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“Friendship is like a house,” she said to him, his head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody.
Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another
ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”
His body slept, bent into shape around the chaos, careful even in the night not to kick anything off the bed.
From: Nick Lobell To: Owen Zuikas; Lauren Banks; Hamish Moore; Matty Shiffman
Owen tried to imagine Nick being sick. Nick was like a human cigarette. All tar and nicotine. Was it possible for cancer to get cancer?
Lore loved to cook, even if she didn’t love to eat. Cooking was sensual, tactile, beautiful; eating was crude, sticky, texturally upsetting.
She didn’t eat her food. She didn’t play the games
she made. Didn’t read her own writing or ever look through her sketchbook. What she made was for others.
it was just a sucking and slurping resentment sixty-nine.
Pete didn’t read anything but the newspaper. He was proud to have never read a book in his life. His mobile phone was an ancient flip phone—one step above a pager. So, there he sat behind the counter. Surrounded by books he’d never read, never would.
Because the bad was so bad, it made the good seem impossible, as if it had never been present in the first place. The good was a guttering candle against the cold wind of a deep dark moonless winter night. It never had a chance.
People are allowed to change, he thought, less like a belief he agreed with and more like an argument he was desperately trying to make to the jury of himself.
“Half of America put the hat on and took the mask off and that was that, and that’s where we’re at now.”
“A queer woman,” she said again, louder, “who is pansexual—” “The hell is that?” Hamish asked. “You bang pots and pans?” “Hamish, Christ,” Owen protested. “I’m genderfluid, pansexual, aromantic, AuDHD—”
Is Lauren meant to be a parody of a leftist? What an insufferable asshole. She probably has a self-diagnosed invisible medical problem, too.
Lore was no such animal. The world was fucked up, everything was fundamentally broken, and she was upset all of the time. As such, it was easy for her to simply disassociate—she
The air was still and filled with the tragedy of reality.
his lips dry as Bible pages.
Owen pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes so hard, the darkness behind his lids turned nuclear white.
Lauren, who would not become Lore until she and Owen went to Sarah Lawrence,
that night he got surly—less the usual Phish vibe and suddenly, inexplicably, more Rage Against the Machine.
Matty was big and tall, and he’d always been a bit rough-and-tumble. A bro who was a nerd, a nerd who was a bro.
Coors Light was sadness in a can.
Lauren hated it. And she loved it. She hated that she loved it.
pink diabetes wine
She let the anger have its moment, then she hit it over the head and threw it in a deep grave, and from that earth she grew a garden of vigorous indifference.
“Jesus,” Nick said. “You tell a story like Phish plays a song.”
Melzer looks like a wad of chewed buttholes in a Pantera shirt, and Szumelak is skinny and gangly like a rain-soaked scarecrow.
“They say you just gotta ignore a bully, but that’s wrong—you can’t ignore them or they keep getting worse.
Nick is, um, not the king of focus. If this were the present day, he’d be called ADHD and maybe given an IEP to help—but in 1996, sure, they call him ADD, but it’s mostly an insult, and there’s no help to go along with it.
The staircase. Black and made of night’s own bones.
The wave of nostalgia that had gone through her died fast, replaced with the returning sensation of being deeply, cosmically alone.
The blood vacuumed back into the room, too—reversing course, rewinding like a movie. No blood, no fingers, no rattling knob, nothing.
Her mind felt calm. That, strangely, was how Lore knew
things were really truly fucked—she wasn’t so great navigating her regular life, but she was aces in a crisis. The worse things got, the sharper and colder she became in response.
In the slanted morning light, the intersection of reality and unreality was dizzying.
She killed that thought before it had babies.
It was The Crazy Bitch’s Guide to Game Design, a title she loved then, hated now, and had almost
gotten her canceled on Twitter about five years back when everyone was trapped in their homes during the pandemic and was bored and vengeful and looking for any taste of blood in the water to excite them.
That was the funny thing about a fear of the dark: you weren’t really afraid of it, but rather what lurked within it. A perfect emblem of the fear of the unknown.
this domestic labyrinth.
Sometimes friendships didn’t break in some big dramatic way. Sometimes they just dried out, curled up like a leaf on the ground, and turned to dirt. Like all things inevitably did.
The house isn’t putting that thought in my head. It just turned up the volume.
her face still bloody, though the blood had now dried to an almost black mask on the lower half of her face—weirdly reminiscent of the face masks worn during COVID.
his brain screamed at him, which was a helluva thing, that your brain can basically scream at you, the you that is also your brain—your mind going to war against itself. (But that, he supposed, was what it meant to be human. To exist in constant opposition to yourself, you as your very best friend at the exact same time you were your own worst enemy. Oh, how stupid it was to be a person.)
Like Emily Dickinson had written: Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.
Glass crunched like little bones.
More of the Cap’n Crunch. No crunch berries, just the shitty yellow mouth-scouring bricks of stale sweetness.
This was not a game. It was a true crime documentary. These were more than just ghosts—they were memories. Rooms of tragedy and terror built into this
living house. Stolen and conjured anew for whatever dark purpose it served.
