Chapter Text
It’s the same day that Will receives his letter from Samwell telling him he’s got a full ride that Will’s life as he knows it ends. His parents praise him, his ma cries and presses wet kisses against his cheeks, and his dad looks on, proud but manly and unemotional, and Will knows that it’s how he’s supposed to show emotion. They throw a party for him, inviting all of his friends from school. Will tells his best friend, Liam, the news in the quiet privacy of his bedroom and they share another secret without speaking, just reading by feeling the cracks in one another’s lips like blind men seeking knowledge with a thirst that only those who know darkness can crave light and it would have been a beautiful end to a day that started out perfect.
Then the unexpected happens, though one could say it was perfectly predictable, and the broken lock on Will’s door is opened and his shared secret with Liam is revealed and his mother runs from the room crying like she was this morning but they aren’t happy tears and Will wonders at how happy tears and sad tears would look the same if it wasn’t for how he felt about them. He tells Liam to run and packs a bag with everything he can fit in it- skates, a picture of his family from two years ago on the beach, a stick, shirts, his phone, his wallet and keys, pants, the keychain his little sister made him for his birthday last year, underwear, the card he was plaining to give his dad for father’s day- and he just remembers to grab socks when his dad shows up in the doorway with murder in his eyes.
Will gets by him with just a black eye, a bloody nose, and a split lip, the hands that held his as he learned to walk and the hands that taught his own how to punch leaving scars in their wake as they grab angrily for the son they no longer have. Will runs through the party, seeing nothing and hearing music, and inexplicably the song American Pie is playing and he can’t help but remember how this song always used to make him cry. He runs out of the house, now hearing Never come back, faggot! in the tune of Bye, bye Miss American Pie and he remembers the pie he tasted at Samwell this year, made by the tiny forward with the big smile.
Will jumps into the truck he got from his uncle, who got it from his dad before him, and starts it up. He pulls away from the house he grew up in and doesn’t stop driving until he reaches the beach where he kissed a girl for the very first time and then he goes a little farther down to the hidden alcove where he kissed a boy for the very first time and he cries until he can’t tell the difference between his tears and the sea.
Will stays in town until his graduation, gets his diploma dressed in clothes he hasn’t washed since May out of fear of seeing his mom at the laundromat and he doesn’t look towards the spot his parents sat in for his older brother’s graduation once- except he does because he can’t help it and it’s as empty as Will’s smile when he poses for a picture with the principal, a picture he knows he’ll never see. He doesn’t stop to talk, doesn’t look Liam’s way because he’s angry that Liam still has a home, and he gets in his truck and drives to the state line and walks barefoot in whatever water he can find.
This is the day he gets his first tattoo. He walks into a tattoo shop and tells the artist flat out that he has been disowned by his family so he doesn’t have a guardian but he’d like a tattoo, please. The man turns him down. So Will goes driving around until he finds a shop that will humor him, knowing full well that it’s going to be the sketchiest shop in the world, and then he gets his tattoo. It doesn’t hurt more than his father’s fist had hurt against his cheek so he doesn’t complain as he gets it.
He’s actually happy with the result; it’s a pair of work boots, the same pair he saw on the floor next to his front door every day of his life, tied together at the string, drawn as if they’re hanging from a peg. It’s simple, about an inch in diameter, but it was born from the phrase Will’s grandma always used to say, “If God sends you down a stony path, may he give you strong shoes.” It’s on the inside of his ankle, he thought it made enough sense, and it’s easily hidden with a sock. Over the course of the next few months, he finds himself rubbing at it absentmindedly every once in a while.
He uses the money he took with him when he left up until after graduation. Then, he drives down to Massachusetts and gets a job working at a garage two towns outside of Samwell. He rents an apartment down the road; it’s on top of a bar and it’s always loud, but the rent’s cheap and the landlord doesn’t question Will’s young age of seventeen and she lets him have some cheap liquor for free, so it’s a pretty good deal. He stops going by “Will”, since no one here knows him as Will anymore, and starts going by “Dex” instead.
“Dex,” calls José one day three weeks into Dex’s job working at the garage. “C’mere, gringo, I’mma teach you some Spanish.”
José says he’s annoyed that Dex never knows what he’s asking for when he asks for a tool in Spanish, so Dex starts learning the names for tools in Spanish. Then, on lunch breaks, the guys speak Spanish, so Dex picks up conversational words. He doesn’t talk much with anyone else, so he starts to speak just Spanish to people every day. His mouth learns how to bend around the accents and twists and he starts to like the way it tastes in his mouth better than English does.
“Where are you from, kid?” Nestor asks one day during lunch. He’d just split his arroz con pollo with Dex, the one his wife makes, and she’s a damn good cook.
“Maine,” Dex says, mouth hard around the accent he still can’t shake in English. He digs in to his shared meal and hopes that this will be the end of it.
“How’d you end up down here?” he asks next.
“Drove,” says Dex, quirking the corner of his mouth up. Nestor laughs and exclaims in Spanish, something Dex isn’t sure the meaning of but he assumes it’s something to the effect of “This white boy is ridiculous!” because he says it every time Dex mouths off. Nestor nudges Dex in the back of the head with his knuckles, berating but soft, and shakes his head, his eyes smiling.
“Tell me a story then,” he says. “If you won’t tell the truth.”
So Dex tells them a story about his life, half in English half in Spanish. In his tale, he’s the son of a rich Maine socialite, sent here by his father to learn what an honest day’s work is. José laughs at this and points to Dex’s hands, saying that there is no way those hands haven’t seen hard work.
A week later, Ernesto asks for a new story, a better one, and Dex uses only Spanish, making up words when he doesn’t know one, to tell them about his quest to find the murderer of his sister. He’s been chasing this man for fourteen years in a quest to avenge her death and all of his clues have led him here. Nestor says that he isn’t old enough to have been searching for fourteen years and then hands Dex an orange. Dex eats it with a smile.
Two weeks later, alone as they work on a car, José asks for the truth. Dex tells him that he’s simply here from Maine to go to college and he got here early to scout for a job. José smiles with his teeth, but his eyes are sad, so Dex stops telling stories and keeps his answers short.
Dex’s landlord’s name is Jenny; she’s tall, tattooed, and loves bandanas with a passion. She teaches Dex how to make drinks and sets him up behind the counter on nights when he can’t sleep. She sits in between a group of large men and laughs uproariously as Dex talks to people from all over the country, the world even. They tell him about their lives, their families and lost loves, and he listens to it all like someone would read a book. He lets himself fall into their lives, a fantasy of sorts, and for a moment, he isn’t a seventeen year old bartender with no home.
“I’ll tell you something, kid,” Jenny says at the end of a night. A biker with a beard so thick it should get its own chair has his head in her lap and she’s stroking the side of his face with the kind of tenderness mothers have for their own children. “Bartenders make the best friends because they won’t judge you for shit and they know how to make a damn good drink.” She laughs at her own joke and tangles her fingers in the man’s beard. She smiles sleepily and asks, “You judgin’ me?”
“Got nothing to judge,” Dex says, drying off a glass. English still feels weird in his mouth, Maine still feels weird in his mouth, but he likes the way it sounds better when he’s talking softly to Jenny at four in the morning.
“Ah, that means nothing. It’s always the quiet ones that have the darkest secrets.” She squints at him, drunk and sneaky. “What’s your deep, dark secret, Dex?”
Dex acts as if he’s considering it, then says decisively, “I dye my hair.”
Jenny laughs so hard the biker falls out of her lap.
Dex knows that the hockey season starts at the end of the summer, so he trains daily in his apartment. He needs his hockey scholarship now more than ever; without it, he can’t go to school. He needs to go to school.
On the Fourth of July, Dex walks to the park, having a day off from the garage and the bar. He sits on a bench and watches the fireworks go off. He finds that they aren’t as beautiful when they aren’t reflected off of the water.
Afterwards, a beautiful man who says he’s seventeen offers to split a joint with Dex and Dex blows him in the bathroom of the bar next door and he wonders why he did it the next morning when all he can think about is if his family is having French toast for breakfast.
Dex gets another tattoo two weeks later. Jenny recommended him to the place. They do something called “watercolor” tattoos and they look beautiful, so Dex gets a black triangle with a smear of redorangeyellow over it inside his right forearm, high up towards the elbow. It looked to him like a fire that couldn’t be contained and he likes the reminder.
He laughs louder at Jenny’s jokes and speaks in Spanish whenever the mood strikes him and he makes up words out of the bits of Spanish he knows and the Maine he remembers and uses these words when he doesn’t know how he’s feeling. He doesn’t contain himself anymore; he acts in the way Will always wanted to and he doesn’t question his decisions. A fire doesn’t question its decisions and a fire doesn’t get hurt. It just takes and takes until it is the only thing there is.
His fire burns out by August when Jenny finds him drunk and sobbing on his bathroom floor and he tells her everything, anything. He talks about the lobster he caught when he was twelve that was the biggest the boat had ever seen, talks about how it felt when he kissed Ronnie Williams in the seventh grade and how it felt just as good as kissing Parker Stephens in tenth, talks about holding his little sister for the first time and how it felt when Liam said I love you and how it felt when his father called him a faggot and his mother cried like she had lost a son when he was standing right in front of her.
Jenny holds him and listens and makes him a drink of chocolate milk with the Hershey’s chocolate syrup she has in her fridge for sundaes. Dex tells her she’d make a good bartender and she cries back at him. It’s then that he realizes that tears aren’t just happy or sad and also that chocolate milk is underrated.
Jenny sometimes gives Dex looks after that, like she wants to wrap him up in a blanket and protect him from the world, but it’s still better than before. He doesn’t feel as heavy, so he can carry himself taller, and he starts to feel more like himself than he’s ever felt in his life.
The day before he leaves for Samwell, he gets his third and fourth tattoos. He gets a balloon on his left shoulder blade, small as anything and empty save for some shading. It’s simple, black, and Dex can only see it if he contorts himself in front of a mirror. Then, he gets a small cat outline, a single line unfinished and open, with pink and purple splashed inside. This he gets on his left wrist, small but noticeable. It’s for his sister, Kitty, who turns eleven the day he gets it and asks her mom where Will is as she blows out the candles on her cake.