Page 84 of The Art of Drowning

I found a quiet corner in the bar and sat next to Callum in a booth. The urge to be close to him still hadn’t gone away. Bowie would tell me I was being a lovesick idiot. He’d tell me a lot of things. He probably wasn’t wrong about a lot of them. Callum Weeks was a habit I didn’t want to break. I couldn’t fix his family. I couldn’t unfuck the mess that we’d just learned about. I couldn’t bring Sam back from the dead so we could punch him in the mouth. But I could order us both a couple of drinks and some dinner to go with it.

“I’m not hungry,” Callum said after the server left with our order.

“Did I ask? We haven’t eaten all day. Hungry or not, your body needs fuel, and no, booze does not count.”

He looked over at me and frowned. “When did you get so bossy?”

“I’m not bossy. I’m just right.”

Callum scoffed, but a hint of a smile betrayed his determination to stay in a bad mood.

Honestly, I could understand why he was hurt. No one likes being lied to. But if my feet were in his parents’ shoes, I’d be hesitant to tell my kid his origin story.

“Swingers.” Callum said, shaking his head. “Can you believe it? I mean, it makes the most sense if you think about it.”

“What a wild world to live in where your parents being swingers is the thing that makes the most sense.”

Our server arrived with our drinks, and I ordered a couple of beers to be brought over with our food. For now, we had the Jack and Coke I’d ordered, thinking Callum needed something with a bit of kick to start with.

“What are you going to do with this information? Any ideas?”

Callum downed half his drink with a grimace. “Honestly, no idea. I mean. They fucking lied to me my whole life. Even Sam knew.”

“And he used it against them,” I offered, trying to keep things in perspective for him.

“What was it with him? Why did he have this magical fucking power of manipulation? I mean, he was a shitty person. And the older he got, the shittier he got. All because why? Because he wasn’t an only child? Because Mom and Dad raised me like their own? Fucking territorial shitbag. If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him myself.” Callum downed the rest of his drink then sat there, chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath.

“The worst part,” Callum said after a minute of thick silence. “The worst part is that if I blame them for letting Sam manipulate them, I have to blame us for the same thing.” He scrubbed a hand down his face and looked around for the server, probably hoping for another drink. I slid mine over to him.

“Are you sure?”

“Go ahead,” I told him. I fully intended to stay reasonably sober anyway so I could keep an eye on him. The last thing Callum needed was for me to get raging drunk. When I was drunk, my emotions tended to go a little haywire. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d gotten wasted and ended up in a corner crying about him. Those weren’t fond memories.

Callum took a sip of my drink and then set it down. He seemed to fluctuate between wanting to get shitfaced and wanting to pace himself. Or maybe he’d just needed that first drink to take the edge off. If he wanted to get absolutely hammered, I wasn’t going to stop him, but part of me hoped that wasn’t the case. I didn’t think it would help much in the long run.

“So what now?” Callum asked. “Do I just… go home and pretend everything isn’t fucked to shit?”

When I didn’t say anything, he looked at me. Annoyance flashed in his eyes.

“Are you going to say anything? Anything at all? You have no opinions on this?” Callum was angry, and not at me, but I was the nearest target.

“I have plenty of opinions,” I told him, weighing my words carefully. “But I don’t think they’re of any help because it doesn’t matter what I think. The thing that matters is how you feel.”

Callum scoffed and took another swallow of the drink I’d given him. He looked, in a word, fucking miserable. I tried to imagine finding out that my parents weren’t my parents, but they were so shitty to me that the idea wasn’t unappealing.

Our food arrived and with it the beers I’d ordered. I wasted no time draining half my beer before digging into the burger. Our plates were identical except for the sides. I’d ordered one burger with fries and the other with onion rings so we could trade. Callum ignored the burger and started picking at the onion rings. I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist them.

“This is a nightmare.” He sounded dejected. Not angry or confused, just quietly miserable.

“I know.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. He sat in silence picking at the fries and onion rings while I ate my burger. By the time I was done mine, Callum had woken up his appetite enough to make him want more food and he devoured the burger in two minutes flat.

“I was hungrier than I thought,” he admitted, somewhat sheepishly. “God, I feel like such a bitch. I had great parents who loved me. They did their best, you know. And all I can think about is how fucked up they are for lying to me.”

“Lying is fucked up. But I can see why they did.”

Callum looked at me and his eyebrows climbed up his forehead, reaching for his hairline. “You can?”