Page 35 of The Party Plot

Casey picked at a stray thread on the couch cushion. The furniture was a sea of beige and pale pink, and he guessed Laurel hadn’t chosen it, because he couldn’t see pink or red very well. He wondered what it was like to live a life without all of the colors. He wondered how Laurel got dressed in the morning, and what sunsets looked like to him, and, weirdly, he felt a little sad. “Why don’t you sing more?” he asked. “I know you sang in choir as a kid. Did you ever try out for anything? You would have been the right age for American Idol.”

“Yeah.” The smile dropped off Laurel’s face, replaced by a look of exhaustion. “My mom wanted me to.” He grabbed another donut. “I filled out all the paperwork. Told her I had mailed it in. But actually, I just threw it away.” He sighed, looking out the window. “She wanted me to do a lot of things.”

“I know.” Casey pulled another thread out of the sofa. There was some ugly seashell pattern embroidered on it, so really, he was doing Laurel a favor by tearing it up. He shouldn’t stay, though. He needed to make up an excuse to leave, because he didn’t care about Laurel’s fractured relationship with Denise. He didn’t care about anything except getting paid. Right?

Rain had started to fall outside, fat droplets hitting the deck. Casey gave in, breaking a corner off of a cruller from the donut box and popping it into his mouth.

“Honestly, I dodged a bullet,” Laurel said. “Amber, the girl from college I was supposed to propose to? She’s some super-conservative mommy blogger now. I guess I should have known. But at the time, I was just grateful that she wanted to save everything for marriage. It took a lot of the pressure off me.”

“I can see why you haven’t told Denise,” Casey said. “That you’re gay. Or, whatever. Shouldn’t assume.”

Laurel waved a hand in the air. “No, you’re fine. But you’re right. She’d make it all about her, in one way or another. Like she does with everything.” He shook his head. “Honestly, she probably already knows, or at least suspects something. I only had the one serious girlfriend, which she holds over my head. As you’ve seen. Do you know, she was taking Amber ring shopping without me? I think she cared more about an engagement than either of us did. And I was just supposed to follow along, I guess. Check the boxes for her.” He ran a hand through his hair. “If I ever did come out, it would be the same thing. She’d be the most performative ally ever, while still voting against my rights every November. I’d be some—some kind of novelty. To show off to people. I don’t know how you put up with it.”

Casey shrugged. “I guess scheming behind her back helps.”

Laurel didn’t laugh. “I just don’t want to deal. Is that wrong of me? Probably. Whenever I come back here, I feel like I’m not myself.”

“Why even come back to begin with?” He didn’t get it.

Laurel took another drink. “Because she asks me to, I guess. And because my friends are here.”

“What about your dad?” Casey heard himself ask.

“Oh, he’s great. Doesn’t speak a lot of English, but when I told him, he was really cool about it. He just said, ‘A chacun son gout. Many tastes make beautiful the world.’ And then he poured me a big glass of brandy.”

The sugary taste of the cruller seemed to have curdled in Casey’s mouth. He cleared his throat. “That’s sweet.”

“It was. I’m lucky. I kind of got my heart stomped on by this older guy, in my mid-twenties. And my dad could tell something was wrong, so I ended up confiding in him. It was weird. Like a dam broke between us. He wasn’t really, like, active in my childhood. I didn’t actually visit him much until I was an adult. I guess I had myself convinced that he didn’t like me. But we’ve been getting closer.” He leaned back, staring out the window. After a moment, he let out a little laugh. “You know what’s funny? I’ve never told anyone else that story. Not even Melody.”

Laurel didn’t add anything else, and the room descended into silence. Outside, it was raining in earnest, and the living room felt hushed and intimate, a cocoon. Casey’s heart was pounding. He imagined asking about Belgium. He didn’t know anything about it, pictured cobbled streets and old buildings and maybe beer? Was beer a big thing in Belgium? Pretzels? Windmills? No, wrong country. He had never been outside of the US, didn’t have a passport.

What if we just got out of here?The words were on the tip of his tongue, but he would never say them. They had agreed that this wouldn’t turn into anything. And Casey didn’t have anything to offer someone like Laurel, not really. He wasn’t sure he had anything to offer anyone, period. He’d been solitary for so long that he would have no idea how to be part of a pair.

“So, do you have parents?” Laurel asked, after a while. “I mean, you must.”

Casey sighed. The whole saga really wasn’t worth telling. Just one more ugly, banal story of childhood trauma, worse than some and better than others. The years of moving around. The cons and get-rich-quick schemes. Being dropped off at his grandma’s whenever his dad was in trouble. The slow realization that his only parent wasn’t a very good person, or in his right mind.

“My mom left when I was a baby.” He’d seen one picture of her, so bleached out by sun and the years that her face was barely distinguishable. A nervous smile and a big halo of over-treated blonde hair, like every other white woman in the early ‘90s. “I was raised by my dad, but I’m not close with him. I was at one point. But he got really religious after he stopped using.” He didn’t add that he had only gotten clean for good after his third stint in prison. Laurel didn’t need to know that.

“That sucks.” Laurel chewed his lip. Casey couldn’t read the look in his eyes—affection, or pity, or fascination—whatever it was, it made him uncomfortable. He turned back to the box of donuts, slowly dismantling one into a pile of crumbs.

“Yeah, well. I don’t miss him. For all his talk about virtue, he put my grandma in the cheapest home he could find. It flooded during Hurricane Michael, and they couldn’t evacuate fast enough. She got hypothermia.” Hypothermia in filthy, bathtub-warm water. It was insulting. Grandma Terri hadn’t deserved that. Casey realized that his hand was trembling, and he clenched it into a fist.

“Jesus. The grandma with the birds? Was she—”

“Okay?” Casey shook his head. He was surprised Laurel had remembered the birds. Who knew what had happened to them. His dad had probably dumped them at a pet store, or just let them out of their cages to fend for themselves. His throat felt tight.

“Casey—”

“So what’s happening with the Halloween ball?” he asked, more harshly than he’d meant to. “I can tell you don’t actually care that much about Denise finally getting accepted into society, so why go through with it? Why promise me all this money? Because I’m fine with just dropping the whole thing at this point. In fact, I’d be happy to. It’s what she deserves.”

“You want to drop the whole thing?” Laurel said slowly.

Casey shrugged, not meeting his eyes. “Why not? It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

“And what happens then, you just leave town?”

Casey shrugged again. He would go somewhere where the humidity didn’t make his head feel like it was going to explode. Somewhere with snow and mountains. Colorado, or Washington State.

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