Maneuvering his bags one-handed, Auggie trudged toward the Sigma Sigma house, his high-tops sliding on the ice and old snow. The bags kept falling; his wrist was still healing, and he couldn’t keep the smaller bag balanced on top of the larger one. Thank God the cast was about to come off.
At the side door, Auggie punched in the code, dragged his bags inside, and was greeted with the familiar post-party bouquet of spilled beer, body odor, and overdone perfume. A couple was passed out in the hall, the girl with her hand possessively on the guy’s ass, and ahead, in the gallery, someone was asleep with a lampshade on their head. Ironic? Or just a genuine love for indoor lighting paraphernalia?
Auggie didn’t even bother trying to make things easy for the partygoers. He dragged his luggage down the hall, ignoring the grunts and half-formed protests when he bumped into someone. He stopped in the kitchen, raided the fridge, and loaded half of a Blimpie’s sub and a can of PBR on top of the luggage. Getting everything upstairs required two trips, and by the time he’d finished, his wrist was throbbing, and he was covered in a thin layer of sweat. His room was a disaster and, worse, had a serious, locker-room funk—apparently he’d forgotten to do laundry before leaving. After cracking the window, Auggie ate the sub sandwich in the dark. He finished the beer. He thought about brushing his teeth and gave up.
Giving up had slipped into his life after that day at Theo’s. For the first few days, the combination of painkillers and aftershock had numbed Auggie to what had happened. He’d been comfortable. Hell, he’d been bouncing off the walls. Theo had spent the night with him at the hospital, and then he’d made sure Auggie got back to the Sigma Sigma house safely the next day. They’d worked up a story about a mugging, leaving Theo out of it, which was good because when Detective Somerset and Detective Upchurch came to take a statement from Auggie, Auggie thought Somerset in particular didn’t look convinced. But Theo had obviously known how things would go, and he’d coached Auggie on which details to invent and which details he could claim to have forgotten; eventually, the detectives had left him alone.
After that, for a while, things had gotten even better. The mugging—and the fact that Auggie still had his phone and wallet—had given him a new level of street cred among the Sigma Sigma brothers. The guys who picked fights in bars and bragged about crushing the other team on the lacrosse field, the guys who hit the gym every day and who would get up in a stranger’s face, screaming, they were the same guys who had grown up in six-hundred-thousand-dollar homes, driven Porsches and Beamers and Mercedes and Audis and Infinitis, had gone to prep schools and reform schools where the closest they’d ever come to real danger was if they were required to take wood shop. When they talked to Auggie, they seemed aware of the fact that the testosterone-fueled violence they manufactured in their day-to-day lives was the equivalent of shadow boxing. They hung on his every word.
And, of course, so did Auggie’s online following. His idea to snap his way through his morning routine had solidified his place on Snapchat, and he’d kept up a solid stream of new, funny content on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. But the assault changed everything. Auggie was human in a way he’d never been for his followers. He snapped everything. He scripted and filmed a satire of frat boys getting mugged with Ethan and Orlando and a handful of friends he liked to rotate through his content; the video almost hit a million views. An agent who had dropped Auggie two years before called. “I fucked up, Auggie,” were the opening words. “Tell me how much shit you want me to eat so I can make this right, and by the end of next year, I can have you making six figures.”
Starting at the hospital, and every day after that, Dylan was there. He’d show up for a few minutes, bringing tea, a book of Zen meditations, a leather bracelet he had tooled by hand for Auggie. He snapped Auggie constantly, silly stuff that made Auggie smile: one raised eyebrow, with a lecture hall in the background; those huge, muscled legs stretched out on the sofa, ostensibly showing Auggie a new pair of red socks stitched with green Christmas elves; a sunrise after he had finished tai chi. Neither of them mentioned the night in Auggie’s room. It was as though it had never happened.
Even finals went well. Four of Auggie’s professors exempted him—he had solid A’s in every class—and although Wagner begrudgingly gave extra time for Auggie to finish writing his essay, Auggie didn’t really need it. He had already written most of it in his head before that day at Theo’s, and he finished it with a battered paperback copy of Romeo and Juliet that Theo had provided without any sort of explanation. After Auggie submitted the paper, Wagner had written back a single line in an email: A. Extenuating circumstances. Theo had sworn a blue streak when Auggie told him; Auggie found the whole thing funny.
Theo was the problem. One of the problems. Theo was with Auggie for as much time as Auggie would allow. At first, it was comforting. Then, by degrees, less so. Theo didn’t eat, as far as Auggie could tell. After a week, his face was hollow, his eyes marked with dark patches. He’d go home and shower and change his clothes, but when he’d come back, he’d be worse in some ways: his attention wandering, his pupils dilated, his words trailing off in the middle of conversations. When Auggie permitted it, Theo slept on the spare bed. Theo tried to laugh. Theo tried to make conversation. Theo tried to be Theo. But by the end of finals week, Auggie felt like he was being haunted by Theo’s ghost, and it was a relief to get on the shuttle and pretend he didn’t see Theo standing there, watching as he drove away.
Another problem, although in a different way, were the four weeks at home. Fer alternated between overly busy and having nothing to do. Chuy slept away the days and disappeared at night. Auggie’s mom had spent the first forty-five minutes after he got home cooing over him, calling him her baby, making an ice pack for his bruises—“It happened weeks ago, Mom. I don’t need an ice pack.”—and then Birch called, and she left, giving air kisses as she backed out the door.
“He’s twenty-two fucking years old,” Fer said after he and Auggie had burned through half a joint together. “If I have to pay for that fucker to have braces, I’m going to fucking kill myself.”
When they were well on their way with the second joint, Fer came back from his room with a gun.
“What the hell?” Auggie said.
“Who did that to you?”
“What?”
“I’m going to kill whoever did that to you.”
“Fer, Jesus, I told you: I got mugged. I don’t know who did it. Wait, when did you get a gun?”
“When our shit-bucket brother decided to become a junkie.” Fer set the gun on the coffee table and hit the joint hard, staring at the weapon’s dull metal plating. Passing back the joint, he exhaled and wiped his eyes. “I want to kill them, Augustus. I want to do to them everything they did to you and then perforate their anal cavity with this fucking gun, and I’m not talking about using bullets.”
That was the first night of the dreams, although dreams might have been too strong of a word. There was nothing visual to them, only the sense of being trapped, the memory of the blows that wouldn’t stop, the helplessness of it. He jolted out of sleep, crying so hard that he had to bite the blanket because he was afraid he’d wake someone up. That’s why he was awake when Chuy got home. That’s why he was awake when he heard the sound of gagging in the next room. He found Chuy passed out on his back, trying to breathe through his own vomit. Auggie screamed for Fer, flipped Chuy onto his stomach, and pounded on his back. By the time Fer got there, the gun in one hand, Chuy was breathing somewhat normally again.