in a dream, at the edge of a river
Sometimes when Billy looks down into the depths of the quarry, he wonders how the water would feel closing over his head.
He wonders if it would sting at all where his lips have been split open so many times, or in the cuts across his brow and cheekbones from the backs of a wedding band. He wonders if the impact would shoot right through his bruised or broken ribs and leave them crushed to powder, or if it would knock the air from his aching lungs and leave them empty to flood. He wonders if he would even survive the fall long enough to feel his body crumble, or if he would break apart into ashes the second he hits the water, like a bird that’s beaten itself braindead on a window it can’t even see, and then, every time, he remembers that it doesn’t matter either way, that he doesn’t care how much of his death he feels, as long as it happens at all.
Sometimes these thoughts pass quickly, here one instant and muffled into obscurity with the next hum of wind through the trees at his back. Other nights, the siren song calls him from the moment he hauls himself off the rust-red splashes on his carpet until he’s crawling back through his window in the early hours of dawn, God knows how many hours later. It’s a wicked melody, hanging heavy in his head all through the next day, leaving him a phantom in a skeleton that doesn’t fit his skin until his next fix of something, of pain or pleasure or drugs or liquor. It never completely ends, never goes completely quiet - only ever seems to sink back into the recesses of his sorry excuse for a mind, knotting its music notes up tight with the heartache he keeps shoved away in favor of hate and rage, with the fear that’s long been beaten into cruelty.
Out here in the dark of night, it’s easy to let all those things creep their way forward past the anger - to let sadness and dread and yearning slip into the forefront and shove his vitriol a little behind. It’s something about the chill rising off the water way below, he guesses, or about the breeze that carries it to his bare and bloodied face, or about the stars high overhead. Back in California, it was harder to see the stars for the pollution and the lights. It’s the one good thing about Nowhere, Indiana, Billy thinks every time his eyes drift upward - being able to see the stars. They make him feel less alone, in that hollow, smaller-than-dust sort of way.
It’s not every night that Billy can slip away. Sometimes, Neil takes his keys on his way out the door, snarls that the Camaro’s only to be used to play big brother, leaving Billy stranded and vicious and caged in his room all night to wipe up the blood no one else ever sees and be glad that he learned from his mother that peroxide lifts the stains - to be livid, distantly, that he has to spend his pocket change on bottles down at the drugstore in town. Sometimes, Neil spits out a curfew and throws the keys at Billy’s flinching body, but the hour is never late enough - wants his failure offspring out of his sight until after he’s gone to bed, wants him back by dawn so he doesn’t have to play the fucking parent role.
Those nights, it’s always hardest to tear himself away from the edge, to turn a deaf ear to the lap of the still water on stone.
The nights that Neil just wants him gone are the best, and the bloodiest. He’s free to sleep in his Camaro until dawn, body long trained to rouse with the sun regardless of how badly it’s broken (Christ fucking forbid he sleep through an alarm). He knows damn well to be back before the rest of the house is awake, always made up as close to okay as he can manage with the first aid kit and cheap concealer he lifted from the drugstore months ago, always right on time for Max to slam the car door on her way in, always ready to yell after her when she does the same on the way out.
It’s those nights that he wonders how far he could make it on the money stashed in the glovebox, shoved well out of cursory sight beneath tapes and cigarettes and registration crap and a disheveled rag that once was white, now a murky brown from years of blood wiped away with shaking hands.
He knows that, somehow, Neil would find him.
