Chapter Text
Billy wonders, sometimes, if he has a sort of superpower. Kids from more normal families don’t hear things the same way he does, or at least, they don’t seem to. They miss the note in a parent’s voice, the edge beneath an otherwise innocuous statement. The change in timbre of their movements, the usual rustling growing ominous, threatening. Those distant-but-unmistakable warnings, church bells tolling in a neighboring town. Sounding the alarm about a storm, or a hurricane, or a tsunami.
He wonders what it’s like, being like the kids on TV sitcoms. Being able to ignore that warning, to the point where you don’t even hear it. Having the kind of bland self-assurance that, no matter what bullshit comes out of your mouth, you’ll be sheltered from the storm.
Also a superpower, in its way.
He shifts restlessly on his bed, flicking through the December issue of Car and Driver. By all measures, this should be a quiet night. Max and Susan are going to Max’s little dance with the nerd herd, the one that Steve’s taking the loudmouthed kid to. Neil’s sitting in the living room, watching a rerun of M*A*S*H. Quietly, the lights of suburbia burn around them. Families going about their mundane, everyday business.
And yet.
It’s not long after Susan and Max have left that Billy hears a knock on his doorframe. Looks up from the article he’s reading on the new Corvette to see Neil standing there, solid, immovable. “I’m surprised to see you home tonight, son. It’s Saturday, isn’t it?”
Billy ignores the drop in his stomach, the loss of pressure that signals the approach of the storm front. Summons a smile, all earnest charm; sometimes the storm can be outrun, or diverted. “It’s Max’s big night. I figure I should stick around in case she needs a ride home.”
“Now, that’s very thoughtful of you, Billy.” Neil encroaches into the room, sits solid on the worn brown loveseat. “But Susan’s going to pick her up, when the dance is over. You’re off the hook for tonight.” Billy allows himself a flicker of relief—until Neil smiles, teeth gleaming small and even in the light of Billy’s bedside lamp. “It’s been a while since we had any real father-son time.”
The flicker blows out in a sudden gust, church bells becoming louder and more frantic—the friendly demeanor, the persistent presence, the unspoken threat that may or may not be hiding behind the words. It’s just us. Nobody to interfere in our family business. He mouths the expected response, keeps his senses on alert. “Thank you, sir.”
Neil relaxes a little at that, leans back against the sofa, the picture of fatherly care; no outward sign of the storm clouds Billy senses, moving, morphing, metastasizing from the horizon. “Now then. Why don’t you tell me what you were up to, last night? I didn’t see much of you after dinner.” He raises an eyebrow in lewd parental inquisitiveness, and Billy can feel his internal barometer drop further, the cold wind gust through his gut. “I hope you were using condoms? I’d hate to see you repeat the mistake I made with your mother.”
On the rare occasions when anyone’s cared enough to ask him inconvenient questions, about marks or language or nocturnal ramblings, Billy has always shrugged carelessly and said, my dad drinks. It’s the kind of convenient answer that forestalls further questions, that stymies the asker with that combination of pity and helplessness that Billy’s learned to turn to his advantage. It’s also, conveniently, true—like a sailor watching the sky at morning, Billy watches for the signs, to take shelter, or get out of the way.
But this…this is the part he never mentions, isn’t even quite sure he could explain. The times when Neil is stone sober, merely showing concern, like a father should. When he’s doing his job, when there’s no sign of anything wrong except for this churning in Billy’s gut, the pervasive uncertainty as to whether the conversation will end with his hair being fondly tousled, or with his body bearing angry bruises.
For a moment, he feels a sick sort of jealousy towards Steve Harrington and his absentee parents—
“No, sir,” he responds, the words half-swallowed. He keeps his eyes on Neil’s, wrestles his face into something resembling earnestness—realizes his mistake. “I mean, no, I wasn’t at a girl’s house. I went to a friend’s.” Keep it simple, he remembers, hard-learned lessons surfacing as he holds Neil’s gaze. The less you invent the less you have to recall later. “One of my teammates. We hung out a while.”
For a moment he thinks Neil will be satisfied by that, but then his moustache curls up at one corner, and Billy’s stomach sinks further. “Until three in the morning?” His voice is practically jovial, a father laughing at a treasured son’s first attempt at a fib. “That’s a little late for a social visit, wouldn't you say?”
Billy freezes. The fire that continually burns under his skin, the anger and frustration that’s perpetually scrabbling to get out—he grabs onto it, smothers it with his body. He knows if he lets it burn, it will only consume him, leave him broken and bleeding on the floor. His only hope—fast fading as it is—is to douse himself in ice water.
He focuses on the here and now. On the irony. His father, worried that he’s going to knock up some bitch. If he were anywhere else right now he’d laugh.
He probably will laugh, when it’s over. It’ll be better than crying.
Neil’s eyes are on him, as if watching his thoughts circle around and around on their hamster wheel; with a force of effort, he keeps his focus, keeps his cool. Drops his eyes, both to think and to signal to Neil that he’s won this round. Admit to a smaller transgression. Something he can latch onto. “I’m sorry, sir. The truth is, we were drinking.” Spin it into something positive. He looks back up, is careful to keep any hint of defiance out of the words. “I figured I shouldn’t drive home until I’d sobered up. It seemed the responsible thing to do.”
Neil’s smile grows wider, though it’s less triumphant than sickeningly paternal. “I appreciate your honesty with me, Billy,” he says, and Billy relaxes a hair. Prepares himself for a lecture about underage drinking, but Neil surprises him by changing the subject. “How is school going for you?”
Billy resists the temptation to shrug. He’s always been an indifferent student, and Neil knows it; there’s not really any point in saying as much. “I’m working on it,” he says instead. Then, hoping that Neil is looking for conversation rather than a fight, he tries a gambit of his own. “Are we still thinking about moving back to California?”
“Well, I think that’s going to depend on your grades this semester,” Neil says, still all fatherly warmth, as if this had always been the agreement between them. “If you’re having difficulty, it’d hardly be ideal to have you change schools in the middle of the year. Don’t you agree, Billy?”
Billy feels his shoulders tighten; he knows this is part of the game, where he discovers the arbitrary rules Neil has set by running face-first into them. When he agrees to them, pretends he knew about them all along, pretends they’re reasonable. Pretends that all of this is perfectly normal. He sets his jaw, meets his father’s gaze. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
“I’m certain you will,” Neil says, smiling again. The clouds are receding slightly, the air warming. “We’ll have to see if it’s enough, won’t we?”
You’re more than enough—
Billy quashes the memory, quicksilver and treacherous as moonlight behind a cloud. Now’s not the time to think about Steve’s face above his, worshipful—“I guess we’re both in that boat,” Billy says.
Half a moment later, he’s kicking himself—Neil’s smile has slipped a fraction, and his eyes have grown cold. “I’m sorry, Billy. I don’t think I understand what you mean.”
This is the place where he backpedals. Where he apologizes, without acknowledging what’s passed between them. Where he finds some innocuous explanation for his comment, where he makes himself small, hopes that his cowering will be sufficient for the storm to pass him by.
There’s so much of you, Billy. Like a hurricane—or an earthquake—I want it all—
“So was the story about you losing your shit at your boss untrue?” Billy’s brain is waving its arms, pulling the brakes, trying to smother the flames that are rearing up once more—but Billy is disengaged, is practically watching from beside himself as he cocks an eyebrow, as Neil’s jaw tightens at the unexpected pushback. “Because this is a small town, and news like that travels fast.” He smiles, showing his teeth, just manages not to say you’ll be lucky if you can get a job bagging groceries in this town. “Guess we’re going to have to go back to California after all.”
Neil takes a moment to answer. “I haven’t yet given up on Hawkins,” he says, his tone carefully even. “I’ve already apologized to my former supervisor. He’s agreed not to press charges. There’s still a possible future for us here.” He meets Billy’s eyes once again, and the storm is bearing down on him but Billy can’t seem to bring himself to care. “Your sister is admirably determined to build a life here.”
“Well, gee, that sounds swell. I’m sure everything’s going to work out fine.” Billy scoffs in the back of his throat, considers leaving it there—but at this point, things are so fucked anyway—“How does it feel, now that everyone in town knows you’re as big a fuckup as your son?”
Neil’s eyes are hailstone-hard. “It’s hardly my fault you’ve refused to learn. I’ve done everything I can to teach you responsibility—”
“Like you learned in the Marines, yeah, I remember.” Billy doesn’t even care that he’s interrupting—that dark glee is swelling, the sight of Neil’s face as he struggles to maintain control bearing Billy along like a wave, pushing him further, and further—he tosses his magazine aside. “Is that what happened there too? Washed out of boot camp because you went nuclear on your drill sergeant? Because your paperwork wasn’t quite clear on that.”
Billy had only been guessing, but from the way Neil goes pale, he’s hit home. There’s a moment of complete silence, and Billy braces himself for the storm’s fury.
Then Neil smiles, a flash of light far too bright to be lightning.
“Paperwork can’t always be trusted.” Neil’s voice is quiet, certain, utterly reasonable. His smile has lost all its warmth; it looks inhuman, a death’s head grinning from the flyer for a band’s final performance. “After all, the paperwork says you’re my son, doesn’t it?”
It takes a moment, the space between the flash and the blast, for Neil’s implication to hit him. For the roar of the fireball to fill Billy’s ears, his head, his body. “What?” The question is barely more than a whisper. “Who else’s would I be?”
Neil raises an eyebrow, far too patient. “Well, now, that’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t think even your mother knows. She’d befriend every passing beach bum, listen to their sob stories, go to their parties, drink their alcohol and take their drugs and open her legs for them like the cheap little whore she was.” His voice is even, each word clearly enunciated, and yet Billy can’t quite string them together, can’t see the picture in his mind—“Is it any wonder as to how she ended up, with a history like that? God knows what it was that finally pushed her over the edge—”
Billy stares, dumbstruck. Then, a flash of an image—from a movie, or a dream—a bed in a padded room, the frame furnished with thick leather straps—
“It was you,” Billy says, and his voice is hoarse, as if he’s been shouting, or screaming, or crying. He gives a little half-laugh, as if he can’t believe his own stupidity. “You drove her crazy. Locked her up. She didn’t run off. You put her somewhere.”
Neil only shakes his head. “I tried to rescue her from that life,” he says, still in that disturbingly even tone. “Tried to bring her home, make her respectable. She even tried, too, once you were born, once I’d claimed you so you wouldn’t be left fatherless.” He shakes his head, as if at a tragedy on the news. “But bad blood will out. It came out in her. And it’ll come out in you.” A little laugh. “With a pedigree like that, is it any wonder you’re a burnout and probably a faggot to boot?”
There’s another silence. A pause, three breaths maybe, during which Billy becomes abruptly aware of three interrelated facts.
The small wellspring of respect Billy once had for Neil is empty. Evaporated. Bone-dry.
This is no longer a matter of Billy struggling against his bonds, trying to scrape out some means of living under Neil’s thumb with some semblance of self intact.
Billy is fighting for his life.
Neil is smiling at him again. “Now you know the truth,” he says, and stands. “Perhaps you’ll rethink some of your choices—”
“Not ‘probably’.” Billy says. He can hear the waver in his voice, can feel the tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, doesn’t even care about the words— pussy, weakling, coward— that he knows are piling up in Neil’s contemptuous brain looking at him. He looks up, meets Neil’s gaze one last time. “Do you really want to know where I was last night?”
“Don’t you dare—” Neil’s smile has turned into a curl of contempt, eyes blazing. “If you want to stay under my roof—”
“You’re right, you know. You’ve always been right.” He gets up off the bed, stands up, looks Neil in the eye; he’ll be damned if he goes to his execution sitting down. “I was taking it up the ass from Steve Harrington. Son of the richest family in Hawkins.” He bares his teeth in his own ghastly parody of a smile. “And I loved every second of it. Screamed for it like a bi—”
Neil’s punch is a bolt from the blue. One moment Billy’s looking him in the face; the next, his head is pointing in an entirely different direction, the shock radiating into his mouth, his teeth. A moment later and the pain hits, a bright red flame along his cheekbone and jaw.
Billy slowly turns his head back to face Neil. “Punching your own son right in the face? Even for you, that’s stupid.”
“You’re not my son.” Neil strings the words together for the first time, turning subtext into text, and Billy bares bloody teeth at him. “My son would have respect. You’re a bad seed grown into a poisonous plant—”
Billy hits him in the nose, feels the sickeningly satisfying crunch of cartilage beneath his fist as Neil falls back a step. He’s running on instinct, now—knows from hard experience that Neil has a good thirty pounds and decades of experience on him. He darts out from the space between Neil and the bed, ducks under one of Neil’s flailing arms, makes a dash for the door—
Neil catches him by the hair. Billy lets out a yell as he’s jerked back, scalp screaming in protest as hairs rip from their roots. Neil’s fingers tighten, haul him closer; his other fist catches Billy in the temple with a hit that makes his ears ring, and he’s only half-aware when Neil throws him to the floor.
Billy shakes his head, feeling like he’s slid several hundred feet down a mountain too quickly. A sharp shock that reverberates through his ribs—a kick, and some distant part of him is grateful it’s too warm for Neil to be wearing boots. The pressure at his temple throbs, and it’s only thanks to a well-timed surge of adrenaline that he scrambles out of the way of Neil’s second kick, catches it against his thigh instead of his kidney. He makes it as far as the hallway; Neil’s advancing on him, his face a mask of blood and fury, and there’s no time to try and stand. Billy cringes and raises an arm as if to ward off a blow, waits a moment—he’s only going to get one shot at this—Neil raises his leg to take aim—
There’s a harder crunch as Billy sends as much force as possible through his heel into Neil’s standing knee. Neil yells and staggers backwards, catching himself on the doorframe; it’s just the space Billy needs to drag himself upright, through the hallway, out the living room (don’t get blood on Susan’s carpet, he thinks, wildly) and through the front door. His legs are still wobbly underneath him, enough that he’s unsure about the stairway down to the street; besides, that’ll be the first place Neil looks if he decides to come after him—to the right is no good, it’s a steep drop to the garage and side door—
Billy dashes to the left, praying that the early dark will hide him. He feels a flash of gratitude that his legs are getting steadier as he runs; he hopes it means he doesn’t have a concussion. He cuts between yards, dodges under the shadow of a clothesline (as much memory as sensory input), dashes for the neighboring street—
The slam of a door opening. “BILLY—” His name doesn’t sound normal, doesn’t sound human, sounds like the roar of a wounded animal, an animal capable of petty cruelty and revenge. Panic drives him forward faster, and he’s grateful for the wan silver light of the half-moon hanging high in the clear sky, even as it casts deceptive shadows. He runs down the pavement, the woods behind the cul-de-sac beckoning—if Neil comes after him, uneven ground will be harder, there’ll be more hiding places, fuck, Neil’s never come after him before but this is new, this is off the script, this is the leveling of all of Billy’s carefully-constructed rules, the annihilation of his entire existence, and he hasn’t a fucking clue what to do next—
Billy hits the treeline, the unmarked but clear boundary between suburbia and forest, and the ground goes from manicured grass to uneven spongy moss in an instant. He slows, mindful of the shadowed trees; he has no light (what if Neil comes after him with a flashlight?) , and the last thing he needs is to trip and twist his ankle. Still, he makes decent progress; his feet seem to know where to land, and the ground stays relatively firm beneath him. He presses on, both to put distance between himself and (papa?) and because, really, what else can he do?
Eventually he slows, comes to a stop, panting. Sits on a fallen log, takes in the woods around him. The trees are further apart, now, and moonlight falls between the leafless branches, dappling the ground. It’s quiet.
It’s creepily quiet. No owls. No rustling of small animals. No insect noises or distant sounds of habitation—his sense of direction has taken him solidly away from humans, though he has only the vaguest idea of how far he’s actually come. But—he looks behind him, listens, just to check—there’s no sign of pursuit. He’s home free, for the moment.
Wherever “home” is now.
He shivers, though it’s more the aftereffects of the adrenaline than the weather—Snow Ball or no, the weather’s still far too warm for snow, or for December for that matter. There isn’t a puff of breeze; the air is almost body temperature, and slides over Billy’s sweaty skin when he moves in a way that feels disturbingly physical. Billy has a sudden image of the air growing thicker and soupier, until he’s struggling to breathe, suffocating, smothering on dry land—
He stands up, starts walking, ignores the way his chest is heaving, gulping down air like a beached fish. There’s no sense in staying here, nothing to do but keep going.
A sound, almost too low-pitched for him to hear at first—a rumbling, maybe, more a vibration than a noise, coming up through the ground from his feet— earthquake , he thinks for a moment, before wondering, we’re in the fuckin’ Midwest, since when is Indiana prone to earthquakes?— looks around wildly for potential falling hazards, braces himself for the agitation, the sense of standing on a table being violently shaken—but the vibration passes, whatever it is beneath the surface of the ground moving onward as if he’s barely a concern.
Billy follows. The sound is receding faster than he can keep up, but he plows on in the same direction, hoping for—something. An explanation? A new discovery? A portal to another world?—anyway, it’s something to do, something to focus on, so he keeps on, hopping over stumps, weaving through thickets, until he pushes his way through a grove of birch trees and comes out in a clearing.
It’s more than a clearing. It’s practically a meadow, a small hillock in the center, entirely bare of trees save for one large tree at the crown, branches spread against the starry sky. The rest of the ground is clear, occupied by grasses and some strange kind of—fungus? There’s an impression of mismatched pale lumps, connected to each other by strands of similar paleness, but the color seems to catch the moonlight and absorb it, makes it difficult to see. Billy moves closer, horrified and fascinated, half-wild thoughts of biology class lectures running through his mind, reaches out tentatively to touch—
—the lump is moving. Slowly, evenly. Expanding. Contracting.
Breathing.
They’re all breathing.
Billy looks up, takes in the scale of the hillside, which suddenly seems vast—he can’t count the number of masses of—plant? animal? Looks back, realizes the lump isn’t as uniform as he’d thought—it’s a wrapping, a shroud of some silky material surrounding…something. Something alive.
Just as the thought sinks into Billy’s hindbrain, he hears another sound, bright against the uncanny silence. It’s a high-pitched whine, like an animal in pain, followed by a scratching, a tearing. He turns his head to the left, sees movement—something more than the hauntingly steady in-out of breath, something frantic and struggling.
Feeling oddly detached, as if his adrenaline reserves are simply tapped out—his maximum level of weird officially reached—Billy moves towards the creature. It’s wrapped in—webbing?—the same way all the others are, but the shroud is incomplete; he can see a dog-shaped hind leg sticking out, making the scrabbling noises. Sees a wiggling at the creature’s rear, like a tail that’s desperately thrashing against its bonds—
Billy reaches for it. He has no idea what this stuff is, what it might do to him, but nothing deserves to be left this way, bound and thrashing and slowly suffocating beneath layers of thick clinging material—especially not some poor mutt that must’ve had the bad luck to get lost trying to find its family. The silk is soft and dry and weirdly sticky beneath his hands; still, it parts, one layer at a time, until both hind legs are free, until he’s unburying its belly, starting on its front legs—the dog is wriggling harder now, making Billy’s efforts more difficult as he avoids the thrashing limbs, but then the front legs come free, and it rolls onto them, unsteady, and Billy grabs hold of the shroud covering its head and pulls—
He falls over backward, but the dog is free, shaking off the remains of the shroud from its back and tail. Billy looks at it, a shadowed shape against the clearing, sees it moving…and something about it is wrong. Something about the way it stands, the shape of it—the musculature—heavy but sleek, like a greyhound, if a greyhound were twice as big and had muscles like a pit bull—
The dog raises its head, snuffles. Stretches towards him, and Billy blinks. The head is malformed, too big for the body, looks like it should be far too heavy for the neck to hold up, looks—pointed, somehow, uncannily so, the point nosing towards his face, wet snuffling sounds growing louder as it approaches. It leans forward, sniffs at him, bare inches from his face, and Billy leans back on his arms, tries to get a proper look at it—
The face opens. Peels back, like flower petals turning to the sun, if a flower had petals that looked like fins and teeth like a fucking shark , multiple rows all down the thing’s—throat?—Billy scrabbles backward, but it leaps, far too graceful for something so ungainly—it lands on him, teeth grabbing the arm he throws up in defense, one forepaw catching the sleeve of his shirt; Billy yells as his head hits the ground, as he feels his flesh shred, as another foot catches him in the scalp, tears a long gash down his cheek, narrowly missing his eye—tries to gather his legs beneath him, to shove the thing off, but it’s too goddamn heavy—
The vibration again, not quite a rumble, not quite a quake, though Billy feels the ground shiver beneath him. The—dog?—shies back, almost rearing, gallops away, towards the rest of the shrouded figures. Starts nosing at a similarly-shaped one on the ground, whines, pawing at it, a certain frantic energy in its movements—
Billy is just sitting up, cradling his arm, flexing the fingers as he scrambles to his feet, when he catches further movement out of the corner of his eye. There’s a growth—swelling up from the ground, maybe thirty feet away, in the middle of the field, like a water balloon made of moss—then, with a distressingly organic sound, it bursts, something splintered and dark pushing through the silver-green growth. There’s no real form to it, nothing human, but the silhouette is strangely familiar in a way Billy can’t quite place—it turns toward the dog shape, an eerie kind of awareness animating its movements, giving it menace as it moves towards the dog-thing—the dog’s head splits open once more, wetly, and it lets out an unearthly sort of screeching roar—
Billy runs. His brain is going a mile a minute—this has to be a nightmare, something his subconscious has dredged up to torture him, something that he’ll forget except in fragments, the way the ground seems to suck at his feet, the way the ground is moving with him—
—the ground is covered in spiders, small and larger, webs trailing behind. Eyes wide, Billy looks up, looks around. Up against the trees, more webbing, figures bound in it, animal-sized, human-sized, hollows where eyes and screaming mouths should be, little pieces poking through here and there where the webbing is thinner, a dangling purse strap, a streak of bright red hair, a fist flexing and relaxing, flexing and relaxing, over and over—
Another screech behind him, followed by a wet and muffled sound, and if Billy thought he was out of adrenaline before, he’s now learning just how wrong he was. His feet are sticking to the ground, spiders spinning madly around them, and fuck no, he’s not going to end up bound against a tree like one of those poor assholes, but he doesn’t know where he’s running to, doesn’t know where he’s going, if he’s moving away from the weirdness or towards it, doesn’t know what the fuck he’s going to do—
Two bright round lights, deep in the woods and coming closer, and a far more familiar rumble sounds through the soupy air, getting louder. Billy feels a surge of relief as profound as it is nonsensical—what’s a car doing this deep in the woods? For a wild moment, Billy wonders if it’s his Camaro, come to life and galloping to his rescue (this has to be a dream, so why the fuck not?) — he shields his eyes from the glare, squints—no, the parking lights are on the opposite side of the headlamps, the engine note is wrong, it’s quieter, more refined, though no less powerful—
The BMW pulls to a stop so sudden it almost skids sideways, the passenger door facing Billy. Harrington leans over, opens the door in a panic that somehow doesn’t match his preppy red sweater, his ridiculous hair—“Billy! Hurry!”
It’s a scene out of a bad movie, out of some B-grade sci-fi TV show, and Billy’s never been so grateful to be living a cliché. He realizes he’s been standing still for a few minutes now, has to literally tear his feet away from the ground, half-wrapped in spider silk as they are—dives butt-first into the car, ripping off as much of the webbing as he can, shakes it off his hands, avoids touching the spiders that’re still clinging to it—slams the door shut, and Harrington guns the engine, powers back the way he came, somehow magically finding all the spaces between the trees that’re just big enough to squeeze through, shocks groaning with the strain of running over logs and rocks and—was that a tree stump?—Billy can practically hear his own voice, a month and a lifetime ago, cocky and hollow— anywhere can be a road if you drive fast enough—
Harrington’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel as he jerks it to the left or the right, miraculously keeping them moving and the car in one piece. Billy looks behind, tries to see through the rear windshield if they’ve been followed (and by what?) but the red glow of the taillights is too weak to show anything in the dark.
It can’t be more than a few minutes, though Billy feels as if he’s aged several years, when the BMW breaks out of the treeline and back onto the highway. Billy sucks in air, takes what feels like his first full breath in several hours. Looks over at Steve, who’s still intent on the road in front of them. One of the car’s headlights has gone out, a casualty of the rough terrain; they can just barely see the blacktop. It’s quiet in the car, though a different sort of quiet than in the woods; the sound of their breath, the road, the engine, and an entire assload of unanswered questions all fill the cabin. Movement. Curiosity. Life.
They’ve been driving a good ten minutes when Billy finally lets out a shaky breath. “What…the fuck …?” It’s not even a question, really, just pure, unadulterated reaction.
Steve gives a little laugh, breathy and ragged around the edges. “God, I hope the fender isn’t dented. How am I supposed to explain that to my dad?”
Billy stares at this boy who’s just done the stupidest, bravest thing Billy’s ever seen—just to pull his ass out of the fire. Who’s risked his car, his life, maybe even his sanity.
Something swells within him then—swells the way the ground swelled before, and for a moment, Billy’s afraid that something’s going to similarly burst out of him. But all that comes is laughter—deep, belly laughter, the sort that brings tears to the corners of his eyes. And if his laughter is a little threadbare, hysterical around the edges; if it’s underpinned with more than a hint of despair…well, nobody knows that but him.