I blinked and gave myself a shake.Jesus…
Holden’s green eyes glittered in the dark as if they held the same thoughts, and then he tore his gaze away and continued down the hallway.
I followed him into a bedroom that belonged to a little boy, with a race car–shaped bed, video game console, and TV. Holden toyed with a model airplane from the kid’s dresser as if it were a relic from a world he didn’t understand.
“It was clear early on that I wasn’t going to quietly settle down and marry a nice girl to carry on the family line. I was a Tasmanian devil born in a glass factory. They tried to do everything to ‘cure’ me, sending me to psychiatrists, reform school, and threats to disown me, which I never took seriously. Then they got desperate.”
“How?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“They sent me to conversion therapy in Alaska for six months,” he said all in one breath.
“Conversion therapy,” I murmured, feeling sick. “That shit still happens?”
He nodded. The song playing through the house sang of living through tidal waves, parishes, and biblical floods.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Christ.”
Holden carefully set the airplane down. “After the Great Alaskan Experiment, they expected me to make a triumphant return to the world as a straight boy. Instead, I was ready to check out.”
My skin went cold all over. “Check out?”
“I locked myself in my room with my notebooks, pens, and liters of booze, ready to drink myself into oblivion. This wasn’t in Mom and Dad’s plans. I mean, think of the bad press! So they hustled me off to a year’s stay in a Swiss sanitarium.”
My stomach felt as if I’d swallowed a boulder of ice. “The conversion therapy was so bad you needed a year in an institution to recover?”
“In a nutshell.”
He said it lightly, but I remembered how he’d dared Frankie to stab him in the heart at Chance’s party. Holden had laughed it off, but it hadn’t been a game. In that moment, it had been real. A crazy desire washed over me to protect him from something that had already happened.
“What the fuck did they do to you in Alaska?”
Holden frowned as if my concern unnerved him. Or confused him. He reached for his flask and took a long pull before answering.
“You don’t want to hear it. Suffice it to say, it didn’t work. My already fragile grasp of sanity took a hit, but the conversion therapy failed. Because of course it failed. It’s not possible to change the fundamentalbeingnessof a person. You can only try to beat it down withshame and guilt. Or try to drown it in cruelty. But I won. Who I am stayed. Unfortunately, the cold did too.”
“Goddamn.”
Holden frowned again at my reaction and looked away. “But that’s all icy water under the bridge. I survived, schemed my way out of the sanitarium, and here I am.”
There he was. In my school, in my space, in my thoughts.An intruder in my perfectly ordered world of make-believe, sauntering through its imaginary walls to show how flimsy they could be…if I let him.
“How did you scheme your way out of the sanitarium?” I asked as we moved on down the hallway.
“The aforementioned blow job with a married therapist. It’s funny how blackmailing an institution with a little sex scandal miraculously improves one’s prognosis.”
I laughed despite the crazy absurdity of it all.
“Cheers,” I said. “That’s probably the best—or worst—thing I’ve ever heard.”
We clinked bottle to flask, and I drained my beer. We’d come to the master bedroom. Holden flopped onto the king-size bed. Cage the Elephant asked if we were for real or just pretending. If we’d burn out by morning.
I stood, not knowing what to do with myself.
Holden grinned his sly grin. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you put that empty bottle under someone’s pillow.”
