The shop sways in front of me as I unclip the seatbelt. “Creative name,” I comment through a stomach-acid-filled burp that causes my curled fist to hit my lips. Atticus grimaces, tipping his head toward the plastic bag.
“Keep the bag.” He unclips his seat belt, explaining the shop name in his emotionless tone. “No piercings. Only ink.”
With my legs wobbly beneath me, I meet him on the sidewalk and follow him inside. There’s a black vinyl chair in the corner, rimmed in red painted metal with the color chipping to expose shiny steel. I slink over and fall into it, still feeling too drunk to stand for more than five seconds.
Through one eye, I watch Atticus disappear down a hallway like he owns the place. The next time my eye opens is because he’s snapping his dirty fingers right in front of me.
“Time for Brando.”
He guides me through the shop with that same hand on my neck. I pull the shirt over my head, and a button pops off, skittering beneath a utility cabinet in the shop.
“That’s my shirt,” Atticus sighs, taking a seat in the chair near me. He scoots it closer like I’m his sensitive girlfriend getting a tribal on my lower back, and he’s my tough boyfriend about to hold my hand while I wince through it.
When the tattoo artist turns to face me, gloved hand holding a tattoo gun, and says, “Marlon Brando, huh?” I know exactly why Atticus is nearly tucked into me. I look up at him.
His face remains expressionless as he says, “You’re good, man. Let’s do it.”
His reassurance is everything in this drunken, exhausted, broken moment.
I nod and face the artist, who seems to kaleidoscope into many versions of him. Closing my eyes, I say, “I want Marlon Brando fromThe Wild One.” I pinch my chest to hold out my leather jacket but–yeah, I’m completely shirtless.
“Brando fromThe Wild One,” I say again as my body grows exhausted.
The artist and Atticus share words, but I’m still dipping in and out of reality, so I don’t catch much of it.
“I’ll go draw it up,” the artist says before disappearing behind a royal blue curtain, off to a secret area in the shop.
I nod toward the curtain from my spot on the tattoo table. “Think it’s platform nine and three-quarters back there?”
Atticus folds his arms across his chest. “No.”
I look up into the fluorescent lights above me. Sobriety is very fucking slowly edging its way in as the silence of the space seeps into my consciousness, leaving me all too aware of everything I was tryingnotto remember.
Pain. Not sharp pain that makes your focus fuzzy. Not waves of pain that bring you bouts of relief. Just…pain. All-encompassing. Every molecule is fully saturated in unending, unnerving pain. The pain of loss. The mind-numbing ache of confusing shock. So much fucking pain. Acid burns up my throat, so I swallow.
“Why?” I ask, and I don’t know if I’m asking Atticus or the world, but Atti answers.
“Why did your pop die?”
My eyes sting, so I don’t respond. His boots click against the tile floor as he readjusts his large frame in the chair. He stares down at the tips of his black boots, ashy from the gravel at the bar.
“Everyone has their time, Burns.”
“No,” I shake my head becauseI know that. Dad was always the older dad with fifteen years on the rest of my friends’ parents, so when he got cancer, fighting it was that much harder for him. “I knowthat.”
I scorch my eyes by staring into the light, loving the way it forces me to keep them open, forcing me to feel the blinding burn. “Why did he tell methatright before he died?Why?”
Atticus raises his head. I don’t need to look; I can feel his weighty gaze sinking into me. “Tell you what?”
I take a deep breath, focusing on the unwavering fluorescent light again as I tell him exactly what my father told me seven days ago, one single hour before he passed.
A true deathbed confession.
The chair holding Atticus’s six-foot-something frame creaks as he leans against it with a sigh. He remains quiet but rests a palm on my shoulder for a moment, giving me a single, comradic squeeze.
After a moment of silence where Atticus is presumably digesting the huge bite of information I’d shoved down his throat, he finally says, “pukin’ in bars isn’t the answer.”
“It’s only been a week,” I defend.