Compulsion

by Heidi Ayarbe

  Tears burn my eyes and nose, and I swallow seven times, then five, then five again, and the fishbowl film of tears that fills my eyes expands until everything in the room is blurry—distorted.

  Leaking, leaking, leaking.

  Focus.

  Focus.

  The dam explodes, leaving my cheeks damp, bringing everything back into focus until the tears well up again.

  I stare at my wristwatch, willing the seconds to move faster to catch up to the clock on the wall.

  8:23

  Eight twenty-three. Eight plus two is ten plus three is thirteen. OK. Eight minus two is six minus three is three. OK. Eight minus three is five plus two is seven. OK.

  Eight twenty-three, eight twenty-four. Twenty-three, twenty-four. Two times at the same time like in parallel worlds. I can almost imagine the space before me folding where I can step out and go back or forward by seconds.

  “Jake? Jacob!” Dad’s voice brings me to the room. I sweep the back of my hand across my eyes, the salt burning my lips. “Stand up. The doctor’s here.”

  The doctor looks tired. “Mr. Martin?” she asks.

  “Yes. Yes,” he says, holding out a trembling hand.

  She shakes Dad’s hand—a strong shake, not like a dead-fish shake that lots of chicks do. “I’m Dr. Chen.” She looks down at the chart and flips through the pages, then looks back at us. “She’s gonna be fine. A pretty lucky young lady, if you ask me. We have some paperwork we need you to fill out before we release her.”

  The doctor stands there waiting for Dad to respond. His knuckles are white and a blue vein pops out on his forehead.

  Dr. Chen’s words turn into quiet static. “Pressing charges . . . Child Protective Services . . . alcohol . . . minors . . .”

  I wait. We all do, wondering what will happen.

  But nothing else happens.

  The doctor stops talking.

  She and Dad and the police have come to some kind of agreement that doesn’t involve Child Protective Services. The police have already taken everybody’s statements and are going on a witch hunt to discover where the alcohol was purchased. Lots of Kasey’s friends look really guilty, like they’re the ones to blame. They get fidgety and weepy when the cops ask about the booze.

  Can’t blame them. Who wants to spend four years of high school known as the one who shut down Reed’s Highway 50 Mini-Mart? The old man has been selling liquor to minors since Prohibition. He’s a Carson landmark.

  But really, we all know whose fault this is. I can see it in everybody’s eyes—the way they look at me; the murmurs and hushed voices. Or maybe, better put, the way they don’t look at me.

  What if they know about me?

  All the work it’s taken to keep things hidden. I think about Mera and her dog choking on a chicken bone. Confessions of a vegetarian.

  But what am I? What am I confessing?

  When the police leave, there’s a collective exhale, and I’m sure we’ll get carbon dioxide poisoning. I’m just glad there’s a fern in the waiting room and I move toward it, counting the fronds.

  The morning almost feels scripted: a gathering of our closest friends, Kasey’s imminent danger, my total impotence in more ways than I’d care to admit, and the inevitable awkward silence while everybody either looks at me or avoids looking at me.

  What if they know about me?

  What if . . . ?

  I try to piece together the idea of what it will be like now that everybody knows the truth—the truth about me. But I don’t even know what that is. I just know I’m not right, somehow.

  What if . . . ?

  People trickle out of the hospital, throwing around phrases like one lucky girl and intense morning, reliving everything like they were the ones who found her—who saved her. And I’m the one who left her for dead. They slip away so they won’t have to look at me anymore, and I feel like a Scooby-Doo villain whose fictitious face has been peeled off to expose the real me. The real me has leaked out over the floor in goopy puddles. There’s nowhere to hide.

  Dad tugs on my sweatshirt and says, “Quit fidgeting.”

  8:27

  Eight twenty-seven. Eight plus two is ten plus seven is seventeen. OK.

  “What is your problem, Jacob?” Dad wrenches my face around until we’re practically nose to nose. He lowers his voice. “You need to get your act together. Now.”

  “C’mon, man.” Luc pushes me behind Dad and the doctor. “I’ll come by later to check up on things at the Martins’.”

  Luc smells worse than he looks. “Get some sleep,” I say. “And a shower.”

  “Will do.” He doesn’t laugh like he’s supposed to. He’s not acting the part. He pauses, caterpillar eyebrows scrunched together. His frame is silhouetted against the waiting-room window—bright sunlight streams in and hurts my eyes. I’m stuck here again—stuck in the door between inside and outside, between perception and reality, truth and lies.

  Kasey is lying on a bed behind a seafoam-green curtain—the metal rings sliding across the bar making a swish-swish sound. Kasey looks tiny, sandwiched between monitors. A blue-black bruise has formed on her cheek.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Not. So. Loud,” she whispers. “Where’s my stuff?”

  A nurse hands her a paper bag of clothes. Kasey looks in, takes a whiff, and says, “Could you not have brought me fresh clothes?”

  “We didn’t think about it.”

  She glares at me. “A little privacy, please.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” I pull the curtain shut and wait in the cramped hallway. “Kase, are you okay?”

  “Where’s Mom?” she asks through the curtain.

  “At home. She’s sick.” I sound like Dad.

  “Mom should be here. Moms come to hospitals when their kids are sick.”

  “Kase—” I say.

  “Mom’s never here. What’s your excuse?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You bailed on me. You left me.”

  “I’m here now.”

  “A lot of good that does.”

  Then silence.

  Some guy lies still on a gurney down the hall, attached to a heart monitor, a tube shoved down his throat, filling him up with air.

  I hate the sound of the beep of the heart monitor and the hum of the oxygen that fills his lungs—in and out, in and out. It’s a grating, choking sound; it’s artificial and cold. And after each lung filling it clicks, then air whooshes out, and the machine begins to fill him up again.

  Noisy. Quiet places are the noisiest.

  The little needle of green light jigs up and down. Blood pressure 90 over 60, 87 over 63, the numbers click and change in front of me and my mind races to keep up.

  The numbers come with certain clarity, organizing my mind, bringing things back from chaos to order. I go from the pulse number to blood pressure, count the lines and crags in the regular beating of the guy’s heart, swallowing back the anger and regret.

  Regret.

  That pretty much wraps up everything about who I am.

  One Hundred Forty-Nine Breaking Normal

  Sunday, 9:31 a.m.

  Nine thirty-one. Nine plus three is twelve plus one is thirteen. OK.

  I fidget with my watch and bring it to my ear, listening to the soft tick. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

  We sit in deafening silence on the way home, waiting for the explosion; the heat radiating from Dad’s body has to do major ozone damage.

  “I don’t know what the matter is with you. Either of you.” He looks at me when he talks, though. I’m the problem. I know this.

  Not you too.

  “Drink water. Get some sleep,” he says to Kasey, and goes into the garage after putting out some snack food.

  Kasey takes a twenty-three–minute shower, totally breaking Dad’s five-minute rule, comes downstairs, and crumples on the couch. Mom leaves the bedroom a couple of times to check on us from the top of the stairs, then retreats to the safety of her four walls.


  “I have to tell you about last night,” I whisper.

  Kasey doesn’t move.

  “I have to tell you now. Like this. Until I can figure out a way to, I don’t know, really tell.” The words fill the room, and I’m afraid they’ll get engraved in the walls. But they don’t. They disappear as soon as I say them. It’s like practice. Because I have to tell somebody—sometime. It’s hard to know how to tell something I don’t even understand myself.

  I just need a sign.

  So I stare at the grandfather clock, work out the numbers, and try to figure out where they’re trying to steer me. Who can I tell?

  “What happened to your face?” Kase taps me on the shoulder, jerking my attention from the clock.

  “Hey,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “Want me to get Dad? Do you need something?”

  “No thanks. He still pissed?”

  “He hasn’t left the garage since we came home.”

  “Yikes. Major Doritos Smokin’ Cheddar Barbecue?”

  “More like Atomic Ass-Blaster Hot Habañero.”

  “That’s not a real flavor.”

  “Well, it should be.”

  “So what happened to your face?” Kasey leans in and pulls my chin close to hers. “And your mouth?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “‘Ethel Thayer, thounds like I’m lithping, doethn’t it?’”

  “Ha. Ha.”

  “Well, you look like shit and talk like a testosterone-heavy Daffy Duck. Well, not that heavy, according to party gossip.”

  “Yeah. Well—”

  “Well what?” There’s an edge to her voice.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I bailed.”

  “Sorry. That does a lot of good, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m not saying it does.”

  “So why are you even saying it at all?”

  “What else can I say?”

  “The million-dollar question.”

  She motions to the plate of cheese and crackers Dad left covered with Saran wrap on the table. I pass her the plate and she places a slice of cheese on top of each cracker, puzzle-piecing it together so the entire cracker face is covered and no cheese hangs over the sides.

  “Kase,” I say, “you called last night and—”

  She eats her crackers outside-in until she only has a little center to pop on her mouth. “And what?” she says through bites.

  “Did anybody take you to the closets? At Mario’s?” The thought sends searing pain through my nerves. I squeeze my head between my knees, half hoping my eardrums will blow and I’ll go deaf and won’t have to hear what happened to Kasey at Mario’s.

  I am such a coward.

  I sit up and stare her in the eyes. “Did something happen?”

  By now she’s finished her crackers and has peeled a bunch of grapes.

  Who the fuck peels grapes?

  “Did something happen, you ask. Yeah. I got as much action last night as you did.”

  “You’re just tearing it up, Kase. Can you get real for second?”

  “What do you expect me to say? You’re the one who comes off as being gallant, shy, the quirky soccer star that respects Reese? C’mon.”

  “Kasey—”

  She holds up her hand. “Don’t. My entire social life blew up last night when I puked on your soccer friends and blacked out, only to have moments of pseudoconsciousness listening to Kalleres repeat himself over and again, ‘Dude, what are we s’posed to do? Dude?’ Are those guys even literate? And why do you all insist on calling each other dude?” She peels another grape, taking out the seeds and popping it in her mouth.

  “Then to make matters worse, they drag me around the party until somebody agrees to give us a ride to the emergency room, but, once again, only because I’m your baby sister. So now I will be officially known as Jacob Martin Superhero’s puking baby sister. You know what they’re gonna call me? Earl. Fish feeder. Technicolor yawn. Fergler. There will be no end. I’ll be voted Most Likely to Marry a Guy Named Ralph. It’s over for me. Totally over.”

  Kase is more preoccupied with her impending fall from the social hierarchy than the fact that she’ll be grounded until she’s twenty-one which, in and of itself, will pretty much squelch any kind of social life she strove to have in the first place.

  “All right. All right,” I say, holding up my hands. “But—”

  “But what?”

  “Why do you care so much about them?”

  “Who’s them?”

  “I dunno who they are: the higher echelon of Carson High’s social circles. Why do they—this nondescript they—matter?”

  “It’s easy for you to say, Mr. UCLA, Maryland, wherever-you’re-gonna-go-and-be-famous,” she says. “You never step outside of yourself for a second. It’s like the world that you live in is perfect and everybody else lets you be there. Everything’s easier for you because of who you are. And harder for me because of who you are.”

  A thick crease forms between Kase’s eyebrows. “I’m not gonna be the girl who doesn’t get invited to any parties in high school—you know, the one who doesn’t even know about them until the Monday after.”

  “I don’t go to parties,” I interrupt.

  “Yeah. But that’s because you don’t want to. You’re always invited.”

  I sigh.

  “What about your day? Do you want to tell me about it?”

  Kase shrugs. “I was picked up from the hospital by my dad and brother. The latter totally humiliated me in front of all of Carson High and possibly the only guy who will ever want to hook up with me, then bailed—and my crazy mom hasn’t even bothered to see if I’m all right.”

  “Kase, that’s mean. Mom’s worried.”

  “Yeah. Real worried. Worried she hit an imaginary bicyclist with an imaginary car or stole imaginary groceries from some guy seven weeks ago. Sure, she’s worried. She’s just not worried her only daughter could’ve died or been drugged and gotten raped at a party.”

  Not you too. Dad’s words keep tapping on my brain. But I don’t do the same shit Mom does. We’re not even on the same playing field. I stare at Kasey’s grape peels and the seeds on her plate—all lined up in perfect symmetry.

  Are we okay?

  “Kase, it’s not like that. You’re not like that.”

  “Then what is it like?” she asks. “What? Should I put a Band-Aid on it like we always do around here?” She rolls her eyes. “Oh, c’mon. Don’t do that Sesame Street stuff with me. I know who I am. And I know what I want other people to think I am. That’s the game, isn’t it?” Kasey brushes invisible crumbs off her lap into her cupped hand and piles them on her plate.

  Perception. Reality. I wonder what it would be like to peel off my skin and become the person everybody else sees—or wants to see. Just for a day. Just for an hour. That Jake must be pretty amazing.

  We sit in silence for a while until I say, “It’s a shitty game.”

  “We all play it.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier just to be real for once?”

  Kase swallows her last grape. “I don’t know anybody who is and survives high school.”

  I think about Mera. She’s surviving. But she might have a volleyball named Wilson she talks to in order to refrain from hurling herself off the top of the Empire State Building.

  “I just want her to be a mom, you know? Sometimes I just want a mom.”

  I get that. I don’t remember the last time we had one.

  “You think I’ll be grounded?” Kase asks.

  “Yeah. We both are.”

  “Until when?”

  “I think until we can go to federal prison—so I only have about ten months left. You’ve got three years.”

  “Funny.”

  “Dad’s already looking into getting those house-arrest anklets. They’re all the rage.”

  Kase tries to stay stone-faced. “Real funny.” She glances up the staircase.

  “She’s checked on you a couple of times.”

&n
bsp; “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “No. I guess not. But it’s something.”

  “That’s all we get? Something.”

  “I think that’s all we get.”

  “What if it’s not good enough?”

  I scratch my watch face, rubbing off something sticky. Kase looks so small right now, like when she used to bring art projects home in elementary school. I wrap my arm around her shoulders, then give her the biggest big-brother bear hug I can muster. She wipes her eyes and rubs guck off my shoulder.

  I think about Mom and me—and for the very first time I wonder if Kase is sick, too: the cleaning, food

  symmetry, always keeping everything in order. Does she feel as desperate as I do?

  It’s not just about me anymore.

  It never has been.

  “Can you just tell me about your day?” And this time I’m asking for her, not for me. She sits with her legs crossed and I sit facing her, knee-to-knee.

  And I listen.

  One Hundred Fifty-One Burying Ghosts

  Sunday, 5:23 p.m.

  Five twenty-three. Five times two is ten plus three is thirteen. OK.

  There’s a shuffle and murmur of voices outside the door. Dad peeks his head in, his face lighting up when he sees Kasey. “Look remorseful,” I whisper.

  Dad tries to put his angry face back on, but I can tell he’s just happy to see her, happy she’s here. He walks to the couch and sits next to her. She hugs him like it’s the easiest thing to do in the world. He kisses the crown of her head. I feel like an invader sitting here, so I remain still, trying to become invisible. I scan the room until I focus on the numbers of the microwave clock, feeling the rush of relief as my brain kicks back into motion, settling down the knot of anxiety that has balled up in my stomach.

  I look up to see Luc standing in the garage door.

  “Why don’t you and Luc go outside and talk,” Dad says. “Then I think you and I have a few things to discuss.”

  Even though having Dad know everything terrible about me is horrifying, I feel lighter somehow, like all the numbers and calculations that have weighed me down so long can be shared with somebody.

  But something itches in the back of my mind. Not you too.

  I nod at Dad. “I will.” And I follow Luc outside onto the porch.