Jark Trowse smiled down at us from a dozen giant campaign posters. Lilly stood beneath him, rhinestone glasses and all, handing out buttons and big sincere smiles.
I didn’t venture far from the door. Katch might slip out once he’d had something to eat—and anyway I wanted an easy escape route myself, for the inevitable moment where I gripped the knife blade of my own hatred a little too hard and started bleeding. I wasn’t standing there very long, but I was able to snag and drain champagne flutes off the trays of three separate waiters.
Cold wind caressed my face, but I didn’t look at the opened door right away.
“Ronan,” Dom said, startling me, and I turned to take him in. In uniform, gun at his hip, he looked like the latest avatar of some magnificent warrior god.
“Dom,” I said, throat dry, struggling to clear my head of how the sight of him still hit me. So tall, so clean-shaven. “Don’t tell me you’re part of this scene.”
“You blend in better than me,” he said, but then grinned.
Attalah had texted me earlier in the day, and I’d meant to write her back. Now I felt guilty for ignoring her message, on top of my guilt for feeling such lust for her husband.
Thirty seconds of silence later, Dom asked, “Wanna get the fuck out of here?”
“Hell yeah, I do,” I said. “But we didn’t eat anything. Allegedly they spend a ton of money—”
“Don’t you read? If you eat the food of the underworld, you’re condemned to stay there.”
“Of course,” I said. “How silly of me to forget that.”
Once we got outside I leaned against him as we walked. He let me.
“Those fucking assholes,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “You eat anything today?”
“Why?”
“Because you sound like maybe you’re a little drunk.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I had a lot of coffee, which is a stimulant, and a lot of alcohol, which is a depressant. So they cancel each other out.”
“Come to my place,” he said, and my heart leapt, and then quickly crashed down: “Attalah will get you fed.”
“Sure,” I said, because what was the alternative? Wandering the streets in a panic of hatred? Heading home to be swallowed up again by the sadness of my father’s fallen state? To drown in the sea of words we’d never get to say to each other? So I went, to the home of the first man (the only man) I’d ever loved, to be fed by his wife.
“You moved out of the Towers,” I said, when he steered us away from State Street.
“Yup. Bought our own place.”
“I’m so happy for you guys,” I said, dishonestly. Or rather—I was happy for them, but I was also desperately unhappy.
So maybe I was kind of a little drunk.
“Kids?” I asked, as we walked up to the front door.
“No kids,” he said, ushering us in, and there had to be a story there.
Attalah was seated in a recliner, reading a book. I’d forgotten how impressive she was, how regal. How big, in so many senses of the word.
“Hello, Ronan,” she said, smiling. “Welcome back to our fucked city.”
She got up. It took her a minute.
“I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your text,” I said. “Figured showing up in person would be even better.”
“You figured right,” she said, and hugged me. And I felt so held. So found.
Our eyes locked. I could see it there, somehow. Her hate. Her anger. It mirrored mine. And I smiled, and so did she.
Where had it come from, this anger? This town hated me. My life in Hudson had been miserable. I still carried the scars. The broken-off blade between my ribs.
So why was I so angry? Why did I want to murder them all, these innocent, wide-eyed hipsters who were killing the thing I spent years dreaming of killing? Why save Hudson at all?
I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know. All I knew was: this rage, this hate—it felt a hell of a lot better than the hurt of how I failed my father. Hate was a drug, and if there was one skill I’d spent years cultivating, it was the knack for self-medicating.
“It’s good to be back,” I said. “I think.”
“We don’t get to choose our cages.” She gave me one last squeeze before releasing me, and it felt so good (so maternal) I could feel my throat tighten. “For better or for worse, this is home.”
And, yes. I knew. Even then, even there at the very start, I could see that they were a scapegoat, an oversimplification. That I hated the invaders, blamed them for my father’s decline—because if I didn’t have them, there’d be nowhere for this hate to go but back onto me. I’d have nothing to drive this harpoon blade into but my own barren, fucked-up heart. And that was unacceptable.
* * *
“I WANT THEM GONE,” I said, without planning to. Two hours had passed, drinking beer and eating cookies Attalah had baked. Talking shit about the new Hudson. Two hours of her anger seeping into me, a contact high that did for my rage what crystal did for lust—magnified, multiplied it; mutated it into something dark and disturbing and dangerous. “I want them all to run screaming from this town and never look back.”
“Shhh,” Dom said. He took another cookie.
“No,” I said. “I don’t just want them gone. I want them broken. I want them to hurt like we’ve been hurt. I want them evicted, displaced. I want them to lose everything.”
Dom started to say something, but Attalah silenced him with one raised hand. “So do lots of us, Ronan. But there’s nothing we can do.”
I continued, feeling weirdly like I was watching myself from outside my body. I’d finally found a replacement drug, and I was well into the shoulder of the high by now—the sweet spot where you can feel your whole body and brain blossom. “I want to harrow them down to their very souls. I want them to know that they are hated, and to live the rest of their lives with the shadow of that hatred blocking out the sun on even the brightest days.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” she repeated. Her dreadlocks went halfway down her back. In the time we’d been sitting there I’d fallen maybe a little bit in love with her. Back in high school we’d been buddies, but I’d never had a conversation anywhere near this long with her. She was compelling, dynamic. Enchanting. Sitting there, under her spell, eating her cookies, I could feel the boundaries of the possible begin to shift inside me.
“We’ve tried,” she said. “For years, we’ve been trying. I’ve talked to every lawyer and community organizer and halfway-human politician I could get on the phone or whose office I could talk my way into, and there’s nothing—”
“Nothing legal,” I said. The words hung there. They got bigger the longer the silence went. I had never seen Dom so shocked, not even the first time I kissed him. “You’ve been doing, what? Petitions? Meetings with politicians? Church fundraisers? Nonviolent demonstrations? That won’t work here, will it?”
Attalah’s eyes locked onto mine. I didn’t blink.
Dom laughed, but it failed to break the tension. “You can’t be serious. What are you—”
Attalah raised her hand again, without breaking eye contact. Dom fell silent. “What are you saying, Ronan?”