Earlier, his mum tried to coax him to head back up north for the holidays — I’m sure your father wants to see you, but you’re even more stubborn than he is, she’d said. And so he stops taking her calls altogether.
Harry’s worse. She consistently leaves him voicemails after the bars close and she stumbles home: Johnny, you need to come home soon — what, you gonna make mum and I put up with da alone again?
But home, he thinks, feels more like it belongs between the sheets in the room upstairs, not in a little town up north. Home, he thinks, has wild hair and wiry arms. Home, he thinks, is so much stranger, so much madder, and so much better than anything he’s ever known.
Home, he thinks, has a white face and a halo of blood around it.
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