Chapter Text
Lake Michigan wasn’t raging. A movement doesn’t have to be rash and quick to be deadly. The worst things come in slow.
Michael Berzatto was awkward. He was, believe it. Mikey was ten years old with limbs too long for his body, skin damn near stretched thin over them, and unbalanced feet. And against all of this, he tried to be small.
He said Carmen and Sugar were small, and it was his job to stick with them down there.
All I gotta do is stick with ‘em.
He never mentioned that his mother was tall and domineering, which meant that she was larger than life when she wanted to be and a raging volcano at other times. His father was small in comparison, in every way that he could be. And he was constant until he wasn’t.
I’m gonna be the one that sticks by ‘em.
But who was supposed to stick by Mikey?
Mikey didn’t know that everyone looked up to him. He didn’t want them to. He was just trying to get by.
But he was charming, even if he couldn’t walk straight if one really looked at him. The lankiness was endearing. Girls looked at him with starry eyes. Teachers excused him when he acted out in class. He could have flung spit wads right at their heads and they would have just said, Oh, Mikey.
Richie thought it was bullshit. Even at eleven years old, he was thinking about raging against the machine, fighting the power. And the power, in his tiny brain, said that big beautiful pre-teens got all of the attention. So he did what pops did to ma when she intimidated him.
He let everything out on Mikey.
One day during recess he punched him in the face and pushed him into the dirt. It might have been the first time he had ever said bitch out loud. His fingers, still greasy from school lunch pizza, tugged at the other boy’s hair. He bared his teeth, almost half of them silver crowns shining in the sunlight, and yelled and yelled as he turned him around to bash his pretty face in properly. Other children shrieked fight, fight, fight, eager to see their favorite guy get up and pounce the short, creepy kid who always sat in the back of the class stacking coins.
But Mikey just let him go at it. His face was bloodied and he was laughing. The boy was fucking laughing. Soon Richie was, too.
That is how they became the best of friends.
Afterwards, the principal’s office was silent but for different iterations of “Shit!” said in turn by two boys.
Shitty shit shit. Shitheads. Shithole. Bullshit. Dogshit. Shit-ake mushrooms. No, that doesn’t count.
Shittttttttt, Mikey would draw out.
Shit balls, Richie would say, deadpan.
Mikey laughed at that one in the way that Richie was starting to notice he always did, with his mouth wide open in genuine ha-ha-h as. He was surprised that he no longer found it annoying. It was starting to register as a favorite sound of his, actually.
An administrator, a secretary or something, entered the room at that point. The door had been opened. Their percieved display of maturity had had the opposite effect. She only looked immensely unimpressed.
When she asked them about the altercation, Mikey took the fall for it. It would have made more sense than what had actually happened anyway. The office believed it. There was no social worker to say, Let’s maybe take a look at their home lives?
So Mikey was put into in-school suspension for two days and Richie was given a pitying look, and that was the end of that. He had saved him a few cracks of a belt, and that was enough for him to owe him one. But the day he came back from suspension, he slid his tray next to him during lunch. They shared a large, rustic beef sandwich, licking creamy sauce off of their fingers. He had never felt so full.
Mike was kind without trying, a hand on one’s shoulder for the rest of time, rubbing, soothing. It made Rich feel endlessly warm inside. The warmth was a blooming thing—expanding like the universe was, or so his teacher said. For him, he could feel his world getting really small, fitting into the shape of a boy.
The next quarter, they sat next to each other in the back of class.
What’s with the coins? the boy with the big laugh asked one day.
The demure one’s answer was simple:
I gotta know what I got.
Richie was an ugly ass kid, truly. A face only a mother could love. Tiff says that isn’t true, but she’s trying too hard to mother him.
He was platinum blond until puberty, sickly pale half of the time, and didn’t talk until he was four; so he floated around like a little ghost. His mother doted on him, her little ghost, at first. His father was charisma on legs, but also a piece of shit, so he said that Richie wasn’t his son.
He beat him when he couldn’t say tata, which probably didn’t help with the whole he’s not fuckin’ talkin’ thing, but nobody ever stopped to think of that. The toddler didn’t even know what was going on.
After a while, his mother started believing her husband. The boy wasn’t his son. Actually, he wasn’t any of theirs. God sent him down to punish us, she would say. Weird fuckin’ kid.
Devil got his fingers in it, too, his father would agree. It was the only thing that they could ever agree on.
They weren’t even religious people really. But God and country meant motherfucking God and country, fuck what they believed. And if a friend of a friend said God loved marriage and the United States of America, then that’s what they loved. They didn’t like each other. They didn’t like community. But they stuck it out because that is what people do.
He was born in Texas. They lived in Alaska for two years, California for three, and then O’Fallon, Illinois. Around that time was when his father got lost—that is how his mother explained it when he was eight— and they moved up to Chicago for good.
His mother was happy here. Still batshit crazy, but happy. She started seeing a man who really appreciated her, and that is when he realized that the best thing you can do for people half of the time is just appreciate them. She glowed until he left, and then Richie was stuck in the dark again.
The first ten years of his life were just shadows. There were no vacations, no sports. His most thrilling extracurricular was pressing his ear up against his door and listening to his parents go at it.
He wasn’t good at school. He didn’t want to read. Numbers never made very much sense unless they pertained to money, in which case they made all the sense in the world. His mother started doing hair out of their apartment in Chicago and he would document. His chicken scratch would record her costs, payments, and tips. That was until she started accusing him of shaving off of the top of the pile.
But he still liked counting. He liked the weight of the coins in his hand. They were tangible and permanent. A cent from 1980 was still a cent in 1989, inflation notwithstanding. And no one could take his money from him with words like they could chip at his self-esteem and resolve.
So he didn't really focus in school. Besides, Mikey told Richie eventually, we don't need school because we're gonna run a big ole restaurant together.
The Original Beef of Chicagoland was a shabby little place where they pretended to do homework in the midst of yelling and the wailing sizzling of cooking, frying, and sometimes burning. A lot of times, actually.
He loved it: the action, the fast-paced Italian shouted across the kitchen, and even the jingle of the register. The bell sounded like home. He didn’t want to be in his mother’s apartment and she didn’t miss him, so he spent all of his days at The Beef.
That is where he spent thousands of hours memorizing the lines of Mikey’s face and the way his hair flopped. That is where the vibrations of his voice sunk into the meat and bones of Rich and changed his chemistry. That is where he knew he would never get out. And he was okay with that.
There were a lot of uncles: Jimmy, Gianni, Lee, Fred, and so on. Fred taught him how to butcher a cow, but more importantly, how not to fear blood. Gianni was clearly a drunk, but no one minded it because he was a funny one. He would put an arm around his shoulders, firm and close as he recounted any of three Vegas elopements, and gesticulate wildly with the other one. They felt safe.
But Jimmy was his favorite. Jimmy wanted to be something. He was studying business in Urbana and would come up every break to make a quick buck. He was all but running the place though, even from a phone call away. He would’ve made a killing in twenties’ Chicago; he had the moxie for it. When the boys found out that he had a wife and a gun and he wasn’t even misusing any of them, they thought he was a saint. They made sure to be real nice to him, just in case.
Lee, on the other hand, was a dick. Plain and simple as that. He can’t even say the man was malicious because he never had the capacity to be that refined. He was just a bumbling prick, a nightmare to be around. He made the kitchen a hellhole. Thankfully, the atmosphere lifted when he got his dumbass scammed to New Mexico. He insisted it wasn’t a scam as he left. Everyone just nodded so he would get on with the damned deal.
The Beef was family, with all the ups and downs that comes with it.
But it was missing an integral part: the women. Goddamn was that place excruciatingly male at one point in time. Not a nonna in sight, which was ridiculous, considering their blood, sweat, and tears were the heritage of the place. Italian beef—a taste of Italy, supposedly. What is taste without a mother’s hand?
So there was roughhousing and jokes they would be ashamed of anywhere else. There was aggression simmering underneath everything. It was a messy place, still clearly reeling after the founder, Donna’s husband, was gone. There was a gap, shit to do, shit to be. It’s where Richie learned how to fill a gap, to make do, to be a man.
For a few years, there was an older kid working the register named Leo. He was vaguely related to the family and was working there in a few aunts’ organized attempt to whip him into shape since he had been caught stealing useless shit from a bodega. They tried to reverse-engineer the lesson Richie had learned naturally. They made him haul vegetable loads and scrub floors so that hopefully he would wake up one day and realize he was a man and he had better start acting like it.
It probably could have worked. The issue was that everyone adored him too much to be strict. He was easy to; playful, nice on the eyes. Mikey loved him to pieces.
He would follow him around like a puppy, eyes wide and mouth slack, and it was weird to see. If Leo got a bolt of lightning etched into his buzz cut then Mikey had to look like that, too. If Leo started listening to new music then Mikey needed the record. If Leo stayed out past dark then so did Mikey. If Leo started smoking then Mikey started smoking, too.
Richie thought he knew what was good for him, thought he could stay away, but his heart wouldn’t let him.
He had to know where his best friend was. He had to be there for him. He was going to be the one who stuck by him.
There was something born in the spray of the lake—not seafoam, unfortunately, but something dirtier—something so pretty it seemed ugly. Something so ugly it came to look gorgeous. It reeled him in, that’s what happened.
They were in the ninth grade skipping Algebra class.
The sun was high. The grass prickled against Richie’s neck. There was a long stretch of grass and weeds between the backend of the soccer field and the department store behind the school, and that is where they were lying.
Mikey had his hands on his chest one over the other, one knee propped up, staring straight up like the sun couldn’t hurt him. His brown eyes were glowing gold. Richie thought that there weren’t any shadows in his life anymore.
He liked the way he looked, he realized. But he wasn’t really sure why. He was a boy.
But he wanted to draw a finger over the curve of his nose, sloped like half a rainbow against the sky above as he stared at him from that particular angle. There was a scar next to his jaw. He said that his mother’s nails scratched him. Richie wanted to pluck them out of their nail beds at the thought.
He had met her, though, and she was so nice to him. It was weird to hear all of the unsavory anecdotes from her son.
She had the most expressive face he had ever seen but he couldn’t imagine her angry. She was a shock of blonde hair rushing to hug him when he entered the house and a warm meal when he was hungry. There was a lot of her, that is true, but not enough to crush him.
He liked the way the house was obviously hers. It didn’t matter how tacky the furniture might have been if she had picked it. What a lovely thought: a mother in the store, thinking, imagining creating a home. Christmas decorations in March, Halloween in July. It felt like a real house. A house where things happened.
But he could tell more happened than needed to. More volume, more pressure, more broken glass. He wouldn’t dare ask for details. He didn’t want to see a sad look on his best friend’s face.
“Richie.”
“Hm?”
Mikey shuffled around his pockets and fished out a pack of cigarettes. He held it up in the air like a trophy.
“You got those from Leo?”
“No.”
“How then?”
“Mom asks me to get them from the place on the corner sometimes so…he doesn’t give a fuck. We’re set, dude.”
He was starting to curse like a sailor. Like his mother. Like the kitchen.
“Oh, yeah? You got a lighter?”
He pulled that from his other pocket.
“Of course.”
He was astonished, his eyes wide. “Dude. Fuck,” he whispered. He liked the taste of the expletive on his lips, so he said it again. “Fuck.” It felt good, like when he said ‘Mikey’.
Mike’s hair had grown out to his shoulders. Before he left, his Uncle Lee said he looked like Bono on The Joshua Tree album cover while he laughed at him. Richie would have likened him to a model on one of those romance novels his mother Donna kept around. Fabio flexing his muscles on a horse or something. He was Italian too, he thought,
“Don’t cut your hair,” he said abruptly.
The other boy narrowed his eyes as he turned to him, the corner of his mouth raised slightly. For a second, Richie was scared. He thought that his best friend may have just found something out about him. He wasn’t even sure what he was hiding. But then he just said, “Okay,” and turned back to fiddling with his cigarette.
He had to flick the lighter a few more times than they had ever seen anyone else do it, unpracticed as he was. But he got there. He tried to hand it to the other boy, who stared blankly, silently at his outstretched hand as the end of the cigarette glowed.
“Oh. Uh.”
“Take it.”
He still didn’t say anything, So Mike sat up to lick his lips and put it in his mouth, pink wrapped around the thin brown paper. He leaned down to hold his face and softly blow the smoke into it, peering down at him with the sun overhead like a halo, tracing his thumb over his cheek. Rich’s whole face burned. He blamed the cloud of smoke surrounding them.
“Okay.” He took it from him, pressing his lips to the same place he had.
His first drag was just embarrassing, a desperate thing. He shouldn’t have done it lying down, which is just common sense, but he did, so he ended up with a nasty cough, hacking through his burning throat as he immediately sat up.
A hand was rubbing on his back, that ever present ‘ha-ha-ha’ ringing.
“Don’t make fun of me,” he said with a withering voice. He sounded pathetic but he couldn’t help it.
The other boy sobered, face dropping immediately. “Sorry. You’re good?” he asked, holding out his hand and gesturing for him to pass the smoke back over.
He nodded, passing it.
“I’m never doing that again.”
It was so clearly a lie.
Richie woke up one day with his arm wrapped perfectly around Mikey’s middle and realized they were about the same height now. He tucked his forehead into the crook of his neck, breathing him in. He loves him. He kissed his forehead before falling back asleep, which wasn’t weird at all because it was the culture they gave him. That was what everything felt like with Mike—grand, historical.
There was always a glass of wine in Donna’s hand. That is what she was starting to make Richie call her, even though it made him uncomfortable. But yeah, Donna, she always had alcohol within an arm’s reach.
“Loose,” she said as explanation when he asked why she was drinking wine if it wasn’t a special day, because the only thing his own mother touched on the weekdays was drugs. “I need to be loose or I’ll fucking kill you all,” she continued. Then she laughed like it was funny. Maybe it was. Anyway, everyone around the table was laughing, too. He was starting to get the feeling that it wouldn’t be good if they didn’t.
Mikey’s siblings were funny. They all came out with different hair colors, like the printer ran out of ink by the time they got to Carmy with his dirty blond. Like they ran out of paper too, short as he was. Both Carmen and Natalie were annoyingly sensitive. He doesn’t know where they got it from for sure, but he put together that they are more like their father. They always looked like they were scared to breathe. It was weird in general but weirder considering they were little more than babies. What had they to worry about? Nothing was wrong. What could have been wrong?
The cracks in this family were starting to show and he wanted to crawl through them, fall into Wonderland. He thought about all the things his best friend never told him as he picked at what Donna said was, “...real fucking lasagna.”
Later, he turned to Mikey in a flurry and asked them all.
The boy just dragged his hand over his face and stared at the floor. “Dude. It’s not that simple. There’s no- There’s no answer for some things.”
For a lot of things, apparently. Later, Donna would ask Richie if she was pretty with her nails gripping the flesh of his cheeks, and he would come to understand.
They’re loitering in front of a laundromat when he learns that Mikey’s father is dead. But also that he’s a different man than his mother’s husband that left.
Donna had him at sixteen with a piece of shit he solely refers to as “that man”. She had fully intended to give birth to him in a bathtub in secret, apparently. Her grandmother dragged her outside kicking and screaming like she was the baby—and she was—and Michael Moretti Jr. ripped into the world by kerosene lampside on a dark night in 1978, skin against concrete, blood on dirt, nearly biblical. He was so tiny. Too tiny. They had to take him to the hospital that same night, a gruesome picture, and the state started keeping a tab on them. Michael Moretti Sr. got out of jail long enough to determine that he didn’t find any use in Mikey and would have a few more children before he got shanked in a bar over five dollars and a beer. He was thirty-three.
Donna married a Berzatto at nineteen and changed their names. It was a shotgun wedding. The child died when Mikey was five, drowned silently in a pool at a big family gathering. So many people and no one even heard the splash. So many people who probably wouldn’t even have heard her if she screamed. That’s when Donna started drinking excessively.
Mikey’s looking at Richie weirdly when he gets to this part of the story. That’s when he realizes he is crying. The other teen’s face is completely neutral, like this is ordinary.
He wipes his face and sniffles. A woman eyes them suspiciously as she enters the laundromat, dragging a giant laundry bag behind her, so they start walking.
“Sorry.”
“No I- um… It is kinda fucked up isn’t it?” He reaches behind him to grab a smoke but the pack is gone. He laughs nervously, patting his hands on the front of his shorts. “I guess I never thought about it too hard.”
“We can go?” he suggests. The sun is getting low.
He fixes him with a stare. It isn’t cold. “I don’t wanna go home.”
“Yeah?”
His hair flops in front of his eyes. He doesn’t move it. A shade passes over his face and makes him look so much older. “Mhm. Just walk with me for a little bit?”
He does. They never stop walking side-by-side.