One for the Team

32 | after

Ace Moskowitz comes like a rock thrown at a window, loud, violent, sudden. His pale blonde hair falls over his hollow blue eyes as he barges into the bedroom. If the names on the door are anything to go by, the room should belong to four boys, Ace included.

There is only one when Ace comes in. Finn Sexton, one with his bed, buried under the faded beige covers, a borrowed book under his pillow like a rock. He is buried and then he's not. Then the covers are flying back.

"Get the fuck up, Finn."

Finn doesn't move. He opens his mouth to tell the other boy to leave, but he does not move an inch from the position he has found a nail of comfort in. A rectangle of golden light folds over his waist and spills over his naked back from the slice of window the curtains could not cover. He hasn't moved in a while, Finn, as if he's waiting for something. Patiently, patiently waiting.

Ace isn't so patient. His hands go for Finn's shoulders and yank him away from the mattress, forcing him to sit up. His mouth opens into a black hole and spits, "It was you, wasn't it? You dug it up!"

Finn's face is a rock, not a flying rock, but a still one, so still, it's scary.

"Him," he says.

"What?"

"Dug him up."

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" The words come out like spit. They come out from a bitter, cold, tired face. "You have no idea what you've done, do you? Are you even there?!"

He taps violently on Finn's temple as talks, where an ugly long scab has grown over once equally ugly long scratches. It's as if he's knocking on a door, checking, and needing someone to be inside.

"Don't touch me," Finn says, trying to get away from the grip on his shoulders. He tries, but there's no point. There was scarcely any point when it came to fighting Ace. You would almost always be the face behind the fist, never the fist before the face.

His grip only goes deeper into Finn's bony shoulder, "You ruined your life, Finn."

Finn shrugs, "My life was ruined the second that trophy fell off its shelf."

"No! No, no, no, you dumb fuck, it was an accident! It was a fucking accident." The words come out so very full of rage, so very full of frustration, that each feels like a punch on Finn's face. "How can you not see that?"

Finn's face wrinkles, lines sink in his forehead, in the outer corners of his red sunken eyes. He opens his mouth, each sentence a mile away from what an accident is supposed to look like.

"We dragged his body to the woods. We threw him in a hole in the ground. We buried him."

"We were out of our fucking minds with alcohol and drugs," Ace says, his words shooting back at Finn too many miles an hour. "We had just seen a person die in front of us. Fine, maybe we should have called an ambulance, so what? It doesn't make us murderers, Finn. It just doesn't."

"Then why do I– I– I feel so much like one?" Finn asks. His eyes become redder and redder. There are deep dark circles under them.

Ace lets go of him with an exasperated push, and Finn's body falls back into bed like an old doll.

"Because you don't listen to me," he says, all of him exasperation. "You have to listen to me, Finn. Listen! It would have been fine. We did them a favor. The whole fucking town would have been better off thinking Levi just ran away after the party instead of scared shitless that there's a murderer out and about their precious town. Fuck, his family would be better off not knowing his son's skull had been sliced open like a fucking cake."

"Stop," Finn says. "Just stop talking."

"No," Ace spits. "No, because you know what? It's over. We're done. You! You made us murderers, Finn."

"No, I– I– I –"

"I can handle jail." Ace backs away from the bed, almost trips on a pair of muddy shoes, the only shoes Finn has left, and then clumsily leans against the desk chair. He opens his mouth again, "I can handle it just fine. I've been serving my time since I was born, but Milo? When word gets out he hung himself in his cell, it's gonna be on you, Finn."

"Shut up." Finn's throat opens just enough for those words to squeeze past. It does nothing, of course, to stop Ace from continuing.

"And Archie?" he goes on. "When the social services come and take him away from your mom, that's gonna be on you too, oh yes."

Finn's still a rock, but now he's a flying one. Flying out of bed and towards Ace, hands closed in fists, ready for impact. The first one lands on Ace's left ear and the second on his own desk. He stops there for a second, hand throbbing in pain, and then barges again towards Ace.

They have fought before, so many times, they have both lost count. Ace remembers most of them, not because he likes to remember all of his fights – there would be no space left in his brain if he did – but because he likes to remember all of his fights with Finn.

This fight isn't like the others though. For one, in this one, it's mostly Finn doing the hitting and Ace doing the swerving, but that's not it, not quite. Ace has done this many times before to know – rolled around on the floor, one on top and then the other – he has felt Finn's tender parts become hard with the years, but now... Now he feels them hollow too.

He braces for a punch and his hand feels Finn's jutting ribs. He swerves another one and feels a pointy hipbone. He holds his wrists down and feels all his bones too close to the skin, like if he applied any more pressure, any more at all, they would snap like small sticks.

"That's enough," Ace says, at last, his body pressing Finn's against the floor, his hands just handcuffs. He's short of breath and bleeding from his ear and his nose and, most of all, he's done.

"We're gonna rot in jail for what we did."

"It was an accident, Finn." His voice is small, and Ace's voice is almost never small, not outside of the trailer park, at least.

Finn's face changes. Eases. The angry hard lines dissolve into smooth ones, his lips part and its corners fall down as if they're too heavy to stand uplifted. The white in his eyes is not white at all, just red. He begins crying an ugly wet cry and terrible sounds come out of his mouth as he does. It's nothing Ace has ever seen before, nothing he would like to see in a million years.

Under him, Finn's body convulses with each horrible sob and Ace wants it to stop. He wants it to stop so badly, he does something even more horrible in his repertory of horrible things.

He kisses him.

This isn't because Ace has never wanted to kiss Finn, but because he always did.

Finn's lips don't move, but he stops crying. He does. His chest quiets for a second, maybe more. Ace has lost count. Ace has just lost it.

Things come back to him only when Finn finally pushes himself away from Ace, crawling backward into the side of his bed, the back of his hand sliding across his lips, like a cloth wiping away the filth.

Ace doesn't move from where he is in the middle of the room, on his knees, mouth still slightly open. His eyes have followed Finn on his escape. Everything eventually escapes him. This is not something he will punch his way out of. It isn't something he'll later try to drown with a cheap bottle of vodka or snort away with a line of coke.

He stands up, wipes the blood away from his nose, ignores the iron taste in his mouth. Finn doesn't move, a thought comes to his mind as fast as it soon leaves it. He thinks of a tree, thinks of Ace as an apple grown out of a sick branch, fallen on a rock, and left there to rot, and rot, and rot, until it is finally picked up. He supposes he's the one behind the hand. Supposes he's the one picking the warms away.

He should have let it be. Ace walk towards the door.

"I'm already rotten, Finn," he says as if he knew what he was thinking.

Rotten, rotten, rotten.