Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (29 page)

I was still crying. ‘I shou— I should’ve …’ Words chopped up between gulps of air. It was a minute before I was steady enough
to
make sense. ‘I should’ve told you,’ I said. ‘You’re the first person I should’ve told.’

‘Look. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He came back into focus. We were facing each other. I had my back against
the tree. He was two steps away, the river behind him.

‘I’ve known you since we were kids,’ he was saying. ‘Okay, you act a bit weird sometimes. But basically you’re a normal person.
You’re like me.’

‘I’m also gay.’ Sound of the word like a sour joke, out here in the dark. That playground insult.

‘But you’re not, Stephen.’ As if he were explaining something I was too worked up to absorb. ‘It doesn’t make sense. You were
going out with Tina all summer.’

‘I hated it.’

‘Come on. That’s not true.’

‘And there was this guy. Tracey’s party.’

Mark flinched. ‘Okay, I heard about that. But you were drunk. You were really drunk that night—’

‘I’m in love with you.’

‘What?’ For a second he smiled uncertainly. Like he really did believe I was joking and was waiting for me to say so, to release
him. He shook his head in a quick little movement. ‘No. No, you’re not.’

‘I am. I love you, Mark.’

‘Stop. Stop saying that.’ Mark’s jaw clenched, his eyes welling.

‘So much. Ever since I can remember—’

‘Man, don’t fuck with my head!’ He kicked at a rock, sent it flying over the edge of the drop-off. I didn’t hear it hit the
river.

‘Just listen,’ I said. Took a step towards him.

‘You stay right there.’

‘Mark, I—’

‘I said don’t fucking come near me!’ Near the edge now. I started babbling, telling him he was everything to me, the best
person I knew, that it tore me apart thinking he’d be stuck in this rotten little town for life, how much I wanted to save
him. I said he could come to the city with me. Bring his sister. Bring the baby too. We’d all live together.

He was on the crumbling lip of the drop-off. The dark was fading and the horizon was starting to colour – grey light, a stripe
of orange.

‘Watch out,’ I said. ‘You’re gonna fall.’ I moved closer.

Mark lashed out quick, lunged at me. Then there were flares of pain just under my eyes. My face was smashed against the trunk
of a tree, the same one we’d been leaning on. He’d taken me by the neck and slammed me into it. I gripped the bridge of my
nose and it was like glass shards stabbing into my brain.

‘You,’ he was saying. ‘You made me do that.’

‘Mark.’ I couldn’t even see him. ‘That fucking … hurt …’

I took a couple steps backwards. Heard him yelling my name, fear in his voice. Then there wasn’t any ground under me. I was
gone.

There was a jolt all through my elbow, like my arm was getting ripped out of its socket. A rock? No time to register anything.
I was plunging into thick, cold water. And then I was sinking.

I kicked downwards. Treading water like they told us in school, craning my head. The right arm was useless. I pushed at the
water with my left. I was numb all over, then pain took hold, throbbing redly and tearing at me every time I moved. But I
had to move. My clothes were soaked. I couldn’t get my shoes off. I didn’t know where I was, didn’t know where the shore was,
which direction I should go if I wanted to try to swim for it. Black water kept rolling towards me, slapping at my nose, my
mouth. Everything seemed to be pulling me down. I went under, gagged, forced my head to the surface. Gulping air, kicking
harder.

How long can I keep this up?
My legs were stiff and heavy, machine parts I couldn’t control. Not allowed to stop, not for a second. I’d sink. And then
float. The sky was turning grey with dawn. Somebody was talking, a small desperate voice. It was me. I was telling someone
that
I didn’t want to die. I was saying ‘please’ over and over. I heard myself calling for my mother, begging her to help. I called
for Stanley too. And Mark.

A sharp tug jolted my throat – like a dog’s chain pulling. I kicked against it and my head plunged under water. Then my T-shirt
was making a tight band around my neck as someone hauled me up to the air. It was Mark. He dropped the shirt collar and grabbed
hold of my arm. The wrong one. Pain blocked everything and I thrashed away from him. Mark called me a stupid moron. His elbow
closed over my neck and then he was swimming us to land.

We heaved forward. I still couldn’t see anything. I tried to help but only made it worse, fucking with the direction. Mark
gave my throat a wrench and told me to quit it. There was a moment when water surged over both our heads. I panicked and swallowed
a cold gulp that choked me.

Then the riverbank came into view. He let me go and I scrambled for him, felt myself drifting down. But it was okay. My feet
could touch the bottom. I could stand.

I splashed towards the shore. Almost on dry land when my ankle caught a bramble root and I lurched forwards, hit the ground
and lay sprawled with my face pressed into mud, gasping and coughing, pulling air into my lungs.

Everything was washed in a ghostly half light. Behind me the drop-off stretched upwards – a sheer wall of crumbling dirt with
hairy tree roots peeping out like reaching fingers. The riverbank was mucky and crowded in bushes, brambles and garbage, shocks
of tall green cattails coated in grey river dust. I’d crushed a few of them falling.

After a while, I forced myself into a sitting position. My nose was probably broken. My right arm hung at a demented angle
from my
shoulder, hand still wrapped in ribbons of silver duct tape. I couldn’t move it or touch it. I sat very still and concentrated
on being alive. Birds were starting to wake up all along the river, chirping and whistling. I remembered reading somewhere
that songbirds actually make those noises to mark their territory and warn other birds away. So we think they’re trilling
sweetly for joy, but they’re really just saying, ‘Fuck off, everybody! Fuck off.’

I laughed, thinking about this. The sound was a rattling croak and it echoed weirdly in the stillness. I was pretty sure I’d
gone crazy.

Where was Mark?

I heard him before I saw him, the slow trickling splash of his legs pushing through mud and sludgy water. His sneakers were
in a tangle at the foot of a bramble bush and he shook the wet out and struggled into them. When he glanced over, I pretended
to be examining my arm. I wanted to thank him for saving my life, but nothing would come out. My face was frozen and my voice
didn’t belong to me.

He started stumbling forward. Dripping hair. Clothes solid with water. Red raw face staring down. His expression was impossible
to read.

Mark spat, then was hit with another coughing fit. He waited it out, head lowered and breath coming in waves that seemed to
hurt him. Finally, he looked me in the eye. He spoke.

‘Your mother’s always been real nice to me.’

I started laughing again. A nice little chat about my mom. After we’d both nearly died.
Well, okay. Whatever you want, Mark
.

‘You think this is funny?’

I didn’t anymore, but I couldn’t stop. Wheezing and creaking, shaking with it.

‘Your mother,’ Mark said grimly, ‘would just lose it if something happened to you. Maryna’s a good person. She doesn’t deserve
that.’

I closed my eyes and shut everything out, waited for it all to slow down. After a minute, something cleared in my head and
I could talk.

‘Mark. You … you saved my life.’ The broken nose made me sound like I had a cold. I tried to pull myself up, stand and face
him. Didn’t like Mark looming over me like that.

He made a sudden movement and there was a wrench of pain like light. My chest was caving in. I couldn’t move or think.

Kicked me. He kicked me. Why? What did I do? Smiled maybe, when I told him he’d saved my life. Or it could be that when I
was trying to stand, I’d held out my hand to him. Because normally he’d be there to help me up.

I felt myself sinking back, swiping at my chest with my good arm. I wanted to ask him why, but I couldn’t form words. I made
a low sound, panting for air. He came at me again with another kick.
Jesus, no
. I tried to move out of range, bring my legs up, make myself into a ball, fold up or roll away. It was useless. His foot
slammed into me again. My stomach and my ribs. There was nowhere I could go. I told him to stop. I told him he was acting
like a psycho, that he was going to kill me. Then I realised I wasn’t saying any of this out loud because I couldn’t talk.

He grabbed hold of my hair and I was hauled upwards. I glimpsed his face for a second, then his knuckles were smashing into
me, just under my eye. I couldn’t see straight. My ears were ringing. Was there blood? He took a handful of my hair again,
yanked my head towards him at an angle. My stomach heaved.

‘Listen to me,’ Mark said. His threatening voice. ‘You …’

I pitched myself forward and threw up into the mud. I heard Mark go, ‘Oh, jeez,’ saw his sneakers hopping out of range of
the splash. Every time my chest moved, the pain in my ribs came back, pressure
bearing down and inwards. I threw up again. Mostly liquid and the dregs of that soup I’d spooned out of the can a hundred
years ago. Then blood. I spat. I had tears in my eyes. I stared down at muck and meal remains blurring together. My face was
turned away from Mark, but I knew he was there, standing over me.

He waited until he could tell I was finished. Then from the corner of my eye, I saw him come at me again. I shrank back, tried
to bring my good arm over my face and shield myself, told him to leave me alone. I’d meant it as a yell, but it came out more
like a whimper. He grabbed the collar of my shirt and pulled it tight around my neck, leaned in close.

‘You. Don’t talk to me, ever again. Do not fucking look at me. I don’t even want to see you on the same side of the street.
Got that?’

I nodded. My head felt heavy. His mouth was next to my ear. Everything was too loud. I wanted to throw up again.

‘I pulled you out of there because of your mom. If it wasn’t for her, I woulda let you drown. And if I see you again, I will
fucking kill you.’

‘But … you don’t get it …’

Suddenly I was plunging downwards and I couldn’t breathe. He’d shoved my face into the mud. I could feel his hands pushing
on my head, one knee pressed into my back. Silent explosions, pressure. I kicked. I pounded my fist on the ground and tried
to pull him off me. I was making high, panicking sounds and low growls in the back of my throat.

Then the weight was gone. I lay spitting up mud and gasping for air and I found I was swearing at him.

I was also crying, but I didn’t connect it with any emotion. It was a reflex, like the vomiting. I sobbed and choked back
strips of snot, trying to keep my mouth clear of the mud. My hand hovered over my head in case I had to fend him off again.

But he wasn’t moving. He was a shape hunched on the mud beside
me, sitting with his knees folded under him and his head bowed. He seemed to be chuckling. Laughing away, his shoulders trembling,
hands gripping each other tightly.

I lay still. The laughing noise kept bubbling out of him. He couldn’t seem to shut it off.

Then I blinked my eyes open and his face came into focus. Oh. I’d got it wrong. Mark wasn’t laughing at all. He was crying.

‘Oh, God.’ He was rocking. ‘Oh, Jesus. Jesus.’

There was an unnatural clarity to everything, like it was all cut-outs pasted on paper. The tall clusters of grey-green weeds
on the bank, the sky the colour of skim milk, the river behind us.

‘Mark.’ My voice was barely a sound at all. It made me think of sand in my throat. ‘Mark, I’m not dead.’

‘But, you are,’ he said, without looking up. ‘You are, Stephen.’

Did I dream it? I was never sure.

A second later, I was closing my eyes – as the dead are expected to do. When I opened them he was gone. There were footprints
in the mud and I was alone.

I lay there for a long time. The sun climbed up. The mud on my clothes started to dry. I felt hollow and strangely calm. It
was just like after my father had left, when I came out of the house and saw that his car had gone. All real now. I didn’t
have to imagine it anymore.

I listened to the birds in the trees telling each other to fuck off. The world had ended again. I was in a new one.

But I had to live in it. I grabbed hold of a tree root poking out of the side of the drop-off and pulled myself to my feet.
My joints were cemented together. My chest seemed to be crushing in further with each movement. My arm was a dull throb. I’d
been raised from the grave too soon. There was nothing else to do but go home.

Two steps inside the house and my mother was pushing me back against the doorframe, crying and clinging, demanding to know
what had happened. I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t drag those words into the light and make it real. Mom, he despises me. He broke
my bones. No. Instead I begged her to give me some time. Twelve hours, I said, pulling a number out of the air. Twelve hours
and I’d tell her everything.

I held her eyes and made her promise. She kept her word, even though I know it must have been killing her. We drove to the
hospital in Middleton to get me fixed up and I told the doctors what they needed to know, but I wouldn’t say anything when
she was there.

Later we were home, loading my stuff into the car. Mom thought we should stay in town another few days so I could rest, but
I insisted. I didn’t care if I was a torso in a box, I told her. We had to leave.

‘You remember what day it is, sweetie?’ She pushed a garbage bag full of pillows and blankets into the back seat.

‘No, and I don’t care.’

I didn’t say much while we were packing. I said nothing at all for the first hour we were stuck together, driver and passenger,
on the way into the city.

Instead I glowered out the car window at the shoulder of the highway rolling past. Everything felt flat and distant. My arm
was broken. My nose was broken. Two of my ribs were cracked and I had a big puffy bruise on my face and a deep cut on my palm.
I kept spinning the dial on the radio, fumbling with my left hand. Couldn’t settle on a station.

When the news cut in, I took a sharp breath. I looked at Mom. The date. I’d completely forgotten.

I was eighteen. Today was my birthday.