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The smell and sound of bacon on the stove used to mean it was a very special day, but now it was every morning for Michael. He was in charge of breakfast on the weekdays, and three fourteen-year olds ate a lot.
“Can you make it extra crispy?” Sam said, and Michael gave him a thumbs up over his shoulder.
“You got any cantaloupe?” Edgar asked, and Michael ignored him. They had never once had cantaloupe.
“Do you guys have a home, or…?” Michael said, as he pushed the bacon around the pan. A bit of hot grease splattered over the edge onto his wrist and he winced.
“Yeah?” Edgar said, mouth full of Cheerios.
“‘Course,” Alan said, between gulps of orange juice.
It was really eating into their budget to feed the Frogs so often. The job at the video store hadn’t worked out after the owner had exploded in their living room, and now his mom had to get up really early for her shifts cleaning the hospital right outside of town. Michael’s own job search wasn’t going very well. Sometimes he wished people were still randomly dying and more places needed the help, but he didn’t really.
He scooped some of the bacon out onto a plate and pressed a paper towel down over it. It would be too hot for a few minutes still, and Sam had a tendency to burn his own mouth. “Lunches are in the fridge, guys,” he said, as he laid a few more strips down. He didn’t need to look back to know they all answered with a salute. He was glad Sam had friends here.
___
“Yeah,” he bit out into the phone. “But you said it was fixed last time, and it wasn’t, and now we have to pay you to actually fix it?”
He still got angry sometimes. He was trying to focus on figuring out what he was angry at. Right now it was the electrician, which made sense. The lights in their living room had never gone back to normal after they’d electrocuted a vampire. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that even electricians in Santa Carla weren’t trained on that kind of damage.
“Fine,” he said, a little calmer. “Yeah. Tomorrow’s good.”
___
Michael went for a run along the beach even though the sun was at its highest, and a few minutes in sweat was already beading all down his back. It was his favorite time of day, mostly by default. Sunrise felt too much like mourning, and sunset felt too much like waiting. The nighttime was its own creature now, and he treated it like one, with caution and respect. He tried to feel gratitude for his quickening heartbeat and the pain in his ankle, which he had twisted a little while ago and was taking a normal amount of time to heal.
His mother had left a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking on his bed one morning. He’d read it and the god stuff had felt weird, but some of it was okay. Picture yourself succeeding, he thought, and imagined himself running all the way to the hotel north of the boardwalk. He could peel off his shirt and throw himself into the Pacific to cool off.
He remembered he hadn’t finished the reading for class. Think a positive thought to drown out a negative thought. His family was alive, and so was he. His legs ached and his lungs burned.
___
“How are you doing?” Star asked, as he stared down the frozen vegetables.
“Fine,” he said, looking up at her. It was still weird to see her under fluorescent light. Even weirder to see her pushing around a grocery cart. “I mean, yeah. Fine.”
She nodded. “Same.” She was the only person who could ask how he was doing without it feeling like violence. Maybe because she always understood his answer. He ran a hand through his hair, still stiff from the ocean’s salt.
“What’s the difference between broccoli and broccolini?” he asked, eyes back on the freezer.
“Just get the broccoli,” she said, so he did. This was their thing, now that she’d moved off their couch and into a house with some friends she’d made very quickly. Grocery stores and diners and sometimes the mall outside of town and anywhere with good lighting and persistent mundanity. They almost never saw each other at night, except for when she came over for dinner or one of them needed to forget about it all.
“Did you remember the coupons?” she asked.
“Fuck.”
___
He still picked Sam up from school, like he’d done back in Phoenix. Sam came out of the doors smiling more days than not. Sometimes he was even talking to someone who wasn’t a Frog. The semester was a few weeks in and Michael hadn’t once needed to try and look intimidating.
“They coming over tonight?” he asked, as Sam waved goodbye to Edgar and Alan.
“Nah,” Sam said. “Something about a lead on werewolves at a car dealership.”
Michael nodded. “Obviously,” he said. “Not going with them?”
“I’m all set with the monster stuff,” Sam said, and Michael had never related to him more.
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Can we get ice cream?” Sam asked, as he climbed on the back of Michael’s bike and clipped his helmet around his chin.
Michael thought about his dwindling savings. “‘Course,” he said.
___
“And if you examine the relationship between perception and belief-” the professor droned.
Michael jerked up, he’d been falling asleep again. His Critical Thinking class started at 5 PM and he was up at 5 AM most days, if not earlier. He heard a small clatter as the pen he’d been using fell to the floor. The guy next to him leaned down and picked it up, keeping his eyes trained ahead as he passed it back.
Michael had gone to a party at his house last week and ruined his parents’ white couch after someone had offered him a glass of red wine. Now they only nodded hello to each other at the start of class.
___
She always made way too much food now, even when it was just the three of them.
Michael heaped spaghetti onto Sam’s plate, and then his own.
“Smells great, mom,” Sam said.
“Suck-up,” Michael said under his breath.
“You would know, Bat-Boy,” Sam said, and Michael laughed, dipping his fingers in his water glass and flicking some at his brother.
“Sam,” his mom said, scolding. She was smiling, though, as she looked at Michael. “Are you going out tonight, honey? Do you need the car?” He wasn’t, and he didn’t. Just last week she’d had a fit when he tried to take Sam out for sodas after the sun had set. She was still finding her feet too, he assumed, making swings between wild permissiveness and suffocating overbearingness.
“Wanna watch a movie tonight?” he asked Sam. He nodded eagerly. Star had reminded him to get popcorn right when they’d gotten in line to check out. He really needed to start writing down a grocery list, but at least it had worked out this time.
He’d told his family he’d gotten the old TV off the side of the road, but he and Star had broken into Max’s house a week after it all happened. There wasn’t much worth taking and there was nothing that made them feel any better, but they’d lugged the TV out of there, along with a couple hundred bucks of cash. The cash was long gone.
___
Sometimes when he shot up in the middle of the night, heart racing and brow damp, the small room he shared with Sam smelled like cigarette smoke.
It did tonight. No one else ever smelled it. He got out of bed and went to unlock the window. It was already unlocked. Sam must have forgotten, even though they’d promised each other not to. Sam forgot a lot. He opened the window and let the cool breeze sweep in.
“Mike?” Sam called out, sitting up in his bed. “You okay?”
“Yeah, bud. Go back to sleep.”
“Nightmare again?”
“Yeah,” Michael said, but he wasn’t sure what a nightmare was anymore. He’d been dreaming about David, but he hadn’t been scared. He rubbed the back of his neck and tried to remember what it had felt like, to have David’s hand wrapped so tightly around his airway as he brushed a curl off of Michael’s forehead. “Same as always.”
Sam sighed and climbed out of bed. He rummaged in the top drawer of their dresser until he found what he was looking for. He plugged the E.T. night light into the wall and a soft red glow filled the room. For emergencies only, they’d agreed, when Michael had been too ashamed to tell Sam that the shadows it cast were worse than the darkness.
He probably wasn’t going to get back to sleep tonight anyway. Think a positive thought to drown out a negative thought. At least if he stayed up the window could stay open, and the air wouldn’t be so stifling as he watched over his brother.