///~///~///~

Chapter 17 - A Bunch of Dead Ends.

“Okay. I think it’s somewhere in the back of his closet here,” Gus explained as he started to dig through the odds and ends stored in the depths of Brian’s enormous walk-in closet.

Qianna joined him, pushing aside luggage and peeking into one shoe box after another. “I get liking shoes - I really do - but why buy them if you’re never even going to take them out of the boxes?”

“I think it’s because Pops just doesn’t have enough real hobbies. He’s got nothing to keep him entertained these days other than shopping. It’s not really about the shoes or the clothes at all. It’s just something to fill the void, you know?” Gus explained as he rifled through an old banker’s box filled with paperwork and then moved on when it clearly didn’t contain whatever it was he was looking for.

“Wait. I think I found it,” Qianna exclaimed as she came across another box that was about the same size as the shoe boxes but much fancier, with silver corner brads and a nameplate on the end that read ’Sunshine’. “I don’t know what Sunshine means, but you said it was a box full of mementoes, and that’s what this seems to be.”

Gus took the box out of Qianna’s hands and led the way out of Brian’s bedroom, down the hall, and into his own room, where they could have some privacy for their snooping. He placed the box in the middle of his bed. Qianna climbed up to sit on one side of it and Gus sat on the other. He then carefully took the lid off and set it aside so they could both see what they were looking at. At first glance the stuff in the box seemed unremarkable. There were some photos, scraps of paper, some small trinkets and such - pretty much par for the course in a box of keepsakes.

“Yeah, this is the box I remember. I found it once when I was just a kid and I was snooping around looking for my birthday presents,” Gus informed his quasi-sister as they rifled through the odds and ends in the box.

Qianna seized on a stack of photos and began thumbing through them. Most were just random pictures of Brian and the gang, albeit with all of them looking much younger. From the looks of it, Brian and his buddies got up to a lot of trouble when they were younger. He had been pretty good looking when he was in his twenties, Qianna thought - not that Brian wasn’t still great looking, just more mature - which reinforced some of the comments and stories she’d heard about his wild youthful ways.

“Hey, I found one with my dad in it. Ha! OMG! Look at this! Was this a Halloween party or something?” Qianna held the photo out for Gus to see so they could laugh together.

The photo in question showed Brian along with five others, all dressed in eye-opening costumes.

“Sheesh, Pops, could those pants have been any tighter?” Gus giggled at his father’s ensemble, which consisted of the tightest white-leather pants imaginable and a shirt that was equally tight and practically see through. “He looks like a pimp or something in that get up.”

“Yeah, and my dad looks like a total twink. Damn he was young.” Qianna shook her head over the red mesh crop top her father was wearing in the photo, exposing practically everything down to his low waist khakis.

“The rest of them look just as bad. I mean, I get Em dressing up as Jackie - he LOVES to dress up just about any time he can find an excuse - but even Uncle Ted is wearing something crazy. I mean, I just can not see him as a leather daddy . . . And Grandma Debbie in those glasses?”

“Who’s the other man in the picture? The one in the crazy purple hat?”

“I think that’s Grandma Debbie’s brother, Vic. He died back when I was just a baby, but I’ve seen lots of pictures of him. None like THAT though,” Gus answered, setting aside the picture and delving back into the box.

“Aha!” Qianna announced as she pulled out another photo, one that was paperclipped to what appeared to be two separate wedding announcements. “Here’s the original of that black and white picture that Quinne found. This is the same as the one we saw online when we were doing our research. And here’s the wedding announcement proving our dads were, in fact, married.”

“That looks familiar,” Gus said, as he looked over QiQi’s shoulder at the picture showing two men dressed in black suits smiling at each other. “I think my Mom has a copy of that in an album somewhere.

“Huh. Look at this, though,” Qianna handed over the two wedding announcements. “They show two different dates about six months apart? Did they have TWO weddings or something?”

Gus looked at the two neatly printed announcements, both with similar designs, but each inviting the recipients to commitment ceremonies on different days. “That IS strange. I wish I hadn’t been so little back then and that I remembered more.”

“You should,” Qianna teased the older boy, holding up another of the photos she’d discovered, this one showing a preschool aged Gus, dressed in a baby-sized tux, holding up a blue satin pillow with two rings tied to it with ribbons. “It looks like you were their ring bearer.”

“Damn. Okay, so my memory sucks. Sue me,” Gus responded, taking the picture out of Qianna’s hands so he could admire his younger self while the girl continued to go through the pictures she’d pulled out of the box.

“Wow! Look at this one.” She held up a cropped photo of the two men, Brian standing behind Justin, holding him close to his chest, his mouth just millimeters from the younger man’s ear, as if caught in the moment before he whispered something to his younger lover.

“Your dad was so young there. What an odd couple they must have made. And I just can’t imagine my Pops actually DATING anyone, let alone a twink like your dad. I mean, even though I remember them together, it’s still amazing to see actual proof like that,” Gus exclaimed as he smiled at the evidence that the two men had been so close.

“Yeah. But they do make a gorgeous couple, don’t you think? Dark and light. And they’re so comfortable with each other - I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad letting someone get that close to him outside of our home. He’s usually so standoffish in public, you know. I guess it’s because he has a reputation to maintain now, but still . . . Look at them together in this picture; you can almost feel the way they just seem to fit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my Dad so relaxed with another man as he is here.”

Gus wasn’t really listening to Qianna anymore though. He’d found something else in the box that had usurped his total attention. It was an envelope filled with yellowed and brittle old newspaper clippings. But the odd thing wasn’t that Brian had kept the clippings, it was that this envelope had been wrapped up in a long piece of cloth - cloth that turned out to be an elegant, white silk, scarf. He’d unwrapped the scarf and found the envelope inside before he’d really looked at the wrapping, but when he looked again, Gus could see that there were some brownish stains blotting the pure white of the scarf, which seemed even more odd than wrapping a packet of clippings with it. There was also one photo in the envelope.

“Look at this,” Gus directed, as he handed the photo showing their fathers dancing together while wearing formal wear, the back-lighting of the scene creating a dramatic aura for the picture that seemed to show the two men caught up in their own little world.

“That’s not from the wedding, is it?” Qianna asked, looking again at the other picture they knew was from the wedding. “No. It can’t be. Dad’s hair is much longer in the wedding pictures. He also looks really, REALLY, young here. Where was this one taken?”

Gus, who’d started in on the clippings in the envelope where he’d found the picture, gasped when he found Qianna’s answer. “It was Justin’s Senior Prom . . . Shit! . . . Did you know about THIS?”

He handed an old page of newsprint over to his new sister for her review, waiting nervously for her reaction to what he’d just uncovered. Qianna took the paper from him - when unfolded it seemed to be the entire front page of one of the local newspapers from almost twenty years earlier - and felt like she’d been punched in the gut all over again. Even though she’d read about the bashing on the internet when they’d first started their research into the dads, it still hit her hard to read this headline again:

‘Local Teen Attacked At High School Prom’.

A quick reading of the subheaders and the first couple paragraphs told the rest of the story pretty succinctly, reminding Qianna of the horror of it all. ‘Justin Taylor, a senior at St. James Academy, a local college prep school, was attacked by a fellow classmate after his significantly older, MALE lover showed up at the school’s senior prom. Taylor was allegedly assaulted and struck in the head with a baseball bat before Brian Kinney, the boyfriend in question, was able to stop the attack. According to police sources, the alleged attacker is in police custody and Taylor remains in the hospital, his condition serious enough that there is speculation that he might not make it’.

By all accounts - and it looked like Brian had saved clippings from several different papers - it was one of the most gruesome and premeditated hate crimes the state had ever seen. And the fact that it had been HER father who had been the victim, almost caused Qianna to keel over herself. It didn’t matter that she’d heard about it before; it would probably never get easier to read about such a horror.

“Yeah. Quinne and I found some of this stuff online a couple months ago. But . . . Damn . . .” she scanned each of the subsequent clippings as Gus handed them over to her, noting how the media had tracked her father’s progress and the criminal case, detailing Justin’s release from the hospital and continuing through the pathetic, unsatisfying, ending of the attacker’s trial. “Did your Pops ever tell you about this?” she asked Gus, who merely shook his head, looking like he was still in shock. “My dad has NEVER said a word about any of this to me either. None of it. I mean, he’s occasionally joked about an ‘accident’ that he had when he was young and how it tanked his career as a world-famous painter, but I never took it seriously. He’s famous enough for his computer animation work, so I never thought he was serious. And, yeah, he sometimes complains that his hand is acting up, but he’s never really said why it hurts. I just thought he was overdoing it at work or something. You know, like, carpal tunnel syndrome or something. I had no idea about any of THIS . . .”

They both took several minutes to read through the entirety of the press clippings that Brian had saved until they felt they had the entire story. It was heartbreaking. Poor Justin seemed to have barely survived, his recovery taking months, and based on the testimony given to the court, it was clear he had sustained permanent brain damage as a result of his injuries. Even worse, that creep, Chris Hobbs - the monster who’d attacked Justin simply for daring to dance with another man - had gotten off with nothing more than community service. It was an outrage. And it was apparently an outrage that Brian hadn’t forgotten either, seeing as he’d carefully kept all these clippings as well as what they could now tell was the blood-soaked scarf he must have been wearing the night of the prom.

“Even after all that, they were still together. They still loved each other. They still got married,” Qianna summed it up for them both. “So what could have possibly broken them up after they survived all THAT? It would have had to be something huge, right? But what?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t make any sense. Especially if they’d gone so far as to hire a surrogate to have a baby together. Which, from what I’ve heard my moms say, was pretty much a shock to everyone in the family,” Gus explained.

However, despite spending another fifteen minutes going through the rest of the items in the ‘Sunshine’ box, the kids couldn’t find anything that explained the men’s subsequent breakup.

“Nothing!” Qianna complained as she shoved the last of the scraps of paper back into the box and pushed the worthless thing away from her. “This just doesn’t make any sense. It’s all just a bunch of dead ends.”

“Well, we did learn one thing,” Gus added as he put the top back on the box and went to pick it up so he could return it to it’s hiding place in Brian’s closet. “We know that, whatever broke them up, Pops at least still loves your dad.”

“Huh? How do you get that?” Qianna asked, feeling like she must have missed something. “They split up me and Quinne, my dad moved 3,000 miles away, and as far as we know they haven’t spoken in over a decade. That doesn’t say ‘love’ to me.”

Gus held up the box and rattled it in his pseudo-sister’s face. “This says love.” When Qianna still looked lost, Gus explained further. “My Pops doesn’t do sentimentality. He doesn’t keep anything old. He throws out clothing after one season, refuses to keep leftovers, even donates books after he’s read them once. Hell, last week we got into an argument over him insisting that I throw out my favorite old hoodie - he got pissed that it’s all frayed and has a stain on the sleeve - but it’s from my freshman year on the track team and I love it, so I told him to back off. He said something to the effect of, ‘old shit just keeps old memories alive and you’re better off living in the moment’. So, don’t you see? The mere fact that he’s kept all this crap about your dad for, like, fifteen years, means he’s not over him. Not even close.”

Qianna wasn’t so sure about Gus’ analysis of the situation, but he obviously knew Brian better than she did. She did wonder if the same was true for her father. Justin was about to marry Hairy Alex after all, which didn’t bode well for Brian’s supposed hopes, if he was holding on to any. Although she knew that Justin didn’t really love Alex - he hadn’t ever truly loved anyone, she didn’t think - so maybe there was still something there? Or maybe Justin had simply been so hurt by whatever happened with Brian that he would never be able to love that way again.

///~///~///~

Speaking of Qianna’s Soon-to-be Yeti-in-law, Quinne was more than ready to be rid of the man, whether or not Justin was. Quinne had only known Alex for a little over twelve hours and was already prepared to kill him if that’s what it took. The troll was simply insufferable. She could find no redeemable qualities in him at all. She had absolutely no idea what Justin could see in the poseur, unless Alex was absolutely fabulous in bed, which seemed doubtful based on his overall selfishness.

He’d started in on her first thing that morning, as soon as Justin had left for work, and it didn’t seem like he planned to let up anytime soon. Quinne had just kissed ‘her’ dad goodbye and was about to sit down with a cup of coffee to catch up on her emails when Alex came rambling in, dressed in nothing but a pair of ratty old sweats, grabbed Quinne’s coffee cup out of her hands, and stole the toast she’d been making right as it popped up out of the toaster. He laughed at her, crumbs spraying out of his mouth, when she called him out on it and demanded that he at least start a new pot of coffee since that had been the last cup. Then he’d just stood there, looking at her with this contemptuous smirk, dribbling even more toast crumbs down his bare, hairy chest. And, yes, it WAS as hairy as she’d expected. Yuck. Not that she had anything against bears, per se, but weren’t they supposed to at least be cuddly and warm and jovial? This guy didn’t have any of those features. He just had the hair.

Instead of fighting with him over the damn coffee, though, Quinne opted to remove herself from the situation. She went up to her own room, starting the shower so she could get ready for the day. But, just as she was about to get in, she heard the sound of a toilet flushing in the master suite and the water in her shower got scalding hot. She cursed under her breath, jumped out of the reach of the boiling spray and waited as patiently as she could until the water came back to normal temperature again.

She’d only barely made it into the shower the second time, and had just started to soap up, when it happened again. This time she got the full brunt of the superheated water before she could escape and her scream of pain was loud enough to ring throughout the house. In response, she heard laughter coming from down the hallway in the direction of Justin’s bedroom. That fucker! He was playing with her. And he obviously didn’t care that she could have been seriously hurt. Well, fuck him! Quinne decided there and then that she was going to take this fucker out and she didn’t care what the collateral damage might be. Justin would have to find someone else to marry, damn it.

Hairy Alex had no idea who he’d messed with.

Quinne quickly dried off, rinsing off the soap as best she could in the sink because she wasn’t willing to risk the shower again, and then headed for Qianna’s computer. A half hour later she was armed with all the knowledge she’d need to make Alex’s life a living hell. It took her about an hour or so more to get everything ready, but she figured it was time well spent. Luckily, she’d been able to find most of the ingredients she needed in the house itself, which had been a bonus, allowing her to get started on her preparations right away.

She started off by harvesting a couple of the old, dried roses she’d seen in the garden, using her lab skills to carefully dissect down to the cotton-like cythilicus at the center of the rosehips and then steaming them to activate the chemicals that would make the fibrous little particles extra irritating. While that was doing it’s thing, she took the box of laxatives she’d found in the medicine cabinet downstairs to the kitchen and whipped up a quick batch of brownies with a special ingredient added. Then, while the brownies were baking, she took a quick trip down the block to the market on the corner, coming home with some mousetraps and some little firework-type things called ‘Pop-its’ that she thought might come in handy. By the time she got back to the house, the brownies were ready to come out of the oven. She quickly cut them up into nice-sized squares, put them all on a plate, covered it with plastic wrap and taped a note to the top of the wrapping that said, ‘QiQi’s Brownies - Please ask before eating’. She left the platter on the counter before going to check on her rosehip experiment, confident that Alex would NOT ask before taking a laxative-laden brownie.

The cythilicus was coming along nicely but still needed to be dried before it would be ready, so she set that aside in a warm place and proceeded with her other preparations. A peek out the window revealed that Alex was currently relaxing in the backyard by the pool so the coast was clear. She snuck into the bathroom of the master suite where she left a couple of the Pop-its on the rim of the toilet bowl, just under the little support legs that held up the seat. That ought to give the Yeti a bit of a surprise when he sat down, she thought. Almost as much of a surprise as the Mousetraps she’d already set in his boots, which would go off the minute he stuck in his toes. She decided she’d also do the same to the guest bath toilet on the first floor, just to be thorough.

Next, Quinne turned her attention to something she was even better at than dirty tricks - computer hacking. It took her less than five minutes to find Alex’s social media accounts and, just as expected, he hadn’t been smart enough to set up two-factor authorization or any other type of security protocols, making it a piece of cake to hack his accounts. By the time the bathing beauty brought his freshly tanned ass in from the pool an hour or so later, Quinne had managed to not only post several photoshopped pictures showing him in compromising positions, but had also trash posted on his behalf on all of his friends’ accounts. Quinne figured that, by nightfall, Alex would be a complete social pariah. And, because she was feeling extra nasty, she made sure to tag Justin on a post she’d made of Alex joking about how unimpressive his fiancé was in the sack. Let him try and explain his way out of that one. Finally, as her coup de grace, before she logged out, Quinne also made sure to change the associated email address on all the accounts to a random gmail address she’d made up and then changed all the passwords to ‘fuckyouasshole247!’.

While Alex hit the shower - after having stolen a couple brownies as he came in from the pool; evidenced by the fact that he hadn’t wrapped the remainders up properly afterwards - Quinne popped downstairs and finished up her chemistry preparations, putting on the rubber dishwashing gloves before she handled the dried cythilicus. When dried, the fine rosehip filaments were practically invisible, not to mention a well known and insidious skin irritant. She proceeded to carefully sprinkle her homemade cythilicus itching powder inside the collar of Alex’s jacket, which was hanging on its customary hook by the back door, as well as all over the hoodie he’d left draped over the back of a kitchen chair and, for good measure, into the already mouse-trapped boots. She figured she’d hold onto the remaining itching powder for future use, thinking that it might be fun to put some into the cretin’s swimming trunks once they’d dried sufficiently.

And then she just had to sit back, wait, and enjoy the fun.

Her phone pinged just as she was finishing up her work for the morning, and Quinne accepted the call before heading back up to her room. “Hey, Sis? Any luck on your research efforts?”

Qianna’s voice answered from the other end of the call. “Nope. Gus and I searched all over the house this morning but we didn’t find anything that would explain why the dads broke up or anything about our mother. Gus suggested that, if there IS anything, it’s probably locked in your Pops’ safe, which means we’ll never find it. The only thing we did find was a box of mementos your dad kept of my dad; Gus said it proved your Pops is still hung up on his ex-husband but I’m not sure. Other than that, though, I’m batting zero. How was your morning?”

Quine started to laugh maniacally, which actually sorta scared her sister.

“Um . . . You okay, Q?”

“Go check out Hairy Alex’s instagram feed,” Quinne advised, giving Qianna the correct handle for the account and waiting while her sister checked the postings.

“OMG! . . . Shit! . . . Oh snap! Quinne, you naughty, nasty, evil little girl. What did the Yeti do to you to deserve that?” she cackled with laughter as she scrolled through the doctored photos, all of which were either demeaning or incriminating or both.

“Oh, that’s nothing. That ape picked the wrong girl to chase out of the shower with his juvenile toilet flushing trick this morning. He has no fucking idea how stupid it was to get on my bad side. I don’t get angry very easily but once I do, I never forgive and I never forget. By this time tomorrow, Hairy Alex will be ruing the day he was born,” Quinne threatened.

“You’re kinda scary sometimes; you know that, right?” Qianna commented. “And I totally love you even more now.”

“Damn straight I’m scary. But I’m not about to let an asshat like that get his claws into my sister’s dad. I’m with you 100% on this, Sis. Poor Justin deserves better than Hairy Alex and I’m just the girl to make it happen.”

“My shero!” Qianna sighed. “I almost wish I could be there to see exactly how you’re going to humiliate Alex.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take video and send it to you,” Quinne promised with a chuckle. “Just wait till the itching powder and the laxative brownies kick in - that should be a riot. Oh, and I booby trapped the toilets too, so when the runs do hit, he’ll get an extra surprise. How much you wanna bet he shits himself when the toilet seat explodes. Hahahahaha!”

The girls dissolved in laughter after that, spending the next ten minutes giggling their heads off. Just about the time they were ready to end the call, though, there was a noisy commotion coming from the bedroom down the hall, so Quinne stepped out into the corridor to see what was up, taking her phone with her. They made it in time to hear a loud popping noise, followed by a rather girly yelp, and then a crash as a something large fell, first against the wall adjoining the hallway and then to the floor. The howl of anger that followed fanned the flames of the girls’ amusement anew. They were both literally crying with laughter when they finally ended the call five minutes later.

It seemed like at least part of their plan - the part that called for Alex to become only an unpleasant memory - was well underway.

///~///~///~