Page 5 of I Will Ruin You

A minor nod.

“Great.”

I stepped closer and held the door for him so he didn’t have to push it with his body.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

He turned around. “That way?” he asked, looking out toward the athletic field and the track that ran around it.

“Yeah. One step at a time. Go right out to the middle.”

Mark took one last glance at me over his shoulder and, as he took another step, said, “Okay.”

And that was when his right foot landed on the long lace that was dangling from his left boot and he stumbled forward.

As he headed into his trip, he threw out both hands in front of him, instinctively, to break his fall.

I said, “Oh sh—”

I had half a second to turn away and run before the deafening blast.

Two

Billy Finster was kicking back on the turquoise leather couch, legs on the coffee table next to a half-open bag of Cheetos. He had a TV remote in one hand and a can of Sapporo in the other, flipping through the channels so quickly the wide-screen television was a relentless blur.

He put the remote down long enough to reach into the Cheetos bag, stuffed a few in his mouth, wiped his fingers on his threadbare Hartford Whalers sweatshirt to get rid of the orange dust, and saw that he had landed on a station that ran game shows from decades past. It was an episode of The $100,000 Pyramid, old enough that Dick Clark was hosting.

Billy stopped flipping.

Some long-forgotten celebrity was rattling off a list of things to her contestant partner. “A frog’s skin. A pine tree.” The contestant had come up with “things that are shiny” and “things that are smooth” but was missing the obvious “things that are green,” so Billy decided to offer some assistance.

“Snot!” he shouted at the screen. “Gangrene!”

“Who the fuck are you shouting at?”

Billy didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. His wife, Lucy, halfway down the stairs to the basement rec room. She was lollipop-thin, with streaked blond hair, ripped jeans, and a blue blouse adorned with sparkles, having changed out of her pale green hospital cafeteria uniform.

“Pyramid,” he said.

“Whoosit’s here,” she said, making it sound like she’d spotted mouse droppings.

Billy tilted his head back, shouted: “Stuart! Downstairs!”

Stuart Betz waited for her to come back to the top of the stairs before heading down. “Nice to see you, Lucy,” he said obsequiously as she passed, barely mumbling a reply.

Stuart beelined it to the bar fridge in the corner of the room, next to the Fast and Furious movie poster, and helped himself to a beer. His fashion sense mirrored Billy’s. Sweats, oversized sneakers, but instead of a Hartford Whalers shirt he was wearing the Boston Bruins. The two of them, with their similar wardrobes, paunches, and shoulder-length black hair, could have passed for brothers.

Stuart pulled back the tab on the beer and stood in front of Billy.

“Do I look funny?”

“You always look funny.”

“No, I mean, like I got somethin’ on me or bird shit in my hair? ’Cause Lucy gave me a look.”

“She just thinks you’re an asshole.”