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sekritomgI am in the best mood ever! Ergo:
Title: Fake Hipsters (8/still don't know)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sekrit_omg
Rating: R
Pairing: Stan/Kyle; others
Summary: You can take Stan out of South Park, but you can't take the South Park out of Stan.
Note: I am so worried about this chapter because it's the first time you really leave Stan's perspective and also drugs/mental illness/weird sexuality/pedo/blah blah blah.
Upstairs, Stan lay on his bed with the lights off, his clothing on, and his eyes open. The shades weren’t shut, and every few minutes the wind smacked a thin wisp of a tree branch against his window. The snow had shaken from it so long ago that Stan could not even find anything poetic about it; it was just annoying. Had he any energy, he’d have gotten up and opened the window and snapped that frail little branch from its larger, stronger branch and tossed it down into his yard to be covered by the next blanket of snow, which was due to arrive sometime the next evening. He took some solace in the fact that if a tree branch was going to keep him awake, at least he would bear witness to one last Rocky Mountain snow storm before he never had to deal with one again.
This was agony; there was no longer anyone to turn to, or so he felt. He ran through the names of his friends from Northwestern in his head. Could he call one of them to moan about ending things with Loren? Of course he could, but he wholly internalized the fact that he didn’t want to, and what was more, he didn’t need to. He felt sickened that he cared so little that it was over, but not enough to will himself to try to care. He could not shake Kyle’s lifeless stare from his mind, and he knew the reaction he would get if he tried to talk to someone from school about it. They were not of the world where you might wake up one morning in a 15-year-old boy’s bed. They were not of South Park. They didn’t know.
Just when he was hoping he would not fall asleep without flossing, his phone began to ring, or rather, moo, so he rolled over and pulled it from his back pocket, opening to reveal the name craig. “Hello, Craig Tucker,” he said lifelessly in answer.
“Stan Marsh,” Craig said in his brash monotone. Stan had been wondering if there had been some kind of reason he had Craig’s number in his phone now. “I put those photos of you up. Did you check it out?”
Stan really wanted not to lie, but something compelled him to do so anyway. “Of course.”
“Good stuff, right?”
“Thrilling.”
“I’m leaving town tomorrow.” Craig coughed into the phone. “Token’s gone back to Hahhhhhhhhvahd, and Clyde’s sitting at home alone practicing his deep breathing.” Stan waited for it, waited for him to add, ‘And Tweek is dead,’ but apparently Craig was far past being able to complete a set. “Do you want to grab a drink?”
Stan sat up, and brushed some hair from his eyes. “Yeah,” he said slowly, dragging it out. “That sounds okay.”
“Oh, okay. Do you want me to pick you up?”
He thought for a moment. No, each additional moment he had to sit in this house was torture. “I can meet you.” He didn’t have to discuss where; there were only two bars in town, and one of them was for lesbians.
He did not ask his mother if he could borrow her car. He just grabbed her keys and left, pausing only to nod the most cursory of nods at his father (who was sitting on the living room couch watching a hockey game) on the way out the door.
~
When Stan arrived, Craig was already seated at the bar, drinking. “PBR,” he announced, as if Stan couldn’t tell. “The ironic choice of disaffected fake-ass hipsters everywhere.” Craig paused to give his self-awareness some weight. “You want one?”
Stan took his seat and removed his bulky jacket to reveal his yellow cassette tape T-shirt. “No thanks,” he said. “Have they got any Goose Island?”
“Nice, but no, why would they? Look at this fucking pit. They haven’t got anything.”
Stan smiled in agreement and ordered a Rolling Rock. “Where’s your camera?” he asked after his drink arrived.
“I didn’t bring it.” Craig wiped his broad, red lips. Stan silently wondered why Craig didn’t use lip balm. “I don’t bring it everywhere.”
“I thought that was your thing. Pictures of drunk people?”
“Well, who’s getting drunk?” Craig asked. “We’re having a drink.”
Stan was fine with this. Performance, being on … he hated it. The first thing he’d learned in his first journalism seminar all those Septembers ago had been: Never let yourself be quoted; never let yourself be photographed. The idea that for eternity pictures of him standing in Butters’ old bedroom looking cock-eyed at a computer monitor would be available to all and sundry bothered him. He hadn’t realized it until Craig had shown up without a camera, but there it was.
They talked about graduation, or the lack thereof. “There’s no way I’m pulling it off this year,” Craig announced. This was somewhere into his next beer, the beer after the beer he’d been on when Stan had arrived. “I’ve got all these incompletes, man. Teachers, you know. They just … sometimes you can talk your way into a B or something, just let it go … but some of this shit, some of this shit that I’m finishing is shit from my sophomore — my freshman year. I accepted a long time ago that I’d be a third-semester senior. So be it.”
It was inconceivable to Stan, this concept of not being finished. It bothered him when it was Kenny, but it surprised him when it was Craig, because Craig seemed so much to have it all together, what with his insidious voyeuristic website. “How can you have managed to get this far and not be graduating?” Stan asked. “I just don’t understand.” The bartender set another green bottle in front of his face. This was his second. He attacked it.
“Very very simple answer. I don’t go to class and I don’t do my work.”
“But that’s pathetic. I mean, complete retards manage to graduate from college.” He was thinking of Loren when he said that. But then he added: “I mean, Kyle is going to graduate from college in May, and he can barely put one foot in front of the other.” Stan recalled Kyle sulking through dinner, the half-lidded exhaustion with which he had pushed food around his plate. Stan noticed that Craig had shaved since the party. He was prickly, but no longer bearded.
“Oh, but Kyle’s not distracted, he’s never been the type to get distracted … he’s pretty focused. You forget, I’m not his best friend, but I’ve known they guy since I was 4. He’s always been intent on things. It’s just that he runs too far with it. I’m just plain distracted. I’m not in school, really. I’m a motherfucking artist.”
“But you’re in school, aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” Craig crumpled his empty beer can in his fist. “I mean, I guess so.”
“What do you mean, you guess so?”
“I mean, I’m enrolled. It’s just … not … happening. Maybe you should come to Manhattan this spring, Marsh.” A hand descended on Stan’s shoulder, giving him a friendly squeeze of knowing. “You have a good thing going in the Midwest?”
“Well.” A week ago, he would have just said ‘yes,’ probably been quite offended, and gone off on Craig for confusing the Midwest with the great city of Chicago. Now he just stilled, and then shrugged. “We’ll see if I can swing it.”
“Great.” If Craig could seem happy about anything, he might have seemed happy now: “I don’t know if you’ve ever been there.”
“Never.”
“Well, maybe you should come. ... I mean go. I mean.” Craig shrugged. “Whatever, I don’t know what I mean. This place is so fucked up. I have to get home.”
“Home?” Stan asked. “Like, to your house? But we just got here.”
“Not home to my parents’ place,” Craig corrected. “Home to the city.”
“Um.”
“New York,” Craig filled in, impatient with Stan’s lack of comprehension. “I gotta get home to the city.”
“Oh.”
“When are you going back?”
“Uh.” Stan didn’t know why he couldn’t make good sentences all of a sudden. It was like his mind was occupied, and yet he really wasn’t thinking of anything. He drank beer to help him complete a thought. It worked. “My ticket is booked for the 15th. But I was going to go back early. I told my mom after New Year’s. I just don’t know.”
“Can’t take it anymore?”
“Not another minute,” Stan said, although now that it was just him and Craig and a couple of beers, he felt no pressing need to get out of Colorado anymore.
“I know. This place is awful. Everything closes by 1, for one thing, and that’s a stretch. “
“I think Walmart’s open all night.”
“Oh, that’s classy.”
With his beer finished, Stan signaled the bartender, who mouthed one minute at him, and went back to making a drink for another patron. “Come on, dude.” Stan sighed. “You know this place. You’re from here. None of this should be surprising to you. It’s sad, but at least in South Park there is the promise of being able to leave it and go far, far away. Whatever you tell me about Manhattan, where could you possibly go from there? You’re stuck, aren’t you? Don’t you ever feel just a little bit stuck?”
“No.”
“Just a little bit?”
“No.”
“You have to be lying.”
Craig shook his head. “I don’t lie. There’s no scandal in lying. No one pays attention to you if you lie.”
“Can I help you?”
Stan looked up at the looming figure of the bartender, balding with a dull yellow ponytail — not blond, yellow. And he was balding. Stan almost giggled. Almost.
“Um, yep.” Stan pushed his empty Rolling Rock bottle toward the bartender.
“Another of these?” the old man asked. He was wiping a glass with a dish towel — a filthy dish towel. Beside Stan, Craig shuddered.
“Uh, no, I…” Stan paused. “What are you having?”
“Me?” Craig asked. “I have to fly tomorrow morning at 7:30. I’m not having anything else.”
“Aw, that’s no fun.”
“Should I come back when you’re decided? I got other customers in here,” the bartender drawled.
“Uh, um. No, just bring me a shot of, um … no, a double … of tequila?”
“What kind of tequila?”
Stan looked at Craig. Craig said nothing, didn’t gesture, didn’t emote, just sat there. “Cheap?” Stan asked.
“Salt and lime?”
“What?” Stan glanced at Craig again. Then he looked back to the bartender. “I’m drinking alone. What am I going to do with salt and lime wedges?”
“Coming right up.”
“Look, Marsh.” Craig yanked Stan’s attention back from the man fixing his drink. “This place isn’t me. I don’t feel any connection to it. I come back two weeks a year. My life is there now.”
“I, um.” Stan felt himself at a loss. He wasn’t sure why he was having problems describing his feelings, but he was. He tried to remember the Stan Marsh who spent the night before he flew home in bed with Loren, wishing like hell he didn’t have to go back. That Stan Marsh had been dreading pouring his heart out to Kyle; this Stan Marsh was feeling inadequate for disagreeing with Craig Tucker on the minute point of how at-home one could feel in a redneck mountain town after spending three years in the big city. He felt betrayed by Craig, but he felt attracted to Craig’s attitude. Too many thoughts were stirring around his head, just in time to start drinking his tequila.
Craig cleared his throat. “Oh, wait. Okay, the most ridiculous thing happened at that party at Butters’. Can I tell you? It’s kind of disturbing. This is your disclaimer.”
Stan did not flinch. Very little disturbed him — or so he thought. He’d seen his best friend smash his own hand with a searing pan; if that didn’t shatter him, what could? “Okay,” he agreed. “Tell me.”
“Ike Broflovski hit on me.”
Stan’s eyes widened. “What?”
“It’s true.”
There was nothing to be said. Around them, the balding bartender was running the blender, fixing someone a syrupy margarita. Craig tugged on Stan’s shirt.
“Hello?” he asked. “You’re either shocked to speechlessness, or it’s just to be expected.”
“Both, I guess.” With a trembling hand, Stan grasped for his drink. “Well, I hope you turned him down, dude. He’s, like … 15.”
“Even if I was into little boys, like if that were my thing, I wouldn’t dream of messing with a kid whose dad once literally sued everyone. It’s just off-putting, right? I mean, don’t you want to ask me what he did?”
Stan shook his head. “No, no. Ike is—”
“Like a brother to you?”
“No!” Stan began shaking. “No, no. Um, not exactly. Not exactly.”
“Well, some cliché like that, anyway.”
“Yeah, sure,” Stan agreed. He surprised himself by downing the rest of his tequila in one gulp without choking.
~
Craig paid Stan’s tab. Stan wanted to tell Craig that this didn’t impress him, that Loren always paid his tab — but then Stan, even with his logic impinged by tequila and flattery, realized that he could no longer count on anyone to pay his tab, so he thanked Craig with sincerity.
“No problem,” Craig replied. “It’s the least I can do.”
“The least you could have done is let me buy my own drinks. Or not called me at all.” Stan smiled. They were outside the bar, only a streetlamp and the copious neon signs in scant cloistered windows illuminating them in the frigid night. A dull pulse reverberated from the laughter and televisions back inside the bar, but outside, they were alone. “But I’m glad you called me,” Stan continued, not caring if his jacket got dirty as he leaned against Craig’s (parents’) car. “I’m so glad I got to see you, dude. It feels like it’s been forever.”
“I think it’s only been since summer. I came home for a week this summer,” Craig reminded him.
“Did I see you then?”
“I don’t know. I think Wendy had people over. Maybe it was Sally. Doesn’t matter. That week kind of sucked.”
“Did this week kind of suck?” Stan asked. He kept having to adjust his balance on the sedan; he didn’t want to fall over, and he hated that it was taking more effort to remain upright than he wanted it to. The neon lights of Corona signs blinded him mildly; in the blue wash of advertising Craig looked … well, he looked almost Canadian, sallow and narrow-eyed. How sick was that? Stan’s cheeks felt hot.
“No, this week was okay, I’m glad I got to see Token; I mean, I went to Boston in October, but one can never get enough Token.”
“…And are you glad you saw me?” Stan arched his brows and pouted.
“Sure.”
“You mean it?”
“Uh.” Craig rolled his eyes. “Yes.”
“Me too.”
Stan licked his lips, and fixed them to Craig’s. Craig’s lips were not soft, really, and Stan liked soft lips, but he also liked a little bit of facial hair, and for the brief moment of their kiss he enjoyed Craig’s stubble on his chin. But before Stan could even manage his tongue past Craig’s teeth, Craig was holding Stan’s face away from his.
“Okay,” Craig said. He took his hands from Stan’s face and put them on Stan’s shoulders, and then he pushed Stan back — he wasn’t rough, but he was serious. Not coy — serious. “That’s enough, cowboy,” he said. “Unhand me.”
“You just unhanded yourself,” Stan said. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to not understand,” Craig replied.
“You don’t want to—”
“Absolutely not.”
“But you paid for my drinks,” Stan whined.
“I was being nice.”
“You invited me out.”
“Yep, and I’m beginning to regret it.”
“You, you.” Stan didn’t know what to say. He was feeling that drunken wooziness again, so he backed up to Craig’s car, and let himself balance against it. “You said Ike Broflovski wasn’t your type!” Stan protested.
“He isn’t my type. He’s a little boy.”
“But I’m a big boy!”
“Yeah, but you’re still a boy,” Craig pointed out.
“What are you saying? I don’t understand.”
“You understand. I don’t like boys.”
“But, you—”
“I’m going to brush this off as you being kind of drunk, Marsh.” Craig took his hand. “Don’t misconstrue this,” he added as he did.
Craig led Stan back into the bar, and abandoned him at a booth against the wall. Before he departed he brought Stan a cola with too much ice, and a cherry floating at the top.
“There you go, big guy,” Craig said. His face was plastered with a look of utter defeat. “Drink that up. Don’t go until you do.”
“What are you gonna do?” Stan moaned. “You can’t just leave me sitting here!”
“Sure I can. Can I trust you to call someone?”
“No!”
“Okay.” Craig was scowling. “I’ll go after I see you take a sip.”
Stan hated the taste of his cola — it was weak and watery, choked with ice. He didn’t want to know if the cherry was a cruel kind of joke or just flung in there by the bartender, hoping no one would complain about the flat, tasteless soda he was apparently fine with serving to well-paying customers. Stan resented this. Who was he to listen to Craig? But being intoxicated, he was suggestible.
“That’s great.” Craig had his hands in his pockets; he wasn’t going to touch Stan before he left. “I don’t know when I’ll see you again, Marsh. But good luck with graduating, and, um, if you come to the city, call me.”
“You mean it?” Stan asked.
“Yeah, I mean it.” He gave a weak wave with both hands. “Make sure you call someone. Someone responsible. Don’t call Kenny McCormick. Finish your Coke. … And definitely don’t call Kyle,” he added as an afterthought.
Stan returned the wave. Tears came to his eyes as Craig left, and he banished them with soda.
~
It was Ike behind the creaking door; he’d knocked three times, even once using the special knock he’d learned by listening to Stan do it back when he and Kyle were in high school, but there’d been no reply, and Ike took this for an invitation to come in. Kyle wasn’t often shy about being busy, or occupied, and generally he did want attention. “Penny for your thoughts?” Ike tucked the door back into its jam behind himself; he was on tip-toes.
“Really?” Kyle asked. He had been lying on the bed in the dark with the blinds drawn, his lighter in his fist on his belly, making it spark to light and catching the flame in his left hand, extinguishing it. He stopped when his brother came in. “My thoughts are only worth a penny?”
“That’s all I can afford to pay you, really. Mom and Dad only give me $20 a week in allowance.”
“Awesome. You know they give me nothing.”
“I’m sure they think it’s best for you.”
“I’m sure my shrink’s told them it just enables me.” Kyle sat up in bed, tossing his lighter onto the floor. “Can I do something for you?”
“That was actually what I came to ask you.”
Kyle shrugged. “I want to tell you something, but I can’t really think of what to say.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s okay, it’ll come to me.” Kyle drew the covers up to his waist. “Do you want to sit?” He pointed to the swivel chair in front of his computer.
Ike shook his head. “I think I’m fine. Um. … We haven’t really talked lately.”
“Well, sorry if I wasn’t in a talking mood. I find out you’ve been devirginized, and the next thing I know, I’m being fucking strapped down. So that was okay.” Despite the heft of his words, Kyle’s tone was static. His pitch neither fell nor rose.
“So, uh.” Ike shifted his weight. He rubbed his hands together. “What’d you do after Butters’?”
Kyle shrugged, like the question bored him. “Went back to Trish’s.”
“Well, don’t tell me you fucked Trish.”
“No, Kenny fucked Trish,” Kyle clarified. “I fucked Kenny.”
“Whoa.” Ike took a step back, eyes widening. He looked behind himself, spotted Kyle’s desk chair, and sat himself in it. “I thought Kenny was straight.”
“He is.” Kyle scowled. “But you never thought Kyle was straight.”
Ike was unsure of whether he was being asked a question; he figured he had better play this like it was one: “I thought Kyle was too interesting to allow himself not to defy categorization.”
“No.” Kyle sat up. “Kyle is too unstable to will himself to keep his dick in his pants. And he hates the third person. It’s a vile, pretentious, murderous set of pronouns. What is this, a damn story?”
“Murderous, really?” Ike asked.
“Whatever happened to direct, personal communication?” Kyle replied.
“Oh, okay. Is the third person why you’re so lonely?”
“No, I’m lonely because I don’t have any friends. Nobody wants to be friends with me. I’m toxic to people.”
“This sounds a bit dramatic.”
“Being dramatic doesn’t make it untrue.”
Ike got up out of the desk chair, and went to sit on the bed with his older brother.
Kyle inched away, butting up against his headboard. He removed his sunglasses, and flung them on the bedside table, next to an alarm clock, a florescent lamp, an array of condoms in square, crinkled wrappers, and several pill bottles of varying sizes and heights. The glasses knocked over a bottle, and it fell to floor. Its loose cap knocked off, dozens of pill capsules spilled out. Kyle took a glance at the mess; he was not bothered by it. “My life is completely fucked up, Ike,” he said.
Ike didn’t see the need to argue. “I know, man, and I feel bad. You know I feel bad, but I’m, like ... I’ll help you however I can but there’s not really a lot I can—”
“I keep Dexedrine in the linen closet.”
Ike shrugged. “Why the linen closet?”
“They won’t let me keep it in my room. She won’t.” There was no need for specification or elaboration. “I think she counts those pills, sometimes. It’s beyond me why I should be able to go off on my own to school and medicate myself, and then I come back here and have to deal with the humiliation of having a million tiny capsules dispensed by my mother and father.” Kyle sighed. His eyes were bloodshot and his lids bruised, the result of sleepless nights and silent self-punishment, unspeakable brawls at collegiate house parties and silent, drawn-out sobbing. It made him look tired, and in fact, he was exhausted.
“So if you go grab me the bottle,” Kyle concluded, commanding more than asking, “at least my prints won’t be on it.”
“You’re paranoid. No one’s counting pills. Or dusting for prints.”
“Yes she is! Do you know that at school, everything is distributed by my RA?”
“I thought you said you medicated yourself at school.”
Kyle frowned. “You can buy things from people. Do you really think I stick to a proscribed regimen?”
“I almost wish you would!”
“Just please get me five Dexedrine and we can move on from this,” Kyle said. “I feel miserable.”
“Did it ever occur to you that fucking around with your drug regimen might just make you more fucked up?”
Kyle pushed himself up onto his knees, and pointed a dramatic finger at his brother. “Did it ever occur to you that I’m not depressive?”
Ike stood up, and backed toward the door. “I don’t know what you are, but the answer is probably not good. Jacking yourself with Dexedrine isn’t going to fix anything, Kyle.”
Kyle waited. Ike stared back at him, a mean look on his face. It made Kyle wish for his baby brother — the one who toddled after him and watched Jim Lehrer with a retarded look of glee and intrigue. He didn’t want to know this stern gay kid who knew everything and wasn’t shy about sharing it.
Their staring match was interrupted by Kyle’s phone — the strangled crowing of a rooster came roaring from its little speakers, trying the best it could to alert its owner of a phone call. Kyle glared at the phone, seized it, and read the name on the display screen.
“You look disgusted,” Ike observed. “Who is it?”
Kyle shut off the ringer, forcing the phone to voicemail. He didn’t even open it. “It’s just Kenny,” he said.
“See? You totally have friends, Kyle, okay? Kenny’s trying to call you.”
“I don’t want to talk to Kenny. He’s trashy.”
“Trashy or not, he’s your friend. He’d help you if he could.”
“I know he would. But he can’t because he’s trashy,” Kyle wailed. “I don’t want to talk about my friends, because I have, like, two.”
“Eric Cartman is kind of your friend,” Ike said. “…Ish.”
Kyle just groaned.
“And Stan is your friend.”
“Don’t you get me started on that rapist bastard!” Kyle cried. Then he flopped back down. “Don’t even say his name in this house.”
“Kyle—”
“Get the fuck out of my room, Ike. I don’t need your help. I’ll just fucking OD on something expired I have in my desk.”
“That’s a really awful—“ Ike was interrupted by the phone beginning to ring a second time.
“Oh, for the love of…” Kyle reached over to shut it off again.
“Kyle…” Ike reached out, only to have his arm shoved away.
“I’m glad you brought him up.” Kyle sat up again. Ike wished he would fall asleep, or at least calm down. “You still haven’t apologized to me for doing that.”
“I have nothing to apologize for.”
Kyle rolled his eyes.
Ike sighed. “I just want to have one thing, Ky, one thing that’s my own. Don’t begrudge me this one thing.”
“You fucked my best friend!”
“He fucked me,” Ike corrected.
“Typical Stan,” Kyle spat. “Not man enough to take it up the ass after all these years.”
“Whatever, I didn’t want to fuck him, he was ridiculously drunk at the time. I was sober. Mostly. Mostly sober. Sober enough for ass sex, which is more sober than you are right now.”
“I’d be more sober if you’d get me some Dexedrine, Ike, please—” Kyle clasped his hands. He shook them in Ike’s face. “Look at me. Look at me, Ike!”
Ike listened, gazing right into Kyle’s eyes, trying not to flinch at how bloodshot and red and raw they looked. “I’m looking at you.”
“Thank you.”
Ike grasped his brother by the shoulders. “Okay, here is what I think. I think you need to lie down and try to rest and let the drugs pass through your system, and if it takes a couple of days it takes a couple of days. ” Ike paused. He kept looking at Kyle, wondering if this was getting though to him. “I also think you and Stan need to talk to each other, but not until you detox from this. You’re upset, and I get it, and I also get that when you get upset you get scary, and that when you get scary Mom and Dad go a little nuts with the drugs. … And I also think you need to lay off Mom and Dad. They’re good people. They’re just not sure what to do.”
“So they do this?” Kyle pointed at himself.
“You and Stan need to talk,” Ike reiterated. “That’s my final position. Calm thyself down, and call Stan. Not before!” Ike let go of his brother. “And I’m out. I gotta go to bed. I have practice tomorrow.”
“Can I tell you something?” Kyle rasped.
“Of course.” Ike paused, his hand already on the doorknob.
Kyle cleared his throat. “I think if you wanted something that was ‘your own’ ” — Kyle delighted in embellishing this with waggles of his index fingers — “you should have done someone other than Stan. Beyond that you knew it would hurt me—”
“I never meant for you to find out!”
“—you picked the one thing that could never be just yours, Ike. You forget, little dude, I’ve had about 8 million hours of psychotherapy. So allow me a little amateur analysis: I think you knew I’d find out. I mean, in this town? Not even counting for your own oversight? Get real. Come on.” Kyle lowered his voice: “You wanted to punish me, like, to take something away from me like I take things away from you. Only you forget, again, that I’m not forcing you to be here. You’re in my room talking to me of your own accord. I never want you to deal with these things. I don’t want to put pressure on you. Okay? I’m sick, Ike, I can’t help it. But you wanted me to suffer.” He raised it again. “So, good job. I feel like about as bad as I ever have, and I’ve felt pretty bad about a lot of things in my time — inasmuch as I can ever feel anything — so well done.”
“Kyle…”
“Go to bed. I’ll try to detox.”
Ike didn’t budge.
“Go ahead. Come on. You have practice tomorrow. You just go out there and be a normal little kid. I’ll lay here by myself and wish I were the smart one and you were the fucked-up one. Sweet dreams.”
“I hate you, Kyle!” Ike burst out. “You’re fucking cruel!”
“Yeah, well.” Kyle sniffed. “I’m not the only one. Insanity’s in the blood, but cruelty — that’s learned.”
Wiping his eyes, Ike didn’t bother to keep himself from crying. “You want cruelty? Okay. Sometimes I wish you would kill yourself! Then I could be normal and my whole life would be about regular stuff and I wouldn’t have to deal with you! You fucking ruin everything, Kyle! You’ve single-handedly ruined my entire life!”
Ike slammed the door as he left, and the reverberations shook the second storey. But nothing was disturbed; their parents were heavy sleepers, and everything that might have fallen off the wall had shattered long ago.
Through the walls, Kyle heard his little brother crying. In his own bed, Kyle curled into a fetal form and began to bite his nails. He knew Ike could hear him crying, too, but he also knew he would stop by the time he tasted blood. His mind turned to his missed calls.
Title: Fake Hipsters (8/still don't know)
Author:
sekrit_omg Rating: R
Pairing: Stan/Kyle; others
Summary: You can take Stan out of South Park, but you can't take the South Park out of Stan.
Note: I am so worried about this chapter because it's the first time you really leave Stan's perspective and also drugs/mental illness/weird sexuality/pedo/blah blah blah.
Upstairs, Stan lay on his bed with the lights off, his clothing on, and his eyes open. The shades weren’t shut, and every few minutes the wind smacked a thin wisp of a tree branch against his window. The snow had shaken from it so long ago that Stan could not even find anything poetic about it; it was just annoying. Had he any energy, he’d have gotten up and opened the window and snapped that frail little branch from its larger, stronger branch and tossed it down into his yard to be covered by the next blanket of snow, which was due to arrive sometime the next evening. He took some solace in the fact that if a tree branch was going to keep him awake, at least he would bear witness to one last Rocky Mountain snow storm before he never had to deal with one again.
This was agony; there was no longer anyone to turn to, or so he felt. He ran through the names of his friends from Northwestern in his head. Could he call one of them to moan about ending things with Loren? Of course he could, but he wholly internalized the fact that he didn’t want to, and what was more, he didn’t need to. He felt sickened that he cared so little that it was over, but not enough to will himself to try to care. He could not shake Kyle’s lifeless stare from his mind, and he knew the reaction he would get if he tried to talk to someone from school about it. They were not of the world where you might wake up one morning in a 15-year-old boy’s bed. They were not of South Park. They didn’t know.
Just when he was hoping he would not fall asleep without flossing, his phone began to ring, or rather, moo, so he rolled over and pulled it from his back pocket, opening to reveal the name craig. “Hello, Craig Tucker,” he said lifelessly in answer.
“Stan Marsh,” Craig said in his brash monotone. Stan had been wondering if there had been some kind of reason he had Craig’s number in his phone now. “I put those photos of you up. Did you check it out?”
Stan really wanted not to lie, but something compelled him to do so anyway. “Of course.”
“Good stuff, right?”
“Thrilling.”
“I’m leaving town tomorrow.” Craig coughed into the phone. “Token’s gone back to Hahhhhhhhhvahd, and Clyde’s sitting at home alone practicing his deep breathing.” Stan waited for it, waited for him to add, ‘And Tweek is dead,’ but apparently Craig was far past being able to complete a set. “Do you want to grab a drink?”
Stan sat up, and brushed some hair from his eyes. “Yeah,” he said slowly, dragging it out. “That sounds okay.”
“Oh, okay. Do you want me to pick you up?”
He thought for a moment. No, each additional moment he had to sit in this house was torture. “I can meet you.” He didn’t have to discuss where; there were only two bars in town, and one of them was for lesbians.
He did not ask his mother if he could borrow her car. He just grabbed her keys and left, pausing only to nod the most cursory of nods at his father (who was sitting on the living room couch watching a hockey game) on the way out the door.
~
When Stan arrived, Craig was already seated at the bar, drinking. “PBR,” he announced, as if Stan couldn’t tell. “The ironic choice of disaffected fake-ass hipsters everywhere.” Craig paused to give his self-awareness some weight. “You want one?”
Stan took his seat and removed his bulky jacket to reveal his yellow cassette tape T-shirt. “No thanks,” he said. “Have they got any Goose Island?”
“Nice, but no, why would they? Look at this fucking pit. They haven’t got anything.”
Stan smiled in agreement and ordered a Rolling Rock. “Where’s your camera?” he asked after his drink arrived.
“I didn’t bring it.” Craig wiped his broad, red lips. Stan silently wondered why Craig didn’t use lip balm. “I don’t bring it everywhere.”
“I thought that was your thing. Pictures of drunk people?”
“Well, who’s getting drunk?” Craig asked. “We’re having a drink.”
Stan was fine with this. Performance, being on … he hated it. The first thing he’d learned in his first journalism seminar all those Septembers ago had been: Never let yourself be quoted; never let yourself be photographed. The idea that for eternity pictures of him standing in Butters’ old bedroom looking cock-eyed at a computer monitor would be available to all and sundry bothered him. He hadn’t realized it until Craig had shown up without a camera, but there it was.
They talked about graduation, or the lack thereof. “There’s no way I’m pulling it off this year,” Craig announced. This was somewhere into his next beer, the beer after the beer he’d been on when Stan had arrived. “I’ve got all these incompletes, man. Teachers, you know. They just … sometimes you can talk your way into a B or something, just let it go … but some of this shit, some of this shit that I’m finishing is shit from my sophomore — my freshman year. I accepted a long time ago that I’d be a third-semester senior. So be it.”
It was inconceivable to Stan, this concept of not being finished. It bothered him when it was Kenny, but it surprised him when it was Craig, because Craig seemed so much to have it all together, what with his insidious voyeuristic website. “How can you have managed to get this far and not be graduating?” Stan asked. “I just don’t understand.” The bartender set another green bottle in front of his face. This was his second. He attacked it.
“Very very simple answer. I don’t go to class and I don’t do my work.”
“But that’s pathetic. I mean, complete retards manage to graduate from college.” He was thinking of Loren when he said that. But then he added: “I mean, Kyle is going to graduate from college in May, and he can barely put one foot in front of the other.” Stan recalled Kyle sulking through dinner, the half-lidded exhaustion with which he had pushed food around his plate. Stan noticed that Craig had shaved since the party. He was prickly, but no longer bearded.
“Oh, but Kyle’s not distracted, he’s never been the type to get distracted … he’s pretty focused. You forget, I’m not his best friend, but I’ve known they guy since I was 4. He’s always been intent on things. It’s just that he runs too far with it. I’m just plain distracted. I’m not in school, really. I’m a motherfucking artist.”
“But you’re in school, aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” Craig crumpled his empty beer can in his fist. “I mean, I guess so.”
“What do you mean, you guess so?”
“I mean, I’m enrolled. It’s just … not … happening. Maybe you should come to Manhattan this spring, Marsh.” A hand descended on Stan’s shoulder, giving him a friendly squeeze of knowing. “You have a good thing going in the Midwest?”
“Well.” A week ago, he would have just said ‘yes,’ probably been quite offended, and gone off on Craig for confusing the Midwest with the great city of Chicago. Now he just stilled, and then shrugged. “We’ll see if I can swing it.”
“Great.” If Craig could seem happy about anything, he might have seemed happy now: “I don’t know if you’ve ever been there.”
“Never.”
“Well, maybe you should come. ... I mean go. I mean.” Craig shrugged. “Whatever, I don’t know what I mean. This place is so fucked up. I have to get home.”
“Home?” Stan asked. “Like, to your house? But we just got here.”
“Not home to my parents’ place,” Craig corrected. “Home to the city.”
“Um.”
“New York,” Craig filled in, impatient with Stan’s lack of comprehension. “I gotta get home to the city.”
“Oh.”
“When are you going back?”
“Uh.” Stan didn’t know why he couldn’t make good sentences all of a sudden. It was like his mind was occupied, and yet he really wasn’t thinking of anything. He drank beer to help him complete a thought. It worked. “My ticket is booked for the 15th. But I was going to go back early. I told my mom after New Year’s. I just don’t know.”
“Can’t take it anymore?”
“Not another minute,” Stan said, although now that it was just him and Craig and a couple of beers, he felt no pressing need to get out of Colorado anymore.
“I know. This place is awful. Everything closes by 1, for one thing, and that’s a stretch. “
“I think Walmart’s open all night.”
“Oh, that’s classy.”
With his beer finished, Stan signaled the bartender, who mouthed one minute at him, and went back to making a drink for another patron. “Come on, dude.” Stan sighed. “You know this place. You’re from here. None of this should be surprising to you. It’s sad, but at least in South Park there is the promise of being able to leave it and go far, far away. Whatever you tell me about Manhattan, where could you possibly go from there? You’re stuck, aren’t you? Don’t you ever feel just a little bit stuck?”
“No.”
“Just a little bit?”
“No.”
“You have to be lying.”
Craig shook his head. “I don’t lie. There’s no scandal in lying. No one pays attention to you if you lie.”
“Can I help you?”
Stan looked up at the looming figure of the bartender, balding with a dull yellow ponytail — not blond, yellow. And he was balding. Stan almost giggled. Almost.
“Um, yep.” Stan pushed his empty Rolling Rock bottle toward the bartender.
“Another of these?” the old man asked. He was wiping a glass with a dish towel — a filthy dish towel. Beside Stan, Craig shuddered.
“Uh, no, I…” Stan paused. “What are you having?”
“Me?” Craig asked. “I have to fly tomorrow morning at 7:30. I’m not having anything else.”
“Aw, that’s no fun.”
“Should I come back when you’re decided? I got other customers in here,” the bartender drawled.
“Uh, um. No, just bring me a shot of, um … no, a double … of tequila?”
“What kind of tequila?”
Stan looked at Craig. Craig said nothing, didn’t gesture, didn’t emote, just sat there. “Cheap?” Stan asked.
“Salt and lime?”
“What?” Stan glanced at Craig again. Then he looked back to the bartender. “I’m drinking alone. What am I going to do with salt and lime wedges?”
“Coming right up.”
“Look, Marsh.” Craig yanked Stan’s attention back from the man fixing his drink. “This place isn’t me. I don’t feel any connection to it. I come back two weeks a year. My life is there now.”
“I, um.” Stan felt himself at a loss. He wasn’t sure why he was having problems describing his feelings, but he was. He tried to remember the Stan Marsh who spent the night before he flew home in bed with Loren, wishing like hell he didn’t have to go back. That Stan Marsh had been dreading pouring his heart out to Kyle; this Stan Marsh was feeling inadequate for disagreeing with Craig Tucker on the minute point of how at-home one could feel in a redneck mountain town after spending three years in the big city. He felt betrayed by Craig, but he felt attracted to Craig’s attitude. Too many thoughts were stirring around his head, just in time to start drinking his tequila.
Craig cleared his throat. “Oh, wait. Okay, the most ridiculous thing happened at that party at Butters’. Can I tell you? It’s kind of disturbing. This is your disclaimer.”
Stan did not flinch. Very little disturbed him — or so he thought. He’d seen his best friend smash his own hand with a searing pan; if that didn’t shatter him, what could? “Okay,” he agreed. “Tell me.”
“Ike Broflovski hit on me.”
Stan’s eyes widened. “What?”
“It’s true.”
There was nothing to be said. Around them, the balding bartender was running the blender, fixing someone a syrupy margarita. Craig tugged on Stan’s shirt.
“Hello?” he asked. “You’re either shocked to speechlessness, or it’s just to be expected.”
“Both, I guess.” With a trembling hand, Stan grasped for his drink. “Well, I hope you turned him down, dude. He’s, like … 15.”
“Even if I was into little boys, like if that were my thing, I wouldn’t dream of messing with a kid whose dad once literally sued everyone. It’s just off-putting, right? I mean, don’t you want to ask me what he did?”
Stan shook his head. “No, no. Ike is—”
“Like a brother to you?”
“No!” Stan began shaking. “No, no. Um, not exactly. Not exactly.”
“Well, some cliché like that, anyway.”
“Yeah, sure,” Stan agreed. He surprised himself by downing the rest of his tequila in one gulp without choking.
~
Craig paid Stan’s tab. Stan wanted to tell Craig that this didn’t impress him, that Loren always paid his tab — but then Stan, even with his logic impinged by tequila and flattery, realized that he could no longer count on anyone to pay his tab, so he thanked Craig with sincerity.
“No problem,” Craig replied. “It’s the least I can do.”
“The least you could have done is let me buy my own drinks. Or not called me at all.” Stan smiled. They were outside the bar, only a streetlamp and the copious neon signs in scant cloistered windows illuminating them in the frigid night. A dull pulse reverberated from the laughter and televisions back inside the bar, but outside, they were alone. “But I’m glad you called me,” Stan continued, not caring if his jacket got dirty as he leaned against Craig’s (parents’) car. “I’m so glad I got to see you, dude. It feels like it’s been forever.”
“I think it’s only been since summer. I came home for a week this summer,” Craig reminded him.
“Did I see you then?”
“I don’t know. I think Wendy had people over. Maybe it was Sally. Doesn’t matter. That week kind of sucked.”
“Did this week kind of suck?” Stan asked. He kept having to adjust his balance on the sedan; he didn’t want to fall over, and he hated that it was taking more effort to remain upright than he wanted it to. The neon lights of Corona signs blinded him mildly; in the blue wash of advertising Craig looked … well, he looked almost Canadian, sallow and narrow-eyed. How sick was that? Stan’s cheeks felt hot.
“No, this week was okay, I’m glad I got to see Token; I mean, I went to Boston in October, but one can never get enough Token.”
“…And are you glad you saw me?” Stan arched his brows and pouted.
“Sure.”
“You mean it?”
“Uh.” Craig rolled his eyes. “Yes.”
“Me too.”
Stan licked his lips, and fixed them to Craig’s. Craig’s lips were not soft, really, and Stan liked soft lips, but he also liked a little bit of facial hair, and for the brief moment of their kiss he enjoyed Craig’s stubble on his chin. But before Stan could even manage his tongue past Craig’s teeth, Craig was holding Stan’s face away from his.
“Okay,” Craig said. He took his hands from Stan’s face and put them on Stan’s shoulders, and then he pushed Stan back — he wasn’t rough, but he was serious. Not coy — serious. “That’s enough, cowboy,” he said. “Unhand me.”
“You just unhanded yourself,” Stan said. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to not understand,” Craig replied.
“You don’t want to—”
“Absolutely not.”
“But you paid for my drinks,” Stan whined.
“I was being nice.”
“You invited me out.”
“Yep, and I’m beginning to regret it.”
“You, you.” Stan didn’t know what to say. He was feeling that drunken wooziness again, so he backed up to Craig’s car, and let himself balance against it. “You said Ike Broflovski wasn’t your type!” Stan protested.
“He isn’t my type. He’s a little boy.”
“But I’m a big boy!”
“Yeah, but you’re still a boy,” Craig pointed out.
“What are you saying? I don’t understand.”
“You understand. I don’t like boys.”
“But, you—”
“I’m going to brush this off as you being kind of drunk, Marsh.” Craig took his hand. “Don’t misconstrue this,” he added as he did.
Craig led Stan back into the bar, and abandoned him at a booth against the wall. Before he departed he brought Stan a cola with too much ice, and a cherry floating at the top.
“There you go, big guy,” Craig said. His face was plastered with a look of utter defeat. “Drink that up. Don’t go until you do.”
“What are you gonna do?” Stan moaned. “You can’t just leave me sitting here!”
“Sure I can. Can I trust you to call someone?”
“No!”
“Okay.” Craig was scowling. “I’ll go after I see you take a sip.”
Stan hated the taste of his cola — it was weak and watery, choked with ice. He didn’t want to know if the cherry was a cruel kind of joke or just flung in there by the bartender, hoping no one would complain about the flat, tasteless soda he was apparently fine with serving to well-paying customers. Stan resented this. Who was he to listen to Craig? But being intoxicated, he was suggestible.
“That’s great.” Craig had his hands in his pockets; he wasn’t going to touch Stan before he left. “I don’t know when I’ll see you again, Marsh. But good luck with graduating, and, um, if you come to the city, call me.”
“You mean it?” Stan asked.
“Yeah, I mean it.” He gave a weak wave with both hands. “Make sure you call someone. Someone responsible. Don’t call Kenny McCormick. Finish your Coke. … And definitely don’t call Kyle,” he added as an afterthought.
Stan returned the wave. Tears came to his eyes as Craig left, and he banished them with soda.
~
It was Ike behind the creaking door; he’d knocked three times, even once using the special knock he’d learned by listening to Stan do it back when he and Kyle were in high school, but there’d been no reply, and Ike took this for an invitation to come in. Kyle wasn’t often shy about being busy, or occupied, and generally he did want attention. “Penny for your thoughts?” Ike tucked the door back into its jam behind himself; he was on tip-toes.
“Really?” Kyle asked. He had been lying on the bed in the dark with the blinds drawn, his lighter in his fist on his belly, making it spark to light and catching the flame in his left hand, extinguishing it. He stopped when his brother came in. “My thoughts are only worth a penny?”
“That’s all I can afford to pay you, really. Mom and Dad only give me $20 a week in allowance.”
“Awesome. You know they give me nothing.”
“I’m sure they think it’s best for you.”
“I’m sure my shrink’s told them it just enables me.” Kyle sat up in bed, tossing his lighter onto the floor. “Can I do something for you?”
“That was actually what I came to ask you.”
Kyle shrugged. “I want to tell you something, but I can’t really think of what to say.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s okay, it’ll come to me.” Kyle drew the covers up to his waist. “Do you want to sit?” He pointed to the swivel chair in front of his computer.
Ike shook his head. “I think I’m fine. Um. … We haven’t really talked lately.”
“Well, sorry if I wasn’t in a talking mood. I find out you’ve been devirginized, and the next thing I know, I’m being fucking strapped down. So that was okay.” Despite the heft of his words, Kyle’s tone was static. His pitch neither fell nor rose.
“So, uh.” Ike shifted his weight. He rubbed his hands together. “What’d you do after Butters’?”
Kyle shrugged, like the question bored him. “Went back to Trish’s.”
“Well, don’t tell me you fucked Trish.”
“No, Kenny fucked Trish,” Kyle clarified. “I fucked Kenny.”
“Whoa.” Ike took a step back, eyes widening. He looked behind himself, spotted Kyle’s desk chair, and sat himself in it. “I thought Kenny was straight.”
“He is.” Kyle scowled. “But you never thought Kyle was straight.”
Ike was unsure of whether he was being asked a question; he figured he had better play this like it was one: “I thought Kyle was too interesting to allow himself not to defy categorization.”
“No.” Kyle sat up. “Kyle is too unstable to will himself to keep his dick in his pants. And he hates the third person. It’s a vile, pretentious, murderous set of pronouns. What is this, a damn story?”
“Murderous, really?” Ike asked.
“Whatever happened to direct, personal communication?” Kyle replied.
“Oh, okay. Is the third person why you’re so lonely?”
“No, I’m lonely because I don’t have any friends. Nobody wants to be friends with me. I’m toxic to people.”
“This sounds a bit dramatic.”
“Being dramatic doesn’t make it untrue.”
Ike got up out of the desk chair, and went to sit on the bed with his older brother.
Kyle inched away, butting up against his headboard. He removed his sunglasses, and flung them on the bedside table, next to an alarm clock, a florescent lamp, an array of condoms in square, crinkled wrappers, and several pill bottles of varying sizes and heights. The glasses knocked over a bottle, and it fell to floor. Its loose cap knocked off, dozens of pill capsules spilled out. Kyle took a glance at the mess; he was not bothered by it. “My life is completely fucked up, Ike,” he said.
Ike didn’t see the need to argue. “I know, man, and I feel bad. You know I feel bad, but I’m, like ... I’ll help you however I can but there’s not really a lot I can—”
“I keep Dexedrine in the linen closet.”
Ike shrugged. “Why the linen closet?”
“They won’t let me keep it in my room. She won’t.” There was no need for specification or elaboration. “I think she counts those pills, sometimes. It’s beyond me why I should be able to go off on my own to school and medicate myself, and then I come back here and have to deal with the humiliation of having a million tiny capsules dispensed by my mother and father.” Kyle sighed. His eyes were bloodshot and his lids bruised, the result of sleepless nights and silent self-punishment, unspeakable brawls at collegiate house parties and silent, drawn-out sobbing. It made him look tired, and in fact, he was exhausted.
“So if you go grab me the bottle,” Kyle concluded, commanding more than asking, “at least my prints won’t be on it.”
“You’re paranoid. No one’s counting pills. Or dusting for prints.”
“Yes she is! Do you know that at school, everything is distributed by my RA?”
“I thought you said you medicated yourself at school.”
Kyle frowned. “You can buy things from people. Do you really think I stick to a proscribed regimen?”
“I almost wish you would!”
“Just please get me five Dexedrine and we can move on from this,” Kyle said. “I feel miserable.”
“Did it ever occur to you that fucking around with your drug regimen might just make you more fucked up?”
Kyle pushed himself up onto his knees, and pointed a dramatic finger at his brother. “Did it ever occur to you that I’m not depressive?”
Ike stood up, and backed toward the door. “I don’t know what you are, but the answer is probably not good. Jacking yourself with Dexedrine isn’t going to fix anything, Kyle.”
Kyle waited. Ike stared back at him, a mean look on his face. It made Kyle wish for his baby brother — the one who toddled after him and watched Jim Lehrer with a retarded look of glee and intrigue. He didn’t want to know this stern gay kid who knew everything and wasn’t shy about sharing it.
Their staring match was interrupted by Kyle’s phone — the strangled crowing of a rooster came roaring from its little speakers, trying the best it could to alert its owner of a phone call. Kyle glared at the phone, seized it, and read the name on the display screen.
“You look disgusted,” Ike observed. “Who is it?”
Kyle shut off the ringer, forcing the phone to voicemail. He didn’t even open it. “It’s just Kenny,” he said.
“See? You totally have friends, Kyle, okay? Kenny’s trying to call you.”
“I don’t want to talk to Kenny. He’s trashy.”
“Trashy or not, he’s your friend. He’d help you if he could.”
“I know he would. But he can’t because he’s trashy,” Kyle wailed. “I don’t want to talk about my friends, because I have, like, two.”
“Eric Cartman is kind of your friend,” Ike said. “…Ish.”
Kyle just groaned.
“And Stan is your friend.”
“Don’t you get me started on that rapist bastard!” Kyle cried. Then he flopped back down. “Don’t even say his name in this house.”
“Kyle—”
“Get the fuck out of my room, Ike. I don’t need your help. I’ll just fucking OD on something expired I have in my desk.”
“That’s a really awful—“ Ike was interrupted by the phone beginning to ring a second time.
“Oh, for the love of…” Kyle reached over to shut it off again.
“Kyle…” Ike reached out, only to have his arm shoved away.
“I’m glad you brought him up.” Kyle sat up again. Ike wished he would fall asleep, or at least calm down. “You still haven’t apologized to me for doing that.”
“I have nothing to apologize for.”
Kyle rolled his eyes.
Ike sighed. “I just want to have one thing, Ky, one thing that’s my own. Don’t begrudge me this one thing.”
“You fucked my best friend!”
“He fucked me,” Ike corrected.
“Typical Stan,” Kyle spat. “Not man enough to take it up the ass after all these years.”
“Whatever, I didn’t want to fuck him, he was ridiculously drunk at the time. I was sober. Mostly. Mostly sober. Sober enough for ass sex, which is more sober than you are right now.”
“I’d be more sober if you’d get me some Dexedrine, Ike, please—” Kyle clasped his hands. He shook them in Ike’s face. “Look at me. Look at me, Ike!”
Ike listened, gazing right into Kyle’s eyes, trying not to flinch at how bloodshot and red and raw they looked. “I’m looking at you.”
“Thank you.”
Ike grasped his brother by the shoulders. “Okay, here is what I think. I think you need to lie down and try to rest and let the drugs pass through your system, and if it takes a couple of days it takes a couple of days. ” Ike paused. He kept looking at Kyle, wondering if this was getting though to him. “I also think you and Stan need to talk to each other, but not until you detox from this. You’re upset, and I get it, and I also get that when you get upset you get scary, and that when you get scary Mom and Dad go a little nuts with the drugs. … And I also think you need to lay off Mom and Dad. They’re good people. They’re just not sure what to do.”
“So they do this?” Kyle pointed at himself.
“You and Stan need to talk,” Ike reiterated. “That’s my final position. Calm thyself down, and call Stan. Not before!” Ike let go of his brother. “And I’m out. I gotta go to bed. I have practice tomorrow.”
“Can I tell you something?” Kyle rasped.
“Of course.” Ike paused, his hand already on the doorknob.
Kyle cleared his throat. “I think if you wanted something that was ‘your own’ ” — Kyle delighted in embellishing this with waggles of his index fingers — “you should have done someone other than Stan. Beyond that you knew it would hurt me—”
“I never meant for you to find out!”
“—you picked the one thing that could never be just yours, Ike. You forget, little dude, I’ve had about 8 million hours of psychotherapy. So allow me a little amateur analysis: I think you knew I’d find out. I mean, in this town? Not even counting for your own oversight? Get real. Come on.” Kyle lowered his voice: “You wanted to punish me, like, to take something away from me like I take things away from you. Only you forget, again, that I’m not forcing you to be here. You’re in my room talking to me of your own accord. I never want you to deal with these things. I don’t want to put pressure on you. Okay? I’m sick, Ike, I can’t help it. But you wanted me to suffer.” He raised it again. “So, good job. I feel like about as bad as I ever have, and I’ve felt pretty bad about a lot of things in my time — inasmuch as I can ever feel anything — so well done.”
“Kyle…”
“Go to bed. I’ll try to detox.”
Ike didn’t budge.
“Go ahead. Come on. You have practice tomorrow. You just go out there and be a normal little kid. I’ll lay here by myself and wish I were the smart one and you were the fucked-up one. Sweet dreams.”
“I hate you, Kyle!” Ike burst out. “You’re fucking cruel!”
“Yeah, well.” Kyle sniffed. “I’m not the only one. Insanity’s in the blood, but cruelty — that’s learned.”
Wiping his eyes, Ike didn’t bother to keep himself from crying. “You want cruelty? Okay. Sometimes I wish you would kill yourself! Then I could be normal and my whole life would be about regular stuff and I wouldn’t have to deal with you! You fucking ruin everything, Kyle! You’ve single-handedly ruined my entire life!”
Ike slammed the door as he left, and the reverberations shook the second storey. But nothing was disturbed; their parents were heavy sleepers, and everything that might have fallen off the wall had shattered long ago.
Through the walls, Kyle heard his little brother crying. In his own bed, Kyle curled into a fetal form and began to bite his nails. He knew Ike could hear him crying, too, but he also knew he would stop by the time he tasted blood. His mind turned to his missed calls.
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Date: 2010-12-04 18:13 (UTC)This whole story is my favorite.
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Date: 2010-12-04 21:23 (UTC)Glad you like the story!
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Date: 2010-12-04 23:32 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-05 03:01 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-05 04:09 (UTC)Also I keep forgetting to tell you these little details that I just love. It kills me that Kyle goes to CC. :D
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Date: 2010-12-05 20:50 (UTC)I don't think there's anywhere else in Colorado that Kyle really could go, assuming he wants to go to a somewhat elitist school, but his parents won't let him go too far from them.