The night that Elvis Haddison mysteriously disappeared on Lake Cusp, Sean McCarthy crashed his car into a mailbox, although he didn’t stop until he reached town.
This was for two reasons- first, he knew who owned the mailbox he’d just bowled over, and knew that his consequences would not be particularly merciful. Secondly, and more predominantly, because he was drunk, and a little sleep deprived, and really shouldn’t have been driving at all. He neither thought to pull over or think to check on the mailbox until he was long out of sight.
But once he was stopped, he stopped for real, stumbling out of the car and sitting on the sidewalk, staring up at the neon light for the local diner. After a few deep, shaky breaths, he fished his phone out of his pocket, squinting at the screen for a few good minutes, before finding what he needed.
The phone rang for only a few moments, before, with a click, it stopped.
Neither spoke for a moment, before Sean remembered who he was talking to, before he remembered that he would have to be the first to talk, and sighed. “Hey bro. How much to convince you to pick me up?”
“Twenty. You at the party still?” The voice, a dry, hoarse, smoker’s voice came through, the faint sound of keys being grabbed in the background.
“Nah, I left, I’m at Frost’s.”
“How the hell’d you get from Jean-Paul’s to Frost’s?”
“Drove.”
“You drove?!” There was a long, fruitful pause, before a huff. “Did you wreck your car?”
“No,” Sean said, before pausing, thinking, and shaking his head hard. “I ran over the Robyn family.”
“What?”
“Not the family. Their mailbox. I don’t know why I said the family,” He thought. “I’m kind of drunk.”
“Man, you’re a lightweight. I’ll be there in ten. You gonna need to pick up your car tomorrow?”
“We have school, don’t we?”
“You're 19 years old.”
“So…?”
A sort of huffed laugh, and the sound of an engine starting. “No, Sean, you don’t have school tomorrow.”
“Okay, then, no.”
“Yes, you do, or it’ll get towed.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Bitch.”
The line went dead.
Sean stood up, stretching his arms over his head. The air was finally starting to cool off, and the hem of his t-shirt wasn’t quite enough to cover his stomach. He shuddered and lowered his arms.
Sean was, to put it simply, an odd looking young man. He was tall, easily six foot, and lanky, with pale pale skin and a buzzed head of bleach fried hair. His eyes were mismatched, one pupil perpetually dilated and surrounded by pale blue, the other surrounded by dark brown. His skin was covered in freckles, his face full of piercings. His clothes were all the wrong size, his shoes held together with duct tape. He looked like a Frankenstein’s monster of a man, all the wrong bits in the wrong places. The result was very nearly a positive one, but not quite.
A minivan pulled up.
Unlike Sean’s rattly old pickup truck, this one was a good deal newer, and in a much better condition. Some would even call it a nice car.
The passenger side window shuddered down, and Sean stumbled over, leaning his head in.
“Hey cutie. Need a ride?”
“I’m not supposed to get in strangers' cars,” Sean fired back, but reached through the window to unlock the door, climbing into the familiar car that he’d been climbing into for the past two years without a hesitation. “Sorry for waking you up.”
“You didn’t wake me up,” Diego Costello lied. “You feel alright?”
Sean shrugged, letting his head roll to the side while he gazed at his best friend.
He was short, and stout, with a mohawk of curls that were ever so slightly longer in the back than the top. His face was permanently scrunched in a scowl, almost a look of disgust. He had the saddest little goatee in an attempt to make his baby face any less of a baby face, and it didn’t quite work. The braces didn’t help.
“You smell like shit,” He said, finally, glancing at the rearview mirror. “Did someone throw up on you?”
“No,” Sean grumbled. “But Jesus Freak tried.”
“Kyrie?” Diego sounded nearly surprised. “Kyrie went to a party?”
“Yeah, and got drunk off his tits,” Sean picked at his cargo pants. “Think Lori drove him home.”
“Hm.”
Sean stared out the windshield. “Are you mad?”
“Mad at Kyrie? Why would I be, he’s 18, he’s a big boy-”
“Mad at me.”
The car was silent.
Sean groaned, letting his head hit the window with a hollow thunk.
This was a song and dance they’d done nearly every weekend for two years, up until about a month ago, when Sean had finally gotten his own truck. They both thought that would be it- the end of Sean’s pathetic dependence, the end of Diego having to haul his friend home.
“Why didn’t you call my sister?” Diego finally asked.
“What?” Sean scowled. “Why would I-?”
“She’s your girlfriend.”
“And you’re my best friend-”
“You don’t get it, do you,” Diego snapped, suddenly, stopping at a stop sign and twisting to look at Sean, look him in the eye. “She’s your girlfriend. You’re supposed to be her problem.”
Sean blinked at him, stupidly, before the words registered, and he clenched his jaw. “Yeah, well. Well… well-!”
Diego exhaled, hard, turning back to the road. “I didn’t mean… I don’t know, you’ve been avoiding me for this whole time-”
“-Have not-”
“You ditched, Sean,” He cut him off. “You hang out with her, and Dean, and that Robyn girl-”
“-Lillian, she’s actually really nice-”
“Sean.”
“Di,” Sean whined. “I didn’t mean to ditch you, I just… you and Miki and Lori… you’re cool, but you guys are… you’re just…”
“Not cool?”
“No, you’re-”
“-No, no, I get it,” Diego said, firmly, pulling up in front of Sean’s house- not going up the driveway, just stopping at the mailbox. “Don’t worry about it.”
“...Would you rather I had called Madi?”
Diego stared out the windshield for a moment, before sighing, looking around, eyes finally landing on Sean. “No. Maybe, I don’t know.”
Sean hissed out a breath through crooked teeth. “Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Monday.”
“Whenever.”
And he got out.
Neither said goodbye. Neither said I love you. Neither said anything they’d always said. Diego drove away and Sean walked up his driveway, and neither of them slept well that night.
Across town, the fog rolled across the Lake, and swallowed Elvis whole.
…
Sean didn’t dream very often.
When he did, they were vague, unclear, sort of blurry. Just the kind of thing where you get a sort of feeling when you wake up that something happened.
This started off like that- vague and blurry, but then, all of a sudden, like an image loading in all of a sudden, it all clicked. And he was standing in the road across from Frost’s Diner, staring down at a charred and blackened corpse. It wasn’t familiar- the lack of any distinguishing features kind of did that- but he recognized the hoodie.
It was him.
He looked up, and the town was on fire- but not regular fire: red flames that licked the sky. He could have sworn at some point he’d heard that red fire wasn’t supposed to be very hot, but here, it seemed almost to be suffocating, even hundreds of feet from him, nowhere near the place he stood.
He woke up the next morning to the familiar sound of his mother in the kitchen, arguing with someone. And, considering his father was out of town and his sister was hardly an arguer, there was really only one person it could be.
He managed to fight his way out of his covers without falling on his face, fighting his way down the hallway to the kitchen-slash-diningroom where his mother stood with her back to him, busy furiously scrubbing out a bowl while she bitched away to the only other person in the room.
“Hey Mama,” Sean said, his voice rough. “Hey Madi.”
Madison Costello, much like her twin brother, was far from tall or lanky. In fact, she was probably a good head shorter than Diego, and twice his weight. Her hair was trimmed short, her wiry glasses held to her face by a broad nose. She wore a sweater vest over a dress shirt, clean gray slacks and a cross necklace that Sean knew better than anyone was just for appearances.
“Sean, baby,” His mother turned around, a flash in her steely gray eyes. “It’s past noon. What were you doing up so late that you slept in so much?”
“And why isn’t your truck in the driveway?” Madi added, an almost playful smirk on her face.
“What?!”
“Uh, I went to a party. No drinking or anything, but it went a lot later than it was supposed to. I got a ride from Diego.”
Madi’s smile flickered, a questioning look replacing it. Sean’s mother didn’t notice, just clicking her tongue and turning back to the dishes. Sean raised an eyebrow at her, and she just shook her head.
‘We’ll talk later.’ She mouthed.
Feeling a little out of the loop, he nodded along. He often felt out of the loop around Madi, almost all the time. It wasn’t her fault, he thought, she simply was… quicker than him.
That was the thing about Madi. She thought of things before anyone else did, and then didn’t elaborate. She just assumed everyone else was having the same revelations she was having, and didn’t stop to consider that maybe they weren’t. Sean had known her about as long as he’d known Diego- which was nearly his whole life- but he wasn’t sure he’d ever had the same thought as she did at the same time she had.
He was just… behind.
When he’d first started hanging out with her and her friends, back when they got together a few months prior, he’d been sure that he’d be left out and confused and alone, but, inexplicably, he found her usual crowd was hardly any more put together than him.
Dean, for example, was a lanky kid who looked faintly like if some supermodel had gotten their face slammed into concrete a couple dozen times. He was attractive, in a very tragic, missing a front tooth, broken nose, sort of way. To boot, he had been a benchwarmer on the high school basketball team, where he spent a good amount of his time daydreaming about space ships.
His main claim to fame, however, was his girlfriend.
Lillian Robyn, like all Robyns, was absolutely drop dead gorgeous. The kind of gorgeous where you’re not sure if plastic surgery was involved. She’d been a pageant star in DC as a child, until her parents divorced and her dad remarried to the only lawyer in Rome, and they settled down in the only house in the neighborhood with a third story.
Neither of them were very cool. They hung out with Madi because she made them seem smarter, she hung out with them because they kept away any assholes. And they all hung out with Sean because he made them all look very smart and very hot in comparison, as far as he knew.
He did kind of miss his old friends sometimes- Diego and Miki and Lori and Kyrie- but this was better for him, he reminded himself. This was less likely to get him labeled a bad kid.
The second Madi managed to shoo him out of the kitchen, he knew he was in trouble, and yet he remained firmly excluded from anything resembling a loop as she hauled him down the hallway, to his bedroom, where she shut the door and turned on him.
“So, Diego gave you a ride home?”
“Yeah?” Sean sat on the bed. “He always does, what’s the problem?”
“The problem is,” Madi said, slowly, condescendingly. “I don’t want my boyfriend running around with a guy who’s known for stealing boyfriends.”
“'Steal boyfriends,'” He huffed. “He kissed Lars Milyama once. And that was before him and Elvis started going out-”
“That’s not the point,” Madi pouted. “You said when we started going out that you’d stop hanging out with them.”
“I though you didn’t have beef with him-”
“Besides, why wouldn’t you call me to drive you? You know I would have-”
“Because- because-” She stared at him, raising one eyebrow, and his voice gave out. “I don’t know.”
The butterflies that came with being in love sure felt an awful lot like a panic attack sometimes, he thought.
Luckily, Madi seemed to get the memo, and just sat beside him on the bed. "Sorry for grilling you, it's just…. I'm worried, you know? You've been going to a lot of parties, and driving home drunk-"
"I didn't drive drunk last night."
"I almost wish you had." She muttered, under her breath.
Secretly, he agreed, but he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t supposed to have heard that, anyways.
“Whatever,” She said, waving a hand. “You need to get dressed, we’re all going to hang out at the park, and you need to at least be wearing something clean.”
By the time he was dressed, he was already wishing he’d pretended his headache was worse to get out of this, but it was far too late at this point. He was going to go to the park and he was going to have a good time whether he liked it or not.
Madi was sitting in her car by the time he got out there, scrolling through Insta on her phone. She glanced up absently when he got in, and for a second he thought she was going to say something about him taking too long and he braced himself, but instead she just snorted. “Your shirt’s on backwards.”
Embarrassed, he managed to twist it around until it sat correctly, buckling up as she pulled out of the driveway.
The park wasn’t really a park, just a field of grass between the highway and the local church, but that was pretty much the only place for people to hang out, and the church didn’t mind, so that was that. The only alternative, after all, was Walmart.
Pulling into the church parking lot, Madi’s phone rang. Before she could dismiss it, Sean glanced over and saw the caller ID.
“What’s Diego calling you for?”
“Hell if I know.”
“You should probably answer.”
She gave him a look and he shrunk back a bit. She declined the call and climbed out of the car, brushing her short curls from her face.
For a second he watched her walk away, trying to hype himself up enough to follow her.
He knew he was in love with her, but the near constant nausea of being around her was a bit much, he thought.
He got out of the car.
It’s not that Sean didn’t like his friends- or, god forbid- his girlfriend. He liked them just fine.
It’s just that they hadn’t known him nearly as long as his old friends had. They didn’t understand him.
Diego knew when he was getting quiet, that meant he was getting overwhelmed. Lori knew when he started fidgeting that that meant he wanted to say something. Miki knew when he huffed out air through his nose it meant he was ready to move on and do something else. Kyrie knew to put the volume in the car on even numbers because odd numbers made Sean uncomfortable.
These guys didn’t know that and, at the end of the day, he wasn’t really sure how to explain it either, so he just kind of went along with whatever they wanted.
He didn’t dislike them, is the point. He didn’t. He just wished sometimes that they knew him a little better.
Lillian looked up when he walked over, and lit up, perfect, pearly teeth shining at him from dark brown lined lips. “Hey big guy! How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been alright. Work’s been ass, but what’s new there?”
“Amen to that, buddy,” Dean said, where he was laying on his back, arm covering his face. “I didn’t realize how much I’d miss school until we graduated.”
Sean sighed, nodding.
The thing you need to understand is that Madi’s gang wasn’t popular. Definitely no more popular than Diego's gang. What they gained with Lillian, they lost with Madi herself, and Dean came in with his perfectly average reputation and demolished what minute bias of social standing they had.
And Sean… well, Sean wasn’t particularly popular, nor was he unpopular. People saw him, and recognized him from the hallways and the cafeteria of school, and said hi to him, carefully avoiding names lest they misremember.
He brought nothing to the group, beyond dating Madi, and having known Dean in elementary school when their teacher kept making jokes about their names rhyming (they didn’t if you pronounced them right) and being third or fourth cousins with Lillian.
He didn’t really belong.
But he sat down in the grass, and grabbed a soda from the cooler and cracked it open, taking a swig that was perfectly normal sized, and watching Madi pull out her phone to squint at the screen.
“Diego again?” He asked.
Dean lifted his head, squinting around.
Dean wasn’t very good at being a jock. He wasn’t very handsome after repeatedly getting his face smashed in by a ball and the floor, and he wasn’t mean enough. He also knew too much- just random facts no one knew or wanted to know, and he would happily chime in to any conversation to contribute. He wasn’t much help to the team in basketball games, but he was too good to kick, so he sat in a comfortable limbo of being too well liked by his teammates to be bullied but not well enough liked by his peers not to be. He had been adopted as a child- not from China like so many people seemed to think, but from Pennsylvania. He was half Korean and half Indonesian, but he always told people he was from Pittsburg when asked.
“Is he still calling you?” He asked, squinting in the bright light. “Maybe you should pick up-”
“No, I told you, he’s probably just calling to ask if he can have my leftovers.”
“You said he’s been calling since 6 in the morning, and he was out of the house when you woke up, that’s a little weird.”
“Wait, when did you say this?” Sean asked, blinking.
“The Snapchat groupchat?” Lillian said, before her jaw dropped. “Oh my god, we never added you-”
“-He doesn’t have Snapchat,” Madi said, irritably. “Because he doesn’t know how it works.”
“I don’t,” Sean shrugged weakly. “I don’t understand social media.”
“It’s fine,” Dean said. “I only got it so I can keep track of my teammates.”
“Creep.” Lillian nudged him with her shoe.
The two of them had been dating for a little over a year at this point, but they’d been going out on and off since seventh grade. It’s not like they’d ever broken up- not properly- they just… stopped dating every now and then. And then they got back together. And then they stopped. It was weird.
No one in Sean’s old group was dating. Kyrie and Lori had gone out on one date, back in freshman year, and kissed once, but that was it, and they all vowed not to bring it up. Now, it felt like everyone was a couple.
He kind of missed sitting around in Lori’s basement, bitching about teachers and eating cold pizza and sipping lukewarm soda because the Capsums didn’t believe in putting soda in the fridge.
But that was the past now.
Things were different.
During their last hangout, before he’d gone to the dark side, he’d warned them he wasn’t going to be eating lunch with them anymore, because Madi wanted to hang out with him more, and the way they all looked at him, disbelieving and incredulous, the way Kyrie laughed a little bit… it hurt.
It’d been a while- long enough that Sean thought that he was getting used to it. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he never would.
“Do you guys think,” Lillian started, taking a long sip of her drink. “That there’s such a thing as God?”
“What?” Dean asked, rolling over.
“I had a weird dream last night, and I think I believe in God, now. What do you guys think, though?”
Sean huffed, laying back on the grass.
That was one thing about this group- the conversations were weird.
Dean had only just started to get rolling with the more complicated details of his theology lecture when Sean’s phone rang.
“If it’s Diego, ignore it.” Madi said, calmly, from her perch atop the cooler.
It wasn’t. It was his little sister Genny, so he picked up.
“Hey Gen,” He said, taking another carefully measured sip. “What's up?”
“Elvis is gone,” She said, hollowly. “He went out on the lake, and now he's gone.”
Sean paused, glancing at the other three, who were still chatting away, as if something was supposed to have changed.
“What do you mean, gone?” He asked.
“He isn't here anymore. I don't know if he fell out of the boat or something, but he's not… we've been looking all morning, we can't find anything.”
“Did you call the cops?” He suggested, a sinking feeling in his chest. Lillian nudged Dean, finally taking notice of what was happening.
“Yeah, they're here, but they're not doing anything.” She said, a bitter scoff on her voice. “Can you come?”
“... I'm hanging out with my friends-”
“Fuck that,” She said, shakily. “My best friend is missing, you can come help me.”
Sean glanced at his friends, who were all watching curiously. “... We're on our way.”
[image description: a digital drawing of diego. he's a latino man with curly hair and sharp eyeliner. he's wearing a furlined leather jacket, jeans, fingerless gloves, and several necklaces. he looks to the side gloomily. end id]
[ ID: Two digital drawings. The first is two borderless panels of Diego, drawn from the chest up and talking distractedly, looking at papers in his hands and holding a pencil. He has brown skin, short brown and grey hair, and a beard. He's wearing a purple sweater, a light purple button up shirt, and a ring. He's emitting a yellow glow. The background is grey-purple. There is no text to accompany him speaking. The second drawing is of a stylized cartoon version of Diego from the legs up, looking up with a confused and concerned expression. In the upper corner, there is a projected image of Oskar from the shoulders up, surrounded by question marks and arrows. Diego is wearing the same outfit as in the first image, and remains looking the same. His pants are brown. Oskar is looking to the side with a neutral smile. He has pinkish skin, short curly orange and grey hair, several freckles, a beard and a small scar. He's wearing a red long necked shirt. The background is light grey. End ID ]
one day I might make a set of this interview because he's so cute in it but I couldn't resist posting this gif of him being embarrassed about Havana Nights on it's own
Diego Luna Rewatches Star Wars, Narcos, Andor, Frida & More | Vanity Fair
