The Staircase in the Woods

by Chuck Wendig

“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.”

to-be-read books, a coffee mug, a blister pack of melatonin, a half-empty bottle of trazodone.

Did he just look in my room

“Man, you’re coming in hot, Lore. Nice to see you, too. Shit. Uh. Yeah, I fuckin’—I voted for Creel. First time, not second or third. How’d you—” “C’mon, you posted it to Facebook and shit. You had the red hat selfies and went to one of his Nazi rallies and everything.”

Creel = Trump? Lol

“A queer woman,” she said again, louder, “who is pansexual—” “The hell is that?” Hamish asked. “You bang pots and pans?”

But Owen had other ways of expressing nerves. Little ways of destroying himself to ease the anxiety. Biting the inside of his cheek. Chewing his lip. Digging his nails into his palms, should he have nails that weren’t yet bitten down below the tips of his fingers. Plucking hairs from places when people weren’t looking, like an eyebrow, or the top of his arm, even from inside his nose. Picking scabs, if he had any. Picking skin. Scraping the cap off a blackhead.

Omg he just like me for real. Bonafide skin picker here

The body was an endless expanse of opportunities to pick and pluck and bite and peel. It made him feel better. It made him feel worse. He did it anyway because he couldn’t help it.

He chewed the inside of his cheek. Not to bleeding. There were vents there—skin flaps—from the frequent chewing. He thrust his tongue into them, as if they were gills he could tickle.

AS I WAS ACTIVELY CHEWING MY CHEEK??? STOP LOOKING AT ME

there was something worse than a father who hated you—one who didn’t care about you at all.

He felt a twitter of validation. Senpai noticed me, he thought foolishly.

Oh bes such a loser

Nick batted his eyes. “We could hold hands, sweetie.” “Don’t be homophobic.” “I’m not.” He scoffed. “I’m actually kinda serious.” “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

(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.)

Home becomes another name for that place where monsters go to hide and do their terrible work.