"It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender."
-Leonard Cohen, "Stranger Song"
*****
It was a nice day.
They took Justin's convertible (one of them, Chris teased, not inaccurately) and only JC and Lance buckled their seatbelts, because Justin drove like a granny on country roads to protect his precious paintjob.
No one expected the kids to burst out in front of them like some kind of Norman Rockwell Jumanji, with bikes and a hamper and fishing poles. No one expected the rails on the bridge to break.
No one expected to live when they hit the embankment six feet down. Six feet was a long fall when you started at thirty miles an hour.
Chris actually saw the glass star around his head. He would remember that later, in a surreal, sick daze. He would remember thinking that this was the last time he would be able to look at the sky without pain.
His life didn't flash before his eyes, but other people's did. He was Lance, in a sequined vest and a big-sleeved white shirt, dancing just a little harder than he had to because he loved the fuzzy dimness beyond the stage spots that meant a packed house. He was JC, watching his first skywriter chalk a swirl across heart-blue sky. He was Joey, with Brianna's spit-sticky fingers tight around his thumb. He was Justin in a gleaming acid-blue pool, so cold he looked like he'd sneaked grape popsicles but pretending he wasn't so his mom would let him swim. He was everyone...and then he wasn't.
He wasn't.
*****
When he surfaced from wherever he was floating, someone was telling him he had brain damage. His heart hammered and icy film collected on his ribs, between his unmoving fingers. Someone else thought he was probably paralyzed, and he was even more afraid of that because such grave worry accompanied it. The worry plucked at him and sat on him and smothered him, like cats, or little children, first annoying and then fearful, because he couldn't see.
Blind and paralyzed. Maybe they just thought he was brain-damaged, but he wasn't, like that guy in the Metallica video, and he'd have to lie here for the rest of his life listening to his friends talk about how much they wished he wasn't fucked up. Until they stopped coming at all.
"Don't--go Josh don't--" he managed, ages later, soaked with the effort. Most of his brain gave under him like a broken arm, and shameful tears leaked into the bandages over his eyes.
A warm, sinewy hand linked through his, and he heard, "Look see you're all wrong you made me scared you assholes how dare you he's fine he's fine," accompanied by a red-black tide of anger that was un-Joshlike. Chris knew it was his, though. It tasted like JC somehow, if he were to get angry. "How did he know it was me?" layered with JC's voice saying "How did you know it was me?"
And that was fucking weird. Some funky acoustics in this-here hospital room, if JC was doing duets with himself. C was talented, but that was beyond even him. Had he somehow mistaken JC's voice for Justin's?
It would be easy to do, because it was loud in here. Like a press conference. Cacophony and nonsense and half-asked questions, all in curiously echoing voices. Everyone was tense, too, cutting each other off with anxious rambles, and if that tension hadn't been slowly flattening the breath from Chris's lungs, he would have been flattered that so many people who didn't know him still cared.
"'s loud, C," he mumbled. "Couldn' they wait?"
Confusion and pain burst in his brain, white, bitter crackles of it, and he gasped.
"No, we couldn't wait, you dumbass," said Joey, off to his right. Chris felt hollow and tearful with the words, like the two were somehow connected. "We were worried you were--" braindead-paralyzed-dying-disfigured- "not gonna be okay there for a while. It's been a couple of days."
"Days?" Chris blinked, eyes itching under the gauze that held them down. "What--when--how many?"
~Am I blind?~ he wanted to scream. ~Am I hideous?~
"Three days, Chris," Lance supplied.
"Five," said Justin at the same time, his voice weak and blue, like denim scraped with a razorblade.
"Which one is it, three or five?" Were they lying for a reason? Had it really been months? Years?
Uneasy silence. They knew he was on to them. A babble of "How did he know"s culminated in one, JC's. "Why do you say that, Chris?"
"I didn't say it," Chris said, baffled. "Justin did."
"Chris, baby, Justin hasn't said a word. In fact, I don't know how you knew he was here."
"Okay, Justin...guys," Chris said, trying to crush the little bud of panic that threatened to push through and bloom. "Not funny to pick on the crip, okay? Quit messing around."
The whispers rose around him again, 'brain damage' and 'crazy' and 'not the same' and 'permanent' and 'get the doctor'. He'd thought they were press, or maybe a few fans and some of the younger nursing staff, but now he wondered if they were ghosts. He didn't know. He couldn't see.
"C," he began, quiet, because he really didn't want to hear the answer, "am I blind?"
"No!" Justin barked. The shock of his vehemence smacked Chris so hard his head rang. "You're fine. They said not even much of a scar," echoed by "probably some scarring."
Chris took a deep breath. He wasn't sure what he planned to do with it--laugh, maybe, or scream--but right then, his doctor walked in. Chris knew because he had a very orderly, disciplined way of--
Thinking.
Chris receded, so deep that the bed was like drowning again, cool and pale and medicinal. Words pursued him, but he didn't know which ones were spoken and which weren't, so he didn't say anything back. Occasionally he felt relief or fear from one of the others, like a warm or cold current in his pool of shock.
He knew what they were thinking.
There wasn't any empirical way to test it, of course. He couldn't very well blurt out, "Hey, J, all that jazz about being a virgin wasn't bullshit after all, huh?" or "Lance, relax already, who cares if the guy didn't tie his tie right, don't hate him on my behalf", because he was in a hospital. With nurses. And nurses' aides. And nurses' aides' thirteen-year-old daughters. And somehow it would leak out that Nsync's Chris Kirkpatrick could read minds.
He couldn't say it when he got out, either, because who could live with someone they were afraid to think around? Who could jerk off, talk to his girlfriend, take a shit, pick out clothes, anything? Who could pick a fight or think trash about his buddy's hair? Who could read his latest lyrical effort aloud and not wonder who hated it? Life on tour, life in close quarters, was made of little things. It broke apart on little things, too, like a stone to a chisel. If they knew, nothing would ever be normal between them--his four friends, the loves of his life--again.
Either he had to be the freak, or they did. He was the only one who could choose.
"Not needed," the doctor was saying reassuringly when things snapped back into focus again. His words matched the emotional color behind them.
"What's not needed?" Chris asked rustily. Justin gave him some juice through a straw.
"Er," the doctor said. "Forgive me, Mr. Kirkpatrick, but I thought you were sleeping. As I was saying, the portion of your brain that was damaged on impact was very small and not needed for any known cognitive process."
"He has X-rays," Joey said to Chris in a loud whisper.
"Look hard at them," Chris said back. "Keep looking. Concentrate. So you can tell me later."
Joey did. Chris could almost feel the intensity of his stare, see his hunched shoulders, his squint. Thinking about that helped him pick Joey's thoughts out of the welter of the others'--Joey's thoughts, what was foremost in his mind, there...no, there...there.
Chris was panting by the time he got it, a watery, tilted picture of his open skull with a dark blotch near the front. It was sort of triangle-shaped. "What's that?" he asked, then kicked himself.
"What's what?" Joey asked, the picture flickering out, and Chris just weakly shook his head.
JC took Chris's hand. "When can his bandages come off?"
"Fuck that," Justin said. Chris felt them all start. "When can he come home?"
"His head injury was relatively minor and the damage is healing well, so he should be able to leave just as soon as we can determine that there are no permanent side effects from it or from the oxygen deprivation. His prognosis is excellent. You were all lucky."
Guilt covered Chris in a bleak wave, the same color that seeped out whenever Justin spoke. Guilt-gray, he thought, guilt-blue, Justin's favorite color.
He hadn't even asked them if they were all right.
He did, just as soon as he could. JC had broken his arm and collarbone. Joey'd broken two ribs. Lance had bruises on one side of his body and cuts from flying glass on the opposite cheek.
Justin, the driver, was fine. He'd landed on the culvert bank as light as a stork. He'd pulled them all to the water's edge. He'd breathed into Chris's blood-slick mouth until Lance edged him aside and did it right.
He wished he'd died right there. In a way, he had. Chris could feel his spirit twisting inside him, staked to the last place he remembered being alive.
"Oh, Justin," he whispered. "It's okay." He used JC's thoughts to find Justin's face, cupping his cheek. Satin and scruff. "I'm fine. We're fine."
He would make it true.
*****
Chris got better.
He ate a lot, because JC wanted him to, and practiced dancing a lot, because Lance worried guiltily about schedules and delayed tour dates and wiping drunk-driving rumors off the record. He watched movies with Joey because they allowed Joey to not feel the crash, to not see the air pitch out of true and the shadow of the bridge fall over the dash and Chris's still body in a puddle of red.
Chris didn't really want to see that either.
He wasn't scarred much at all, true to Justin's pronouncement. His hair looked funny, buzzed off in the middle and freaked up the sides, with a little dent in his skull where the missing piece had gone into his brain. He tried not to touch it until the hair grew in again, but he found himself playing with it anyway, daring himself to push, as if it was only as thick as an eyelid and he could force it to blink.
He got better. It was ironic, because after a few weeks, he was pretty sure nothing he did would make any difference at all.
There were good things about hearing and feeling everyone around him. It was amazing sitting by Joey when he goo-gooed to Brianna on the phone, to feel that poignant, helpless love plucking at dormant caves in his soul. To cherish, to fear, that much, over something he couldn't control awed Chris. He wanted to kiss Joey every single fucking time, kiss him like a husband-wife-lover-child-friend-human being, because Joey, this unremarkable guy, was so beautiful when he loved.
He loved sitting in the bunk next to JC's when he worked on a song that was going well, when he shrank to a wisp of consciousness and Chris could almost strum the silver cord that chained him to his body. But he didn't need to strum it, because the words did, words big and blocky, words thin and elegant, traversing the fragile thread between JC's spirit and his hand. Each perfect strum mating into a chord, each chord greeting the night, and when he asked Josh what he'd done until dawn, he'd say "Nothing" and smile.
He liked being near Lance most of all, because Lance was calm. Not boring, not vacuous, just orderly, as natural as forming crystal or uncurling ferns. Lance didn't have annoying tics. He didn't tap his pencil on his teeth or think incessantly about sex or stare off on a tangent about what it was like to die. He thought in lists, in hierarchies, in numbers. Reason beat emotion in Lance on most occasions, and reason was damned soothing to listen to.
He found that, with effort, he could tune himself to one of them like a radio and fall asleep to their thoughts. If nothing too surprising intruded--like JC fantasizing about Johnny once, Jesus--and no one else came within a block of the buses, Chris could sleep two or three hours at a stretch, re-tune, and sleep again.
What he was tuning himself away from was Justin.
He hated himself for it. Justin was his little brother, his best friend, his basketball buddy, his would-be savior. But Justin looked at Chris and wanted to die, and Chris didn't know how to make him stop. And some days--most days--he was just too sick of failure to try.
It didn't help that Justin had never been happy, and none of them had known. He fretted constantly about image, about letting them down, about disappointing the world, about being a fool. He worried that they all thought he would leave them; he feared the someday-Justin, older, more worldly, who just might do it. He was afraid he was useless, that he'd done nothing to last, that he was selfish and didn't know it, that he was going to hell.
He feared something he didn't name, even alone in the dark. Chris, who feared it once, knew. Justin was bisexual.
In other words, Justin was young like Chris used to be, just exactly the same, and Chris didn't think he had the strength to do it all again. It was safer to leave him alone until the danger passed and Justin put the man he would become together from the pieces.
After two weeks of practice and not much else, Lance started getting more anxious and less restful, and Chris knew why. They'd missed four tour dates already and were scheduled for two more before hiatus. Joey's ribs were all but healed and JC was down to a short cast and a sling, and Chris's hair was almost back to...well, what passed for normal on his head, and there seemed no real reason not to go on. They'd have to modify some of the choreography, but it didn't matter much; Justin was fine and seventy percent of the screamers were there for him anyhow.
The only person who voiced an objection to this, oddly enough, was Justin.
"I don't think we should," Justin said, jaw set, as he folded a playing card over his middle finger. Flick. Chris shot his own at one of JC's wardrobe hats and missed. "We were in a serious accident three fucking weeks ago, man. Construction workers take off for that. Mailmen take off for that. We got the cash, I say we can take off for that."
Chris ground his teeth with Justin's tension. He forced himself to stop.
"Justin," Lance said, voice gentling. "You're fine. We're fine. It's over. Time to get past this."
"I'm past it," Justin snapped. "I just want to chill a little. The last three weeks sucked ass, Lance, and don't tell me they didn't because I can see the circles under your eyes. Why the hell did we make all this money if we can't relax?"
"I know how we can relax," Lance said. Chris's eyes stabbed to him with something like horror, as if he was in a dark theater watching the first lick of flame. "We can take a nice, relaxing ride. Your turn to drive, Justin. Let's go."
"Fuck you!" Justin screamed.
Lance had a black eye when it was done, and Justin's nose bled. Chris saw him rolling the dark liquid between his fingertips, speculative, and shuddered at what he saw in Justin's mind.
Justin didn't drive, even when Lance actually offered it as the price for cancelling the last two tour dates. They went on as planned in Philly.
*****
Chris went over it in his mind beforehand. He would tune himself to Lance. Lance was stablest. He would fill his head with numbers, count every step. Picture the sheet music taking up the field of his vision, the regular lines and the neat black notes, the font of the words, the cryptic m-shapes of rests. He wouldn't get lost. He wouldn't let them down.
He stayed as much by himself as possible backstage, breathing deep and trying to push all the minds around him to a distance like he did crowd noise. One of the lighting crew guys fumed over his ex-girlfriend just outside the door, though, and every time he stalked past, Chris got a cramp in his neck. JC came behind him and rubbed it away.
He leaned back into the touch, groaning. He sometimes suspected C of being telepathic too, only from birth, so he'd grown up thinking it was normal to share your consciousness with everyone around you. It was comforting to think he wasn't alone, that someday if he got the guts to confess, someone would be there to explain it all. (He knew it couldn't be true, though. Another telepath would never sing the same four lines of 'Karma Chameleon' in his head for two solid hours if he could hear how intensely Chris wished him dead.)
"All right?" JC asked.
Chris tilted his head back to look at him. "Yeah."
"You're quiet."
"You're complaining?"
JC smiled. "No, no, not me. I just thought you were maybe thinking over what Justin said."
"What, about needing time off? No, Lance is right. It's only two more nights. We owe it to the fans." He stood up. The light rigger thought of hitting and blood, a red, blunt thought, and Chris staggered, catching himself against the back of the chair.
"New shoes," he said weakly.
"Time," Lance called from the dressing room door. "Let's hack, people."
They were nearly saved from having to go on at all by Justin's sudden and inexplicable lack of skill at hacky-sack. He stepped on Lance's foot twice and kicked JC in the hand. Joey finally looked to Chris with mute appeal--which, in Chris's case, wasn't that mute--and Chris said, "We don't really need any more bad luck, J."
Justin's constant reservoir of guilt overflowed. He kicked the sack like he was supposed to on the next pass, lips white.
Lance was furious when they walked onstage, as hard to tune to as a forest fire. JC's hand hurt, Joey was distracted and pessimistic, and Justin ached inside like the trapped sound of waves in a quarry.
Chris was exhausted until the crowd hit him. Then he was nothing at all.
It was falling into a lake of lava, too incomprehensibly vast a sensation to call pain. It was walking on the sun. It was dropping forty thousand feet to his death while dosing on ten hits of prime acid. The thought of control was laughable. He opened his mouth to sing and his lungs imploded.
*****
They told him about it later. He'd stumbled through two and a half songs of choreography before charging at the edge of the stage, with the apparent goal of bodysurfing the crowd. Fortunately their security was not entirely innured to threats from within and managed to wrestle him to the floor. It came off as typical Kirkpatrick tomfoolery, and his stiff, plastic body was carried away to applause and hooting.
The citizens of Philadelphia got a four-man show. Chris got a MRI.
He was normal. No one found that as funny as he did.
Lance was disgusted with him. "God, Chris, if you didn't want to play the show, you should have just stayed home. Do you have any idea the kind of press this is giving us on top of the accident?"
"Lance, relax," Chris said, jaw throbbing. It was a matter of survival at this point--his or Lance's, since he wasn't sure if Lance would get to him before Justin got to Lance. "I was screwing around, and I must've pushed myself too far. I got dizzy and passed out. It happens. The doctor said I could get dizzy spells for the first month or so."
"We need to cancel the next show," Justin said tightly. Chris longed to shake him. And Lance. Together. In a cement mixer. "Who's with me? Chris's health or a million bucks? Lance, you can vote too."
"Christ, grow up!" Joey snapped. "Both of you! Chris, do you want to go on with the last date or not? Decide."
"No," Chris said, and bit his lip to keep from crying.
Lance's anger rolled over him, and below it the gasoline choke of fear. He hadn't expected Chris to refuse a performance, not ever. The Chris he knew wouldn't. Justin's savage joy flared.
"Do you feel sick?" JC asked gently. " We can look for a specialist if--"
"No, C, no...I'm fine, I just..." ~Just can't face going in front of people ever again because I'll go batshit nuts and die.~ "I just think I rushed it a little. It wouldn't hurt to take a rest. If you guys went on alone, I'm sure--"
"We will," Lance said quickly. His eyes caught Justin's, and there was reason, not rage, behind them. "A lot of people paid good money to see us. Came a long way. It's only one night, J."
~Do it,~ Chris thought. ~Please.~
Justin nodded.
Chris was alone the night of the last concert. They got him a live feed. He cried for an hour. It was the first emotion he had to himself in almost a month.
*****
He hoped that the end of the tour would fix things, or at least give him space to think about them, but it didn't. He was expected to comment on his recovery. MTV wanted a soundbite. Rosie wanted an interview to headline a show devoted to children who were injured in car accidents. BOP wanted to update his picture with the new hairstyle.
When he didn't call any of them, Lance started dropping him e-mails, then calling his cell from unfamiliar numbers.
"Chris, c'mon," he said in what would have been a whine if he were Justin, while Chris sat on his lawn and tried to tune out the frantic tangents of the landscaper. He was a Boston transplant. "Work with me here. They're asking us whether you're really recovered. They're hinting about prescription drug abuse. Is it so hard to get your face on camera saying 'I got a little dizzy at the last show, I overdid it, but I'm back on track'? I can set it up for Friday."
"It's nice," Chris said. "Talking to you on the phone. I missed it." He had, too. Without the confusing echo effect of Lance's thoughts blurring every word, it was like he had his friend back.
Lance sighed. "Chris."
"I'll take care of it, okay? Don't stress." The landscaper was in the middle of a wisteria-or-spruce crisis. He sounded like an aviary full of small, shrill birds.
"Okay, Chris, but how--"
"Just a minute. I have to go bludgeon a yard worker to death. Be right back."
He set Lance down very gently and walked over to the landscaper. Breathed in...one, out...two, like C'd shown him. Centered himself, found his chi, lined up his chakras. "Wisteria." The man's lashes flapped. "Ten. Save the spruce for the rear of the yard. And I don't want you mixing pink and red flowers in the bed by the back door, no matter what you saw on the Rue de Saint-Laurent. Now please do something far away."
He walked back to the phone, the itch on his spine finally dissipating. Lance had hung up. Chris called back and he claimed it was interference from driving under an overpass.
Chris sent a statement to MTV, a tape to Rosie, and a couple of head shots to BOP, along with a vague apology for his busy popstar schedule. Otherwise, he stayed in his house a lot, put in hours at Playstation, and bounced the basketball around in his driveway in at least a hundred games of none-on-one. He erased his messages without listening to them.
After three or four days of that, Justin came over--"To see if you did a Hendrix, man, shit"--and followed Chris around all afternoon. His thoughts differed so much from his light and avid chatter that Chris had to escape to the kitchen and swallow vodka straight from the bottle. Did Justin always lie this competently, lie with his body, his hands, his ready smile? Was he really any more conflicted, inside from image, than Chris, or did it just seem ominous because Chris was objective?
After his third trip to the kitchen, Justin diffused into a glowy, angular shape on the rug in front of the couch. He was sort of beautiful that way, like a hurt deer, wanting help but ready to kick Chris for trying. Chris sat as near as he dared and rubbed the back of Justin's neck.
"Did you walk over?" he asked.
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Kick. Pain shot through Chris's forehead.
"Nothing. What it means."
"Yeah, 'course I walked. It's only a couple of blocks."
"Have you driven since--"
"No!" Kick. The pain was crippling, nauseating, like a migraine on the end of a mallet.
"I--"
"Drop it."
"Justin--"
"Drop. It. Now." Warring guilt and anger. "I don't...want to talk about it, Chris. Please." Chris caught an image of a little brown bottle, haloed with paper-brittle reassurance. "I'm taking something a doctor gave me. It's helping. I just...I don't like talking about it."
They went quiet together.
"Does it work?" Chris asked.
"Kind of." That felt true.
"What does it do?"
"Mostly makes me sleep. Calms me down. Things aren't as big a deal."
Silence again, tenuous, with Justin's hope and anxiety stretched over a chasm of despair. Chris knew all about that, so intimately that he wasn't sure how much of the feeling belonged to which of them. "Do you think the doctor could give me some?"
Justin nodded, looking at his big, bony hands where they linked between his knees. His thoughts were enough like Chris's that the rest of the night was almost comfortable.
*****
Justin's pills helped Chris a lot for the first week. That was mostly because he spent eighteen hours of every day unconscious, and the rest in a fugue so profound that it rendered him insensate. He lost his appetite and his skin numbed and he forgot to blink when the sun hit his eyes. He still heard thoughts, but he lost the urge to interpret them. It was like spending his waking life very drunk at a pep rally.
He even managed to do an interview, but a few times he forgot to match the movement of the questioner's lips with what he heard and ended up answering things he wasn't asked. Some of those answers were rather startling, to judge by the alacrity with which JC or Joey sprang to fill the silence.
He sat backstage somewhere getting makeup reapplied, and Lance yelled at him. No...he fought to focus, and Lance's mouth was a hard black line. Lance wanted to yell but there were too many outsiders. Lance wanted to know what he was on. Lance wanted to know whether he was trying to sink the group for a reason or if it was just simple disrespect. Lance wanted to know why Chris and Justin didn't just get better, since there was no margin in staying in limbo like they were and it was scaring him.
Lance feared change, Chris saw. Not outer change--he'd always liked that, an unfamiliar beach, an new restaurant, an unplanned vacation--but deep change, the kind that mattered. He didn't want Justin and Chris to end up different, to forever alter the dynamic that supported all of them and always had.
It was too late for that, but Chris couldn't say so. He couldn't do anything but let Lance be frightened in peace.
The producer of the talk show came up to him with an expression a lot like Lance's. "Your job from now on is to say nothing. You will sit in front of the camera and smile and no one will ask you any questions, and then you'll get up and go home. All right? Good. Now take your seat. We're back in two."
Chris said nothing. The show was a blur. He fell asleep under the warm lights and Justin had to wake him to walk him to his car.
*****
Lance got Joey to find Chris's stash of medication. Joey was the best at finding things. By the time Chris emerged from his stupor to look for his daily dose, it was dissolving in the plumbing.
Chris perched on one end of his couch and Lance sat on the other, his discomfort as palpable as a clammy shirt. Justin glowered from the doorway. Chris put his hands over his face and imagined pushing his fingers past his eyeballs, through his scar, pulping the brain beyond into a restful mess.
"You need to get some help," Lance said. ~Please,~ he added, not aloud, but Chris tasted the tinfoil sting of desperation. ~Before we have to do something.~
Chris closed his shaded eyes. He could have found Joey, seated in the recliner, a mile away. His concern was that vivid. "Okay. Okay."
"You too, J," Lance began, and Chris rose with a marionettelike jerk as Justin snapped.
"Am I fucking up shows?"
"No--"
"Am I fucking up interviews?"
"No, but--"
"Am I smiling at the goddamned, fucking paparazzi? Am I making nice for the fans? Because if I am, Lance, if I am, I am not your problem. Stop trying to solve me."
They glared at each other. Chris held the back of his neck with both hands, fighting to breathe.
"Never mind," Lance snarled at last. "Chris, I know someone you can talk to. Her name's Mitzi Calhoun. I think you'll like her." He collected his cell and his coat, with a click and a snap, and paused at the door. "I'll call you with the time, okay?"
"Get the fuck out!" Justin yelled.
Chris gaped, but Joey hadn't heard it and neither had Lance. Still, the fury behind the thought stunned him. Only the strongest thoughts cohered into sentences.
"Don't hate him," Chris begged after the others left. Justin leaned against him apologetically, reeking of guilt.
*****
Chris's therapist was nice. She had warm brown eyes, russet hair, and pale creamy skin, and she volunteered at a free clinic on weekends. Her two teenage daughters threatened once a week to run away with various boys, and she suspected her husband of cheating with his personal trainer. Chris missed most of his first session tracking her inner monologue and finally steered the subject to family so the contrast wasn't so jarring.
She sympathized about his lean upbringing and was glad that he got on all right with his mother. She kept wanting to bring up Sarah and Sabrina, so he finally asked, and she punctuated the rest of their time together with examples of their misbehavior. She tried very hard to phrase them positively, in a way that absolved her of judgment, but inside she was certain her children would stay out of trouble if she were a better mother. She was particularly self-critical because she'd done an internship in youth counseling.
The second time they met, Chris told her that her daughters were normal but overindulged, and that they wanted her to set limits. He suggested she follow her instincts and make Sarah break it off with Tim, who was too old. He also hinted that her husband felt neglected because her attention was always on work. By the end of the hour, she was holding his hand and telling him how mature he was.
During the third session, Mitzi was determined to give Chris all her concentration. She did very well, despite a fifteen-minute mental detour into what route would be the fastest to get home to defrost the roast, and he saw what Lance liked about her. She was doggedly analytical and never excused self-pity. They discussed the accident, and he confessed worry about Justin.
When he arrived for his fourth visit, Mitzi wasn't there. Her secretary said she was taking some personal leave, which he saw meant that her fears about the personal trainer had proven true and she'd taken her two daughters to Atlanta. The secretary offered to refer him to another doctor.
Chris passed. He started drinking instead.
*****
There wouldn't have been a problem with drinking a lot if he didn't do it so often with Justin. He wound up forgetting to compensate for his stature ("What's that, in heels?" Lance had snorted, looking over Chris's first press sheet) and usually puked his guts out in, or near, a bar or restaurant.
At least his hair was short. He wasn't recognized as often as Justin was, stooping beside him and rubbing the back of his neck and glaring at strangers.
Justin, drunk, was a mixed blessing. He usually drank too much because of a surfeit of bad emotions and twitchy, cyclic thoughts. Then, after the seventh round, something clicked in his head and he...melted. That was the only word for it. Lax, mellow, talkative, and horny, with a flat-footed, oil-hipped glide and the strong inclination to wrap around Chris. He was usually hard.
That was a mixed blessing, too, because Chris had the advantage of knowing Justin was bi. Justin had yet to shake that reality out of his mid-brain. He probably thought he was experiencing a prolonged adolescence or some weird side effect of strong tequila, and Chris decided it was unfair to push him.
He had a hard time remembering that sometimes, because Justin was hot, and acted easy when he drank. And he needed so much. Needed to hold Chris's temples when he heaved, needed to walk him home curled in one arm, needed to hear Chris mumble, "You're th' bes', Just'," seconds before passing out in bed.
Once he only pretended to pass out, and Justin kissed him, quick but firm, on the lips. Justin's thoughts were an amiable blur, affectionate without intent, and Chris sighed in relief. He'd expected a kiss to be harder to resist.
Soon it was time to leave for the month-long promotional tour. That was another of Lance's new ideas, and Chris suspected its purpose was dual: first, to fulfil their obligations to advertisers and second, to get any potentially embarrassing public behavior over and forgotten by tour time itself. For it, they were taking a single bus and a small crew, mostly security and a few staff.
Chris and Justin hid out from it at Chris's house with two cases of Skyy and several pints of whiskey. Chris was actually hiding from the single bus and Justin from Lance, but it came to the same thing. They made labyrinths with tables and sheets, like they'd done when Justin was a kid, and spent hours wobbling through them on their hands and knees. They had thumb wars over the prize in the Captain Crunch box. They ate picnics of pasta and ketchup and tacos on a blanket on the roof, and when Justin leaned over to be sick and fell on the wisteria, Chris howled.
Justin sprained his wrist and scratched the hell out of his back. Chris had to rewrap the ace bandage three times because he couldn't stop his hands from shaking. "Is there blood?" Justin kept whispering, and Chris was disturbed at how turned on he was--Justin was--he was. Their minds slipped together.
"Yeah, there's blood," he murmured. "I'll get it for you," and he licked Justin's shoulder, and that was fucking crazy. It stupefied him, went off in his face with a flat Fourth-of-July concussion of DUMB. He wasn't going to confuse the kid. He wasn't.
He licked his bloody fingertip instead. Justin turned around shock-slow, staring.
"I'm sorry," Chris whispered. Justin nodded, eyes swallowed in shadow, then stood to take the disinfectant from Chris's hand.
They almost kissed. Chris felt the panicked little wriggles of Justin's breath on his upper lip, the stamp-stamp-stamp of his heart like the throb of a silenced bell. They were both wasted, like they always were when they got this close, but it was different now. There was iron on the air.
Justin wanted to suck his lip. So did Chris. Justin's welts burned Chris's skin, hot and fresh, like something clawing its way out.
He chickened out finally, or Justin did. The moment broke, the bell tolled. He painted the cuts over with bitter iodine and gave Justin a clean shirt, fresh from the package.
They slept in a fort under the dining room table.
They drank the last of the whiskey with spoonfuls of frozen orange juice in it, sitting on Chris's veranda the next morning. The sun rose red.
"I want to die," said Justin, beside Chris. Chris looked at him, but there was no way to tell if he'd spoken aloud.
JC picked them up, for which Chris was grateful. JC's morning thoughts were as scattered as sun-stroked clouds. He made little noises of revulsion at the state of the living room and louder ones about the kitchen, but he didn't say anything unnecessary. He drove Chris into the downstairs shower and levered Justin into the upper one by some supernatural means, clucking, "Oh, baby," under his breath.
Chris and Justin both suffered mild DTs on the way to the compound where they were meeting the bus. They drank water and went very pale and their sweat stank, and Joey opened up his window all the way and bitched, and Lance sat rigidly quiet until Chris wanted to crack him in the head.
Johnny told them that they looked like death. Chris was sober enough now to hear the thread of alarm running beneath the anger--was this the beginning of the end? Were they going to rack up drug charges, start punching bouncers and slapping girls? Would he have to spin a stretch in detox soon? He sounded just like Lance, complete with the genuine concern that left Chris incapable of resenting him.
Chris tried very hard to tune himself to Justin when he fell asleep across JC's lap after the bus rolled, but he couldn't. The others' thoughts were too intrusive. He blinked heavily in the sun.
"You could have killed him. He could have died." Joey. "He's not used to drinking like you, Chris."
"He's not five." He leaned his head on the rumbly glass. Concrete smeared by.
"He still could've."
He tried to get mad at Joey. Failed for the hundredth time. Joey was thinking of Brianna, how someday he wouldn't be able to keep her safe from bad judgment, and Chris was helpless against that protective love.
He sighed and didn't say anything at all.
"Forget it, Joe," Lance muttered, standing, and slammed to the back of the bus. "Apparently someone's got to die to get through to them."
~I hope not,~ Chris thought. He fell asleep with his face buried in the crook of Justin's shoulder and JC stroking the hair over his scar.
*****
Chris discovered a way to get through promo gigs. He sat very still, said nothing to anyone, and planned trips in his head. Sometimes he told his family and the group that he was going, and sometimes he just disappeared, bought false ID, shaved, grew his hair long and worked somewhere he never had to wear shoes. He went to lots of remote places, with mindless sounds in them--running brooks, sighing pines, rushing waves. He slept for a month. He never, ever drank. He read without JC crumpling up three pages of lyrics between the lines. He listened to music without Lance pondering the ethics of the latest Law & Order.
He wrote letters to everyone, telling them that he'd seen the best of them and they were beautiful, telling them he missed them almost as much as he missed peace. (Sometimes his eyes watered at that part, but he invented an allergy problem and Makeup gave him eyedrops between takes.)
He debated really doing it before the next tour commenced, but he was a coward. He saw himself in Cozumel or Bali in a sea of Nsync-fan tourists, picking and prying and fretting at him with their minds, like the birds in the Hitchcock movie. He saw a Mexican insane asylum, wall to wall with schizophrenic minds and catatonic minds and psychopathic minds and manic-depressive minds. He pictured telling dark-skinned eloquent doctors about the voices that never let him sleep, and them restraining him and drugging him and shaking their heads when he never got better.
It was better to pretend he could escape than to try. He needed to remember that.
"Why are you so sad?" asked a fan, a boy of about ten.
They all sat flanking the crowd at a closed mall in Spokane, and Chris stopped automatically scribbling the inner swoop of the K in his last name to stare. He'd been in Big Sur. The redwoods were tall and quiet, the shadows evergreen.
"What do you mean?"
"You always used to have fun and laugh and mess around," the boy said. "Now you look sad all the time."
Chris could feel Lance listening to the exchange, and the black flood of his helplessness appalled Chris. He had no idea how personally Lance took Chris's continued depression, how profound he perceived his failure. "I'm fine," Chris said, putting all the energy he could into the words. "Really. Just a little tired from being on the road. Missing my family and stuff. Wouldn't you?"
The little boy nodded. "I'd miss my mom."
"Well, me too. Even grownups miss their moms." He finished signing his name.
He was limp.
*****
Bev called him on his cell a little after dinner. He sprang up, thrilled to get away from Joey's mental porn-loop of a girl he'd had in back of a club three weeks before. Her voice was strange to him at first, an artifact from a childhood that seemed only part his.
"Hey, mom," he said, throwing himself on his bunk. "Did Lance offer you a walk-on in his next film for cheering me up?" It was touching, in a literal, Lance-like way.
"Do you need cheering up?" she asked.
"I dunno," Chris said. "I don't think there's much you can do about my crappy mood, but I'm glad you called. How's everybody?"
She told him, at length and in detail. He drank it in, savoring the pure energy of a voice without thoughts, like a flute without glissando. The mutter of the others receded, and with it the knot that never quite left the back of his neck.
It wasn't a cure, he thought, but he owed Lance for this.
They talked until his phone beeped and skipped. He offered to borrow one of the guys' and call back, but she hesitated, and he realized it was after midnight there. He blew her a kiss good night instead.
When he hung up, his hands shook. He felt raw, unsafe, like the telepathy was brand new. He went to the minifridge and popped a beer.
"We're gonna watch 'Gods and Monsters'," JC called from the couch. "Wanna sit by me? Joey had those last two burritos, so weigh that in your decision."
"Don't be a hero," Lance cautioned.
Joey made a rude sound. "Warning shot!"
"I saw it already," Chris blurted. "It sucked." He almost ran to his bed, jamming his headphones on and cranking the Beastie Boys as loud as they could go.
Even that and a new issue of Strings didn't drown out the moment Justin understood--the wages of age and fame and failure and homosexuality in the body of a too-human monster, whom kindness availed nothing. Whose friends always betrayed him. Who always died at the end.
He came to Chris's door a little after midnight. Chris opened it before he knocked, and Justin slammed into his arms. He was crying so hard Chris could smell the ocean.
"Chris--I-I-I--"
"Shhhh." Chris sat him on the end of the bed, thankful for the dark, because he was crying too. He couldn't help it. It was like freaking out onstage--there was just too much emotion not to react to. "It's okay, J. It's okay."
"No, Chris, I-I-I have to tell you s-something, I've been th-thinking about it for a wh-while now and I-I-I have to just s-say it to somebody. And I wa-want to say it to you." Chris expected another spate of fumbling, but Justin snuffled deep and sighed. "I like guys. Like them. You get it?"
"Sure," Chris said. His bladder almost let go with the strength of Justin's relief. He trembled, perching beside him. "Good for you, Just. That took a lot of guts."
Confusion twined the air. "Um, you...that's all you're gonna say?"
"Yeah, well...that and 'me too'," said Chris. "I've known I was bi since I was thirteen, but I didn't have the balls to tell anyone for four years."
"Oh my God," Justin said, hugging him again. His heart drummed against Chris's like a bird's. "God, Chris, all this time I had no fucking clue and you...Did you tell any of us?"
"Nope," Chris said. That surprised him, now that he said it, but it was true. He rubbed Justin's sweaty back. "I think Lance guessed, maybe. And you never know with JC. But you're the first one of the group I told in words."
"Aw, man," Justin said. "Aw, man, I'm so...happy right now, I just...this weight, I didn't know, it just took off and flew away and I am so..." And he started crying again.
Chris looked up, sensing Lance outside the door. Listening, but not wondering why. Lance was a lot more perceptive than people thought.
"Want to sleep here tonight?" Chris asked, taking the plunge. It was the first time he'd voluntarily lingered near this intense a display in months.
Justin froze in his arms, heart stuttering, and Chris realized what it sounded like. "Sleep, J. Just sleep! You know, sort of an unconscious queer bonding thing."
They both laughed shaky laughs. "Sure, I guess," Justin said, and burrowed into Chris's side.
It was harder than Chris remembered finding room for both of them in the bunk, but they managed. Justin was warm, and soft, and smelled good, like fear fading away.
Chris rode his happiness to sleep.
He woke just before dawn. Justin was already up, rigid against his back and staring down the monster--his creation, the terrible shining self who wanted men and craved the spotlight, who was beyond entreaty, who destroyed both hope and reason as he was destroyed. His sole weapon scared Chris more than anything in a hundred nights.
It was love.
~loveChris,~ Justin's thoughts burbled, trusting. ~loveChrisloveChrislove~. If he loved, he wasn't selfish, wasn't a sinner, wasn't damned. If he loved, he wasn't alone. ~loveChris~ running his hand over his strong belly, cupping his own hip, eyes closed, and they were Chris's hands against him, his eyelids crinkling with will, afraid but oh he needed, just the same, just enough, just in balance. Wanted to reach out and ask with all his body. Meant to offer the home of his soul.
~Oh, God, spare me this~, thought Chris. ~Not now, God. You wouldn't be so cruel.~
Justin reached out, the monster and the man coming to an agreement. Serenity flooded them both. He touched Chris's shoulder, hummed in his ear.
Chris turned over, hunching, and moaned "Lance," under his breath.
The immediacy of Justin's self-recrimination stunned Chris. It was like stepping on a mine full of razorblades. ~of course of COURSE he saved him I didn't! he saved him I didn't don't shouldn't even have tried don't deserve! not mine not mine!~ The monster turned on Justin, terrifying when it couldn't be saved, and he embraced it. ~I die at the end. I die at the end. I should have known I die at the end~
Horrified, Chris turned to--stop Justin, fix him, hold him, something, but he was already gone, his indentation in the bunk cool. Chris had been too pole-axed to feel him leave.
JC, he begged silently. Joey. Find him. Get up. No one can feel like that three feet from your door without waking you, can they? He could still hear Justin's sobs faintly through the wall--at least he thought he could.
Finally he tiptoed out and pretended to fall against JC's door, then sprinted back to his own bed. A few minutes later, Josh sat on the edge of the toilet seat, rocking Justin and murmuring, "Shh, shh. We already knew you were, baby. We already knew."
Justin let him think that was everything, just one big coming-out crisis, and wept hot tears on the collar of JC's T-shirt. Chris the coward lay stiff on his bunk, drowning in chlorine and hair gel and Sportstick. His own betrayal hovered around him like a ghost.
*****
Chris reflected on how normal the mornings were, now that he knew what happened on some of the nights.
JC was a periodic insomniac who went about three days a month without sleep. By the third day, his mind teemed with desperate blind alleys and bargains with God, and every waking moment was choked with the groundless fear that he would never rest again.
Joey sometimes felt so lonely, so sick to hold Brianna, to hold anyone, that he couldn't cry. He would pace instead, his arms locked around a pillow from the couch, reminding himself why he chose this life every time he had a choice. Some nights, it was a very short list, and Chris was always on it.
Sometimes Justin lay pinned, restless, under the blank slide of sleep, just aware enough to perceive its weight. His legs twitched, the memory of growing pains stretching the tendons and snapping at the bone, and he punched the walls in a frenzy he forgot by dawn. Buried alive, Chris always thought, buried in the coffin of his bus bunk.
Chris remembered punching walls once, too.
The next morning they always got up, though, said Hello and made toast and fought over the remote and gave the condiments funny voices, and Chris was more haggard than any of them. He peered close at Joey and saw the seams of isolation, sealed for now, but weeping. He felt JC's dread as he closed his eyes for a failed nap on the couch. Justin wore little white-centered calluses on his knuckles. And he marveled that for years, these people had borne these pains and smiled, joked, called Chris's great experiment a success. Cried in the dark and laughed for the camera and said it was worth it in the end.
He wanted to write them all a song. Wanted to hold them all and tell them they could go home if they really wanted. Wanted to deserve them.
"Love you, Josh," he said one morning. "Love you, Joe. Lance, Justin."
"Um, Chris?" said Lance. "Is this the part where you tell us you have a week to live? Because dibs on your stereo." ~I love you.~
"No, it's the part where I say I love you, Bass. Will you marry me?"
"What, all of us?" JC said. ~I love you, Chris.~ "That's kinky."
"I sort of have," Chris answered. He smiled. "By the power invested in me, I now pronounce us Nsync."
"Chris, you're a freak," Joey said. "Lay off the Pixy Stix. And gimme the butter." ~I love you, too.~
Justin didn't say anything. He should have known then.
After his rejection, Chris was afraid that Justin would hate Lance openly, but he forgot that Justin's love--all of it--was secret. Barely realized, never declared, and why shouldn't Chris want Lance instead? Just because Chris had picked Justin first at the inception of the band and Lance last didn't give him the right to expect anything. He didn't deserve Chris. He was too old to doubt justice.
Justin was very mature about things. He didn't hate Lance openly. He hated him privately, on a sort of deathless hate pyre for which he himself was fuel. Chris could barely stand to be on the same bus with him after a few nights, particularly because Lance sensed something acrid on the air and wondered, with dumb pain, why it burned him.
He'd avoided clubbing since the accident, afraid of meeting a critical mass of fans and having another collapse. Now the idea of losing his identity tempted. At least onstage, he'd been nothing, remembered nothing, endured nothing, dreaded nothing. What was the big deal? A few moments of stark terror, then oblivion.
He drank way too much the first night out. He hadn't counted on the sensations and impressions of hundreds of drunk and drugged minds multiplying the effects of his four beers until he staggered to a corner and threw up on someone's Dockers. The someone grabbed him by the back of the head and kicked him in the lower spine, and things swirled for awhile until the air turned wet and dark.
"Way to fucking go in there, Kirkpatrick," Joey muttered. "Very classy." Mist-ringed streetlights. Blacktop. Motion. Disgust-anger-fear. They turned a corner in someone's rental car and Chris passed out for a merciful interval.
When he woke, he was feverish. He pressed his cheek to the metal inner wall of the bus, shivering. JC and Joey talked about him in the darkened sitting area, as clear as his own voice.
"Gonna get himself killed," Joey sighed. "He's not the same. He looks right...through you when you talk to him and you just know it's not sinking in. I mean, jeez. Have you seen his eyes?" Joey went quiet. "Maybe...Maybe Lance isn't so far off base with the rehab idea. They could at least figure out why."
"I don't want him to go," JC said in a small voice. Chris heard the catch in it, the swift tear-controlling breath they all knew. "I love him. He loves us. I can't believe he'd be better off without us."
"Lance is just worried," Joey said. He sounded apologetic. "When he's worried, he lays out a plan. That's how he thinks."
"I know," JC said. His affection for Lance was a small, warm spark in the dark. "Just...just give him til the end of the promo tour. That's less than a week, and then we have six weeks down time. We'll see what happens by then and if it doesn't get better, we'll do an intervention."
"Justin won't," Joey said after a moment. "He won't help. He won't believe anything bad about Chris."
"Justin," JC said wearily. "That's something else."
"He's fine," Joey said. If he'd been Lance, Chris would have tasted the match-head tang of irony, but Joey was just sad. Wet ashes. "He says so."
"He's not."
"He does his job." Joey shifted in the dimness. Chris could feel him prying at his own shoulders to ease the strain. "I tried talking to him, I tried teasing him, I tried...I dunno, I fucking tried."
"Maybe once Chris is doing better," JC offered.
"Maybe."
Neither of them said "if", but Chris heard it. He burned up like a signal flare in the dark, unrescued.
*****
He didn't drink the next time he went to a club. The disorientation was almost more than his balance could handle anyway. He found himself talking to a girl in the back hallway, a pale, long-faced girl with Picasso breasts and a short, short dress. She lifted the skirt to disclose a wisp of red silk, and he had to touch and tug and finally ask aloud to make sure there was an offer being made someplace other than his mind.
He pushed aside the thong and hesitated, and she hissed, "I'm on something, no babies, 's okay," but he fumbled on a condom anyway because he wasn't going to spend what were arguably his end times pollinating VD throughout the midwest. He slid into her with no effort at all.
"Ohgod," she groaned. "Ohgodyeahohmaannn, mmm--" and he fucked her, the dark meeting over them and between them and inside them, red-shot dark with no thoughts in it. He felt her nipples harden like they were his, in a weird double prickle, and they were his and hers and his again, and her body went taut and gulped, gulped, gulped at his cock in orgasmic thirst and he was nothing. He was nothing. He was gone.
He kissed her, in thanks and because she wanted him to, then zipped halfway up and looked for someone else to make him disappear.
Getting head didn't work anymore. They always worried about their technique, or compared the size of his dick to other band members', or wished he was in better shape, or thought of something completely nonsexual that distracted him. He knew what he wanted when he met them, and when they started to drop to their knees, he asked them flat out and searched their thoughts for the truth. He wouldn't waste someone's time who couldn't offer him the mutual annihilation of sex.
He'd never taken full advantage of being famous. Once he had four girls in a night, and his dick was raw and throbbing for two days after. He had no potency problems once he knew they wanted it; his passion rose with theirs, and he almost always came at the same time.
He stayed away from men at first. He didn't trust his judgment, didn't know what pickup would be seen by what curious fan, didn't know if it would be as good, if he'd be safe. More than that, he was afraid he couldn't keep his own thoughts out of it. That he'd end up cruising Justin's cheekbones, his little waist, his long curly lashes, and sex would cease to be an escape.
Without meaning to, he'd memorized Justin. He coldn't help it, now that he knew his own truth. Justin lying on his stomach in a puddle of Kansas sun, the hard, graceful V of shadow inside of his bent elbow, the sharp slope of his naked back. Justin curled up on his side with his spine submerged to a row of vulnerable little bumps. His long corded legs, his big ugly feet, the way the gold hair glittered on his skin. The dry white place where he liked to bite his lip. He had the smallest earlobes Chris had ever seen.
He was a virgin. Not innocent, but still. It cast a precious freshness over him, like he was sluiced in clear water.
Chris could never think of him during sex and still feel nothing, so he tried not to think of him at all.
Despite his resolve, he ended up at a gay swingers club near the end of the week. He kissed the first person who tapped him on the shoulder in the crowd. It turned out to be JC, who stared at him with a hand to his mouth.
"Don't say you didn't know," Chris said. "You figured J out, you figured me out." Then, because there was still such frightening blankness between them, "I'm sorry--didn't mean anything by it."
"I know," JC said softly, pained. "Do you ever?"
"Oh, Christ," Chris muttered. "C...I...you don't get it, okay? You aren't going to get it. I can't...the whole point is to never...oh, fuck it." He put his hands on C's arms. "I gotta go."
"Chris, stop," JC said, jerking him close, and Chris had forgotten how strong he was. He always looked so feathery. "Stop. Please."
"Josh, either give me what I want or *let me go*."
"What do you want?"
"You know," Chris said, voice velvet, breath snagging damply against JC's neck. He pressed his hardon against C's belly, then sagged his knees a little and rode his thigh. "This."
"Oh, Chris," JC whispered, rubbing Chris's back, slow soothing all-wrong touches. "Come back to the bus with me. We can meditate. Listen to music. Relax for a while."
Chris shoved him away and stalked across the little dance floor, feeling the silken links of fear-love-anger stretch, deform, snap. Someone grabbed him by the arm, someone big and powerfully built, someone who wanted to be empty even more than he did. He let himself be dragged into the bathroom and slammed against the wall.
*****
"Joey," JC said into the phone two days later, "I can't--I don't know what it was but I woke up and I could hear him screaming. Did you find the club yet? Did you?"
"Pulling up now. Wow. Nice place. What did you say you were doing here again?"
"Shut up, just go, I feel--" JC clenched his hands. "Oh, Joey, hurry, just hurry. The bathroom, the screams echo, I think he's in the bathroom--"
Joey closed his phone when he got inside, glad he was coming from a club where leather was de riguer, glad for his big shoulders and his off-tour bulk, glad that he didn't have to punch anyone he pushed aside because he kind of sucked at punching.
He found the bathroom door wedged and wrenched at it. The memory of JC's wobbly, stunned voice added strength to the pulling. Finally he just slammed against it with all his weight, splintering the rotten jamb.
Chris was there. After driving all this way, he still barely believed it. Bent over a urinal, one side of his face purple and his eye swollen shut, while a guy bigger than Joey slammed into his ass. Chris bled, from his head and from...there, where they were joined, and his fingers shook with fatigue where they gripped the porcelain.
Joey took his cell phone, the only hard thing he had, and wrapped it in his fist. Then he crushed the guy's jaw. His knuckles exploded and his elbow popped sickeningly out of lock before clunking back in, but it was the best punch of his life. He kicked the rapist's inner thigh while he lay groaning, then aimed better and launched his balls on the end of his boot.
Chris moaned from the floor. The haze cleared from Joey's mind, a fury he'd last directed toward the fucker who'd sent a letter threatening to kidnap Bri, and he scooped Chris tenderly against his chest.
No one stopped them on the way out.
*****
The moment the man bent over Chris went down, the loop of hungry, singleminded pleasure shorted and simple agony replaced it. Chris dropped like a stone, not sure if he was crying or if all the pain just finally reached his eyes at once.
He was aware of Joey picking him up as easily as he might JC, and carrying him...somewhere. Chris got dizzy in the crowd and kept swallowing desperately, his will narrowed on one goal--not to puke on the person who was trying to help him. Because he was the asshole here. He knew how it looked.
He couldn't do it. He mostly managed to get himself and not Joey, and Joey didn't drop him in disgust, which was good.
Joey lugged him into their hotel suite an indeterminate time later and stretched him on the bed. Chris was wet but didn't stink as much, so he guessed Joey'd cleaned him up somewhere. There was a fist of pain inside him, solid but sleeping, and he was afraid to move in case it opened.
"Oh my God," Justin said nearby, on the edge of screaming. A door banged. "Ohmigod Joey what happened? What's wrong with his eye?"
~My eye?~ Chris thought. ~Great.~ He tried to touch it, but Joey slapped his hand away.
"I don't--he was--" Joey's voice fell apart, jagged, breaking. "It's beyond me."
"What's beyond you?" said Lance, emerging from the adjoining room. Chris groaned, his brain already bursting with Justin's pealing, vacant shriek, with Joey's grief. "Oh...oh God, his face."
"My face," Chris muttered. It felt stiff when he moved it, like something crumbly covered the skin. Vomit? Blood? Come?
"What was it? Oh, Jesus," JC said, running in from the hall where he'd been trying to call Joey. "Oh no...oh Chris--"
"Stop," Chris said hoarsely. Every comment, every exclamation, every flare of revulsion, sorrow, anger, fear, need to know, echoed five times in his head, once each aloud, five times silent. Silent to all but him. "Stop thinking. Oh God shut up shut up shut up shut UP SHUT UP--"
Joey slapped him. It stunned both of them--hell, all of them--into perfect stillness, within and without. Chris had a thought of his own, one whole thought, and time to say it.
"Kill me," he said. "All of you--one of you--if you love me, kill me please."
JC's hand closed on Justin's shoulder, trembling, at the moment Justin burst into hysterical sobs.
Chris put his hands over his ears and curled up. Now that he knew what he wanted, every second he was alive was one to be endured.
"He was raped at the club," Joey said. He was crying, too.
"Oh, my God," JC said. He sank to his knees beside Justin, rubbing his back in distracted circles. "Joey, did you--"
"Kick the fucker to death?" Joey said. "No. But I wanted to."
Lance touched his shoulder, and Joey's mouth twitched at one corner, not a smile, but an acknowledgement of the gesture.
"Is he afraid he got--" JC visibly bit back the A-word, though Chris felt it detonate in all of their brains like a concussion grenade. "--something, from the guy who did it?" He was groping for a reason, beyond momentary despair, that Chris would want to die.
"We have to call the cops. Give them the club name and a description. Find out if," Lance said. "We have to now."
~Good old Lance,~ Chris thought, half deaf with Justin's razor-rain of horror and Joey's looming rage and JC's helplessness. ~The man with the plan.~ But he sensed Lance's rage too, behind and through the calm words, vaster and more abiding than Joey's. It was like a glacier to an ocean. Lance would have killed the man in the bathroom, bluntly, bloodily, and lied to all of them about it. Chris was sure, because Lance wished he'd been there.
Lance hated it when his family hurt.
"Lance--" Chris's voice broke. "I need to talk to you."
"Okay, Chris, ah..." Lance began. "Alone?"
Chris nodded.
"Okay, um...guys?" Lance said, turning to the rest of them, meeting their eyes. Joey nodded, not without trepidation, and JC squeezed Justin's shoulder and stood.
Justin lunged forward. "I love you," he whispered in Chris's ear. "I love you. I love you." Breathing what he thought was a secret, his lips hot and desperate against Chris's cheek. "Oh please Chris. I love you don't leave please--"
Chris closed his eyes. Tears slipped from the corners, stinging the cuts on his cheek. He could taste Justin's love, the abandon of his giving, his heart in freefall. "Lance, get him out of here."
"I love you," Justin said, at conversation level, and then louder, screaming it until his voice went. Lance held him hard all the way to the inside door, then pushed him at JC. JC held him then, not as hard, but with filial authority Justin was forced to accept. The door eased shut behind him.
"That was pretty," Lance sighed, sitting by Chris's head.
"How do you hold it?" Chris asked curiously.
"Hold what?"
"All the rage. All the time. How do you hold it?"
"Chris..." Lance eyed him, wary rather than confused, and Chris nodded to himself. "Did you want to talk to me about something?"
"Yes," Chris said. He felt strangely calm. "You remember the crash, right?" He paused. "Well, no shit, everybody does. You remember how I hit my head?"
Wheels started to turn in Lance's head. Chris smiled at the possibilities it produced.
"I don't have a tumor. I'm not crazy. They didn't miss any bone fragments. I'm not in an altered state." Or was he? Could telepathy be put in the brain damage category? Something had certainly changed. "I can hear you think. And I can feel your feelings. Or...not feel them, but sort of...sense them, with the thoughts. Know what they are."
"Mine?" Lance said, stunned. "Mine or--"
"Everyone's," Chris said. His voice was teary again, and he swallowed. "Every fucking person on this planet."
"The fans." Lance's eyes widened as he started to get it, the scope of it. "The crowds."
"The reporters the interviewers the audiences the choreographers the caterers the cleaning ladies the drivers the managers the bag ladies we pass on the way to lunch. Everyone. Someone's always awake, Lance. Someone's always thinking. I can't...I just can't. I can't drive. I can't dance. I can't hear us sing together--" He sobbed, cringing at the pain down the right side of his face, and gave up everything he loved in pieces. "I have no life. I am no one. I'm...I'm all these...shards of everyone and...that's no way to live. I can't. I can't. Not any more. Don't make me stand it anymore."
"Chris," Lance said in an odd voice. "What am I thinking now?"
Chris closed his eyes and listened, and beyond the icy fury, he felt...warmth. Almost too intense to bear, because he'd denied himself so long. He burned with Lance's love, his fierce protection, the generosity he'd always known balanced his capacity for anger. Lance gave it to him freely, radiated it with all the determination and focus he brought to everything he loved. ~I have you. I hold you. You're mine. I care.~ He basked, mute, and let it beat his weary body to the bone.
"You aren't going to kill me," he said. "Or let me die. Damn you, Lance."
"Nope," Lance said. His eyes were red, which surprised Chris; he hadn't thought that Lance's love would move him as much as it did Chris.
"What kind of friend are you anyway?" Chris muttered. Lance smiled and stroked his hair. "You gonna tell them?"
"Shit yeah." Chris groaned. "We have to figure this out. Fix it. I'm not doing that alone, and neither are you."
"I'm never alone," Chris said. He needed aspirin. In fact, he needed stock in Bayer. "Justin..."
"I know," Lance sighed. "I bet he's the worst of all of us, too, right? I hate to think what the inside of his head sounds like."
"He worries a lot. He's afraid a lot. He's still waiting, under it all, to screw up--" He bit his lip, eyes wide, realizing that he was giving away Justin's secrets like spare change. "He...I should. I'm sorry. Don't say I told you that."
"I won't," Lance promised. But there was something altered in his eyes, softness that hadn't been there in all the years Chris had known him, and Chris got the feeling that he wouldn't forget he'd heard it. "How far does it go? The telepathy?"
"How--oh. I don't know. I was trying to make it stop, not find maximum range."
"Line of sight? Not touch."
"No--God, I wish it was that easy." Easy. Just stop touching people. It was amazing how his standards could drop.
"The guys." Lance jerked his chin to the mostly-closed suite door. "Can you hear them?"
"Oh, yeah," Chris said. "No problem. It's like a party in my head, only without the fun." He let out a breath. "Justin's still crying. He's got C started."
"How about, um...her?" Lance pointed out the window to a girl on the corner, waiting to cross.
He concentrated. "Like...well, like she's behind glass. Mumbly. Fainter. I can still catch some words."
"And him?" Gestured up the street, to an ant-sized kid in a windbreaker.
"Just general impressions. There's a mind there. About all I can tell."
"Could you stand it if it was all like that? Could you sleep? Sing? Function?"
"What--yeah, 'course. Why?"
"Okay, about a quarter mile," Lance said under his breath. "We can do that."
"We can do what?"
"Get you a quarter of a mile from populated areas until we figure this out." He closed his hand over Chris's, thin and warm. "You aren't going to go crazy, Chris. You aren't going to die. Even if..." He trailed off, worrying his lip. "Even if we have to end the group."
"Oh--oh, hey, Lance, no--"
"You said it yourself, dumbass. If one of us can't go on, we don't go on. Or would you crawl over my body?"
"No," Chris whispered.
"Well, there you go. Oh--can you handle us? Just us, I mean, without other people? If it was spread out over a big area, like a ranch or a four-story house?"
Chris looked at him narrowly, and a picture flashed into his mind. Tall, rugged structure with age-silvered cedar siding, surrounded by evergreens and knee-high grass. Whitewashed fences, a little brown stream. Good, quiet feelings came with it. There were mountains nearby, a lake. "Where is that?"
Lance's eyebrows rose a fraction. "It's a property I bought about four months ago. I've been having it renovated."
"It looks nice. Seems nice. I mean...you think it's--"
"I gotcha, Chris." He shivered. "Weird. Anyway, if you can take it, I'll bring you there. We can stay for the interim. It's big, quiet, no towns for fifteen minutes any direction. We can work on this, study up on psychic phenomena, conference with specialists, do experiments with blocking it...whatever it takes. Okay? No dying. That's not like you, Chris, giving up."
"I forget what I was like, sometimes," Chris said hoarsely. "Sometimes I get so pissed and then I realize it's Joey who's pissed. Sometimes I want to cry til my eyes bleed, for this helpless fucking...hole inside my chest and then I know it's C trying to write a song and it's not working. And some nights I lie awake thinking and thinking about numbers, rows of numbers, marching numbers doing all this shit I can't even follow and I feel like an ant on my own fucking eyeball, and--"
"That's me," Lance said softly. "I go over the books when you're all in bed. Sometimes I can't turn it off."
Chris squeezed his hand. Felt a blurt of misery from Justin, who must be watching somehow, even if he couldn't hear the words. It must look like he was confessing his undying love to Lance. He sighed.
"Chris," Lance murmured. "I'll remember for you. Okay? I'll remind you who you are. I won't let you get lost."
And Chris knew that was Lance's gift. His ability to retain a memory empirically, not without emotional color but detached from it, was what made him the best one to follow in front of an audience. Justin lit on fire and JC flowed away on a golden-throated river and Joey became nothing but a happy, sweating body. Lance always thought every word. Always visualized the steps, counted the changes, timed each song. He loved performing, but he never lost himself in it. He would remember the real Chris best.
"Thanks," Chris said. His stomach felt hollow with the start of hunger, and his ass ached deep inside. The guy hadn't come--he would have felt that--and he hadn't had the everpresent angry simmer of someone with a terminal disease. This was a mid-sized town without a large gay population and only a few places for casual contact. Chris decided, tentatively, that he didn't have AIDS.
It was weird. Dying didn't sound that great anymore.
"Guys, come back out," Lance called.
They did. Chris laughed weakly at the way they tripped over each other like crap falling out of a too-small closet. They must have been almost standing on one another's shoulders to peer out the crack in the door.
"Okay, instant recap," Lance said, folding over one finger. "One, Chris is telepathic. Two, for some reason he thinks I'd be most likely to want to kill him, which makes me doubt number one because he's gotta know that's Justin. Oh, and three, he loves Justin back."
Chris goggled.
"I read your mind," Lance said, rolling his eyes.
"Wait," Joey said, brow furrowed. "What?"
"Chris loves me," Justin said. He buried his face in Chris's neck, hot and damp and snuffly, and Chris tasted his misery and joy. Wormwood.
"I love you, baby," he whispered, to dissolve sugar in the poison. "I love you back."
"I think there's a larger issue here, no offense," JC broke in. Justin spared him a look. "Okay, maybe not larger, J, happy for you and all that, but--"
"Telepathic," Joey finished. He looked at Lance as if he held the last nonsense/English dictionary.
"Yes," Lance said levelly.
"So that's been what's wrong?" JC exclaimed. His creamy-green eyes were wide, wide. "All this time? Since the accident? Oh, I should have known!"
"What?" Joey sputtered, half-laughing. "How--why should you have known? This is not shit you know, C!"
"We all should have at least asked," JC said. "Oh, Chris...God, the freak-out when you woke up...and you couldn't follow your part when we sang anymore, and the crowd--it was the crowd, wasn't it? When you collapsed?"
Chris moved his head slightly.
"And you stopped talking," JC said softly. "You didn't talk for three days and I was so busy I didn't ask. You didn't talk in interviews. I should have known they couldn't have made you be quiet...oh, Chris, I'm sorry."
"I was hoping it would stop you from thinking about me," Chris said. "But it didn't. You all worried."
Joey was regarding JC incredulously. "Only you, C, would look at all that shit and go, 'Oh, duh, he's a telepath'. I was thinking he was whacked on drugs or planning on quitting the group or something."
"I was an asshole," Chris said. He touched his face gingerly. Justin kissed the spot after his fingers left it, leaving the invisible mark of his shame on the skin. "I was trying to make it stop. All of it stop. I drank too much...and the pills, and I...I'm sorry about the therapist, Lance, but she had all these problems at home and it was loud and...fuck, Justin," he said, his voice wrung, "don't be so sad. Please, or I won't be able to..."
"Sorry," Justin said, scrap of a whisper.
"I just didn't..." Chris said, and closed his eyes, tears clotting the lashes. "I didn't want you to leave me, but I couldn't stand being around you. I'm sorry. Sorry."
"Get me a washcloth, C?" Justin said in a low voice. JC did, warm and covered with lightly scented glycerine soap. Justin washed dried blood from Chris's cheek and brow, his mouth clenching whenever Chris winced, and Chris realized that there were disadvantages to not knowing how much you were hurting someone you loved.
"You're not even drunk, are you?" Joey said curiously. "You seemed really drunk before. And you got sick."
"I only had club soda." Chris sat up a little. "The voices and impressions make me dizzy. All the drunks make me drunk. That makes me sick. It's all a wild recipe for fun, fun, fun."
"And that guy, the one in the bathroom--" Justin's hand stilled, then continued, stiff and painstaking. "He was--"
"I enjoyed it," Chris blurted. His face pounded like a second punch as he flushed, and his vision fuzzed out. "I was locked into...into him, into his mind, he enjoyed it, he loved it, thought I was fucking with him and he was giving me what I deserved. And I believed it. I couldn't even feel how bad it hurt. I...I liked hurting me."
"You were bleeding," Joey said. His voice faltered. "Oh, I wish I'd have...hell."
"How did you find me, anyway, Joe?" Chris asked suddenly. "I mean...thanks a lot, but...I can't believe you were just passing by to see if I was maybe in the bathroom of a gay dive bar."
"I heard you screaming," JC said softly. He tapped his forehead. "It woke me up."
"I..." Chris looked at the ceiling. "I remember praying that you would come by, because you did before, but...I dunno. I don't remember doing anything."
"I'm just glad it worked." JC brushed Chris's hair off his forehead, meeting Lance's hand as he reached to do the same, and both of them smiled at one another.
"Now, boys, don't fight over me," Chris said. "I know I'm pretty, but show some dignity."
Lance chuckled. "I'll try to control myself."
Chris flinched as Justin scrubbed a little too close to the bump forming on his cheekbone. Justin hated, pure and white and acid, like the kind of prison laundry soap that ate away skin. But the hate wasn't for Chris, not a bit of it, and Chris thought that given time he could fix the part directed at Lance. At least he had the chance, and he was pathetically grateful for that.
It would be nice to do something unpathetically again. He slid his fingers over Justin's collarbone like he would the polished back of a rocking chair. Golden, sleek, made for touching. Justin felt like love.
"So what's the plan?" JC asked, and Lance told him.
*****