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True to every cliche in every high-school themed media his father would have had his head for consuming ever, Travis is standing in a corner between drywall and punch bowl with a red solo cup and regrets out the wazoo.
It’s not enough for him to do the whole ‘why did I agree to this, I wish the ground would swallow me whole’-spiel, but it’s a close thing.
The reason he’s there at all is pretty simple, actually: when you’re seventeen, freshly freed from the clutches of your cultist abuser of a father, and hopelessly desperate for human connection, you just don’t refuse a party invitation. Not even if the invitation is to Addison Apartments, Room 402, where the blue-haired freak from math class is celebrating his stupid birthday, not even when you know all his satanic friends are going to be there, even the gay ones, and obscene amounts of alcohol and possibly even weed. Basically, when your name is Travis Phelps and you get The Teenage Experience delivered to you on a silver platter, you don’t say no.
There’s only a slight problem, which explains the corner-standing part of his predicament, and that’s that The Teenage Experience is an elitist club where they don’t really let you in when your first sip of alcohol was communion wine, and you’ve never even touched a girl below the waist before. How is he supposed to socialize when the ‘socializing’ in question is gossiping about assholes he’s never met, previous parties he couldn’t attend because he was busy getting his fucking ass beat at home, and so on.
Those are the little things CPS can’t save him from. The fact that all of them, his would-be peers, can tell stories, are allowed experiences, have the ability to talk about their lives without fucking trauma-dumping all over the place. They never have to eggshell-walk over the question, “what were you up to last Friday?” And he can’t even blame them. No one wants to hear his sob story when they came here to have fun. He doesn’t know how to have fun.
He drinks from his decidedly non-Christian solo-cup drink.
It’s jarring: once he’s allowed the same as the others, to be more than their parents, Travis finds that he simply doesn’t know how to. Turns out it was never about permission, only about ability.
The alcohol makes his thoughts go heavy and blurry around the edges, and even after his second cup, no one comes to talk to him.
It’s about two and a half downright awful songs on the busted stereo later that somebody does approach him, and Travis tries hard not to jump out of his bones when the noise of someone addressing him reaches his hazy ears. Screw him for zoning out, whatever. But then he almost jumps out of his bones again when he sees it’s that goth chick Sally Face always hangs with. Since he’s not a fucking wimp, he doesn’t get scared (he doesn’t.) at the very possible and reasonable prospect of a girl hitting him for bullying her friend or whatever, but that doesn’t stop him from drafting exit routes in his head. Old habits die fast, all that.
“What was that?”, he snarks down in the vague direction of her choppy bangs that he’s pretty sure she cut herself.
It looks awful. But before leaving, he had sworn up and down, both to himself and a week earlier to Sally through the stall door in the boy’s restroom, that he’d quit with the cruel remarks, so he bites his tongue and swallows the insult.
Out the corner of his eye, he thinks the chick rolled her eyes at him, but he can’t be sure because he’s not meeting them. What, it’s totally not because he’s nervous and unable to even attempt conversation. It’s totally because, well. Other reasons. Get creative.
“I asked you if you were having a good time”, she (apparently) repeats herself, but she sasses it with a good bit of animosity, as if she only just remembered who she was even talking to.
And isn’t that just the thing. Because if he were to answer honestly (lying is a mortal sin), he’d have to get into the whole ‘I am a survivor of abuse and, consequentially, somehow wholly unable to function like a teenager, thanks for asking’, and then she’d know, and none of this ever ends well for him. Nevermind that the whole arrest and trial was broadcasted on TV like a piece of good, scandalous, tabloid-esc gossip. Maybe he should have stayed at home.
Instead, he hums, as ambiguous as possible. Luckily, he’s saved from this painfully awkward line of small-talk questioning with a girl whose name he doesn’t even remember (it might start with a B- or Sh-, but he might also be off entirely) by a loud crash-and-bang sound from across the room.
There’s a vague pile of teenager, camping chair and fairy lights decoration in the direction the noise came from, and through the abhorrent yelling that Johnson kid managed to sneak past the makeshift DJ, he can hear hysterical laughter. The chick snaps her head in the direction of the crash, just to start laughing along like a maniac. She seems to forget who Travis is again, though, because in her mirth, she jabs a spiky elbow into his side as if they just shared the funniest inside joke imaginable. He can’t bring himself to laugh. It’s not something his muscle memory can agree with. She throws her head back to look up at his face properly, and when their eyes meet, there are honest tears of mirth in her eyes. He briefly wonders if the black shit she smears around her eyes will bleed. He doesn’t ask, because again, he doesn’t know how to function. Broken record.
Through her laughter, as if the words are fighting for air, she forces out, “boys, am I right?”
And it feels like a cold shock, a bit, because she is insinuating something. It’s something in her tone, so obvious that it’s just out of his reach, he just doesn’t get it enough, and he promised he’d stop with the slurs, he promised he’d be better. It’s not fair for her to bring it up. Not for anyone, but especially not her, not the girl who is allowed to leave lipstick stains on Sally’s weird medical mask, not-
“What the fuck are you even on about”, he breathes, forced, and he hopes she is smashed enough to read his undertone as warning, not as insult.
Whatever. What. Ever. She doesn’t know, there’s no way she knows, no way anyone knows, because there is nothing to know. There isn’t. It’s that simple.
Her face falls. There’s no disappointment in it, but recognition.
“Ah.” She sounds sober, or maybe she just stopped smiling.
Rolls her eyes again.
“You know what,” her smile comes, back, slowly, like the sun after a summer shower (the fuck did they put in his punch to get him to compare this chick’s visage to the sun), and there’s a mischievous glint in her eyes he recognizes from the movies. “I think I know what to do with you.”
Travis has half the mind to give her shit for treating him like a science project, but she spins out of his sight, and he’s alone again. Before he can start zoning out all over the place again, though, she reappears with two wine glasses (bad, bad idea. Fragile things, easy to drop, hard to clean. Expensive mistakes. Bruises. ‘I fell down the stairs.’), both filled to the brim with an unidentifiable clear liquid. Again, bad idea. That’s, like, the one other thing he knows. Clear liquid at parties is dangerous. Or water. Going off of the evil energy the girl gives off, it’s not water.
She chatters away, and then his trusty solo cup is gone and replaced with the skinny neck of a wine glass. She knocks her glass into his, ‘Cheers!’, but she stops and catches his eye the second before her lipstick-lips hit the rim. Must see how he doesn’t plan on drinking with her.
“Look”, she says slowly under her breath, leans in, conspiring, “we throw these back on three. And after, we’ll have a good fucking time.”
Travis can’t really argue with that. He’s also not a fucking pussy, and over his dead body will Little Miss Shit-for-bangs go and tell Sally Face that Travis is a little bitch who doesn’t want to have fun at his, Sally’s, own party and-
“One..
Two..
Th-”
She gets to two and the liquid is already sizzling down his throat.
When he feels ready to reflect what giving into that weird pissing contest so easily says about him, the glass is already empty, and he has more pressing issues, for example not throwing up on the spot.
Across the room, someone (Larry fucking Johnson) hollers at them (‘Jesus, Ash, way to go!!’). Ashley (at least Travis can remember her name now) hoots back.
Then there’s a window of time where Travis can not remember what happened for the life of him.
His next memory is sitting with the others in an egg-shaped formation on the Fisher’s living room floor. Next to him is this girl Maple, who he vaguely remembers sitting at Sally’s lunch table from time to time, not that it matters now. At his other side is a black boy with braids whose name he missed because he was introduced as this other dude’s boyfriend, so Travis was too preoccupied with forcing himself to not a) go into cardiac arrest or b) assault the two to catch his name. Whatever. He doesn’t force a conversation on Travis (besides Ashley earlier, no one does), so he’s fine for now.
Directly across from him, Larry is in the process of rolling a fucking massive joint. It’s at least the second of the evening, going off of the heavy cloud of smoke that’s looming between their heads and the low ceiling. The carpet also reeks, but that’s neither here nor there. Next to Larry, Sal is nursing the roach. Between his feet (he’s wearing mismatched socks, which for some reason makes Travis’ throat close up as if he’s about to cry, what the fuck) is a pile of wrapping paper and an opened-then-discarded zip lock baggie stuffed with weed, courtesy of the ginger queer who apparently has the 'chillest' parents and a cannabis field in their kitchen. Or something. See, that makes a nice gift for the blue-haired freak. Travis came empty-handed.
The new joint makes two full rotations (skipping Sal, who is content with his roach and a fat short kid, who insists he’d get too hungry if he smoked) during which Maple, bless her heart, dutifully doesn’t let Travis hit it, who instead clutches an empty water bottle (he must’ve chugged the thing sometime during his first blackout). It’s on the third rotation that Maple forgets about their unspoken rule to not let the church boy partake. He almost wants to accept, out of sheer curiosity, but Larry catches on from all the way across the circle.
“Dude, nah”, he calls over, languidly, “you’re not getting crossfaded on Sally’s carpet.”
“Okay, mom”, he snarks back, pretty much out of pure spite. A few people snicker.
He sees that Larry wants to pick a fight, sees it in his red-rimmed eyes (pent-up and misplaced aggression recognizes itself), but between his high and the fact the party has been going pretty peacefully so far all things considered, he probably keeps himself in check for Sal’s sake. Travis also finds he doesn’t really want to start shit here.
There’s another blank in his memory following that, where he only dimly remembers the silhouette of Sal lounging around with his back against the couch, talking up to somebody or other. Travis thinks he might have tried to stumble their way at some point, but there’s no way to verify that really.
Next thing he knows, he’s dancing with Ashley.
‘Dancing’ is too generous maybe. More like, they’re hopping in place, her nails digging into his bare forearms (he must’ve rolled the sleeves of his sweater up to escape the humidity of the room), and, alarmingly, they are actually talking.
Again, generous. They’re yelling at each other over the music - some pop rock act that usually wouldn’t be his thing, but anything is better than the noise Larry calls music at this point. But alas. They’re getting along.
Travis is, admittedly, not the best listener right now, and Ashley is, in all fairness, also not being coherent with her storytelling at all, but he catches the tail end of a story about how she went skinny dipping with some guy. He’s, like, eighty percent sure it’s about Sal (when is anything ever not, really), or maybe he just thinks that because blue keeps appearing in his field of vision but never for long enough to actually register, and if the story really was about Sal, wouldn’t that be a shame, because isn’t his brain the treacherous bastard who always wants to know everything there is to Sal, the treacherous bastard who keeps wishing and dreaming about being a part of his life, who can’t fathom anyone else sharing moments with the guy despite never really approaching him outside of, you know, bullying him and calling him slurs and Travis can slowly but surely feel how his thoughts derail and he might slip on through the floor if he doesn’t get a grip right now.
Ashley is laughing at whatever she just finished saying. Travis doesn’t know how to respond to something he already forgot, so he laughs too. The room is spinning so hard, he’s sure he’d loose balance immediately if he stopped jumping. Ashley’s grip on his arms gets impossibly tighter, so she must be feeling it too.
“You wanna know something?”, he yell-slurs right in her ear, to make sure she hears.
“Uh-huh”, she slurs back, nods vehemently and promptly looses her balance in time to the song’s breakdown. Travis manages to catch her, but he has to stop jumping to do so. They tumble to the ground together. Somewhere above them, a few people laugh.
“I’m like, so afraid of people”, he tells her.
They’re still smiling. Neither of them makes a move to get up.
“Or not afraid of people, but of interaction.”
On the floor, Ashley’s hand finds his. She nods, solemnly.
“‘s always easier with alcohol”, she tells him. “I think everyone is a bit afraid. Of being precied- percieted. Percieved.”
She gets it on the third try.
“Motherfucker.”
“No ‘s not”, Travis says. “They’re not. Afraid, I mean. Not like me.”
Ashley’s hand squeezes his. He’s not sure she knows she’s doing it.
“It’s like, you guys have friends. And that’s not even-”
He pauses. That’s not even the part that gets him, is the thing. The part that gets him is that he is so utterly inexperienced with having nice things that he doesn’t know how to even when given the opportunity, but it feels shallow now. Doesn’t know how to vocalize that through the warm, mushy feeling being drunk has wrapped him in. Isn’t sure if he wants to tarnish his first ever time feeling nice by acknowledging that he’s built for anything but.
“You have friends too”, Ashley tries, earnestly.
“Like..”- she hesitates. Seems to ponder very deeply. Then, she lights up- “like me! Dude, I’m totally your friend now.”
And she seems to mean it. Through the booze, she genuinely doesn’t seem to notice how big a lie that is. Through the alcohol, Travis doesn’t have the heart to call her out on it either. Tries to smile instead, just to find that he never stopped in the first place.
Travis thinks his face forgot how to not smile. Like there’s so much dopamine in his body, it might get clogged if he doesn’t let it leak out somewhere.
The song changes into something even more upbeat. A few people holler at something or other.
“You know what’s the funniest part about this?”, he yells through his crazed grin and right in Ashley’s face that’s way too close to warrant yelling.
She shakes her head wildly, eyes wide and intrigued. He laughs, forces his words out in between, “I’m so nervous talking to you, and I don’t even like g-”
The world stops a bit. It’s very, very quiet suddenly. He kind of wants to rip his head off, stick it up his own ass if he enjoys admitting he likes it that way so much.
Ashley doesn’t seem to notice the change in him, just laughs as if he just said, like, the funniest shit she’s ever heard.
“That’s cool”, she chirps, almost naive in the way she doesn’t address the massive elephant in the room. “Y’ don’t seem nervous now, though. Must be b’cause I always have the best ideas.”
They’re all from Jersey, so it isn’t very obvious usually, but now her accent is almost aggressive with her slurring. Oahlways the best ideahs.
He, impossibly, finds it in himself to laugh it off (for the first time in his life) and then proceeds to promptly forget a whole bunch of evening again.
Next thing he knows, total déjà vu.
The solo cup is back (only now filled with water, he checked). Travis is back in his corner. The punch bowl is considerably less full than it has been earlier. He’s mildly impressed by how much liquid (substance in general, that ziplock bag) a bunch of teenagers can casually put away like that.
Speaking of, Larry is fully passed out on the couch. The party has quieted down by now, most people Travis didn’t recognize as part of Sal’s closer friend circle have left (except for him, which, maybe he should leave, but it doesn’t feel right and he has nothing to return to anymore. Else he wouldn’t have been able to come in the first place, duh.). Maple and the ginger are sitting by Larry’s feet and chatting quietly. Ashley is smoking out a window. She looks tired, and even if she wouldn’t, Travis doesn’t feel wasted enough to actually approach her himself. The fat kid and the black queer are playing cards in another corner.
Sal is nowhere to be seen, until he just sort of materializes in front of Travis and startles the ever-loving shit out of him.
With the time that’s passed already, he feels less and less like his presence alone has to fight for its right to coexist in this space with the others every waking moment, so he doesn’t feel the immediate need to flee the premises. But it’s still Sal, so how comfortable can he be, really.
Sal speaks first. (Obviously.)
“Hey, Travis.”
A greeting, easy. Nevermind how hot and oppressive the room suddenly feels, stuffy and humid and generally unpleasant. That doesn’t even make sense, considering Ashley’s open window and all. Still, he blames the room when he stumbles through his response.
(How the fuck do you even mess up a one-syllable, three-letter name. It’s pathetic.)
The thing with Sal is, he’s hard to read. Like, notoriously. That’s what happens when you wear a fucking expressionless prosthetic over your entire face, figures. So the only chance you have at deciphering him is his eyes. His one real eye at least.
Problem with that is, no way can Travis hold eye contact with him. Not for that long. Not ever, because it’s wrong. Fuck if he told Ashley about not liking girls, fuck that, because that doesn’t even matter. That’s not the issue. The issue is that he’s the type of person Genesis condemns. Leviticus, Corinthians. Timothy. Romans. He knows them by heart, how could he not. His father had put them as the pin code for his bike back in middle school. 18222013. How could he ever forget.
The numbers are meaningless now. They did nothing to make him turn out normal.
Two truths can co-exist: there is God, and He must hate Travis.
For all his praying, it’s these things that suffocate him now, more than his Kenneth Phelps' hands ever could, whenever he looks at Sal, and, like, isn’t that something. (It’s always been like this.)
Sal has to tilt his head all the way back to look Travis in the face, even more so than Ashley had. His hair is longer than Ashley’s too. It’s cascading down his shoulders in all its choppy glory, and Travis totally doesn’t want to run his fingers through where it’s all tangled from the elastics. Wonders if they did their hair together, Sal and Ashley. He wears the grunge look better than she does, but that’s not surprising, because in Travis’ eyes, he wears everything better than Ashley does. And that’s that.
“Sorry I didn’t talk to you earlier”, Sal offers.
His voice is something that always, always gets Travis. Because it’s low and so distinctly boy and ignites this weird, persistent pressure in his lower stomach that his father tried so hard to beat out of him. He thinks maybe, if he’d only learn to hate his dad enough, he might grow to embrace it one day. The one thing that’s his own entirely. So native to him that no measure was able to take it from him. That’s what he gets for complaining about being nothing more than what his father forced him to be.
He shakes his head a little, like, ‘no big deal‘. Sal tilts his head. His hair sways with the movement.
“Sooo”, Sal says, dragging out the O, “are you having a good time?”
“Yeah”, Travis drawls, immediately fears he sounds too deadpan and not appropriately genuine towards Sal, the only person whose judgment still matters these days. (A little dramatic maybe, so what. He can have this.) To avoid sounding not convincing enough, he adds, “totally.” Overkill.
Sal nods his head in that way of his, where he's really more shaking his hair out than actually nodding, clears his throat awkwardly. He’s holding a cup too, nursing a drink through a funky looking straw. Travis would bet that he is stone cold sober at his own party. Maybe a bit high, but not enough that Travis notices. And he, for all his regained coherency, is still fucking plastered.
“That’s good”, Sal says.
Travis never would’ve taken him for a small-talk sort of person, but then again, what else was there for them to talk about. Turns out he’s bad enough at this that even confident assholes like Sal feel awkward around him.
Sal shakes a bit of cigarette ash from his sleeve. He’s wearing this knitted sweater that’s, frankly, huge on him. It looks very comfortable.
“Look”, he says, and they both pretend Sal isn’t practically taking to a wall here, “I don’t wanna disappear on you again already, but the air in here is making all this”-he gestures vaguely around his face-“itch really bad and I think I might have to take it off for a minute. So..”
He trails off. It’s clearly not an invitation at all, but Travis has had enough of pussyfooting around Sal for no reason at all. (He forces himself to ignore the years of reason he has stacked up like armor. Now is not the time, not ever.)
“Can I-”, his voice breaks slightly, ”can I come with you?”
And Sal.. well, he probably smiles.
“Yeah, ‘course.”
It sounds like he’s smiling through the words at least. Then he grabs Travis’ wrist, doesn’t seem even remotely concerned with getting his ass kicked for it, and drags him over the legs of the ginger and his boyfriend, who passed out on the floor holding hands. If he doesn’t think about it more closely, the info can’t hurt him.
The light in the bathroom is low and a little bit fucked, takes a good ten seconds to turn on and proceeds to flicker on-and-off at random intervals. The door falls shut behind them with a satisfying clack. Somehow the air in the bathroom is cool, fresh (he notices a window is cracked open and held in place by a broken stick), and it washes over him in a pleasant rush. A fat tabby cat is sleeping in the tub. Sal sighs his relief, loud and long. His fingers wander up, sift through his hair until they find the clasps securing the mask in place.
Travis doesn’t get the time to mentally prepare himself for seeing Sal’s face, or whatever, and even if he did, what the fuck would that have even looked like. The mask falls into Sal’s hands after the last smooth click of a clasp opening, and, well. There he is.
Travis is a little taken aback. Sal’s face- it’s not pretty. It’s really not.
It’s something straight out of a horror movie, with the torn mouth and exposed bone and all. It kinda looks cool, if you think about it like that, but also painful. He doesn’t want to ask if it hurts, despite there fair bit of morbid curiosity gnawing at him, but that’s also always gnawing at him whenever he thinks about Sal. Which is a lot.
Not pretty at all, but he can’t look away. Not even in a ‘can’t stop watching a train crash happen’-way, just. Wonder, maybe. Fascination. Because as awful the guy’s face looks, there is something gorgeous about it too. It must be because it’s Sal. He’d get anything to work for him.
And there’s also the intrigue - perverted, hormonal intrigue - because the barrier is gone. If he wanted to, he could reach out and just. Like, touch. It’s strange to even think about, but it just is. If he wanted to kiss Sal, now he could.
(And he knows he wanted, wants to, so bad. Has had enough dreams about exactly that, only his subconscious didn’t seem to get the memo that the prosthetic isn’t Sal’s actual face, so he had his fair share of uncanny sentient-mask-face-kiss encounters. If he wouldn’t have had to repent for dreaming about kissing a boy anyway, he would have done so for dreaming about such a wicked mannequin-like apparition. Throughout all of it, he still wanted.)
The silence between them isn’t comfortable, exactly, as they really don’t know each other well enough for that, but it’s not oppressive and awkward anymore. Travis, as bizarre as it might sound to any and every remotely sober version of him, for once doesn’t feel ashamed to just- look. It’s probably rude, but he doesn’t care anymore. Never really did care much about manners outside of his childhood home or church. Some habits die hard. In the secretly poetic depths of his repressed mind, fueled by the countless sermons and prayers that are a lot more lyrically adroit than one might think, Travis feels as if his eyes somehow made it home, right there on Sal’s horrific visage. He could sit and look at him until the end of time. Or like, at least for the next five minutes. Because now, away from what’s left of the party, he suddenly feels infinitely tired. Still, as his heavy eyes slip dangerously half-closed from time to time ('please don’t let me pass out in his bathroom while fucking standing up’, Travis thinks, and immediately feels guilty for calling in a favor with God while also eyeing up a guy he’s hopelessly and pathetically devout to. The guy he would betray his teachings for.)
Sal, obviously, because he’s a perceptive genius who hides behind ripped jeans and shirts two sizes too big, notices the staring easily.
“What, ‘s there something on my face?”
Now that Travis can actually see his expressions fully, it feels less daunting to talk to him. They’re still off-kilter, what with the torn cheek forcing half his face into a perpetual grinning sneer. It doesn’t take away from the palpable sarcasm in the remark.
“No”, he answers, too quickly and too earnestly for what has clearly been a teasing joke.
To remedy it, he adds, “you’re just..”
He pauses.
Tell her you love her, says the phone booth down the street from Addison Appartments, the one Travis had used to call his aunt after they busted down their door and took Kenneth Phelps away.
“..you’re just pretty, is all”, he finishes lamely.
And Sal- his face goes utterly blank for a moment, like, unbearably blank for Travis who just confessed his gravest sin, blank like the mannequin hybrid Travis dreams of.
Then, like he himself is surprised by it, Sal laughs. Travis wants to say it rings clear like bells, because that’s what he, somehow, feels a pretty person’s laugh would sound like, and yet. It’s nothing like bells. (Nothing like church.) It’s low, raspy from the smoking and unapologetic, shakes his whole body, tears his face further open like ripping seams, is a distinctly grating, scratching sound. Not like bells, but the hiss of the iron they’re welded from. It’s violent. It’s boy.
Sal laughs for a good long while, until it’s bordering on hysterics. Travis falls harder. It’s the same old spiel, except it’s really not and the more Sal laughs, the more Travis’ suspense grows. Is he laughing because Travis is a queer? Did all of them lie about the ginger and his boyfriend, about the acceptance, did they pose in their ugly (repulsively attractive) fishnets, pin-infested jackets just for this moment, for Travis to slip up, so they could make a fool of him? Did he walk into their trap? They’re already waiting in front of the bathroom door, he bets, summoned by Sal’s brutal croak of a laugh to beat him up, tear into him and stuff him in the dumpsters. Like a cosmically ironic act of karma.
Before they do any of that, though, the laughter stops.
Sal is glancing up at him with this glint in his squinting eyes, peaking through his messy bangs like the sun through the forest leaves (E. E. Cummings ain’t got shit on Travis), and smiles. A small, secret thing. If that’s still amusement at his expense, Travis doesn’t think he’d mind that much. Even though the chasm of Sal’s missing cheek doesn’t let it turn quite gentle, it’s something dear. Travis thinks he doesn’t need gentle. He’s never known it anyway.
“Never knew you could actually joke, Phelps”, he grins.
His teeth worry at a glinting metal ring through his bottom lip. The thing is pierced crooked, to avoid the mangled, scarred skin. Travis wonders what the point even is of decorating your face, if no one’s ever going to see behind the mask, but maybe that’s just one more way Sal doesn’t care about appearances. It’s probably hard to still care when your face screams ‘accident’ to the point it becomes your nickname.
After scrutinizing him a few beats more, like he’s a bug in Sal’s killing jar, he adds, “you’re actually funny once you drop the slurs.”
It’s only then that it clicks: Sal doesn’t believe him.
He genuinely doesn’t, and he interprets it as fake so easily, so dryly, as if he had never received a genuine compliment in his life. Travis knows that isn’t true, he’s overheard the group’s friendly, borderline flirty banter enough to know Sal gets plenty of that, and yet he levels Travis with this thoroughly deadpan look that betrays nothing but wry amusement.
“I’m not”, Travis stutters in his surprise, “joking, I mean.” He isn’t funny either.
Sal tilts his head, eyes searching lazily. He almost looks resigned, as if he’s had this conversation a billion times before.
“Travis”, he begins, slow and patient, like he’s explaining something to a child, “I have to wear a prosthetic because my face looks like something even zombies would turn away from. The fact I can breathe without tubes and talk like normal is a medical, like, anomaly. I am not pretty.”
He stresses the last four words with this grave, meaningful look in his eyes. The non-glass one at least. It accomplishes little, safe for convincing Travis more of the opposite. His eyes are made of the stuff people write songs about.
He’s got half the mind to protest, double down, drill it into Sal’s head that none of that changes anything, but Sal is quick to talk over him the second he opens his mouth.
“No”, he says, simple and efficient, “no amount of alcohol in your system can make you actually believe that. This isn’t me fishing for compliments, Phelps, I don’t feel bad or self-conscious about being fucking hideous. It’s just how things are.”
Travis thinks that’s it, but after pausing for a moment, Sal adds, with finality, “the only bad part about it is people trying to convince me otherwise. If you’re going for flattery, make it something less obvious at least. I don’t think I’m that shallow.”
Travis watches through Sal’s cheek how his tongue flicks around in his mouth as he talks. How his molars click together.
“Okay”, he answers at last. “I guess you’re not, like, pretty pretty.”
He pauses while thinking about what he’s going to say next and hopes Sal doesn’t notice how little sense he’s making right now.
He throws all caution and carefully mapped-out sentences out of the window when he instead blurts, all in one breath, “you’re pretty in the way that you make me think that I might want to kiss you.”
The bathroom gets impossibly more silent in the wake of the admission. Time sort of stops in this very peculiar way, like they’re stuck in a capsule that doesn’t obey the concept anymore, and Travis thinks he might want to hurl. Sal cocks his head. His hair follows like curtains.
“Something gives me the impression you’re not joking anymore.”
(That bastard.)
“And also”, a sly grin tugs at his lips, “that Ash is gonna be very happy when she finds out Chug owes her five bucks.”
“What?”
“They bet on it, dude. Ash said you were into me and Chug never really pays attention much. He’s, like, her personal victim when it comes to stupid bets. Don’t ask me why, but he still agrees.”
“Oh.”
This weird dread settles in Travis’ stomach. He’s reminded of the time - the first time - his Sunday prayer went unanswered.
The week before he went to confession, and like every week, went down the mental list of sins he had racked up throughout the days, while pretending he didn’t know the shrouded figure behind the divider was his father himself. It started with the usual stuff (lying to his classmate, three Hail Maries; talking back at his teacher, seven for Forgiveness and Pamphlet duty on Tuesday after school; forgetting saying Grace before lunch in the cafeteria, belt), but then he foolishly admitted looking at the boys during recess. He knew it was unnatural, against God’s will, and thereby rightfully frowned upon, so he expected repentance. He didn’t expect to be beaten half to death at home. The next week, he left that part out of the confession, as if his father really had managed to expel the sin from him with his strikes.
James 4:17; ‘Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do so, commits sin.’
Travis wasn’t even surprised when instead of the familiar warmth of relief after prayer, all he could feel was the cold, heavy air of the Phelps Ministry. A chilling nausea from the revelation that God doesn’t answer to sinners in His house.
“Sooo..”, Sal drawls, and Travis isn’t thirteen and desperately cast-out from his own belief anymore, “you gonna kiss me or what?”
Travis doesn’t ask how, even if that’s something he had pondered late at night before, under the safety of his covers. Travis doesn’t punch him. Travis doesn’t know how, between his inexperience and the whole boy thing and the fact this boy’s face is half missing and that there’s a fucking ring through the only unharmed tissue, but somehow, he just does. Kisses Sal. He’s come to find that out about being drunk: you just forget to struggle.
Kissing is strange. The thought alone, pressing your mouth to someone else’s and having that feel pleasant somehow, that whole concept is odd. Even with a gun to his head, Travis couldn’t exactly explain where the urge to do just that even stems from.
Kissing Sal is stranger. As off-putting as ‘lips to lips’ may sound, it’s got nothing on ‘chapped, tense teenage boy lips to scar tissue and teeth and metal’.
His whole upper body is curving down, bending to meet Sal somewhere between their height difference, and it takes about ten seconds for his spine to start protesting. Sal’s hand finds his neck, sort of cards through and sort of grips at his overgrown hair there. His other hand loosely rests on Travis’ hip, like it just happened to pass by, like this is all so easy and effortless for Sal. Meanwhile Travis’ hands are clammy and awkward at his side. He wants to put them to Sal’s face, like how he’s seen the actors do in the movies before his father found the remote and turned the indecent scene off, but he’s scared of, what, irritating the scars there. They have been through enough. He would put his hands on Sal’s shoulders instead, maybe, but that might push him down with how far on his tippy-toes he’s balancing, and someone else in his place might be so bold to put them on his lower back, to pull him in by the hips, but even the thought alone is so much that Travis has to pull back a fraction and catch his breath.
Sal, in a move that makes Travis’ stomach flutter alarmingly, lets him catch his breath for a moment before chasing him with a small, well-aimed peck at the left corner of his mouth. The lip ring tickles for just a second before the sensation is gone all together and Sal backs out of his space just a little bit, just in case he’s too overwhelmed from it all. The secretive yet cunning smile is back.
It makes him so unreasonably giddy, the kiss and peck and smile and Sal of it all, that his eyes burn with it. Crying, it’s not something that boys do, but he feels like maybe he should right now. He doesn’t. Instead, he laughs with it.
It surprises himself, the gurgling, startling chuckle that comes more from his chest than from his throat, a bit like a sob, but laughter, clearly. Across him, Sal’s still smiling.
“Whatsup”, he asks, with amusement so thick it breaks the word up into syllables. Wha-ha-ts up. Through his smile, more wry and teasing suddenly, he continues, “‘s kissing me that funny, huh?”
His head is cocked again, like a door with only one hinge. His eyebrows are narrowed in this faux-stern way, but the act keeps cracking with every tremor of half-suppressed chuckle.
Travis shakes his head, but his head is swimming from the booze and the hormones and all the stupid teenage bullshit Kenneth Phelps ultimately failed to beat out of him. And how he failed. It’s a little bit tragic and a whole lot spectacular, how much the whole thing backfired. Because he, Travis fucking Phelps, at age seventeen, is standing in this boy’s bathroom and fully imagining it all, telling his nonexistent grandkids about this moment, 'and that’s it, my first true love’, all that.
“That’s kinda corny”, Sal smirks from where he moved to open the window further.
The night suits him, falling onto his features in this cold sheen. Sal climbs onto the tiled windowsill in one expert, swooping movement and starts digging through his pockets. His bony fingers reemerge seconds later with an old and battered pack of cigarettes.
“Did I-”
Travis never gets to ask if he said any of his musings out loud (he couldn’t have), because seconds later, he’s hurling the past seven hours into the Fisher’s bathtub.
In a great show of supernatural intuition, the cat that’s been sleeping there manages to flee the scene just in time.
Behind him, in the general direction of the window, he hears cardboard hit the floot, and seconds later Sal is hovering at his side. His shadow is looming into the tub next to Travis’, and he can see his arms idling somewhere above his back, as if Sal isn’t quite sure if he’s allowed to touch him again.
The heavy iron cross on his chain keeps clattering against the tub in a rhythmic imitation of his heaving.
“Can I-”, Sal tries, and is interrupted by the howl of an alarm from somewhere outside that startles them both.
The cross knocks against the tub again.
“Can I get that for you?“
The shadow gestures loosely around the room, in the vague direction of Travis’ general location.
“Yeah”, he croaks.
He isn’t quite sure what he just agreed to, but he doesn’t think he quite minds, with Sal. The next thing he feels are Sal’s nimble hands gently unclasping the chain around his neck.
It’s the last thing Travis knows before he, at last, he passes out for good.
He wakes up the next noon in what can only be Sal’s bed, cocooned in fluffy blankets that are way too hot for the middle of fucking August. To his surprise and relief, he discovers he has no headache, but a mouth drier than the Summer School Math course. It also feels oddly fuzzy, which, he realizes after a few more moments awake, is because it’s full of cat fur.
He frees himself from the oppressive heat of the blankets, sits up sluggishly and immediately finds the culprit, the same fat tabby cat he encountered yesterday at some point, curled at the foot of the bed, sleeping soundly.
He spots Larry next, still fast asleep on the floor next to the bed, snoring so loudly it’s a feat in and of itself he doesn’t wake himself up with it.
Sal chooses this moment to sneak in through the creaking door. His hair is even more messed up than usual, flat on one side, like he laid on it, and a weird mix of spiky and curly on the other. His slender figure is drowning in a shirt that’s ridiculously huge on him, to the point it might pass as a short dress. His legs are bare, safe for two fluffy mismatched socks that are clinging onto his heels for dear life. In one hand he’s balancing a steaming cup, with the other he’s shutting the door as quietly as possible.
At once, Travis is hit with this utter embarrassment, for the show he pulled yesterday, fully aware he might not even remember the worst of it. Then follows a fondness. Which is strange, because he’s pretty sure he has never felt fond of anything before in his life. Lastly, absolute satisfaction crashes over him like a wave, at the fact he knows what Sal looks like in the mornings, that he knows how it feels to kiss him in a bathroom while Sal’s high and Travis is fucked on one infamous clear liquid or other.
That he went from being unable to exist in a room that has people in it to knowing that Sal’s lip ring tingles cold through a peck, and also discovering that Sal has a lip ring in the first place.
Sal catches his eyes from all the way across the room. The mischievous glint in his eyes that Travis kind of remembers from the night before carries over the stretch.
It’s only then that Travis is humbly reminded of a very important detail, which is that he, without the whole ‘forgetting to struggle’-boost, still doesn’t really know how to fucking act.
In an Oscar-worthy maneuver , he makes a great show of yawning and promptly drops back down on the sheets, that, for all their warmth, are worlds ahead of the thin linen he gets at the shelter in terms of comfort.
He feels the thick mattress dip when Sal sits down on it moments later. It’s not an act anymore when Travis falls back into a blissful slumber only seconds later.