init1
He hasn't heard from her in weeks and he frowns at his phone. It's late - God, what fucking time is it? After one a.m., he realizes. He's been in the zone since seven, but he's dragged out of it now: blinking at his monitor, he can feel the strain behind his eyes and the twisting cramp at the base of his spine and the ache in his jaw from grinding his teeth.
right now? Elliot texts back.
Another text from her pops up before his can be delivered: nevermind.
no what's up? Radio silence. darlene?
He remembers, belatedly, that she hates being called by name. It makes her twitchy and uncomfortable, brings back memories of having it shouted, drunkenly, down the hall by mom - shouts that usually preceded worse things, things that he would always hide in his room for but would see the aftermath of, later: broken dishes; a couple of missed drops of blood on the floor soaked into the grey kitchen tile grout; Darlene's busted lip, the bruise spreading out and the scab flaking under dark plum lipstick.
being stupid ignore me, she says.
do you need me to come over? He stares at his sent text, waits for dot-dot-dot typing indicator to pop up on her end but it doesn't. Antsy, he rephrases, if you need me to? i'll come over
i need you to, she responds a half-second later.
i'll be there ASAP, he types, pulling on his shoes. With a wince, he adds: send me your address, i can't remember where you live?
"I forget what's real, sometimes," she said from the floor of their parents' house. They were teenagers still, stuck together like glue in their own little friendless loser bande à part, and her voice was scratchy and thin from the hit she was holding in.
He was almost eighteen - weeks away - and was counting the days until he could leave the house and never look back. Find some way to bring Darlene with him. He wasn't going to leave her on her own anymore. This was his chance, finally, to put an end to things.
Stretched out and staring at the ceiling, she exhaled, letting a plume of smoke stretch above her, and she dragged her hands through it, breaking up the cloud and letting it dissipate between her outstretched fingers. He watched the way the light changed when it hit the bruises on her forearms: welts raised enough that he was sure they cast shadows. Little purple burial mounds on her skin.
Or maybe he was just really high.
"Yeah?" he asked carefully, leaning across his bed to reach down and take the joint from her.
Half the bruises were from mom. The other half - the biggest ones, he suspected - weren't. She thinks nobody notices, the way she'll crack the bony edge of her forearm against a doorway as she passes through it, the way she pinches at her skin underneath the sleeves of her hoodies, digs her nails into the skin at the base of her thumb.
"Sometimes I just want…" she trailed off, rubbing a hand over her face and snorting a laugh.
"Want what?" Elliot asked slowly, his weed-fuzzy brain refusing to cooperate with his cottony mouth.
She shook her head at him, still laughing that kind of self-conscious, fake laugh we all put on when we're being truthful but wish we weren't. "It's crazy. Nutso. Ignore me."
He shifted on the bed to hang off the edge, the knuckles of his right dragging along the floor beside her and his chin propped on his palm. "Tell me."
"Sometimes I feel like…" She rolled onto her stomach to pick at the carpet and her hair fell forwards, hiding her face and her arms and he wanted to lean forward to push it back again but he didn't. "Like I need someone I trust to beat the shit out of me and then be really nice to me after. Or, like, hit me while being really nice to me at the same time?" She snorted. "I don't think that makes sense outside of my head."
Taking another drag off the joint, he stared at the back of her head and waited for her to say more, but she just picked at her nail polish in silence until brown red flakes littered the carpet in front of her like long-dried blood spatters.
"I'm almost eighteen," he said eventually, voice hoarse. "I'm gonna get a place and then you can come stay with me. And then things will be alright."
She rolled her eyes towards him and a smirk pulled at the corner of her mouth, a learned reflex after hundreds and hundreds of these conspiratorial little conversations. Empty promises. They both knew it wasn't the thought that counted when it came to things like this. "Sure, Elliot," she told him softly, kindly, "I can't wait."
He can usually tell when she needs it, before she even has to ask.
Chewing the inside of her cheek, eyes wide and unfocused, fingers scratching hard and mindlessly at the inside of her wrist. He'll wrap his hands around her upper arm and lead her somewhere quiet where, automatically, she'll hold her hands out in front of her, palms up in supplication, so that he can sharply slap his own downwards.
The ritual is weird yet explainable enough that they never worry about getting walked in on midway through: just a stupid game of slaps to outside eyes. Both hands at once, harsh and fast, as many times as she needs him to until the combination of sharp noise and sharp pain returns her to herself and she sheepishly pulls her own hands back, tucking them under her crossed arms and avoiding his eyes. Afterwards, it's like magic: he's watched her go from fidgety and useless to sharp and in the zone immediately after. It's like the pain clears a fog in her brain so she can lock in and focus (until things inevitably start to get cloudy again, but that's usually not for a while). Memory management, pun intended.
Or maybe it's just the opposite. Maybe the pain just numbs the shit out of her, puts all the bullshit in her brain on mute like after a good hit of morphine: all the pain still present but much easier to ignore.
Fuck if he knows.
It's nearly an hour before he gets to her building and he texts her once he's downstairs, huddled in the entryway. There's an abandoned sleeping bag shoved in the corner at the top of the stoop and a Coke bottle that he's fairly certain is half-full of piss and he steps gingerly around them to get out of the cold wind blowing down the corridor of run-down Brooklyn lowrises.
i'm here, he says, instructions? The question is important: he has to suss this out now before he gets inside. Speaking breaks the spell she's in; if she has to ask for it she gets embarrassed and retreats into herself and then he can't draw her back out. That's when she gets worse.
hard/flat/dull, she answers.
ok. buzz me in.
There's a shitpile of guilt built up in his chest from all the times Darlene took the beatings for both of them. He can admit that.
See, he eventually got too big and Mom stopped coming after him. "Or maybe she just likes you more," Darlene joked one time, her laugh dying in her throat as soon as she caught the horror on his face. "Don't," he told her, eyes wide, "never say that." But the thing was, Mom always gravitated towards Darlene when she was drunk or angry or sad and needed to get out whatever she was feeling by making something break or bleed. Even when he was small enough to hit, Elliot was always more of a last resort.
Once, when Mom was on one of her rampages, Elliot had tried to stomp into the kitchen and scream at her, to put an end to it once and for all. His voice had dropped by then, and he was a few inches taller and - and he was the fucking man of the house, it was his responsibility to take care of Darlene and make things better -
"Don't," Darlene hissed at him before he could confront Mom, grabbing his arm to quickly drag him back to his room. (Her eyes stayed trained on the end of the hallway, keeping watch; when she shouted her name, Darlene only had a few seconds to appear or else Mom would come hunting.) "If you get in her way right now she'll come down on me twice as hard when you're not here."
"Then I'll make sure I'm here." He stood up straight and squared his shoulders. See? I'm a man, now. I can protect you.
She shook her head at him pityingly and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "It doesn't work that way, El," she said. And then she left, carefully shutting his bedroom door behind her. He stood motionless, staring blankly at the wood grain with his hands balled into useless fists, as the screaming began to crescendo in the kitchen.
She opens the door in an oversized sweater and ratty leggings and if he couldn't already tell from one look at her face that she's totally fucking adrift (he can), it'd be obvious from the state of her place. Weeks worth of dishes piled in the sink, the couch barely visible under piles of envelopes and dirty clothes. He almost tells her, "Jesus, it stinks in here," but he doesn't (even though it does: stale air and old cigarettes smashed out in dirty cereal bowls).
She doesn't say hello and doesn't offer her hands to him, just retreats backwards into her apartment to stand in the middle of the living room, waiting. His hands are shaking, which he hadn't expected - he'd smoked three cigarettes between the train station and her apartment to steel himself. Hell, even before he left home he considered taking a small dose of the Ketogan he's been saving - just 10 mgs, enough to make him floaty and take the edge off the grit in his teeth. Quiet the anxiety rattling around in his head.
But he was worried about being absolutely present: this is not something he wants to fuck up or, God forbid, misjudge. (He also, admittedly, doesn't want to waste a rare and expensive high on a night that he knows'll be miserable with or without drugs.)
"Where?" he asks.
She shrugs at him. I trust you.
Hard/flat/dull, he thinks. You can do this. He nods at her once, then moves closer and takes a deep breath to steel himself.
She closes her eyes a half-second before he punches her in the bicep. It's tentative and he knows it and she blows out a frustrated breath before he hits her again in the same place, harder this time.
"Hey," Elliot said, his cheek pressed against the pantry door. "Mom went out. You can come out now."
On the other side, Darlene took a deep breath. She whispered back: "How long do I have?" Her voice was raw from crying.
Mom had thrown her in there hours ago ("I'm sick of looking at your smug face.") and then milled around the kitchen for a long time afterwards, smoking and ranting and drinking and taunting ("Come out, I dare you. Show me what a tough little bitch you are, Darlene - come on.") until she'd gotten bored and wandered off to watch TV, the Friends rerun laugh track ominously filtering through the house.
"I don't know." He traced the curve of the doorknob with one bitten-down fingernail. "I think she went to the liquor store?"
"Okay." He just barely heard her stand up, bumping against the shelves and knocking over a box of cereal with a muttered, "Fucking fuck. Fuck." A long pause. "Can you go?"
"Why?" Elliot asked, confused. He reached for the doorhandle again and began to twist it but she grabbed it from the other side and held it tight.
"Because - because I was stuck in here so long I fucking pissed myself, alright?" she hissed. "Jesus. Can you just go already?"
Oh. He reached for the doorknob again, "I can help you clean up before she gets -"
"God, Elliot, just fuck off!"
He let go, stumbling backwards like he'd been burned and nodded, dumbly at the closed door. Clearing his throat, he added as reassuringly as he could manage (he hated himself for it; he'd been hiding in his own bedroom up until that point, and now he was going to play at taking care of her?): "I'll go keep watch at the front window."
"Whatever," she said, flatly. It wasn't until he turned the corner out of the kitchen, his footsteps gone from tile-slaps to muffled thumps on the carpet, that he heard the pantry creak open and her dry, swallowed-down sobs.
He lowers himself to his knees and punches her once, closed-fist, in the side of her hip. Hard enough to make her stumble a little, her knees wobbling for a second before she regains her balance.
"Goddamnit," she breathes. Her eyes are pressed closed and her jaw is set and he knows not to ask her if she's okay, not to ask her if he should keep going. He knows not to stop unless asked and he trusts her to ask if she needs to.
So he pauses and watches from the floor as her breathing hitches and waits for her to settle before he hits her again in the same place with the flat of his hand. It's sharp and loud and his palm burns from the sting of it; the leggings she's wearing don't provide any padding, the strike might as well be skin-on-skin. Before the sound of it hits his ears, his eyes flit back up to train on her face, watching her expression carefully to make sure that this is okay, this is okay.
She hisses a breath then nods for him to keep going. And so he does.
One hit, then another, and then another.
"You're good," Elliot murmurs, "you're okay." He lays his palm flat against where he's just hit her, feels the burning heat of her angry skin through the thin, pilled-up fabric, then stands and moves towards her kitchen.
Slowly running his fingers across the handful of items lined up like matches on her tiny island, his fingers pause on a new addition to the familiar collection: a wooden baton, store-fresh and shiny. Picking it up, he's relieved to find that it's not weighted, just leather and wood.
Still, it would be capable of doing so much damage if he wanted it to.
Elliot's stomach lurches and he drops the baton back on her counter like he's been burned. He hurriedly makes his choice and comes back to her side, hovering close enough that he doesn't have to speak above a whisper.
"Do you want to know which one?"
She hesitates for a second before nodding once, her eyes still pressed shut.
"The ruler," he tells her, before striking her once, hard, across the back. The bark of the wood is worse than its bite so he puts some muscle into it: ten strikes alternating between her shoulder blades, hard enough to leave a welt yet not hard enough to make her expression change beyond her eyebrows, which knit together slightly in concentration.
He can tell she's chasing something, trying to find what she's looking for in the pain but not able to grab hold of it, and he works on instinct, one hand wrapping itself in her hair and squeezing tight, his fingers working slowly enough to give her time to say no if she needs to, but she doesn't. Squeeze, twist. Five more strikes. Her mouth parts a little. Her hands clench and unclench and her shoulders drop as her breaths turn to pants.
"Okay," he says. "Okay." Not a question, not are you okay?, but a quiet, mindless repetition of assurance, the kind of comforting nonsense you whisper while running your hands over a spooked horse. Okay, buddy, okay, okay, shh. He slowly, gently lets go of her hair and lets his hand rest for a moment on her shoulder, heavy and grounding.
As much as he hates these nights, there are some things he knows are undeniably true: she's always so much better, afterwards. She's more focused and not so stuck in her own head. Her eyes are brighter and she laughs and smiles like she's a human again. If it weren't him then she'd find some stranger to do it - someone who wouldn't know her nonverbal cues half as well as he does or, worse, someone who'd outright ignore them. Some asshole from the Craigslist personals section who gets off on abusing girls.
(Also, simultaneously, undeniably true is how much he fucking hates doing it. It makes him feel so dirty, like he's carrying around a mark tattooed on his forehead that tells every cop he passes on the street, every pretty girl that catches him looking at her for just a moment too long on the subway, that he's a disgusting, immoral piece of shit.)
She's on her knees, doubled over with her forehead on the ground and her arms wrapped around herself and he kneels in front of her. Touching her lightly on the shoulder, he whispers, "Up."
She sits up straight and juts out her chin like an indignant little kid, her eyes red-rimmed and wide open, and reaches towards her, his hand brushing her jaw and drawing a line up to the curve of her ear before he wraps it around the base of her skull and gently pulls her to him, letting her bury her face in his shoulder. She smells like cigarettes and old sweat and he presses a kiss to her dirty hair before letting go.
"You okay?" he asks finally, rocking backwards on his heels.
"Yeah." She doesn't meet his eyes.
"It's okay if we stop now?" He holds his breath waiting for her answer: he needs this to stop now. They've never figured out a way for Elliot to tap out; he's always been too chickenshit to ask, always just gives her what she wants and waits for her sigkill.
"Yeah."
Thank God.
"You wanna talk about it?"
"No."
He nods, runs his hand over her hair one more time before standing up. There's a blanket tossed over the back of her sofa and he grabs it and wraps it around her from behind, swaddling her arms against her ribcage and holding her still. They stay like this for a long minute until Elliot finds her elbow and helps her to her feet.
She pushes him away and shuffles towards the couch on her own, using one foot to kick away some of the clothes strewn across it before flopping down and burrowing into the corner of the pillows.
"Have you eaten?"
She stares at him blankly, her eyes narrowing.
"I'm going to make you something and you're going to eat it," he tells her over his shoulder. It's always easier if there's no discussion. You're going to eat it, because those are the rules.
She reaches one arm up to rest her knuckles on his knee and he automatically takes hold of her wrist, wrapping his fingers around it so he can press his fingernails into the inside (it's already raw where's she's been scratching at it - a few days' worth of blistery red, tracks of scraped-up skin that look like pulled fabric). Press, hold, let go. Press, hold, let go. This kind of gentle, predictable pain: it's like rocking a baby to sleep.
"You didn't hit me," she says quietly, her voice muffled by the blanket.
He knows what she means to say: you didn't hit me in the face.
That's always been a sticking point in these strange interactions that neither of them has developed the right words for. The last time he managed to do it was the anniversary of Dad's death; she was drunk, he should never have agreed to it. As soon as he hit her it was like someone had reached into his guts and squeezed them until they turned to jelly and he'd had to stumble away from her to go throw up in the kitchen sink.
"I know," he says. He doesn't look away from the TV. "I'm sorry." He's not sorry, not in the least, but she doesn't need to know that. "I couldn't today." He's not sure he'll ever be able to do it again, but she doesn't need to know that either.
The remnants of the grilled cheese that he clumsily made for her from the scraps of semi-stale food he could find in her fridge sits abandoned on the coffee table, nibbled down to its burnt crusts and accompanied by a smear of ranch dressing; she'd slowly picked away at the middle, glancing at him occasionally for feedback until he'd finally given her the nod that she'd eaten enough.
("You're getting too skinny again." "I know." "You gotta take care of yourself." "I know.").
"Don't say sorry, dude." She pulls the blanket up with her free hand to cover her nose and tucks her head down. "I'm sorry for dragging you into something so fucked up."
"Naw," he says. Truthfully, he's glad she's sorry but he still means it when he says: "That's just us. Couple of fuck-ups."
She snorts a laugh and pulls her arm out of his grasp to light a cigarette for him, and then herself. "Totally."
Elliot stands up to open the window - because the air in her apartment is already too close and sour, but also because he suddenly realized he needs to be as far away from her as the room allows. Outside, the streetlights are starting to flick off one by one as the sun comes up. There are voices on the street outside, and the sound of shopfront grates unlocking and rolling up. His eyes and throat feel like sandpaper as he takes another drag of his cigarette and blows it through her torn window screen. On the couch, she's stretched out in his absence: her legs draped over the armrest, staring at the TV as she strokes her upper thigh with one hand, fingertips gently tracing the swell of the bruises that are probably already forming under her leggings.
"I love you, you know," she says quietly, and he turns to look at her.
"I know," he says finally, and she tilts her face towards him to shoot him a shark-toothed grin, one hand shielding her black-smeared eyes against the morning light.