***

JAMES BISHOP HADLEY sits in the driver's seat of his car, hands and forehead on the wheel.

He feels despondent. He feels stupid. He feels like in the one minute he's been sitting in his garage his soul has been sucked dry of all energy and hope. He feels overdramatic.

He bangs his forehead on the wheel. The car lets out a honk that startles some birds outside.

"Stupid," he says out loud. "Stupid, stupid, stupid."

Because he's forgotten his phone at the diner—probably on the table—and he can only hope that one of them notices and doesn't leave it because, hey, it's his fucking phone and hey, he fucking needs it and hey, it's fucking expensive and hey, if someone just takes it for themselves—

Stop being dramatic, he thinks. Stop whining.

He gets out of the car. If he's lucky, one of them will notice. Gregory, most probably. He's the best at these sort of things. The only question is whether Gregory will drive all the way to Hadley's house or if he'll just hold onto Hadley's phone until he returns.

The day just keeps getting better and better. First his shirt. Now his phone. What next?

Hadley hears a piano note. Faint, barely there, but there nonetheless.

It's Philippa. She's the only one at home who plays the piano for fun on a Saturday. And if she's home, maybe Hadley can use her phone to call his phone and he'll talk to Gregory who (probably) has his phone and everything will be fine. He can change clothes while he's at it, with a pristine new shirt that doesn't stink of Hershey's chocolate syrup.

He takes the shorter and scenic route, through the garden. It's a wonderful garden where half of it is in perfect condition with pretty little flower beds and grass shooting through the spaces in between the pathway, and where the other half is all vines and creepers climbing up the walls of the house and overgrown hedges that look slightly terrifying. When Hadley was younger, he'd spend hours and hours in the garden, chasing after imaginary friends and getting tangled in the bushes, getting his knees scraped and his clothes torn and the mansion loomed right in front of him, like something straight out of a gothic novel.

Maybe staying back here won't be so bad. He's too big to get lost in the hedges now, but it's quiet and peaceful. He could just sit here, near the stone fountain, read a book and drink something prepared for him by Marzia while Philippa plays the piano.

And that's when Hadley sees him.

A boy with a pair of binoculars to his face, peering up at the sky until Hadley realizes it isn't the sky he's looking at, but at an open window from where piano notes float out into the garden, where Philippa plays away at her instrument, unaware that someone is gazing at her through the lens of a binoculars.

Hadley stands there, unmoving. The boy hasn't noticed him. A large part of Hadley's mind has stopped working, unable to process the situation in front of him. Here's a voyeur peeping on his sister and here he is, unsure of whether to use his words or his fists. Should he tell the boy "No Trespassing" or should he convey his point through the subtle use of a punch to the throat?

Hadley doesn't have enough time to choose because the boy turns his head to look at him.

"Oh, jeez," says the boy. His tone is bordering on the edge of blasé. "What happened to your shirt?"

Hadley refuses to glance down. "Milkshake. What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Spying on your sister." The boy smiles, his round lips stretching into a fine line.

It's the smile that does it. Hadley doesn't walk towards the boy so much as he lunges at him, throwing himself into whatever the hell it is that he's doing.

His face hits the ground before he can blink. Some part of Hadley is baffled by the process. One moment he was upright, ready to strike, and the next his face is pressed into the dirt. The other, much larger part of him is more concerned with the fact that he is now on the ground and that there's something heavy and human like sitting on his back.

"Get off me," Hadley growls.

"Are you kidding? So you can try and beat me up again? No thanks." The boy shifts around and Hadley's ribs dig into the ground. "And—oh. It's you."

"Get off."

"Holy cannoli, it really is you. The prodigal child, now cursed!"

Hadley tries to push himself up, to push the boy off his back with his arms, but to no avail.

"Listen," says Hadley, too tired to muster any anger in his voice, "my shirt's ruined, I left my phone back at some shitty 50's imitation diner, and if you just let me go inside I can fix all of these problems."

The boy laughs, a short bark of laughter of someone who's accustomed to doing it often.

"Just fucking get off you fucking—"

"You kiss your mother with that mouth? Relax. I get it. You're having a bad day. It's going to get worse, though. I'd advise you to avoid anything that screams bad luck. See? I'm getting up. And you won't try and punch me, or kick me, or scratch me, because that's bad energy and what you need right now is positive energy, lots and lots of positive energy. C'mon. Inhale."

"I can't fucking breathe with you on top of me."

"Okay, that's okay. See? I'm getting off," says the boy, like Hadley is some rabid dog that needs talking to, constant reassurance so that he won't bite off someone's head. The boy gets off.

Hadley rolls onto his back and looks at the boy. He has a face that's built like a very earnest square, all squared off edges and jutting corners. The only soft part about him is his mouth.

"Don't claw at my face."

Hadley gulps in air. His lungs feel like they're crushed. "What the fuck are you doing here?" he wheezes.

"Spying on your sister. But not for the reasons you think."

Philippa stops playing the piano. Hadley hears her shut the windows. He can't bring himself to get angry again. It's like all the rage he felt from less than a minute ago fizzled out as soon as he saw the boy's face. Or since he realized his shirt was still ruined, that he was no closer retrieving his phone than he was five minutes ago, and that he was here, lying down on the dirt of his garden with a boy squatting next to him. He doesn't feel aggressive, he feels tired.

"All I want is my fucking phone and a clean shirt," he says. "Fuck off or I call the police."

"Hey, no need to do that. I'm not your average pervert! Hell, I'm no pervert at all!"

Hadley scrambles to his feet and the boy leaps back before Hadley can grab the other boy's t-shirt.

"Hey, relax! Holy shit! You've got some aggression issues!"

"Leave or I call the cops."

"Racist! You won't even let me talk."

This really shouldn't get to Hadley, it really shouldn't, but that doesn't mean it doesn't. There's a lot of things he can't stand, and one of them is being accused of being something he isn't.

Hadley, knowing full well he's being tricked, folds his arms. "Let's hear you talk then."

"Okay, so I totally know what this looks like but you better believe it isn't, alright? I mean, your sister's a fine girl and everything but—"

"Get to the point."

The boy frowns at him. "Impatient. Whatever." He takes a breath, looks straight into Hadley's eyes and says, "You're cursed."

There's a long and pregnant moment where the gears in Hadley's mind stop working. He stares at the boy before him.

The boy lets out a sigh. "You don't believe me."

"No."

The boy lets out another sigh, and from his pocket, brings out a little black book. He flips through the pages with one hand and pinches the bridge of his nose with the other. Hadley watches him do this with blankness, because that is in essence what his head is, at this very moment. Blank.

"Alright," says the boy, squinting at the book. "Has anyone looked at you strangely? Have you had minor accidents happen to you? Do you feel as if the world is somehow wrong?" It's like he's listing off symptoms of a disease.

Hadley answers without thinking, "Yes."

"There you go." The boy shuts the book. "You're cursed."

"I'm cursed," says Hadley. "You're fucking with me."

"I'm not, but—" the boy shrugs noncommittally— "that's your problem."

He looks at the boy—skin the color of mahogany, slightly crooked nose, the small and barely perceptible scar on the cheek, hair close to the scalp, clothes straight out of Goodwill—and decides that he's lying.

The boy stares back.

"Just go," says Hadley. "And don't come back."

The boy holds up his hands. "Suit yourself, I guess. But here—" the boy hands Hadley a card, who takes it without even glancing at it— "is a little something. In case you change your mind."

"Change my mind about what?"

"About believing me."

They look at each other again.

"Well," says the boy, breaking the silence, "I'm glad we could talk and stare lovingly into each other's eyes. Real fun. You have such wonderful eyes, you know. Anyone ever told you that?"

"Yes," says Hadley, drily. "Are you going to leave any time soon?"

"Sure, bye, thanks and sorry," says the boy, and turns to leave.

Hadley doesn't stop him.

The boy keeps walking, and soon, he's gone.

Hadley lets out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. He looks down at the card in his hand and reads it. There's a phone number scrawled onto it, in a careless, almost masculine way. Hadley hadn't known handwriting could be so boyish.

There's a name, too, written with an equally boyish hand: David.

"David," says Hadley to himself. David and the Goliath. King David. David the saint. A solid name, a good name, a biblical name, a bourgeois name.

Hadley walks to the back door, all the while studying the card (coffee-stained, smelling faintly of lavender) as if by osmosis, he can absorb whatever knowledge about this so-called David and consequently decide what to do. (Call the police? Call David? Call no one and just let it go?)

His foot hits something. Hadley looks down. It's the pair of binoculars David had held.

He picks it up and observes it; it's an ordinary pair of binoculars. When he puts it to his eyes, however, his vision swims before him and his head hurts and he nearly goes fucking blind.

He throws the binoculars onto the ground and digs the heel of his palm into his eyes, trying to rub out whatever the hell that was.

"Shit," he hisses. His retinas feel like they've been fried. He stands there for a while, waiting for his vision to return to him.

When it does, he picks up the binoculars again, heads into the house and thinks as hard as he can of his shirt, his phone, his fucking friends and not of the boy and the binoculars and the card in his pocket that feels like an anchor.

***

[a/n] : at this point I've stopped giving a fuck and the only goal is to churn out more words and more words and more words till I finish this. whatever the hell this is anyway. but @ whoever's reading this: thank you for reading this. you're the real mvp