Secrets 9

Five minutes later, I found Patrick waiting by the front door as I was coming down the staircase. He was staring at me, an expression on his incredibly handsome face that was a cross between frustration and disappointment. Patrick wore a long, black pea coat, and matching colored gloves. When I saw the gloves I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my stomach that zipped upward toward the base of my neck. “You ready to go?” he asked sullenly. 

“Yeah,” I said.

Patrick opened the door and we went outside into the cool night. Everything was quiet. I felt glad to be outside, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been outside. We went over to Patrick’s car, in dark silence, and got inside. It felt really weird to be alone with Patrick in that compact space. I realized, as he turned on the ignition, that I should’ve told him that I would walk home, or catch the bus. Just because I’d asked him to take me home, didn’t mean that he would. Part of me was a bit afraid that he would take me somewhere else. Again, I noticed his black-gloved hands, gripping the steering wheel tighter than he should’ve, and I thought about opening the door and breaking out into a run to get away from him.

“Put on your seatbelt,” Patrick said. I was a bit afraid he had heard what I was thinking, even though it was probably a bit impossible…

I did as Patrick told me to do. He pulled out of the driveway sharply and started to peel down the street. He didn’t bother to halt at the stop sign at the corner; he just kept going. I looked at his face, and he was staring at the road with an intensity that I’d never seen before on him. He almost looked possessed. 

“Why are you lookin’ at me?” Patrick asked. His eyes were still fixated on the road. His right hand was on the gearshift and he was clutching it as if he were trying to crush it between his fingers. 

“I can’t look at you?” I responded, trying to sound causal in a peculiar situation.

“Not when you’re lookin’ at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a bad person. Like there’s something wrong with me.” Patrick passed right through a red light. Luckily, there had been other cars in the intersection other than his. “But I’m not the fuckin’ one with the problem, Sean.” Patrick pressed down hard on the gas pedal, causing the car to lurch forward violently and rapidly. Even if I had told him to slow down, he wouldn’t have listened to me. “I mean, I don’t fuckin’ get you sometimes. Just two nights ago you told me you were in love with me…and now you don’t fuckin’ want to be around me. You think I’m tryin’ to kill you or somethin’. You keep talkin’ about dead bodies and all this other shit that doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been tryin’ to be patient with you, Sean, but it looks like it’s not workin’.”

“I agree,” I answered. 

Patrick finally came to a stop at a red light, about ten minutes away from my home. He was silent for a while, and just as the signal was about to turn green, he asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing ever goes the way I want it to.”

A car behind us honked their horn. Patrick, angrily, jammed his foot on the gas and took off again. “What do you mean by that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

I didn’t want to tell Patrick what I was honestly feeling or thinking. Things were already complicated and I didn’t need to make things even more chaotic between us. We spent the rest of the car ride home in bitter silence. It was awful, sad, disappointing, and unreal. Patrick pulled up to my driveway, and I had the feeling that I had been riding in a car with a stranger, instead of someone I had known for more than half of my life. Half of me wanted to stay inside of the car with him and the other half of me couldn’t wait to get away from him. 

I wanted to be alone. And in the next instant, I realized that I had always been alone. As I looked at my empty-looking house, with none of the lights on, I realized that I had never been close to anyone. Even with Patrick, even when had sex, there was a part of me that felt withdrawn and suspicious, and I felt the same in him. Even when we were together, especially now, only half a few inches away from each other, I felt like we were miles apart. 

I looked at Patrick, and he was still staring straight ahead, out the windshield, aware that I was watching him, but refusing to turn and look at me, and it came to me that I didn’t know who this boy was at all. He didn’t know who I was. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen—however many years of knowing each other, and I didn’t know a single thing about him. I hadn’t fallen in love with my beautiful, charismatic, wonderful best friend. I had fallen in love with a handsome, charismatic, wonderful actor, who through the years mastered the art of portraying the perfect boy. And what about me? I had spent my whole life pretending to be something else too, pretending to be normal, pretending to be happy, and pretending to a quiet, nice boy that never caused any trouble. I’ve spent so much time repressing who I am that I’ve forgotten what I used to be, or what I used to want to be. 

Patrick finally turned and looked at me. His eyes glittered in the darkness. I want him to tell me that everything was alright, and that I didn’t have to worry about anything ever again in my life. I was looking at the boy I’ve always wanted, the boy everyone who’s ever wanted a boy ever wanted…and it wasn’t enough to make everything right. Patrick looked at me, and I felt small, and unimportant…I felt like there was something really wrong with me that I would never be able to fix. I didn’t want to get out of that car, but I 
really didn’t want to stay inside. At that moment, I hated everything at once, I hated Patrick, I hated the world—I hated myself. I hated that I was powerless to a life that I couldn’t control. The worst feeling in the world is feeling like a mindless puppet, and that’s how I felt. 

“Do you want me to go inside with you?” Patrick asked. 

I wanted to say yes. I should’ve said yes. There was no reason really for me not to say yes, but I said, “No. That’s okay. I think I just need to be alone for a while.” And I wanted him to say, “I don’t want you to be alone tonight, Sean. I need to be with you.” But he just turned his head, looking away from me, and muttered, “Ok,” and I felt cold, and empty, and dark, just like the house in front of me. I thought about reaching out to touch his hand, or to try to do something to make things feel less awkward, but there’s nothing I could’ve done in that situation. The only thing I could think to do was leave in silence. I opened the car door and stepped out into the frigid night. 

Patrick backed the car up and pulled away. It took less than thirty seconds before his car was too far for me to see him anymore. Cold and alone, I turned and went toward the front door. I suddenly thought of Danny. I thought of his spring-grass green eyes and the way he used to smile. As I turned the key in the lock, I thought of him putting that gun to his head and pulling the trigger. I thought of the blood on the white bathroom floor. Was all that just a lie? Just something out of my head? If I go inside of this house and go into that bathroom, will I see what I saw that night, or will everything be completely normal?
I pushed the door open and entered.

The inside of the house was colder than the outside of the house, and I wished that Patrick hadn’t left me alone. Being in this house, the house I’d known for all my life, was now foreign and strange. I turned on the lights, and saw the couch, and the TV, and the fireplace, but I kept having the feeling that I didn’t live here anymore, that none of this stuff was familiar to me. I pulled off my jacket and let it fall to the floor. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go to my bedroom, but for some reason I was afraid of what might be in there. I didn’t know what I was expecting, but whatever it was, it couldn’t have been good. Regardless, I decided to go anyway. Even though I had slept the majority of the day, I was still tired. I wish I hadn’t told Patrick that I wanted to be alone. Because now that I was alone in this cold empty house I realized it wasn’t what I really wanted. 

On my way to my room, I saw that the bathroom where Danny shot himself was slightly ajar, and the light was. Every other light in the house had been turned off, except for that one. Why would that one light be on and none of the other lights? I felt chills run from the top of my spine down to my ankles. I didn’t want to see blood on the floor. I didn’t want to see Danny’s dead body. I didn’t want to go inside of the bathroom, but at the same time, I was compelled to go inside. 

Slowly, I moved toward the bathroom, and I heard two things: one the beating of my heart, and the other, the sound of water dripping. I suddenly felt more afraid than I ever had in my whole life. I decided that I couldn’t go inside of there. I turned back around and went in the direction of my bedroom, at the other end of the hallway, when a familiar voice made me stop.

“Where were you?” 

I didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. While I wasn’t really surprised to hear his voice, his was the last voice I thought I would hear in a long time. I turned around and saw Danny leaning out of the bathroom doorway, gazing at me with a friendly smile, a smile I’d never seen on him before. From a far away distance, I couldn’t see any wounds on his face or anything peculiar. He looked normal and alive. Yet I wasn’t sure, especially in the state that I was in, if he was really there, or if I were imagining him to be there. Both options could’ve been possible. Maybe he hadn’t really killed himself. Maybe he had. Maybe Danny never existed at all. Maybe he did. I didn’t know. 

“I was at Patrick’s house,” I said quietly. 

“Doin’ what?” Danny asked. 

This couldn’t have been real. Danny couldn’t have been really standing at my bathroom door, talking to me, when only a few nights before, I watched him put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. 

“I’ve been waitin’ for you to come back, but you never came,” Danny said. “I got lonely.”

“You’re not here,” I said, taking a step backward. “This is all just like a big dream or something. You’re not really here.”

Danny stepped fully out from behind the bathroom door. He looked real. At least from far away he did. 

“I left after what happened to you,” I told him.

“What happened to me?” Danny asked. “I came here to talk to you and you left me alone in this house by myself, to go run off with your little friend.” Danny began to take long steps toward me. 

“You know what happened,” I said. “Right there in that bathroom.”

“You don’t look too well,” Danny said. “And you’re not makin’ sense. Nothin’ happened to me. I’ve been here the whole time.” He continued to advanced toward me, and all I could do was just stand there like a frightened animal about to get ran over by a fuckin’ truck. The closer he got to me, the more I came to see that he was real. He wasn’t dead. He was alive and real, either that or I had a really vivid imagination. “Get the fuck away from me!” I screamed. My head started to ache again. “You’re not really here.”

And then he was standing directly in my face and we were at the same eye level. His eyes weren’t green anymore; they were honey-brown. I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see Danny’s face, but his image still lingered behind my eyelids, so it was no use. 

“Sean what’s wrong with you?” Danny asked. He reached out and touched my arm. I couldn’t have imagined him touching me. Even if this was an elaborate illusion, there was no mistake that Danny’s hand was touching mine, and it was real. His hand felt so cold against my arm. 

“You’re dead,” I whispered. I felt so many things in that moment: anger, fear, worry, confusion—all these emotions spinning and churning around in my head and nothing made sense to me. I balled my hands into fists and once again wished that Patrick were here. “I saw you kill yourself with a gun. Right there in the bathroom.”

Danny cradled my face in both of his hands, and by this time tears were freely falling down my face. “No,” he whispered, “I’m right here. I never left.”

In a surge of fury, I pushed Danny away from me. He stumbled and almost fell to the ground. “You’re not really here. Stop trying to make me think that you are. You’re just in my imagination. All of this is just in my imagination.”

“You’re crazy,” Danny said with a laugh. 

Him saying that made me even angrier. I lunged at “Danny” and tackled him to the floor. I was possessed by a rage that I had never experience before. My hands still balled up, I was about to punch him, right directly in his face, and then I saw the fear in his eyes, I saw how helpless he looked. This thing couldn’t have been Danny. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. “What the fuck are you doing to me?” I asked. “Why the fuck are you playing with me like this? Fucking playing around with my head. What the fuck are you trying to do to me?”

“I’m trying to make you see,” Danny said. He no longer looked afraid now. He started to smile now, not the warm, friendly smile before, but a leering, taunting smile. 

“See what?”

Danny started to chuckle. I punched him square in the face and he still kept laughing. “Did you really think I would kill myself over you? I never liked you all that much.”

My heart nearly stopped when he said that. “What the hell are you talking about? I know what I saw.”

Danny kept smiling. “I know what you saw too, Sean. I know what I wanted you to see. It’s so easy to get under your skin. It was fun.”

“How did you do it?” I asked. “What I saw in there the other night, it looked too real to be fake.”

“It’s a secret,” Danny responded. “I can’t tell you.”

I was about to punch him again, but he caught my fist but it could connect with his face. “You’ve been fucking with me this whole time, making think all this shit was real when it wasn’t. You had me thinking that Patrick was all behind this, when it was really you the whole time.”

“Oh, it wasn’t just me,” Danny said. “I couldn’t do everything by myself.”

I wanted to strangle the life out of him. I wanted to kill him. For real this time. “If it wasn’t just you, then who else was it?” 

“Is it obvious?” Another voice behind me asked. My skin went cold in an instant. Of course. How could I forget? This whole time, and it never even came to me. How could I have been so stupid? I let go of Danny, stood, and turned around.

Rose White, Patrick’s ex-girlfriend, was standing behind me, smiling sinisterly, dangling the infamous gun in one hand. “Me.”