Errol’s inhale sucks all the air out of the cab. My heart drops from my chest down into my feet.Good job, asshole.“Shit, I’m sorry, man,” I say quickly. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Intellectually, I know life dealt his folks a shit hand. After Errol was born, they decided to play another round of genetic Russian roulette. And on that second spin, the bullet silently slipped into the chamber.
Dennis was younger than Errol by about three years and shared his brother’s dark-brown hair and soulful eyes. They didn’t have much else in common. As best as the doctors could tell, Dennis had the cognitive development of a twenty-month-old, Errol told me once. He was what they called medically fragile.
As a teenager, I didn’t know exactly what that meant biologically, but I soon came to see the real-world consequences with devastating clarity: Every minute, every dollar, every ounce of energy the boys’ parents had was consumed by the Herculean task of keeping Dennis alive. There wasn’t so much as anattaboyor a blip of mental bandwidth left for their remaining son.
They forgot to pick up Errol from games and after-school activities more times than I could count, and almost never remembered to sign permission slips or send him with money for field trips. Birthdays and holidays slipped by unacknowledged. Junior year, I bought him a game cartridge for Christmas. The way his face lit up was the first time I understood the wordheartbreak.
My folks didn’t really have a lot of money, but Errol always had an open invite for dinner. And they came through in the clutch when it really mattered.
Halfway through senior year, Errol’s parents heard about an intensive, quasi-experimental therapy to treat Dennis’s condition. It was being conducted by a highly-regarded university hospital —sixteen hundred miles away. They contacted the research team and secured a space in the program for Dennis.
They didn’t have much to say about what this meant for Errol. I still don’t understand how they could effectively abandon him. There was some vague talk about him moving in with his Gran, who didn’t seem especially keen on the idea and wasn’t even planning to return from her annual winter stint in Florida until the month before graduation.
My best friend was effectively on his own. Horrified, I begged my parentshardto step in. By that point, Errol had so much practice making himself inconspicuous that when I swore they’d hardly evenseehim if he moved in for the rest of the school year, it wasn’t really a lie.
I’d already taken over the basement, so we scoured local marketplace listings until we found a futon that looked like it wouldn’t fall apart. My mom put her foot down at the prospect of bringing a secondhand mattress into the house, so she made my dad go buy a new one to put on top of the frame. Errol promised his parents would pay them back, but everybody knew that wouldn’t happen.
Back then, I used to wonder: Who would Errol have been if life had turned out differently? What would his personality have been like if he hadn’t grown up completely convinced of his own insignificance?
That thought was usually followed by a wave of relief and guilt all mixed up together. In the darkest, meanest part of my soul, I was grateful that things turned out the way they did. Because otherwise, he probably never would have bothered to talk to a gawky nerd like me.
If the other kids had known Errol like I did,he would’ve been popular. I knew it. They wouldn’t have made fun of petty shit like his hair or his weight. He would have gotten hugs and high-fives in the hallways, invites to parties and a steady stream of DMs reaffirming that everybody loved him.
Instead, he just had me. Sure, I stuck up for him and tried to keep bullies off his case. But he deserved better.
Errol’s sigh is heavy. “I figured it was going to come up sooner or later. He died a couple of years ago —just a couple months after Gran, actually.” He blows out another exhale and gives his head a little shake. “That was a rough fucking stretch for a bit there.”
“Holy shit, I’m sorry. I can only imagine.” The words sound hollow and inadequate.
“No, you can’t imagine.” His voice has gone sharp. When I glance over, the dark smile on his face is so brittle it looks about to crack. “They contested the will.”
“Theywhat? I mean… holyshit. Your parents tried totakethe house?”
“Yeah. Petitioned a judge, the whole nine. Logically, I knew it was bullshit. I mean, I’d been living with her for years by then, keeping the place up, driving her places and, towards the end, even doing the cooking and stuff. But I would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, after nightmares about being kicked out.”
“I’m so sorry. That’s just… fuckingwrong.”
Errol kind of shrugs. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything different. I kind of feel like an asshole saying that. Because it wasn’t their fault Dennis needed so much time and money and —”
“No. The way they treated you wasn’t right. I’m sure what they went through was awful, but their way of coping was… what? To justignorethe fact that they had two sons, not just one? Uh-uh.”
I shake my head. “It’s not like they had a puppy they realized they didn’t have time for after Dennis came along and needed so much care. They had anotherkid. I’m sorry, I feel like a dick saying this, but even though they had it tougher than most parents, at the end of the day they did a shit job actually parenting.”
My vehemence surprises me. It’s like I still feel that sense of protectiveness towards him that I used to have. Lord only knows why — or what that feeling is good for —anymore. I keep running my mouth, though, because that’s what I do.
“Who knows — maybe if they didn’t orient their lives entirely around Dennis’s care and — oh, I don’t know — chaperoned a field trip or came to an intramural day or some other shit once in a fucking while, maybe they would’ve had the emotional reserves to do a better job taking care ofbothof you.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Errol whispers. Then I guess neither one of us knows what to say, so we just fall quiet and listen to the swish of the wipers and the hiss of tires on wet pavement.
8
AARYN
“Did you have a lot of girlfriends?” Errol asks abruptly, breaking the silence. “You know, in college and afterwards?”
I shake my head. “Not exactly. I had some college hookups, but we were usually working on the same projects or whatever. Once I started doing my own thing, things kind of dried up for a while. I was just toobusy.”
