"Does this hurt?"

GODDAMMIT FUCK YOU OF COURSE IT GODDAMN HURTS YOU FUCKING MORON HOW'D YOU EVEN GET A MEDICAL DEGREE

"Yes."

The nurse's nametag said LARK CERRONE, RN and when she leaned in close to examine Dick's nose he could smell, underneath the usual doctor's-room potpourri of latex gloves and rubbing alcohol, the deep funk of patchouli oil. It reminded him of this toy he had as a kid, a He-Man figure. Stinkor. It was the same mold as Mer-Man, but black and white like a skunk, and his whole thing was that he smelled. Lark smelled like Stinkor, but in a good way somehow.

Dick supposed it was a good sign he could still smell, no matter what he was smelling.

Unless this is just the phantom odor you smell when a piece of your nose bone is poking into your brain. Maybe that asshole Drew punched you so hard he gave you a fucking stroke GOD FUCK THAT GUY

The nurse prodded the bridge of Dick's nose with a latex-encased finger, her ear cocked, listening for something. "Ow," said Dick. She shushed him and prodded again. She turned her ear more toward his nose, leaning in closer. A strand of neon-pink hair dislodged itself from behind her ear and fell in front of her face. Like the patchouli and the multiple chunky rings that created grotesque knobs and ridges under the latex glove, the pink streak in her otherwise graying brown hair seemed like a desperate attempt to cling to some sense of youthful rebellion. Dick did not yet know why anyone would want to hold onto their youth. He wanted to discard it, bury it and forget it.

"The bad news is, I think it's broken," Lark said. She peeled off her gloves and dropped them in the trash can. She had a half-dozen rings on her right hand – a pewter skull, a thick bronze band with a Greek-key design, the rest in New Mexico tourist-trap silver and turquoise – but just one on the left. A plain silver band on the ring finger, an engagement ring maybe, but with an amethyst instead of a diamond.

"You think?" said Dick.

"I'm getting a little crunchy sound in there." She made a few notes on Dick's chart. "The good news is, we're not going to have to cut you open. It should reset on its own, as long as you can manage not to piss anybody else off."

"This wasn't my fault."

Fucking Drew piece of shit

Lark flashed a crooked-toothed smile. "Of course not." She tucked the strand of pink hair back behind her ear. "Freshman year, my roommate tried to stab me with a letter opener. Wasn't my fault either."

Dick cautiously touched the cut on the bridge of his nose.

FUCKKKKKK

He wanted to hear the crunch. It did feel a little soft, a little gravelly.

"Give it the weekend. Keep ice on it. Take some Advil. If the swelling gets worse, or if it starts bleeding again, come back in on Monday and we can do an x-ray. Has it been bleeding much?"

"No, not for the last couple hours."

"Then we'll just clean it up, put a bandage on that cut. You should be fine."

As Lark reached for another pair of gloves, there was a knock on the exam room door. She opened it. It was another nurse, the one who signed Dick in. "There's somebody out here who needs to see you," she said.

"They can wait. I'm just finishing up in here."

The other nurse seemed nervous, not quite sure what the protocol was. "They... asked specifically for you? Like, all they said was 'We need to see Lark?'"

"Shit." Lark looked at her watch, then at Dick. "Okay." The pink hair came loose again. "Okay. I'll be right back, Mr. Gibbons." Then she left, closing the door behind her.

All at once Dick was alone. Fluorescent tubes buzzed in their frosted panel in the drop ceiling. The patchouli scent continued to hover in the air around his head. It felt like it was seeping into his brain.

He had gotten Stinkor when he was a little kid, but he kept seeing his bedroom from like ninth grade. The Ministry and Nine Inch Nails posters and the swimsuit calendar were hanging on walls still covered in the kiddie football wallpaper, the cartoon quarterbacks looking alarmed and a little aroused at Trent Reznor and Kathy Ireland. Stinkor was in a box in the closet. All he cared about in that moment was finding that toy. He pulled out the box, dug through his Go-Bots, the half-melted GI Joes he inherited from his step brother. A Michelangelo that his mutt Corndog had chewed up years earlier, part of a rampage that had gotten the dog banished to the backyard. Dick ran his thumb over the imprint of Corndog's teeth in the green plastic. He wanted to be bitten. He wanted to be chewed up. He wanted to be held in slavering jaws, a prisoner, and shaken till he fell apart. But that wasn't going to happen. He found Stinkor at the bottom of the box. The smell was as strong as it ever was. He stuck the plastic body right under his nose, and inhaled, like a mountain climber breathing in pure oxygen. The little comic book that came with him was in the box too. Dick looked at the title as he breathed in: "The Stench of Evil!" He could hear his stepdad in the living room, ranting to his Bible group about a pale rider. Dick wanted that smell to drown out everything else in his world.

Five minutes went by, and Lark still hadn't returned. Dick poked at his nose again. He could stand the pain if he could control it. He dampened a paper towel at the sink and took a look in the mirror on the back of the exam-room door.

Jesus CHRIST you look like shit

He hadn't had a chance to look at his face since it happened. Dried blood crusted his nostrils and his upper lip. An inch-long cut ran southwest to northeast across the bridge of his nose, and the area around it swelled and purpled. Just fucking purple mountain majesties from one eye to the other.

God shed his fucking grace on thee, Drew

Dick dabbed at the blood with the paper towel. It blushed rose pink. He found a Band-Aid in a drawer and stuck it on his nose. It made him look kind of tough, like a boxer or an enforcer for the mob. Maybe he could press charges against Drew. Not this campus-police, DUH-justice bullshit, but for-real cops. See how much the little fucker smiles when he gets hauled off to jail for the night.

Maybe the Handbook had something to say about this. Dick had learned from Chet to keep it with him at all times, and it sat warm and weighty in his pocket, ready for deployment. He thumbed through the index until he found it:

That fucking asshole,

The one at the diner...75

The one in the fedora...59

The one in the laundry room...134

The one in line at Hallowed Grounds...252

The one who breaks your nose...66

He turned to page 66.

The altercation at Weston will set the tone for your entire sophomore year. Wintertree 79, once your sanctuary, will become a bottomless well of tension – not only with Drew, but with Tim, for his pathetic attempts at neutrality, and with Chet, for whatever secret it is now obvious he's been keeping. You dread the sound of Chet's key in the lock, or a knock on the door from Drew or Tim, because neither one of them can be bothered to track down a fucking key for the room.

Things only get worse when Julian Washington hands down his sentence for the fight. You are each to attend a religious service of the other's choosing. You would rather be expelled. Initially you see the potential for mischief and mockery, and you set about writing scripture for The First United Church of Universal Churchology and constructing crude papal miters out of posterboard. But even the act of creating a fake religion starts to feel too much like the real thing, and you abandon the project long before the seventh day.

But Drew does not. He drags you to something called "A Place to Praise Him!" that's held in an open-air pavilion over by the Tower, and there are no robes, no pews, no stained glass, not even a real preacher as far as you can tell, just a bunch of suspiciously healthy-looking twentysomethings in Birkenstocks, strumming guitars and smiling way too much. A whole army of Drews. You can sort of understand the appeal of religion when it's ritualized – when you can feel the edges of a great mystery but can't quite see the full shape of it. A god that's distant, unknowable, kind of pissed off all the time. Drown the whole thing in gold and candles and incense and Latin. At least then it can make you feel something, even if you know it's not real. Or go full Signs Following, take up serpents and drink strychnine. Prove your faith by tempting fate. This happy hippy feel-good bullshit, you're just wondering what the angle is. Who's in on the grift, and what are they trying to get out of you with all these smiles and hugs?

Dick felt a hand on the small of his back and smelled patchouli oil again. He must not have heard Lark come in. He closed the Handbook and looked up, but he was still alone in the room. The fluorescents hummed in their cage.

There was another smell underneath the patchouli, something dark and earthy and rancid. Something was making a sound, a crunching sound, down below. He tugged at the tail of his shirt, but he could still feel the hand on his back. "A young soldier," someone said, a smoker's croak like an echo from an ancient well. "A soldier for Jesus." That hand still on his back. A tattoo peeking out from a sleeve, a broken cross. "He ain't no soldier yet." His stepdad's voice. "We'll get him there." Red flags. Find that sound. Down on his belly in the dirt like a snake, the first traitor. The tail rattled, a warning. Red flags everywhere.

Goddamn Drew really did break your fucking brain

A drop of blood fell from Dick's nose onto the open Handbook. "Shit," he said. He blotted it with a Kleenex. The red splat landed on the word "sanctuary." Dick balled up another Kleenex and plugged up his nostril.

Lark had been gone for twenty minutes now. Dick couldn't stay in this room any longer, this isolation chamber where time didn't exist. He opened the door a crack and peeked out. The hall was empty. He knew there was no reason he couldn't leave, but there was some command etched into the deepest part of his brain, telling him that once you were in a doctor's exam room you had to stay there. He fought back that hardwiring and walked out, down the silent hall to the waiting room. It was empty too, not even a nurse at the check-in desk. He walked out the door and down to the bus stop, just in time to get on a Yellow Line to take him back to Wintertree.

Dragan was dozing at the security gate. Dick kicked the leg of the desk to wake him up. Dragan jerked awake, yelling something in a consonant-heavy language Dick couldn't understand. When he saw Dick he said "Oh. Is Dick." Dragan consulted the DUH binder. "Can you still smell him?" he asked.

"What?"

Dragan checked the list again. "It is saying, 'Can you still smell him?'"

Don't answer don't you FUCKING answer

"Yes."

Dick opened the door of Wintertree 79 to the sound of laughter and gunfire. The room was dark, but a blue-ish light came from the open portal into 79A, flickering and changing. Dick shut the door as quietly as he could and climbed up the loft to the loveseat. From there he could see into 79A, where Drew and Chet sat on the edge of one of the beds, playing a video game. He watched them for a little while, watched them laugh and playfully curse at each other, watched them try to distract each other, covering eyes or messing with the controllers, watched the victory celebrations. He watched their easy friendship and something in him started to harden, until his whole body felt dried up, sucked out. Perched on that loveseat, a gargoyle, a grotesque in a sacred place, Dick watched.

After a while he'd had enough. He climbed up another level to his bed. He pulled out his Handbook and turned to page 66, to the section titled "That Fucking Asshole Who Breaks Your Nose," and he ripped out the page with its bloody highlighting. There is no sanctuary, not for anyone. He didn't want Drew's name in his Handbook, not in his room, not in his life, not anywhere. He ripped out the next page, then the next, and the next, until the entire section was gone. He halved and quartered the pages again, then stuck them into the drawer of his nightstand, deep in the back, past the unopened box of condoms.

Dick pulled the covers over his head, to block the light and sound from 79A. Soon he fell asleep, and he dreamed of a dark, cold place, where it smelled like dirt and rot. He could hear the sounds of life above him, but they could not see him or hear him, and they would not find him. He would become the dirt, become the rot, and until the end he would still hope to hear his master's voice and feel his master's love.

Lark treats another patient.