The Last Stand of Haviland Dinwiddie

Chapter 7

By Dabeagle

email

The costumes were cheap, but not plastic or anything. Sandy took some measurements and muttered a little. Daphne asked if we weren't going to talk about what had just happened, but Sandy told us to let Hav handle things.

I wasn't on that night, so I wandered back up to the apartment. Mom and I looked up a few recipes for other things she'd used to enjoy eating but didn't know how to make. We made a list of ingredients and headed off to the store.

“Rigby was much nicer this time than the first time we met him,” my mom remarked.

“Yeah, hard not to improve on that, huh?” I said with a chuckle.

“Were you working on school assignments? I heard some laughing at first, but then it got quiet.”

“Yeah, English.” I paused. “I think he's got some kind of learning disorder. He's not dumb, but he really struggles to read. I watched him trying to read the requirements for the project, and he was really focused – I mean, like he had to pay strict attention. His mouth was moving a little.” I shook my head.

“Maybe he's dyslexic? Has he been tested?”

“His mom seems to be kind of anti-reality, so she won't let anything be done.”

“She sounds charming.” She paused. “What's his family like?”

“Chaos. I have no idea how he's not...well, I guess he kind of is a hot mess, but it could be a lot worse.” I described the living conditions, how his mother sent the little one to get Rigby to make him food rather than take care of it herself.

“Well, sometimes older siblings can help in a family without it being neglectful,” she said, pulling into a space. “My Tia Sophia had six children, the poor woman, and the kids had to help out. They were a family.”

I sighed as we climbed from the car and walked into the store. “I know. I think...just because the whole thing looked so run down, and I felt like they were already putting nearly no effort into their home, I just felt like...they probably dump things like that on him.”

“You could be right,” she said quietly. “It does sound like a bad space. He looks healthy, though.” She smiled a little bit. “Pretty cute.”

“Mom,” I groaned, and she bumped into me playfully.

“Here, you get these things,” she said, tearing the list in half. “We'll meet up front.”

I tried to put things out of my head as I went from aisle to aisle to find different spices, cooking wines and such. I lost track of what I was looking for a few times, though, thinking about that calm that had come over Hav. It was...it was like the feeling you get when you're in a dark place and hear a strange noise. The little hairs on the back of your neck start to stand up, and your muscles tense in a fight or flight response. You can't hear well because of the blood pounding in your ears, and yet you're trying not to breathe too loudly so you can hear.

My phone buzzed, shaking me from my thoughts, and I dug it out. Daphne was texting me that she was bored and asking me to come back down. I told her I was grocery shopping with my mom, so she'd have to call her actual boyfriend. I have no idea what a watermelon and water droplet emojis mean.

I met my mom up front, and we checked each other's baskets to be sure we'd gotten everything; we'd do that when we used to live with my dad, because missing something off his list would be cause for his concern and he'd have to 'make a point'.

Back in the car, I figured my mom was going to start up about Rigby again; I don't know why I thought that or if it was all in my head, but I decided to start a different conversation.

“So on Halloween all of us at the store have to dress up and hand out candy, I guess,” I began.

“Oh, that sounds like fun. Do you need a costume?”

“No. Sandy had some already; they must have done this before.”

“What will you be?”

“The tin man.”

“Oh, the Wizard of Oz! What will everyone else be?”

“Daphne will be Dorothy, and Rigby will be the scarecrow. Sandy said Hav can be the cowardly lion, but I don't know if he'll do it.” I chuckled. “He told Sandy she can be the wicked witch.”

“Daphne is nice. She's become a friend, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah. My first one in town, actually. She's super friendly, and her boyfriend is smart and cool. I sit with him at lunch.”

“What about him, was he cute?”

I rolled my eyes. “Not my type, I don't think. Besides, he's dating.”

“Doesn't mean you can't find them attractive,” she said quietly. “It's simply not acting on it.”

I swallowed. “Yeah. I know all about that.” No need to mention the one time I tried to hook up.

She glanced at me and then back to the road. “I guess...I guess you do know about that.”

We got home and put our stuff away. I stretched out in my room and scrolled on my phone until I remembered Rigby had said he had texted me a link to his Insta. I was curious to see what he looked like with more hair, so I followed the link. He didn't have many pictures, but I found one I couldn't stop staring at. It wasn't particularly artistic and not a thirst trap, not really. He wasn't flexing, and he was clothed; in fact his head was tilted down so you couldn't even see those bright eyes of his. He was wearing a plain white shirt. His hair was as he'd described: a fade cut with the hair on top long and somewhat wild. His gaze was focused on his phone screen as he took the mirror selfie. Small droplets of water dotted the mirror; the skin of his arm looked smooth and soft, lean muscle under the skin. His fingers, slightly spread to hold the phone, looked strong, his nails short, almost as if chewed.

The tips of his hair were a mix of wet and dry so that some strands were darker than others. His lips, slightly pressed together as he focused on the phone screen, were so kissable; even as I took in other details, drank in his features, the lips kept drawing my eye.

I set my phone down and rubbed my face. I needed to stop staring at him. I powered up my school laptop and checked his list of outstanding work; it was much shorter. Given that he was noticing I decided to back off of it a bit. I went into the living room and ate a little more soup before showering and lying back down. I was going to listen to music, but I hadn't plugged my headphones in – again – and woke my phone to scroll. Of course it opened up to the picture I'd been staring at. In an odd way it was almost like Rigby was looking at me, even though I couldn't see his eyes. I plugged my phone in and tried to sleep.

^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

I woke up about four-thirty and felt uncomfortably out of place. While I wasn't missing my father in any way, the sudden absence of him felt acute that morning, and I struggled to understand the feeling. I should be happy that he wasn't there, happy to no longer be worried that my every move might end up with me in the garage so my father could 'make his point'. Neither my mother nor myself had to be thinking about the next time he'd hit one of us.

And yet.

My mother had only left the apartment a handful of times, and most of those were for doing laundry. If she did leave, it was with me, like our trip to the grocery store. I hadn't thought about that before bringing Rigby here. She seemed to be okay with him – but maybe I should ask. Being attracted to Rigby is what it is, but it can't take over my life. I can't ignore the reality that my mom and I still have fresh wounds from my dad, maybe some wounds that will never really heal.

I got out of bed at six when I heard my mom moving around. After using the bathroom, I joined her at the little table. She sipped coffee, and I had a protein drink.

“Hey, Mom?”

She raised her eyebrows in reply as she sipped her drink.

“Were you...did you feel okay when Rigby was here yesterday?”

She tilted her head. “That's an interesting question,” she said quietly. “It was different. For so many years our house was just you, me and your father's anger.” She looked toward the window. “In many ways, Harvey, we're still...it's like being born all over again.” She turned her gaze back to me. “I didn't feel uncomfortable with him. He seemed nice, and he makes you smile. He made me smile, and we both could use more of that.”

I nodded. “Okay. That's good. I was wondering if it had made you uncomfortable.”

She nodded and sipped her coffee before letting her gaze go back to the window and the pale morning light. “I'm afraid, Harvey.” She shifted her cup from side to side. “Men. They scare me, deep in some place I'm not sure I could find in an anatomy book.” She looked down at her coffee. “I know at some point I'm going to have to deal with this, professionally. So will you. You can't go through what we did and not have things you need to deal with.” She looked up, her eyes wet. “But Rigby was fine.”

I nodded slowly, not sure what to say to that. She was probably right, but I wasn't looking forward to opening any of those painful memories up for examination.

“I wonder, you making friends, if they are real things or just convenient, though,” she said. “We've had this...debilitating experience. How do we know if we're not just starved for some interaction? Some social situations where we've been cheated so long that when people are nice we think...oh, this is a friend.”

“I think they're my friends,” I said quietly. “New friends, maybe. I haven't known them that long, of course.” That made me think, though, that she was right. I had no real history with them or they with me. We might like each other right now, but we really didn't know each other well.

“Yes,” she said nodding. “New friends. It's a place to start.”

I shifted on my feet. “Uh. Daphne invited me over to watch horror movies with her and Tony and her mom after work on Halloween. It's a sleepover. Rigby will probably be there, too.”

She looked like she was checked out for a moment, and then she said, “I'll just want to talk to her mom.”

I picked up Rigby on the way to school, and he told me about watching some videos about the whole Pinto thing. He said he wanted to listen to some more stuff, because some videos seemed to blame the corporation completely, like they knew they had a bad design and knew it would kill people and were just after the money. Others were more talking about how driving is dangerous to begin with and the car was built to safety standards at the time, and this brought attention to something that was later changed across the industry in terms of safety standards.

“It's probably a little of both,” I said. “Corps are greedy. They exist to make shareholders money, and they sometimes hurt people to do it.”

“Right. Free Luigi!” he said dramatically and I laughed at him. “Do you think we can work on this project together?” he asked. “It was more interesting when we talked about it.”

My throat tightened. “Yeah, of course.”

“Sweet,” he grinned. “See ya.”

That night we were busy as per a normal Tuesday, but of course we were all wondering about the fallout of what we'd witnessed the day before. Paul, the guy who worked in the backroom, had some details, and Rigby and I were soaking up any scraps we could get.

“I was talking to Sandy when she was on smoke break number one-hundred and forty,” Paul said to us as we broke from putting orders for pickup together. “That guy on the town council, he used to be some kind of general contractor and a pretty big customer. The way I heard it, the guy was cutting corners in the things he built and in how he paid his workers. One of the workers got fired for trying to get what he was owed, and Hav ended up hiring the guy here.” He lowered his voice. “I have no proof, but the rumor was a few places the guy's company had just finished building or were pretty close had fires. That got some people looking at things, and there was this big investigation into the other places he'd built. It drove him out of business, and his workers hooked on with other companies that grew up to take his place. So that's why the guy hates Hav – or so I hear.”

“Why wouldn't Hav just report him? Why burn things down...if he did?” I asked.

“Hav generally doesn't go looking to others for help, for one thing,” Paul said. “Second thing is that this fellow, Dooley, had some political connections that he'd been using to skate by. An investigation would have probably gone nowhere, but things burning down got insurance involved, and they couldn't ignore it.”

I glanced at Rigby who gave me a serious expression. We looked back to Paul as he picked up the story. “So when I heard about this thing, I told Sandy it didn't make much sense to try and take this store by eminent domain – it's in the middle of downtown, and there isn't enough room for a box store, not with the cost to get enough buildings condemned and the tear down and all. That's when Sandy told me they condemned Hav's house. They want his land, which is just on the edge of town. Plenty of room for a box store and parking.”

Rigby's jaw dropped. “They're going after Hav's home? What the fuck?”

“Do you know what he's going to do?” I asked.

“Sandy said he was meeting with a lawyer, probably just to make sure he understood things. I don't know what he can do. They say you can't fight city hall.”

Most of the rest of the week was me trying to distract myself from thinking about spending more time with Rigby, although I have to admit the coven helped me with some of that. I was a little late getting to the lunch line that Wednesday, and Kate, the one that had critiqued my shirt the first day, fell in beside me.

“School dances are kind of trash, but you could go with me if you want.”

I glanced around quickly, thinking she meant someone else, but was stunned when I figured out it was me. “Uh, you're right. School dances are lame. I'm skipping it.”

“Yeah, can't blame you.” She paused. “There's a party after. You could join me.”

I gave her a very confused look. “In the only conversation we've had you insulted me and I insulted you. Is that a turn on for you?”

She sighed dramatically. “I just don't hold grudges. I mean...respect for at least fighting back.”

I shook my head. “I have plans. Thanks anyway.” I was never more glad to suddenly be making mediocre lunch choices if it meant not talking to her anymore.

Of course not thinking about Rigby wasn't very easy, because we were working on our project in the evenings. I did the reading out loud, and we had pretty fun discussions about our topics, even debating some of the stuff we'd found out. Once he'd started typing the report up, his whole energy changed, though. Just like when he was reading, he was hyper-focused and frowning at the screen as he slowly typed. I've never seen Hav type, but I think it would have looked something like that.

“Let me read what you have,” I said to him.

He grunted, but by now I was familiar with this. When he was trying to read or write it was like his head was underwater; he heard the noise of your voice but couldn't process it and what he was doing at the same time.

“I heard Mari is saying one of your balls is smaller than the other.”

“One second,” he said absently.

“She also said your dick looks backward.”

He looked up and blinked. “Wait. What did you say?” he asked, seeming like he was fuzzy from sleep.

I laughed. “Let me see what you wrote so far.”

“Oh, uh, yeah. I mean, it's not finished,” he said, turning his laptop over and handing it to me. It was pretty bad, but as I read it aloud I made some corrections, and he started to talk to me about what he'd wanted to say, and I modified his paper so it said what he'd wanted to, rather than what he could manage. It was tiring, helping him with his work and then also having to do mine, but I got a lot of satisfaction from our conversations and hearing his thought process and translating that to the page.

Halloween night came, and Hav wasn't in sight, though Sandy was waiting for us as we got to work. She'd dressed herself up as the wicked witch, even caking on green makeup. We used the bathrooms to pull on the costumes, and then Sandy painted our faces. Daphne had red spots on her cheeks and her hair plaited in a braid, and Rigby had a triangle painted on his nose, some dots on his cheeks and some lines radiating from his eyes. He had some straw sticking out of the arms of his shirt, and from between the buttons with a few extra poking out from under his hat.

He was adorable.

My face got slathered with a silver face paint as well as the backs of my hands. I felt kind of silly, but as we took the sales floor and started handing out candy and getting our pictures taken with little kids who'd lined up outside with their parents, I thought the whole dressing up thing was pretty cool. Some of the smaller kids were placed on one of our laps for their pictures, and thankfully none of them peed on us or anything.

“Tony's not going to come by and see you in costume?” I asked Daphne.

“He wanted to, but when he told his parents he was going to dress up as Glinda, the Good Witch, they were a little unsure but then said no when he told them he needed to shave his legs if he was putting on a dress.”

Rigby burst out laughing. “Are you for real right now?”

“No,” she said with a giggle. “He's helping my mom set up a couple of air mattresses and snacks for our movie marathon.”

“Did my mom talk to your mom?” I asked her.

“Yeah. My mom texted to let me know,” Daphne replied. “I hope you guys are bringing ear plugs because Tony is loud!”

“Okay, keep him over by you, then,” Rigby told her.

After the store closed, we got cleaned up, and Daphne headed home. I went upstairs to get things to sleep in, excited and nervous for the overnight, and Rigby tagged along with me.

“This should be a good time, huh? You like horror movies?”

“They're okay,” he said dismissively.

“You good?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. I was just thinking it's kind of funny – I've known Daphne for basically ever, but we never really hung out. Now I'm staying over at her house.”

Since we were alone in the car, and because I'd already let it slip about my father, I told him I'd never slept over anywhere before.

“For real? Huh. Well, it'll be different tonight, for sure. Staying over at Gordo's was pretty much not a planned thing. We would just be doing something and look up and it'd be, like, two in the morning. Not even any sense in walking home then.”

“He wouldn't drive you?”

“Nah. We used to sneak out of his house. Well, I say sneak, but really we just walked out. We'd go down to the convenience store and get energy drinks, spike them with some of his dad's liquor, and then go down to the train tracks by the old mill near the falls. We'd throw rocks at the building while we drank.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. We were just bored. Nothing to do in this town but drive fast and fuck.”

“Or throw rocks and drink?”

“Until you can do the other things, yeah,” he said with a laugh. He pulled out his phone and tapped out a message.

“Daphne?”

“Nah. This girl Amanda is trying to talk me up.”

Instantly I felt hollow in my chest. I had no right to it; Rigby wasn't mine. “Yeah? That name sounds kind of familiar. Don't know why, though.”

“She's part of the coven,” he said distractedly as he tapped another response. “She's asking me to go to some party.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

I rubbed my eyebrow quickly, feeling an itch. “Uh, that girl Kate asked me out for tonight. Sort of. Said there was a party.”

“Oh, that makes total sense now. They figure if I go, you'll come with.”

“That's manipulative.” I shook my head, unimpressed.

“Partially. Amanda's been interested in me off and on for a while. We never get past the talking stage.”

Maybe because texting isn't easy for you, I thought. “Why's that?”

“Bro, she's dumb. I know my grades are nothing to celebrate, but this girl – the closest she comes to an A is her cup size.”

I laughed. “So she has no problem getting an F?”

“She's had a bunch of F's from D's,” he said with a snicker.

“Slut shaming, Rig? You?”

He laughed. “Bruh. I was talking grades. I hear she's a lousy lay.” He burst out laughing, and I couldn't help but join him. “Besides, I can't imagine being in a relationship with her. She's always looking for something, and I don't need that.”

“Facts,” I agreed, feeling better. “Who else do you hang out with? I mean with Gordo on your shit list?”

“You, mostly,” he said. “I hang out in groups and stuff, get my fair share of pulls at parties and things. Just not finding anyone I fit with, you know?”

I laughed nervously. “You fit with Gordo?”

He waved a hand. “We just kind of fell in together. His mom and my mom were friends; a bunch of them like to play cards. We just ended up in some of the same places, got up to some shit together. Not really much more than that to say.”

We arrived at Daphne's and met her mom, who was really enthusiastic about us joining their movie night. She told Rigby and me how much she's heard of us, and Daphne told us, with a bit of sarcasm, that she'd only told her mom the good parts so we'd be allowed over. Daphne's house was really nice – not super clean like my father had wanted, but warm and lived in. There were bowls of snacks and drinks in the fridge. Her mom told us to get changed so we could settle in, so I went to the bathroom and pulled on sleep pants and a tee shirt.

Rigby took my place; Tony had been dressed for a night in when we arrived. I was in the living room with Tony, Daphne and her mom when Rigby rejoined us. He had on flannel sleep pants and a tank top. I was a little surprised his arms had more muscle than I'd realized; his tee shirts covered most of his biceps.

“Before we start the first movie,” Daphne's mom said, clapping her hands lightly. “The bowl with the red tape around the top has candy with peanuts, like your Snickers and such.”

Daphne looked at me. “And such.”

I made a connection to the first night I'd been in town and had asked for cleaning things and such. So I guess I'd reminded her of her mom.

“The bowl with the green tape has sugar-free items,” her mom continued, describing two more bowls of treats and what was in them. She said it was to avoid allergies or just things we didn't like. We started to arrange the bowls and take seats on the full-sized air mattresses – Daphne and Tony on one, Rigby and I on the other and her mom in a recliner. As we traded the bowls around I let out an involuntary noise of excitement and said, “Oh! Hundred Grand bars!”

“I think I accidentally picked wisely!” Daphne's mom said, a pleased tone in her voice.

“My favorite,” I said with a smile. Rigby picked through the bowl and took two of the bars, tossed one to me, and said he wanted to try it.

“So. Our first movie tonight,” Daphne's mom said, obviously enjoying her house full of people to watch a movie. She proceeded to give us a very basic plot outline and warned it was an old movie so we'd have something to compare it to for the second movie. We finally lay back with our treats, and she started the movie. I can't say the movie was that good, but it was weird and had a twist ending. Daphne poked Tony twice during the movie, and he scared us more than the movie did. Once the movie ended, the discussion started up.

“So wait,” Rigby said, his eyes wide, sitting up to move his gaze to the rest of us in the room. “That lady took Angela, who was actually Peter, and made him pretend to be his dead sister?”

“That's insane,” Tony said.

“The movie is most famous for the twist ending. Really it's just another 'kids die at camp' movie,” Daphne's mom said. “But did anything else stand out to you?”

“Some of those were really weird ways to die,” Daphne said. “How would you even get a whole bees nest into the bathroom?”

“That's scary enough – trying to, um, go and have a swarm of bees dumped on you?” Rigby said and made a funny noise while shaking himself dramatically.

“Not just that,” Daphne said. “Having a curling iron shoved in your ho-ha sounds worse,” she said, curling her nose but laughing.

“Did...it seemed like they kept flashing back to those two guys in bed?” I asked.

“Right,” Daphne's mom said. “It's a lazy thing, but filmmakers will use fear of 'the other' or some poorly understood group to try and inspire fear. In this case they were trying to say that seeing his father in bed with another man had traumatized the boy, but in reality the combination of seeing his sister and father die in front of him while almost dying himself, coupled with being forced to be someone he wasn't, is what scarred him. They threw that in for salaciousness, and if you think about it, that's a conversation that's going on today with respect to people living as they feel they are – the trans community.”

“Right?” Rigby said. “No one gets bent about seeing gay people unless they're in the closet or hyper religious.” He looked at Daphne's mom. “Please tell me you're not religious and I didn't just offend you.”

She laughed. “Being religious doesn't immediately translate to being intolerant, but no – no offense.”

“That's pretty relevant for today, though,” Tony said thoughtfully. “The movie takes the idea that someone who sees something homosexual is scarred and then kind of makes it seem like being made to live as another gender makes you a murderer.”

“Right. But then it also kind of makes the point about how wrong it is to make someone live as someone they aren't, right?” Daphne replied.

We discussed the movie a little longer, how it followed horror movie rules as far as if kids tried to have sex they got murdered. The revenge arc of the movie was a guilty pleasure because, even though the kids that died besides Paul at the end, had been shits to the killer, you liked seeing them get some revenge handed to them. Granted, it was overkill – no pun intended – but it made the deaths more fun than terrifying.

We took bathroom breaks and got drinks before settling in for the second movie. The second movie had a weird set up of all these people caught at a roadside motel after a bridge gets washed out from heavy rain. It was less about jump scares and gore and more of a mystery with people dying along the way. When the killer was revealed in the end, Rigby sat up and said, “No way! Aw, crap!” Looking at him he'd spilled his drink on himself.

“Oh, let's rinse that and get it into the dryer,” her mom said, standing up.

“Thanks. I'll put my other shirt back on,” Rigby said, peeling off the tank. Very quickly I felt overly warm and shifted so I could stand. I honestly think I was too scared to get an erection, but I also knew my brain was soaking in every bit of him and was probably at risk of burning my eyes out. I can't stress enough that he wasn't built or sporting a six pack; he was just...it was just more Rigby. He had good skin, moderate pecs and a flat stomach. I'm sure most guys have something similar. Most of us aren't hitting the gym all the time and working for gains and all that. He was just a normal, healthy...hot guy. Pair that with his face and-

I stumbled and looked down, realizing I'd stepped on one of the candy bowls.

“Is that how you claim things as your own? Step on them?” Tony teased.

“Beats peeing on them,” Daphne said with a laugh as I straightened up the things I'd knocked out of the bowl. Once I'd snagged the last of the candies I stood up.

“I'll just put these in my car, now that they're mine,” I said with a sheepish grin. Rigby pulled on the tee shirt he'd worn when we'd arrived and went with Daphne's mom to rinse the tank and put it in the dryer.

“I had no clue those were multiple personalities,” Tony said, shifting the conversation back to the movie we'd just watched. We started talking about it a little. Rigby came back, and we slowly settled back in after another round of bathroom breaks and such. Daphne's mom said she was turning in, and lights were turned out in the room, leaving us in a gray-scale landscape. Rigby shifted next to me, probably looking for a comfortable position, and then kicked me.

“Oh, sorry,” he said in the most 'not-sorry' voice I'd ever heard and then kicked me again.

“You shit,” I said quietly and shoved him. Of course the mattresses weren't that big, and rather than just being pushed back, he slipped off the edge and onto the floor with a thunk. He started to giggle, which set me giggling, and Tony and Daphne started to giggle, demanding to know what was going on.

“He pushed me!” Rigby stage whispered.

“He kicked me!” I replied, indignant.

“Oh my God, you guys are twelve,” Daphne said, and then sounded like she was muffling her laughter.

We readjusted on the mattress, Rigby flicking my shoulder with his finger. Eventually I reached out to grab his finger and got most of his hand. In the low light I could see him grinning at me in the darkness. With his hand in mine, not romantically held of course, but just the contact and the close quarters and the shadows making his smile half-hidden, my heart pounded. I was very quickly bricked up, and my anxiety went through the roof. I pushed his hand away.

“Keep your fingers to yourself,” I whispered.

He bent his finger up and down. “I'll finger you!” he said, trying to whisper menacingly, but then he realized what he'd said, and that brought muffled laughter from the other two. Feeling that I had to, I rolled over to face away from Rigby and tried to think about anything besides him lying behind me. Thankfully, he settled down, and soon I heard nothing but steady breathing around me and a light snore from Daphne. Somewhere in the house something kicked on, and I heard air moving through duct work.

Slowly my eyes adapted to the room. Moonlight fell between the vertical shades, and I slowly rolled over to face Rigby. He was on his back, his face turned slightly toward me. His mouth was open just a bit. I watched him for a minute, but there was no storybook moment where he opened his eyes and smiled at me or smiled in his sleep or said my name. He slept on, and I closed my eyes, trying to draw some pleasure from having him close by.

Next Chapter Previous Chapter