It was no good being a celebrity if you couldn't pull a few strings now and then, but the strings that Chris pulled to be let into the police impound lot had nothing to do with his celebrity and everything to do with his innate and basic ability to schmooze people, an ability he'd discovered in childhood and only cultivated as the years went on. Justin's Escalade stood in mute testimonial in the corner of the lot, police tape furled around the door-handles, silent and solid and holding no secrets, or at least no secrets anyone knew how to read. Chris shivered in his t-shirt in the midsummer Florida sunshine and fingered the cell phone in his pocket.

They'd found Justin's cellphone, sitting on the front seat. The police reconstruction of that night had been as exacting as they could make it, all of them working together, all of them holding a few crucial details back. Justin had left Chris's house at three seventeen AM, and arrived at Joey's a few minutes later. Kelly remembered; Kelly had been the one to answer the door, the one to steer Justin into the kitchen, leaving him turning a mug of tea around in his hands and staring deep into it while she went to wake Joey. They'd talked, and Joey refused to tell anyone what they'd talked about, except to say he'd sent Justin home right when the first pale rays of purple had begun to paint the sky. Home to sleep, and then to deal with the rest of it in the morning, when he was no longer hazy and half-sleepwalking.

The phone records, subpoenaed from Verizon, placed the call at five twenty-three, but Chris hadn't needed to hear that detail from the FBI investigator, because he'd been awake and staring into the darkness of his bedroom when the answering machine had clicked and whirred. "Call me, you fucker," Justin had said. "I know you're screening." A pause, with the hiss of the road in the background of the recording, and then an exasperated sigh. "I still love you, you know, even if you are a high-maintenance son-of-a-bitch. I'll call you tomorrow." The machine had caught a few seconds of dial tone, and then silence, and the sound of the tape rewinding.

Chris still had the tape, thrown in a drawer in one of the rooms of his house he never went into.

No signs of foul play, they said; Justin's car had been parked by the side of the road, locked with a key that no one could find. It had taken the locksmith hours to break through the security system, and in the end, they'd nearly had to cut the door off entirely. There were three empty bottles of Diet Coke in the backseat and a cigarette butt with a stranger's shade of lipstick on it in the otherwise-pristine ashtray and the CD player had been playing Outkast at a volume that should probably have led to ear damage, except Justin had been subjected to far louder for years.

For the first few weeks they kept hoping, waiting, jumping at each ring of the phone or peal of the doorbell. Chris changed his sheets and did his laundry and sometimes caught himself wondering if he was forgetting to breathe, if he didn't pay enough attention to the motions. Three days after the deputy stamped the case closed for insufficient evidence, Chris went out to a club he vaguely remembered having been to with Justin, and drank his way through an entire fifth of overpriced bad whiskey, and when he woke up in the morning the sunlight of the holding cell pierced his hangover with a pickaxe and left him out to dry.

"You have to stop this," Joey said, three days later, with his hair standing on edge from the pillows that Chris's call had once again pulled him away from, still in the pair of sweatpants that had been old even before No Strings had dropped. Chris slouched further down in the passenger seat of Joey's car, his boots on the dashboard leaving prints from the sticky beer that had not yet completely dried, and didn't say a word. "Chris, you have to stop this. You're not accomplishing anything."

"Fuck off," Chris finally said, his voice razors with every syllable. "You have no fucking idea what happened." He knew it was a mistake when he said it, because Joey did know, Joey was the only person who knew, but he'd never been very good at thinking things through before he said them.

"It wasn't your fault," Joey said after a minute more. "We don't know what happened, but it wasn't your fault. He was fine when he left my place. Whatever it was, that wasn't it."

"I said, fuck off," Chris said, and they never said another word about it ever again.

JC started looking like he was sleepwalking and Lance kept looking at himself in the mirror like he was expecting to disappear any minute himself, and both of them swore up and down that Justin wasn't, couldn't be, dead. Chris turned away, tight-lipped and silent, and knew he couldn't believe it, because if he did, he would break. Justin was gone, Justin was dead, and no amount of positive thinking would change the fact that there was a hole at Chris's side shaped like someone who'd never stand there again. Formally retiring from the group didn't do anything but make it official, because the group was dead already, dead and buried the way they wouldn't be able to bury Justin.

JC went to find Justin and Lance went to find himself and Chris wanted to hurt, to scar, to leave his mark in a way that nobody could ever deny. He put four pieces of 14-gauge wire through his earlobes and called up a few people he hadn't spoken to in years, people who could look him in the eye without stammering or apologizing and without the damn fucking pity that made Chris want to snarl, and four months later he was screaming like Axl Rose over a guitar bleeding noise like a failed suicide attempt against the studio walls. Joey stopped calling when Chris stopped picking up the phone. He thought he saw JC at the first show he played under his new name, with new faces behind him, but he didn't stop to look and it could have been a trick of the light, anyway.

"You know what happened, don't you," Lance said, one of the nights when Chris stopped in to see him because there was nothing else to do. Lance had been a little bit in love with Justin, Chris thought. So had they all. "There's something you're not telling us."

"There's a lot of things I'm not telling you," Chris said, looking out the window and refusing to meet Lance's eyes. "But nothing that would matter. Not in the long run."

He hated Lance a little for that thread of hope he saw in Lance's eyes, the unspoken and unstated belief that one day they'd all wake up and find that the last few years had been a bad dream brought about by too much cold pizza after bedtime. Lance was angry, angry at Justin, angry at himself, but if he knew he'd be angry at Chris and no one, nothing, could possibly be angrier at Chris than Chris was at himself. Chris was angry too, fucking pissed at Lance and at JC, at whatever rose-coated worldview dripping with good faith and fairy-tale happy endings they shared that made it possible to believe that there could possibly still be hope. Fucking pissed at Justin, for whatever had happened, whatever stupid thing Justin had done that had led to an empty car and a few lines on an answering machine and nothing more than that, never anything more than that, never again.

"I gave you your time," Joey said, standing on Chris's front doorstep and squinting against the sunlight. "You're going to get over yourself now, because I need my friend and Briahna needs her uncle and dammit, Chris, it's not fair to any of us to try and do this alone."

"Fuck off," Chris said, but he didn't mean it the way he had, once, and when Joey left six hours later he almost felt normal again. Almost. And then the guilt set in again, because he had forgotten, and forgetting was the one thing he never could afford to do.

He woke up every morning in a hotel room in a city which was every hotel room in every city, and he knew damn well he stole that line from somewhere but he couldn't remember where and he didn't much fucking care, with someone different shutting the door behind them on a silent whisper three or four times a week, and he walked out every night on a stage which was every fucking stage and sang things he could never remember once the words had left his mouth, and he went out every night to a bar which was every fucking bar and drank his way through the alphabet and back again. He listened to JC's music, and tried to ignore the way it made him want to find JC and shake him by the shoulders and make him face the cold hard reality of things, the way things really worked. He tried to watch his mouth around Joey and Kelly's new baby, and never called him by his given name, and when Joey called him up and asked him to babysit, Chris never said no, no matter how much he wanted to.

He flipped on a radio one day, long enough that it should have been safe, and caught Justin's voice on I've been sitting here, can't get you off my mind, I try my best to be a man and be strong. It took fifteen stitches for them to sew up the backs of his knuckles where he put his hand through the supposedly shatter-proof plate-glass window.

Sometimes, if he was very lucky, he got to sleep without dreaming.

. : | back | : .