The True Detective Read Online Free PDF Page A

“I mean you’re always sort of weird,” he says. “But lately, you really do seem weird.”
    “I’m fine,” Vernon says.
    Watching him still, Duncan nods. Carrying his cup then, he starts back in the direction of the bathroom. “Okay,” he says. “Calculus tomorrow.”
    Vernon sits at the table. He’d like to have said more, as usual, but didn’t. It could be so pleasant, he thinks. He could so enjoy someone being friendly with him. Taking the lead, though, because it was something he’d never been able to do. Did any of them have any idea how much he suffered by his reticence?
    Getting up, believing he has heard a voice—it would have to be Leon or Wayne in the other bedroom—Vernon slips back to his own bedroom, to close himself in. He couldn’t face those two right now, he thinks. Not today.
    Sitting at his desk, next to the door, he hears them moving around in the kitchen and bathroom. At times like these Leon always wore a pair of gray sweatpants that revealed the droopof his genitals, which embarrassed and angered Vernon. Something about Leon always seemed to say, look, see what I have here—so Vernon sensed—which made him avoid looking at all costs.
    This is awful, he says to himself, sitting in his room. What is so strange, he thinks, is that the one person who could lift him out of his depression on nothing more than a couple words is the one person who isn’t about to.
    He sits at his desk. In a moment, on a thought, he digs into the bottom of a drawer to remove an erotic magazine—in a manila folder—he has had in his possession since childhood. Called Summertime Friends, the magazine is something he had yet to show to his friend, and he is wondering now if it would have any effect on him, if it would excite him—two prepubescent boys engaged in page after page, scene after scene, of sex play? Would it help now?
    He glances through the magazine, scans its pages. It’s been a long time, months, since he has last looked at his two young friends, but he knows the pages well and feels some comfort now in their presence. There were times in his life when the two boys seemed to be—they were—his only companions, and glancing over the pages, it seems less the two of them he is seeing now than himself, himself alone, perhaps studying the photographs, kissing them, tracing them, daring all sorts of things with them in the kind of escapes they allowed him to experience. Childhood.
    The telephone in the kitchen rings. Vernon’s heart stops; he doesn’t move as he hears someone walk past his door.
    The telephone rings a second time. Vernon holds.
    He hears Duncan speaking. Hearing Duncan laugh, he knows the call isn’t for him. It means he’ll have to go ahead with the meeting. If I don’t call . . .
    Duncan would be getting a call from his father in New Jersey. This seemed to happen every weekend, when they caught up on how all the sports teams in the East had fared since they had talked last. Was that how fathers and sons talked? Was it a secret code?
    Vernon closes the magazine cover and the manila folder. Checking his watch, coming around, exhaling, he decides he might as well go on his way, go ahead and get it over with.
    On his feet, he checks his pants pocket to be sure he has his keys. He leaves the secret magazine where it is on his desk. Does he hope it will be found? he wonders. Turning out his desk lamp, he leaves his bedroom, pulling the door nearly shut.
    Crossing the kitchen—his coat is on a hook in the doorway—he raises a hand to say so long to Duncan, as does Duncan in turn, capping the phone and saying, “Later, Quiet Man. Calculus tomorrow.”
    In an odd leap, as if through a blank space, Vernon is outside. Perhaps the momentary time lapse had to do with the weather, he thinks, for the air outside is immediately sunny and warm. The air is almost hopeful. He walks around the cabin to a row of cars in the sun, to unlock the door of the third and last in line, a faded,