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“Alright, never have I ever,” Sam says, and he’s laughing, too, still a little buzzed from the vodka cokes Chloe, a blonde girl from Chicago and Brady’s current obsession, keeps forcing onto him (“You’re so tall, there’s no way you’re even feeling it yet—”). “Never have I ever, uh…”
Sam’s done a lot. All the typical fare was covered before he was fourteen: drank, smoked, ran from cops, almost died. Even something like trying drugs he’s covered recently, though he’s pretty sure Brady is full of shit and they’d just been smoking oregano. “Lived in a place for longer than six months,” he says.
Chloe, from the other side of Brady, says, “Dude?”, and drinks.
“This is the first I’m hearing of this,” Brady, next to Sam, says, and takes a sip of his too.
Chloe’s roommate—a pretty brunette girl with a lot of black eyeliner and a AC-DC shirt that makes Sam think, against his will, of Dean—drinks too. She doesn’t say anything, but she does look at him with some curiosity.
They’re sat in a circle on the floor of Sam and Brady’s room as the first-week Floor Six party rages on around them and alright, maybe Sam’s more than a little buzzed. He’s used to beer and whiskey but vodka, in Dean’s eyes, was for girls so he wasn’t quite sure how much to let Chloe put in his drink. He’s pretty certain the plastic cup in his hand is at least fifty percent vodka; maybe sixty percent, judging on the colour of the coke. It tastes like shit.
“So, what, your dad’s like military or something?” Chloe says. “My best friend back home, her dad was too. She spent her childhood tossed around different bases round the Midwest.”
“Or something,” Sam agrees.
He can feel Brady eyeing him. “I thought your dad was a mechanic,” he says.
“I said or something,” Sam says. “It’s kind of complicated. He did a lot of stuff.”
Sam’s not sure why he’s even lying but he’s certain in the knowledge that, no matter what, he doesn’t want anything from his old life to bleed into his new one. In another world, it might not have been like that—if Dean was still talking to him, if Dad hadn’t told him exactly how things were going to be from now on by telling him if he left he couldn’t come back—and certainly Sam had never meant it to be this way, that he’d have to get out and lie his ass off at every opportunity. But it is like that. Sam’s determined not to let it bother him. He’s out. Away from Dad. Away from the terror and the blood and the constant, oppressive guilt. He can’t let any of it come knocking at the door.
Brady and Chloe are still looking at him like they want an explanation. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s not an idiot; he knew, before, the way they lived wasn’t normal. It was just. Well.
First off, there’s the fact that him, Dean and Dad weren’t entirely alone in it. All Dad’s friends were hunters, and, true, they had a tendency to vanish into smoke after a year—John Winchester was a notoriously difficult man, and not just with his own kids—, but they were still there. Evidence that their alternative lifestyle wasn’t that rare, even if it was, even if it was just that Dad probably knew fifty of the hundred hunters in all of the USA. Some of those hunters even had kids, Sam’s certain, though he didn’t remember personally meeting any. If you live a life for long enough, it feels normal. Even when you know it isn’t; that there has to be something more than it.
And even then. Sam knows the hunting’s something he has to lie about, but what about the rest of it? Every brick that’s made up his life so far—worrying about money and Dad drinking and living off diner food and every little thing about Dean—can he talk about that, or is it something that’ll immediately mark him as different, as other? Normal or abnormal?
Sam decides to take a risk. Or maybe it’d be more accurate to say the vodka decides for him, because he’s saying it before he even realised he wanted to. “My mom died when I was a kid,” he starts, and it all comes tumbling out. Lies, thankfully, but as close to the truth as he can get. “My dad was a mechanic but he got kind of obsessed with trying to find the thing, uh, the killer who got her, so we moved around a lot while he looked for leads—” He can feel them staring at him. He fumbles. “—checking out police departments, talking to suspects himself, stuff like that—”
“And it took—how long?” Brady says. He’s sharp, Sam realises, though he doesn’t know why it’s a shock since he’s liked Brady from the moment they met, dropped off by his mother at Sam’s dorm with an awkward smile; hey, I think I’m your roommate?. “Your whole life, by the sounds of it. Right?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I dunno. He’s an obsessive guy.”
The atmosphere’s changed. Sam did that. Chloe and her roommate have quit looking like they’re two seconds from hysterics, and instead are really looking at him, like they’re searching his face to see what that looks like on someone, a life spent with no real home. Right, Sam thinks. Abnormal. But he knew that already.
“Wow,” brunette girl says. “And here I thought my dad had his problems.”
Why did Sam say anything? Wasn’t this what Dean was always telling him, what Dad had drilled into them? Don’t let anyone know. Not anything. Not even close.
Then again, Dad and Dean aren’t here. Sam doesn’t even fucking know if he’s ever seeing them again. Well, everyone’s got to break away from home at some point, right, Sam thinks wildly, and he almost laughs.
“Yeah, Sam, geez,” Chloe says. “I’m sorry.” The atmosphere is awkward, and Sam’s grateful that she quickly moves on. “Right,” she says. “Brady’s turn.”
“Uh,” he says, like he’s struggling, then: “Never have I ever shot a gun?”
Brunette girl takes a sip, so Sam takes a gulp of his drink too without saying anything. He feels a little sick. The sense-memory of cold metal in his clammy hands, first put there before he was in middle school and never really put down ever again, haunting his hands long every night when he tried to go to sleep.
Dean had always loved guns. He delighted in cleaning them, looked so cool and at ease with them in his grip, made senseless violence look fun the way he did it. Sam, not so much, though he’d been such a good shot by the time he was twelve even Dad had admitted it.
“My mom’s a total hippie,” Brady says, by way of explanation. “I was making Peace Not War banners at ten.”
Brady’s from San Fran. Every glimpse of his life Sam gets—the soulful, affectionate mother, the teenhood spent playing football and avoiding homework, the house and the kitchen and the yard he came home to every day—is completely alien to him, except for maybe his mom’s protectiveness. For a second, watching Brady and her unpack, Sam had entertained a world where Dad had surprised him and came through, had bitched and moaned the whole way there but had driven Sam to college, Dean in the front seat blasting something stupid, and helped him settle in.
The fact that wasn’t even really what Sam had wanted was irrelevant. Sure, Sam had wanted a clean break, a life outside of the lines Dad had drawn for him when he was six months old. But he hadn’t thought he’d end up getting it. Dad didn’t leave him alone. That wasn’t who he was.
If Sam was acting up, Dad handcuffed him to the radiator or yelled at him about responsibilities for three hours, he didn’t kick him out. Sam had hoped that a final, legal, escape attempt would be the thing that made Dad finally understand, and that if it didn’t, it didn’t matter, because he could still go.
And Dad hadn’t understood. Hadn’t even tried to. Had just told Sam he was selfish and stupid and going to die out there without protection and ruining their family, spitting on the memory of his dead mother, all which was expected but then had told Sam to get out and to stay gone instead of finding some ultra controlling way to ‘let’ Sam still go to college while staying in his life. And Sam had been—he’d been relieved. Even while his entire world was breaking apart around him. He’d been relieved.
He has to cling onto that, Sam thinks. That relief. It’s what’s going to get him through.
“Samuel,” Brady says. “What about you? Do you have another strange story to grace us with? Did killer-obsessed Dad train you to shoot for self-defence?”
Brady doesn’t mean anything by it—of that Sam is sure. He’s just trying to ease the tension. Still, the fact that he’s essentially right stings. They’re all looking at him like they’re waiting for confirmation. Shooting guns too well—abnormal, Sam thinks.
“No,” Sam says. “I just went to a shooting range a few times as a kid. My brother liked them. Me, not so much.”
There. Easy. Easier than the truth, even, and not too far from it except for a world away.
Chloe almost looks relieved. “I haven’t,” she says, “but I dunno, I think it’d be kind of cool,” she says.
“Maybe in the movies,” her roommate, the brunette girl, says. “I’m from buttfuck nowhere Alabama. It’s just a family bonding activity for us.” She fumbles around behind her, by the door, and locates the vodka bottle. Pours it into the cap of the bottle, then downs it like a pro. Then she hands the bottle to Sam.
“You both already drank,” Brady points out.
“We’ll all do shots,” Chloe says. “Sam, you next.”
Sam obeys. It doesn’t go down his throat properly, lingering in his mouth for a moment, so burns twice. It’s okay, though. He follows it up with his vodka-coke as a mixer. That just makes the burn worse. Everything’s a little floaty, all of a sudden. It’s hard to see what he was worrying so much about before. He’s free. He made it. He’s out.
Brady and Chloe drink straight from the bottle, despite brunette girl’s objections that they’re going to get alcohol poisoning. Then it’s Chloe’s turn. “Never have I ever smoked a cigarette,” she says.
Sam’s about to drink, citing Dean, before he reconsiders. Is that abnormal? Dean got him into it, Dad pretty much encouraged it too until he decided it impacted lung capacity enough to make it a good idea for hunters to quit. That feels normal to Sam but then again everything does. He doesn’t do anything for a second.
Both Chloe’s roommate—Ella, Sam thinks her name is?—and Brady drink. “Sam, I’ve seen you smoke,” Brady says. “Drink up.”
It’s true, though Sam doesn’t like smoking, stole one from Brady so he had an excuse to stand outside and catch his breath while teenagers and excited parents roamed the hallways. He takes a sip.
“You’ve really never smoked?” Chloe’s roommate says to Chloe.
“Nah,” Chloe says. “My whole family chainsmoke like crazy, I never saw the appeal. My sister was always trying to get me to smoke when I was about twelve.”
She laughs. Her roommate and Brady laugh too. Sam feels like he should be taking notes. So that’s normal, bad influence older siblings, or at least, it isn’t worrying; doesn’t ruin parties or attract too much attention. Dean might be a safe route in general, in fact, if Sam wants to seem less like a stand-offish prick for never talking about his family.
“You know, that’s the same for me,” Sam says. Once he starts talking, he just wants to keep going. Here no one can actually tell him to shut up. “Except I smoke sometimes, but not really. My brother, he got me to try my first cigarette at thirteen—he was obsessive over it, taught me how to roll one myself so I didn’t look like an idiot in front of some girl, Sammy!” He mimics Dean’s voice. If you ask him, it’s perfectly accurate. “Course I hated it and spent the next two years trying to get both him and Dad to quit.”
“Man, my dad would’ve genuinely killed me if I tried that,” Chloe says. “No one interferes with his cigarettes.”
Ella nods like she’s agreeing. Shithole controlling dads—a normal fixture of the world. That’s relieving.
“Oh, he tried,” Sam says, growing more comfortable. “Third-worst fight we ever got in was when I threw away all his cigarettes when I was pissed at him.” He made me pull out of the school play the night I was due to perform in it because he didn’t think I’d been dedicated enough to my training recently—but that was hunting so Sam had to edit it out. “He yelled at me for hours, I swear, all this shit about the lack of respect I had for him. Then I said he was full of bullshit and my brother decked me one for daring to disagree with Dad.”
Chloe actually laughs. Sam is killing at this. He can be a normal person. He’s so good at this.
“That’s so something my sister would do, God,” she says. “We used to fight all the time. I swear I have scars from her stupid nails on my arm.”
Sibling violence—thank fuck, something they can all bond over. “I literally showed up here with a broken nose,” Sam laughs, even though it was anything but funny at the time. “That’s how mad my brother was that I was leaving.”
Unsure silence greets this. Nobody laughs.
“He broke your nose?” Brady says.
Great. Sibling violence—not a safe topic. It was meant to be funny. Sam doesn’t want to talk about this suddenly. “No, I mean, I’m exaggerating,” Sam says hurriedly. “He didn’t—I didn’t mean he actually broke my nose. That would be— weird. Duh.”
Yeah, okay. Sam’s aware he’s a little too drunk for that to come off as convincing.
“Okay, to be fair, I have given my sister a black eye,” Chloe says, and Sam wants to kiss her nevermind how annoyed Brady might be.
“How old’s your brother?” Ella asks, ignoring Chloe.
Great. Sam is still in this conversation. “Few years older,” Sam says.
“So he’s what, like, twenty?” Brady says. Twenty-two, Sam thinks but doesn’t say. It still hasn’t healed quite right. College nurse asked if I wanted to press charges on the perpetrator and when I said no she gave me this look like, yeah, I bet. “Yeah, Sam, that’s kinda fucked up. Was it an accident?”
What part of I don’t want to talk about this do they not get? To be fair, Sam has not said that out loud, because that would be weird. Now Dean is not a safe topic. What even is there?
“Yeah, no, of course,” Sam says. “He was just mad. He’d never actually hurt me. Chloe gave her sister a black eye!”
“Okay,” Brady says. “Sure.”
Yeah. Sam is drunk. He takes another few sips of his drink to try and forget the fact. He decides not to speak ever again.
“My turn, I think,” Ella says. “Never have I ever done drugs—”
Sam and Brady drink simultaneously. Chloe laughs at them.
“Stronger than weed,” Ella finishes, also laughing. “Not sure if that drink counted, boys.”
Sam doesn’t open his mouth because he doesn’t trust himself not to stumble into saying something stupid like I’ve been on some pretty intense pain medication cause I got stabbed through the chest by a skinwalker once and it punctured a lung or something but I didn’t have time to heal up properly in the hospital cause CPS were on our trail so Dad and Dean just stole a bunch of meds and I spent the next week in varying states of drugged-up in the Impala. (True story!) Besides, that probably wouldn’t count anyway, so he’s not lying.
“Fuck,” Brady says. “How do we take it back?”
“Me and Ella will take one too,” Chloe decides. “Then we’re all on even footing.”
They drink. Then it’s Sam’s turn again. “Never have I ever gone a month without seeing my family,” he blurts out. He thinks it sounds like a pretty normal thing to say. He’s saying he hasn’t. Which isn’t even a lie.
Chloe pours a little more vodka into her drink, then takes a shot. “Sleepaway camp,” she says. “And let me tell you, with three siblings, it was nice to have a break.”
“Ugh, if you said two weeks, I would’ve been able to drink,” Brady says. “My mom went camping with her friends for a couple weeks in the summer and I had the place to myself.”
Sam laughs. “I said a month for a reason. Being left alone for two weeks at a time made up most of my earlier teen years. At least until—” Sam has to literally clamp his own mouth shut to avoid saying I joined them on hunts. Alcohol is bad. Like genuinely evil. Sam isn’t sure how he didn’t reach this conclusion earlier, considering his childhood was continually marred by it, but he sure has reached it now. Sadly it still feels kind of nice, being floaty and weird and not thinking about what he says until halfway through saying it.
“Oh, yeah,” Chloe says. “Dad who was always on the go.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. There we go. He’s not that weird. It’s fine. “By the time I was fifteen I probably knew half the motels in America.”
“You got left in motels on your own?” Brady says. Sam wishes Brady would shut the hell up.
“Yeah, but I was like fifteen,” Sam says. Brady’s still staring at him. “Sixteen,” he says. “Seventeen—”
“Dude, props to you,” Brady says. “I wouldn’t even stay in one by myself now.”
Fuck. Sam feels oddly like he’s going to cry. He’s fucked it up again. Why did he even say that? Obviously that isn’t normal, even though it pretty much feels like it is. He was practically an adult at fifteen. Him and Dean were left alone together when Dean was miles younger than that, five and nine, Sam is sure. He knows that’s fucked, but is leaving your fourteen year old for a few weeks really so strange?
It’s so hard to judge these things. What about viewing CPS as an enemy at all costs, or dropping everything to lock the car doors and pick up everything and driving twelve hours cause your youngest keeps trying to run away? That’s not normal, Sam is pretty sure that’s not normal, something he needs to take care he doesn’t accidentally drop into conversation.
What about the more basic stuff? Is making your own dinner normal or does Sam need to hide that too? In terms of severity how different is making your own dinner to living in a car? What about getting disowned for going to college? What about spending three nights a week tiptoeing around your dad passed out on the motel couch? What about spending the other four either bandaging someone up or being bandaged up? On a scale of one to extremely damaged, how strange is having nightmares every single fucking night?
He takes another gulp of his drink. Then another. Everything swims for a second, and then it’s back to normal.
“Fine,” he says. “Can I get another go? Never have I ever bought takeaway burgers instead of groceries.” That was strictly a Dad-and-Dean-coded decision. Sam’s food choices over the years: bags of marshmallows and a takeaway pizza, then later, more recently, not very much at all. This past week, choosing for himself, he’s liked salads; black bean burritos from the place ten minutes from campus; avocados, a new discovery made in the college dining hall thanks to Brady; smoothies that make him feel good when he drinks them.
“Have to say,” Chloe says, “I regularly order pizza instead of groceries.”
Sam manages to stop himself from saying, Yeah, me and my brother did too, but it’s kind of stupid cause you get way more groceries for the price of pizza so we’d end up like sharing a slice a day to make the money last and he’d try to give me the whole slice cause he felt responsible for me but then he’d still be pissy all day about it and then I’d try to give him the whole slice cause I didn’t even particularly want to eat and we’d end up literally fighting over it. He doesn’t say anything at all.
“You don’t get another go,” Brady says.
Play continues. Sam barely even notices the questions, just shakes his head at requisite intervals without listening to what they’re asking until he’s nudged by Brady. “Dude, your turn again.”
The floor’s kind of weird. This very dirty looking cream. Why would you even have a carpet in a dorm room? Ninety percent of the time, motels have floorboards. Much easier to clean spillages from. If Sam thinks about it, where he lives now is kind of like one huge motel. Brady in the bed next to him is Dean. Dad’s not there.
Everything I’ve done is abnormal, Sam thinks, so he’s just going to start lying.
“Never have I ever defused a bomb,” Sam says. October 1995. There’s context but it’s swimming in Sam’s head; he just remembers Dean, sixteen and incapacitated in the dirt next to him, one of Sam’s earlier hunts. He’d had a strawberry milkshake afterwards for some reason and Dean had made constant comments about how it was girly because it was pink, which even at twelve struck Sam as faintly pathetic, but Dad had just laughed at him and ruffled Sam’s hair and been in too altogether a good mood, when Sam felt like curling up under the table of the diner and trying to rub every spec of dirt off his body and never coming out.
“No one’s done that, Sam,” Brady says, a little tiredly. “Pick something different.”
“Um,” Sam says. “Never have I ever had to hide college brochures inside porn mags.”
“Ew,” Chloe says.
“So you hid porn mags inside college brochures,” Ella says. “That’s what I’m getting from that.”
No, actually, but the only way Dean understood the word privacy was in respect to jerking off and even then he only respected it like eighty percent of the time, and if Dean knew he was going to college Dad would know and that couldn’t happen until right before or he’d never be able to go. “Sure,” Sam says.
“Sam,” Brady says. He sounds kind of annoyed. Or maybe concerned. Sam isn’t sure which, or if there’s a difference. “Dude, how much have you had to drink? I think you should have some water.”
“Yeah, and try to pick something we’ve actually done,” Chloe says.
“Okay, take your pick,” Sam says. “Never have I ever actually hid a gun in my locker like a freak school shooter. Never have I ever stayed up late to do my homework under the covers cause I’d get yelled at if I was seen caring about academics. Never have I ever been given the silent treatment for mentioning my mom. Never have I ever been kicked out.”
Yeah, okay. Now everyone’s staring at him. Sam probably should’ve drank that water. Or put less vodka in his glass. Or had less glasses.
Brady looks a little worried, actually. Which is—sweet. Sam guesses it’s sweet. “Sam, are you okay?” he says.
“I’m fine, Brady,” Sam says, hurriedly. Hoping his voice sounds normal. “I’m just gonna go get a drink.”
He gets up and bursts out of the dorm room without looking back.
He fumbles with the door to the kitchen. When it finally opens, he knocks a smallish blonde boy who barely registers it, occupied talking to his friend carefully pouring shots, but Sam feels like he’s going to sink into the floor. Instead he heads for the tap and gets distracted by a jug labelled Pina Colada! Another proclaimed ‘girl drink’ that Sam knows for a fact Dean actually really likes.
He pours some into a red solo cup, just like in the movies, and takes a sip. It’s good; sweet and tangy and he can barely even taste the alcohol, which is useful, because he probably shouldn’t get any more drunk. The kitchen’s actually surprisingly empty; by this point, most people have retreated into smaller groups in their individual rooms, keeping their doors open to maintain some semblance of a larger party. Two girls are doing tarot card readings sat on the floor by the sink, the blonde boy and his friend are now leaving, and that’s it.
Sam leans back against the wall of the kitchen and sinks down to the floor, solo cup in hand. There are empty beer bottles around him. He thinks briefly of a younger Sam and Dean waking up after a particularly bad day to bottles haphazardly piled loose near the trash and a note on the ceaselessly empty motel fridge: Hunt in Alabama. Be back in a week. Money’s under my pillow. Don’t do anything too crazy. He stares at the linoleum, chipped from whatever freshmen lived here before them and whatever freshmen lived here before them, and wishes someone would repaint it, he’d do it even. This is where he lives, now, but it’s not his place, he’s entitled to even less ownership of it than he was of, say, the Impala, and it’s certainly not home. Just another in the long string of places to inhabit, all blurring into one after a while.
His vision’s blurring up too. Badly suppressed tears. The Stanford school counsellor, in one of her opening speeches, mentioned that adjusting is a difficult process, that feelings can come out after you’ve moved away from home that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. Sam’s not sure if the sudden lurch of what anyone else would describe as homesickness can be attributed to that, especially since he doesn’t know what he’s missing, because it’s not the hunting or the fear or Dad, not really, and maybe it’s Dean but even that’s still tricky, and what else does he have to miss?
He still lies awake every night terrified by the fact they don’t put salt under every door and window in the building. He still sometimes can’t make himself sleep because he’s so aware of everything that’s out there waiting for him. He can’t tell himself his fears are irrational because they’re not. He has to be at peace with the idea he could die every night when he goes to sleep. And Dad and Dean are still out there hunting, with one less person as backup, one less person on research. That makes him feel sick when he thinks about it. Dean after a hunt, patching up his injuries on his own.
Sam closes his eyes briefly. The darkness is comforting. He’s suddenly aware of footsteps approaching, opens them hurriedly so no one steps on him, and notices Converse that certainly belong to his roommate.
He looks up. Brady’s standing over him, looking down, beer in hand. “You okay?” he says.
Sam nods. He feels stupid and small and lost, and like he’s completely embarrassed himself, which he has. They probably all just think he’s a pathological liar now. It’s fine. It works.
Brady sits down next to him. “What’re you drinking?” he asks.
“Pina Colada,” Sam says, “but I’m not convinced it has any alcohol in it.”
“Probably for the best,” Brady agrees.
Sam sighs. “Just forget whatever I was saying. I was talking out of my ass.”
“Sure,” Brady says, a little gently, like he doesn’t believe it at all but is going to try to let Sam think he does. “Okay.”
He puts his beer down. They sit in silence for a minute. Then Brady sighs too.
“I’m drunk,” he says, “which is why I’m telling you this, but my dad was kind of crazy, too. Not, like, dragging me across the country and leaving me in motels crazy, but sort-of feelings are for girls and one too many bottles of Stella crazy, if you know what I mean, so— I’m not saying I get it, but I kind of get it. Um.”
Sam has no idea what to say to that. It’s—it’s sweet, that Brady’s offering that up, just to make him feel better. Oddly sweet. He wishes he could give something of himself back, something that wasn’t totally batshit insane that’d scare Brady away or just flat out scare him. But he doesn’t have anything. “Thanks,” he says.
“They have a counselling service, here, I think,” Brady suggests. “I’ve been thinking of going, I mean—you could try it.”
For a second, Sam doesn’t say anything. It’s sweet that Brady’s offering, that he wants to know, that he seems to, for some reason, care. More than that, it’s appealing: the idea that his life could ever be so mundane as to fit into the schedule of a counsellor. Tuesday, 9AM, see Brady about his father issues, 10AM, Chloe about her sibling rivalry, 11AM, Sam about his history of monster-fighting— the idea is a joke. Even if he went, tried to talk about something less explicitly supernatural— he’d just be reminded of all the things he couldn’t say, how he would always and forever be a freak by virtue of his own history. Better to say nothing. Probably nobody would remember anything by the morning, anyway. How many times had Dad or Dean gotten drunk and dumped everything on their chest onto Sam, then acted disgusted by the very idea the next day? It was better that way. Nobody had to know anything Sam didn’t want them to. Not anymore. Not from now on.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Maybe.”