All We Can Do Is Wait(34)
“Poor?”
Jason shifted uncomfortably.
“Kidding,” Morgan said, giving Jason a meek smile. “I mean, about your boyfriend, not about—I mean, my dad always says we’re gonna be the last poor family in Dorchester. You know, since you got all the rich people buying houses in Savin Hill. First it was the gays . . .” She looked at Jason. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s O.K. I am a gay, it’s true. But, uh, don’t tell anyone that.”
“They don’t know?”
“They might, but I’ve never told them. So.”
“I get it.”
“Your dad, is he going to be O.K.? Did she tell you?”
Morgan nodded, held the fake cigarette between her fingers, flicking it back and forth with her thumb, though there was no ash to flick off. “Yeah, yeah, he’ll be fine. I don’t know. Your parents are gonna be fine too.”
“That’s what I told my sister, and she freaked out. She said I was high.”
“Are you?”
“Eh. Hard to tell at this point.”
“Yeah. My mom used to take Oxy? Got hooked working at this hospital, ironically enough. She’d be fucked up for days. I hope you’re not taking that shit.”
“No, no, nothing like that. Did she quit, your mom?”
Morgan pulled up her hood, puffed on the e-cigarette. “Nope. She died.”
“Oh man.”
“I mean, I assume she died. You can’t get Oxy after a while, so you go for heroin, ’cause it’s easier to get, and cheaper. Which is pretty fucked up. So she was on that for a while, and then she left. My aunt said she came to stay with her in Nashua for a little while, but then she left there too, and that’s the last time anyone saw her. In fucking New Hampshire.”
There was a long pause, then finally Morgan broke the silence.
“So, tell me about your boyfriend,” she said, offering him the cigarette again. He took it, pulled on it, thought for a second. Jason felt a sudden closeness to Morgan, the way she set him at ease, talked to him like a person instead of a collection of disappointments.
He wanted to tell her about everything that happened after that first kiss on the beach. About the next kiss, on the porch after Alexa had gone to bed.
And the next one.
And the next one, and the next one. In places he couldn’t remember anymore.
He wanted to tell her about how he had said “I love you” while he and Kyle were driving to Provincetown, their first and only time going there together. The way Kyle had said nothing at first, only reached out his hand, the other hand loosely on the steering wheel, and ran it through Jason’s hair. How Jason had felt so seen and known and safe and alive just then.
He wanted to tell Morgan about the first time he and Kyle had sex, awkward and giggling in Jason’s bed one night after drinking a bottle and a half of Linda’s wine. He wanted to tell her about how Kyle fell asleep first afterward, and Jason lay there listening to him breathing, running a finger along Kyle’s freckled back, wanting to eat him alive, to absorb him through his skin, to bury himself under Kyle’s armpit or behind his knee.
He wanted to tell Morgan about all the bad things too. About how melodramatic and petty Kyle could be, about how much he lied about trivial things. About how he sometimes treated his and Jason’s secret like a weapon or a threat, to get something he wanted or to guilt Jason into indulging his fantasies for a little while longer.
Jason would sometimes get annoyed hearing about all the wonderful things Kyle was going to do in New York—because as much as they were consumed with each other then, those future plans never quite seemed to involve Jason. He would tell Kyle that, and Kyle would frown, his eyes darkening a little bit, and then, with a sinister breeziness in his voice, he would say, “Well, if I can’t talk to you about that, maybe I should talk to Alexa about us, or to your parents about us,” and Jason would give him a little shove and say, “Fuck off.”
Jason wanted to tell Morgan about the fight that he and Kyle had, when the summer was fading and the real world loomed on the horizon. He wanted to tell Morgan how sorry he was. How he’d do things differently if he could. If he could, if he could, if he could.
He didn’t tell her any of that, though. Instead, he just took another drag off Morgan’s cigarette and said, “You would like him.”
She smiled, friendly but lined with sadness, shivering in her sweatshirt, pale under the streetlights.
Chapter Eight
Skyler
SHE’D MADE HER way to the nurses’ station, squeezing between what felt like an endless tangle of people, but whatever answers Skyler had hoped to find on the other side weren’t there. Just more confusion, more questions, more worry. Yet another nurse asked her where her parents were, but as Skyler tried to explain who she was trying to find, the nurse was distracted by someone else’s question and turned away from her. Skyler felt small and silly, yet again, so after a few frustrating minutes, she edged her way free from the reception desk and back into the emptier recesses of the waiting room, where she saw Scott, looking guilty. Alexa was curled up in a chair, looking like she’d given up.
“Hey,” Skyler said to Scott, who gave her a halfhearted smile. Skyler gestured toward Alexa. “She O.K.?”