by Amy Reed
“Fine,” I say. “I was just leaving.” I turn toward the stairway.
“No you don’t,” he says. “Stay right there.”
“It’s okay,” Mom says with a tired voice. “Let him go. He has every right to be angry.”
“Oh, thanks so much for your permission.”
I march up the stairs, stomping as hard as I can, but it’s not loud enough, not satisfying. The house doesn’t shake. Mirrors don’t fall from the walls. Lights don’t fall from the ceiling and come crashing down on their heads.
I go to my room and turn the music up as loud as I can stand it. I stand in the middle of the room and look around at this place, my cave. No one besides the biweekly cleaning lady has stepped foot in this room since David died. Not until Evie. She was the only one I let in.
I can’t do this anymore. This can’t be my life.
I water and pick dead leaves off the plants David left when he moved out. Only a dozen remain of the almost thirty plants I started with those three years ago. Even after everything I’ve done to keep them alive, all the research into indoor gardening, all the watering and rotating and soil fluffing, all the repotting and fertilizers, they still keep on dying.
The plants are watered, and I am alone. Mom’s car is gone from the driveway. I call Evie’s number, but it’s been disconnected. Tomorrow’s my last day of junior year, and then summer starts. I should be excited. I should have something to look forward to. I try to think about the future, but there is nothing but empty, useless space. Without Evie. Without David. Without anything or anyone that matters.
I am so sick of this, so sick of myself.
Something has to change.
there.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK?” DAVID SAYS. I CAN’T TELL IF HE IS kidding. There’s no way he could really want my opinion about this new shithole apartment he shares with his girlfriend, this life he decided was worth throwing away Yale, worth throwing away our family.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“Don’t get distracted by the way it looks,” he says, stamping out his cigarette in the already overflowing ashtray. “That’s superficial shit. That’s the bullshit people like Dad want you to think is important. Money and power and position. That’s their world, Marcus, not ours.” He gets up off the ripped and saggy sofa, steps over a pile of clothes on the floor and into the tiny kitchen, and pulls two beers out of the fridge.
“This apartment means freedom,” he says, handing me a beer.
This apartment means he’s gone. It’s final proof of what I’ve known in my heart for months, as I’ve been missing my brother even when he’s standing right in front of me.
“Did Mom buy you this beer?” I say.
“Yeah.” He laughs. “She took me to Trader Joe’s and basically told me I could fill up the cart with anything I wanted. I cleared out the frozen pizzas.”
What am I supposed to say to that? Congratulations on using Mom’s weird codependent need for your devotion to get free groceries?
“It’s so funny,” David says, lighting another cigarette. “She’s the one who always talked about leaving, and I totally beat her to it.”
David’s girlfriend, Natalie, is lying on the couch next to him, her head resting in his lap. She was already tired after a long night of work at the strip club, then she had a joint and four shots of tequila as soon as she got home, and now she can barely keep her eyes open. “I made really good money tonight,” she murmurs. “And I didn’t even have to touch anyone.” She laughs to herself at the joke I cannot bring myself to understand.
“Don’t judge me,” she slurs in halfhearted outrage, at an imagined reaction she could not have seen through her closed eyelids.
I am barely more conscious than her. She is snoring now. I cannot open my eyes more than slits. Before I pass out, the last thing I see is David laughing, still completely awake despite having consumed more than twice as much as us. He is stacking things on top of Natalie’s prone body, as if she is a table, not a person, as if she is an unfeeling thing—the TV remote, junk mail, a dirty plate.
David’s lip is cracked and his eye is swollen and blue. He’s been gone for five days and won’t tell me where he’s been. I called him as soon as I read the letter Mom left in the kitchen, but apparently she had gotten to him first.
I want to talk about her. I want to know what she told him. I want to show him the letter she left for Dad and me, how it explains nothing. It weighs heavy in my pocket, the drunken, scribbled words burning a hole into my leg where they are scrawled across the page:
I can’t take this anymore. I’m leaving. I’m sorry, Marcus. I love you. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to be a mother, but I am done being a wife.
I want to know if she told him more than she told me. I want to know how his heart is breaking, if it is in the same shattered pieces as mine.
But he refuses to talk about her. He won’t tell me where he’s been or how he got the black eye. “She’s gone,” is all he says. “It’s over.” He’s pacing around the apartment like a trapped animal.
“What’s over?” I say. I want to hurt him. I want to hurt somebody. I want to hurt myself. I want to dig into my skin until this pain stops. I need something to make me stop thinking about her, about her absence, about my being left alone in that house with no one on my side.
“Our family,” he says. “I’m gone and she’s gone.”
“I’m still here,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me.
“Fuck it,” he says. He sits down and pulls a small leather bag out of his pocket. I watch as he pulls out a wrinkled piece of burned black tinfoil. A glass pipe. A baggie of brown clumped powder.
Because I don’t see any needles, I tell myself David’s not a junkie. But, deep down, I know heroin is still heroin, even if you smoke it.
I pull the letter out of my pocket. I shove it in front of him. “Read it,” I say. He takes it without looking at me, pulls a lighter out of his pocket, and lights it on fire. I watch the flame climb up the paper and lick his fingers. “David,” I say.
His face is empty, blank. No pain, no feeling, nothing. For a split second, I wish I could be as numb as him.
“David!” I pull the letter out of his hand and throw it in the ashtray. It is black, charred, barely solid. The words are gone. It is halfway to ash.
David sits there, looking at his hand with no expression on his face. The tips of his fingers are burned red. They will blister for sure.
“Does it hurt?” I say. I suddenly feel strangely calm. His pain is so big it erases mine.
“No,” he says. “Nothing hurts.”
I say nothing as I watch him get loaded. I am removed somehow, watching a documentary about a promising kid’s life getting destroyed by drugs. It is someone else’s brother, someone else’s life. He smokes until he can’t keep his eyes open. Even after all we’ve drank together, all the pot we’ve smoked, the ecstasy, the mushrooms, the acid, he’s never been like this. Gone. Barely human. I know in this moment I am going to lose him too.
He sinks into the ratty couch and pulls an unzipped sleeping bag over himself. “I shouldn’t have left,” he mumbles. “I’m sorry, Marcus.”
“You can come back,” I say, but he’s already sleeping, and I know it isn’t true. When he left, there was nothing left for Mom to stay for. Now that she’s gone, I know he’s never coming home.
David sleeps his junkie sleep, the skin on his face slack, his mouth open and drooling, his mind emptied of its burdens. This deathlike sleep is the only way he knows to find peace. My brother has been replaced by a zombie.
I go home. The house is dark and silent. Dad is out with whatever bimbo he’s seeing at the moment. I could trash the place. I could destroy it beyond repair.
But instead, I walk up the grand staircase and down the hall to my bedroom. I don’t turn on the lights. I stand in the middle of my room and feel the darkness go on forever, in every direction. No matter what I do or where I go, it will be there.
Waiting for me. Following me. I will never get away. Fate is fixed. There are only different shades of darkness.
I grab my left wrist with my right hand. I dig my fingernails into my flesh. The darkness contracts. But my nails are not long enough. I need something sharper to really carve the darkness away.
I am disgusted with myself the moment I think of it, but there is already so much to be disgusted by, what’s one more thing? I walk slowly, calmly to the bathroom. I lift my razor from the counter. I remember how proud I was the day I first shaved, how it was David, not Dad, who showed me how.
I pull the plastic away from the blade. The sharp edge reflects the ceiling light as I feel the metal sliver in my hand.
I try not to think. I focus on the steps down the hall. One two three. Back to my room. Back to the darkness of my cave, where I will huddle in the corner, tiny as a mouse, hiding from the beasts that are most hungry, making myself small and bitter tasting so they won’t want me.
I lock the door, not that Dad would ever come to this part of the house. I take off my shirt. I turn the lights off and light one candle. Everything else stops existing. My world is the dull circle illuminated by that weak flame. Reality flickers in and out.
This blade, this tiny, sharp thing. It has the power to shrink the world to the size of a narrow line. A centimeter, an inch. A moment of nothing. Just a finite location, so small there is no room for David, no room for Mom or Dad or anyone else whose absence demands so much space inside me. I press down and meet resistance. I press down, harder, and in a split second my pain funnels to this minuscule opening, this dot of light.
I cut myself to let them go. I open my skin to release them. I slice them away. I bleed them out. The pain makes me clean. And the blood speaks louder than I ever could. The blood is my voice. It tells me I’m alive.
here.
I’M NOT SURE WHY I EVEN CAME TO SCHOOL TODAY. IT’S the last day of junior year, but I have nothing to celebrate. All my papers have been turned in, all my tests taken. Everybody else is making a big deal about cleaning out their lockers, saying good-bye to teachers in a final ass-kissing attempt to ensure good letters of recommendation, comparing summer travel plans or impressive internships, but we all know the real purpose of today is to confer about what parties are happening and what girls will be there and who has what drugs. Maybe this isn’t how it is for some students, but I don’t know those people.
I’m sitting where I usually sit at lunch, at the table in the corner with the school stoners. Funny how we have this title when practically half the school smokes as much or more than us. And many of them do even harder stuff. Cocaine is especially popular among the school elite. Some of the top guys here, the ones with the most important parents, the ones destined for the Ivy League, are full-blown cokeheads, snorting lines in the bathroom between classes. That and popping Adderall, which is the same thing as speed, which is basically the same thing as meth, but these guys wouldn’t be caught dead saying they do such a low-class drug as that. They can convince themselves that a prescription isn’t as serious as a street drug, even though it’s just as addictive and just as deadly. And they keep getting away with it, keep getting bailed out of whatever trouble they get in because the system is designed to not let them fail. I’m sure some black kid in an Oakland public school would have an entirely different consequence if he got caught doing the shit some of these guys do. I’ve never been quite sure where I fall on that spectrum, but I certainly don’t want to find out.
The guys at my table are a hodgepodge of people who don’t quite fit in. We got the stoner label because we don’t spend as much time keeping up appearances as the rest of the school. But I wouldn’t say we’re friends. My out-of-school contact with these guys is minimal. We stand next to each other at parties, I guess. But I don’t go to movies with them or hang out at their houses or whatever it is friends do. Some of them do that but not me. David was always the source of my social life. When he died, my social life died with him.
“Are you going to Tyson’s party tonight?” someone says, and it takes me a few seconds to realize the question’s directed at me.
“Huh? Oh. No, I don’t think so.” Then for some reason I add, “I have plans with my girlfriend.” The lie makes me feel lonelier.
“Why don’t you bring her?” someone else says.
“And subject her to you assholes? No way.” Ha-ha-ha. Everyone laughs. I learned a long time ago that sarcasm is the best way to keep my distance from people.
I feel a hand on my shoulder. I look around to see Gabe, my dealer. One of the richest kids in here, I have no idea why he has the need to sell drugs. He definitely doesn’t need the money. Maybe it’s about the power. Maybe it’s the only way he’s found that makes him feel important.
“Hey, Marcus,” he says.
“Hey.”
“Need anything? I got it all right now.”
I think about it for a moment, and a realization pops in my head like a bubble, my answer so surprisingly clear. “No,” I say. Even though I have been out of pot for a couple of days, even though normally I would have searched him out by now, fiending to buy more. “I’m good,” I say.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, man.”
He shrugs and moves on to the guy sitting next to me, who already has his money out.
No, I don’t want to buy any weed today. I don’t want to get high. I don’t want my head in the clouds when there’s so much down here that needs my attention.
Something needs to change, and maybe that something is me. Maybe I need to start doing everything differently. Maybe I will take that internship at my dad’s office and start reading those college brochures. Maybe I’ll start eating more vegetables. If I clean up my act, maybe Evie will want to be with me again. She’ll get out of rehab and I’ll be waiting for her, changed, better. I will prove I’m good enough for her. She’ll give me another chance. We’ll start over, without lies, without secrets, without drugs to keep us hidden.
My phone buzzes in my pocket with a text message.
Marcus, this is your mother, it reads, from a number I don’t recognize. I’m sorry about the way things went last night. Can I take you out for coffee after school? Just this one time, then you never have to see me again if you don’t want to.
What the hell.
Sure, I text back.
If I’m going to change, I might as well go all the way.
there.
AFTER MOM LEAVES, I TAKE OVER HER JOB OF CHECKING on David. I bring him meals, I do his laundry, I clean his bathroom and pay his unopened bills, and watch him fade away. No matter what I do, no matter how I help, David’s world gets smaller and smaller until it’s only the size of his sunken seat on the sofa and as far as his arms can reach to the ashtray, to his bag of poison.
“Natalie and I haven’t fucked in weeks,” he says as I open the kitchen window to air the place out. The stack of dirty dishes in the sink is growing mold. Even if she let him touch her, I’m not sure David’s body is capable of that anymore. He has a hard time making it to the corner market to buy cigarettes. David had always been big and muscular like Dad, but now he is skinnier than me, and he seems to have lost several inches of height, if that’s possible.
“I’m pretty sure she’s dating a chick from work. I can’t remember the last time she came home.”
Home. Is that what he calls this hellhole?
“Fine with me,” he says, his eyelids drooping. “All she ever did was . . .” His voice trails off. His thought stops midsentence as sleep takes over.
“Hey,” I say, shoving his shoulder. “Wake up.”
“Why?” he mumbles from wherever he is, and I cannot come up with a good answer.
Today, my job is to figure out what’s wrong with his heater. It’s the middle of the summer, but David is always cold. Every day, it’s something new—he needs me to loan him twenty bucks, he needs me to bring him a gallon of milk, he needs this favor or that favor, countless t
hings that normal people know how to do themselves. And I keep doing them because I don’t want to know what will happen if I say no.
Sometimes I talk to David when he’s passed out. I wait until he’s totally gone, when shaking him doesn’t make him blink, after his head has fallen back and his mouth hangs open, and his upper body slides down the back of the couch until he’s half lying, half sitting, his body contorted at a strange angle. Occasionally, he mutters something that almost sounds like words, but I know he’s not with me. I pretend the silence means he’s listening. I pretend I am not the loneliest person in the world.
I wonder what all the girls who used to chase him would think of him now, in clothes that haven’t been washed in weeks, with his hair all grown out and matted like a Brillo pad. The guy who should have been valedictorian, the guy who got accepted early decision to Yale, the guy with perfect teeth and six-pack abs who could get any girl he wanted in all the Bay Area—he’s now on his way to joining the ranks of that homeless guy who hangs out on Telegraph selling sculptures he makes out of tinfoil, with the one giant dreadlock as thick as a tree branch, with sticks and leaves poking out of it. David and I used to joke about it being a nest for rats, imagining all the different vermin that could live inside it.
David scratches his head in his sleep, and his whole scalp moves. I suddenly feel itchy. I try not to think about what kind of things could be living in this furniture.
There are really only a few things that separate David from that homeless guy on Telegraph—his education, who our father is, the fact that he was at one time handsome and charming enough to get a girl with her own apartment to like him enough to let him live with her. But all that has faded by this point. David’s genius is irrelevant; he is so strung out, his brain cannot form coherent thoughts anymore. Mom is gone and Dad has disowned him. I know Natalie is going to stop accepting my money for his share of the rent soon and finally kick him out. After that, I don’t know what’s going to keep him from living on the streets, what’s going to keep him from selling garbage on the sidewalk. What will he have after he finally loses everything? Me? What good am I if I’m all he has left?