I needed physical contact. A hug, a kiss... anything.

I picked up the phone again. My eyes felt watery again.

"Hey, handsome Canadian guy 🔥🔥"

Lucas replied immediately. "Hey. Even though I'm always from New York."

"Do you feel like a little action? 🍆💦💦"

"Do you ever think about anything else..."

"Guilty. I can't stop thinking about your hard cock"

I managed to hold back the tears. I felt my heart slow down a bit. It's all okay.

Lucas took a few seconds longer than usual to reply.

"My hard cock in your tight ass? 😁"

I quickly typed the response and sent it. "Yeah, okay"

This time his message arrived immediately. "Really???"

I imagined Lucas in my bed, on top of me. I hated bottoming, I never liked it, but at that moment the idea of having a warm body so close... arms holding me tight...

"Sure. But if I don't cum, you'll give me a blowjob"

"Ahahaha okay"

I wanted to ask him to come over right away, but it probably wasn't a very reasonable request. It was already evening and all the Smiths were home. We had to wait until tomorrow.

I closed the conversation with a few more comments about his cock.

Once I locked the screen, I found myself again in that dark room. I no longer felt the need to cry, but I still felt like I couldn't get comfortable anywhere. 

I returned to curl up on the bed and spent the next two hours scrolling through silly videos on YouTube, which, unbelievably, didn't make me feel any better.

At midnight, I got up to grab the guitar. There was no way I could fall asleep.

I connected the guitar and headphones to the amplifier and started strumming without a real goal. My fingers found the chords of the most depressing songs I knew on their own. They were betraying me.

I continued that torment until I looked up from the floor and saw the clock on the nightstand. It was three in the morning.

I was hungry.

I went to open the door and peeked at the tray in the hallway. There was a plate covered by a lid to keep something warm, which must have cooled hours ago. There was also a glass of water, a pastry, a note, and a little flower.

I bent down to look at it better. It was one of those wildflowers that grew in the garden. Had Jeremy gone out to pick a flower and put it in my tray?

It was a silly thing, but it made me smile.

I picked up the note. On one side, it said "enjoy your meal" in that typewriter-like handwriting that Jeremy had. And then on the other side it said: "I'm sorry, I know our mother is a difficult person."

I stared at the note not really knowing what to think. It wasn't even the judge who was the problem. I mean. She wasn't helping, but she wasn't the crux of the problem.

I placed the note near the plate and picked up the tray to take it to my room, but before crossing the threshold, I heard a very slight click.

I remained with my ears strained, and I heard it again. It was the click of a mouse, coming from the door in front of mine.

Jeremy was still awake. 

I placed the tray back down, and without even knowing why, I lowered the handle and peeked into his room.

Jeremy was sitting on his swivel chair. The blue light from the PC screen illuminated his face. He had a horribly bored expression but didn't seem sleepy.

I opened the door wider, took a step into the room, and Jeremy jumped in surprise.

"It's you... God... I thought it was Dad."

"Are you afraid you'll get caught watching porn past bedtime?"

Jeremy snorted a kind of laugh. "No. I'm studying."

I leaned toward the screen and saw something that must have had to do with math, formulas, and stuff like that.

"At three in the morning?"

He shrugged. "I'm behind. If I don't catch up now, I'm afraid I won't get into college."

Ah. He must have really cared about this, to study at such an ungodly hour. It wasn't something I could ever understand. School had never mattered to me much.

We didn't have much in common, Jeremy and I.

"Why are you awake?" he asked, smiling at me.

It's not that I didn't want to tell him; it's just that I couldn't put my tangled thoughts into words. I pondered for a moment, then simply said, "Want to hear me play? You can listen with headphones; we won't wake anyone."

He glanced back at the screen for a moment. It was written all over his face that he wanted to finish what he was doing. It was important to him.

"Sure. Let me hear."

He got up and smiled at me again. He led the way, and on the way to my room, he gave a worried glance at the tray.

Fortunately, he spared me the lecture about needing to eat and take care of myself, blah, blah, blah...

My guitar was still connected and warm. I just took a seat in my corner and handed Jeremy a pair of headphones as he sat on the bed.

My mind immediately went to "November Rain," but in that moment, I didn't want to play anything that reminded me too much of my father.

I strummed a chord, and from there, the others followed in an automatic movement. It was "Little Things Give You Away." I felt Chester's voice over my guitar. His words split my heart in two and made it bleed directly onto the strings.

"Don't want to reach for me, do you? I mean nothing to you The little things give you away"

The song ended, and I felt empty. Not bad, just empty. It was as if the guitar had cried what I hadn't been able to cry for myself.

"Wow. You're really good," Jeremy said, taking off the headphones. He genuinely seemed surprised. I wasn't sure if I should take it as a compliment. "Did you write that?"

"I'm immensely honored that you think I'm capable of writing such a song. No, Jeremy. It's Linkin Park."

There are these moments in life when something happens that flips your entire worldview. Something that makes you realize that the way you've always thought about life and reality was fundamentally wrong.

I had one of those moments when Jeremy asked, "What is it? A band?"

Whatever deep-seated doubts I had about my identity, about my father and our relationship together, were immediately set aside to make room for a new, much more important, much deeper existential question.

"Did you just ask me what Linkin Park is?"

Jeremy looked sideways with a strange smirk. He seemed uncomfortable.

"I... I don't know a lot of things that a guy my age should know. It's like you said... I don't have friends."

Okay. I didn't remember saying that. I had thought it, for sure, but usually, I keep those things to myself.

"Yeah, okay... but you've never set foot in a store with music? Or turned on the TV, like ever?"

He shrugged, still looking sideways. "When I was little, I wasn't allowed to watch TV, and after... I didn't have time. The last four years have been... very busy."

"Busy doing what?"

He lowered his gaze to his hands and watched them tug at the hem of his shirt. It took him a while to look up at me.

"Looking for you."

...

Neither of us spoke, and then Jeremy got up. He still had the look of a cornered rabbit.

"I can show you..." It was somewhere between a statement and a question.

I didn't know what he wanted to show me, but if someone in that shitty situation finally decided to give me some answers, I wouldn't say no. I got up too.

We retraced our steps to his room, and this time, the blue light from the computer illuminated both of us.

Jeremy lost the mouse and closed his math notes. He opened the browser.

"When I was fourteen, the FBI changed the status of the case. Formally, it meant they would focus the search on finding a body, but in reality, it meant they would take money and personnel off the case. In short terms: they gave up."

As soon as the Google screen appeared, Jeremy moved the cursor to the bookmark bar, clicked on a folder named "search," and from there, a river of other folders cascaded down to the bottom of the screen. Each one was labeled with a different date.

"Before they abandoned the searches, the agents periodically mapped my face with special cameras. They uploaded the biometric data to a facial recognition program that scanned public images on social media. They never found a match, but I was sure they gave up too soon. If there was a chance you were alive and not locked in a basement, then it was likely your face would end up on social media after fourteen years, not before."

I was still quite confused about what this meant. Jeremy moved the cursor to the first folder, which opened another river of folders and from one of those emerged an endless column of pages. Mostly Instagram, but also Facebook, school album pages from different cities...

"You couldn't have found me like that. I don't have any social media. My father..." I stopped before continuing. The words died in my mouth. My father had never allowed me to have any profiles. He was so vehemently against it that I had never dared to go against him.

There were literally only two rules in my house. No social media, no heroin.

Jeremy gave me a kind look. He spared me the explanation of why my father had been so adamant.

"It wasn't easy, I didn't have any facial recognition software. At first, I searched around the Vancouver area, then I expanded further and further. I looked for users our age who posted many pictures of many different people."

The mouse returned to the first river of folders and scrolled down to the last one, then deftly maneuvered between folders and pages even though there were only numbers and acronyms guiding it. It reached a last folder, named "OH MY FUCKING GOD." So. Further proof that Jeremy swore, but only when he thought no one was listening.

From that folder, ten pages opened. Jeremy clicked on the first one.

I recognized the account. It was the guy assigned to take pictures for the yearbook of my school. Jeremy scrolled to a photo of just two months ago.

And there I was. I was staring straight into the camera and flipping off the photographer who wouldn't stop following me.

"After I found that picture, it took me just one night to find you."

Jeremy flipped to the next page. I didn't recognize this account, but I recognized the end-of-year party Dickhead hosted in the cover images. I was practically a dot squished in the midst of a thousand other dots in the crowd, but somehow, Jeremy had found me anyway.

There were four more like that. Pictures of me half-cut, a bit blurry, never looking into the lens.

Jeremy straightened up and waited for me to say something.

I had no idea what to say. I grabbed the mouse and navigated through the folders. How many were there? They seemed endless. As I moved the cursor, my stomach clenched.

"I made an anonymous call to the police, giving them the name of your school, and they did the rest. I didn't tell my parents what I was doing... that it was me who found you. And please don't tell them."

Jeremy lowered his head, his voice thinning.

"Dad has been saying for years that I’m not trying hard enough at school. That if I really put my mind to it, I could make it. I always denied it. But he was right. Since I started high school, all I've done is the bare minimum to keep my head above water. The rest of the time... I was here."

He gestured to the screen filled with hundreds of folders.

My head felt heavy, and my stomach tight. I felt like when I had read those notes in the cardboard box.

A suffocating sense of nausea.

Back then, I hadn't known what caused it, but now I understood. It was the awareness of being incredibly important in someone else's life, while I barely knew who they were.

We were on completely different levels. He looked at me and saw his disappeared brother, the one he had waited for sixteen years. I... I didn’t know what I saw.

I looked back at the screen and saw Jeremy there, sitting at the desk spending his freshman year scrolling through photos. Then his sophomore year. Then junior year... I had reached halfway through his senior year.

"I've disturbed you," Jeremy said.

It was as if his eyes were tiptoeing, looking at me shyly, ready to flee.

I looked back at the screen. Then Jeremy.

"So, you were doing this instead of listening to Linkin Park?"

He was momentarily taken aback by my sudden lightening of the conversation.

He chuckled. "Well, yeah. I'd say finding a missing person is a tad more important."

I grabbed him by the collar and pushed him back into the chair. "Look, I'm not punching you just because the missing person is me. NO. Sit down. Where the hell are your headphones? Shut this shit down. Open YouTube. There, now I'll show you how adolescence is normally spent. Get ready for your first auditory orgasm."

As soon as he put the headphones on, I started playing Numb.

He sat there in the chair with his hands folded in his lap. Occasionally, he gave me a faint smile, and I tried to reciprocate with all my might, but... really. It had been a tough day.

I felt a weight on my chest that showed no signs of dimming, and I didn't know how to make it go away.

I needed to get away from him for a while.

But I couldn't just take off. I couldn't say goodnight, because he still had the music blasting in his ears. Waving goodbye with a little hand seemed weird, right? In the end, I walked away from the computer and, while he was turned away, I reached out a hand to his neck and squeezed it a little.

He turned back with a confused expression, as if searching for an explanation.

I didn't give him one. I left him with a playlist of Linkin Park open on the YouTube page.

...

Closing my bedroom door, I leaned heavily against it.

Oh, my god.

A million thoughts flooded my brain. It was too much. Too much all at once. My heart was about to burst.

A muffled sound interrupted the chaos in my mind. The fractured light of my phone indicated a new notification.

I clung to the screen like a life raft.

Lucas: "Are you still awake? I can't sleep."

This guy I had just met was one of the very few things in my life that made sense. He understood it. Crappy family, no money, crappy job, wanting to have sex and scream at the world. Those things I understood.

"I can’t sleep either."