by Amy Reed
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Did my uncle ever actually live up on the water tower?”
Gordon spits out his beer, spraying all over the coffee table. “Oh man,” he laughs. “I was not expecting that. I thought you were going to ask me to get you some Molly.”
“So? Did he?”
Gordon gulps down half his beer. “We used to go up there a lot. He loved it for some reason I never could understand. But the true story is we got drunk up there one night and passed out. So I guess he could say he slept there once, on accident. But he sure as hell didn’t live there. All that time he claims he was homeless, he lived right here with me and my dad.”
“Oh,” I say. I can’t tell if I’m disappointed or relieved.
“You know he cried when I called to tell him my dad died? He was on tour in Germany or something. He wanted to cancel that night’s show, but I talked him out of it. I was like, think of the fans, man. What would Pop want you to do?”
“Oh,” I say again.
“Let me tell you something about your uncle’s stories,” Gordon says, leaning back and putting his bare feet on the coffee table. “Maybe he’s a musical genius or whatever like everyone says, but the whole ‘I’m this poor misunderstood artist from this super-oppressive place’ thing? That’s bullshit. All those stories he tells on TV about growing up here, they’re only about half true. He might actually believe them, because he’s constructed this whole persona, you know? And it’s based on this whole Caleb Sloat, poor abused kid from Rome mythology, poor victim, boo hoo hoo. And he, like, needs that, you know? But the truth is, if you took away his fame and money, he’s still just like the rest of us. And that shit’s not interesting.”
For a moment, I forget how much I want to get out of here because I’m in shock that Gordon’s saying some pretty deep stuff.
“The thing is,” Gordon continues, “back in the day, he was the one following me around all the time. He wasn’t some cool artist. He was just some kid who wanted to get high and noodled around on his sister’s old guitar. He used to steal from your grandma all the time too. Did you know that? He pushed her down the stairs once. That’s how she broke her hip. I hear she hasn’t been upstairs since. She didn’t kick him out—he just left. That’s what he does.”
I really don’t want to cry in Gordon’s house. I can’t think of a worse place to start crying than Gordon’s house.
“Hey, but I’m not bitter,” Gordon says. He drinks the rest of his beer. “I got a good life. And what’s he doing? Hiding out in Korea from a billion fans, but with no real friends in the world? Who’s the loser now?”
“Um, I have to go,” I say. “Can I just get the stuff?”
“Yeah yeah, okay.” Gordon scratches his crotch, then opens a wooden box on the coffee table full of mysterious plastic baggies.
“Are you sure you don’t want to play video games?” Gordon says. “I just got Kill the Bitches 5.”
“No thank you,” I say, pulling money out of my dolphin wallet.
“Are you hungry? I could heat up some taquitos.”
“Um, no.” I hold the money out to Gordon. I hold my other hand out to receive the bag of weed. I lean in closer, to make sure Gordon notices my hands. But he just keeps talking.
“Oh, I know!” Gordon says. “I got some nitrous cartridges around here somewhere. You ever done nitrous?”
I grab the baggie from Gordon’s hand, drop my money on the couch, and stand up. “Sorry, but I really have to go.”
“Oh, okay,” Gordon says, looking about as sad as I could imagine a one-armed shirtless drug dealer could look.
“Thanks and everything,” I say, backing toward the door.
“Yeah, no problem,” Gordon says. “Come by anytime. Even if you just want to hang out, you know?”
“Okay,” I say. Are all drug dealers this lonely?
When my hand reaches the doorknob of the front door, I feel immediate relief. But before I go, I have one last question.
“Hey, Gordon,” I say. “How’d you lose your arm?”
“Oh, that?” he says. “I fell off the water tower.”
I had two official Caleb-related tasks to do after school—buy weed and buy more doll-making supplies—but I just couldn’t help myself. In the glass case at Thrift Town where they keep all the nicest stuff was an acoustic guitar that, even though I know nearly nothing about guitars, looked to be in excellent shape and a steal at twenty dollars. So what if it had a couple of pink heart stickers on it and WWJD? written in Sharpie? As soon as I saw it, I knew Caleb must have it.
I know Caleb said he wanted to leave his whole rock star life behind, and maybe this guitar doesn’t seem like a great gift at first glance. But before he was a rock star, Caleb was just a musician. He was someone who loved music, like Lydia loves dancing. It made him happier than anything else in his life, except for maybe drugs, but those stopped working. I think that person is still inside him, and maybe part of him getting better is about him finding who he was before his life got all out of control. Maybe he doesn’t see it that way right now, but sometimes what people say they want is different from what they actually need.
This is some advanced helping.
When I get home, there’s a new camper van parked outside the house. A man and a woman in matching sweatpants are roasting hot dogs on a little portable grill, like they’re tailgating and my house is some kind of show. They stare at me as I walk by, their heads turning slowly, just like the crows.
“Hey, Billy,” the man says with a friendly and surprisingly sane-sounding voice. “Heard anything from your uncle?”
“No,” I say. “How do you know my name?”
“The Internet knows all,” he says, and I keep walking.
As I approach the front door, I hear a rustling coming from behind the house. Could be the possum and her family, but it sounds bigger. Maybe it’s one of those nuclear reactor bears from Canada. Maybe it’s that thing with hooves that sneaks around in the fog that Lydia refuses to call a unicorn. My normal response to scary noises is to ignore them and pretend they’re not happening, but I’m feeling kind of confident with this guitar in my shopping cart, so I park the cart and walk through the knee-high weeds around the side of the house. I peek my head around the corner, and there, rooting around in the stacks of old paint cans and broken coolers and a rusty lawn mower, is Cult Girl.
“Um, hello?” I say. She jumps, then kind of recoils like a scared cat. “What are you doing?”
She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me with her big eyes, all tense and nervous like she’s getting ready to bolt. She’s got her hair up in a tight bun like she always does, and she’s wearing a drab sweater and ankle-length skirt, but I get the impression that she’s undercover, that it’s all a disguise, and she’s got a cape and superpowers under there somewhere.
“It’s okay,” I say, slowly walking toward her. “I’m nice. Too nice, really. It’s kind of a problem. Are you looking for something?”
And then she hikes up her skirt and runs away, and she’s gone before I have a chance to try to convince her to stay.
Somewhere in the distance, I hear crows squawking.
I stand there for a minute after she’s gone. Why do I feel so sad? Why does it feel like the air got sucked out of the sky?
I look through the pile of garbage she was digging around in, and I find a bundle wrapped in plastic bags. I open it, and inside is a cellophane-covered library book—The Handmaid’s Tale. I think that’s one of the books that’s banned at my school. If I’m not even allowed to read it, I’m pretty sure Cult Girl would get grounded for a million years if her parents caught her with it, though I’m not sure how you’d ground someone who already can’t do anything. Her whole life is basically like being grounded all the time, so this book must be pretty good if she wants to risk whatever punishment she’d get if she were caught.
I wrap the book up tight and put i
t back where she hid it. I guess I have room for yet another small secret.
The possum doesn’t attack my ankles as I enter the house, so that’s one small consolation for this very weird day. As I climb the stairs to the attic with Caleb’s new guitar, I almost don’t notice the house shaking, it’s become so normal. I think about Lydia and her dance classes, how she hasn’t once suspected anything besides the story I told her about the scholarship. Even I know the story had holes, and I certainly know Lydia is more skeptical than the average person, especially when it comes to good news, so I’m kind of surprised my gift/lie has gone over so easily. But maybe when someone really wants something, they’re more willing to put on blinders, to see what they want to see and ignore what they don’t. Maybe desperate people are easier to fool. Even Lydia, who pretends not to want anything. Maybe especially Lydia, because she secretly wants so much.
I knock on the attic door and hear Caleb’s muffled “Come in.” I open the door and haul the plastic Thrift Town bags behind me, like some skinny, half-rate Santa. “I got your stuff,” I say as I drop the bags at the entrance of Caleb’s structure, now permanently open, more like a horseshoe instead of the previous closed circle. “And a surprise!”
Caleb’s watching something on his laptop that’s making him laugh. Last time I came up, he was actually outside his nest, doing push-ups. He gave himself a sponge bath yesterday and even washed his hair. He’s been requesting that I bring him salads and brown rice bowls from Rome’s one healthy restaurant that’s always empty and will probably go out of business any day now.
“Caleb,” I say. “Did you hear me? I got you a surprise.”
“Did you finally go to Gordon’s?” he says without looking away from the screen. “I’m living on stems right now.”
“Yeah, but I got something even better.”
Caleb looks at me, his face relaxed and almost pleasant. “Did you bring me a woman?” He laughs at his own joke.
“Happy late Christmas!” I pull the guitar from where I was hiding it behind a wall of blanket.
Caleb’s face could be a movie screen. It tells a whole story in the next few seconds. From calm, to surprise, to confusion, to something that looks like yearning, then heartbreak, then anger, then fury, then rage, then something so hot it is unnameable.
“Get that fucking thing out of my face,” Caleb growls. Low, slow, primal. He’s an animal, cornered.
I don’t get it. Caleb’s reaction does not compute. I am the king of knowing what people secretly want. My greatest talent is helping people. It’s the only thing I’m good at.
“What were you thinking?” Caleb says. “How can you be so stupid? What is wrong with you?”
It is Caleb’s voice, but those are Grandma’s words. Sloat words. Family words.
“I just thought—”
“No,” Caleb says. “You weren’t thinking. I came here to get away from this shit. I don’t want a fucking guitar. I don’t want to see a fucking guitar for the rest of my life.”
“But it made you happy once,” I say. I can feel my bottom lip trembling, pathetic. “I remember from when I was little. When you played music, you weren’t like us anymore.”
Caleb says nothing. He will not look me in the eye. He just stares at the twenty-dollar thrift store guitar like it’s a grenade about to go off.
“Music’s what got you out of here,” I say, extending my arm, offering Caleb the guitar one more time. “Don’t you want to get out of here?”
There is a moment of silence, of stillness, when both of us stop breathing. I swear the monster dolls lean forward to get a better view. The top of the blanket fort is lined with an audience peering out of mismatched plastic and glass eyes.
Caleb reaches out his hand, takes the guitar from me, and chucks it into the corner of the attic, where it lands with a hollow thud and the dissonant ring of untuned strings.
“Why do you give people shit they don’t even want?” Caleb says. “All I asked you to do is bring me food and weed and to dump my shit. I’m paying you good money to do those very simple things. That’s the only shit I want from you. I don’t want your fucking friendship or bullshit psychobabble. I don’t want you coming around here to hang out.”
I open my mouth to say something, but all I do is choke.
“You know what I really want?” Caleb spits. “I want you to leave me the fuck alone.”
And then I go on autopilot, like his words flipped a switch inside me. I am numb as I walk out of the attic and down the stairs. I focus on my breathing like the therapy talk shows have told me to do my whole life.
I breathe in.
I failed.
I breathe out.
I’m useless.
I breathe in.
I’m pathetic.
I breathe out.
Caleb hates me.
I breathe in.
I hate me.
I breathe out. I push the bookcase at the bottom of the stairs back in place. I hear the front door open and close, Grandma’s heavy breaths as she walks into the house. All I want is to watch a therapy talk show or the AA channel. I want to hear about somebody else’s problems so I don’t have to think about mine. But that is not an option now.
So I go into my almost-empty room. I lie in my bed and stare at Lydia’s painting on the wall, at the endless spiral inward.
Black holes suck in all the light around them. They consume everything that comes near.
I don’t know how to help Caleb. I don’t know how to help anyone. There is one thing I thought I could do, and I can’t do it.
I turn onto my side and face the hole in my wall. I watch as a stream of ants poke their heads over the edge of the opening and take turns throwing lifeless bodies off the side, all their brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and various distant relatives who have died somewhere inside the walls of my house, as if they have decided my room is some kind of ant cemetery.
I don’t bother cleaning it up.
LYDIA
I WAKE UP TO THE little girl’s ghost face just inches away from mine. The first thing I see is her eyes staring into me, and for a moment I think I am dead. I think, this is what hell is—staring into yourself for eternity.
When I scream, I half-expect to hear nothing, like in dreams, like in my worst nightmares, where I scream and scream and nothing comes out. But my voice is loud and clear, and it scares the girl into the corner. I jump out of bed and chase her out of my room and into the living room, knocking the lamp off my bedside table in the process, running into the coffee table with my shin, ramming into the side of the bookcase with my hip so hard, one of Larry’s prized Unicorns vs. Dragons snow globes smashes on the floor.
“I hate you!” I scream, as if that would make her stop, as if hurting her feelings could somehow cure mine. But she just keeps running.
“I don’t want you here!” I scream as I chase her. “Nobody wants you. You’re pathetic.”
But it isn’t me speaking, it isn’t my voice, and it isn’t her I am talking to, and every word I say feels like a punch in my own heart, and by the time we are both exhausted and stop running, I am the one who is crying.
And then she just stands there, looking at me, calm and emotionless, never breaking eye contact as she reaches over and takes the picture of my mother off the wall, the one she’s been moving and hiding and taunting me with. Time stops as our eyes turn to the photo in her tiny hands, at the woman trapped and motionless inside the frame. Then the girl looks up at me, a new glint of something cruel in her eyes, something sociopathic, like she takes pleasure in hurting me, and as I scream, “No!” she hurls the picture at my head with the aim and force of someone much more powerful than a nine-year-old girl.
I duck just in time for it to smash against the door to Larry’s bedroom.
After all the screaming and running, it is this that finally wakes Larry up. He opens his door and pokes his head out, sees the picture on the floor haloed by broken glass, and then looks u
p at me full of hurt and betrayal, like I’m the one who killed her.
“I was dusting,” I manage to say. “It fell.”
He just stares at that broken glass like it’s eight years ago all over again, like that morning we woke up to an empty apartment and a knock on the door and the rain-drenched cops standing there with their bad-news faces, and we both knew Mom was gone before they ever said anything.
“Clean it up,” he says, with no breath behind his words. And he retreats back into his room, and I retreat back into mine.
And the girl is gone, whatever version of her that was just here, not the annoying one who follows me to dance class and school, not the one who spins in circles or plays harmless tricks, no longer the boring ghost she started out as. I had almost gotten used to her over the past couple of months, but now it’s like she decided she’s not okay with me just tolerating her presence. Now she wants something. Every time I look in a mirror, there she is, staring back at me with her needy, unblinking eyes. She keeps knocking things over, spilling my drinks. I try to ignore her, but it only seems to make her stronger and more solid. Like pushing her away feeds her.
The girl who showed up this morning is dangerous. She is capable of hurting someone. She is capable of hurting me.
I feel shaky all day, almost dizzy. I keep seeing the girl’s eyes in front of mine, blocking my vision, blinding me from everything else. I keep seeing my mom’s eyes, empty and glossy inside that frame. I keep seeing the glass smashed on the floor, and Larry’s heartbroken silent stare, keep hearing the sound of my own scream echoing inside my head, and I look around for the girl, like she could give me some kind of answer, like she holds the missing clue, but her absence now is almost worse than her stalking. I need her to tell me what to do. I need her to tell me how to end this.
I’m so unhinged I even think about telling Billy. But the bags under his eyes are darker than ever and he’s making less and less sense, and he has enough to deal with without worrying about me. There is only room for one of us to be haunted.