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Johnny retched.
It was the third time that night he’d been awoken by a nightmare. That word didn’t cut it—it felt as though the night terrors were real and the waking world was his muddled, confused dreamscape. His heart pounded in his head as he keeled over. The pale blue pattern on Will’s extra blanket spun. It wasn’t usually this bad.
He’d gotten the majority of the nightmares out of his system before he’d even considered returning to Jingletown. Rock bottom was how he’d describe it if he ever felt he could talk about it. He half-remembered writhing on the motel room floor and scraping his back on the concrete. His palms would pour sweat and his body would eject any food or water he tried to put in it from one end or the other. And her: her face, her upturned nose, her pink flash of hair. And him: his hands, his ink, his piercing gray eyes. The street lamps would flicker wildly with her and him beneath them and he’d vomit his heart out. It wasn’t that bad, not anymore.
The good news was he’d never have to wake up in the motel again. The bad news was that Will’s place was unfamiliar. When Johnny had fled Jingletown, Will was living in his parents’ basement. A shitty set up, but a comforting one nonetheless. The cathode-ray tube television that made the hair on their arms stand up if they got too close sat steadfast in front of the old couch. Placed usefully beside the couch was a minifridge always stocked with beer. There were two bookshelves filled with CDs and cassettes; behind those was the basement bathroom, complete with cracking ceramic. Will’s new place was three floors up in an apartment on the edge of town. The walls were empty drywall that lacked the charm and comfort of the old late-1970s wood paneling Johnny missed. The couch was scratchy to the touch and prodded his back as he tossed and turned. There were photographs stuck up with sticky tack: Tunny and Elena holding Will and Heather’s baby; the three boys, now men, in Tunny’s mom’s backyard. It was different. Fuck. They were different.
Chest aching from the harsh breaths he was taking, Johnny wrapped his arms around himself. His throat felt thick and his gasps were guttural. He missed his mother. Elena was pregnant and his mom was still with Brad. Will’s couch was the only place he could go. He couldn’t bring himself to crawl back into his childhood bedroom and sleep in his cradle of punk rock posters and angry holes in the wall. His mother had held him after his father pressed a M1911 to the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger. She’d sent him to summer camp the following year. Tunny was good at everything, hoarding the badges the kids got from completing survival activities. Will was afraid of frogs. Johnny was confused and tumultuous, thrown from the lifeboat and grasping at driftwood in a fruitless attempt to stay afloat.
He grew up thinking it was inevitable. Everybody became their parents at some point. He’d tried with the deep scars slashed vertically up his forearms and the time he’d sat in Brad’s car, working up the courage to floor it into a ditch in the belief that it’d explode like in the movies. He had a dim, more recent memory of holding Jimmy’s pistol to his temple—or maybe holding his pistol to Jimmy’s temple? It didn’t fire. Or maybe it did, and Will’s dingy Jingletown apartment was purgatory.
A tall figure appeared in the doorway of the living room and Johnny’s heart lurched, helpless to turn away as he sat trying to catch his breath. It only took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He felt his body relax as he recognized the mess of curly hair and figured that just thinking about Jimmy wasn’t enough to summon him again.
“Why are you awake?” Will asked.
“Why are you awake?” Johnny responded.
Will dragged himself into the room. His eyes were half-lidded and he was clutching a mug that had the words “World’s Okayest Dad” printed on it in both hands. He’d probably just clambered out of bed, standing in front of the couch with the left leg of his sweatpants rolled just below his knee and his Looney Tunes t-shirt pulled up to show his hairy stomach. “Need coffee,” he said.
Johnny glanced outside the window. The almost-full moon hung in perfect view. There wasn’t a lick of light on the horizon. “What time is it?”
Will checked his watch. “Three.”
“Why the fuck are you drinking coffee at three in the morning?”
Will half-smiled and shuffled to the kitchenette behind the couch. Johnny found himself breathing regularly again and he pulled the blanket around himself, sitting up and turning so he could watch Will as he poured himself a cup of coffee from the traveler in the refrigerator left over from Elena’s baby shower. It was startling to wake up somewhere his post-nightmare brain didn’t recognize but Will walking in with the same zombie-like posture he always had instantly pulled him out of the Kafkaesque horror he’d been stewing in. Will settled beside Johnny on the couch, cramming himself against the armrest. Johnny wasn’t convinced he wasn’t sleepwalking.
“Ain’t you goin’ back to bed?” Johnny asked.
“Not unless you want me to,” Will said. “But you’re already awake.”
“Maybe you can’t sleep ‘cause you’re drinking coffee at three in the fuckin’ morning. Jesus. Your piss must reek.”
“Shut up,” Will said through a sleepy grin. “Like you’re the picture of physical health.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The abject dullness of Will sipping his fridge-cold coffee was distracting enough to prevent Johnny from slipping back into the pit he had woken up in. Will and Tunny were the same comfort to Johnny even though all of their lives, relationships, and roles had shifted in the trauma of the past year. Sylvester the Cat stared at Johnny from Will’s shirt. “It’s a lot, isn’t it?” Will said.
“Oh, shut up,” Johnny echoed. He leaned down and groped blindly along the floor until his hand hit the lighter he’d discarded there the night before. “You ain’t therapizin’ me. Speak in that fake-ass voice to your kid all you want, sugar tits, but it ain’t working on me.”
“Point taken,” Will muttered into his mug. Johnny lit a cigarette and uncurled slightly to stretch his legs so his feet rested on the floor. Will was used to Johnny’s biting quips, although since his homecoming his attitude was noticeably more subdued than it had been as a feral teenager. Will tried to play counselor sometimes. Striving to be a decent dad caused him to practice his fatherly inclinations on everybody nearby, much to Johnny’s chagrin. It was vaguely insulting to him. Johnny wasn’t a child, and he found the faux-gentle manner of speaking Will would put on to be patronizing. He prayed Tunny wouldn’t be the same when adjusting to his upcoming fatherhood.
Besides his disdain for the therapist LARP, Johnny didn’t want to tell anybody anything. He couldn’t. It was virtually impossible to put his thoughts into words. His memories were a roll of film exposed to light. Glowing bands of white and orange interrupted what should have been his steady flow of memory. It made sense, given the severity of his drug use; still, it left him without the ability to speak on that year. What could he say? That he’d met a girl, and he’d met a guy—but not really. It was futile. There weren’t words to describe the baseline events, let alone the soul-eating emotional devastation he’d undergone. He gave up before he began. Will and Tunny wouldn’t be able to make sense of it, especially not if Johnny couldn’t in the first place.
“Mind if I stay here?” Will asked.
Johnny shrugged, noncommittal.
“Slept so much on the couch at my parents’ place I swear I sleep better on ‘em than beds,” Will continued. He closed his eyes and sat back in the nook where the back of the couch met the armrest, still holding his coffee mug in two hands like a toddler and his sippy cup. “Figure you’re small enough we can both fit.”
“We can’t all be fat fucks like you,” Johnny said, mirroring the way Will sat and closing the gap between them by pushing his feet up against the side of Will’s leg. He took a drag of his cigarette and watched as Will grabbed the remote control and switched on the television. The usual graveyard slot advertisements shrouded the living room in fuzzy colors. A non-stick frying pan. A sex toy with three different modes. Johnny slouched and rested his head against the top of the armrest, closing his eyes and letting the feeling of Will beside him and the drone of the over enthusiastic infomercial pushers lull him into peacefulness. He wouldn’t sleep, unwilling to risk a fourth night terror, but he would rest as comfortably as he could in Will’s dark little apartment.