
At the dinner table, Sarah regales them with tales of college life. John is immeasurably relieved; he half expected her to grill him about Iraq. He should have known better. Sarah has always had more sense than their parents.
Q-tip (who has, once again, put aside the do-rag for the duration of the meal) waits until she finishes a story about hazing some freshmen comping the newspaper before he asks, “What college do you go to, Sarah?”
“Harvard,” she tells him, cheerfully.
Q-tip’s head swivels almost comically until he is facing John. “Your sister goes to Harvard?”
“Don’t look at me, man, I had nothing to do with it.”
“How come you didn’t tell me your sister went to Harvard?”
“I did.”
“You didn’t.”
“I told Rolling Stone. That’s as good as telling the whole platoon.”
“Well, why didn’t you go to college?” Q-tip persists.
John fielded this question a million times two years ago, when he first decided to join up. It is no less annoying now than it was then. “I don’t know, Q-tip,” he says. “I guess I just thought that deliberately driving into every ambush between Nasiriyah and Al Kut in an unarmored Humvee with no clear mission, no rations, and no gun lube would be more fun.” John throws his fork down angrily, and it clinks against the china. The sound rings out into a long moment of quiet. Then, all at once, John’s family breaks it.
“What do you mean, unarmored Humvees?” says John’s dad.
“What do you mean, no rations?” says John’s mom.
“You deliberately drove into ambushes?” says Sarah. “How is that even remotely logical?”
“I’m not hungry anymore,” says John.
John is hiding in his tree house. It’s not really a tree house-- it’s really just a platform of sanded planks built into the branches of this one tree at the edge of the forest near his parents’ property. It’s also not much of a hiding place, since Sarah knows exactly where to look for him. Even if John couldn’t see the bobbing white glow of her flashlight, he would be able to hear the crunching and crashing and thumping that she makes picking her way through twigs and leaves and brambles in her converse. Behind her, Q-tip’s footfalls are silent, and he walks only in the places where Sarah has already stepped. Don’t blaze a trail, John thinks, remembering Q-tip telling him to tread in Sergeant Colbert’s footsteps.
“This is the fortress of teen angst, where he comes to brood,” Sarah tells Q-tip, when they are standing under the platform.
“I don’t have teen angst,” John calls down.
“Yeah,” Sarah concedes. “I guess you have soldier angst now.”
“We’re not soldiers, we’re Marines!” John and Q-tip exclaim in perfect, horrified unison.
Sarah laughs a little, but it sounds sort of sad. “Well, Marines, I am going inside to pretend like I’m making headway on my thesis research.” Sarah is always doing schoolwork, even over vacation. Her thesis is on the Lincoln assassination. “You can deal with my brother, Evan.”
When Sarah leaves, she takes the flashlight with her. She knows John and Q-tip don’t need it.
“This is cool,” Q-tip says, his head appearing at the edge of the platform. It’s dark in the woods without the constant backdrop of artillery fire lighting up the sky, but John’s eyes have adjusted, and he can see the muscles in Q-tip’s arms tighten as he hauls himself up next to John. “Did you build it yourself?” he asks.
John snorts. “I used to think I did,” he says. “But my dad did most of the work. I was only seven.”
“I’ve never been in a tree house,” Q-tip says.
“It’s more like a tree platform,” John offers.
“Whatever, dawg. I like it. Can we sleep here?”
“Sure, man,” John agrees. There are sleeping bags in the house, but he doesn’t move to fetch them. It’s June, and the Illinois night is warm. A hell of a lot warmer than night in the desert, anyway. They don’t really need sleeping bags.
“Yo, man,” Q-tip says. “How come you ain’t told your family shit about Iraq?” Q-tip isn’t big on beating around the bush.
“I don’t know, man,” John says, annoyed. “Maybe I just don’t fucking feel like talking about it.”
“I know,” Q-tip says. He sounds like he’s trying to tread carefully. “No one expects you to talk about the fucked up shit. But, dawg, they didn’t even know who I was till I showed up here. We rode next to each other for a month, and my name didn’t even come up?”
“I’m so sorry if I’ve injured your sense of self-importance,” John says sarcastically.
“I’m very injured. I’m gonna go cry in a minute.” Q-tip’s attempt at lightening the mood falls flat. He struggles to regain his point. “It’s just, man, you keep saying how your mom is treating you like a kid and all that. But it’s like you want her to. It’s like you came here to pretend you wasn’t a Marine anymore or somethin’. You don’t want them to know nothin’ about your life. And you’re fuckin’ hiding in your tree house like a kid.”
“Fuck you,” John says.
Q-tip doesn’t say anything. He’s sitting with his knees tucked up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. He’s looking at John like he has all the time in the world to wait for him to come up with a better answer.
“It’s just,” John struggles. “I don’t want to tell them about the bad stuff, you know? But if I tell them just the good stuff, and make myself sound like, I don’t know, some kind of bullshit war hero, then I’ll feel like a liar. It’s easier if they just think I’m still their kid, who plays football and hides in the tree house and drinks the milk out of the carton.”
“Well,” Q-tip says. “I hate to break it to you, man, but you ain’t really foolin’ them. I heard them talkin’ in the kitchen. They’re pretty worried about you.”
“That’s fucking awesome,” John says.
“Well, you didn’t even tell them about the combat-meritorious promotion, dawg. That’s kind of a big fuckin’ deal. You know they ain’t given anyone that shit since Vietnam?”
“LT told me,” John says. “Iceman’s getting one, too.”
“Yeah, I heard,” Q-tip says.
For a while they just sit there and listen to the sounds of the animals in the woods. The crickets and frogs are raising a real racket. It doesn’t sound anything like the desert. Then John looks back up at Q-tip. “Alright, dude, your turn to share. What the fuck are you doing here?”
Q-tip snorts. “Got sick of crashing on the couch, man. I heard you had some really cool bunk beds with football sheets.”
“That’s hilarious. I’m waiting for your real answer.”
“I dunno, dawg,” Q-tip says, ducking his head to avoid John’s probing eyes. “Maybe I just missed your ugly mug.”
John grunts. Q-tip isn’t telling the whole truth, but at least he’s telling part of the truth. It’ll do for tonight.
When John and Q-tip get back from their morning run, Sarah is making pancakes. Of course, because Sarah is, well, Sarah, and an overachiever, she is actually making whole wheat buttermilk pancakes with blueberries.
“It’s so weird that you guys dress alike,” Sarah says, crinkling her nose as she flips a pancake from the skillet to a plate on the counter. John and Q-tip are both wearing their proper PT gear-- olive green t-shirts with the USMC logo on the breast and “CHRISTESON” and “STAFFORD” stenciled across the chest.
“Everyone in the Corps dresses alike, Sarah,” John says, rolling his eyes. Q-tip swipes some blueberries out of the bowl, and Sarah whacks his knuckles with her spatula.
“You don’t find that freaky?” she asks.
John does not, in fact, find it freaky. He finds it normal. It’s this domestic tableau—Q-tip bonding with his sister—that is freaky. Sarah is an individual. Even if she weren’t a girl, she would never make it in the military. But before John can start cracking jokes about how not everyone feels the need to be a Special Snowflake, Mom sweeps into the kitchen, dressed for work.
“Honey, you made pancakes!” she exclaims, stating the obvious. “How thoughtful!”
John scowls at his Special Snowflake of a sister. It is sort of thoughtful. He hasn’t had pancakes since he got back from Iraq.
Q-tip carries the plate of pancakes to the kitchen table like the disgustingly helpful guest that he apparently is. He also sets the places with forks and knives, but he puts the fork on the right and the knife on the left, so John goes around the table sneakily changing them while Q-tip stands at the counter swallowing his pills with orange juice.
“What are those for, Evan?” Sarah asks, when the entire family is seated at the table, passing around the plate of pancakes.
“My leg,” Q-tip says. He is preoccupied with stuffing as much pancake in his mouth as he can fit. John decides to elaborate for him.
“He took an inch of shrapnel to the leg in this ambush outside Al Muwaffaqiyah. But he tourniqueted himself, got back up on his weapon, and returned fire. Then he refused to get cas-evaced.” John wonders if he sounds as dorkily proud as he feels. He covers by following Q-tip’s excellent example and jamming as much pancake in his mouth as possible.
The pancakes actually taste really good. Perhaps there is something to be said for whole wheat flour and buttermilk.
John’s mom looks vaguely horrified. His dad is inscrutable. Sarah just says, “Well, aren’t you hardcore.”
“Yeah,” Q-tip agrees around a syrupy mouthful. “But it got infected, though. When we was camped outside Baghdad and everyone was getting sick.”
“It was really nasty,” John elaborates.
“There was pus,” says Q-tip.
“Green pus,” John specifies.
“Ew,” says Sarah.
“Wanna see?” asks Q-tip.
“No,” Sarah says firmly.
“Not at the table, please, Evan,” says John’s mom.
“Yes, ma’am,” Q-tip says. Then he turns to Sarah. “It’s not as gross as before, anyway. Since I’m takin’ antibiotics.”
In deference to the fact that the Christeson household has apparently reached a critical mass of car-less post-adolescents, John’s dad has started dropping his mother off at work, leaving John, Sarah, and Q-tip with the old Chevy Blazer. Sarah has seized possession of the keys.
“I’m the best driver,” she says loftily as she turns onto the highway.
“That is just blatantly untrue!” John exclaims from the back seat. “You realize that we’ve both been trained in offensive driving, right?” John is kind of playing up his skills for the sake of argument. Neither he nor Q-tip actually drove the Humvee in combat; Gunny did almost all of the driving in Iraq, and when he needed a break, Fick mostly took over. But they did both have to learn to handle the vehicles when they were stationed at Matilda.
“All the more reason for me to drive,” Sarah insists. “We practice defensive driving here in the United States of America, thank you very much.”
“Yo, man,” says Q-tip. “Remember when Baptista ran over that car in Al Gharraf? That was fuckin’ offensive drivin’ right there.”
John actually has no memory of this. “I don’t think I saw it, man.”
“Dawg, how’d you not see that?” Q-tip exclaims. “He was right fuckin’ behind us.”
“I don’t know, Q-tip,” John says. “Maybe I was busy shooting people.”
“Well, it was cool, man. It fuckin’ crushed that car. I tell ya, Humvees be slow motherfuckers, but they’re good for somethin’.”
John thinks about sitting in the back of the command vehicle with Q-tip, one leg hanging off the back of the Humvee, M-16 trained on his sector, his back pressed up against Q-tip’s as Q-tip bobs slightly and belts out a Jay-Z song. “Yeah,” John says. “It’s weird being in these puny civilian vehicles after all that.”
“Puny?” says a scandalized Sarah. “This car is not puny, John. This car is an immense, gas-guzzling abomination. This car is causing global warming. I keep begging Mom to sell it and get a more fuel-efficient car, but she refuses, even though she no longer has your football gear as an excuse.”
“Yo, John,” Q-tip says. “Your sister’s a liberal, Ivy League tree-hugger. You a bisexual, too, Sarah?” he asks cheekily.
Sarah flips him off.
“Both hands on the wheel!” Q-tip howls obnoxiously. “You’re supposed to be defensive driving!”
It takes John a minute to realize that Q-tip just called him by his given name. He can’t remember Q-tip ever doing that before—in Iraq it was always “Christeson.” He wonders if the sudden switch means something, or if it’s just the result of constant exposure to family members who refer to him only as “John.”
John cuts Q-tip’s hair sitting on the steps of the back porch. It’s gotten so long that the top is downright floppy. Sixta would have a shit fit if he saw it.
“I could almost braid this,” John points out as he turns on the clippers.
“I had corn rows in high school,” Q-tip says.
John has to hold the clippers away from Q-tip’s head so he can laugh without injuring an ear. “Oh my God, of course you did. Is that when you developed the do-rag habit?”
“Yeah.”
“You realize you don’t need it anymore, right? I mean, the point is to preserve the ‘do,’ or whatever. You don’t have any hair to preserve anymore. It’s just silly.”
“Dawg, why you always gotta be hatin’ on my do-rag?”
“Because it’s fucking ridiculous, you wigger,” John says cheerfully.
“Shut the fuck up and cut my fuckin’ hair, you racist,” Q-tip replies.
Cutting hair actually requires a certain level of focus, so John doesn’t talk while he does it. He’s never actually done this for anyone else before. He’s done his own hair, of course, sloppily and with the help of a mirror. But he tends to simplify his own cut by nearly shaving it all off at about the same length. Q-tip wears his hair (though it is rarely actually visible) in a proper high and tight.
John starts at the bottom, because that’s the part that he actually does know how to cut. He flips the clippers to the lowest setting, and shaves nearly all of the hair off. He starts near Q-tip’s temple, keeping a firm hand on the back of his neck as he moves the clippers slowly back towards himself. Q-tip’s neck is loose and pliant under his fingers as he tilts his head to accommodate the humming blade.
John flicks clumps of hair away as he goes, feeling the warm hardness of Q-tip’s skull under a scant barrier of hair. It’s kind of weird, seeing the shape of Q-tip’s head, exposing it with his clippers. He’s so used to Q-tip in his Kevlar. When he closes his eyes and conjures a mental image of Q-tip, it is of him in his MOPP suit, grinning, M-16 slung over his shoulder, with that ridiculous gay daisy doodled into the camo of his helmet.
He is careful to avoid clipping Q-tip’s ears, which are pink, probably from sunburn. The hair gets everywhere—in John’s lap, on the backs of his hands. It clings where it lands, because it’s so fine. John never used to understand the difference between thick hair and thin hair; he couldn’t figure out what Sarah was talking about when she bitched that her hair was thick and unruly. But, up close, he sees that the shafts of Q-tip’s hairs are a fraction of the size of his own. And they’re so light. There’s something so deliciously ironic about this guy who does his level best to pretend he’s Black having the whitest blond hair he’s seen in anyone over the age of five.
John takes his time on the fade, tilting the clippers slightly so it looks less severe. He turns the setting up higher for the longer bit, and runs the clippers from the back of Q-tip’s head to the front to preserve his bangs, such as they are.
It’s not a bad haircut, John thinks as he runs his hands through it, brushing out the remaining loose bits. Q-tip leans into his hand a bit, sort of like a dog when you scratch behind its ears.
“Wow,” says a voice behind him when he finishes. John didn’t even hear Sarah come out onto the porch. Some Recon Marine he is. “I think you missed your calling as a barber,” she says around the popsicle she is eating.
John throws a handful of Q-tip’s fine, pale hair in her face.
“Ew, John!” she shrieks. “It’s all over my popsicle! That’s so gross.”
Sarah is twenty-one. It is therefore her responsibility as a dutiful and generous older sister to provide John with booze. Luckily, Sarah is also fairly intelligent. John does not need to explain this to her. On Friday night, after dinner, their parents go to see a movie with friends. Not five minutes after they leave, Sarah emerges from her bedroom holding two bottles of tequila.
“Anne and Margaret are coming over for margaritas,” she says. “You two are welcome to join us.”
John isn’t sure how it’s possible, but Q-tip’s grin actually looks wider than his face.
Anne and Margaret are Sarah’s best friends from high school; both of them go to college in state. They show up together around nine in Margaret’s red 1994 Jetta with chips, guacamole, and a shit ton of limes. Sarah is hell-bent on squeezing their own lime juice.
This really should not surprise John. Sarah is as particular about her alcoholic beverages as she is about her pancakes. The concept of drinking just to get drunk is anathema to her. There needs to be fresh lime juice. There need to be themed snacks. Sarah even digs a Tito Puente record out of their father’s dusty collection and puts it on.
“I don’t think Tito Puente was Mexican, Sarah,” John says. Sergeant Espera would have a field day, if he were here. White kids trying to be Mexican, and failing miserably.
“Shut up, John,” Sarah says. She is busy measuring tequila and freshly squeezed lime juice into the exact proportions specified by the recipe she found online. Q-tip just rolls his eyes and spikes everyone’s glass with extra tequila when Sarah turns around to transfer the guacamole into an aesthetically pleasing bowl.
“How are you two even related?” he hisses at John, as John jams a guacamole-covered corn chip into his mouth.
“We’re not,” Sarah calls over her shoulder. She is carrying the platter of chips and the bowl of guacamole into the living room, where their Mexican evening is apparently going to take place. “Gypsies left John on our doorstep. Our parents were too Christian to turn him over to the state.”
John snorts into his margarita. Then he takes a long sip. The tequila burns pleasantly. The fresh lime juice actually does taste significantly better than store-bought sour mix. Fucking Sarah.
John and Q-tip follow Sarah out into the living room. John remembers a time when Sarah and her friends would have scoffed at the idea of hanging out with her kid brother, but no one blinks at his inclusion tonight. John wonders if this is simply because he’s already crossed that magical, equalizing line of high school graduation, or if there’s something about getting shot at in a desert that makes him automatically an adult.
“So, Evan,” says Margaret. She takes a sip of her margarita, and her eyes widen as she registers the extra tequila that Q-tip dumped in it behind Sarah’s back. “Why does John call you Q-tip?”
“Because he’s a retard,” Q-tip says, without missing a beat. He shovels some guacamole into his mouth, using a corn chip as a crude platform.
“It’s because of his hair,” John explains. “It’s so white, he looks kind of like a Q-tip. See?” John removes the do-rag and ruffles the scant quarter-inch of hair that remains on the top of Q-tip’s head.
“Yo, dawg, give that back!” Q-tip snatches the maroon cloth out of John’s hand and jams it back over his offensively blond hair.
John snorts and downs the rest of his margarita in one gulp. “He lets us get away with it, though,” he explains, “because of the rapper Q-tip. You know. From A Tribe Called Quest.” John is actually pretty sure that Margaret has never heard of A Tribe Called Quest. She doesn’t listen to rap. But that’s not the question Margaret latches onto.
“Who’s ‘us,’ John?” she asks.
Q-tip looks at her like she has brain damage. “Bravo-Two,” he says.
“Our platoon,” John explains.
Sarah is, predictably, a lightweight. This is what happens when you weigh one hundred and five pounds and spend your Saturday nights chasing footnotes in the library. It only takes two margaritas before Sarah is lying on the floor, lecturing them all on some nineteenth-century theater critic and essayist who was apparently madly in love with Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln. This is the sort of nonsense that Sarah talks about when she is drunk. She takes her thesis research way too seriously.
“I think it’s time for some water, Sarah,” John says, lifting her easily off the carpet. John has carried gear heavier than Sarah across mountainous terrain during training exercises. He steers her into the kitchen.
Sarah pours herself a glass of water from the gallon bottle of Poland Spring that resides in the fridge. The Christesons’ tap water comes from a well on their property. It’s not unsafe for drinking, but it tastes funky. After the ass water in Iraq that gave his platoon the shits, John thinks it tastes delicious. He is irrationally angry with Sarah for drinking bottled water when refugees in Iraq are scooping sewer water out of the streets in buckets.
It’s unfair, and John knows it. Sarah doesn’t even know about the refugees in Iraq. She doesn’t know because the news networks don’t care, and because John hasn’t told her.
“Did you know that Edwin Booth actually saved Abraham Lincoln’s son’s life? How ironic is that?” Sarah says, dutifully sipping her water.
John pours some straight tequila into his empty margarita glass. “Jesus Christ, Sarah. The things you talk about when you’re drunk.”
“Sorry,” she says. “I realize I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about people who were alive one hundred and fifty years ago.” Only Sarah would use the word “inordinate” in casual conversation when trashed.
“That’s kind of what I mean,” John says. He chases this sentence with a massive, burning gulp of tequila, because he’s afraid he won’t have the balls to continue otherwise. “You think about Edwin and James Wilkes Booth. You think about your summer internship in St. Louis. You think about whether you’ll make Phi Beta Kappa. That’s, like, that’s the stuff that you think about. Every day.” John pauses for another sip of tequila. “I think about when my platoon will get warning orders to go back to Iraq. I think about whether Sergeant Patrick will ever walk on his foot again. I think about what the hell would have happened if that inch of shrapnel had gone into Evan’s heart instead of his leg. Then where the fuck would I be?”
John looks up to see Sarah leaning against the fridge, eyes pink and wet with unshed tears. He feels instantly terrible. He isn’t trying to guilt trip her. He doesn’t hate her for not having fought in Iraq. In fact, Iraq is precisely the last place he wants Sarah to go, ever. He went to war so that she could keep going to Harvard, researching nineteenth-century actors, and pursuing internships in St. Louis, without ever worrying about the building she’s studying in getting blown up.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he offers weakly.
“No,” Sarah says. “No, you’re right. My life is frivolous. I get it.” She blinks and sniffles a bit, but doesn’t cry. “I’m just glad you’re home, John. I was so worried about you.”
She looks sad and small as she says this. And John knows when he looks at her that it isn’t true—her life isn’t frivolous. Sarah doesn’t spend most of her time thinking about her thesis or her grades or her job at the school paper—she spends it worrying about whether he’ll get shot in Iraq. John steps forward and pulls her into a hug. Her hair, which is dark and curly like his, spills over his arm and tickles his wrist where he holds the back of her neck gently. Sarah has always been a bossy, protective older sister. But as he stands there, looking at the top of her head, John feels as though they’ve traded places. Somehow, he is now the grown-up, and she is the baby, and he is responsible for her. The weight is new and strange, but not unwelcome.
Sarah, though, pulls herself together fairly quickly. She stands back and wipes her eyes on the sleeves of her blue and white button-down shirt. “I’m glad Evan’s okay, too,” she says. “I mean, I’m glad the shrapnel injury was minor. I mean, you know what I mean.”
She’s still drunk, bless her.
“Yeah,” John says. “I know what you mean, Sarah. I’ll tell him he’s wormed his way into your cold, academic heart.”
Sarah takes another sip of her water. “He’s kind of your best friend, huh?”
“Yeah,” John answers. “I guess he is.”
“What is he doing here?” Sarah asks. “Shouldn’t he be with his own family? Is he okay?”
“I don’t know, Sarah,” John says. “I don’t know.”
Margaret, at any rate, seems to think that Q-tip is okay. More than okay, even. The more she drinks, the funnier she seems to find his jokes. Q-tip, to John’s immense relief, does not seem to be reciprocating her obvious interest. John has known Margaret since he was five; it would just be weird if she hooked up with one of the guys in his platoon.
John plops himself between them on the couch, in the space Q-tip creates as soon as he sees John exit the kitchen. Q-tip snakes his arm around John’s neck and gives him a particularly aggressive noogie.
“Srewby, man!” John yelps. “Fuck you!”
Q-tip chortles drunkenly. “Don’t be such a pussy, Christeson. That don’t hurt. You know what hurts? Shrapnel in your leg. That shit hurts.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” John says. “You’re a big fucking war hero.” Q-tip has stopped knuckling his skull, but his arm is still wrapped around John’s neck.
“They cuddle a lot,” Sarah tells Anne sagely, stealing a sip of her margarita. “It’s weirdly intimate. Suddenly I understand why all war literature is so homoerotic.”
John flips her off, and shoves Q-tip’s arm off of him.
“Ray Person thinks war is pretty homoerotic, too,” says Q-tip, unfazed. “You two should talk.”
“Who’s Ray Person?” Sarah asks. She is scowling at Anne, who has reclaimed her beverage.
“Doesn’t matter,” John says. “You will never, ever meet him.”
“Let’s go to the tree house,” Q-tip says. They are sitting on the porch steps; the sounds of drunken laughter filter through the open kitchen windows over the background noise of the television. John and Q-tip fled the house when the girls decided to watch the BBC Pride and Prejudice. No amount of cajoling could convince them to watch The Return of the Jedi instead, so Q-tip and John are now alone outside, passing the bottle of tequila back and forth.
“You sober enough to climb it without breaking your neck?” John asks.
Q-tip looks offended. “Of course!” he scoffs.
“Then let’s go,” John says, passing the bottle back as he stands. He likes sleeping outside better, anyway, even if the night is too warm and humid, and the wood of the tree house is softer than concrete or hard-packed desert sand. Q-tip seems to feel the same.
Despite Q-tip’s insistence on his own sobriety, it takes them a while to get up to the platform. Their feet keep slipping, and there’s a lot of cursing and laughing. They aren’t exactly doing First Recon Battalion proud. John points this out, and Q-tip just laughs more. They’ve both managed, at last, to haul themselves up onto the platform, and are lying in a haphazard heap beneath the branches. John’s head is resting on Q-tip’s right bicep. It is more comfortable than his Kevlar. John approves of this arrangement; he decides not to move.
He’s not sure what happened to the bottle of tequila.
“I like the tree house,” Q-tip says.
“I know you like the tree house, Q-tip,” John says, snuggling into Q-tip’s arm a little. “We have already established that fact.”
“It’s a good place to hide,” Q-tip says.
“I thought hiding was for kids and bitches?” John asks. He’s only half listening. He is tired, and the tequila is making him feel all warm and buzzy. Q-tip is a hot, solid weight beside him, and it’s hard not to move farther into it.
“Then I guess I’m actin’ like a kid right now. Or a bitch. Or both.”
Now John is listening. Q-tip isn’t offering anything more, though, so John decides to push it. “Is this you telling me why you showed up at my house with no warning?”
Q-tip takes his time finding his words. “I fucked up, John. In Tampa. I did something bad.”
John sits up. The woods swim. His chest feels tight. “How bad is bad, Q-tip?” he asks.
“I got in a fight,” Q-tip says quietly. In the dark, John can barely see his face, but the whites of his eyes glint a bit in the moonlight.
“With who?” John asks.
“My friend,” Q-tip says. “The one who’s dealin’.”
“Was that what you fought over?” John asks. “Him dealing?”
“No. Maybe. I dunno, dawg.” Q-tip closes his eyes. “It’s like what you said about your family. You go home, and everyone thinks you’re still the same person. But you don’t feel like the same person. But you feel like you gotta pretend, you know? For the other people?”
“Yeah,” John agrees.
“The old me didn’t have no respect for nothin’, dawg,” Q-tip confides. “And my friends in Tampa, they’re still like that. But I ain’t like that no more. Some of the shit they get up to, dawg? I don’t like it. It ain’t right.”
“Q-tip,” John says warily. “How bad did you fuck this guy up?” John knows that Q-tip, like all of them, can do some serious damage when he wants to.
“Pretty bad, man. For sure I broke some bones.”
“Jesus, Q-tip! Are you in trouble with the cops?”
“Naw, man, of course not! He’s a dealer! He ain’t talkin’ to no cops. That’s not what I’m worried about, dawg.”
Q-tip might not be worried about it, but John certainly is. He feels some of the weight lift off his chest. No cops. Q-tip isn’t going to be dishonorably discharged. That’s something, anyway.
Q-tip opens his eyes and sits up. He grabs John by both of his shoulders. “It wasn’t right, man. That shit’s something the old me woulda done. I know better now. I know better, John.”
“Yeah,” John agrees, bringing his left hand up to rest on Q-tip’s arm between them. “Yeah, you do.”
For a few minutes they just look at each other, and listen to the sounds of the crickets and frogs and small furry animals scampering around the woods.
“It’s gonna be okay, Q-tip. You’ll fix it.”
Q-tip laughs, but it’s not his normal, happy laugh. “I don’t know how to fix shit, John. I just know how to fuck shit up. I’m an expert at fucking shit up. Like we fucked shit up in Iraq and then just ran off and left our mess.”
“Yeah, well,” John says. “If it makes you feel any better, I think we’re going to have to go back and fix that shit, too. Probably in a couple of months.”
“Yeah,” Q-tip agrees.
“You want to sleep out here?” John asks.
“Yeah,” Q-tip says, promptly lying down and dragging John with him. “No offense to your football sheets or nothin’, dawg. I just sleep better outside.”
“Me too,” John confesses.
“It’s even better with you snorin’ at me,” Q-tip says.
“It would probably be even better if shit was blowing up and we both smelled like ass.”
Q-tip laughs into John’s neck. His breath is hot and damp. It smells like tequila and lime juice, and his neck smells like sweat, and the soap in John’s shower.
“Q-tip,” John says. “You’re not going to roll off the platform, are you? If you have a nightmare?”
Q-tip straightens so that he’s lying next to John. Their heads are level on the platform. “Naw, man, I’m good,” he says. His voice sounds strangely hoarse, maybe from the liquor. He turns to look at John, and his eyes are inches away from John’s own.
“Good,” answers John, sounding a little odd himself.
It’s Q-tip who leans forward, plants his lips on John’s. But John doesn’t tense beneath him or shove him off. He just lets his eyes slide shut and concentrates on the way Q-tip’s mouth feels against his. Q-tip’s lips are still chapped and cracked from the desert. When he nips at John’s bottom lip, John opens his mouth slightly to let Q-tip in. His tongue is warm, rough, and limey.
It is a sloppy, boozy kiss. Q-tip shifts more and more of his weight towards John, until he is lying on top of him, half crushing him, half suspending his weight on his arms, which are planted on either side of John’s head, as if he is about to start doing push ups. The hardness of Q-tip’s chest against his own is unfamiliar and masculine, but it doesn’t stop John from running his hands up Q-tip’s back, under his baggy white t-shirt, feeling the shifting lean muscles under his fingers.
They both tense when a twig snaps directly beneath the tree house. For a long moment Q-tip holds himself above John, and they breathe silently but warmly into the inch of summer air between them.
“It’s probably a raccoon,” John whispers, but the moment is broken. Q-tip lies back on the wooden platform, and shifts until they are no longer touching.
“We should go to sleep,” he says.
“Okay,” John agrees, and lies awake, listening to the quickness of Q-tip’s breathing.
John wakes naturally at oh-five-hundred. Drinking excessively always fucks with his sleep cycle—he never manages more than three hours in a row after a night of tequila like that. He expects Q-tip to still be snoring drunkenly, but when he turns his head to check, he finds Q-tip wide awake beside him, staring up at the leafy canopy overhead. Their shoulders and the sides of their arms are pressed warmly together. John wonders if he slept at all. He didn’t hear any nightmares, but he was pretty drunk.
“Wanna run?” asks Q-tip.
“Man,” says John. “I am so hungover.”
“Fastest way to kill a hangover,” Q-tip tells him. John knows this. But it’s also the most unpleasant way to kill a hangover.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.” When he sits up, his brain sloshes painfully against the inside of his skull, and he winces.
John leads them on a different route than they’ve been running all week. He doesn’t so much care if Q-tip is finding the scenery boring; he just knows that this road has fewer hills. He is in no mood for hills this morning. A few miles out from the house, Lebanon’s public high school sprawls in a tree-less field, and Q-tip slows to a stop on the grassy shoulder of the road.
“This where you went to high school, man?” he pants.
“Yeah,” says John. The building is low and modern, made of red brick. It looks smaller than John remembers.
“Man, it ain’t so big, is it?” Q-tip apparently agrees on this point.
“Small town, man. There were only fifty kids in my class,” John says.
“Wow,” says Q-tip. “There were five hundred kids in my class.” Q-tip regards John’s school quietly for another minute. Then he grins deviously and says, “Let’s break in.”
Breaking in, it turns out, is not necessary. The front doors of Lebanon High are unlocked. The halls are quiet and empty, and he and Q-tip make no noise as they creep along between rows of lockers. They pass the administration office, which is closed and empty. The vice principal who was always on John’s ass for being late isn’t in yet, though John is reasonably certain that he still works here. John hasn’t set foot in this building since he graduated. The lockers have been painted blue—when John was a student, they were a nasty beige color. The slight change among all of the familiarity is off-putting.
“Which one was yours?” Q-tip asks, jerking his head at the bank of lockers.
They turn down another hall so John can show him. John hasn’t consciously remembered his locker combination, but his fingers dial it into the black knob regardless, and the door swings open.
“Wow,” says John. “I guess they didn’t bother to change it when I graduated.” John’s locker has obviously been inherited by a girl. There is a mirror taped to the inside of the door, and a brush is resting atop a pile of books, along with a neat, white pair of gym sneakers.
“It was messier when I had it,” John tells Q-tip, but when he looks up, Q-tip has wandered down the hall and is sliding into a classroom. John follows him.
“This was my English classroom,” he says, coming up behind Q-tip, who is studying the board. It wasn’t cleaned last night—the definition of “hendiadys” is written on the board in sloppy handwriting that John still recognizes as Mr. Sullivan’s.
“I hated English,” Q-tip says. “But I pretty much hated everything ‘cept art.”
John laughs. “I liked it fine. My teacher was pretty funny. He was kind of a communist pacifist, though. He was pissed when I turned down some colleges to enlist.”
“You enlist right outa high school?” Q-tip asks.
“The same day I graduated,” John says. “I’d been planning it for a while, though. My parents had to sign a waiver, because I was still seventeen.”
Q-tip grunts and nods. Through the window, John can see the football field in the early morning light. It’s empty; it’s off-season for football, so there won’t be any morning practice. He looks at the grass—it’s green like nothing in Iraq was green—and remembers running suicides in the hot sun while his coach yelled at the team that they were all a bunch of sissy girls. He remembers thinking it was hard. It wasn’t hard; he knows that now.
Q-tip once told him that he joined the Corps because he wanted to do “something hard.” It’s the best articulation he’s ever heard anyone give for the appeal of being a Marine. John may have joined in a fit of righteous patriotism, but he thinks, now, that that’s what he was looking for all along.
That, and his brothers in Bravo Two. Though, of course, those friendships come with the heavy price tag of the constant, nagging question—which one of them is going to die first?
John’s life before the Corps—before the war—now feels like an elaborate game of make-believe. Or like something that happened to someone else.
“I think I need to go back to Tampa, man,” Q-tip says behind John. His voice is quiet. John turns, and sees him leaning against the teacher’s desk. Q-tip is looking right at him, his blue eyes serious. “I need to deal with shit, fix my mess.”
“Yeah, Evan,” John says. “I think you do.” Q-tip stays quiet for a while, so John says, “I’ll drive you to the airport. If I can wrestle the keys to the Blazer from Sarah’s iron death grip.”
This earns him a smile and a sort of laugh-snort. “I bet she’s still passed out on the couch, man. Do you think your parents were pissed when they got home from their movie?”
“Yeah, probably,” John says.
The quiet returns.
“I’ll see you soon, though, dawg, right?” Q-tip asks. “At home?”
John knows Q-tip means Oceanside, means Camp Pendleton. That’s their home, now. “Yeah, man,” he says. “Of course.”