Release(28)

Linus smiled his gleaming, toothy smile that looked all Broadway but had actually happened naturally, no braces ever needed. “Not so bad yourself,” he said. “In a blurry, steamy way. You sure you don’t want company?”

“Not yet, but soon.” Adam let the water run off his shoulders and down his pale belly, already a little plump. A lifetime of negotiating with it beckoned. “Angela’s going to spend senior year in Holland in a programme her aunt runs.”

Linus’s mouth opened in surprise. “You’ve had a busy morning.”

“In one amazing way I’m really happy for her.”

“And in another?”

Adam looked up from the spray and the steam into Linus’s still-blinking eyes. “Maybe don’t move away any time soon?”

“Not planning on it.”

“Good. And I’ll be in Frome for the rest of my life, I think, so, you know, if either of you ever want to visit–”

“You’ll get out. We all will. Every gay has to have their years in a huge coastal city. It’s like a law.”

Adam just breathed again. “I’m kinda using up all your hot water.”

“We’re in the rainiest state in the Union. We’ll struggle through.”

“Is there something wrong with me, Linus?”

“Lack of willingness to manscape?”

“Ugh, no, I hate that stuff. I’m not Barbie.”

“No, you’re really, really not Barbie.”

“I’m serious.”

“And a little self-pitying.”

“Sorry.”

“Forgiven. You’ve had a remarkably shit day and it’s only two o’clock,” Linus said. “Look, there’s nothing more wrong with you than there is with anyone else. And nothing so wrong that I don’t spend all my time thinking about great big ungroomed naked you wasting hot water in my shower while my parents are out playing softball.”

Adam smiled, slightly, then leaned forward and gave Linus a wet kiss.

“Nothing so wrong,” Linus said, “that I wasn’t able to fall in love with you.”

Adam used the tip of his tongue to touch the faint coffee taste Linus always left on his lips and said, “I love you, too.”





The girl they have found is clearly under the influence of a drug. Her eyes are open, she is breathing, but she sees neither the Queen nor the faun as they approach the sofa where she lies.

“You are Sarah,” the Queen says to her, not a greeting, a fact.

The girl hears this – or some form of it – and her eyes swim to the Queen, though who could say what she actually sees?

The Queen has led the faun on an unerring straight line that took notice of no boundary or landscape. They crossed roads and houses, only going around an obstacle when going through it would have taken too much time. All this in broad daylight, on a day when these creatures were mostly at their leisure. There are still memories upon memories he needed to erase. He begins to despair. What can it matter if they see? If he can’t save the Queen, all is lost anyway.

They came to a house. This house. One that smells of a sickness so powerful the faun had to force himself to go inside.

“You are Sarah,” the Queen says again, kneeling in front of the sofa, taking the hand of the girl–

And unexpectedly, from nowhere, the faun sees a chance.





She feels such love for this girl, it almost makes her stumble. Sarah. This person, this friend, this home–

She had known after seeing her mother, after returning to that place that had offered silences or screaming but little in between, a place where more than one of her mother’s boyfriends had put hands on her over the years, a place where – after she told her mother about the first boyfriend who did so – her mother had beaten her for a liar. These images come to her now in a kind of swimming clarity. Because she was inside it all those years, it had still somehow always looked like home.

It has taken death to finally see it for what it was. The mouth of a predator.

But here, this house, this girl, this Sarah, even seen from the outside, even from beyond the borders of the sickness and blindness that bind her here–

This, this is her home. This is where love had been found, even refuge when necessary. Oh, that she had been able to see it sooner. Maybe she could have saved her friend. Maybe she could have saved herself.

The Queen reaches forward, takes Sarah’s hand.

Sarah wakes. And sees the Queen.





Linus Bertulis, a Lithuanian name, even though his ancestors had been in America longer than the Thorns. Linus Bertulis, at the top of all the College Prep classes, taking half his subjects at the local university extension because he was so far ahead of anyone else. Linus Bertulis, who Adam wanted to love so much it almost physically hurt.

Linus was cute, and that was a fact. He was a nerd, like Renee and Karen said, but nerdiness – like a big nose, like a belly – was never any barrier to cuteness. He wore black-rimmed glasses, had a thick swoop of brown hair that was already showing signs of handsome recession, and dressed with an old-fashioned formality that mostly, but not always, stopped just short of a bow tie.

Adam would never be able to introduce Linus to his parents. He was polite, friendly, smiley, and would raise so many suspicions, Adam’s mom and dad would probably send Adam on a year-long mission trip to Turkmenistan just to get him out of town until graduation.