The Waiting

They could have stayed in the truck, which would have been smart. Snow swirled across the empty parking lot and more was coming down, sticking in their hair and melting on the cigarette they passed back and forth. 

Sam’s hands were numb. He looked down at them to make sure they weren’t turning blue. No sign of blue, just a little red and chapped like Ronin’s lips. Sam had wondered if they would feel hot like when you have a fever and your body’s trying to stitch you back together, but he hadn’t tried. Sam’s mom was around, decorating the tree and trying to coax Sam’s dad and little sister into helping. 

After the Christmas party spilled through Sam’s front door and Sam began to feel like a pecan pie baking in the oven, he convinced Ronin to take the truck and drive out to the mall. It was closed, of course, since today was Christmas Eve.

The cold stopped stinging when Ronin gave the cigarette back, its glowing tip like one single determined ember. Sam could barely make his hands work and close around its narrow papery body. “Back in the truck?” Sam asked.

“No. My dad smells smoke from a mile away, ‘member?” Ronin said.

“I know, I know.”

Any other day, Ronin wouldn’t have cared if his father said something about the smoke. There was a pack hidden in the A/C vent that didn’t work, and Ronin only bought Lucky, not Marlboro. What he smelled was his own denial.

Someone drove by, their windows tinted. Both boys watched it pass by with slitted eyes. 

“We can’t get a moment’s fucking peace,” Ronin muttered.

Sam took a drag on the cigarette. The warm smoke curled down into his lungs, and he breathed it out through his nose, the smoke pooling in the icy air. “Whaddya mean?” he asked with a leaden tongue, but he knew how this conversation would go. He didn’t want to have it.

“They gotta know. Somebody’s gotta know. How the hell could we have gotten away with it? We don’t—we didn’t know what we were doing. It was self defense,” said Ronin as if he were arguing his case to someone who wasn’t there that night. But Sam had been.

“You beat him with that goddamn bat until he stopped moving. I told you to fucking stop,” Sam gritted out. His jaw clenched, aching already, as if he hardly ever stopped grinding his teeth or pressing his tongue flat against the roof of his mouth.

“Don’t say it so goddamn loud!” Ronin hissed. The sound was a birdbone, hollow and fragile but capable of traveling so far. 

Sometimes, Sam heard the burbling of the creek underneath the thin layer of ice when he blinked or finally closed his eyes to sleep. The ice must have cracked as they’d laid the boy’s cooling body down in it, but Sam hadn’t noticed it. Only the rushing creek, bubbling, gurgling. Like a boy choking on blood. Spitting it out on the cement, on a curled ancient leaf. 

There had been more of them. More boys. Three more of them, shuffling behind the leader, cracking their knuckles and ballooning their chests. Ronin had taken to carrying Lee’s bat around recently because there was a stray dog on the loose in his neighborhood. It was a good thing too, or maybe it was a bad thing. Would they have been beaten to death if Ronin hadn’t cracked his bat against that boy’s skull the second time he spat out “faggot” like venom? Would they have had to tell their parents why they’d been roughed up on the old route to the quarry?

Sam flicked the cigarette, and it landed in a pile of snow. Their freedom was a waiting game. How long until those other boys stumbled over each other into the police station, asking for their friend who was last seen with a baseball bat between his teeth? How long until some hunter found the boy’s body? 

He had looked innocent in the creek, freezing water draining over his stone-gray skin. He could have been anyone, not just the homophobe with a stolen taser held in a shaking fist. Self defense. It was self defense. Well, who’s gonna believe two fags? he thought.

“There’s British slang for a cigarette,” Sam said conversationally. He stared at the dead cigarette, the gray butt. “It’s called a fag. It seems kinda like a compliment, you know? Cigarettes make you look cool, so being a fag is cool.”

“That’s fucking stupid,” said Ronin, but there was no edge to his words.

“I’ll bite your face off,” said Sam.

A half-smile tugged at Ronin’s mouth, that chapped feverish mouth. “You need some chapstick, man, Jesus,” said Sam.

One bright shock of laughter escaped Ronin. “Want me to taste like cherries when you cannibalize me?” he asked.

“I was thinking cinnamon, actually.”

“The fuck, man.” Ronin shook his head, that half-smile tilting into an almost full one. “You’re fuckin’ crazy.”

Was he? He did help his boyfriend put someone his boyfriend murdered into a river to hide the smell as white-out conditions hid the pine-needled bank a few feet away. They did trudge through the winter storm together and hide out in a drainage pipe for half an hour, probably the same one where Ronin killed the boy. Where the others had ran away, abandoning their friend. “We both are,” he said with a vicious hiss of venom.

He hadn’t meant it that way. Guilt and fear had slowly worked its way through his stomach and up to his heart, working on his aorta. He closed his eyes, and the truck creaked next to him as Ronin leaned back. “Do you think we’ll survive jail?” Sam asked.

“Hell yeah. Everyone in prison’s a fag, so we’ll fit right in. Nobody’ll ask questions there,” Ronin said. Then, softer, “Maybe we’ll even like it.”

“Maybe.”

If the courts didn’t try them as adults and give them the electric chair. Goddamn, what a depressing thing to think on Christmas Eve.

“I better get home,” said Sam as he opened his eyes. 

The snow had stopped, and patches of cool blue sky peaked between the iron curtain of clouds. They got back into the truck silently. At any moment, Sam expected sirens to pierce the abandoned quiet of the mall parking lot, but they turned onto the main road without problem. Every stoplight they passed, Sam saw a flashing police light, but it was always the weak sunlight winking off a dark window. When they skidded onto Sam’s street, he should have seen police cars crowding his driveway. There were none.

“Wanna come over tomorrow? We can watch shitty Christmas movies in my room,” Sam said, climbing out of the passenger side and almost slipping on a patch of ice. 

“Yeah, sure,” said Ronin. He winked. “Can we get under the covers?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re so fucking horny.”

“Get it from my dad.”

“Do not say that.”

That was when it happened, when the waiting finally ceased. The sirens started, screaming like a banshee. Sam’s heart seized and somersaulted, and he stared at Ronin who took a deep breath, white-knuckling the wheel. “If we run, it’ll be worse,” he said, his low frightened voice nearly lost in the frenzy.

Then the sirens faded. They grew fainter and fainter, a candle running out of wax. 

Ronin breathed a sigh of relief. He looked over at Sam, a big smile breaking across his face like the plague. 

Nausea spread through Sam’s stomach. The waiting had begun again, and honestly, Sam had been an idiot. He hadn’t been thinking clearly, but now he was. It would happen when they least expected it, when the waiting crushed their shoulders. There would be no sirens. There would be no warning.