#Ive had this sitting open in my tabs as a reference for an entire year just let me have this

[goose-books]

goose-books productions: a 2020 review

view the image in higher quality here! (open the image in a new tab to zoom in.) thank you to my dearest @yvesdot for the template

transcripts and month-by-month details under the cut! for reference, you can find my projects here :-) overall, new and old followers, thank you for another good year over here! [holds your hand] [holds your hand] [holds your hand] [holds your h

january

i spent late 2019-early 2020 working on 2019’s nano project, quark, aka the speculative fiction thing about new york city and prophets and dissections of the chosen one trope and gay people. quark is my second-oldest project (five years!), but it’s also probably the most ambitious, so it’s been... difficult to wrangle into place, and i didn’t end up finishing a first draft. oh, well.

enjoy a snippet that is devastatingly emblematic of everything about quark. the tone. the homoerotic tension. the ensemble cast all talking over each other. the fact that caelum has spent pretty much this entire scene crying. fun autopsy report meeting.

Marble stares at the notebook in Shade’s hands. Or maybe he’s staring at Shade’s hands. Dawn feels a little voyeuristic, so she does what she does and says a dumb and unrelated thing: “Augustus, I think this pizza-on-the-floor thing is hurting my ass.”

Augustus flutters his hands. “Sometimes nonconformity is painful.”

“At least we’re originals,” Caelum mumbles into his sleeve.

“Exactly,” Augustus says.

“True originality doesn’t exist,” Marble says.

“Oh,” Shade deadpans, “it’s going to be a fun autopsy report meeting.”

It isn’t.

february

in january i stressed myself out trying to make the plot of quark work. so in february, i decided to take some time and write something Entirely For Fun. like, entirely for fun, no rules. and. my god. how do i explain the project i started calling “third eye for the bad guy.”

it was an unholy mashup of many of my past hyperfixations, including the gone series, a tale of two cities, warrior cats, and the left hand of darkness. one of the characters was a canon scalie and one was a canon fictionkinnie. it centered around a polycule of wannabe-evil-overlord high schoolers. i only wrote like three chapters but i was lost in the sauce for all of february and then i just… like… wiped it from my mind and moved on? somehow??? one character was a werewolf and that literally wasn’t relevant at ALL

I.

Someone was going to die on these steps.

This had been Ivy Lee Palomo’s thought last year during the all-school photo, and it rose in her mind again now. The one hundred marble stairs leading up to the great double doors of Saint Constantine Academy were the school’s pride and glory, steep as the mountain, sharp as the blade under Ivy Lee’s skirt. With the cutting wind and snow glazing the stone more often than not, with the freshmen wild and wired on their first day of their first year, it was really only a matter of time before someone slipped and cracked their fucking head open.

It wasn’t going to be her. Not when she had Doc Martens and reflexes like an electric coil. Still. Ivy Lee didn’t want to watch someone die. She didn’t get along with dead people.

march

in march, i got back to the project i’d started in 2019 - AMT, my podcast! it’s a shakespeare retelling set in a modern high school; this excerpt is funnier and also more unnerving in context. (double, double, toil and trouble...)

INDRAJIT: What the hell are you doing?

[PAUSE.]

DEE (like she’s lying): Making pasta.

[ALL THREE OF THEM LAUGH.]

NONA: That’s right.

MORA: We have the keys to Mab’s office.

DEE: We’re using her stove.

NONA: To make pasta.

DEE: Do you want some?

[A TENSE PAUSE.]

INDRAJIT: No.

april

and darkling rears its head! all of my other projects have existed for at least a year; darkling (specfic king lear retelling) is... special. it was conceived in april, when i started hyperfixating on king lear, and i still managed to write an absolutely ridiculous amount of content for it. it was like the power of hyperfixation let me speedrun the entire process. which. okay.

iv: control

They say Cressida Stayer was nine years old when she turned her hair to gold. They laid her down in bed blonde, and the next morning, the waves cascading down her shoulders were solid metal, glinting harshly in the sunlight, weighing her down, creating that odd head-cocked expression she still wears now. Nine years old. Two or three years before most people develop enough magic skills to dye a single curl. Much less transfigure their hair into precious metal.

People also say Leovald Stayer’s immediate reaction was to hack it off her head and melt it down for cash. But generally they say that part a lot quieter.

may

in may i wrote AMT episode 15, by which i mean that in may there was a day when i sat in my room with the door shut for literally five straight hours listening to the same three songs on loop as i wrote the climax of one of the plotlines of AMT. so. that sure was… a day.

ISAAC: Do you want… do you want someone to drive you home? Hawk, you’re worrying me -

HAWK (almost cutting him off): Don’t. Don’t say that. I’m here to help. With your… thing.

ISAAC (quietly): I… don’t know if you should be here to see this.

HAWK (a little louder, more audibly upset): Well - what else am I going to do? Go home and - and have my dads talk at me and - and not be able to answer them? Because I can’t? I can’t. I don’t know what to say.

[PAUSE.]

ISAAC (V.O.): I wonder if this is what he feels like, on the outside, looking in at me. Watching someone else hurting. Helpless and afraid.

He still fits perfectly in my arms. I rest my chin on top of his head and pull him close to me, like I can stop him from shaking, like I can stop anything from happening the way I know it’s going to. I bury my face in his hair. He smells so familiar. He’s so warm.

God, Hawk. I love you so much. You shouldn’t be here to see this. Something bad’s gonna happen. And you’re not the kind of person who belongs in a tragedy.

june

okay, honestly, i should talk about “night shift” here, because in june i wrote a whole short story in one night (and then foamed over it for a week), but i am still in the process of submitting it places! so i am terrified to put even a sentence of it online. instead: the other thing i did this month was to finish AMT! (sixteen episodes and somewhere around 175k, iirc, but don’t quote me.) these lines are the opener to the final episode!

RAHMA (V.O.): The combined series of sophomore year disasters stretched through November. It’s June now. It’s taken me… a long time to get this all put together. I was going to make a vlog about it, initially - well, calling it a vlog sounds frivolous. I was going to make a video recounting the whole deal. All of it. From when I kissed Avery Fairchilde to the very last night. I scripted dozens of drafts; I put together dozens of bullet-pointed lists of what to cover… and it was never enough. Because Avery and I weren’t the only ones involved. Even if I was only focused on the two of us, it wasn’t just the two of us.

So… I gathered up everyone else. The whole town of Ellisburg is still talking about the week the town went crazy, but it wasn’t just a week. There was a lot leading up to it. And I think if anyone’s going to talk about it, it should be us. The people who lived it. So here we are. The most ambitious Rahma Ashiq production of all time - at least so far.

july

every july i pause whatever else i’m doing to celebrate the birthday of aurum & argentate, twins from my oldest and dearest WIP The Mortal Realm. july fifteenth! mark your calendars. they’re princes, though argentate would really rather not be; you can read the full birthday piece here.

“Do you… plan to get dressed?” A bit of the usual humor crept back into Aurum’s voice. “Although if you want to speak to the kingdom in your underthings, by all means, you have my full support.”

Argentate scrubbed at his face. He wasn’t dressed, no, but the usual malaise hung over his shoulders like a cloak. Guilt. Nerves. The sick sense that he hadn’t done something he was supposed to. The numb knowledge that it was too late to change a thing.

“I meant to,” he said. “Get dressed, I mean.” The rest went unsaid: I have just been sitting here. On the floor. Thinking about how I should get dressed.

“Ah,” Aurum said, extending his hand. “The traditional route. We’ll save the nude speeches for the future, then.”

Argentate took his hand, stumbling a little as Aurum pulled him to his feet. He steadied himself on the closest wall, taking a few deep breaths. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. His hands found their way to the cross, again and again.

august

this summer, i wrote an entire draft of Valentine Van Velt is Dead, AKA “holden caulfield goes to exposure therapy,” AKA the weird little personal side project i keep tucked into my coat. interesting features include second-person narration from a narrator who doesn’t like the main character all that much. so reading it is kind of like the book wants to kill you? with an added dash of general melancholy.

You used to live here. That’s the thing that’s got you feeling so off.

You didn’t recognize your old house. I mean, you kind of did. You remembered that the road was on a hill. That hill felt like a goddamn forty-five degree angle when you were a kid. But if you didn’t have the address written down you wouldn’t have known it at all. It would have been just another little suburban house in rows of perfect little towns that make your skin crawl.

So now you’re in this diner looking out a gross smudgy window trying to block out the elevator music pumping through the speakers in the ceiling or whatever. I don’t know how speakers work. You’re trying to tune that shit out. The waitress comes over and catches you by surprise so you just point at some coffee thing on the menu so she’ll go away. For the record: you don’t drink coffee.

There’s a public library across the street. A little square building. You probably used to go there. The lady comes over and thunks your coffee on the table and gives you a kind of look, like she wants to know what in the goddamn hell you think you’re doing here and not at school. You sip your coffee and look out the window until she leaves you alone again. And then you spit it back into the cup because, for the record: you don’t drink coffee.

september

i spent september and october prepping for nano, so i was mostly working on darkling...

It’s late spring; still, at this time of night, on a rooftop, there’s a chill. The wind plays with the end of Ruby’s coat, with her hair. She hands the bottle off to Jasper, stares up at the fogged-over sky, wishes she were lying in Dany’s arms in Dany’s bed instead of here. Wishes, even, that Dany were the one on the roof with her. At least then they’d be cold together. At least then she wouldn’t have to imagine what Dany would say; she could just listen, and watch Dany’s flashing smile and her flinty eyes.

(She cuddles. This is another thing Dany does that Dany probably shouldn’t do, based on everything about Dany; it’s not like rattlesnakes cuddle. But Dany likes to nuzzle into Ruby’s side and rest her head on Ruby’s collarbones and toss an arm over Ruby’s chest, and hold her down like she’s worried she’ll float off somewhere. She’ll card her fingers through Ruby’s hair and hum. Even though they could get caught, even though she’s probably got better places to be - Dany cuddles.)

Ruby imagines it, momentarily, both of them on the roof together, sprawled like horrifyingly beautiful gargoyles, sharp teeth flashing, blood running hot. Up here - it’d be like they ruled the world.

But whatever. Jasper’s fun. He’s hot. He’s got a sharp tongue in a lot more ways than one. And she likes when he lets the mask down. She likes seeing the soft bits underneath. She wants to sink her teeth and nails into them so hard she draws blood. Masks don’t bleed. Ruby would know; that’s why she is what she is.

october

...though i was also in creative writing class in school, and thus ended up writing a bunch of poems of varying quality (my teacher had a real thing for poetry) and also one darklingverse short story where rory and cressida hold hands! which you can find here.

Lorelai Rory Flowers is afraid of thunder.

This is a bit of an embarrassing thing to admit, as they’re seventeen (“at least seventeen,” they like to tell people, “maybe two hundred, who’s to say?”) and generally wise beyond their years, or whatever it is that adults say about kids with too much psychological baggage. Being afraid of thunder is not a very wise-beyond-one’s-years trait. And yet the state of affairs remains: loud noises make Rory want to melt into the earth. Back when they still went to school, even the fire alarm sent them scuttling under their desk to hide.

Right now, in the elevator, all they can do is shrink into their sweater.

They haven’t let go of Cressida’s hand yet.

november

and then november of course was nano which was an adventure all the way through. (opening tumblr on the fifth day of nano to find out about d*stiel... was something.)

“Apologize to me. Or get out of my house.”

Gracen’s voice is very, very low. For a moment she thinks he hasn’t heard her at all. Then he spins, eyes blazing. “What did you say?”

Gracen watches her own chest heave. She pushes herself up off the desk, stands with the effort of pushing a mountain off of her back. Leovald is six-foot-four. Gracen is six-foot-two. In her heels, in the heels she must wear to be a professional woman, to be a lady - they are the same height.

Gracen wipes her nose. When she lowers her arm, there’s a streak of blood across the back of her hand. Fire shivers in her chest; her heart rings in her ears; her voice could cut steel.

“I said,” she says, low, slow, volume building, “apologize to me. Or get. Out. Of. My. House.”

december

and finally, the poem i posted this year! it’s called the beast sonnet, and you can find it in its own post over here (with commentary! how sexy.)

i kill the beast and drop down to my knees, my blade stained dark with blood of stygian hue, and for a moment these scarred hands shake free, and hold a world unfurled for me anew. but once-mourned victims, victors, vices find; fear winged me; now its absence strips me bare. my sword now dulls, my legs, my voice, my mind; the beast, pried from my throat, leaves no skill there. and still i hear it laugh, O DEVOTEE— O CHILD DEAR, NO GLORY WITHOUT ME.

i was quite productive this year; i have to think it was because i was avoiding things... the peak of my productivity happened over the summer and in november, AKA, college app hell. (almost done with the last applications! pray for me.)

a general breakdown of what occupied me this year:

(no, i don’t know why the “various other things” category ended up so large... i blame all the one-off projects i wrote a single page for, and also whatever the fuck happened in february. yes, i do know why it looks hideous; it’s because each of my WIPs has a theme color

thank you once again for spending some time at goose-books dot gov this year! what to expect for next year: well, i very much hope i can produce AMT... also hoping to get darkling ready for beta readers, so keep your eyes out!

[unfolded73]

How Do We Get Back (8/16) - schitt’s creek ff

Summary: In a literal alternate universe where the Roses escaped financial ruin, David and Patrick struggle with loneliness and a sense that something isn’t right. A chance meeting in New York and a terrible tragedy drive them to question whether the timeline they are on is the right one.

Rated explicit. This chapter 3.3k words. So you know how my summary has always referred to a “terrible tragedy”? Ummm... here we go.   (ao3)

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7

_____________________________________

Chapter 8

Spring arrived in New York on muddy, wet feet, pouring down from the sky in day after day of rain. As David dragged himself from his empty apartment to his empty gallery and back (when he bothered opening the gallery at all), he found the rain to be perversely appropriate. The grayness, the lack of sunshine for days at a time fit his mood perfectly.

He knew he needed to stop hibernating alone, that he needed to put himself out there — go to a bar or at least open Tinder and swipe right on someone. But it felt like more than he could possibly handle, and so he stayed in his solitary cocoon. Friends would call or text sometimes, telling him to get his ass down to this or that party, but that too felt like it would require more energy than he could muster.

He rewatched Downton Abbey during those weeks, starting over with the first series as soon as he came to the end, and when he didn’t have the TV on, he wrote and wrote in his journals, filling two full books in February and March. He wrote about the way he was feeling, the heaviness on his heart that he couldn’t explain, and the way the thought of resuming his old dating habits, with its revolving door of shallow people, made him feel like crying. He wrote about the fact that his entire professional life had been a lie, propped up by his deceitful parents. And he wrote about Patrick.

There was a part of David that wished he and Patrick had never met. It was unfair that a person who’d been in his life for not even 36 hours could have made such an impression, could have left him feeling so abandoned when he had absolutely no right to feel abandoned. Patrick didn’t owe him anything, and what else was he supposed to do other than go back to his small-town Canadian life? But David couldn’t stop thinking about him, couldn’t stop unlocking his phone and looking at the few texts they’d exchanged, couldn’t help wondering what would happen if he texted Patrick now. He was too afraid to find out.

~*~

“Patrick, would you like some eggs?” his mother asked as he descended the stairs.

“Mom, I’ve told you that you don’t need to cook for me. I’m trying not to be an imposition,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table to put on his shoes.

“You’re our son, not an imposition. And I’m making eggs anyway.” She gave him an exasperated but fond smile. “Where are you headed so early on a Saturday?”

“I’ve got more apartments to look at.” He’d been staying with his parents for several weeks and trying to find a more permanent place when he had the time and energy. So far the apartments he’d seen had been nice, but out of his price range, since he was still paying half the rent at the apartment where Rachel was living.

Marcy shot him a sad look. “You don’t have to run out and get another apartment; you can stay here for as long as you need to, until you and Rachel have a chance to work through everything.”

“I’ve told you that’s not going to happen.” When he’d shown up on their doorstep, teary-eyed and exhausted, his parents seemed to have resolved to let him figure things out on his own without commenting on his personal life. Apparently that resolve was crumbling as the weeks stretched out and he wasn’t reconciling with his wife.

“What’s not going to happen?” his dad asked as he came in from the back door, where he’d no doubt been up early trying to get a jump on preparing the yard for spring.

Marcy pulled an egg carton from the fridge and cracked two more eggs into a bowl. “I was just saying that Patrick doesn’t need to rush out and get another apartment. He has an apartment with his wife.”

“Which I’m going to be moving out of permanently once I get my own place,” Patrick said, picking up the newspaper to give his hands something to do. Every article on the front page detailed another horror. The rise of a new extremist sect in Syria that even ISIS was afraid of. Drought in California that threatened the world’s food supply. A mass suicide in China by some group called the Acolytes of King Yan. Bushfires in Australia. Patrick pushed the paper away.

He could see his parents exchange a look in his peripheral vision. “Patrick, I’ve spoken to Rachel a few times,” his mother said, and Patrick’s heart began to race. Had she told them what he’d done?

“What did she say?” he asked, terrified of the answer.

“She won’t say what happened, but I’ve never heard her so convinced that things aren’t going to work out between you two.” His mother abandoned the eggs she was whisking and sat down at the table next to him. “But for as long as you’ve been together, I can’t imagine that there’s no way to work things out. Whatever happened—”

“We aren’t going to work things out because I never should have been with her in the first place. Because I’m gay,” he blurted, his hands clutching together. Patrick sat there in the moment that hung silently after those words had left his mouth, in utter shock at himself.

“What makes you say that?” his father said and then chuckled uncomfortably.

Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound, Patrick thought. “There was a guy I met in February, and if love at first sight were a real thing, then I swear that’s what I experienced. I cheated on Rachel. And I realized the reason things have never felt right with her. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out, but I’ve spent a lot of time soul-searching the past few weeks, and thinking about my past and some of the… some of the other men I’ve known, and… this is who I am.”

His parents were looking at each other, having a silent conversation with their eyes. The other thing Patrick had thought a lot about over the past few weeks was whether his parents were homophobic. He didn’t think so — he knew they were good people — but the fear of rejection clawed at his throat as he sat and waited for them to react.

The first thing that happened was that his mother reached for his hand. “Oh, sweetheart. First of all, know that we love you.” She looked up at Clint, who nodded. “And second of all, this must be very difficult and very confusing, so know that we’re here for you.”

“This man you mentioned, are you… still seeing him?” Clint asked.

Patrick looked down at the table. “No.” He wished he could say yes. He still thought about David every day.

“Rachel knows?” Marcy asked.

He nodded. “I told her everything.”

“Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry you’ve been struggling with this alone. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have been pushing you to patch things up.”

“Yeah, you did that a lot over the years,” Patrick said, and then immediately regretted it as Marcy’s face fell. “But you didn’t know. How could you? I didn’t even know.” He stood up, anxious to put an end to this conversation. The best thing he could probably do at this point was to give his parents a little while to process. “I’m going to be late for my first appointment, but I’ll be back later, okay?”

“Oh!” Marcy looked at the clock. “What about breakfast?”

“Sorry, I’ll grab something later,” Patrick said, and then found himself pulled into a hug by his mother before he quite knew what was happening.

“We love you so much, sweet boy,” she said. “That will never change, you hear me?”

Patrick nodded. He felt his father’s hand, a comforting weight on his shoulder, and Patrick sagged with relief. He’d told them. He’d come out, and his parents had taken it pretty well.

Once he was sitting in his car, he pulled out his phone and sent Rachel a text.

I came out to my parents. You don’t have to keep it a secret anymore if you don’t want to.

The receipt appeared, indicating she’d read the text, but she didn’t respond. Not that he deserved a response from Rachel — it was enough to know that the message was delivered.

He then switched over to a text chain with Stevie. Her deadpan jokes and the occasional stupid meme she’d send him had been getting him through the last few weeks.

I told my parents I’m gay, he wrote. It was getting a little easier each time he said it. She didn’t respond immediately, so Patrick put his phone in the cup holder and started his car, backing out of the driveway to drive to a block of apartments on the other side of town. When he arrived, there was a message waiting from Stevie.

how’d it go?

[Patrick] Not bad, considering.

[Stevie] i’m proud of u 🌈

Smiling for the first time days, Patrick got out of the car and walked up to the apartment building with a bit of a spring in his step.

~*~

David winced as he walked into the club, the thumping techno beat and strobing lights already giving him a headache before the night had even started. Attractive men and women filled the dancefloor and clustered around the bar, an orgy of attempted human connection. Immediately regretting his decision to leave his apartment, David made his way to the bar and ordered a martini, the most efficient vehicle for feeding alcohol into his bloodstream short of an IV. While he waited, he looked around the room, automatically cataloging the designer clothes on display. Seeing a few interesting pieces that he didn’t recognize, David made a mental note to do some serious shopping soon. His hibernation meant he’d fallen out of the loop on a number of fronts, and fashion was foremost among them. He nodded to himself; a day of shopping on Fifth Avenue was perhaps just what he needed to shake himself out of this funk. His drink arrived, and he handed over his credit card, telling the bartender to open a tab, before he set off toward the back of the club.

“David, darling!” A tall woman in a black jumpsuit was waving him over to one of the large roped-off booths. “I told you I could get him to emerge at last.”

He went where he was being summoned, giving her a tiny wave. “I can never pass up an invitation from you, Diana.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve passed up a few, David, but I suppose I’ll forgive you. What have you been up to this season?”

“Just taking some time for me, you know?” He didn’t have to tell her that ‘me’ time was bingeing on Netflix and junk food and sleeping ten hours a day.

David fell into the rhythm of meaningless patter that this crowd of people required: name drops and salacious gossip and loudly proclaimed, buzzword-filled opinions about art or books or film. He bought rounds of drinks for the group, more rounds than anyone else paid for, because he was David Rose and that’s what David Rose did. That was why he was invited to things, he suspected. Not because any of these people gave a damn whether he lived or died.

“David!”

He knew the voice before he even turned around, the raspy scrape of it was like a sharp stick between his shoulder blades.

“Sebastian,” he said, trying to keep his own voice even and unaffected by the presence of his ex. “I didn’t know you were in New York.”

“I wasn’t until recently. Vanity Fair hired me to photograph Jack Dorsey’s spiritual awakening in Tibet, so I was out there for a while. Really beautiful, haunting stuff,” Sebastian said as he plucked an olive out of David’s drink and put it in his own mouth.

David narrowed his eyes. “Can a person have a spiritual awakening when it’s being documented for Vanity Fair, though?”

“How are you? People are saying you might close the gallery.”

David’s mouth dropped open. “I’m not closing the gallery,” he said. Surely the fact that his father’s business manager had advised him to do exactly that couldn’t be public knowledge.

“Okay, good.” Sebastian put an arm around him in a possessive move that made David cringe. “You know how these rumors get started. Must be because it’s been closed a lot lately? That’s what I heard. And that you haven’t hosted an opening in a while.”

Sebastian Raine may have only been back in town for a short time, but apparently it was enough time to collect a whole set of sharp darts for him to throw straight and true into the heart of David’s insecurities.

“Can I get you another drink? Sebastian asked.

David looked down at his mostly-full glass. “No, I’m good.”

He thought about Patrick suddenly, and how refreshing it had been to talk to someone whose every remark wasn’t calculated to cut him down and play on his weaknesses, or to just get him wasted. The gnawing empty hole in his heart that he’d been living with for weeks widened a tiny fraction.

“I spent a lot of my time in Tibet just, feeding my soul, you know?”

“Mm hmm,” David said.

“It made me see a lot of the things that happened in the past in a new light. Us, for example. I want you to know that I care about what happened between you and me. And while my therapist said I should never feel sorrow, I do appreciate your pain.”

“I’m not feeling any pain about the past, Sebastian,” David said. “Not anymore.” Not about you.

“That’s good, David, that’s so good.” He felt Sebastian’s hand slide down his back. “It really frees you to… pursue your desires without baggage.”

David almost laughed. Sebastian’s attempt at seduction was so obvious, and it made him wonder if he had always been this stupidly transparent. What exactly had he seen in this self-important douchebag?

Nodding, David took a large step away from Sebastian, shaking off his arm. “It really does. It makes a lot of things very clear.” Looking around at the other people whose drinks he’d been buying all night, David frowned. What am I doing here?

“Diana? I’m gonna head out,” he called.

“Oh, David, the night is so young!” she said with a fake pout, but then someone else lured her attention and she appeared to immediately forget he existed.

“Can I walk you home?” Sebastian asked.

“Nope.” David said as he pulled on his leather jacket. “I’m good.”

The look of confused disappointment on Sebastian’s face would keep David warm for weeks, he thought as he went over to the bar to close out his tab, a half-smile on his face. Traversing the few blocks back to his apartment, David held his head higher than he had in months.

As he unlocked his apartment door, his phone buzzed with an incoming call. Dad, it said on the screen. Why on earth would his father be calling him at midnight, he thought with annoyance, answering the phone.

“Hi, what?” David dropped his keys into a bowl on the table in the foyer and began shrugging out of his jacket.

There was a pause. “David, are you at your apartment?”

His father’s voice sounded weird. “Yeah, I just got home, why?” He could hear what he thought was his mother in the background, but it was almost like a whimpering, keening noise. Then it faded, like his father was moving farther away from her. “What’s wrong with Mom now?” David asked, figuring she’d failed to get cast in a role she wanted, or that the cleaners had ruined one of her favorite outfits.

“David, can you sit down? I need you to be… I need you to sit down.”

David stood in the middle of the living room, looking out the dark windows of his apartment. “I am sitting down,” he lied. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s Alexis.” He swallowed so loudly that the phone picked up the sound. “David, she…”

“Oh my God, spit it out!” David’s pulse had started to race. Surely she was fine, though, right? She was fine. She was always fine.

“She was on a yacht with some friends, and… they don’t know how it happened, but she fell overboard and no one realized it. It was dark, I guess, and people were drunk…”

David’s vision started to narrow, whiteness filling his periphery. “Is she…?”

“She drowned, David. Alexis… she drowned.”

His body was breaking out in a cold sweat. It felt like a sudden onset of the flu. Or like he’d felt when he was thirteen and had broken his nose, the blood pouring down onto his white T-shirt.

“David, did you hear what I said?” His father’s voice sounded like it was coming to him from the bottom of a well.

“What do you mean, she drowned? Are they sure, or can they just not find her?”

“They found her.”

Her body, that’s what he wasn’t saying. They found her body.

David sagged, catching himself with a hand gripping the back of the sofa. His eyes followed the zig zagging pattern on the rug under his feet. back and forth and back and forth and....

“David?” Johnny said softly. “Are you there?”

“I think I might be sick,” David whispered.

“Okay. That’s okay, son.”

Still holding the phone to his ear, David stumbled into the bathroom and leaned over the sink. He knew it would be better to kneel down next to the toilet, but he felt like if he got down on the floor he might just never get up again. “What do we do?” he asked his father.

“We have to arrange to have her…” Johnny paused and cleared his throat. “We have to have her body flown back to the States, so I’ve been on the phone with the U.S. consulate in Mexico, and also with the airline—” Johnny seemed to lose his voice on the last word, like he’d suddenly been sealed under a bell jar. David looked up at his face in the mirror. His stubble stood out harshly against his over-pale face, the mole on his chin that he’d nicked shaving dozens of times even more noticeable than usual.

“Is Mom…?” David asked.

“She’s taken a sleeping pill.”

“I’ll come up there… now. I’ll come up there now.”

“I can send a limo to get you,” Johnny said.

David considered refusing that offer, but he imagined getting on a train and just the thought brought him closer to vomiting. “Okay.”

He hung up the phone without saying goodbye, setting it carefully on the vanity before finally sliding to the floor.

~*~

“Stevie?” Patrick said into the phone. “I’ve literally never seen you use a phone as a phone, what’s wrong?”

“Remember when you told me to google that guy? David Rose, right?”

Patrick’s eyebrows shot up, and he paused midway through pouring himself a cup of coffee from the office coffee pot. “Yeah?”

“To be honest, I forgot immediately and never did it. But I just saw something online, and… this is the David Rose whose sister is Alexis Rose, right? The socialite?”

She said that like he should have heard of Alexis outside of meeting her, but he never had. “Yeah, his sister is named Alexis.”

“It’s all over twitter. Patrick, she died in a boating accident.”

Chapter 9

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I know, guys. I know. Just repeat to yourself that this universe is wrong, and please don't yell at me too much!