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If you tell the same lies enough times, you can make them feel real, maybe even to yourself. If you want to believe them, you can swallow your own lies like medicine. They might even go down easier than the truth.
After Neil leaves, Susan starts telling this story. The story of a man so distraught over the loss of his son, so wracked with grief, that he can’t take it anymore. A man who leaves because he can’t bear to stay in the town where his son was dead and buried. Susan tells this story over and over.
She tells it to the people around town, who offer their condolences and sympathy. She tells it to Max, even though they both know it’s not the truth. But worst of all, what Max can’t stand to hear anymore, is the way Susan tells the story to herself. Between ugly gasps and sobs, a couple drinks too far gone, crying on the couch at night.
Max doesn’t know when “mom” turned to “Susan” in her head. Maybe when Susan stops acting like a mom. Maybe when Max stops waiting for her to be one again. No, that’s a lie, too. Max knows the last time Susan was “mom”. She just only realizes it in retrospect.
Because the truth looks something like this.
Neil was clearing out Billy’s room before they’ve even planned the funeral. He wasted no time in gathering Billy’s things and piling them on the curb for trash day. The whole time, grumbling about all the “junk” he finds hidden away in Billy’s room. Shaking his head at some of it, scowling, making faces of disgust.
Max watched it happen. She wanted to scream, STOP! Those are his things! She wanted to say, wait, please . But no words come out. She tasted bile in the back of her throat.
If asked, Max couldn’t tell you why she went out later and hauled some of Billy’s things back in. Why she piled them in her own room, mingling with her own belongings. She took everything she thought she could get away with, that wasn’t broken. A lot of it was broken.
She can’t even explain it to herself, really. Except that. Maybe it was just hard to watch Neil erase Billy from existence so easily. To discard every trace of Billy, like it meant nothing, like he’d never been there at all.
The first time she put on one of Billy’s shirts, she looked in the mirror and wanted to smash the glass. That was her but that was Billy but but but. What was the difference? Was she becoming him? Was that how this worked?
Maybe she just wanted to feel close to him, for once. She wanted to carry him with her, like he had never left. Billy couldn’t die if he lived in her head. Billy couldn’t die if she became him.
Max wasn’t even sure she had ever liked Billy. Nobody had liked Billy. And now nobody cared that he was dead. Except for Max. Max, who cared so much she thought it would strangle her. Max, who hadn’t liked him, but who thought maybe, maybe she could have. Maybe she still could.
And. Okay, Max had friends, but none of them understood. And she thought. Well, Billy would understand this. Billy, whose room had been full of small trinkets, mementos of all the people and places he had loved and lost. He would understand.
Well, and El had understood. In her own way. Mourning her own loss. But also, El had seen something that night. Something in Billy, something that nobody else had seen in him. Something good, something worth saving.
But El was gone. Joyce had whisked her and Will away. Out of this fucked up little town full of monsters and nightmares. And memories.
Nobody was going to whisk Max away. She wasn’t sure if she’d even want them to. Trying to move on, to forget… It wouldn’t feel right. It would feel like a betrayal. It would feel like Billy was dying all over again. Like she killed him. Like she held the knife and twisted it.
How could she ever make anybody understand that?
She knew her friends thought she was crazy. Mourning a dead boy that was nothing but a monster in their eyes. To them, he was an evil in her life. They probably thought she should be happy, or relieved. That he was dead. That he couldn’t bother her anymore. She thinks it would be easier if she were. She feels sick even thinking it.
Max could feel the distance growing between herself and her friends. She knew she was pulling away. It was just that she couldn’t look them in the eyes. It was more than just that they didn't understand. It was that sometimes she thought she might hate them.
How they went to school every day and they talked and they laughed. How they made new friends, joined some stupid club. Like nothing had happened. Like they hadn’t looked death in the face, like they hadn’t witnessed something horrific. Like. Like it wasn’t even a tragedy, in their eyes.
Max knew it wasn’t fair. That they didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t their fault that she couldn’t move on. But she also couldn’t help the way the resentment crawled up her throat every time she looked at them.
When she broke up with Lucas. For good, this time, she thought. She did it because it wasn’t fair to him. She felt like there was something ugly and mean taking root in her. She thought, if she let him get too close, it would infect him, too.
Some days, she looked around herself, at all the kids at school, and she thought she knew what real rage felt like now. She saw kids who were happy, who were having fun. And she hated them for it. She wished she could tear their perfect little lives apart. She wanted to burn everything to the ground and show them the ashes so they could feel like her.
What was wrong with her?
Max had always been a little mean and angry and sarcastic. She had always been a little bit. Like Billy. Even if she liked to pretend she wasn’t.
But now, there was a black hole inside her and it was going to swallow everything around her before it consumed her, too.
She didn’t know what to do. Anger was the only thing that filled the void. It was a comfort, it soothed and quieted the parts of her that wanted to roll over and die. It was armor.
It felt better. When she let herself feel bitter and angry and resentful. When she hated her friends and Neil and Susan.
It felt like lighting a match and filling herself up with flames. It felt like protection, like the fire would burn anybody who came too close.
She wondered if this was how Billy had felt. She thought, maybe, that she was starting to understand him.
It was funny, the closest Max felt to Billy was after he died. Except, how it wasn’t very funny at all. How it made her want to scream and cry and stomp her feet. Because it wasn’t fair. She didn’t even feel like she had a brother until she was watching him die.
So, Max was wearing Billy’s clothes the first time Neil hit her. She wondered if he knew. If she looked enough like Billy in that moment, if he saw the way she was shifting into something not quite Max but not quite Billy. Or maybe he just missed having a punching bag.
This is the part where Max lied. She knows the last time that “Susan” was “mom”. It was when Susan decided she’d had enough. It was the day she told Neil he needed to leave before she called the cops.
Max thinks, bitterly, that Susan probably hadn’t meant for him to leave and never come back, though.
But that’s the truth.
Neil didn’t leave because of Billy. There was no mourning, no grief, no devastation. Not from Neil. That was all Max. And Max was the reason Neil left, too.
Because Neil hit somebody who had never belonged to him at all. The clarity of that thought had Max kneeling over the toilet bowl.
When she thought of Billy, as he had been, when he’d been alive. All she saw anymore was Neil’s play thing. Like how cats play with a bug, batting it between their paws, torturing it for their own amusement. When it would be easier, maybe even kinder, if they just killed it.
At least the Mind Flayer had finished the job. If only it had taken her with him.