Missed Connections (23 page)

"No!" Kyle snorts. The whole apartment smells like moldering grass. The early June heat hasn't left for the night and the room is suffocating. Even the paint on the walls sweats as Kyle thrusts handful after handful of change back at him. "Trust me, kid, you don't need all twelve."

Twenty dollars back is more Kyle ever thought he'd get, though most of it comes in the form of sixty-five shiny quarters. Theo fumbles with the coins, funnels them into his pockets. When he moves he jingles and he's barely able to carry all six beers out of the apartment without dropping a can.

*~*~*

The beer tastes like a mixture of bitter old socks and orange rind. It prickles Theo's tongue and every sip feels like it's going to shoot out his nose. Theo drinks it anyway—swallowing down two cans over a forty minute period with vague feeling of accomplishment and something that he wants to think is tipsiness.

As he walks along the edge of the apartment complex Theo lets his ankles roll, tilting his steps right before he lets his arms out and the counter balance swings him left in a way that he thinks should make him fall. It doesn't. There's a looseness to his shoulders, a draining of tension, but no matter what he thinks—it has everything to do with the time and little to do with the alcohol. Above him, the street lights hum a fading golden glow and beside him the rest of the city yawns into darkness. Theo tries to ignore everything, even drivers blasting favorite songs as they pass by, because that is what he thinks drunk people do. Meredith was always oblivious a few drinks in—more often than not quieted and standing by the sink with soap from the dishes up to her elbows. Most of the other kids at the parties Theo's been to have been the same. Sloppy or loud, the drunk at a party didn't bother to pay attention to the details. Theo did.

The stretch of concrete Theo's laid claim to is the end of the road for the complex. Beyond it is maybe an acre of grass that buffers the buildings from the back sides of a string of cheap shops: A Laundromat, the Chinese place that always tastes like burnt oil, a gutted corner store. The most that's ever been between the shopping complex and the apartments is trash.

Theo hasn't paid the acre any mind in years, though he used to pick up old cans and paper on the weekends just for something to do.
Keep your environment green
his sixth grade teacher told him—and Theo had tried. Nothing bigger than a shoebox had ever been discarded on purpose. A door is out of the question, much less one that stands on its own in the center. Nevertheless, when Theo looks this time—there it is.

The apartments were built two decades ago and, as far as Theo knows, no work has been done on them since. The complex is open air; the hallways between buildings are lined by cement supports and fitted with metal. It's a systematic place where rust and broken glass doesn't seem amiss. Grass clings to the cracks in the pavement and creeps up to tenants' front doors.

Theo has lived here as long as he remembers and knows better than believe what he sees. There's never been any door in the field. There were never plans to expand. Theo swings to a stop when he sees it, unsteady in his sleeplessness, and thinks:
they were going to build another building here
. But that's not right. The door is big, easily twice as wide as the doors nearby, and it's
red
. All the other doors on the apartment buildings are brown. The door in the woods was green.

It is now past midnight on a hot June evening. Sweat collects at Theo's temples. Hours ago, fireflies made one of their rare appearances. There is no reason to look at the door and think about breathing steam because of a winter which refused to let go of spring. There is no reason to remember a forfeited night leaning against an imaginary door with a crack in it. That night Theo had been dreaming about
home
and now he desperately wants to get away. It's not only that, of course. This door is nothing like the door Theo saw before. It's wide enough to be a gate and it makes Theo wonder if he could open it—would he be going inside or outside?

Theo stares at the door and shivers. He takes one step. Two. He drops his third can of beer and it rolls, half full and drooling against the concrete.

There's nothing holding the door up just like there was nothing holding up the last one. Grass barely scrapes the hard ridge of the wood and it hasn’t been cut in weeks. Theo doesn't bother to circle the door. He just walks up and slams into the wood with the flat of his palms. The pain reverberates up his elbows and he hisses as the sting of reality shimmies up into his eyes. It irritates him enough that he hits the door again and feels the same sting. It doesn't move.

"Dammit." Theo isn't sure what he expected. The other door never moved, not even when it split. Maybe he wanted to make the crack himself this time but he has never been strong enough to break anything. Theo would struggle shattering tempered glass.

"I don't want to be home anymore." Theo feels like he's continuing a conversation that's been dead more than eight years. He knocks his head against the wood and feels it vibrate back with a steady
thud, thud, thud
. "Why am I even thinking about that stupid door tonight? It was stupid when I was ten." Even if he never did stop thinking about it.

Might be your lack of friends.
The thought is poisonous and Theo tries to will his grimace away. It's bad enough he baits the other teens at every out-of-school hangout—now Theo's gotten good at baiting himself. Theo kicks the door instead of pursuing self-flagellation and then he tries the door knob.

Theo knows how this goes. He twists and pulls on the door knob and it doesn't move. He walks around the door and it doesn't move. He tries both sides and it doesn't move. That is what the door did last time.

Except this time is not like the last time and when he twists and pulls—the door feels hot in his hand and
opens
.

*~*~*

The door opens into a corridor. Dark wood stained and painted over in metallic spray paint and creaky floorboards that seemed to barely cloak the bones of a house all used up. The door is still behind him. Theo checks. He curves himself into the wall—checks again. It's still there. The door is propped open with a crushed beer can. Theo stares at it and feels nauseous with the desire to run right back out but, at the same time, he can't help but think
this is a dream
.

His next thought is
Kyle
because if it's not a dream than Kyle had been telling him the truth and not only that—Kyle sold drug-laced beer.
Dare not to do drugs
, the officer at school had said, and Theo had always agreed—solemn-faced like it was the first time he had ever heard those words. Now the memory chides him along with a strip of red spray paint which points him towards a perpendicular hall at the end. Theo's laughter is choked and partially hysterical. His teeth knock in shivers as it rolls through him.

Is this how drug addiction starts? The idea is ridiculous as it is terrifying. Theo might have made fun of the promises to puppets about not doing drugs—but he intended to keep them anyway. His head hits the wall and through it he feels the
wump, wump, wump
of a heavy base. Theo can't help but huff an uneasy breath and wonder if he's found a party or if it's just the soundtrack for his own ignorant death.

He's halfway down the hallway when a door swings towards him, fast enough that Theo pastes himself to the wall. His heart lodges itself somewhere around his collarbone, air whistling into his lungs loud and frightened.
I will never pretend not to be a chicken ever again.
The thought is a prayer which falters into a cough when he sees who's walked out.

It's a boy with dirty blond hair and bright red cheeks. There's a cockiness to his gait—at least until he sees Theo plastered to the wall across from him. Theo is only three shades paler than the wood but this does not grant him invisibility. The blond teen stops and grins, the door shutting behind him. There is little of the chubby-cheeked boy with a lisp who stayed up with Theo in the woods. There's no mistaking him anyway. Grown up Matthew looks all of nineteen or twenty with overly long arms and a flop of hair that doesn't look like it's changed styles since their last meeting.

"You're the boy in my closet." Matthew chirps, like a meeting in a spray-painted shack after more than ten years is perfectly normal. His smile has a sharpness to it that doesn't end at the edges but goes into his teeth. With the lighting low and hazy Theo stares but tries to chalk it up to an illusion. He returns with far more reluctance, "You're the boy in the door."

There's an instant where they are five feet away from each other then Matthew is right in Theo's face—thumbs rubbing over his eyelids and lips. Matthew's thumb is in his mouth next—rubbing up against his incisors and Theo feels like a racehorse. He chokes, barely resists biting down.

From this close up Theo can tell Matthew is about two inches taller but that Theo is stronger. There's a wispiness to Matthew that makes it seem like he only needs a stiff breeze to fall. Theo almost wants to give it to him.

"You didn't grow up too bad." Matthew says and this time Theo can't resist—he gives Matthew a little shove, stepping two feet back to give himself breathing room.

"You sound like my aunt. Ge'off."

Hallucination or not, Matthew is an oppressive force—uncomfortable and invasive. But that might be because looking at Matthew reminds Theo of all the wet dreams he never wanted to own up to having. If Matthew wasn't so touchy in all the wrong ways, Theo would be stuttering. He counts his blessings that this is the least sexy dream he ever remembers having.

"Oh, still wanting to go home?" There's a teasing note in Matthew's voice but Theo isn't so sure it's honest. The cruel tilt to Matthew's voice sets Theo's jaw tight as he remembers the stupid pleas he mumbled at the door. It's something he suspects this hallucination would know—along with anyone else who might have listened in.

But the question also reminds him why he was ever brave enough to step through.

"
No
." It comes less than casual and Matthew's face loses some of its tempered malice.

"Oh."

"Oh what?" It's the first time in the conversation Theo's felt like he's had the upper hand and he grabs it, desperate in a way he doesn't recognize. He thinks it has more to do with Meredith and less to do with Matthew but it hardly matters now. He reaches out unthinkingly and twists fistfuls of Matthew's shirt between his fingers. It feels
real
and Theo's not sure if he wants to pull him closer or push him away. Both thoughts rise high in his cheeks.

"You're going to leave." Matthew answers, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. He doesn't pull away or put his hands over Theo's to make him to let go. The fabric under Theo's hands feels slick and strange.

"Where would I go?"

"You know." Matthew says, leans in close so they bump noses. It hurts. Under his hands Theo feels heat, the slow undulation of Matthew's stomach, an imagined heartbeat.

It feels real.

Theo kisses Matthew because it can't be real. The kiss really isn't so much a kiss as a teeth-clacking nightmare that makes Theo's head ring as he pokes a hole through Matthew's shirt with his fingers and tries not to bite down on his lip when he stumbles forward and Matthew stumbles back.

This is what someone who is something does
, Theo thinks even if he has it all wrong. If he'd ever kissed anyone before he might have tried to grasp the belt loops and save Matthew's T-shirt from ruin. He doesn't though, he simply tears holes in the loose fabric and scrapes his nails against Matthew's belly. Matthew's stomach is as soft as Theo's, as familiar as looking in the mirror. It helps even if it makes this moment hyper real when Theo was trying to prove it fake.

Theo only knows he's done it
wrong
when he pulls away and tastes blood. His, Matthew's, it's hard to say. He's stuck standing there sucking the blood from his teeth. He'd do it again, he realizes as he stands there, and that, perhaps, is the most terrifying thing of all.

Matthew nonchalantly wipes the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and says, "Oh." As though that moment was normal, commonplace, less violent than it was. "What was that for?"

"This is a dream, isn't it?" The words sting and Theo is forced to assume it's his busted lip that's made them look like they've been involved in a botched murder.

"No."

"Hallucination, then."

"No."

"Then
what
?" Theo jabs a hand towards Matthew. Maybe he's having a seizure, he considers momentarily as Matthew smiles. Matthew could be a caricature of Theo's subconscious, though why his subconscious is a cherubic white man he isn't sure he wants to know.

Theo hates it on principle.

"Does it matter? You have to go."

Theo doesn't expect the push. The quarters in his pocket sing out as he stumbles back. Two fall to the floor but he doesn't bother to pick them up. Theo rights himself with the wall, spits blood onto the floor just as Matthew pushes him again. "Stop it." He still sounds like a little kid and that makes him flush more than the other petty embarrassments his mind has dredged up. "
Stop
." The copper taste rolls nauseously through him, the moving ground makes it worse.

"No, you have to go." And it's in that moment that Theo realizes he's being pushed right back towards the door he came from. "Unless you don't want to go to the ocean."

Theo sputters, confused, "I can't go to the ocean—it's too far away."

Matthew grins at him again and it looks too sharp. Theo feels its rigidness along the thin line of red along the bottom of his lip. He is still bleeding. Matthew reaches behind Theo and yanks open the door. "I'm still sad you're not blue."

The next push shouldn't surprise him as much as it does. One moment Theo is standing in a hallway and the next he's landing hard on his elbows on a pile of sand. He's too startled by the fresh air on his cheeks and the taste of salt to say,
Of course I'm not.