Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor Page A

would never … you have never
done
anything to them?”
    If the possibility of violence had been anywhere in him, Tran would have hit his father then. He was taller than T.V., and broader in the shoulders. He would have grabbed his father by the front of his expensive, tacky polyester shirt and smacked him twice across the face, hard.
    But Vietnamese children did not strike their parents. The tradition of ancestor worship had died only two generationsback, and it lay uneasy in its grave. The parents of Versailles complained about the terrible rudeness their children learned at school, the lack of respect they seemed to revel in. But the thought of physically harming a parent was as foreign to these children as the idea of burning incense before a photo of a dead great-grandfather.
    And Tran had no violence in him; he was only drawn to it in others. That was one of the first reasons why he had loved Luke.
    But the notion that he would hurt his brothers … the idea that an integral facet of his character was the fault of some dreadful mistake his parents had made … it was all too much to bear. The talk was over, Tran realized, and he was the one ending it. “Fine,” he said. “Get out of my room. Go to work. Tell Mom to give me two hours after she takes the twins to school—go shopping or something. I’ll be gone by the time she gets back.”
    â€œVinh—”
    â€œI want my car. It’s in my name. I won’t take anything else from the rest of the house, just the stuff in here.”
    â€œWhere will you go?” T.V. asked. He didn’t really sound as if he expected an answer.
    â€œWhere else? The French Quarter.”
    Tran might as well have said
Angola
or
the lower pits of Hell
. T.V. shook his head hopelessly. “To spend so much time there is bad enough. How can you live in the Quarter? We’ll never hear from you again.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œIt’s dangerous.”
    â€œEast New Orleans is dangerous. People get shot out here all the time. The Quarter’s a safe place.” Relatively speaking, this was true. The Quarter had its share of robberies and occasional killings, but most of them happened to tourists who didn’t know any better than to stray into pockets of desertion late at night: Rampart, upper Barracks, the ghostly area nearCanal where the burned-out facade of the old D. H. Holmes building loomed over the narrow street. If you knew where you were and who was around, you were usually fine.
    â€œWe thought we could take you to a doctor.”
    Tran closed his eyes. A slow burn was spreading behind his lids. “I’m not going to any goddamn doctor,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
    â€œYou don’t realize how sick you are. Sick in the brain. So intelligent, such potential—and yet you are doing everything wrong.”
    Tran turned away from his father, started pulling books off the shelves and piling them on the floor.
    â€œWe only want to help you.”
That’s what Luke said to me once,
Tran thought,
and he meant he wanted me to die with him
. But he stayed silent.
    â€œHave you been tested for AIDS?”
    Ask me anything. Ask me how I felt puking my guts out the first time I let him shoot me up. Ask me about the time he accidentally came in my mouth, and all I could taste was death spilling over my tongue, down my throat, seeping through my tissues. Ask me about the phone calls that lasted till dawn, the receiver slick with sweat and tears, sealed to my ear like a barnacle. Ask me any of those things. Please, Dad, ask me anything but that.
    â€œYes,” Tran said as calmly as he could. “I got a test. It was negative.”
    It was true; he had gotten one negative result. But that was only three weeks after the last time he’d slept with Luke. And they had told him to come back in six months, and six months after that, and six months