“I remember this,” he said. “This bit Idoremember, but no one believed me.”
“We believe you,” Javi said. “So you were talking to Birdie. Did she ever ask you to meet her somewhere?”
Leo shook his head. “No. That was my idea. She needed money, and I… I thought that she might, that she was pretty and might….” He shrugged his shoulder with a teen’s awkwardness. “So I said I could get her some. Dad keeps a stash in his safe in case of emergencies. The combination was my birthday. Used to be. So I grabbed it and went to meet her.”
“You met her?” Cloister said.
The hint of disbelief in his voice was enough to make Leo look up angrily and sniffle back snot as he insisted that “Yes! I met her,” Javi bumped Cloister’s knee with his under the table—a mute signal to be quiet.
“Where did you meet her?”
“Don’t remember,” Leo said.
“You do,” Javi said. “Think.”
Leo hissed out a frustrated sigh. “Idon’t. My memory’s fucked, okay? It was some garage, all right? Mom had dropped me off at the movies. I walked there. It was dark. Birdie was waiting for me. She’d gotten me a slushie. She—”
“Did she look different?” Javi asked.
“Yeah. She looked like shit. Her teeth were gone, she was all sores, and….” Leo swallowed and glanced down at his hands, with their scars and swollen, chewed-at nails. “She looked like me. If I hadn’t known it was her, I wouldn’t have recognized her. Didn’t wanna fuck her anymore. I didn’t even want to take the slushie. I’d never thought about it before, you know, how shit your life could be and you still think it’s better than something else.”
“But you’re sure it was Birdie?” Cloister said.
“Yes!” Leo bristled. “Fuck sake, how many times do I have to tell you? Yousaidyou believed me.”
Javi put his hand on Cloister’s thigh and squeezed. The length of hard muscle clenched under his fingers, but the heat and the rough scrape of denim were a pleasant sensation he put away for later.
“We do,” he said.
“Tell him that,” Leo said, jabbing a finger at Cloister. “He’s gotno ideawhat my life is like. No idea what you’re asking me to do. And he’s sitting there sneering at me?”
“I just don’t get it,” Cloister said, ignoring the fingers that dug into his leg. “You said you hardly recognized her that night. How did youknowit was her?”
“She was…. She said….” Leo stumbled over the sentence like a bad starter motor, catching for the conviction and then losing it again. Despite the bad years Leo had on Billy, there was something painfully familiar about them in that second. “It was her AIM. Her profile was a selfie. It was… she said it was her. Who’d lie?”
Javi wasn’t interested in answering that question just then. He dodged it instead and dragged the conversation back to the path he wanted to be on.
“What happened after you gave her the money?”
Leo closed his eyes. They looked bruised and older than they should. “It was really weird. She made me take the slushie. I didn’t want to. There was lipstick on the straw. It was gross.Shewas gross. But she was getting upset, so I took it, and I had a drink, and she said she’d drive me back up to the movie theater.”
“She had a car?” Cloister asked.
“Yeah. No. There was a guy with her. I know I shouldn’t have gotten in the car with him, but the wind was so bad, and I didn’t want to walk back in the storm. I don’t remember much after that. I think I was sick. The guy said I’d been sick. Nothing after that… nothing that makes sense.”
“Did she get in the car?” Javi asked.
“Yes,” Leo said. Then he opened his eyes and squinted. “Or… no? I don’t think she did. I didn’t see her again.”
“Doesn’t matter. Go on,” Javi said. “What happened next?”
Leo hunched in on himself, wire tight with the strain of remembering. “I don’t remember. Really. It’s just—” He thumped the heel of his hand against his temple hard enough that they all heard the impact. “—noises. It was hot and it was noisy—so noisy I couldn’t think. Someone was talking, but it was like God screaming at me. I knew it was important, really important, but I couldn’t make out the words. I was out of it for over a week. A trucker found me a week later in a truck stop begging for water. There was a fountain rightthere, but I kept asking people to let me drink.”
He laughed, although there was no humor in it, and did jazz hands around his face.
“This is your brain on drugs, kids,” he mocked as he mugged a dull expression. Then all the energy soaked out of him, and he slouched down in his chair and supported his head on his hand. “I was lucky, I suppose. Guy who found me called the cops. The cops called my mom. They thought I’d been doing drugs and had a bad trip.”
“How were you physically?” Javi asked.
