He didn’t. He followed me up the walk, trailing behind like a kid on his way to the principal.
My father met us at the door, eyes already red, a bottle in his hand. He looked at Ty, then at me, then back at Ty.
“What the fuck you doing here, Higgins?”
Ty tried to answer, but my dad didn’t wait. He reached out, grabbed Ty by the collar, and yanked him inside.
“Dad, stop,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. Or maybe he did, and just didn’t care.
He threw Ty against the wall, hard enough that the plaster cracked. The bottle slipped from his hand and shattered on the tile. The reek of whiskey filled the hallway.
“You want to come here and run your mouth? You want to make trouble for my family?” My father’s voice was a growl. “You think you can just fuck around with my boy and not pay for it?”
Ty tried to push him away. My dad punched him in the stomach, once, then again, each blow heavy and final. Ty doubled over, wheezing, but didn’t cry out. He just shook.
I jumped in, tried to pull my dad off, but he was too strong. He backhanded me across the face. I went down, my head bouncing off the door frame. The world went soft around the edges.
When I looked up, Ty was on the floor, curled in on himself. My dad grabbed him by the arm, hauled him up, and dragged him outside.
I scrambled to my feet, followed them into the yard. The night was so quiet I could hear the ice forming on the gutters. Ty’s breath came in ragged bursts, white in the air.
He tried to run, but my father didn’t let him. He grabbed a whiskey bottle from the porch and slammed it over Ty’s head. Blood spurted out. Ty fell to the ground. No more white breaths.
My father picked Ty up, put him in his truck.
“Get in the back, boy,” he said to me in that gnarled violent voice.
Us at the creek. My father dragging me out of the truck. The truck on fire.
“Ty could still be breathing” I screamed. We needed to get him help.
My father laughed. “Boy you were here for this too. You better never say one word about it.”
The pain in my own head was too much. I sank to my knees. If I just took a break, I could get there in a few minutes.
But that was the last I remember. Until the next day, when my father told me to get the hell out of town.
And I did. Because I was too scared to do anything else.
I snapped back to the present, the taste of blood in my mouth, my hands clenched so tight my nails cut half-moons into my palms.
I looked at my father, slumped on the floor now, head in his hands.
He was old now. Slow. But the meanness hadn’t faded. If anything, it had gotten sharper, more concentrated.
“I remember everything.”
He sneered. “About what?”
“About Ty. About what you did to him.”
He scoffed, but there was fear in his eyes. “You don’t know shit.”
“I know you killed him,” I said. “I know you made me go to the creek with you to scare me, to make me an accomplice.”
“He wasn’t worth all this trouble,” he said with a sneer.
I shook my head. “He was a kid. Just a scared kid. I’m going to the cops,” I said, voice flat. “I’m going to tell them everything.”
