Chapter Eleven
Sam smiled, because he was supposed to. He shook the principal's hand, accepted the diploma, glanced briefly out at the audience. All those proud parents and grandparents, and bored siblings.
Well. He was lacking the former, maybe, but he definitely had the latter.
Dean was wearing his knitted burgundy tie again, and the khaki twill shirt, and jeans, because all he had were jeans. And his big lace-up work boots, because that was also all he had for footwear. And Sam wondered, as he went down the stage steps and returned to his seat in the auditorium, why neither of them owned anything other than one pair of shoes.
Well, scratch that. Sam had a pair of cleated soccer shoes tucked away in his duffel. Thing was, with the last growth spurt—now just over 6'4" and the tallest Winchester in the history of Winchesters, Dad said—he'd outgrown the soccer shoes. It was time to get rid of them, donate them to a thrift store so some other kid could use them. It's how he'd gotten them in the first place, forking over $6 to Goodwill.
Yeah, Dad gave him an allowance, and Dean slipped him some bucks any time he had a win at pool or poker, so he probably could afford another pair of soccer shoes, but sports really wasn't on his radar right now. Not even if it only cost him $6 for another pair of shoes, which he kind of doubted was possible these days with his height, hands, and feet. Because even $6 could go to food. Sure, he'd scored a full-ride scholarship to several schools, but that didn't cover "incidentals," as the admissions packets called any expenses outside of tuition, a meal plan, dorm, and books.
He knew damn good and well Dad wouldn't be paying for his cell phone, once he left. He needed it for hunting; he didn't, Dad would declare, need it for school. Because school wasn't the 'family business.'
Sam Winchester, Esquire. That's what he'd be when he received his law degree. Or maybe Samuel, which sounded more adult. But one thing it wouldn't be was 'Sammy.'
Little Sammy Winchester. No one could call him that anymore.
He sat in the sea of fellow students and didn't even listen to the names being announced. Not many came after Winchester anyway. He and Dean had been doomed to always be near the end of everything during roll-call, or they were asked to answer questions. Now and again the teachers flipped the class roster, which Sam loved because he always knew the answer. Dean hated it because either he never did, or he didn't want anyone to think he did.
It was easier for Dean, for reasons Sam had never been able to fathom, to let teachers believe he was less intelligent than he actually was.
No, he wasn't book-smart like Sam. But nobody had the street smarts his big brother did. That counted for a lot, Sam figured. It kept them alive.
Dean didn't sit with all the parents and family members. He hovered at the back of the auditorium, stationed close to the doors, as if he needed an escape route. And maybe he did; Dean, like Dad, always knew where the exits were. Possibly Dean suspected a monster might be hiding in the auditorium, because he'd been nervous as he walked Sam to Commencement.
Or maybe that was just because Dean felt this was Dad's job, to attend his youngest son's graduation.
Or maybe, Sam's intuition told him now, it was because Dean never made it to his own graduation, because he dropped out before he could.
The principal said something into the microphone and everyone around Sam surged to their feet cheering and whooping and flinging their mortar board caps—those stupid, ugly hats with tassels—into the air.
Sam didn't. Sam got up, made his way a few seats down—with a name at the back end of the alphabet he'd been seated close to the aisle—and left them all behind. They had parties to go to, maybe even family celebrations in restaurants. Sam didn't know.
He had . . . no father in attendance, is what he had. And a brother who didn't want to be there.
Samuel Winchester, high school graduate. And a whole freakin' year late, thanks to Dad. He was older than everyone in his graduating class. He'd be older than everyone in his freshman class at Stanford.
Stanford. Ivy League. Just like Bobby had suggested.
As he walked, Sam looked briefly at the crisp, heavy paper in his hand. Then he glanced up, saw his brother waiting by the big bank of push-bar doors. He didn't look nervous anymore. He leaned slightly, one shoulder set casually against the wall, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. And he was smiling.
It wasn't the cocky grin that annoyed adults and had chicks giggling to one another or practically fainting. It was just a quiet smile that indented his cheeks a little and put the faintest of creases at his eyes. And the expression in his eyes . . . well, Sam had learned to read them many years before. And what he read now was pride.
Pride. In his little brother.
For a moment, Sam returned the smile. It set a little glow in his stomach, that look, that pride. And then reality came rushing back, and he saw again the absence at his brother's side. The smile slid off his face.
The pride he wanted, for just one night, was his father's.
Sam stepped by his brother, hit the push-bar, shoved open the door and stepped into the auditorium foyer. When Dean followed, Sam turned on him, thrust the diploma into the air and gestured with it.
"One more summer. That's it."
The smile was gone from Dean's face, too. "I know, Sammy."
He'd always been able to read Dean. But right now, he couldn't. How was that possible? Dean had a vast array of masks, but he never wore any against Sam.
Until now.
"I want to get drunk," Sam said. "I want to go back to that shit-hole of a rental house, and I want to drink whiskey like you do, and I want to get drunk."
"We can do that if you want," Dean said after a long moment in which he continued to wear a mask, "but I thought I'd take you out to dinner. Celebrate a little. Nothin' fancy—" he shrugged a little, eloquently stating that of course Winchesters couldn't afford anything fancy, "—but, you know. Something a little better than a burger joint."
Sam unzipped his rented gown, bundled it up, dumped it onto a table in the foyer. Then he pulled off his idiot hat and dropped it on top of the gown. He didn't care that he was supposed to keep the tassel as some kind of marker for his rite of passage. He didn't freakin' care.
His rite of passage had begun eighteen years, six months before.
"You like burger joints," Sam said.
Dean shrugged again. "Yeah, but this isn't about me. There's a little Mediterranean place I found. It's walking distance. All kinds of healthy food."
Sam pushed his way through the bank of big plate-glass doors into the warm air of late spring. "If we've got some Lucky Charms, or Mac-n-Cheese, in the house, that's good enough. I just want to get drunk."
"Sammy, look—"
Sam just walked on. Dean would catch up, or he wouldn't. Sure, Dean had the second set of keys to the house—but Sam knew exactly how to break in. And he knew where the whiskey was.
Dean caught up. Sam had three inches on him now, but he hadn't quite yet sorted out how to assemble his legs into anything approximating graceful movement. Dad had been riding his ass about it, too, telling him he needed to start jogging every morning, to learn how Sam worked again. And a small part of him knew Dad was right. Dean had grown up all of a piece, at an even rate. He'd gotten broader over the past few years—and Sam knew from experience how much power he packed in those big shoulders—but not taller. He knew how his body worked. Dean's body was an incredibly efficient machine. Sam was still a work-in-progress.
Dean hadn't outgrown his shoes for years. Sam figured he'd better scrape up the bucks to buy some new ones, even if they were only new-to-him, because his toes weren't happy.
Shoes were probably on the list of 'incidentals.' Or else they weren't, because Stanford Admissions would probably assume that even someone who needed an academic scholarship to attend would nonetheless have enough money to buy shoes.
Yeah. He'd need to find some kind of part-time job over the summer. Dad would bitch, but unless Dad planned to pay him minimum wage for all the hours he spent researching or putting down monsters, Dad would just have to keep his mouth shut.
Sam felt a stab of remorse. Because Dad did sometimes take actual paying jobs. So did Dean. Neither had any trouble scoring jobs in Mom-n-Pop garages for under-the-table pay. These days new cars came with computers, and a lot of young mechanics were going to school to nab jobs in franchise shops. A lot of them, Dean said, knew next to nothing about classic cars. That's where the Impala actually covered part of her gas expenses. Dad or Dean pulled up at a small shop in that black beauty, and were soon buried in the engine or talking pistons and valve heads and drivetrains with the garage owner, who promptly hired them on the spot.
Sam didn't want to be a mechanic. He knew next to nothing about what was under the Impala's hood, and Dad and Dean didn't care because one or the other of them always had her back.
Her. It never failed to amaze Sam that his father and brother assigned gender to a car.
Dean didn't say anything the rest of the way back to the rental house. Sam didn't, either. He just waited while his brother unlocked the front door, and then he went to the beat-up kitchen cabinet where Dad kept the whiskey, pulled down the half-full bottle and two glasses. He had a beer now and then, but whiskey wasn't his poison.
Tonight, yeah.
He carried bottle and glasses into the front room, poured liquor, held one of the shots out to Dean. His brother had already pulled off his tie, hung it over a door knob. Dean gazed at the offered glass a moment, then took it.
The mask, again. Sam didn't know how to react. He stared a question at his brother.
Dean lifted the drink into the air, said "Here's to the graduate."
Since they were coming from Dean, Sam accepted the congratulations. He tapped his glass against Dean's, took a breath, then slammed back the whiskey.
When he could speak, he gasped, "Holy crap! That burns all the way down! I think my gut's on fire!"
"Yup," Dean agreed.
"Why do you even drink this?"
"For the burn." And Dean smiled behind his mask.
"How can anyone drink enough of this crap to get drunk?"
"It's like walking," Dean explained. "One foot in front of the other. Only it's whiskey instead."
Sam sat down on the couch. His eyes had actually watered when the fumes hit them. But he was determined to see it through. He poured himself another shot, downed it, too. If a little more slowly.
Dean pulled the armchair close to the coffee table, took a seat. He knocked back his whiskey, didn't even so much as blink. But then Dean had been drinking for a fair number of years by now. Sam didn't recall ever seeing him truly drunk, though. A good buzz, yeah; and he came home in the early hours sometimes walking just a shade too carefully, but he'd never been falling-down drunk.
"That's when you smell of perfume," Sam noted.
Dean's brows shot up. "What?"
"When you come home after being out with a girl."
"Oh." Dean's half-smile suggested relief. "Well, yeah. It's all part of the deal, Sammy. She gets a little Old Spice from me, I pick up a little perfume from her. Swapping of all the essences, you know?"
"You make that sound dirty."
Dean grinned, and this time it was cocky. "It's a beautiful, natural act, Sammy. Maybe when you're forty, you'll know what I mean."
Sam poured himself another drink.
Dean watched him swallow. "Why do you want to get drunk?"
"To forget," Sam said, knowing it sounded melodramatic and cliché, but it happened, in this instance, to be the truth.
Dean's grin disappeared. His gaze unfocused into a thousand-yard stare somewhere beyond his brother's head, and Sam realized Dean wasn't thinking about Dad and missed graduations. He was thinking about something decidedly else.
"Sometimes it even works," Dean murmured, and then he poured a double and knocked it back with an efficiency that spoke of practice.
Sam felt the whiskey. He just wasn't used to it. Two beers he felt, if he even got that far. But this was . . . well, this was definitely different. But it's what he wanted. So he drank a little more and sensed a new lassitude in his body, a looseness in limbs that had him blinking slowly at the face across from his.
"Dad says you look like Mom."
That got Dean's attention. "What?"
"He got drunk one night . . ." Sam raised his empty glass, " . . . and said you look like Mom. Dunno where you were. Probably out with a chick. But he took this picture from his wallet, and he showed me. And you do." Sam waved a hand. "I mean, she's a she and you're a he, but you know what I mean. An' he said . . . he said he was proud of you. That you never let him down."
A muscle jumped in Dean's taut jaw. "I've let him down plenty of times."
"Not for real . . . not for real real. He chews yer ass sometimes, but it's diff'rent."
Dean's tone was scornful, but Sam knew it wasn't meant for him. "Have another, Sammy."
So he did, if only because that's not what Dean meant, either. "Yer like a curse box, kinda."
Dean stared at him. "I'm a curse box?"
"Kinda." Sam wanted to be clear on that. "You're all locked up tight with all the bad stuff inside, an' yer afraid if anyone else unlocks it, bad stuff'll come out." He shook his head. "'s wrong, Dean. There's good in there. You've seen bad stuff, but yer not bad. Yer good." He stared at his brother, fearing he wasn't being clear. "Yer good, Dean. Really good. Better'n anyone. Better'n Dad."
The muscle jumped in Dean's jaw again. "So, do you want Lucky Charms, or Mac-n-Cheese?"
"Don' deflect." Sam waved that away with a sweep of his arm. "'s what you always do. You should lissen, Dean."
"Yeah, well . . . I don't want to."
"I know you better'n anyone. Better'n Dad, even. 'Cuz I'm the only one you let get close to you. But earlier . . . at school—" Sam poked the air with a finger, "—you put on a mask. Firs' time you ev'r done it with me. How come?"
Dean stared at him. "You always were an emo little bitch."
"Don' shut me out. Not me. An' tell me why it makes you uncomf'ble to have me say yer good."
Dean took up the whiskey bottle, poured himself a double, downed it.
Sam said, "You need t' be drunk to answer?"
His brother said, "Maybe I just won't answer at all. Because this is a stupid conversation. Fortunately you won't even remember it in the morning."
"I will." Sam tapped his head. "What goes in stays in."
Now Dean looked amused. "Say that when you wake up in the morning with your first whiskey hangover."
"You gonna tell Dad?"
"What—that you got drunk? No. Why would I?"
"'Cuz you tell 'im everything."
"Uh, no, I definitely do not tell Dad everything."
"Oh. Like, sex." Sam waved a hand. "I mean about me. Because he always knows what I've done."
"If Dad came home tomorrow, I wouldn't have to tell him you got drunk tonight. Trust me. And no, I do not tell him everything you've done. First of all, I don't have to, because you can't lie your way out of a paper bag; second, you always answer when he asks what you've been doing; and third, he's a dad. Dads know things."
He was too drunk to be seriously angry, but a small wave of it slapped against the shore nonetheless. "He didn't know tonight was my graduation. Or he didn't give a damn. And that's worse." He stared at Dean, felt the sting of tears and hated himself for it. "You came. You stayed home from the hunt so you could come."
"Sammy . . ." Dean pulled out his phone. "I should have played this for you earlier, before the ceremony. I just thought it would piss you off, and I didn't want to spoil it." He turned on the phone, pressed a button, then set it down on the coffee table.
Sam blinked as his father's voice sounded.
'Sammy. I'm sorry. I meant to be there. I planned to be there. But I hit a deer on the way home. The Impala's not running. I'll get her repaired, be home by tomorrow night. Oh, and in case you don't believe me—and I guess I wouldn't blame you if you didn't—I'm sending a photo. Check it out. Impala—1, Deer—0. And Sammy—congratulations. I'm proud of you, son.'
Sam stared at the phone. The sting in his eyes was back.
Dean got up, rounded the coffee table, sat down on the couch beside his brother. Bumped Sam's shoulder with his own. "You gonna look at the picture?"
Sam swallowed heavily. "No. The whiskey's kind of—moving around. That picture might make me puke." And then the first tears fell. "I just want to be normal. Is that so wrong?"
Dean slung a heavy arm around his shoulders. "You'll never be normal, Sammy. You're too you. But no matter where you go, no matter what you do, you'll always be a Winchester."
"Dad's gonna kill me when I tell him."
"Maybe. But tonight he's proud of you, and that's what counts." Dean's arm tightened. "Live in the moment, Sammy. Live in the moment."
"I'm really drunk."
Dean unslung his arm, leaned forward, poured whiskey into two glasses, gave one to Sam. "I'm going to make some dinner. Then we can eat, drink, and be merry—because tomorrow you most certainly will think you've died. Or wish you had." He got up, went off into the kitchen. "How's Mac-n-Cheese sound? I'll even add some bacon."
But Sam didn't answer. He picked up Dean's phone, switched it off speaker, held it to his ear and listened to the replay. To his dad's voice.
And lived in the moment.