I gave Jay what looked like a normal bottle of Advil, and after he examined the contents, he tossed the bottle onto a side table cluttered with rolling papers and BIC lighters. “Maybe for Saturday night?” he said. Bonnie Fine was having a party. She was a skanky friend of Jay’s, not mine. I never could get those girls, the ones who kept lists, scorecards of drunken, late-night hookups. I thought guys that did shit with them were douches.
“Sure,” I said. “But it’s not a party drug, exactly.”
“What you mean?” he asked, packing the crushed, almost iridescent bud of Green Crack into the metal bowl of his bong.
I watched Jay take a hit. A month or so ago I would have been jittery, waiting for my turn. But I didn’t even really want to smoke; I was only taking my turn to be sociable and not to have to listen to Jay’s whining about how boring I’d become. “Percocet’s mellower than weed. It’s hard to explain.”
I couldn’t tell him about the melting feeling when you’re fucking. I didn’t talk dirty shit like that with guys, especially not about May. She was the kind of person you felt could be damaged by that, by things she didn’t even have any way of knowing.
There were four or five cars in Bonnie Fine’s driveway when Jay and I pulled up. Jay’s one of those rich kids with a spanking-new MINI Cooper. Scott Bardfield’s beat-up Toyota was parked crookedly next to Bonnie Fine’s banged-up Subaru, like a stray, unpiloted object. I was feeling heavy in the legs, reluctant to drag myself inside. An hour or so earlier, I’d been in my bedroom alone staring at my Advil bottle full of pills. The yellow-and-blue Advil label contained few legible letters; only half a V, an I, and the L remained. But it wasn’t an ordinary pill bottle to me anymore. It was a sort of totem. When I glanced at the bottle, I felt a preliminary warmth flood through my body. I felt the soles of my feet within my shoes. I felt loose in tight places. The center of my lower back, in particular, felt vibrant, autonomous. It felt strange and animal-like to have a body like this, a body that responded, part by part, to an idea, the idea of popping a Perc.
Inside, there were fifteen or twenty people hanging out. Mostly Bonnie’s girlfriends—Lizzy Dorf, with her blond, field-hockey player’s ponytail, dip-dyed blue at the ends; Sara Anderson, braless in a pink sweater. There were some guys from soccer, James Fox and Morgan Grant, both major douche bags with their retro, preppy sweaters and floppy haircuts. Naturally, the girls flocked to them. Morgan, the worse of the two, smoked a fat spleef, not passing it along.
I tried to tell Jay earlier, I didn’t even like those girls. There was no point to a party like that. Girls looking on as some guy rolls a joint, passing it around, big show of every hit. Then people disappearing, doors closing, and the reemerging with self-conscious looks all around. No one sure if they want people to know or not. Why the hell should anyone care? I’ve always wondered that. If someone’s a skank, I figure that’s her business.
I sat down at the kitchen table far away from everyone else. Jay passed me a beer from the six-pack he’d conned his older brother into getting us. I took a swig, and set the bottle back on the table. It tasted like swamp water. Miller Light, not cold. Jay had a thing about buying the cheapest crap available unless you were talking weed.
Jay took the joint from Bonnie, and then passed it to me. I shook my head. I felt a strange sensation in my neck, like maybe I was moving it either a little too fast or a little too slow. I thought people might be looking at me. I took another swig of beer.
“Adam not smoking?” Sara raised an eyebrow. She was a smart, snarky girl who liked to razz people, and to wear shit like the sweater she had on, underneath which you could faintly make out the outline of her nipples. She kind of got away with strutting her slut on account of being in honors English, and because of the cool-eyed way she’d stare other girls down. “I’ve never seen you abstain before,” she said, and raised her eyebrows. I noticed how dark her eyebrows were compared to her hair.
She took the joint from Jay and blew her smoke my way. “No pressure, Adam,” she said, laughing and coughing. “I just hate losing my shit with you sitting there looking all owlish.” Everyone laughed. I realized I had been staring, that my eyes were probably dilated. I could’ve been out-and-out drooling for all I knew. But even though I knew she was giving me shit, I’d heard something in her voice when she said my name, something delicate, an invitation.
I looked away, and Sara must have felt bad about calling me out, because she got down off her kitchen stool and slunk over to where I was sitting. The girl had a killer ass in her tight gray pants, and then there was the mesmerizing sweater. She put her hand on the back of my neck and slid it down to the middle of my back. I had known Sara since third grade, and I couldn’t recall any other time that she had touched me. A part of me wanted to shake her off. I thought of May, and her strange way of sensing when something went wrong with me. I imagined myself trying to explain it all to May, because I already knew then what would happen, and I worried about her, how May would feel when she’d lost me.
I already knew even before Sara let her hand slide all the way down until it seemed stuck there at the waist of my jeans. Sara liked to show people she could do whatever the fuck she wanted. A few months before I might have made a point of resisting her. But now I was Perc man, zombie Adam. And it wasn’t just that I couldn’t quite get my mouth to form the right words. I knew from experience there was no better feeling than being high on Percs and getting what Sara was plainly offering. The last clear thought I had was yes—and I was grateful to the girl in the pink sweater that she had dressed the way she had, that she had offered herself to me, that I did not have to be alone for one more second, melting into the tall kitchen stool in fucking Bonnie Fine’s kitchen. I never minded Sara. In ninth-grade algebra I’d sat behind her and I remembered how she smelled like lemons.
I stared hard at her, and she picked up my hand and led me down the hall, and then upstairs to what had to be Bonnie’s older brother’s room. Michael was away at college, but had left behind a fish tank that someone else must have had to clean.
The bed was made up with green-and-black flannel sheets, like they sell at L.L.Bean. I sat down and pulled Sara toward me. But Sara had her own ideas, and she pressed her palm into my chest and pushed me back on the bed. I said her name once, and she told me to be quiet.
Afterward I put on my jeans and tucked my shirt in, but then I sat back down heavily on the bed. It was surprisingly hard to stand. Sara was combing her hair out with her fingers. I noticed for the first time how her nose turned up a little at the end. She was a cute girl but not a beauty. She had none of May’s alluring strangeness. She combed her hair out as if she were looking into a mirror, but it was just the fish tank she faced, with a lazy, orange-finned fish fanning its way around the fetid water.
I felt light-headed. There was something I needed to tell Sara, but I couldn’t form the words. I felt a coldness creep up my back, a darkness, a debilitating silence. My heart started beating crazy fast, something that had never happened to me before on Percs. I thought, frantically, that I might never be able to speak again, that there might never be anything I would need or want to say to anyone. Sara and I did not exist on the same plane. She had already put what had happened between us behind her. She had fixed her hair, and was ready to join the others and have a smoke. But I still couldn’t move. I wasn’t sure how I would ever get out of Michael Fine’s childhood bedroom. It was May I needed, and now I had lost her; there was no way I could conceal any of this from her. May had always been on this path to destruction with me, and I needed her to know I had arrived.
I couldn’t recall how much beer I drank, or the actual number of pills I’d taken. Had I even had a hit off a joint? I remembered Sara saying my name in a tone of surprise. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t explain it to her. I couldn’t tell if there was something physically wrong with me, or if I’d simply become paralyzed by the thought of needing to move. I felt my own hands on my face, but as tho
ugh it were a stranger’s touch. Then, the darkness and silence within me broke into a million pieces, like shards of nothingness. I heard myself choking and tried to muffle the sound. I remember Sara coming over to me, and trying to pull my hands from my mouth, but I was biting them then, coming down hard on my fingers and palms. I remember her calling for Bonnie, for Jay. I remember tasting blood.
The day they brought me here was a Saturday. Dad had on khakis and a blue polo tucked in, but no belt. It was an odd thing to notice, the lack of a belt, but Dad is the type to wear the same things in the same way, and even that small omission from his usual uniform made me wonder. His hair, I noticed, seemed a bit too long, and his eyes were rimmed with red. Mom had looked like shit for days, so bad I couldn’t even look at her without a stab of accusation running through me. She didn’t know what pissed me off so much, thought herself the injured party. How could I, her only child, have done this to her? How could I have risked her happiness?
But what surprised me during intake was Dad. We sat there in Dr. Mick’s stuffy little office, with kids walking in, interrupting, sitting for a minute or two, then wandering out again. This place is different, the kids said, neither rehab nor mental ward, but a place for smart kids like me to start over. You take classes. You mow the lawn. You talk the endless talk about being here, and when you weren’t here, and when you might someday be able to leave.
Dr. Mick leaned back in his chair and eyed me with suspicion. “So, kid, are you finished?” he wanted to know.
“With what?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
“Fucking up?”
Then Dad jumped in, his voice breaking. “Adam is not a fuckup. He’s a good student, responsible, an outstanding athlete. He just succumbed to the pressure, and needs to get his head together.” Dad had his elbows on his knees, his body a coil. He said, “His name is Adam, not kid.”
Dr. Mick looked back at me and said, “What do you say to that, kid? What do you say to your dad?”
I said, “Yeah, Dad, I know what I am.” And then I said something I hadn’t really even thought, except maybe during the soccer game, or maybe a few times with May, downing Perc after Perc. I knew what it was I was after, what I’d chased down all year long. I wanted to feel nothing, to be nothing. It was only that night with Sara that I’d known what that really meant, that it meant losing, and not just giving up. “All this year, Dad, I’ve really wanted to be done with it all—everything. School. Soccer. You. Mom. Everything.”
Dr. Mick looked back at Dad. I could hear Mom quietly crying. But Dad stared at me, his mouth tight, his lower lip slightly curved. His hands trembled in his lap.
And then he stood up, and I half expected him to walk out the door, to get away from me, his loser son, but he didn’t. Instead, he walked over to me and bent down, and he put his arms around me, which felt kind of stiff and strange. He brushed my hair off my forehead and he kissed me on the top of my head, the way I remember him doing a few times when I was very young, and for some reason he was the one who had to put me to bed. I remembered back then on those rare occasions when he tucked me in at night, how thorough he was about it all, and how he never rushed, but carefully pressed the covers to my chest, smoothed them down, and then planted that identical kiss. I realized then how deliberate he was, how much that must have meant to him, and that maybe sometime, some infinity ago, someone had kissed him in just that way, and he had felt it strongly, as though he truly believed he had received, way back then in his own childhood, a kind of a lasting blessing.
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About the Author
Photo by Lanny Schwartz
CLAIRE NEEDELL is a middle school teacher at a public school in New York City. She is the author of Nothing Real Volumes 1 through 3, three short story collections published digitally under the HarperTeen Impulse imprint. Claire also writes for The New York Times.
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Copyright
NOTHING REAL VOLUME 1: A COLLECTION OF STORIES. Copyright © 2014 by Claire Needell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © May 2014 ISBN 9780062338235
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Nothing Real Volume 1 Page 6