BOYS OF SUBURBIA [boy x boy] [Wattys 2018]

✗ SIX ✗

Home was not where the heart was.

At least, it wasn't in Niko's case. More like home was where the battlefield was.

At eight in the morning, the Salingers' household was dead quiet. No mum to wake everybody up and drag everybody down for breakfast, no dad reading the paper by the table and pouring his morning coffee, no younger siblings squabbling over the morning telly, no older sister complaining about her allocated bathroom times. Not a sound, not a noise.

Niko trudged into his shithole of an apartment through the doorway and was instantly hit with the smell of beer, not just regular beer but like three-day-old stale beer sitting out by the tacky, smudged coffee table. Niko sighed. His father must've been out. Again.

Not that Niko was ever brilliant on familial attendance; sometimes Niko and Roger could effortlessly party all night till dawn and Niko would crash at Roger's house for a couple of days and nobody in Niko's family would have a stroke- well, except maybe Rae, but that was it.

The living room was utterly trashed- as expected. Floor covered completely in packets of potato chips, beer cans strewn all over the bloody place, bags of cocaine powder littering on the carpet with their white ashes pouring out of their sealed ziplock, plastic bags of rolled-up joints and so on were simply resting on the armchairs of the stained couches. Niko was ankle-deep in shit.

"Niko?" called out his sister. It was Rae, which was short for Rachel. Rae emerged from the shadows, wearing barely-covering her-pert-ass booty shorts he knew that if Roger was here he would appreciate, a fitted tank top and socks rolled up all the way to her knees. She was beautiful, in that badass don't-mess-with-me-motherfucker sort of way, with her choppy dark hair and her perpetual moody expression.

"Yeah?"

She kicked a beer can out of her way, sending it flying, and crossed her arms as she glared at him. "Where have you been?"

"Out."

She exhaled noisily. "That's not a proper answer, Nikolas." Great, Niko thought, she's using my full name.

"I went out, driving around. Then I crashed at Roger's house," Niko's lie was pathetically flimsy, but whatever. Niko was exhausted. He didn't know why he didn't want to tell his sister he was out with Sebastian- Sebastian. That shy kid. It felt strangely personal as if he dared divulge information about Sebastian, the rest of the world would try to climb inside his brain and steal memories of the boy.

"Liar," accused Rae, snarling- not meanly, just out of concern. Niko loved his sister to pieces but he wished she would just lay off and stopped acting like his mum- even though his mother was actually some depressed, bipolar crackwhore who had finally cracked after Miko's death unlike Rae, who was kind, gentle, stern and forbidding, like a real mum- but Niko felt as if she shouldn't need to be. Rae was only the mere age of eighteen; she didn't need to worry about him- she shouldn't be worrying about him. She should be worrying about buying the next Sam Smith's album or studying for fucking finals, or whatever the hell eighteen-year-old girls worry about. "I called Roger. He said you weren't with him."

Niko sucked his teeth. Goddamn it, the thought seethed through his brain as his fists clenched. "I was just cruising around, okay?"

Rae wasn't going down without a proper fight. That was one of the things Niko loved and hated about her. "Tell me where you've been," she barked, folding her arms against her chest. She was stepping towards him with every syllable, eyes burning ferociously. Niko swallowed the lump in his throat nervously, rubbing his sweaty palms into the scratchiness of his threadbare jeans and hoping his lies didn't sear through them.

"I was just at the grocery store to pick up some things," admitted a defeated Niko, knowing he wouldn't be able to bullshit through his sister's lie detector. Niko's shoulder slumped as Rae arched her eyebrows, unimpressed, and Niko continued, "Met a mate. Decided to hang out. Lost track of time, passed out in the car."

Rae didn't seem to satisfy, but he knew that she realised this was the truth. "Alright," she said, "Call next time, will you? I was going sick with worry."

His irritation slowly melted into guilt and remorse, suddenly aware that Rae wasn't being a bitch because she wanted to but she was being a bitch out of worry and panic. "Yeah sure," he said, the lie slipping out effortlessly but not guiltlessly. "Where's, uh, Dad?"

A tortured expression flashed across Rae's face like it killed her to admit it. But sugarcoated packages couldn't be easily ingested by Niko, nor did he wanted it. So she ran a hand through her matted hair and said, "He's out."

Those two syllables might've been discarded as simple or disregarded without a care but they were powerful, delivering a message Niko could decode deep in his blood. They shared an understanding as their eyes clashed, knowing their father would be home anytime soon, drunk and unwilling to go to work- thus another default on their repayments. Niko knew just from that single look, he would have to stop sparing whatever loose change he had on cigarettes.

"Mum?"

"In her room, asleep."

Translation: she passed out from taking too many sleeping pills. Again.

He had almost felt tempted to ask where the bugging hell is Miko but he remembered that Miko was dead as a doornail. Then Rae cleared her throat and shuffled back into her room- to catch up on sleep most probably.

Niko squeezed his eyes shut as he eased himself into the lucidly crisp morning by settling down into a couch. As his body slackened, the lack of sleep began to take a toll on his body- letting him collapse into the couch, which was tattered and torn with holes of foam pouring out. There was an empty silence that descended into the house, hoarse and hollow, like the aftermath of a tortured scream dying out. It was null, like his whole life.

Like his whole heart.

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