by Don Zolidis
“Stop!” she said. “It wasn’t what it looked like!”
I spun on her. “Did you know he was going to be here?” She didn’t answer. “Did you know he was here? Did you plan this?”
“There was nothing going on!”
“You had your arm around him! I’m not an idiot!”
“He’s a friend. He’s just a friend.”
“He’s your ex-boyfriend!”
“He was just being nice!”
I believe I made some kind of coughing noise. “What the hell, Amy? You said you were taking care of your mom tonight! And instead, you’re out here with that guy!”
“Listen to yourself! You sound like a jealous boyfriend right now!”
“WHAT? I am the least jealous person in the universe! I’m also the fucking dumbest! You’re lying to me! You lie to me all the time!”
“No, I didn’t!”
“How long have you been back with him?”
“I’m not back with him!”
“Is this just like us? Do you break up with him all the time too? Do you just alternate between us? Who the hell are you?”
Amy was clutching me now, and though her face was obscured by her hair again, I could tell she had started crying.
Not gonna work this time, I thought.
“My mom fell asleep, and he called me up and…”
“And you didn’t think to call me?”
“I don’t need your permission to go to a party, Craig!”
“Especially when you’re going to be making out with your ex-boyfriend!”
“I didn’t kiss him! He was being nice!”
“Yet. You didn’t kiss him yet.”
She threw up her hands. “All right. Whatever. Think what you want to think.”
“Well, what am I supposed to think? You tell me a lie about what you’re doing. I come to a party, and I find you with your arm around your goddamned ex-boyfriend!”
“I can’t do this,” she said, burying her face again. “I can’t! I’m sorry.” She put her hand against a tree. “I wasn’t going to do anything with him. I was just feeling really sad, so I wanted someone to talk to.”
“You looked really sad,” I said, being mean.
Amy screwed up her eyes at me. “Fuck you,” she said. “You don’t know.”
“You didn’t tell me! Call me if you’re sad! Talk to me! That’s what I’m here for! You can lean on me!”
“I don’t want to lean on you all the time!”
“That’s what I’m here for! About your mom, about school, about prom, about everything! I have been nothing but kind and thoughtful and great with you and you’re out here cuddling with your ex-boyfriend!”
She turned away. “I can’t do this,” she said again. “I’m sorry—I just…I can’t do this right now.” She waved her hand like she was swatting some kind of imaginary bug. “I just wanted a minute where I wasn’t dealing with all the shit in my life; and he called up, and I thought it would be fun. You hate these things; you didn’t want to come out, so I went with him. And, fine, I was having a good time, but I can’t…You can’t force these expectations on me like I’m supposed to be perfect! I wasn’t doing anything. I love you, but I just…I can’t be with you right now.”
Fine, I thought. Fine. You want to do this now, let’s do this now.
It was all piling up, the fight with Kaitlyn, the collapse of my future, Amy…
Let’s just burn it all down, then. That’s how this is gonna go.
“You can’t be with me?! You weren’t with me! You were with him!”
“Stop it! I’m not having this stupid fight—”
“Maybe you should’ve thought of that before—”
“My mom’s got chemo on Monday, okay? She’s going in on Monday. All right?”
I stopped.
“It’s bad, Craig. It’s bad this time.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“My mom’s probably going to die, okay? And I’m the one who’s taking care of her! My dad has checked out; my brother isn’t helping; it’s all on me! Okay?! I’m the one who has to give her her medicine! I have to make sure she eats! I’m the person who gets up in the middle of the night and has to help her get back to sleep! I’m fucking doing everything and it’s too goddamn much! I deal with that every night. My mom is dying. Every. Night. And I’m supposed to be going to school and running things and being your girlfriend—I can’t do it!”
A void opened up inside me. All the words I wanted to say tumbled out of my head.
“And I just keep hurting you. I keep hurting you all the time, and I can’t help it!”
Then she put her head down and stumbled away from me, deeper into the trees. “You want so much from me that I can’t give you right now! And I’m sorry that I keep blowing things up and—”
And that’s when she ran face-first into a low-hanging tree branch.
Amy’s head snapped back, and she dropped to her knees like a rock.
“Oh…FUCK!” she shouted, holding her forehead.
Even in the dark, I could see the blood coming from her face. The branch had torn a long horizontal gash above her right eye, and blood was pouring out of it like a geyser. Maybe not a giant geyser. A small geyser of blood. Still, a worrisome geyser.
“Holy shit!” I said, running to her and barely missing bashing my face against the same tree.
Amy was going fetal, and I put my arms around her shoulders and pulled her to her feet.
“Oh, man,” she said, looking at the blood in her hands.
“It’s fine…it’s fine…it’s just…oh, man, it’s not fine…oh, Jesus,” I said, displaying the calm resolve that would disqualify me for military service. Or being a firefighter, policeman, nurse, doctor, or trash collector.
We stumbled out of the woods.
We were quiet on the entire drive to the hospital. Afterward, I sat in the waiting room of the emergency center. It was probably about midnight, and their magazine selection was horrible. Mostly Ladies’ Home Journal, which appeared to be only articles about doilies and baking stuff.
So I sat there, in a blue plastic chair, staring at the wall.
You don’t give a shit about anyone except you.
Her mom was dying. She wanted to be out of the house to be away from it for a while.
There were people at the party who liked me.
There was a whole world I didn’t understand. A whole world that didn’t center on me. I might not be going to college next year, and I thought it was the end of the world. But it wasn’t. And I’d been fighting over that like it was life itself. And meanwhile, Amy’s mom was fighting for her life. And Amy was taking care of her. What was that like every day? What was going on in her head every day? I had no idea. Of course she needed to get out. I had thought I knew her, but maybe I just knew my idea of her. Maybe she was a different person than the one I had imagined. Maybe her life didn’t revolve around torturing me.
There was a youngish mom there with me. She had checked in with a sick little boy and was now fidgeting in the corner, trying to read a Ladies’ Home Journal and probably hating it.
What was going on in her mind? What was her life like? I wondered what problem the little boy had. Maybe he was dying too.
And then it occurred to me that even though things had been pretty tough the past six months, my whole life had been basically untouched by tragedy. Apart from the litany of dead pets, nothing bad had really happened to me. My grandfathers had died before I was born; I had never broken a bone; my parents were still together. Groash had it worse. Elizabeth had it worse. Brian had it worse. Amy had it worse. I was the luckiest person I knew.
That thought didn’t make me feel good, though. It made me feel like kind of a dick.
Amy came out at about one in the morning. They had bandaged up her face. She had eleven stitches.
“They said I might have a scar,” she said, trying to give a weak little smile.
“It’ll make
you look badass,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Like, I will fuck you up. Do not mess with me. You know the tree that gave me this scar? It’s dead now.”
She laughed a little bit and sat next to me.
“Maybe we should go back there,” I joked. “With, like, a chain saw. You tried to take me out, tree? Say hello to my little friend!”
“Have you ever used a chain saw?”
“No, I’m totally scared of them.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Amy sat there for a second. “Thanks for taking care of me,” she said.
“To be fair, I think I caused this.”
“No.” She shook her head. “You didn’t do any of this.”
“Did you call your parents?”
“No. I guess that’s the benefit of being eighteen. I don’t need to bother them with it.”
“Do you need a ride home?”
“I think so.”
When we stopped at her house, it was nearly one thirty in the morning. I pulled into the driveway and shut off the car.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay.”
Amy bit her lip and looked down. I had turned the car off, and it felt like a coffin in the dark. I tried to think of the words I needed to say—anything that would stop this, or let her know that I understood. But there weren’t any.
“I should go,” she said, after a few minutes.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you too.” She said it like a death sentence.
Then she gave me a hug, and I started crying. That was breakup number six.
Kaitlyn was pretty annoyed with me when I showed back up at the party. Apparently, someone had said that the cops were going to show up. That had cleared out most of the house, but there were still a few diehards there when I found it again. (I only got lost twice!)
“So what happened?” she asked on the ride home.
“With what?”
“With Amy.”
I sighed. It was only a twenty-minute ride home. There wasn’t enough time to tell the whole story. “We broke up. Again.”
“That sucks.”
I turned to look at her. She was staring out the window. Clearly, she had been lobotomized during the party or replaced with an alien replica. Then she turned to me.
“Are you doing okay?”
“Am I doing okay?”
“Yeah. It’s a question.”
“No, I’m not doing okay. I’m doing fucking horrible. I found out I can’t go to college and I got dumped and her mom is having chemo on Monday. It’s been a banner fucking day.”
Kaitlyn nodded. “Yeah.” She turned back to the window. “That all sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry about what I said today.”
“Me too.”
There had been no resolution in the college thing. What were we going to do? My friends were already making their plans for next year. Brian had gotten into Michigan. Groash was going to U-Rock, the community college in Janesville, which, come on, sounds fairly stupid. It’s like everyone who showed up there needed a little validation.
I suck, I’m going to U-Rock.
No, you rock!
Thanks. I feel better.
You rock!
I do rock, thank you.
You rock!
Now you’re overdoing it.
Elizabeth had gotten accepted to Madison and was going to try to make it work. (Her mom had less money than we did, but Elizabeth had the benefit of being an only child, so it was a little easier to swing it.)
But for Kaitlyn and me it boiled down to this: On my mom’s salary we couldn’t afford for both of us to go to college at the same time. Even though tuition was fairly low at Madison, it wasn’t cheap, and the cost of living in the dorms, or even commuting every day on the bus from Janesville, would be enough to break us.
One of us could go.
One of us would need to stay and get a job.
I felt like a plant withering in the dark.
This is how it happens. This is how they shrink you. You take time off, and the next thing you know it’s five years later, and you’re at the GM plant, or the Parker Pen plant, or you’re working in some fast-food place and trying to be assistant manager. And then you get married and you settle and you have kids and your life washes away from you before you ever had the chance to start.
I looked at my stack of college mail. All the shiny pictures; the sunshine; the smiling students wearing sweaters and laughing about Descartes. (He was the French guy behind the whole revolutionary “I think, therefore I am” idea that swept through Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Like, before that, were people confused or something? Hey, am I real? Get back to digging that poop trench, Bob.)
My room started to look like a prison.
No more Amy, no more northern lights, no more eating popcorn with cute girls on a co-ed floor…
Jesus, quit your whining. It’s not all about you.
Oh, sorry, where was I?
So the Wednesday after breakup number six I decided to go to the hospital after school. There was only one hospital in Janesville: Mercy Hospital, which was enormous, so it was fairly easy to call them up and find out where Amy’s mom was staying. With two visits in four days, I was pretty sure they were going to recognize me soon.
Amy’s mom was propped up in one of those adjustable beds watching Jeopardy! when I showed up. There were about ninety-five vases of flowers around the room. I recognized Amy’s handwriting and terrible spelling on one of the cards. Glenn had made a mixtape, apparently.
She looked worn-out. Her eyes were sunk in a bit. She hadn’t lost her hair yet, but you could tell that it was going to go. It didn’t have that whitish sheen anymore. It seemed brittle. Everything about her seemed brittle.
“Hey there,” I said, immediately recognizing the fact that I had forgotten to get flowers or a card because I was a dumbass once again. A little more planning would have gone a long way here.
“Craig! How are ya?”
“Oh, you know.” Girlfriend dumped me. Might not be going to college. But I didn’t have chemo on Monday, so that’s a bonus. “Hangin’ in.”
“Yup,” she said.
“How about you?”
“Well, they took the tubes out, so that’s nice.”
“Oh.” I did not want to hear about tubes. “You got a lot of flowers.”
“Oh yeah. Amazing.”
“It’s kind of weird when you think about it,” I mused. “Like, is it supposed to make you feel better? I mean, think about it. You take something beautiful, and then you cut it up, and then you watch it slowly die next to you.”
She frowned. “You’re kind of a downer, Craig.”
“Sorry.”
“You gotta cheer up. It could be worse.” She laughed a little bit.
“Tubes?”
“Let me tell ya. Not fun.” She shuddered. “So what brings you over here?”
“Figured you could probably use some company. But I see you have the flowers.”
“Don’t talk about the flowers again.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I thought maybe I would do something funny that would cheer you up.”
“Okay. Do it.”
“But I didn’t really think of anything.”
She laughed. “Oh, that’s good.”
“That wasn’t even really a thing.”
“Good timing, though.”
“I guess. At least I’ve got good timing in something.” I smiled bitterly.
“Amy broke up with you again?”
“Yeah. Did she tell you?”
“Oh, sure. We talk all the time.”
“Cool.” It was weird to even think it. I never talked to my parents if I could help it. The thought of Amy explaining yet another breakup to her riveted mother kind of gave me pause.
“How are you at Jeopardy!?” she asked.
“Mediocre.”
&n
bsp; “Good. Pull up a chair.”
So that’s how we spent the next fifteen minutes or so. She got tired pretty easily, so I was able to shout over her and answer the questions first—I even remembered to answer in the form of questions.
“Who is Muhammad Ali?” (He was my go-to answer.)
“Who was Billie Jean King?”
“Who was Socks the Cat?”
“Who the hell knows?” She laughed.
“Who is probably Muhammad Ali again?”
“Why would I know that?”
“What is the Marianas Trench?”
She was asleep. Her breathing was shallow, but steady.
I sat there for a bit, not sure what to do. Maybe she would get better. Maybe the chemo would work. I hoped so. But it all seemed so incredibly huge to me, so utterly beyond my ability to understand. I didn’t know what Amy was going through. I couldn’t know what she was going through.
“Hey.”
Glenn was standing in the doorway. He had his backpack slung over one shoulder and was a little out of breath.
“Hi,” I said.
He gave me a little nod then went over to his mother.
“I think I put her to sleep,” I said. “Not like…not like an animal at the vet or anything, but, you know, she fell asleep while I was here….”
He smiled. “I walked over here from school. I was hoping that I could talk to her.”
“She probably needs to rest. She’s gonna be okay, though.”
“You think so?”
“Well, I mean—I’m not exactly a medical professional, but…”
Glenn looked back down at her. “The doctors don’t think so.”
“What the hell do they know? If they knew what they were talking about, would they have to take so much time in medical school?”
That got a little chuckle out of him. Then it seemed like a curtain fell in the room, cutting out the light. The place grew dimmer.
“I guess I should go,” I said. “You got a ride home?”
“Amy’s coming to get me.”
“Okay. All right. Well, um…take it easy.”
I was halfway out the door when he said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“You think I should tell her?” His eyes were huge and dark under the industrial lighting.