And Cully had broken then, crying with stress, with acceptance, with gratitude. He’d fallen asleep eventually, pre-snack, and when he’d awakened, there was a wonderful smell in the air and muted voices—and activity—in the living room, where he’d left all his finished projects on the couch with tags as to which character and which act and scene the costume was for.
When he walked into the front room, he saw Kate and Josh very carefully packing the costumes in the garment boxes that had occupied the living room for a week. Alex was typing an invoice on his laptop while they called out the character name, act/scene, and a description of the garment being packed.
Bartholomew was cooking something amazing in the kitchen—it smelled sublime—and Jordan was labeling the already-packed boxes, filling out the FedEx paperwork in tiny scientist’s handwriting that put Cully’s to shame.
“Where’s Dante?” he asked frowzily, overwhelmed. Sure, he had one more costume to finish, but this, all of this that his friends were doing, was the thing he’d been most afraid of. Organizing his thoughts, organizing the boxes, literally getting his shit together to send out. It had terrified him.
“Where’s Dante?” he asked tentatively. “I… where’d he go?”
But at that moment Dante burst back in, smiling a secret smile and smelling like August sunshine.
“Where were you?” he asked, feeling plaintive and stupid.
“Sit down and eat,” Dante told him. “And trust me. As soon as we get all this shit out tomorrow, I’ll tell you what’s doing.” He looked around. “God, you guys, you’re miracle workers.”
Jordan and Alex had looked up, but Kate and Josh—who both had worked retail jobs on their way through college—had been busy making the clothes as wrinkle-free as possible between layers of acid-free tissue.
“Your instructions were very specific,” Jordan said mildly. “It’s like you’ve been planning how to do this for a month.”
Dante gave him a sheepish look, and Cully realized that Dante probably had. He’d listened to Cully vent for a month about what had to be done to send the costumes out and had made a plan and organized things in his head and done all the things Cully’s brain wasn’t good at, but done them inside so when crunch time came, he could give instructions like the costume god himself.
“Well, I had a sense of things,” Dante mumbled. “Barty, is that almost ready?”
“Yeah. If you want to put the garlic bread in, we’ll have chicken alfredo for seven very shortly.”
Cully looked around helplessly and sank into a chair that had—that very morning—been covered in packing instructions and a turn-of-the-century-style ballgown. He looked at Alex across the kitchen table, which was now devoid of coffee cups, and asked, “What do I do now?”
Alex—compact, dry, understated—had given him a look of compassion.
“You take a deep breath and get ready to finish that last dress when we’re done eating,” he’d said. “Don’t worry, Cully. We got you.”
Cully had nodded, still tired, and rested his head on his arms as the people who’d made themselves family worked around him.
He hadn’t realized—not really—how much they’d all worked together, how much they’d all meant to each other, not until this moment.
When Barty had started the baking business and asked Cully if he wanted to contribute stock, he’d jumped at the chance. Go into business with his friends?
He couldn’t think of anything better.
MEMORIES—so many memories—flooding him as he stared at the plate on the table.
Leave it, he thought. Leave it to show Dante you know he’s got your back. Leave it—it will be a message that you trust him, that everything’s okay.
Like an automaton, and from far away, he saw his own hand reach out to grab the plate, and his body followed to rinse it off in the sink.
By the time it was in the drying rack, he’d forgotten about the plate, the message, and the Post-its and was on his way back to his bedroom.
His sewing machine awaited.
But What Does It Mean?
DANTE could hear the sewing machine going, could hear Cully swearing to himself, but by this point, he knew if he got up from the kitchen table where he was writing, he’d forget where he was going by the time he got there and would end up in his bedroom, or in the shower, or at the refrigerator.
He wasn’t sure how long they’d been locked in limbo after the spell, but he was beginning to learn the rules.
When someone from the outside world stopped by—and he’d been checking the calendar, so he knew it happened every day—he would be left with a lingering impression of the visit, but very few concrete details.
One day, he’d been in midconversation with Jordan when Jordan had asked him what the writing was on his arm. Dreamily he’d looked at his arm and seen, in Sharpie, all sorts of questions. But in the way of dreams, he hadn’t been able to read a single one of them, not a word. He’d held his arm up to Jordan mutely, and Jordan had opened his mouth as though to respond, and then Dante had been eating a meal of fresh veggie kabobs that he was pretty sure Jordan had brought over, cooked and everything, and watching the words unwrite themselves from his arm.
He’d found Cully’s Post-its, asking questions, though, and he’d written Post-its back. But the next time he thought to look, everything had been cleaned, including the Post-its on the walls inviting Cully into his room to see his secret project, the one he was working on now.
He wasn’t sure why he’d done that, except… except it seemed important. There wasn’t much Dante and Cully didn’t know about each other, except the big thing, the big lie that he was starting to suspect had gotten them into this situation.
They were eventually going to have to talk about the big thing, the big lie. Dante thought that maybe showing Cully the other thing, the thing he was so embarrassed and hopeful about, and letting Cully know that Dante had trusted him above all the others, including Jordan, might let Cully… maybe open up. About the big thing. The big lie.
Dante hoped so.
The thought of being that open and vulnerable, even in front of Cully, terrified him.
THIS memory crept up on him subtly….
“Hey, Mom.” He hated this—this ritual he performed once a year in early September. “Happy birthday.”
“Happy birthday to you, honey. Did you get my card?”
His birthday was August 21, and hers was September 4. Their cards often crossed in the mail, but he never forgot a phone call.
“’Course. Thank you. Uhm, you guys don’t need to send money anymore. You know that. Sentiment is fine.” Except he really wished the sentiment was real. Achingly, he remembered his fourteenth birthday, before he’d come out, before he’d graduated and moved up to Sacramento. He’d been the apple of his parents’ eye—even Carlo, his brother, knew that. Dante who played baseball, Dante who got good grades, Dante who volunteered at the local dog shelter. Carlo, who could count the days he didn’t have detention on one hand, had probably hated Dante with all his soul.