If I'm Sinking In Laughing At Something Sunken In I Am

Chapter 1

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"Doesn't it bother you?"

"Doesn't what bother me."

"The fact that you spend so much time in this house. Like, maybe you should get a job or something."

"Nobody wants to hire me." Caro slumps down further in the armchair he's been occupying by the fireplace for the past three hours. It's a Sunday. No school. Their parents aren't home.

"Maybe they would if you actually filled out an application."

Caro turns the page, not looking up. He never seems to look people in the eye. Not Dan. Not their Papà. Not their classmates. Only Mama.

"It's just sad, watching you do this."

"Then don't watch. Go hang out with your friends."

That's the thing. Dan doesn't want to. He feels bad, leaving Caro here alone to brood. He doesn't even really like his friends, but that's not a thing you say, and having drinking-buddies you don't like is better than being a lonely alcoholic.

"I enjoy being alone. It's OK, you know." Caro turns another page in his stupid book. "Reading is usually better than real life."

"That's fucking rich."

"Sure." Caro shrugs. "You drink to escape. I do this. Which one of us has the more toxic coping mechanism?"

Dan storms off, feeling fragile in the way only Caro makes him feel. Before too long, their mother's car pulls into the driveway. She enters the house with an armful of groceries. Dan can hear voices downstairs. He puts on his headphones and zones out until dinner time.

* * *

Caro is fucked up, though. Like. Really fucked up. Dan is constantly amazed that no guidance counselor or teacher has ever noticed.

The guy spends entire days jerking off in Dan's closet. Fantasizing about tentacles with eyes, dripping orifices, gore and blood, and twisted, writhing creatures that look like they came from a deep-sea trench, but still all fuckable.

He's obsessed with slasher movies. Talks about serial killers all the time. He's probably not the sort of guy who'd show up to school with a shotgun for revenge. But Dan also knows that Caro can't grow a beard. And he doesn't use their Papà's old straight razor to shave, but he still keeps it in a drawer under Dan's bed. There are ugly scars on the insides of his thighs. Where people won't think to check.

Dan is the only one he doesn't try to hide it from. The bedroom door doesn't lock. The bathroom door doesn't either. There's been a few times Dan's walked in to find Caro sitting in the empty bathtub, dragging that blade along his naked thigh. Not even crying as the blood spilled out. Just staring blank into the distance.

It's scary. It's really fucking scary, but who is Dan supposed to tell about it? What can he even do about it?

***

"Caro, chiudi la porta per favore?"

Dan's mother is standing over the sink, washing vegetables. Olive skin glowing in the afternoon sunlight that streams through the window. She's still pretty. Long, curly black hair. Large eyes. A square jaw that makes her look almost feline. She's been thirty-two for as long as Dan can remember. Never ages. Dyes hair that should be going silver. Last year, she got a neck lift.

"It's Dan, Mama." Dan pulls the kitchen door shut behind him.

"Oh, Silenzio! Maybe out there you're a Dan, but in our house, you will always be my little Daniele." She smiles at him. No acknowledgment of the mistake, as usual.