You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(110)

That wannabe Shining grin again and I can’t believe you love him. “This shit is good.”

I rub my forehead. The fumes. The pain. “So, I took her to Serendipity.”

“To what?”

Idiot. “We went to this place we’ve always wanted to go and we were happy. I mean, to me, that was us at our best. But then she left me. She left me to go call you. Do you know how that feels? You’ve got a hold on her and you don’t care.”

He laughs. I don’t. He’s not a boy, not yet a man, and I feel older than him, wiser. Like Britney at the end of Crossroads. He barks: “Gimme that rock.”

Two hits of crack and it’s rock. I load his pipe. “And you’re so lucky, Dick. You’re so fucking lucky that she hangs on to you, and you…Do you know what I would do to have her love me like that? Do you get that I actually…I meant every fucking word I ever said to you. And you had her, you could have her right now, and I’m not that guy who is gonna blame it on her. I am not that guy who says, ‘If I can’t have her, nobody can.’ I am not a fucking sicko and I would never help you hurt her and…Can’t you just be good to her?”

He licks the bulb of the pipe and I am trembling. On the edge of the cliff. No one pushed me. I slide off the mountain and my fingertips are raw. I meant what I said. I would let him have you and I would let you have him and is that what love is? You above me. Him above me. Everyone above me on their feet while I grope falling rocks and hold on for dear life?

I see it now. He’s gonna have his come-to-Jesus moment and I’m gonna let him out of here and the two of you are gonna make babies and rub it in my face and I’m gonna have to move to old Honolulu, San Francisco, or Ashta-fucking-bula.

“Wowza,” he says. “I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my fucking life.”

There it is; he wants you. I am gonna lose you, I really am. “Okay then.”

“Fuck cocaine, Goldberg. Gimme that rock.”

I can’t do it, Vail. I can’t spend the rest of my life knowing that I was the one who brought this dead phantom dick back to life and let him wrap you around his finger. I can’t let you linger unloved and caged as you and Dick mimic the soap opera that is your sad-sack S&M parents. If you love a woman, and the feral dog bit her and is champing at the bit for more, if she is numb to her pain and oblivious to the blood trickling down her leg, then you do the impossible.

You don’t set the dog free. You drag it into the woods and shoot it.

Mr. Mooney says readers hate books where people kill dogs, and Dick is not really a fucking dog. Dogs are sweet, even the wild ones that aren’t meant to rely on us, lay down with us. Only a man can be wholly fucking vicious and I hope that all dicks go to hell, same way all dogs go to heaven.

I stick his party favor props in my pants pocket. I light up the rock. I know his limits; I don’t need a gun. I watch him go white. Didn’t know eyeballs could sweat like that. I see it in his neck. He was right! Blue and red. This is the rock that no paper can cover up. This is the blow that ends him and saves you and there is fire in his face. Smoke snaking through his lungs, pulling them in tighter. His eyes are not on the same head. Bubbles in the sky above the schoolyard. I can’t catch them, can’t see them. He’s the kind of asshole who will probably get to hell and cry to all the pretty dead girls about his tragic suicide at twenty-five. That’s what liars do. They lie to themselves first, to practice for all the lies they tell The Others. I bend over his body—it’s a body now, he is going going gone—and I know the truth. I know it when I dig his wallet out of his back pocket.

Richard Arnold Palmer didn’t overdose and wasn’t a fucking accident. I killed him. I broke his dickhead heart.

And I did it for you.

It is quiet. I expected something dramatic. I thought the world would explode or something. And that’s stupid, right? People die every day. I wait to feel heavy or hardened. I’m supposed to be a changed man. That’s how it works, right? A solider is never the same after the first kill. But I’m not like that, I guess.

I feel…the same.

I was testing him, rescuing you, but now that he’s gone I can admit it. I did this for me too, Vail. I wanted to know the depth of my devotion. Would I still kill to be in his shoes if he was dead…if being the one you love meant getting killed in a warehouse? Losing out on a future, a life? Would I, you know, die if that would make you love me? I stand over his dead body and I’m sure of two things. First, there was only one way to find out. Second, the answer is yes, Vail.

Yes, I fucking would.





38


Life goes on and we pick up the pieces and you know what I’m gonna say. I’m a murderer now—holy shit—but nothing’s that big of a deal. That’s the joy of being a reader. We book people will tell you that we go back to our novels, to our paperbacks, because a book is a friend. A light in the dark. As a reader who knows that the best work we do as people is the work that outlives us, as in the stories we tell so that others might read them and feel seen. Known. The one on my mind as I get cozy with a corpse for the first time in my life is Stephen King’s The Body. You know the drill, the lost boys who have each other go on a mission to see a dead body. That one changed my outlook on people.

I went to school and looked at The Others in a whole new way, all these potential buddies. I put myself out there, tried to find a crew, build a team. The deceased man in the freezer is a solid example of why I never did find my crew. The truth is, Vail, most guys are like Richard Arnold Palmer.