Chapter Text
Joseph Kavinsky goes missing on a Sunday morning.
It’s not a loud affair, as most things surrounding Kavinsky are. Henrietta is hushed by the early-autumn fog that falls over the cold morning, and there is not even the slightest shift in the air when Kavinsky is removed from the town. Though this is understandable; most of Henrietta could not care less about Joseph Kavinsky’s existence or lack thereof.
To be fair, not even his closest friends realize that he’s missing until it’s been a week since they’ve heard from him and it’s become apparent that his white Mitsubishi Evo is not, in fact, just going to roll up into his driveway and produce a totally fine, if somewhat hungover, young degenerate.
But Henrietta is different without Kavinsky. There’s a balance that exists, a divide that falls somewhere between Joseph Kavinsky and Ronan Lynch. Without Kavinsky, there’s no one to hype Lynch up - only Richard Gansey to subdue him. Without Kavinsky, there’s no one to keep his boys in check. Without Kavinsky, there’s no one to stir up the air.
Somehow, it seems fitting that Joseph Kavinsky goes missing on a Sunday - a holy day. Kavinsky, in his own way, is a messiah, collecting the sons of ruined families and turning them back unto the world as something new. If he’s going to disrupt the balance of Henrietta, it might as well be on a day that is spiritually sound.
Henrietta does not shift, but Viktor Prokopenko does.
“Where’s K?”
This is the start.
The words are whispered by Swan, leaning forward to Prokopenko thirty-seconds into first-hour Economics on Monday.
Proko lifts a shoulder and then slowly drops it; a shrug. “Prob’ly still sleeping off Saturday,” he mutters, tilting his chin back in Swan’s direction.
He tries to be nonchalant, but the slightest bit of worry nags at him. K hadn’t been doing well the last time Proko saw him: high off of dream drugs and real drugs, drugs that shouldn’t have been mixed with each other and drugs that were more placebo than anything else. When he’d kicked everyone out of his trashed house late Saturday night (early Sunday morning, probably), it’d been the direct aftermath of what could only be called a breakdown.
K just got that way sometimes, though. A PTSD-style panic attack that was triggered by memories of his father or memories of nightmares or memories of who-knows-what-the-fuck. And so when he cleared out the party, Proko and the boys included, Proko hadn’t taken it personally.
He sits back in his chair; it creaks in response, the sound falling in unison with his back cracking.
Taking roll call, the teacher says, “Kavinsky?”
There’s no response. The seat in front of Proko is horribly empty, and twenty pairs of eyes turn to look at it.
Kavinsky missing school is no big deal.
After a moment, the teacher clears his throat and moves on.
During lunch, Proko texts him.
TO: Joey K
11:58am
hey k how are you doing
By the time he goes to bed that night, he hasn’t received a response.
When Kavinsky doesn’t show up to class on Tuesday morning, he’s slightly more concerned.
Taking roll today, the teacher says, “Kavinsky’s not here again?”
The question is directed at Proko, who freezes, and then shakes his head.
Class goes on as usual. Swan leans forward and says, “You haven’t heard from him?” It’s phrased as a question but Proko knows that it’s not actually one.
“He’s fine,” Proko says. He’s not sure who he’s trying to convince.
The Mitsu isn’t parked in K’s driveway.
“What the fuck,” Proko says. He throws the Golf into park and looks over to Jiang, who has one earbud in and only tagged along for the ride. They’re the only ones who came; Skov had soccer practice, and Swan fucked off to who-knows-where.
They climb out of the car and the sound of the driveway’s gravel crunching under his feet is familiar enough to calm him. Jiang’s footsteps behind him are light enough to be considered nearly nonexistent.
The front door isn’t locked, but then when is it ever. It’s not a cause for concern as much as the missing car is.
The house is eerily silent, though Proko is sure it isn’t uninhabited. Kavinsky’s recluse of a mother is surely locked away in her bedroom, haven’t having eaten in who-knows-how-long.
A painting has been knocked off the wall and has landed sideways on the floor, and Proko panics for half a second before he remembers Tad Carruthers knocking it down while attempting to do parkour at Saturday’s party. The hallway is littered with trash, which is odd enough in itself. Kavinsky may be a mess himself, but he rarely leaves post-party messes out for more than a day.
K’s bedroom is on the first floor, the room at the end of a long hallway of empty rooms. The Kavinsky household is big enough to house a small army, and instead it’s filled with dust and the stale smell of cigarette smoke and the hope for something more.
His room is empty. Proko isn’t sure what he was expecting to find, but he’s almost relieved at the site of the empty, unmade bed, a familiar mattress covered in mismatched pillows and a pile of sheets.
An empty bed, in the end, is better than a bed holding an overdosed Joseph Kavinsky.
He’s not in their usual basement hang-out spot, either, and it holds the same mess as upstairs. Empty beer cans and half-snorted lines of coke are littered over the bar and the coffee table and every available surface that’s not stained carpet.
There’s no point in checking any of the other rooms. Jiang doesn’t talk the entire time; there’s nothing to say.
It’s not until they’re getting back into the Golf that Jiang says, “Y’know he’s probably just on a bender.”
Proko knocks his head back against the headrest. He secures his seat belt, pulls out onto the road, and fumbles his phone out of his pocket. Kavinsky is the first in his most recent calls; he’d called after first hour this morning.
He leaves it ringing on speaker phone on his lap. He counts the buzzes; twelve, and then an automated voicemail that he cuts off immediately. As he ends the call, he grinds his teeth together.
Dammit, K, where are you?
TO: Joey K
1:06am
hope ur not dead in a ditch somewhere asshole
On Wednesday, they check the fairgrounds.
Skov drives, and Proko lounges across the backseat of the RX-7 with his head on Jiang’s lap. He keeps his eyes closed and his phone balanced on his chest, as if K will text him back any moment and the vibration will make Proko’s heart beat normally again.
They’re greeted at the fairgrounds by six dozen white Mitsubishis. It’s more than Proko remembered, but it’s been awhile since he’s been here.
Like the house, the ground is littered with empty beer cans and half-smoked cigarettes, though these are from Kavinsky alone rather than a party. There’s no telling how long they’ve been here, though, and so Proko kicks the front bumper of the nearest Mitsu in annoyance.
“Proko,” Skov says, and it’s a warning underneath a monotone voice.
He turns, laying back on the hood of the same car he’d just attacked. Throwing an arm over his face to shield the sun, he says, “Where the fuck else would he be?”
The car dips under another person’s weight; cracking one eye open, he confirms that it’s Skov. With a sigh, the boy drags a hand through recently-dyed hair. “Dude, it’s K. He’s fine. He probably fucked off to the desert for a week to smoke peyote or some shit.”
To be fair, this is a perfectly reasonable thing that Kavinsky could be doing. Despite never having expressed an interest in driving all the way to the desert to smoke peyote, it’s definitely within Kavinsky’s realm of possibilities.
The surface of the Mitsu is cold beneath him, and the sensation seeps through his thin t-shirt like dread.
“But why didn’t he tell us,” Prokopenko says, and it’s not a question.
“Why does Kavinsky do anything?” Swan replies.
None of them have an answer.
Thursday, Proko skips school.
He stays in bed at his Aglionby dorm, scrolling absently through his Facebook feed on his laptop and drowning out his thoughts with music. His stereo blasts a loud k-pop CD, a secret interest that K constantly mocks him for but actually enjoys himself.
None of them really use Facebook, but he goes to K’s profile anyways. The messenger sidebar simply shows a rectangle next to Kavinsky’s name; it’s been too long since he’s been active, and he hasn’t been on Messenger on his phone. His phone must be dead by now, actually, considering the amount of times Proko has attempted to call him and been sent straight to voicemail.
Kavinsky’s profile picture doesn’t even show his face. It’s K, half bent-over, with the hood of his sweatshirt up and his arm around Proko’s shoulders. It looks like it’s a friendly grip, but Proko remembers the moment and is pretty sure that K had actually been using him for balance. Proko had been halfway through a laugh, and his face looks more young and joyous than he remembers seeing it in the mirror; he wishes he could remember what he’d been laughing about. Jiang had snapped the photo on Kavinsky’s phone, which K had told him to hold onto so he wouldn’t drunk-text Ronan Lynch. At some point, K had found the picture in his camera roll and deemed it the best shot of him ever, even though there was nothing to identify the man in the picture as Joseph Kavinsky except for his protective grip on Prokopenko.
It’s a few months old. Updating it was the most recent thing that Kavinsky had done on his profile.
Proko switches to his phone and saves the photo. He sets it as his phone background, but the square-to-rectangle ratio messes it up and it’s blurry, zoomed it too far to Proko’s own face. He changes it back to the old picture: an orange tabby cat that he’d seen sitting in a window a few weeks ago.
Even knowing what it’ll yield, Proko clicks Kavinsky’s name in his recent calls and holds the phone up to his ear.
”Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice message-”
He hangs up.
On Friday morning, when it’s been five days since any of them have heard from Kavinsky, Prokopenko is stopped in the hallway before first hour and escorted to the dean’s office.
He falls into the seat across from the dean, trying to fix a mask of contempt. He slumps in the seat, one leg crossed over the other and the non-regulation hoodie he’s wearing over his Aglionby sweater making it clear just how little he cares for the dean’s rules.
(That’s not true at all, really. Prokopenko cares about the rules, but Kavinsky doesn’t, and sometimes it’s easier to pretend he’s Kavinsky than it is to be Prokopenko without Kavinsky.)
“Mr. Prokopenko,” the dean greets, his face twitching as if he’s contemplating whether or not he should bother to fake a smile. “How are you this morning?”
Proko gives him a bored look. “Fine.” He doesn’t ask how the other man is doing, because he doesn’t care.
“Let’s get right into it-”
“Please.”
The dean glares for half a second before wiping his face of emotion and taking a more professional stance. “Joseph Kavinsky hasn’t been in class all week.”
He waits for more, and when it doesn’t come, he lifts an eyebrow and says, “And?”
Really, his chest is tightening up a bit. Aglionby is not a place for Joseph Kavinsky, it never has been, and the teachers and faculty try their hardest to pretend that he doesn’t exist beyond numbers in a computer, the arrest record of a juvenile delinquent and the transcript of a prodigy. The fact that the school is taking interest in his attendance is concerning enough on its own.
The dean flattens his hands on the desk. They’re tan and veiny. Proko spends too long looking at his uneven fingernails and starts to idly pick at the dirt underneath his own.
“After his fourth consecutive unexcused absence, we attempted to contact his mother,” he says. Proko’s heart drops into his stomach. Looking a bit irritated at the memory, the dean continues, “We were… unable to get ahold of her at the number provided.”
No surprise there. Proko lifts an eyebrow.
He must be masking his concern well, for the dean looks the slightest bit perturbed by his expression. After a moment, he continues, “We’ll be sending a truant officer to his house if he isn’t here on Monday. And if we have to resort to that, Mr. Kavinsky will be expelled from Aglionby.”
Prokopenko’s throat tightens up. He swallows, but it doesn’t make it feel any less dry.
“What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?” he asks. Miraculously, it doesn’t come out choked.
Leaning forward, the dean doesn’t bother to cover his annoyance as he flatly says, “I want you to recognize the severity of this situation, and I want you to convince Mr. Kavinsky to come to class, Mr. Prokopenko.”
It hits Proko, then, that the school still thinks that K is just ditching. He supposes he can’t blame them, though, since the rest of the boys still think that, as well.
He wants to yell at him that something is wrong, that K doesn’t just disappear like this without a word. That something needs to be done, that some adult in the world needs to have more concern for him.
But it’s not what Kavinsky himself would do, so he doesn’t say any of this. Instead, he stands, throws his backpack over one shoulder, and says, “Nobody makes Kavinsky do anything.”
They check back at Kavinsky’s house on Saturday morning. The driveway is still empty, and there are several packages stacked on the front porch step, gathering dust.
They’re addressed to K, all from Amazon. Proko faintly remembers K ordering things while he was drunk, various clothing items and trinkets that he’d never wear or use.
The house is still empty, the hallways still trashed, K’s bed still unmade. The milk in the fridge expired on Tuesday, and there’s a twelve-pack of beer that Proko put in there Saturday night that wouldn’t still be there if Kavinsky had been home at any point this week.
Jiang steals one of the beers and cracks it open. Nobody points out that it’s ten o’clock in the morning.
“Dude,” Skov says, leaning against the island counter, “what if, like, the cops come? And see all of his drugs and shit?”
They all look at him. Proko says, “Why would the cops come?”
Skov gestures vaguely. He’s the most conscious out of the four of them, since he’d been up for early-morning soccer practice whereas the rest of them had just rolled out of bed. “Y’know, like, if K doesn’t come back. And they file him as a missing person.”
Both Proko and Swan open their mouths to respond before shutting them. A hush has fallen over the room, because Skov spoke the word that they’d all been avoiding using all week: missing. It’s too crazy of a thought, that Kavinsky could be gone unintentionally. Lost or kidnapped or hurt or something.
Because Joseph Kavinsky isn’t the kind of person who goes missing. He’s a poster child for bad habits, for volume and rudeness. Kavinsky doesn’t know how to be quiet; he prefers to exist loudly or not at all. He’s not someone whose face appears on the side of milk cartons or fliers advertising ’HAVE YOU SEEN ME?’
Prokopenko steps around Jiang and heads for the stairs.
“What are you doing?” Jiang calls, but it sounds bored and tired and not like he cares enough to pursue him.
Mrs. Kavinsky’s room is the middle door in a series of such upstairs. Proko goes right to it and tries the knob, unsurprised when it’s unturnable.
Instead, he bangs on it. “Hey.” He isn’t sure of her name, so he says, “Mrs. Kavinsky!” and bangs a few more times.
The door doesn’t open, and there’s not any sound from the other side of it.
“Do you even know that K is missing?” he calls, steadily growing more angry. He pounds the flat part of his palm against the wood like beating on a drum. “Do you even care that your son is missing?”
Probably not, Kavinsky’s voice sneers in his head.
He doesn’t know anything about Kavinsky’s mom other than the fact that K hates her for never coming to his rescue growing up. That she stood by and watched his father beat the everloving shit out of him until he ended up hospitalized, and that she lied to the doctors and the police and never even came to see him in the hospital. That she pretended she didn’t know what was happening when ten-year-old K came crying to her with a broken arm and his father’s voice ringing in his ears.
Proko hates her for all of that as well, and he drops his hand and stalks down the stairs.
The rest of the boys are watching him carefully, but they’re lacking the contempt they’d held all week when they’d thought he was overreacting. Now, there’s a quiet stillness to them, a discomfort at the idea that something could be wrong with K.
Because as much as they act like they could all exist fine on their own, existing only in their own orbits and not that of another person, it’s a farce. They all need K, each for different reasons.
Proko’s hands clench into fists, his dirty fingernails biting into the skin. He has to fight the urge to rake his nails down his inner arms, to mimic the sensation of K doing it to him with either a laugh or a sneer, depending on his mood.
At some point, Swan has wrapped an arm tightly around Skov’s waist, and the smaller boy leans into him. Jiang has finished his first PBR and gets into the fridge for another.
Proko reaches up to drag his hands through his hair, forgetting that he’s wearing a snapback and knocking it off his head. It’s not until he’s bending over to grab it that he remembers that this is K’s hat, one that Proko had taken from him during a party and that K had forgotten about quickly enough to not demand it back.
He feels his chest clench up, his breath and his heart stuttering in unison and threatening to stop altogether. He knows that they have things to be doing, that they need to be moving the dream drugs and the booze and the illegal fireworks so that if the police search the house, they won’t find anything incriminating. But it’s just too much, the idea that Kavinsky could be missing and not coming back to be rid of the items himself.
He drops the hat again and instead grabs two fistfulls of his own hair, sucking in a sharp breath.
Jiang says, “Well, we’re fucked.”
TO: Joey K
9:39pm
pls come home