Page 77 of The Staircase in the Woods

The rest of their parents, not so much.

“My parents know we didn’t do shit, but my dad…” Owen started to say before shrugging. “He’s still pissed anyway, like even though we didn’t do it, it’s still somehow our fault. Whatever. He fucking hates me anyway.” Which was true. Not a guess. His father had told him once, while drinking schnapps:I didn’t want you. You’re your mother’s child. I take responsibility for you, because you’re mine and I know it—but I don’t love you, Owen. I regret having you. And some days, honestly, I hate you. I hate that you’re here. I hate that you happened. You’re like a boat anchor, dragging us all down.

Lauren stared off into the corner. Her gaze trapped by lost space. “Same shit for me. Mom’s gone most days, most nights. Few moments I get with her she’s only half there. I think she’s on pills now? Whatever. She tells me everything is fine, tells me not to worry. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know shit.”

“My mom pretends it’s okay but she cries at night,” Hamish said. “Dad fights with her about it, tells her we need to lawyer up. She saysGodwill fix it—did I mention she’s been going to church now? Ugh. I dunno.” Way he said it wasaye-unno.

Nick just stood up and circled the room, the beer in his hand sloshing around the green bottle. He plugged it to his lips and drank some down, pulling it away with aploomp. Nick sniffed. “Yeah. Well. My dad’s cool and he knows I didn’t do shit.” He tapped a cigarette out of a soft pack and went in search of an ashtray. Finding it on a shelf next to his D&D books, he said, words half muffled around the cancer stick: “I talked to his lawyer.”

“What?” Lauren asked. “Why?”

“Because I’m gonna do something stupid.”

Oh, shit,Owen thought.

“Niiiiiick,” Hamish said, setting his bottle down. “Whaddya mean, dude?”

“So, I’ve been thinking.”

“Never a good sign,” Lauren mumbled.

“Fuck you, Laur. This is real shit. Okay? We’re kinda fucked. That detective lady, Doore, she isn’t going to let this go. She’s looking for some way,anyway, to hang this on us. On all of us. And so I’m going full-on Tank Thunderforge.”

In any other context, in any other group, that would’ve been an absurd, honestly nonsensical thing to say. But to this group, right now?

They understood it immediately.

Thunderforge was Nick’s old Dwarf character from their D&D games—he was an ex-blacksmith, kicked out of his guild for too much, in Nick’s own words on the character sheet,killin’ and whorin’.He was a self-hating plug of pure dwarven rage (and because of this, Owen sort of loved the character, even if the others mostly found him annoying), and demanded that he be used as a meat shield and trap tester. Any time they entered a new room in a dungeon or crypt or forgotten temple, Tank was first through the door, drawing all the fire from whatever monsters awaited them. And failing that, shouldthe room be quiet—someone, usually Matty’s paladin (Erik the Fist of the Golden God) would pick up Tank and literally chuck him onto spots that might’ve been trapped in order to trigger whatever poison gas vent or fireball spewer was gonna get them.

So, if he was going full Tank Thunderforge—

It meant he was going to jump on the traps.

He was going to draw their fire.

Nick was going to be their meat shield.

“Nick,” Owen said. “Whatever it is you’re thinking, you don’t need to do this, okay? We can figure something out—”

“Nah,” he said, using his Jack Kenny whiskey Zippo to spark the cigarette. (He was allowed to smoke down here, as evidenced by the fact the basement smelled like a creosote cancer factory.) He spit out a nit of tobacco. “Listen. People are going to hate us. They already hate us. Looking at us like, you know, we did it. Or we did something. We’re never going to live this down, so I’m gonna try to take a little of the heat. Doore is going to find some angle on us, maybe even make one up, I dunno. But I’m going to give her the drug angle.”

The room erupted in protests, but Nick yelled for them to shut up.

“It’s the easiest thing. I tell her, hey, I bought drugs, bad drugs,weirddrugs, ooooh, ahhhh, and I gave them to Matty, and maybe Matty didn’t even know what I’d given him, and he freaked the fuck out and disappeared on us. The lawyer says I’m gonna take a hit, obviously, and they’re going to arrest my ass, but he’s pretty confident he can get them to leave me out of juvie—I’m seventeen still, so. It’ll be like, probably probation and rehab and counseling and random drug testing—” He took a deep hit off the Camel, then blew twin streams of smoke from his nose. “Blah blah bullshit blah. I’ll be fine. I’ll be the asshole. You’ll all skate.”

“No,” Hamish said, standing up and marching over to Nick. “No fuckin’ way, man. No way, dude. This is the Covenant. We all go down together.”

Lauren nodded. “Yeah. Let ’em come for us. Fuck ’em. We haveour story, we can stick to it. And we didn’t do shit. We shouldn’t have to hang.”

“We got your back,” Owen confirmed. And he meant it. Though the fear ofwhatthat meant, exactly, gnawed at his brain stem like a pack of rats. “You don’t have to do it.”

“I know you do, Zuikas,” Nick said. “And thanks, everybody. But it’s too late. I already did it. I already put a statement in with the lawyer, the lawyer’s talking to the detective, and I’m expected to surrender myself—” He looked at his empty wrist, where a watch would be had he owned one. “By fourp.m.today.”

At that, the mood became funereal. A dark pall settled over all of them. What this meant, they didn’t know. They’d find out, of course, soon enough: Nick would take the hit, and the lawyer wouldn’t be able to keep him out of juvie—it’d be six months in detention, upstate Pennsylvania, near Scranton. And while it would save the rest of them any legal entanglements—Nick really did jump on that trap, Tank Thunderforge–style—what it would not save them would be the judgment, the isolation, the harassment. Matty was beloved. He was a fixture in school, in town, and everyone would always look at them as if they did it. As if they’d killed him. They’d find their lockers spray-painted. Their houses and cars vandalized. People would either look away, or mutter curses about them, or even spit at them. They were killers at worst, fuckups at best, and everyone knew—falsely—that it was the four of them who took Matty from this world.

But that was the truth of a later day.

On this day, the funereal feeling turned fast toward the vibe of an Irish wake: a lot of drinking and laughing and crying. Reminiscing. Cursing the world. Lamenting the loss of their friend Matty, and soon their friend Nick. And they sang for Nick a champion’s song, a paean to his heroism like he was the hero, Tank Thunderforge, charging forth into the fray, into the fire, his hammer hot, his soul hearty with the love for—and the loveof—his friends. “The Covenant,” they said to him. And he said it back: “The Covenant.”

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