America

by E. R. Frank

  “I’m going to kill myself,” I tell her. Her face turns the color of sand, and she runs out of the utility room. I follow her, racing out of the building. She makes loud clopping noises because her soles are hard. I make squeaking noises because my soles are rubber. Mrs. Evans sees us. I hear her yelling for us to stop. Liza runs so fast, I can’t keep up with her.

  Three blocks away from the school I don’t know where she is anymore. I walk back to class, and Mrs. Evans doesn’t yell. She asks me what happened, and I tell her. Mrs. Evans takes me to the principal’s office and calls Liza’s mom. They talk for a long time. Then Mrs. Evans calls my number, but nobody answers. Browning is probably out, and Mrs. Harper’s probably sleeping.

  “Why do you want to kill yourself, America?” Mrs. Evans says.

  “I don’t,” I tell her. “We were just kidding around.”

  “You’ve bruised your forehead,” Mrs. Evans says. “That doesn’t look like kidding around to me.”

  “It was a dare,” I tell her. “Liza dared me to do it.”

  “Are you angry about something?” Mrs. Evans asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “We need to get you some help,” she says.

  * * *

  “What should I paint?” I ask Liza. It’s art, and she’s making a killer whale out of clay. She loves whales. “Liza,” I say. “What should I paint?”

  “She’s not talking to you,” Billy says.

  “Shut up,” I tell him.

  “You shut up,” Liza says.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” I say. My chest goes thumpy.

  “So?” Liza says.

  “If you talk to me again, I’ll tell it.”

  “I don’t talk to people who are going to die,” she says.

  “Who’s dying?” Billy says.

  “Go away,” Liza tells him.

  “You’re supposed to be my friend,” he shrieks.

  “Shut up,” Liza says. Billy starts to try not to cry, but he can’t. He throws his smock up over his face and sits down in the corner on the floor.

  “He is so weird,” Liza says.

  “I’m not dying,” I tell her.

  “I hate people who kill themselves,” she says. “So if you ever even try it, I will hate you and hate you and hate you like you never ever knew anybody could hate you.”

  “I won’t kill myself,” I say.

  “I will hate you so bad,” she says.

  “I’m not going to,” I say.

  “Promise,” she says. I don’t want to promise. What if some time, the only way to get to Mount Everest is to die? “If you don’t promise, I’m never speaking to you again, ever,” Liza says.

  “I promise,” I say.

  “What’s the secret?” she asks.

  My chest goes thumpier until I let myself know that I’m not for real going to tell. “Browning lets me drink vodka anytime I want now.”

  “That’s not a secret,” Liza goes. “America, sometimes you are so lame.”

  Then she squishes her killer whale and hugs me, and I try hard not to push her away, even though I’m afraid she’ll smell Browning’s smell on me, and she’ll know, and she’ll hate me forever, anyway.

  * * *

  The principal and Mrs. Evans like him a lot.

  “Mrs. Harper sends her regards,” Browning tells them while he’s shaking their hands. “She’s real sorry she can’t make it, but you know. She’s pretty frail and all.”

  He came home early last week and caught me about to burn another letter. He read it and then poured us each a drink.

  “We’ll take care of it,” he told me. “We’ll talk to them so we can all figure out how to fix it.”

  “I’m not trying to be bad,” I told him.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” he’d said. “You just are bad, and you can’t help it.” He’d poured more vodka into my Coke. “Me and your school people are going to try to help.”

  Now they ask me why.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Is something bothering you?” Mrs. Evans asks.

  “No,” I answer.

  “Are you upset about anything?”

  “No,” I say, but then I’m not sure.

  “How is he at home?” the principal asks Browning.

  “He’s just fine,” Browning says. “Does his chores, helps me and Mrs. Harper out. We’ve got no problems at home.”

  “Maybe you and I got on the wrong track somehow,” Mrs. Evans says. “Do you think that might be it, America?”

  “No,” I tell her. “I’m just bad.”

  “You are not bad,” Mrs. Evans says. But she doesn’t know.

  “We’d like to have America evaluated again,” the principal says. “And we’d like to see if medication might be an option.”

  “I’m on board with whatever you need to do,” Browning says. “Mrs. Harper will be, too.”

  “Is there anything at all you’d like to say or ask, America?” Mrs. Evans asks.

  “No,” I tell them.

  After the meeting, Browning smokes three cigarettes in a row on the way to Friendly’s. He buys me a banana split and lets me eat the whole thing without sharing. I save the cherry for Mrs. Harper, but it’s smushed and covered with pocket dust when I get home, and when I poke my head into her room while Browning’s setting the table, she’s asleep.

  “I see you,” I whisper. “I see you.” But she just snores a little and turns her head the other way.

  * * *

  I fly past the ceiling in school.

  Liza kicks me, and it makes me fall back into my seat from Mount Everest. I’m mad because the sun shining on the snowflakes was bright and real beautiful, and I didn’t want to leave it.

  “America!” Mrs. Evans is saying, like she’s been calling my name a million times.

  “What!” I say.

  “He spaced out again, Mrs. Evans,” Liza says.

  “I can see that, Liza,” Mrs. Evans says. “Are you with us now, America?” she asks me.

  “Uh-huh,” I say.

  * * *

  “When they evaluate you, they find out stuff you never told them,” Liza goes.

  “How do they do that?” I ask her.

  “They make you look at pictures and tell stories, and then they read your mind on what you really meant to say.”

  “You can’t read people’s minds,” I tell her.

  “They can,” she says. “They read mine after my father left.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know her father left.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean, he left?”

  “Duh. He ditched me and my mom. Walked out and took all our money and never even said good-bye.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “I hate him,” she says. “Stop talking about it.”

  “Was he cool?”

  “I hate him, I told you,” she says. “You can’t be cool if you leave. He was cool, just as cool as Browning, but then he stopped being cool because he’s an asshole because only assholes leave.”

  “Browning isn’t so cool,” I say.

  “You’re a moron,” she says. “And you better not kill yourself.”

  “I won’t,” I say.

  “You better not,” she says. “Because killing yourself is just the same as leaving, only it’s even worse than that.”

  “I wish I could, though.”

  “Why?” she asks, and then her eyes get watery.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “Don’t cry.”

  “What did I do?” She wipes her fist hard across her face.

  “You didn’t do anything,” I tell her. “I’m only not doing it because of you.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I just don’t like it here.”

  “You promised,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “You can’t break promises.”

  “I know,” I tell her.

  “You better not.
”

  “I won’t,” I say.

  * * *

  Browning knows about evaluations, too. He says I can’t share any of our secrets during any evaluations. He says we have to take a nap before dinner. We never take naps.

  “I’m not tired,” I tell him.

  “Yes, you are,” he tells me.

  We get into the bed, and I fly right up to Mount Everest. Only this time, something different happens. Something that yanks at me like a rope and pulls me hard, so I’m halfway up and halfway down, stuck, and it hurts. It hurts worse than anything. It hurts worse than Brooklyn and Lyle and the people beating you down all at the same time. It hurts as much as Liza said she would hate me if I kill myself. It hurts, and it won’t let me fly up. It pulls me down below with him, and it hurts.

  * * *

  Browning doesn’t fall asleep after.

  “We should get dinner going,” he says, pulling up his pants.

  When I walk into the kitchen a little while later, he’s sitting at the table. He has a pile of carrots and a metal mixing bowl in front of him. He has a carrot scraper in his hand. He points to the chair across from him for me to sit in, so I do. It hurts.

  “We’ve got a lot of carrots to scrape tonight,” Browning tells me. “Watch how I do it.”

  “I know how to scrape carrots,” I tell him.

  “Uh-huh,” Browning says. Then he starts to scrape. He scrapes the peels into the bowl.

  “Imagine,” he tells me after the first carrot, “if this was someone’s finger?” I hurt a lot. “Could you imagine,” he says, “what it would feel like to have your finger scraped? To peel the skin of your finger right off?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer, and he doesn’t look at me. He’s just staring at his scraper and his carrot. “Imagine what it would feel like to have every single finger on both hands scraped. Just like a carrot.”

  “It would hurt,” I say.

  He nods. “My point exactly,” he says. He scrapes a few more carrots, and I watch, because I’m too tired to do anything else. After a while, he says, “Could you imagine what it would be like to have all your fingers scraped, and then to watch someone else getting their fingers scraped?” I wish I hadn’t promised Liza. “Could you imagine, say, if that someone else was somebody you really liked a whole lot?” He’s quiet again for a whole other carrot. He scrapes it extra slow. “Like, say, Mrs. Harper? You should try to imagine it, America.” He sighs and then starts to hum. Those scraped carrots are bright, lined up next to each other on the table near the shiny bowl full of their skins. Those carrots are bright and wet looking. “You should just try to imagine it,” Browning says. “As a way to think about what things might be like, if you ever told our secrets.”

  And now, me and him and Mrs. Harper are eating those carrots in a salad and waiting for the spaghetti to be done, and I’m watching us from a real, real high place. So high and so cold and so sparkly that it’s nicer than it’s ever been before, and nothing hurts.

  * * *

  When I come down from the cold in the middle of the night, the light in the hall is burned out so I feel my way to Mrs. Harper’s room. I hear her snoring, and I stand in front of her for a long time, letting my eyes get used to the darkness. Then I touch her soft, soft hand and the smooth top of her round, black ring.

  I know I’ll need money, and I know Mrs. Harper keeps her cash in the bottom drawer. So I look, real quiet, until I find her piles of bills, stacked tight with rubber bands, and then I tiptoe into the bathroom to count it all. At the bottom of the third pile, folded up longwise, there’s some piece of paper. Some chart, or something.

  GRACIE HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL REHAB.

  Exercise Five

  Me

  My Babies

  Drug Money

  Math

  Fifteen years old

  Jade

  $25 a week

  $25 times 52

  Sixteen years old

  Pearl

  $50 a week

  $50 times 52

  Seventeen years old

  Kyle, Lyle

  $100 a week

  $100 times 52

  Legal

  Brooklyn

  $200 a week

  $200 times 52

  Nineteen years old

  America

  $40 a day

  $40 times 365

  Total

  Could have bought me a damn house

  For a second I try to remember the lady who was my mother, but I can’t. And even though I know she’s the one who must have written up this chart, I’m too tired to figure out what it means or how Mrs. Harper got it, and it’s too much to care about, anyway, so I try to fly up high, but I can’t do that, either, so instead I hold the paper over the sink and pull out my lighter and watch it burn. There’s no smoke alarm up here to bother with, only in the kitchen and at the foot of the stairs, and the yellow and blue of the flames look real nice against their own black burn line, and I look at them awhile. I still hurt, and I want to say good-bye to Liza, but if I call her house everyone will know, so I don’t. I go into my room and throw the ashes of my mother’s chart onto Browning, only they don’t throw so good. They flutter instead, which makes me mad. So then I sit on the edge of my bed and watch my lighter burn for a long time.

  “Go to sleep, America,” Browning mutters, so I snap the lighter closed. Then I pull on my jeans and a shirt and stuff Mrs. Harper’s money in my back pocket, and just before I walk out of the room, I get the idea, and it seems like the right thing. So I hold up the end of Browning’s blanket at the foot of his bed, and I flick on my lighter again. The blanket catches fast, with little flames at first, dancing all along the blanket’s edge like overgrown grass blades against the fence bottom on a real windy day. I watch the little flames grow longer and wider and peel off into new flames, and then I go downstairs and find my shoes, and I tie them so quick that by the time I’m a few blocks away from Mrs. Harper’s house, one of them’s untied and all pulled undone, and it’s raggedy at the tip, and I know I’m never going to be able to string it back through.

  Now

  YOU’RE ALL SET to die, and then things happen that make you need some shit before you check out. Some shit you can’t even explain to your own self, and needing it messes up all your plans.

  * * *

  “Saw a guy in green pants in the back of the kitchen,” I say.

  “Did you?” Dr. B. goes.

  “Yeah.” I say. “What’s up with that?”

  “What do you mean, what’s up with that?”

  “You said only J building guys get to be in the kitchen.”

  “No, I said only J building guys serve.”

  “You mean, other guys get to do the food?”

  “Other guys who’ve achieved a certain level of stability and who want to. Yes.”

  “What level of stability?”

  “They can’t be suicidal, for one,” Dr. B. says. “Because of the access to knives, among other things.”

  “Oh,” I go.

  “You’d like to work in the kitchen.”

  “Maybe,” I go.

  “In order to work in the kitchen, you can’t be feeling a desire to be dead.”

  “Whatever,” I go.

  “What is it about the kitchen that makes you want to work there?”

  “Bored,” I tell him.

  “When we’re bored, there’s usually some other feelings underneath the boredom.”

  “You got that right: more boredom.”

  “You could participate in sports. There’s arts and crafts. Schoolwork. Game room. Group. Psychodrama. Grounds work. There are lots of ways to alleviate boredom here.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m interested in why you’re particularly pursuing kitchen work when you’ve been less than thrilled with other activities.”

  “Food here sucks,” I tell him. “Just because I’m crazy doesn’t mean I have to eat shit.”

  “Hmm,” Dr. B. says.
r />   * * *

  I stand in the back of the line, and I watch him. Some kid starts bitching.

  “That’s hardly any,” this dude goes when Brooklyn dumps rice on his plate. “Give me a little more, man. Damn.” Brooklyn stares at him a second and then takes the plate. He spits in the kid’s rice and hands that shit right back over. That’s Brooklyn. Still badder than anybody.

  * * *

  “I have something to tell you,” Dr. B. goes.

  “What?”

  “I’ll be going away for two weeks in March.”

  “So?”

  “We’ll miss two weeks of session, and then I’ll be back, and we’ll continue as usual.”

  “So?”

  “We have four weeks prior to the two weeks we’ll skip.”

  “So?”

  “Another doctor will be covering for me while I’m gone, if you want to speak to anyone during that time.”

  “So?”

  “Do you have any questions about this, or anything you’d like to say?”

  “Yeah. Cut the damn deck so I can deal here.”

  * * *

  They’re talking some shit in group, but I’m doing my own thing. I’m thinking a little, just for the hell of it. I’m thinking, that’s how it goes. Nobody sticks around for long. Nobody can stand you for long. America’s mother left him twice. My file probably says it clear as anything. America’s mother left him to run all kinds of errands and take all kinds of drugs and have sex with all kinds of men. Those files tell it like it is. People are all the time pretending they care, but the truth is, they can’t wait until their stupid errands. Stupid vacations. Once they get out of here, they never come back.

  * * *

  Ping. Pong. Ping. Pong.

  How do you know if you really want to be dead? You have those times when you feel so bad, the shame makes your skin feel inside out and that’s when you know you ought to be dead even if you deep down inside don’t want to die. You have those times. But other times you want to say something to Brooklyn. Or you want to visit Mrs. Harper and tell her you didn’t mean it. Or you want to see Liza again. Or you want to figure out some way not to let Dr. B. just up and go like that because even if it is pussy, you went ahead and ended up real used to him.

  So then you get stuck. You make yourself in the middle place. This place where you don’t think shit, you don’t feel shit, you don’t know shit. You just do. You’re like some zombie or some junkie where you can’t hardly even stand up, but somehow you don’t fall down, either. You’re just there. Nothing.