Chapter 2: That night
The car ride home was silent except for the thrum of tires on asphalt and the sticky, faint smell of spearmint that seemed to have permeated the very fabric of Elias’s being. He’d spat the gum into a tissue, but the ghost of it remained, a cold, mocking kiss on his tongue. He stared out the window at the blur of streetlights, his reflection in the glass a smeared duplicate of the clown in the department store mirror. The lipstick was gone, scrubbed raw in a gas station bathroom, but the stain of it felt permanent.
The house welcomed them with a sigh of neglect. The living room was a shrine to failed expectations. Wallpaper peeled away from the corners like old skin. A half-built bookshelf, a project his father had abandoned years ago, leaned against one wall like a drunken uncle. On the mantel, a framed photo of a nine-year-old Elias, flexing in a swimsuit at a community pool, was cracked clean down the middle. The air smelled of expired coffee grounds and something else, a bitter tang like regret.
Margaret dropped her keys into a ceramic bowl with a sharp clatter. “Well. That was productive.”
Elias moved toward the hallway, a moth seeking the dark.
“Not so fast.” Her voice stopped him, clean and surgical. “We’re not done. You’ve had your little public moment. Now we have a private lesson.”
He turned. She was smiling, but it was all teeth. She walked to a moldering cardboard box in the corner, one that had sat there for a decade. It was labeled, in his father’s clumsy block letters, ‘OLD SHIT’. She flipped the lid open, releasing a cloud of dust and mothballs.
“Your father,” she said, rummaging, “was a useless man. Weak. But at least he was built like a man. A functional, if unimpressive, man.” She pulled out a bundle of cloth. It was a pair of men’s jeans, faded denim, and a plaid work shirt. They were small. His father had been a slight man. “Put these on.”
Elias stared. “Why?”
“Because I said so.” She threw them at his feet. “A lesson in proportion. In what you didn’t get. In what you’ll never be. Put them on, Elias. Now.”
His hands trembled as he picked up the clothes. The denim was stiff with age. He shuffled to the downstairs bathroom, a cramped space smelling of mildew and his mother’s flowery deodorant. He stripped, avoiding the mirror. The fluorescent bulb buzzed overhead. The jeans were tight in the waist but baggy everywhere else, especially in the seat and thighs. They hung on his slender frame, emphasizing the lack of substance. The shirt was worse, the shoulders drooping past his own.
When he walked back out, she was sitting on the sagging couch, one leg crossed over the other. She let out a short, sharp bark of laughter.
“Look at you. Swimming in them.” She shook her head. “He wasn’t a big man. But he filled these out. You look like a child playing dress-up in his daddy’s clothes. Which, I suppose, is exactly what you are.”
He stood there, drowning in fabric, the coarse material scratching his skin. He felt five years old. He felt unborn.
The front door opened then. A heavy tread in the hallway.