Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  The place smelled bad. Like some sort of chemical.

  “Shut the fucking door!”

  Roman pulled me by my arm so that I was in the room whether I liked it or not, and when he pushed the door shut over the swollen carpet I focused through the screams and smells to see a black guy holding a glowing ember of a metal rod to the bare arm of a white guy, and in the corner a pale redheaded woman was sitting on a blanket, and a diapered baby was propped against the wall, crying and crying.

  The black guy placed a small block of wood in the other guy’s mouth, and the white guy nodded, and then the black guy pressed the burning piece of metal into his partner’s arm, and the one guy squealed like an animal through the wood in his teeth while his friend with the metal smiled an ugly smile. The baby cried and cried and wouldn’t ever stop.

  None of us newcomers said anything. Doing so seemed like a bad idea. I’d been struggling through Hume’s Dialogues and was fixed on the idea of the unmoved mover, which was Plato’s idea that some force must have flipped the switch to set the cycle of the world—one unending system of causes and effects—into motion and that this force, the unmoved mover, was supposed to be God. Father Joe had lent me his copy of Hume after I’d invaded his office one afternoon to discuss how impossible the prospect of God was starting to seem and how totally desperate this was making me. But even Father Joe, with his undone collar, perpetual five o’clock shadow, Radiohead creeping from the stereo, even he, like all people of God I’d met, couldn’t explain what the calling had felt like or how he had come to know God. What he did was give me a book and invite me back to discuss it, which gave me a little bit of hope at the time, even if the book ended up confusing me even more. Because even if God was the unmoved mover, what good did that do for any of us now? So long after the fact?

  Cullen had stepped into my own world and set it into motion. What had moved him, I don’t know. It wasn’t his parents, who’d been gone for I don’t know how long. But something did it. And something had moved that something, and on and on. Cullen was our unmoved mover, and at each key point we waited for him to send his signals from up on high. So we all stood there at the door of apartment 8C, waiting to see what we were supposed to do next.

  When the glowing iron dropped from the white guy’s arm, he—a short, square-headed bunch of muscle with a pockmarked face—spit out the block and snatched a glass tube from the table, ignited one end with a lighter that hummed like a blowtorch, sucked in deep, and blew out an almost invisible blue smoke. He handed the pipe to his partner, who did the same. I thought maybe they’d forgotten we were there. The room filled with that chemical smell again.

  “Terry.” The girl in the corner scratched at her oily hair. “Terry, who are all these kids?”

  The white guy turned to see us.

  Cullen nudged Roman, who stepped forward. “Ter. It’s me.” Roman bent over and looked into the guy’s blank face. “Roman.”

  “What the fuck”—the guy’s throat spasmed, and he swallowed down gulps of air—“do you want?”

  “Uh, I wanted . . .”

  “Who let you in?”

  “You did, man. You, uh, you buzzed . . .”

  Terry rose, taking the pipe from his friend. “I did?” he said. His eyes seemed to come alive all of a sudden, back from the dead. “You knocked, and I said, ‘Who is it?’ and you said, ‘It’s Roman,’ and I opened the door and welcomed you into my home and told you to bring all these goofy-ass kids with you? Is that what happened?”

  “Terry . . .”

  “Is that what just happened, Roman?”

  “But you buzzed us up.”

  “Is that what happened, yes or no? You knocked, and I answered, and let you in. Yes or no?”

  “No, man. That’s not what happened.”

  Terry sniffed and wiped his nose with his fist. The blister on his arm was in the shape of an E. He looked us over, lingering on Bri, then reached out and touched her face—poked at it with his middle finger, dimpling her cheeks, then moving down to her neck, and then her breasts, just poking like a kid nudging a dead body with a stick. I stared at the ground. He poked her chest again and again, and I stepped toward him, but Cullen gripped my wrist and shifted in front of me. Terry glanced at us, barely distracted, his eyes blank again, dead, and Bri took his finger and put it in his own mouth. He grinned—a dumb, drooly smile with his middle finger hanging from his teeth—and then handed the pipe to Bri.

  Bri stared at the pipe. Cullen dug his grip into my forearm. Terry glared at me. “Easy,” he said.

  I thought about how Amir wouldn’t just stand here and let this happen. I pictured ripping the guy’s esophagus out. Gripping and pulling it through his skin. If I’d already had a gun in that moment I probably would’ve shot the guy and not thought twice about it. My sister held the pipe in her hand and looked at me, and I looked away from her. Suddenly I couldn’t understand that this was where we’d come and this was what we were doing.

  “Just show me you cool,” Terry said. “That’s all. You can pay?”

  Cullen produced a wad of cash from his pocket.

  “Perfect, man. So, just show me you cool. That you not just a bunch of assholes who broke into my shit and don’t even knock.” He pointed to the pipe, wobbling where he stood, then turned to his friend on the couch. “Fuck,” he said, fingering the blistering scar on his arm. “Shit kills.”

  The guy on the couch nodded. The baby was crying again.

  Cullen took the pipe and the lighter from Brielle and smoked from the pipe—sucked a puff of smoke that gathered inside the glass like a tornado and then shot from the chamber into his mouth. He coughed it back up again.

  Terry laughed and shook Cullen’s shoulder.

  “Okay?” Cullen said.

  Terry watched Bri. He wobbled on his heels and reached his finger out again, but she snatched it before it touched her. She raised her eyes to meet Terry’s, and when I looked over to see this I wasn’t as angry as I’d just been. Instead, I was surprised to find that this wasn’t my sister at all. Something had changed in her face. Her eyes squinted and her jaw tightened, and she gazed at this guy with his tattooed neck and the tiny beads of blood oozing from his arm and a head twisted with crack or meth or whatever it was in the pipe that made all that blue smoke. She looked at him with the look of a girl who not only belonged in the room but somehow seemed to own it. She didn’t say anything, but everyone saw it and got real quiet. Her body shifted a little, and her chest rose, and she took Terry’s finger, placed it between her teeth, and bit down, softly at first so that Terry’s eyes blinked and his knees twitched, but then harder and harder until Terry folded and blurted out a screaming laugh, his body bent and hanging by a fingernail from Bri’s teeth, groaning, one hand on his crotch, until she let him drop and he curled up on the floor, squirming around like a cut-in-half worm.

  The redhead rose from the corner and was screaming at Bri, “Fucking bitch! Fucking stupid bitch!” The guy from the couch intercepted her and pushed her back into her corner, saying over and over: “Calm. Calm.” But even then, the Bri who eyed the girl wasn’t any Bri I’d ever seen before. She glared at the girl like she wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Brielle

  THE O’DELLS do not exactly thrive on confrontation. Only once do I remember a true familial altercation—at my grandmother’s house down the shore, soon after my grandfather had died, during a period in which I’d once overheard Grandma telling my mother, her daughter, that she’d been crying herself to sleep every night for the past month and a half. The trips had grown into caretaking missions—checking in with Grandma, cooking a small dinner for her, some vacuuming, some laundry. Maybe we went to the beach and maybe we didn’t. And in this new world, Ray and I—no longer adorably scrappy and photogenic youngsters but now gawky and surly teenagers—faded into the background. Maybe it was that fading that let my aunt and my
grandmother forget themselves one night and burst into a shouting match that shook the walls of my grandmother’s seaside cottage and culminated in my aunt—my mother’s drunk, red-cheeked, red-haired sister—hurling a beer bottle at my grandmother that just missed her head and smashed into the wall behind her.

  Mom and Dad quickly escorted us away from the fracas that had shaken our world, where family meant everyone getting along at all costs. Where there was no bellowing and no swearing, and if there were any real issues they were, as far as my brother and I knew, resolved quietly and mysteriously behind closed doors by grown-ups. But there on a warm July night in Lavallette, New Jersey, with the salt of the ocean sneaking through the screened porch and a pot of crabs boiling on the old yellow stove, suddenly the veil had dropped, and behind it lay a trembling and violent rage that shook me to the core so much that I stamped my head to my mother’s shoulder and pushed my palm over my other ear to plug the gap and halt the flood of growing up coming on too fast. Mom hurried us out of the house, loaded us in the car, and Dad drove us away—an hour and a half back to Rosewood—hoping to let the moment dissolve before the memory congealed into permanence for Ray and me. At some point on the way home, Ray started crying and we pulled over so Mom could sit in the backseat with him. I had to move to the front. I remember wondering why Mom couldn’t just sit in the middle, between the two of us, but I never said anything. I just curled up against the window in the front seat and felt so alone, trying to forget what I’d seen that night.

  It was a similar feeling that overtook me that day in Elizabeth. Those same thoughts: Get out of here, Bri. Make this stop. Stop the screaming and forget it now, because you are not safe here. If you stay much longer, this will be inside you for good.

  But I didn’t leave. We were huddled close together—Cullen’s arm touched my shoulder, and I focused on feeling him there. I was passable as long as Cullen was here, and there he was, I could feel him. His world. His story. And in his story, I was meant to be the type of girl who wouldn’t gasp and weep and fumble for the door but instead would do something bitter or cruel or perverted or whatever it was that I did when I took that guy’s finger in my teeth and clamped down harder and harder with a sick, simmering anger, staring at the girl coming at me from the corner—a sparkling fire of bone and freckles and big lost eyes flaring at me—telling her with just one look: Back. The fuck. Off.

  And it worked.

  They took the money and gave us a gun.

  Cullen pocketed the pistol inside his coat, patting it while his hands twitched, his mouth seeming to chew on his tongue, nodding at Terry and his partner, who now held a glowing metal rod over a hot plate by the window. Terry grinned at me when we left, sucking on his finger, eyes twinkling with perversion.

  In the truck, on the way back, Cullen rocked in the front passenger seat. Shoulders hunched, fingers clawing at his neck, he couldn’t stop moving, chewing, looking all over, and talking because of the stuff Terry had made him smoke.

  “I’m fucked up,” he was saying, cracking his neck. “God, I’m fucked up.” He whipped his head back and forth and popped his eyes wide, letting the icy wind from an open window whip his face. “Shit, God. How long does this last?”

  Roman shrugged. “One time I smoked a dime bag laced with PCP. Lit me up for a while.”

  “Everyone-always-says-that.” Cullen’s words ran together as one. “That they smoked some shit laced with whatever. Whatever, man. I can’t even . . .”

  “I did, though. For real.”

  “Whatever, man. I never seen anybody feel like I do from smoking a blunt, Ro.”

  I dared my hand onto his shoulder, and he shrugged it off. Ray pulled his jacket in tight against the wind from Cullen’s window.

  “What’s it feel like?” Ray asked.

  “A lightning storm. Like . . . like my veins . . . my veins are electrical sockets and my brain is, like, squeezing out through my eyes.”

  Roman reached over and popped open the glove compartment while he steered. “Grab that.”

  Cullen produced a leather eyeglass case and took a small joint from it.

  “Calm you down,” Roman told him.

  Cullen flipped through the glove compartment and found a lighter. A trembling hand fixed the thin, twisted thing between his lips, and with a flick and a spark it flamed from one end. He pulled on it, eyes closed, breathing in until he couldn’t fit one bit more, and then one last pull on top of that, all of which he spit out in a spastic fit of choking.

  He passed it back to Ray with his chest still convulsing. Ray took it between his fingers, considered it, and then passed it to me without inhaling. A gray urban world flickered by. Irvington or Orange or Brick Church. I didn’t even know. Just rails and houses and something of a sky—all smoky and dimmed beneath a dreary blue winter light.

  I held the joint. Cullen fixed his stare at the dashboard, stuck in his pose like a bird I saw once on our backyard fence post. It was so stiff and motionless I thought it was dead, but Dad told me it was “stunned.” Lincoln must have scared him, he told me. Scared him stiff. Stunned, not dead, was Cullen, looking at the dashboard and not at me.

  I put the joint to my lips and breathed in.

  “Like you’re going underwater,” Cullen mumbled. “A big breath like you’re going under.”

  I tried again, and this time I felt it. Suffered the smoke pushing into me then fleeing. Cullen picked the joint from my fingers while I coughed so much I thought I might die.

  “Feel better?” Roman said.

  Cullen shook his head no. Dank smoke settled into the old upholstery. The truck rattled out of ironbound streets and into the suburbs, where the season’s first Christmas lights sparkled from handsome houses like thousands and thousands of tiny stars in the dull twilight. Cullen chewed on his tongue and turned the gun over in his hands, feeling its weight.

  The pot swallowed me up into myself like a starburst. Left me windless and cold and fluttery. Aware of my heart and its insistence. Its relentlessness. I didn’t like it, and I was left wondering what in the world made me think I would. I reached out to Ray and took his hand in mine, but he quickly pulled it away. My breathing tripped, and suddenly I was crying. But then I had the thought that maybe I’d been crying all along, and it was only now that I noticed it.

  Cullen

  IT WAS METH. I’m sure of it. Felt like my blood was on fire for like forty-five minutes, and then it was gone and I was burned out. Bone dry. Next day at school I fell asleep in the library before the first bell. My car was in the shop getting new shocks, so I’d hopped on the school bus with all the freshmen and sophomores that morning, which delivered me thirty minutes early. I’d curled up in a cubby at the far end of the library before class, and when I woke it was the middle of third period and nobody knew I was there. I felt so shitty that I just left. Walked home. Took me three hours to cover the ten miles home, but it was better than the alternative—staggering into the dean of men’s office and trying to explain why I was so wiped out that I’d slept through almost the entire morning. Why my eyes were shot with blood and why my breath reeked like death no matter how many times I brushed my teeth. I stopped at White Castle on the way home and ate a six-pack of burgers before hurling them up in the filthy bathroom. When I got home, Nana was halfway through Days of Our Lives.

  I collapsed on the couch next to her. She waited until the first commercial break to turn to me, confused.

  “What’re you doing home?” She spoke in a perpetual whisper, courtesy of six decades’ worth of Marlboro Reds.

  “I’m sick,” I told her.

  She leaned over, the chair creaking, to peek out at the driveway, where the car was missing. “How’d you get here?”

  “Walked.”

  She watched the show. I tried to sleep but couldn’t—my brain felt like someone was stretching it end to end and it was about to come apart in
the middle. Many minutes passed. Another commercial break.

  “Walked?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me see your face.”

  I leaned my head halfway off the couch.

  “You’re sick?” she said.

  I nodded. She inspected my face. And then smiled.

  “What?” I said.

  “Just like your dad.”

  “I’m sick!” I insisted.

  “Your dad always assumed I was some kinda dummy too. What’d you get into last night?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing,” she said, smiling, nodding. “Mm-hm.”

  The show came back on. I remembered that I hadn’t made a sandwich for her that morning, feeling as terrible as I did and rushing to catch the dumb yellow school bus three blocks away. It took just about all of my strength to make it to the kitchen now, where I slapped three pieces of turkey and one piece of Swiss on a roll and cut an apple into eight slices.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said, when I returned with the food.

  I plopped it on the TV tray next to her La-Z-Boy. “Yeah, yeah.”

  I was so exhausted, about to tilt over like a rotten tree onto the couch, when Nana said, “There’s a beer in the bottom drawer of the garage fridge.”

  “Huh?”

  “Drink it,” she said, not taking her eyes off the show. “It’ll help you sleep.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  She nodded. Watched the show.

  “Nothing,” she said again, smirking, chuckling softly. “Mm-hm.”

  I had to hand it to her. At eighty-three, she couldn’t remember to make—nor sometimes even eat—her own food, and she needed an oxygen tank to help her breathe, and even right now, as she looked at me, a bewildered, watery gaze in her eyes, I couldn’t be sure if she knew for certain—as she had just moments ago—that I was her grandson and not her son . . . but she always knew when I was lying. She couldn’t have known exactly what kind of seriously off-the-wall stuff I’d gotten into yesterday, but still, she knew enough. And I was thankful for that, actually.