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It happened sometime between second period and lunch one day during their sophomore year of high school. Second period had been math class, one of the few periods they had shared that autumn as they had both been in the advanced class, and Parker had been present that morning with a dark cloud hanging over his head. It was one of those times that Chester sometimes jokingly referred to as one of Parker’s “hangry” days even though food never actually did anything to lift his spirits. He just seemed to be unable to eat when in one of those moods and hunger was a convenient and humorous excuse on Chester’s part for the biting remarks and gloomy comments. On those days, Parker would snap between quiet and broody to angry and raging at the drop of a hat.
“Hey, I can’t find Parker,” he had greeted one of their mutual friends at their usual table, tossing his lunch tray in front of him with a noisy clatter of plastic on warped wood. “Did O’Brien make him stay behind in class or something?”
“You didn’t hear?” It was a different kid that interrupted their conversation as the mutual just shrugged out a response. “They’re saying he was suspended. He got in a fight with a kid in the hallway and really messed him up.”
“I heard he broke the kid’s arm,” another boy chimed in.
Parker didn’t respond by text. He didn’t pick up the phone. All of the direct messages that Chester sent him on various social media accounts sat on Unread. Only one of the e-mails he sent as a last-ditch attempt received a response.
My mother’s observing all my actions online, but I wasn’t expelled, just suspended for thirty days. The cops were involved, I’ll tell you about it in person next month.
The other kid returned to school the next day with his arm in a cast. By end of day, it was covered in signatures and sketches by the other boys in their grade. He bragged to anybody who would listen that he had come out on top in the fight; those who had witnessed it said otherwise. When Parker snapped, he really snapped, and Chester has always done his best to stay on his good side lest he become victim of such a rage.
But Parker wasn’t a bad guy, he never has been, he can’t help if his brain doesn’t quite work as it should.
That was a long, lonely month for Chester. Best friends since the age of nine, he and Parker had spent nearly every waking moment in each other’s company since elementary school. Walking to school, walking back from school, lunch, Choir, video games, swimming, badminton, fishing. Then suddenly, like that, he was gone, leaving Chester alone for the first time in a very long time.
Oh, he wasn’t alone alone. Though often teased for being a little weird, a little awkward, somewhat of a sidekick to his more domineering best friend, Chester was, nevertheless, rather well-liked by his classmates. Something between class clown and AV Club nerd, he tended to fit into any casual friend group. But hanging around a bunch of random guys you just sort of get along with is a totally different experience than having Parker, his best friend, and possible soulmate, at his side, hovering over him with a hand on his shoulder or lower back. Always there with a helpful suggestion or a kind word.
He hadn’t realized at the time that nothing would ever be the same. When he finally returned that Monday morning, Parker had changed. He was more subdued, almost robotic in the way he moved and talked. Not that Parker has ever been the outgoing, cheerful type of guy to begin with, that was always more Chester’s style, but even for himself, he was quieter, more mellow. When he spoke, his voice came out slower. Still as articulate and thoughtful as ever, but it was as if his words had been bottled up inside a balloon, only allowed to escape as a slow, controlled leak rather than the crashing wave of ideas and thoughts that used to gush from him periodically.
“Court orders,” Parker had explained somewhat lethargically when Chester had shown worry over what the pills were doing to him. “It was this or juvey. If I go off them before I turn eighteen, I could end up in jail.”
It wasn’t just one pill. They had him on a cocktail of multi-colored capsules. He was seeing a guy every Thursday at first, and then every other Thursday, and then just once a month. Every time he came back from an appointment, he seemed to either have a higher dosage of the drugs or he had switched out the pink one for a blue one or added another white one on top of the handful he had to swallow down every morning. Parker complained about his legs cramping and having trouble sleeping at night.
For the next two and a half years, having Parker in his life felt like having a half-asleep version of his best friend shuffling around their world. He was there but he was never quite fully with it. He did fine in school, better, even, as he seemed to be able to concentrate more without the instability of fluctuating moods. But his emotions were dampened, the positive along with the negative, and he rarely smiled. It made Chester’s heart shatter, seeing his best friend in such a state, and what a relief it had been when Parker turned eighteen and instantly tossed all the bottles in the trash.
Within a few weeks, Chester could already see the changes in him. The spark returning to his eyes, the jaunt to his step. He began to laugh, randomly and loudly, at times that weren’t necessarily a time most would laugh at. Sometimes he grabbed Chester out of the middle of nowhere and just gave him a quick, bone-crushing hug.
And then graduation snuck up on them like that and Parker decided one day in the middle of July, seemingly out of the blue, that he did not want to go to college, after all. He had other plans.
Plans that he asked, desperately urged, Chester to join in on.
Chester wasn’t stupid. He knew Parker was unstable without the medication. He knew that he was going through a manic phase. He had gone off his medication much too quickly and for the next few years would have regular ups and downs that were far more extreme than those he had before going on the drugs, to begin with. But at the same time, he didn’t want to go to school without Parker, couldn’t imagine living a life so distinctly different and removed from his best friend, and Parker had contacted the school to cancel his admission. Nothing he said at that point could undo what Parker had already done. Having planned on entering his freshman year as an undeclared major, Chester wasn’t sure what he wanted out of life at the age of seventeen, but the one thing he did know is that he wanted Parker to be part of it.
So, he said yes. Of course, he said yes. He had already previously considered taking a gap year anyway, he’d work at convincing Parker to go back next year, and they’d return to campus rested and refreshed. Just a gap year. Plenty of kids need a break after twelve years of basic education.
The gap year turned into two, then three, then four. And, well.
Sighing, Chester rubs at his eyes, forgetting for a moment that it really is this dark out and he isn’t just wearing his sunglasses and looks up towards the sky at the moon overhead. Without the dark lenses, the brightness is astounding. Full moons can be amazing sometimes, when they feel so close like on a night like this. It seems enormous, white like a seashell hung in the sky. He wishes they had an excuse to use the night cameras more often.
“Are you filming?”
“Yeah, dude,” Chester says, glancing towards Parker at his side. It isn’t totally dark here, the light of the giant moon cuts through some of the canopy above, but he can understand why Parker would have trouble seeing his movements. Everything below their necks is cast in black shadow. “If something comes out of the clearing, I’m going to get it on film.”
This is their life now. Their passion. Or rather, Parker’s passion. Chester’s passion is Parker.
Hours from home right now, squatting in the woods, fighting off mosquitos and summer dampness, and hoping they won’t run into coyotes or wolves or maybe a fucking mountain lion because fuck, they really are out in the middle of nowhere. A short hop, skip, and jump away from the St. Lawrence, practically in Canada. Practically.
Ask the former slaves as they stood on one side of the river, waiting to make it to the other, if practically is good enough.
The house should be a landmark. The final stop of the Underground Railroad. Yet there it is just standing there, nearly lost in the trees, decrepit and half-fallen apart. Somehow still the home to a single woman old enough to remember when her own grandmother had spoken of the tortured souls that would sleep below her in their basement.
The basement had been the first place they had set up their cameras as it had been an obvious choice. Damp, dark, reeking of wet dirt and moss and stone. People had died down there. Men, women, children. Sick and injured, bodies weakened from pneumonia and infections brought on by frigid weather and man-inflicted injuries. So close yet so far from freedom, unable to see anybody about their injuries until they reached the other side.
Yet Denise insisted that the basement wasn’t where “the evil” resided. That’s what she called it, whatever it is that has been haunting her home for generations, “the evil.”
“The woods,” she had explained, standing on her front porch in a too-large cardigan and pointing out towards the distance. Trees upon trees upon trees. “It seems to like the woods. But sometimes it comes from the barn.”
Chester had recognized her the moment she had opened the door to allow them entry. It is extremely likely that this job may be their biggest break so far. Their first chance at real exposure. This house, that woman, they’ve been featured on numerous YouTube channels. On real television shows. The property may not quite qualify as a “Top Ten Haunted Places in the US” list topper, but it is renowned enough to attract ghost hunters from across the northeast. Yet, somehow, she had contacted them directly, asking them to visit after a relatively well-known paranormal investigator had recommended their expertise.
“He could sense them when he was here,” she had explained to them when Parker had asked about the sudden and unexpected invitation. “But he said he was only capable of locating them, that I would need somebody with true abilities to drive them out.”
Chester doesn’t know exactly how Parker gained just such an ability. It isn’t something inborn, not something that came naturally and organically. They had been novices when this all started, and Chester still has no idea what was going inside of Parker’s marvelously ludicrous brain to make him propose they take on demon hunting as a career track. It certainly wasn’t anything he had shown any particular interest in before graduation. The first couple of years on the job had been a whirlwind of near-death experiences, the two of them barely escaping with their hides intact in most cases, and none of these early escapades had resulted in any legitimate exorcism of the demons. The most they could do was usher their clients to safety. They just didn’t know what they were doing.
Then Parker started disappearing for long stretches of time, leaving Chester alone to dawdle the hours away alone at video games or editing videos for meager pay as a freelance artist. It wasn’t that Chester didn’t know where he was, or his approximate whereabouts anyway, he did. His best friend had started down the long, difficult path to acquire and hone the skills needed for this peculiar calling and he had chosen to do so within the walls of various religious institutions. But he chose to do it away from Chester’s prying eyes, in churches, temples, libraries, or locked away in his own bedroom. When he was home, he spent a lot of time reading and a lot more time praying than he used to.
Religion has always been something that Parker has held much closer to his heart than Chester. Twelve years of Catholic school had barely left an impression on Chester, but Parker is a genuine believer. He owns more rosaries than Chester owns pairs of underwear. Chester owns two of the intricately beaded trinkets. Or rather, he thinks he owns two, he hasn’t seen the one his parents had given him as a child in a while, he thinks it's somewhere in the back of his closet. On the rare occasion that Parker drags him along to Mass or Confession, he brings the much higher quality one that Parker had gifted him as a graduation present.
That Parker would seek answers in God was not surprising in the least.
It had started with meetings with the Priest at their own church and some of the faculty at their old school. Then he had expanded to other nearby Catholic churches, and then some of the Protestant churches and even some Synagogues, expanding until he was traveling around the entire state to study with various theological scholars. Sometimes, Chester would go with him to New York City, and they would make a vacation out of it. The old churches were beautiful in their own way, but he was left sightseeing the more secular destinations on his own. The year after they turned twenty-one, Parker lured Chester down to New Orleans with promises of Mardi Gras and liquor and parties, and then they had been stuck there until after Easter, shacked up in a cheap one-room motel that accepted pay by the month. Chester still isn’t sure exactly what Parker had been seeking in the city, but he had found pamphlets on Santeria in their bedside table.
This isn’t to say that Parker is some fundamentalist or a born-again evangelical. He still laughs jovially and describes himself as a “good Catholic boy” to both their parents and their friends. Chester refers to himself as a “not-so-good Catholic boy.” It’s a joke, but it isn’t. Parker tells him it doesn’t matter, as long as he believes, he’ll be with him in Heaven someday.
“Even Jesus wasn’t perfect,” he told Chester the first time they got stoned in high school and kissed. And then, later, “Even the Pope says being gay is okay,” after they followed up dazed kisses with intoxicated sex.
Chester had been afraid that Parker would run off to confession after that like he had done the first time they kissed. Maybe beg for forgiveness then insist that they never touch each other “in carnal sin” ever again. But the Parker of twenty was very different than the Parker of fifteen. Instead of begging for forgiveness the next morning, they did it again, the two of them still reeking of alcohol and bad cologne, and Parker touched his face afterward with that gentle smile on his face and told Chester that he loved him so much it made him feel like throwing up sometimes.
The world would probably be a better place if more people were like his best friend. If they took the time to examine their own beliefs instead of blindly accepting what one priest or reverend or whatever holy man, they follow tells them to believe.
“After five years of studying, the most important thing I’ve learned is that God didn’t create us just to watch us suffer. He wants us to be happy, and he wants us to be kind to each other.”
“It looks like you’re staring at a ring light.”
“What?” Chester asks, startled from his thoughts, having nearly forgotten about his current surroundings entirely. There is a strange intensity to Parker’s gaze, and he has a feeling Parker has probably been watching him for a while. “What are you talking about?”
“The moonlight on your eyes,” Parker replies quietly. “When you were staring at it. It was like the reflection of the ring light at home.”
The ring light. The one they have set up on the computer for the videos they record at the computer. It’s part of their job, the way they earn money to continue with this entire crusade. Chester’s eyes usually don’t reflect the ring light. Glaucoma. He can’t take such harsh direct light in his eyes and normally wears sunglasses anytime they’re using any sort of bright setup. But he knows what Parker is talking about, he sees the reflection in Parker’s when they’re recording, a tiny white circle, though it’s such a common sight these days he barely takes note of it when recording or editing.
The camera jiggles in his hands when Parker leans over to kiss him. Surprised and unsure what to do with his own hands when he feels Parker’s clammy palm against his cheek. This isn’t something they normally do on the job. Parker is usually far too invested in his duties to show any physical affection and Chester is usually hiding behind a camera.
“What was that for?”
“You just look so nice in the moonlight,” Parker replies, smiling fondly at him. “I don’t think I tell you how much it means to me having you here with me, sometimes.”