The Last Handful of Clover - Book 2: Gifts Both Light and Dark

2.80 The Room

June 15, 8:16 pm

Richard's rage followed him into his own memory, where he materialized like steam on cold glass—and his body came together already shouting. He heard his own voice, but he wasn't the one forming the words, as if his shouts were being tuned in on an old radio from a station on another continent.

"You can tell me about how you're not gay the next time you're sucking my cock," Richard was yelling. He could not only hear it, but feel the bitter words in his own mouth. And yes, it was his mouth now. "Or better yet, tell it to whatever professor you start fucking within the first two weeks at Dartmouth. You can tell him all about how you want to date girls, while he's driving his cock into your ass!"

There was a body attached to that voice. He looked down at his pointing finger. His hands looked far less lined, and on his wrist was a watch that he had not worn for more than a dozen years. That wrist was trembling. It was his wrist, and it was attached to someone shameful that he used to be.

Richard and Justin were standing in the room where the two of them last saw each other alive. Only vaguely was Richard aware that this was the past, and that much had transpired since this horrible day. He fought to remember it all, but in the rage that once again filled him, and with the hatred he felt toward the boy who had wronged him, all of that was vague and unreal.

Forcing himself to look around the room, he saw it too was different from what it would be on the day that he died. Different—and yet the same too. All the furniture was what his mom had when this was her house, and the walls were the white he remembered from when he was a child. The gore was gone from the carpet and the wall, and where that stain had spread was now hanging a picture of himself and his brother, on a fishing trip with their uncle when they were both teenagers.

This is the room the way this room looked when Justin and I were seeing each other, he realized. It was the year after I moved into the house. There were still some boxes of books against the far wall where they had sat for that whole first year.

It was all like he remembered it... But no, not quite. The colors were wrong. They were too bright, too clean. The furniture was untouched. The windows didn't show anything outside; just a blank whiteness, like the glow from a neon sign, or like the room was suspended in sunlit fog. The room was bathed in a light that came from nowhere, making everything soft, hazy, indistinct. This was an idealized, CGI version of this room—pieced together from his own faulty memories, and sanitized to hide, or perhaps highlight, his guilt and regret.

Even as Richard took in the details of the room, he could hear his voice continuing to rage at the boy who stood before him.

"You're just another self-hating Mormon fag," he screamed. "I should have realized from the beginning that you're nothing but a whore!"

God, the sound of his voice! He hated it so much. Was he ever truly this bitter, this vindictive? And there was Justin, standing across the room, looking so hurt and vulnerable. Why couldn't he see at the time how deeply his words were wounding the boy? How irretrievably they would cut his soul and mar him through the rest of his doomed life—and beyond.

He tried to stop the Richard from seventeen years ago, tried to silence his shrill and desperate voice, tried to make him shut up before he did even more damage. But the poison was already out, and Justin was speaking, his voice high and tremulous, like a little boy.

"I'm not self-hating, and I'm not repressed!" Justin advanced on Richard, his finger poking him in the chest. "In fact, the only person I hate right now is you! I'm not your fucking property. I'm leaving this shit hole, and I'm leaving you, and I'm going to New Hampshire! So you can just fuck off, big fucking deal fucking Professor Pratt!"