Huntley Fitzpatrick - The Boy Most Likely To

Anyway.

I shower in the bathroom off Dad’s new room, crowded in by the walker, the quad cane, and the commode chair. Tiny hospital-issue soap and body wash and shampoo, because I forgot to bring my own. Hospital towels are rough and tiny, it takes two to dry off, and still my dark blue sundress clings in a few wet patches. No blow dryer, so my hair will dry curly. So be it. When I look in the mirror, I recognize myself again.

There’s a sharp sound from the other room, like air through teeth.

Sweat stands out on his forehead and his face is chalky white.

“Dad?”

“Al,” Dad says gently, “come back a little later, okay?”

“Not happening. What do you need?”

My hand is poised over the call button. He sets his on top of it. “They’ll only dope me up. Not what I want.”

Dad shifts in the bed with a crackle of plastic hospital mattress pad. He sucks his breath in hard, again blows it out. My own breath snags.

“Scale of one to ten,” I say, groping to find the professional in me.

“I’m not your patient, tiger,” Dad says. “Luckily for both of us.”

Without warning, my eyes fill. I don’t cry. I never cry.

Which Dad knows. His hand shoots out, squeezes my shoulder. “You know I didn’t mean it like that. You know that.” Now he’s batting at the box of tissues at the side of his bed, which is slightly out of reach, and something about that, my dad, who can do anything, who can fix everything –

“You look gorgeous, Alice,” Dad says. “Hot date?”

“Just a thing,” I say, my face going hot.

He studies me, saying nothing, waiting for information to come to him. Mom and Dad have that one down to an art.

“How’s Tim these days?”

These two questions are not connected. He’s making conversation. Distracting me from calling the nurse and another debate about pain medication. “How Mom and Dad Met” is a family fairy tale – Mom’s told us the story so often, we can all fill in words when she pauses. But there’s a part she leaves out when we’re younger . . . that charming, perceptive Jack Garrett had a dark side back then. He was, as he tells it, “mad at the whole live world” because his mother had died the year before, and his little sister and brother, my aunt Caroline and my uncle Jason, had stayed behind in Virginia with their grandparents, while his father had taken my father, alone, since he was sixteen and old enough to bring in a paycheck, up to Connecticut. Dad had a drinking problem, which got worse until his twenties, when he realized he could go that route, or have a life with Mom, and turned his around.

I have never seen my father drink alcohol. He doesn’t even have soda, although he’ll be the first to tell you that entire coffee plantations are supported by his caffeine habit.

It could go that way for Tim. Or it could go the other way.

“Oh . . . you know. The usual.”

Dad laughs. “That kid has no ‘usual.’”

Out in the hallway again, I rub the back of my neck, close my eyes, flip back my hair. I’m looking forward to Tim – Tim! – like a steaming hot bath after a long, cold day.

Still, I pull Dad’s chart from the plastic holder outside the door, page through it. Standard entry, expected procedure, the usual blah, blah, blah.

But then . . .

Holy.

Holy Mother of God.

Chapter Fourteen

I’m doing pushups as a healthier alternative to a pack of Marlboros, wondering when the hell the magic powers of the nic patch will kick in, when I hear the knock at my door – so faint, it’s not really a knock, more like a scratch or a tap. I’m at that top-of-the-pushup, arms-shaking point, right before I exhale –

Collapse.

Wipe my arm across my sweaty forehead. I’m wearing Ellery gym shorts and a sweaty black polo. Not exactly poised to receive company. But I’ve still got time to get it together for Alice.

Whatever it is we’re sampling on this date, the thought of it has me grinning as I open the door.

But when I do, the face I see is so out of context, it takes me a few seconds.

Big blue eyes, small pointed chin, tidy ponytail. One seat to the left of me in English Writers of the Western World. I used to borrow her perfectly sharpened pencils. Never gave ’em back.

“Tim?” she says, like I might be Tim’s evil twin.

“Hi. Uh . . . Heather.” How I scrounge that name from my subconscious, I have no idea.

“It’s Hester. Can I come in?”

What? I think, at the same time I say, “Sure,” and open the door wider for her. She brushes past me, sits down on the couch, and looks at her shoes. Hester was a Brain and a Good Girl. So we had nothing in common. What’s she doing here? She smoothes down her khaki skirt, readjusts her white shirt. Prep wear. Clothing as birth control, my douchey friends and I used to joke. All those fuckin’ buttons. Little gold hoop earrings, neat part in her brown hair. Shit, is she, like, a Jehovah’s Witness or something? I don’t have time for this. But now she’s weaving her fingers together, studying them. “So, Tim . . . you left Ellery early this year.”

“Yeah, left, as in got booted.”

I look at the clock on the stove right as it flips from 5:58 to 59. Less than half an hour to meet Alice, and it takes fifteen minutes to drive. If you don’t run the lights or speed.

Hester lifts her face and looks at me squarely. “Before that, you went to Ward Akins pool party.”

I did? Geez, I was so messed up back then, worst of my worst. I can hardly remember those last months of school. Little flashes. Ward Akins? Asskite guy on my tennis team. Pool party? Would I have gone to one of those? Who’m I kidding? I would have gone to anyone ’s party.

But also? Who the eff cares what party I did or didn’t go to.

“Uh. Look, can we catch up some other time? Sorry – I mean . . . not to be a dick, but . . . why are you here?”

“Ward is my godmother’s stepson,” Hester says, like family history answers the question. “Even though he’s an abject loser, I went to this party because . . . well, never mind.” Her voice, which is husky, throaty, stalls out for a sec. Then she braids her fingers together even more tightly, swallows. “Big house – very modern, glass windows . . . the pool’s indoors, heated. They have a tiki bar . . . do you remember any of this?”

Not even the tiki bar. “No. Sorry. I got nothing.”

Her face shuffles through a boatload of emotions in, like, seconds – there and gone. Then her features smooth, totally composed. She looks dead on at me, blue eyes crystal clear, focused, narrowing, like she’s aiming a gun. “You don’t have ‘nothing.’ You have a son.”

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