It hurt when Bree started playing basketball. It felt like a slap in the face, a knife to the heart. She had never been a basketball fan. On the few occasions where I would invite her over to watch a game with my father and I, she’d sit there groaning to me the whole time.
“I don’t get the point of running around in a smelly jersey and chasing other people running around in smelly jerseys just to get a sweat-covered ball,” she had said to me one time.
She also didn’t get why I spent so much time pretending to love something just to please a man that barely acknowledged my existence. But the thing was, I wasn’t pretending. In the beginning, I had forced myself to learn the ways of basketball, but along the way I fell in love with the game. It became a constant in my life, and I told her that I’d love basketball with or without my father.
At the time, I didn’t realize how closely the two were intertwined. I didn’t realize that losing my father would mean losing basketball too, but it did. I couldn’t face the game. I still loved it, but I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with it anymore. It was kind of like when I’d start to associate a favorite song with someone and then that someone left my life. I’d still really like the song, but I wouldn’t be able to listen to it. Every time I’d just think of that person and how they were no longer there. The song would lose its identity as a good song and just become a bad memory, ghost words. My father brought basketball into my life and then he took it away.
I thought Bree understood this. I thought even when our friendship was drifting apart that I could count on her to never touch that sacred piece of my life, to never play that beloved song I couldn’t bear to listen to anymore. But she did. Bree joined the basketball team. She knew it was mine and my father’s thing, but she joined anyway. I’m not sure if she ever realized just how much that hurt, or that it was the final weight that broke our crumbling friendship in half. I’m not sure if she cared.
At 4:26 on Tuesday afternoon I saw Bree sitting on my front porch as I walked up the driveway.
“Where have you been?” she asked when she saw me.
“Walking,” I said, smiling innocently as if I hadn’t just knowingly made Bree sit there and wait for me. “Some of us don’t have a mommy and daddy that will buy us whatever car we want.”
“And did you stop to take a nap along the way?” she asked, ignoring my jab at her sporty little car taking up space in my driveway.
“Nope.”
I did, however, stop at the store. And the library. And just about every other building along the way.
Bree huffed and I could see she was annoyed. I knew she would be. Bree had this thing about punctuality – she liked it. She also had this thing about people that didn’t follow her perfect little rules on how to be perfect in a perfect little world – she didn’t like them.
“Why didn’t you just take the bus?” she snapped.
“It left without me.”
The bus did leave without me. The fact that I’d spent a half hour staring at the back of my locker in order to miss the bus was a minor detail.
Bree narrowed her eyes at me. “Nice try, Carson, but I am tutoring you whether you like it or not.”
I glared at Bree and pushed my way past her, shoving my key in the door. I hoped it got jammed and broke and we ended up being locked outside. Maybe then Bree would take it as a sign that this was never meant to be and she’d pack up and move on.
Unfortunately, the lock turned and I was forced to lead Bree into my house.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said, throwing my bag down beside the coffee table and plopping myself on the couch.
I looked over and Bree was still standing by the door, staring into the kitchen.
“Can I help you?”
Bree shook her head like she hadn’t just been in some kind of trance.
“It just all looks the same,” she whispered.
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t sign up for tutoring, I didn’t sign up to have Bree in my house, and I certainly didn’t sign up to walk down memory lane with the girl.
“Yeah, not much has changed,” I said dryly. “We did some renovating in the garage and added a freezer for all the dead bodies, but after that there wasn’t a whole lot of money in the budget for a new kitchen table.”
Bree ignored me and sat on the other end of the couch, as far away from me as possible.
“My STDs aren’t going to jump out of my pants and attack you, you know,” I snapped as I slammed my math book on the table.
Bree pulled her book out of her bag. “So it’s true then? The things people are saying about you are true?”
“I guess if people are saying them then they must be true,” I said through clenched teeth. I started to write out a math problem in my notebook but I could feel Bree staring at me, so I stopped. “It’s called a joke, Bree. I know it’s hard to believe, but not everything you hear in the halls of a high school is true. Sorry to disappoint.”
I went back to the math problem, pretending I actually cared about solving it, but I could still feel Bree’s eyes on me and it was starting to piss me off.
“Is the tutoring going to start anytime soon? As much as I love people staring at me like some kind of zoo animal, I get enough of that at school,” I said without looking up.
“You know, people wouldn’t say those things if you didn’t act the way you do,” Bree said.
I gripped my pencil so tight I was sure it would snap in half. “And how is that?” I asked. “How exactly do I act?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Actually, I don’t,” I said, looking up and glaring at her. “I’m stupid, remember? You’re the smart one, the flawless tutor. So please, enlighten me.”
Bree was silent for a minute and I thought maybe she’d realized she was two inches from crossing a line she didn’t want to cross, but then I saw a shift in her eyes and I knew she’d decided to stomp all over that line.
“You don’t talk to anyone,” she said. “You mope around the school dressed for a funeral and act like your life is miserable – ”
“You don’t know anything about my life,” I said, narrowing my eyes even more.
This girl had some nerve coming into my house and telling me how my life was. She didn’t know the first thing about me or what I’d been through over the past few years and she didn’t care either. She’d made that very clear when she’d tossed me out of her world and never looked back.
“And whose fault is that?” she asked.
“Call me crazy, but I’m going to go with yours.”
Bree shook her head. “It’s not my fault, Carson. It’s not my fault that you stopped talking and starting sleeping with any boy that walked by.”
“Wow,” I said, laughing coldly. “Is this how you treat all the kids you tutor or should I feel honored to learn from such a judgmental bitch?”
“Why do you do it?” she asked. “Is it for attention? Are you so desperate to get people to notice you that you don’t care what you have to do to make it happen?”
“I think you should go,” I said. I was five seconds away from taking my pencil and stabbing Bree in her shooting hand. “Just save us both the time and leave. You’re good at doing that.”
Bree didn’t move an inch and I knew she had something else to say. After being best friends with the girl for so many years, I’d picked up on her little ticks just as she’d picked up on mine. Bree had a habit of moving her foot in circles when she was trying to decide whether or not to say something. Right then her foot was moving so fast I thought it might spin right off her body. I wished it would.
“If you don’t want people calling you a slut,” she finally said, her foot stopping mid-circle, “then stop acting like one.”
Too far. She’d gone too far.
“Get out,” I said in a deadly whisper. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
Bree left without saying another word. I couldn’t decide if this made me more relieved or angry
.
Why was it so easy for people to just walk out of my life? Why did no one ever fight for me?
Chapter 20
Dark Holes
I think I’m afraid
To be happy
It’s like I’ve been unhappy for so long
Felt so dead inside for so long
That the idea of being truly happy
Of being truly alive
Terrifies me
I can take little bursts of happiness
Little instances of feeling full of life
But I always go back to
The dark hole
The pit of unhappiness
And I hate it there
I want to leave
I want to stay
I want to claw my way out
I want to chain myself to the bottom
I guess I’m scared of change
And even though I want to be happy
I’m scared of what I’ll find outside the hole
Because even if I get out
Even if I find the path to happiness
I could end up tripping
Falling down a deeper and darker hole
So isn’t it better to just stay here
Where I am now?
Dr. M ripped a piece of paper from her notepad and handed it to me, along with a pen.
“I want you to write down five things you like about yourself,” she said.
“What?”
“Five things. They can be anything, anything at all.”
She had to be joking. I’d just walked into the room. I hadn’t even sat down in the magical chair of therapy yet.
But she wasn’t joking. Dr. M was staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to do something. So I did. I sat down and pulled my legs up so that they were hiding the paper from view and used my thighs as a sort of desk. I stared at the paper, but nothing came to mind. Not a single thing. I could feel a knot start to form in my throat and I tried to swallow it down, but it wouldn’t go away.
Why was this affecting me so much? It was just some dumb therapy exercise. God, Carson, pull yourself together.
I moved the uncapped pen along the paper, dropped to the next line and continued. When I handed the paper back to Dr. M a moment later, her face dropped.
“It’s blank,” she said.
“Well I could’ve written “nothing,” but that would’ve been a waste of paper. Go green. Save a tree.”
I hoped Dr. M didn’t notice the break in my voice, but judging by the look she was giving me, like I was a tortured puppy that she needed to rescue, she’d noticed.
“Carson, I’ve observed that you use sarcasm to deflect the attention away from yourself.”
I narrowed my eyes at Dr. M. For someone that knew me so well she hadn’t seemed to observe that it set me off when she tried to analyze what I said or did. Either that or she’d observed it and just didn’t care.
“I was very serious. I am all about the trees.”
“Carson – ”
“Oak, Maple, Pine – I don’t discriminate.”
Dr. M took a deep breath. I wondered if she had to take anxiety medication just to see me.
“You can’t spend your life hiding your pain behind a wall of jokes, Carson. Eventually, you’ll have to come out and face the world on your own.”
“And when that happens I hope I’m facing a world where all the trees haven’t been chopped down to make paper for stupid therapy assignments.”
Dr. M cleared her throat. “Learning to love yourself is important, Carson.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I want you to have five things written down the next time I see you,” she said, handing me the paper.
I took it and folded it up before shoving it in my pocket. A small part of me registered how heavy that little piece of paper felt.
“Carson, can I ask you a question?”
“If I say no do I get to leave early?”
Dr. M gave me one of those “nice try” smiles. “Why do you dislike your name so much?”
“My name?”
“Yes, your name. I’ve known people that preferred a nickname or their middle name, but you’ve become angry on the few occasions where I accidentally called you Juliet.”
Maybe because there had been nothing accidental about those many more than few occasions.
“I told you, I don’t want to be associated with some story about a pathetic girl that kills herself over a boy she just met,” I said.
“And that’s the only reason?”
“It seems like a pretty valid reason to me.”
Dr. M looked down at her notes before nodding. “Your father’s name is Julian, correct?”
My body tensed.
“My father is dead,” I said coldly.
“Carson – ”
“He’s dead and I don’t want to talk about it.
Dr. M jotted something down. I wondered what she was drawing today.
“Your mom told me that your father left when you were fifteen.”
Wow, this lady really couldn’t take a hint. I sat there, silently glaring at her.
“Do you think that’s really why you don’t like your first name, Carson?” she asked. “Because it so closely resembles your father’s name?”
“I think I already told you why I don’t like my name.”
Dr. M paused, but I knew she wasn’t finished with me. She was like a mosquito: determined to suck as much information out of me as she could.
“Can you tell me a little about what it was like when he left, Carson?”
“There’s not much to tell.”
Dr. M was looking at me, waiting for me to come up with something. I huffed and rolled my eyes. Fine. If it got Dr. M off my back and me out the door, then I’d tell the sad and boring truth.
“When I was fifteen my mother got depressed. I don’t know why, but she did. She stopped having sex with my father. I remember hearing him screaming about how he was a man and he had needs. Apparently those needs were more important than his wife and kid because one day he just left. End of story.”
“How did it make you feel when your father left, Carson?”
“It didn’t make me feel anything,” I said. “The man was never exactly father of the year. He was just taking up space in the living room.”
“And you felt like he abandoned you?”
“My father abandoned me long before he left,” I said. “But he’s gone for good now so it doesn’t matter.”
Dr. M nodded. “Carson, do you blame your mom for what happened with your father?”
“Why do you think I blame my mom?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“From what I’ve seen you have a lot of anger directed at your mom,” she said calmly.
I thought about that. I didn’t hate my mom, but we weren’t close and she didn’t even try to understand me. She just wrote me off as a miserable and selfish teenager with a death wish.
“Look,” I said, “I don't blame my mom for my father leaving. My father was an abusive asshole. What I blame my mom for is meeting the bastard in the first place. If she hadn't met him then I wouldn't be here right now.”
I wondered if my mom thought the same thing sometimes. That if it weren’t for me she would’ve been able to make a clean break from my father a long time ago. Instead, I would always carry a part of him with me, a part that would haunt her. We each tied the other down to a man we both wanted to forget.
“Here as in therapy, or here as in alive?”
I shook my head, remembering the last thing I said out loud. “Take your pick.”
For a minute it was quiet and I could feel that again I’d tip-toed on the edge of the line between things you could say in therapy and things you couldn’t say in therapy unless you wanted to be involuntarily placed in a psychiatric facility. There was an uncertainty in the air that came whenever I made a comment that was on the questionable side.
Finally, Dr. M cleared her throat, the express
ion on her face lightening. I knew I had dodged the bullet.
“So how is school going?” she asked. “Have you started getting tutored?”
It was still confusing, not to mention annoying, how Dr. M sometimes changed subjects so abruptly, going from one topic I didn’t want to talk about right to another topic I didn’t want to talk about. It was like how she went from one emotion to the next in a matter of milliseconds.
“Tutoring lasted for about five minutes,” I said.
“Things didn’t go well?”
I knew Dr. M was rooting for an epic reconciliation between Bree and I, but it still amazed me that she thought tutoring would go anywhere near the realm of “well.” I mean, there was such a thing as having hopes and dreams and then there was such a thing as being completely deluded.
“I guess you could say that.”
“What happened?”
“Well, Bree called me a slut so I told her to get the fuck out of my house.”
Dr. M cleared her throat, but she didn’t say anything about my less than eloquent language. That was the one good thing about seeing Dr. M. She’d give me looks or clear her throat or squirm in her seat, but she had never told me I couldn’t swear to my heart’s desire.
I could see the gears working in Dr. M’s head and I knew she had something to ask but was trying to choose her words very carefully.
“She just called you that out of nowhere?” Dr. M asked, pausing for a moment. “You weren’t arguing with her or anything?”
Dr. M had chosen the wrong words.
“Are you suggesting that this was my fault?” I asked, narrowing my eyes and clenching my hands into fists. I could feel my nails digging into my palms. “That I said something to Bree and so she had a right to call me a slut?”
“No, Carson, not at all. I was just saying that in the heat of the moment sometimes people say things they don’t mean and – ”
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