Home > Surrender Your Sons(5)

Surrender Your Sons(5)
Author: Adam Sass

   Me: Well, you’d just have to be cool with me seeing guys on the side lol

   After an eternity of Vicky typing, her response is simply haha. I shouldn’t joke (maybe only half-joke). Vicky, like me, is up to her neck in shit, and if I offered to be Avery’s unofficial father, she’d say “I do” just for the extra naptime.

   Vicky: I gotta go, but I love you. Text whenever.

   I switch back to Ario, who as it turns out had been texting me the whole time I was talking to Vicky, but my asshole phone never buzzed. He sent a GIF he made of himself—doe-eyed, with curly black hair, making a heart shape with his fingers.

   Me: Do you think I could stay at your place for a couple nights? I’m kinda nervous here.

   When he doesn’t respond, I notice that I missed his last message following the GIF: brb I’m heading out—promised my sis I’d drive her and her demon friends to the county fair. Blerg, it’s like an hour away. Text me later, okay?? Hang in there!

   GOD DAMMIT.

   I missed my window to text Ario my most important ask. The tops of my ears burn. I flip my phone facedown and stroke the pendant lying across my bare chest. It’s a recorder the size of a finger, handcrafted from bamboo; gripping it always brings me closer to Ario. I need him to text back or I have literally nowhere to go. I can’t burden Vicky with this. She’s got enough on her plate, plus me shacking up with Vicky would cancel whatever remaining doubts Mom might have about us.

   Meanwhile, Ricky Hannigan’s envelope sits on top of my swirly, untucked covers, almost forgotten. Mr. Hannigan, that sweet, sunken-eyed man, left me a present in his will. I undo the envelope’s brass clip; inside is a folded booklet. No money. I’m not sure what I expected; the envelope was way too light. I recognize the booklet’s bright yellow cover immediately—a Broadway Playbill. Ricky’s room was covered in them. Old ones, mostly—Chicago, Dreamgirls, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Into the Woods—all from a time when Ricky was still able to go out. This Playbill is for South Pacific. On its vibrant, chalk-drawing cover, sailors dance around a tropical island. Ricky was always playing showtunes when I walked in, but I don’t remember this one. I flip open the booklet’s cover to a rude sight: the pages have been vandalized with black Sharpie in large, scrawling letters, so uneven they don’t even resemble words at first.

   Then I understand: Ricky left me a goodbye note. He couldn’t comfortably hold a pen, so his letters are different sizes with tremorous shakes in the lines. Still, his message is clear:

   HELP CONNOR.

   My lips open but no breath comes. I flip to the next page. Across the acknowledgments section, Ricky has scribbled another word: NIGHTLIGHT.

   It doesn’t stop. On every page, splattered over the cast bios:

   NIGHTLIGHT. NIGHTLIGHT. HELP CONNOR. NIGHTLIGHT.

   The Playbill falls onto the tangled shirts in my open bag, and I scamper backward as if it were a bomb. Pins and needles flood my fingertips as goose bumps sail across my shoulders; the night breeze coming in my window isn’t cozy anymore. I try to pull on my sleeveless hoodie, but my arms have become clumsy slabs. In my struggle with the shirt, panic detonates inside my head like a nail bomb, bits of anxiety shrapnel flinging this way and that, lacerating every nearby thought.

   Something isn’t right.

   Hairs prickle on the back of my neck as Ricky’s message swirls, echoes like a scream: HELP CONNOR. NIGHTLIGHT. Ricky gave me this message in his will. Not when he was alive. What did he think I could possibly help him with once he was dead? He died from an infected bedsore, nothing weird or suspicious. He had the Reverend, his mom, and a million other people who helped him with anything he wanted or needed. Why me? Why now? And what does Nightlight mean?

   My chest suffocates with paranoia. I no longer feel alone in my empty room. I pivot around quickly to my bedroom door, expecting to find the sallow, pleading face of Ricky reaching for me, a ghost, the living dead. There’s no one. Jumping, I pivot again toward my open window, expecting that sweet man’s rotting, soil-matted corpse to be crawling inside. Nothing.

   Yet the feeling of eyes surrounding me won’t go away.

   In a way, Ricky’s ghost is here. His message is trying to reach me from beyond the grave.

   A plea for help. Ricky’s scrawled writing looks so pained.

   I welcome in a clean breath of rationality to slow my heartbeat.

   Ricky is dead, Connor. Whatever this is about, you can’t help him anymore.

   I need to get out of here.

   The grip on my chest doesn’t relax, but is instead buried under the heavy blanket of worry about what the hell I’m going to do about tonight. I think she wants to kick me out, I text Ario rapidly. Once again, I curl on the floor and wait thirty minutes for my phone to light up and teleport me out of this shit.

   I fall asleep waiting.

 

 

   “Connor, you need to wake up,” says a tough British voice.

   “Dad…?” I moan. My dreams have been a blizzard of footsteps and people whispering. I’m still sprawled across the floor, but my room is filled with strangers dressed in black. Two men stand over me, night shadows obscuring their faces. Not shadows—ski masks.

   This isn’t a dream. And that isn’t my dad.

   There are strangers in the house.

   “Hello,” another man says, dangling my backpack from his finger. “We have your bag.”

   “MOM, someone’s in the house!” I scream, unable to stop myself trembling.

   “We need you to come with us,” the British man says. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” I don’t waste a moment. In the dark, I scramble upright, but my feet slip on the carpet and my hip collides with a rolling desk chair. “Easy way, then…”

   My phone. It’s still charging in the wall. I’m inches away from the glow…I lunge, but the men pounce viper-quick. My arms and shoulders hit the floor as lifelessly as wet bread. I can’t even squirm as their powerful hands hold me flat. “MOM!” I shriek into the carpet.

   Before I take another breath, I’m ripped from the room and hauled onto the upstairs landing. My feet leave the ground as one of the men hoists me—all 140 pounds—over his shoulder. We descend the stairs, and I clutch at the wall with numb, useless hands, dozens of family photos crashing down the steps as I slap them. A trio of crucifixes from Precious Moments fall, shattering into a pile of gold filigree and pink ceramic dust.

   “Don’t ruin your mum’s nice things,” the British man grunts as I flail.

   Make more noise, Connor. Wake Mom up!

   Finally, my mom’s voice calls from the other room: “Buddy?” Upside-down, my head rolls around the intruder’s sweat-dampened back until I glimpse my mother standing in the kitchen archway, still in her nursing scrubs from dinner. “I love you.”

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