Nothing Real Volume 1

by Claire Needell

  I would be doing actual stuff, chores and whatnot, but in my head I’d be thinking how it was all just up to me now. I’d stomp around in my heavy boots, walk around the back of the house, knocking down the thick icicles that hung glistening from the roof. They were heavy as hell, and believe me, it’d be all over if one of those ice daggers nailed me, but I’d make the danger of it worse, smacking a few of them at a time, ice crashing in a shower, the sound like glass breaking. I’d whack tree branches with an ax handle, and the ice and snow would fall, some of it going straight down my back, a sheet of blinding white, and I’d pretend all of this was work, that it served some sort of purpose, and that I wasn’t bored out of my mind, wasn’t outside smoking a fat blunt.

  I pretended to myself that these things needed to be done and I was the one to do them.

  Sometimes I’d catch Mom watching me out of the upstairs window, her face pale against the green curtains, her brown hair streaked gray. She was still pretty, but in a way that made you think about what she looked like when she was young.

  I cut entire weeks of school. Other times, I’d show up without any books or even anything to write with. I didn’t go to some blow-off school either. Hamilton High is the kind of place where even sophomores are talking about college, taking PSATs and sweating it.

  I lied to May Schwartz about where I went. I said I had the flu or a bitching migraine. She wasn’t my girlfriend exactly, but she wasn’t nobody. I told her not to come over, that I felt like crap, which was true, but I also wouldn’t have been there if she had come by.

  Sometimes, I’d spend all day messing around. I’d take the train down to the city. Then I’d take the subway around Manhattan. I knew my way around since we’d lived in the city until I was twelve, until my parents got the effed-up idea I needed a more wholesome environment. They should have seen May Schwartz the first time we hooked up. Wholesome my ass.

  One day, I took the train up to Washington Heights, near Fort Tryon. It was where we used to live when I was a little kid. I hardly remembered it anymore, but walking around there gave me a feeling like being in a dream, like even the ordinary shit I saw was supposed to mean something. I walked around up there, even though it was cold as shit, wind coming off the Hudson, all the trees and bushes looking frozen solid. I wondered which ones grew flowers in the spring, how they survived the brutal layer of ice and snow.

  There was a hill with a few little kids sledding with their moms or babysitters, kids too young for school—babies. They were all zipped into their snowsuits, feet out straight, the mom or some young Dominican girl in the back of the sled, and down they’d go, pretty damn fast, snow flying; then the kid would bounce up, stand there like they accomplished something, little baby mountaineers. The grown-ups would drag the sled back up the hill, and sometimes the little kids would flop down in the snow, not moving. I wondered what they thought, lying there in the cold. If they thought about not moving, staying still, maybe forever. I was someone no one noticed, a dude on a bench. Not creepy enough to call attention to myself, being what I was: lost.

  I didn’t know whether May was drowning me, or I was drowning her, which of us began the downward spiral—only that we were both on it. I knew I needed to help her, but at the same time, she needed to save me too. I’d look at her as she slept, her hair fanned out behind her, and I’d think how if I could get her out of the room, to go to a movie, or if I could keep the knives and scissors and nail files and paper clips, all sharp things out of her way, then I’d be some sort of hero. I’d stop her from being so scared and depressed or sad, or whatever it was that made her want to cut herself. Anyone who could save someone else must surely be able to save himself.

  “Where’s your mom?” I asked. May didn’t look up from her marble composition notebook.

  “Doctor’s.”

  “How long?”

  “No telling. I don’t know which it is. Shrink, acupuncturist. Real.”

  “She lets some guy stick needles into her?”

  “Relieves pain.”

  May turned on her side and eyed me. She was a weird-looking chick, that kind of weird you can’t stop looking at so you decide it’s hot. Straight Asian hair like her mom, but her features were a weird blend of Asian and Jewish. Light brown eyes, juicy lips, perfect skin. She reached over to her nightstand and grabbed a cigarette. I thought that was majorly fucked up since her mom was so sick, but May shrugged. She said she only smoked after we did it. For all I knew that was true, because other than being in her bedroom once or twice a week and seeing her in French class, I barely saw May. For a while, I tried to get her to go places: Sam Bardfield’s parties, kegger on the hill, a fucking movie. But May always said no. She said she couldn’t be my real girlfriend because she didn’t have enough to say to me, to say to anyone. “I panic when I go to those parties,” she said. “Like there’s cotton in my throat, like I can’t breathe or speak.” It made me feel bad at first, like I was a fuckhead for sleeping with her and never taking her anywhere. But it was her call. She seemed to enjoy herself up there in her bedroom on the days her mom was out at the doctor. Enjoyed herself a lot, especially for a girl who didn’t really like anything else.

  At first, that was all the wrong-ass shit I was doing—cutting school, going to May’s, smoking weed. I knew I wasn’t exactly meeting anyone’s expectations, but I still felt mostly numb. I’d think up the stuff about Dad dying, and I’d think up asshole stuff about Dad, and how I’d like to knock that know-it-all look from his smug lawyer face. How I wished he and his triathlon ass would beat it.

  I remember being in the goal cage and getting pounded. It was one drive after another. My ribs hurt like a mother. Jake, who was trying to give me some cover, looked like shit. He’d fallen in the first half, eaten dirt, and come up with a big grin on his face, but his lips had started to swell so bad he looked like a camel. I had a pain in the ribs that went straight through my body, so I didn’t even know which side had taken the blow. But none of this slowed me down, and that was the weird part. It was like the more I hurt, the more I threw myself at the ball, shot after shot. People were going nuts. We should have been dying, but there I was, making it happen, save after save. After about the twentieth time I dove on the ball, the whole team started smacking my head, just smack, smack, smack, until I couldn’t see. Coach finally called them off so we could finish the damn game. Then it was over.

  We won one-nothing, and it was my game. Even the parents were going apeshit. Jay Parker’s mother, with her giant fake boobs, was losing it, jumping up and down in her glittery hoody like some deranged forty-eight-year-old cheerleader. Scott and the other forwards spent the last minutes of the game standing around in uniforms that were as clean as when the game started, watching me dive in the mud like they were spectators on their own forward line. May was even there, standing off to the side with Ellen Susstein, and May was doing a little silent dance, with her mouth open and clapping with her hands over her head. Her freakster imitation of being down with the moment.

  Then there was Dad. He was standing with his arms crossed, not moving, thin gray strands of hair lifted by the breeze so they stood straight off his head. Dad was the only one standing still, not making eye contact. Rolling back on his heels, his compact body tensed, looking like the former gymnast that he was, like he could spring off his heels and into some sort of backflip. Dad had that focus. He didn’t need any running start, or time to think through a move. He was grimacing, and I knew right away what it was. The guy was all choked up. I made him so proud. That made me just about puke in my mouth.

  I shook hands with everybody, let everyone pound on me, slap my ass. I wanted to find somewhere to lie down, get May to help me take my shirt off, have her lean over me, her hair across my face, everything about her gentle—her quietness the thing I wanted to tell her I loved, even more than her body. The quietness inside her was the thing I needed her body to get to.

  But she was gone, of course. May couldn’t fight her way t
hrough the crowd for me. Neither could Dad. They’re improbably alike in that way, but her silence was gentleness and his was something else. He stood his ground, and waited for me to come to him.

  “Adam.”

  “Dad.”

  “Some game.”

  “I think I’m going to pass out.”

  “Now you know what it takes, Adam.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To win. It takes everything you’ve got.” He gave me a quick, minimal-contact man hug and nodded several more times. His nose was a little pink, and his teeth flashed white and straight in his tight smile. That was Dad in a happy moment. A flash of white, tense bodily joy.

  I wanted to tell him it wasn’t what he thought, that I was dying out there. I didn’t know where any of it came from, didn’t really want it to ever happen again. If that was winning, I was too tired for it.

  “My rib, Dad, I’ve got to ice it.”

  He took me by the arm and I leaned in to him. We hobbled down the hill to where he parked, and I did what I shouldn’t have, what I felt negated everything for him: showed him who I really was. I sniffled and wiped my nose, let hot tears run down my cheeks. I didn’t take it like a man. In the car, I really started to cry, moaning a little even.

  At the ER, the doc was cool. “Got your moment of glory, now, did you?” I said yeah, though it felt like ancient history by then. He taped me up and said I’d be out for as long as the ribs took to heal. At least five weeks, could be twice that. “Broken things want to be still,” he said. “But ribs are things that move even when you sleep, every time you breathe.”

  I started some noisy-ass crying then, right there in front of the guy. He was younger than my dad, maybe late thirties, bald and skinny with a big nose and watery blue eyes, the kind of eyes that darkened with concentration when he looked at you. He seemed to understand the blubbering better than I did. He stared at me long and hard over that beak of a nose, trying to see what he was dealing with.

  “I’m going to give you something to help you rest, okay?” he said at last. “Last thing a wounded warrior needs is a bad night’s sleep.” I nodded, and waited while he gave the nurse the prescription.

  When we got in the car, I told Dad we should stop and pick up the drugs on the way home. “Hurts that bad?” he asked. Dad was anti-drug, barely ever took aspirin, and hated the idea of a cloudy head. A one-beer-a-game kind of guy.

  “Yeah, he said it’s important so I stay still when I sleep. Otherwise, I might miss more of the season.” It was a small lie, a white lie, I figured, and I wondered about that expression, how the difference between lies that hurt and those that didn’t was a kind of cloud, or a smudge.

  “It was some game you played,” Dad said, as he grabbed my leg and gave it a squeeze. “When you do something right, even pain afterward is a kind of a sweet reminder.” I let that statement hang there, didn’t even nod.

  What he said stayed with me. I was determined to forget not only the pain, but the impulse that had taken over me, that had made me a winner in his eyes. I knew all along what I was doing out there, and it wasn’t winning I’d wanted.

  I’d wanted the pain.

  When we got home, Mom had dinner waiting for me. She was still in her work clothes, some sort of blue, silky pants. I had already taken a Percocet before I sat down to eat, and I remember thinking those blue pants she wore were the most beautiful pants I’d ever seen.

  There are more half-douche guys out there than there are either good guys or full-douche guys. I might even be half-douche myself. It’s hard to say. Jay was a definite half, but better than most. Girls went nuts for the guy, and that should tell you, because one thing you can guarantee about girls is that they aren’t lining up to go out with someone genuinely nice. Never happens. Jay and I were best friends because he wanted it that way for some incomprehensible reason. He was not a deep dude, but he’d get real certain about stuff—where to go for pizza when all the pizza in town sucked, or how Pamela Mahoney had the best tits ever. He meant this shit. Like Pamela was hotter than Scarlett Johansson, or some fucking swimsuit model. He was like that about friendship too, with about as much reason. “My main man,” Jay’d say, and smack me on the back. I’d nod like Jay and I were tight, and like we ever talked about anything deeper than whether my guy, Sam Weissman, sold better weed than Sam Smythe, Jay’s delinquent, porn-obsessed neighbor—that was it, Purple Cush versus Green Crack. That was basically our bond. Plus Jay would take shots at my head all Saturday afternoon in the goal cage my dad bought me over the summer.

  Dad thought I’d love to practice with him on those long August evenings before double sessions started up. I made it a point to be out of the house by the time he finished dinner, even if that meant riding my bike over to May’s, even if her mom was home. Even if we just watched TV and ate the organic chocolate-chip cookies her mom bought, which tasted weird and whole-wheaty when you mixed them with milk. At May’s it was like there was no time of day, maybe because she didn’t live with her dad, and there was no one coming home all jazzed up from the day of being the most important fucking tax attorney in New York City, in the world.

  I didn’t tell Jay about my new best friend. I didn’t tell him how when I got almost done with my little nonrefillable bottle of Percs, I started looking on the internet for a way to get a prescription, or a way to get something like them. It wasn’t hard and they were a shit ton better than Sam’s weed, in my book.

  Percs aren’t an in-your-head buzz like weed. Percs are all over you. On Percs, life is a slow dance and the sex is hotter than it even should be. Of course, May wanted in.

  The internet is made for shit like buying Percs. There are about a hundred websites where you fill out your name and some bogus doctor info, and then a little credit info. I’ve got one of those prepaid credit cards from Dad, so online shopping is not a problem. Mom didn’t ask a thing about the little brown package when it arrived, because I’m always ordering vitamins and protein bars from Bodybuilders.com. She figured it was more of the same.

  Parents are easy to bullshit, since they want the same thing you do. They want to believe in magic. That things can be made right by shutting the front door and saying, Hi, Mom, I’m home. By setting the table with the good napkins, and saying sure when someone suggests you clear your plate. He does what I ask him, they think. He’s a good kid. They want that whole happy-family thing that smells like bubble bath and baby powder.

  At first I was afraid there’d be something wrong with the almighty Perc buzz, that the pills would be fakes or something. But they were the real deal all right. May made one of her trademark humming sounds after downing her first one. I should have known the game would be up fast that night when May lay in the crook of my arm and told me she loved me. That should have meant something, but I just laughed. Because yeah, I loved her too, but I also loved the roses on her tacky bedspread, and the way her tan-and-brown sneakers had holes in the toes. I loved the way the sun came in her windows through the sheer blinds, and I loved doing nothing but lying there high as shit, and loving nothing so much as I loved Percocet.

  Dr. Mick told me at intake that mine was the fastest crash and burn he’d seen in his nineteen years of working with fuckups. His saying that almost made me doubt myself, doubt I was legit, that I needed to be here at all. Because that’s how I think. Am I even the right kind of fucked up?

  There was an incredible arc to the whole thing, a kind of structure, looking back. It began with me and Jay a few weeks after my heroic game, and the beginning of me being the Perc king, a version of myself so mellow I stopped being afraid of Dad. A version of me that cared so little, May’s silence stopped feeling like peace and started feeling like emptiness.

  I had been taking two, three, four Percocet a night. That was my main thing, stoning out on it up in my room at night when the house was quiet. I’d put on some ridiculously chill music. Electronica, weird trance tapes that Jay got from some kid he knew from camp.


  One night, as the melting of my joints began, I drifted off. I was neither asleep nor awake. There was a sudden unity to things that I could sense through my body, up through my spine—a oneness. I felt a rush, a desire to speak out, to call to someone. I startled myself out of it with the sound of my own voice. I was calling for Mom. Not out of fear, but to tell her there wasn’t anything to fear. I thought the news would ease the pinched appearance of her mouth when she looked at me and Dad, the knowledge of our icy separateness an obvious, everyday pain. I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter. This sort of pain was nothing.

  I had found bliss and I wanted her to be proud.

  There was the morning I stumbled on the stairs coming down to breakfast. I hadn’t popped any pills since the night before, but my legs were still soft and slow beneath me. Dad looked up from his iPad, but only glancingly. Mom was frying him an egg. She frowned at me, as though I had done something on purpose to disrupt them. Neither of them detected any stonedness.

  Later that same week I fell asleep in Ms. Grayson’s English class. She touched the back of my head with her small, light fingers. People laughed when I raised my head and looked around. “Look alive there, Adam, this is junior year,” Ms. Grayson said, and continued her high-heeled circuit around the room. She was that teacher you might glance at twice if she were a lady in the supermarket, or pulled up next to you in her car—high cheekbones, hair slightly gray in front. I never got into that old-chick fantasy. But I always wanted Ms. Grayson to like me, because she was smart and pretty and seemed like the sort of woman a grown man might want to marry.

  After a couple weeks of splurging on Percocet with May, I passed some along to Jay. “What the fuck is this?” he asked. I explained the origin of my stash, how I got turned on by the ER doc. We were in his bedroom, his two-foot bong by his side. He eyed me skeptically, and for the first time since I started taking the pills, I began to wonder myself: What the fuck is this? It didn’t feel like real life anymore, but a sort of pillowy existence. I hadn’t thought how I would get back to the world of hard edges, of requirements, of work.