It shouldn’t have been a surprise when he started drinking on top of everything else. It was your standard downward spiral, the whoosh of a toilet being flushed as the life our family once knew swirled down the drain.
After that, whenever things got heated between my parents, he’d stay and fight. Rather than going outside to clear his head like he used to, he’d follow Mom around the house and keep yelling. Sometimes he’d even give her shoulder a little shake or poke her in the chest to drive a point home. These were things he’d never done before his brain injury. Once, he tapped his finger in the middle of her forehead, and not too gently, either. I stood in a dim corner of the room, out of his way but keeping an eye on him, clenching my fists over and over.
“Stop it,” my mother said. It was clear she was trying to keep from crying.
“Well, you don’t listen,” he told her, tapping again. “What else am I supposed to do?” His voice was slurred. I’d already seen him at the bottle that morning, pouring some whiskey into his coffee cup when he thought I wasn’t watching.
“Cut it out,” I told him, my voice shaking.
He rushed at me in silence as Mom screamed at him to stop. Grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me down onto the rug. “What did you say to me, boy? Don’t you ever talk that way to me again, you hear?”
After that, we never knew what to expect, never knew how he might act on any given day or night.
11
AGNES
DAY 90: MARCH 27
My Easter basket is full of jelly beans, marshmallow chicks, and more chocolate than I’ll probably be able to eat for the rest of the year. I also got a fancy Victorian sugar egg, one with a peephole you can look through to see the little sculpted frosting rabbit mom with her two rabbit children opening their Easter baskets full of carrots. It’s a pretty impressive panorama, really.
That afternoon, I log in to the online progeria community to wish everyone who celebrates it a happy Easter. The website isn’t a huge part of my life or anything. There are no more than a couple hundred of us progeria kids alive at any given time, and we’re all scattered across the globe. Still, I have bonded with some of the other kids, and I like to stay in touch. The hardest thing is logging in only to see that someone isn’t doing well, or worse, that someone I talked to only a month or so ago has died. For some reason, it’s their parents I always worry about most.
Sometimes, like today, when people the world over are celebrating rebirth, I catch Mom watching me when she thinks I don’t notice. Her eyes take in my gnarled hands with their oversize joints and brittle, misshapen fingernails. My bird bones and loose skin. I wonder if Mom is thinking that this is how she might look at eighty, at ninety.
A mother shouldn’t be able to see her own future in her child. Then again, since she grew up not knowing her real mother, my mom doesn’t have anyone to watch for these kinds of clues. I guess that makes me a sort of oracle. That can’t be all bad, right?
12
MOIRA
DAY 89: MARCH 28
Agnes goes straight to her room after school on Monday to finish homework and edit photos on her computer. I don’t feel like doing my homework yet. I’m a straight-A student who manages to make procrastination work for me, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to break my streak by getting stuff done early for a change.
Since I don’t feel like going home yet, either, it’s a relief when Agnes’s mom, Deb, summons me out to their little backyard patio. Once we’ve settled into a couple of plastic chairs, Deb snags a partially smoked cigarette from an ashtray sitting on the little table between us. “I need to quit,” she mutters, shooting a guilty glance at the back door. “Agnes hates it.” She lights and inhales in one quick motion. I still like hanging out with her, though. Deb’s one of the few adults who don’t seem at all fazed by my clothes or my makeup. Probably it’s because she’s pretty much seen it all. Agnes told me a long time ago that her mom grew up as a foster kid who was shuttled from house to house and never really had any family to speak of until she met Agnes’s dad.
Not that I have anything against spending time with my own parents. Sometimes, though, it just seems like they’re too stuck in their own … worldview … to really relate to me. While I, for example, feel most at peace lost in thoughts of hard-core thrash music and general urban destruction, my parents are ardent worshippers of nature. While I can’t get enough of distorted guitar licks and screaming vocals, they’re late-blooming flower children who still listen to Wavy Gravy and Frank Zappa. In the nineties, when all the other twentysomethings were climbing the dot-com ladder and flipping houses, my parents were camping naked somewhere along the Pacific Crest Trail, or gifting at Burning Man, or mourning Jerry Garcia.
The second my older brother, Grant, was born, they put him in a hemp baby sling and just sort of incorporated him into their lifestyle. It was only after I came along that they reluctantly settled down and got jobs with a couple of local nonprofits that focus on environmental education and the arts. My mom bought copies of the Moosewood Cookbook and Tales from a Vegan Table. She became the ultimate hippie homemaker, baking dairy-free carob chip cookies and tie-dyeing all of my T-shirts.
This was all well and good until that horrendous sixth-grade year, when kids decided that the only acceptable clothes and home lives were those patterned directly after the latest top-twenty pop videos and Disney sitcoms. It didn’t seem to matter that nobody actually had a life like that. You just had to look and act like you did to be considered acceptable. It’s probably the reason I find Agnes’s interest in shiny, sparkly, bubble-gum pop star stuff so distasteful. I deal with it, of course, just like Agnes deals with my reaper-like taste in clothes and music, but it’s not always easy.
For a while, I tried really, really hard to be the kind of acceptable the sixth-grade ruling class insisted upon. I tried to wear the right clothes and watch the right shows (always at Agnes’s house, since my own parents are totally anti-TV. They even have a “Kill Your Television” bumper sticker on their restored Vanagon). It didn’t take me long to figure out how expensive those acceptable clothes could be, though. And Mom refused to buy any item that wasn’t a) practical and b) absolutely necessary.
Enter Deb. One day toward the start of junior high, she taught me and Agnes how to sew a few different types of stitches on her old Singer sewing machine. At first, we made basic things, like pot holders and Christmas stockings, before moving on to simple A-line skirts. Not too long after that, I started branching out and experimenting with my own patterns.
Unfortunately, no matter what style possibilities I could envision in my head or bring to life on the sewing machine, it didn’t seem to matter. At school I was still just the big girl who got bigger every day. No matter how many diets I tried, I remained the easy-to-strike target for as many insults as my classmates cared to hurl my way. By the end of grade school, I’d heard it all: Freakshow … Lard Ass … Ten-Ton Tessie … Humpback … Can’t believe nobody’s harpooned you yet.
“You okay?” Deb asks, squinting at me.
“Yeah.”
“So, what’s this I hear about some guy insulting you and Agnes at school over a week ago?”
One of the things I’ve always loved most about Deb is that she’ll never push you to talk if you just kind of want to hang out and say nothing instead. So it means something that she’s pushing a little for information now. I can’t blame her for wanting to know. Agnes is always trying to protect her mom from stress and worry, and I’m sure it makes Deb nuts that her own daughter thinks she’s such a wimp. Because she isn’t. Not only is she a single parent, but she’s attending college online so she can get her teaching credential. When Deb’s not studying, she works as a substitute teacher to make ends meet and get experience. Still, at the end of the day, she can’t out-stubborn her own four-foot-tall daughter. I know for a fact that when Agnes decides to clam up about a situation, like this new one with Boone Craddock, nothing’s going to convince her to do othe
rwise.
“Tell me what really happened,” Deb says, sneaking another puff of her cigarette. “Tell me all the stuff Agnes won’t.”
“God, where do I start?” I answer. “I seriously wanted to kill him. Still do.”
Deb blows smoke out the side of her mouth and smiles. “Well, he’ll be coming here to rake leaves next week, so maybe you’ll get your chance.” She waves the smoke away with one hand.
“He’s what?”
“Apparently, the school is trying to take a ‘creative approach’ to the bullying problem.” She makes air quotes with her fingers. “That’s what the principal told me, anyway.”
“God.”
“Yeah. I have to say, though, part of me feels bad for the kid. I’m pretty sure he and his mom had a hard go of it after that thing with his father. I mean, don’t get me wrong—the principal told me what he called the two of you, and I think he’s…” Deb glances at the back door again to make sure Agnes isn’t within earshot. Then she lowers her voice to a whisper. “I think he’s a complete shit for that.”
We sit there for a while in silence while I relive the cafeteria scene in my mind, how I didn’t recognize Boone at first from the back. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so nasty when he started holding up the line. But I had the shakes, like I always do before lunch. Mainly, though, I was just trying to protect Agnes from the fight or whatever it was that had broken out in the line behind us. Boone’s slowness in getting the hell out of our way almost seemed like a hostile act.
“You remember that thing with his dad, right?”
I nod, still half lost in thought. “Yeah. I never really heard details, though. And Boone left school right after, so…”
“I never got all the details, either,” she says. “He was a nice boy back when you all hung around together, wasn’t he?”
Agnes comes out to the patio before I can respond. She frowns at the ashtray and at the cigarette in Deb’s hand.
“We should work on the dresses Saturday,” I say in my brightest voice to distract her.
“I can’t,” Agnes responds. “It’s my dad’s weekend.”
Deb rolls her eyes.
“Good luck with that,” I tell her. “Just don’t come back here and try to convert me or anything.”
“They’re not religious wackos,” Agnes says. “Jeez.” She turns to go back inside.
“If you say so,” I call after her, unable to stop myself. “But don’t let their churchy propaganda get inside your head. I like you just the way you are, snowflake.”
13
BOONE
DAY 88: MARCH 29
“I’m talking to you as a friend here.”
I’m back in the principal’s office, aka my second home.
“You’re not a bad kid,” Weaver’s saying. “I know that. But, unfortunately, the world isn’t going to know that if you keep going around knocking people out every time somebody gets in your face. You just can’t do that, son.”
Don’t call me son, I think. Out loud I say, “I didn’t punch her.”
“This time.” Weaver creaks back in his chair. “Look, I know things have been hard for you since … well, for a long time now. And I know things are even harder now that the ACE program’s been cut. Some other former ACE students are struggling right now, too. But I think you’ll find you can fit in to regular school just fine if you—”
I don’t necessarily mean to snort, but I snort anyway.
“Is something funny?” Weaver sits up straighter now. Ceases to look like an ally.
“Just the way you call this ‘regular’ school,” I answer him. “Like ACE was somehow irregular.”
The principal sighs.
I look down at my hands, which are dotted with calluses where the ax handle and the sledge handle and the mucking fork handle and the shovel handle have rubbed in different spots. My fingernails are chewed down and grimy, and my wrists disappear into the ratty but still-hanging-in-there cuffs of my dad’s old Carhartt jacket. I’m embarrassed by these hands. Nobody else at school has hands like these, but what am I supposed to do? Stop using them? That’s a laugh.
Thing is, Weaver’s right. I know I should chill out, but how can I when people are constantly trying to get a rise out of me? They have no idea what I’m capable of doing to them, either. I would gladly kill the next jock who gave me shit if I thought I could get away with it. But you can’t say that kind of thing in “regular” school.
You have to keep it inside.
That’s not how it was in my alternative classes. The ACE building is only about a hundred yards away from where I’m sitting now, but it couldn’t have been more different from the regular version of high school Weaver’s so proud of. Not that it was an endless group therapy session or anything. It was still school. Hell, it was this school, but at least we bad seeds had some time and space most days to chill a little and talk about whatever stuff might be eating away at us. At least I got to hang out with students from all four grades and not just other sophomores like me. Now that we’re all mainstreamed, I only see the other ACE kids in the hallways and in a few of my classes. It almost seems like the new schedules were designed to keep the former ACE tenth graders apart. Everyone’s so busy trying to assimilate that we barely talk to one another. Sometimes there’s a S’up, sometimes a quick chin-jut greeting, but that’s it.
“Getting back to this most recent incident,” Weaver says, “we’ve contacted Ms. Delaney.”
“Agnes’s mom,” I say, remembering.
“Yes. And she’s agreed with our assessment that a form of … service on your part would be an appropriate response here. I’m thinking yard cleanup, maybe some heavy lifting she needs help with around the place. You’re a strapping guy. You’ll need to complete two days’ worth of service, total. At least two hours each day. Weekdays after school or weekends are both fine.”
I have to work and haul water on the weekends, so that’s out. “Do I have to?”
“It’s that or long-term suspension at this point. Possibly expulsion.”
I don’t need to think about this for very long. If I refuse to do the service, I’ll be out of school. And no offense to Mom, but there isn’t a chance in hell I’m going to spend more time at home than I absolutely have to. I love her and everything, but … no.
“I’ll do it,” I tell Principal Weaver. “Yard work, lifting, whatever. I’ll do the service.”
14
AGNES
DAY 87: MARCH 30
“Hey, Muscles!”
Dad calls me this sometimes, especially when it’s been a while since we’ve seen each other. He first said it when I was in second grade and he let me win at arm wrestling.
I climb into the backseat of his car Wednesday after school. I have a doctor’s appointment, and since I’ll be spending the night at his house anyway, Dad thought it would be nice if he drove me there for a change. Afterward, we’ll go get ice cream. When he asked what I thought of the idea, I heard Moira’s voice in my head saying, Whatever floats your boat. Out loud I said, “Sounds great.”
Today’s appointment should be pretty run-of-the-mill. Typically, a nurse will check my height and my weight, neither of which has gone up since I was seven. Dr. Caslow will ask if I have any new pain or mobility issues and give me updates on drug trials I’ve been invited to participate in. Occasionally, some specialist on aging or heart disease or Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (the fancy name for what I have) will ask for permission to publish the results of my various tests in medical journals. As a rare case (I’m almost sixteen and haven’t croaked yet), I’m in pretty high demand that way.
Dr. Caslow is my main doctor. He’s a gerontologist who also practiced pediatrics in his younger days. Sometimes I meet with him at the hospital instead of during his rounds at the senior center, like when specialized tests are needed, but that hasn’t been the case for a while. I consider him family. Over the years, I’ve been poked and prodded by some of the top progeria doctors
and researchers in the world, but he was the one who first diagnosed me when I was a toddler. Like most progeria kids, I looked totally normal when I was an infant. It wasn’t until I was almost two years old that my growth slowed way down. My body was also starting to show some of the classic signs that a couple of doctors in nineteenth-century England first noted when they “discovered” the disorder that would one day be mine: there was my skinny little body and my comparatively too-large head to start with. Then there was my hair, which was falling out, and my skin, which looked and felt like it was drying up.
Today, Dr. Caslow is going to check my joints, which have been really sore lately, and my heart, which has started doing this flutter-kick sort of thing in my chest when I get even the slightest bit excited or upset. I know these things are to be expected. Kids like me deal with all the typical stuff old people do. We just do it sixty or seventy years early, when kids our actual, chronological age are cheerleading, skateboarding, and running track. I try not to let it get to me. Sometimes I even succeed.
* * *
Kitty’s the first person I see when we walk through the big double doors of the senior center. She’s a glamour queen in her dotage who used to be a foxy Chicago socialite. When Kitty moved here to be closer to her kids and grandkids, she refused to give up her makeup and diamonds and fancy clothes. Today, she’s decked out in a silk pantsuit, lounging on one of the sofas in the lobby.
“Darling!” she cries, getting slowly to her feet when she spots me.
I walk into her open arms for a Chanel No. 5–scented hug. “Hi, Kitty.”
100 Days Page 4