Page 29 of Sublimate
He looked down at me again. “You questioned me before about the character of my friends and you weren’t wrong, but this one is different. Beau is a pretty good guy. He used to travel with me a lot.”
“Like a sidekick?” That was nice for both of them. I remembered trying to stay awake as I had gone across the country, talking to myself or singing to break the silence. It was too bad that the radio in my car didn’t work.
“Maybe you could have called him my sidekick, but those days are over. He told me that he won’t be able to travel for the foreseeable future because he and his former girlfriend just had a son.” He paused. “It’s difficult to believe that Beau Gowan is a father. He was hardly able to take care of himself.”
“Are you worried that he’ll neglect the baby? Because kids can get into a lot of crapola unless you’re on them.”
“Do you know that from personal experience?”
“Yeah, the personal experience of getting into crapola myself,” I said. “When I was pretty young, maybe three or four, I poured out a whole bottle of dish soap on the floor because I thought it was fun to slide around in it.”
“That does sound fun.”
“Well, it was, but I wasted all the soap and my mom’s boyfriend got mad and pushed my face in it. After that, I had to clean it up and I remember crying because no matter how long I worked, I couldn’t get rid of all the bubbles. We moved not too long after that.” I paused and then said, “I think that guy threw us out and maybe the soap had something to do with it. Speaking of soap, I also ate a laundry pod but I threw it up. I ran away a lot, too—I guess it’s more that I wandered away by myself and once while I was out there alone, I fell into a ditch and broke my arm. And that’s just some of it. I did a lot more because I was a holy terror, according to my sister. She’s two years older and she was supposed to watch me. My mom left us together a lot.”
“So, when you were three, she was five yet she was in charge.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “It wasn’t very fair to her, I guess. Maybe that’s why she grew up so mean. We don’t get along at all.” She had a lot of problems similar to my mom’s, like drugs and other unlawful stuff that I didn’t want to discuss. “Did you get into trouble as a kid?”
“Not like that. When I was little, I didn’t eat poison or break bones because I had a nanny watching me. When I got older, though, I did whatever I wanted. There were no eyes on me anymore and I got into a lot of things that authority figures wouldn’t have liked, had they been aware.”
“When you were in high school, you would drive off to Chicago in the middle of the night,” I said.
“What? How did you know that?”
“You were in the same grade as Cadence and she told me,” I answered. Then he wanted to know what else she had said, so I mentioned that she had explained how nice he was.
“Nice,” Nolan repeated. “Really?”
“You saved their volleyball team,” I recalled. “You also used to go to all their games and lead cheers.”
“You’re right, I did go to those games. I remember drinking in the parking lot before I went into the gym,” he said. “I drank every day and I’m surprised I didn’t get kicked out of that school. That was why I got expelled from another place after ninth grade, that and getting in a fight.”
“I can’t imagine you fighting.” I looked him over again. He wasn’t so thin anymore, like he used to be when we’d first met on the snowy road, and he was broad across the shoulders. Due to the shorts, I could see that his legs had a lot of muscles—not that he was thick and bumpy, but he looked strong enough to fight and he was tall, six-three or more, so he must have had a good reach.
But I still couldn’t imagine it. I had witnessed people going at each other before, and it had been ugly, dirty, and vicious. He just seemed above all that.
“I got into a fistfight with my roommate,” he said. “He took a swing at me and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I swung back.”
“Why? Why did he try to hit you?”
“He was making another kid do all his work, scaring the guy and threatening him, and I thought that was bullshit. I told him either to do it himself or to do what I did, which was nothing. I never opened one book the entire year and I didn’t know the password I was supposed to use for the school app to see what was due.” He shook his head as he remembered. “We had a rotating class schedule and I never knew where I was supposed to be. I also didn’t care.”
“Cadence said that, too,” I told him. “She said that you never did any work but you aced all the tests.”
“I didn’t ace everything. How does she know all this about me?”
“I guess she paid attention,” I said. “It’s kind of weird, though, that she remembers so much and you didn’t even recognize her at the hospital.”
We went for half a block before he answered. “I was drunk most of the time, which accounts for part of that. I was also a self-absorbed little shit, which explains the rest of it.”
That didn’t explain why he had bought all that wrapping paper for her team and it didn’t explain him standing up to his roommate on behalf of someone else. I was about to tell him that when he said something else.
“It’s six months. Six months ago today, I stopped drinking.”
“What?” I grabbed his arm. “It’s your anniversary?”
“Not a year, just six months,” he corrected me.
