This Might Hurt a Bit

by Doogie Horner

  Mom and Dad were both home at the same time.

  They trudged up the stairs together, and I was wondering why one of them wasn’t staying at the hospital. Then Mom looked at me and said, “I’m sorry, honey.” She looked exhausted, like she had walked all the way home from the hospital.

  I went to my room, and a little while later I heard Grandma’s car pull out of the driveway.

  Nobody came into my bedroom to talk to me. I think my parents were too worn out themselves to do anything else. They were wrung out like dishrags.

  I lay on my bed and watched it get dark. I couldn’t think. All my thoughts felt too big to fit in my brain. I lay on top of the sheets feeling my head stretch, wondering when it would crack.

  When my leg was broken, I’d lain in bed without moving or doing anything for hours at a time, so I decided to try that again. I watched the square of sunset from my window creep around the room, the light getting dimmer and dimmer until my room was dark. I didn’t turn on the light. I didn’t move. I didn’t cry. I didn’t do anything, just waited for that big thought to expand so much it would split the walls and bring the whole house tumbling down around our heads.

  I was grateful when it got so dark that my room disappeared.

  I’ve always liked the nighttime because it’s so quiet and still and there are no other people around. It feels like the whole world is yours, or like maybe the world doesn’t even exist outside of your bedroom. I decided that for all intents and purposes, from this moment on, it didn’t. I refused to be a part of the world anymore.

  It felt like the only sane thing to do.

  I lay on my bed in my clothes and shoes. There was a painful crick in my neck. The pillow was too low, but I didn’t shift the pillow to make it feel better because I knew that if I didn’t move, the night would last forever. The power of my loss had granted me this one-time magic ability, but I had to prove my devotion by not moving an inch. If I could do that, reality would bend to my will, like light bending around a superdense black hole, and the world wouldn’t reappear in the morning.

  God, I thought, that would be great.

  But after a couple of hours I had to take a pee, and I didn’t have the commitment to piss the bed.

  I got up and opened my bedroom door, and the spell was broken: Sure enough, there was the rest of my house, waiting for me. My big plan hadn’t even lasted one night. My stupid life was right where I’d left it. Time hadn’t stopped because Melanie died. Melanie stopped, but the world kept going, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop that. I couldn’t even stop myself. I just kept moving farther and farther away from where Melanie stopped. That was the worst part about it. I was leaving her behind.

  My parents’ bedroom door was next to the bathroom door, across from Melanie’s empty bedroom. I wanted to go into her room and look at her things—her little purple boom box, her hair scrunchies that she hadn’t been able to use for months but that she’d still sometimes wear around her wrists, her My Little Ponies, which she was too old for but whose hair she liked to comb—look at her stuff and maybe even lie down on the carpet, sleep on the floor there. But I didn’t. It seemed too weird.

  Instead I looked at my parents’ door and pictured them lying together on their bed. Were they holding each other? Were they crying? I had no desire to open that door and find out.

  I was already dreading the next morning when I’d have to see them at breakfast, black bags under their sad eyes as we sat across the kitchen table from one another, going through the charade of living, shoveling calories into our food holes because our bodies demanded it.

  After breakfast we’d want to smash the plates or throw them out the window, but instead we’d wash them, because that’s what you do if you don’t want bugs and mice all over your house. Mom would even wipe the counter, because that’s what you do after you put the dishes away.

  I would try very, very hard not to say a word, but eventually I’d have to ask Mom something dumb like, “Are we all out of orange juice?”

  “Yes,” she’d say. “I’ll pick more up this afternoon.”

  When, come on, fuck the orange juice. Burn the orange groves. Detonate a series of controlled explosions along the northern border of Florida and let the whole shattered state float out to sea. How could I care about orange juice at a time like this?

  Easy: I’m thirsty, and orange juice is refreshing. My tongue doesn’t care that Melanie is dead. My body wants food, the Earth wants to spin, time moves forward and wants to keep moving. We must always walk along the path of the clock, so it is written in the tablets of Nardorock.

  Standing in the hallway outside the bathroom and knowing I’d do all those things again made me hate myself. If Melanie’s death meant anything to me, I would refuse to circle the sun. I’d defy the Earth’s rotation and float into space.

  Instead I went to the bathroom, because I drank so much soda with the pizza that I had to pee really bad. My mouth tasted like garlic, so I brushed my teeth, too. I even placed the toothbrush back in the Garfield jelly glass next to the sink. I briefly considered smashing the Garfield glass—I even raised it above my head and was about to throw it down onto the floor—but I was worried Mom or Dad might cut their foot on a piece of glass later in the night.

  I shuffled back across the hall and crawled into bed.

  The next morning I woke up to the sweet smell of waffles cooking out in the kitchen. I crept out, and Mom had already set the table with sunny yellow place mats under the plates and silverware, napkins folded into neat triangles under the forks. The kitchen table looked nice, but there were only three place settings instead of four, and Mom’s eyes were dead and gray like a turned-off TV screen. “How are you feeling?” she asked me in a monotone voice.

  “Fine,” I lied.

  I sat down at one of the settings, and Mom put a warm waffle on my plate. It smelled heavenly, but when I took a bite, the batter tasted like cardboard in my mouth.

  “Hey, Mom . . . can I have some syrup?”

  — — —

  I draw another burning breath and ask “What?” again.

  Mark is still leaning down with his hands on his knees, a shit-eating grin on his weathered face. He can tell he’s hit a nerve.

  “I saaaaiiiid,” he drawls flirtatiously, “do you got your sister’s underwear on under that dress?”

  I scream in his face and punch him in the balls so hard my fist hits his tailbone. He folds up, clutching his crotch. I lunge forward and try to bite his nose, but he jerks back and my teeth clack empty air. Fire flows up through me and I scream again, random curse words, ancient tongues, the language of the Old Ones. My fists are hot-forged iron as I stand and swing a looping uppercut at Mark’s jaw and miss completely, but then throw a left and hit him right in the face. A shower of red sparks spills through the air. The rooftop of Nakatomi Plaza explodes. I am God’s hammer.

  “Mark?” his brother yells from the truck. “Mark!”

  Mark stumbles back and swings at my face, so dizzy he misses by a mile. I storm forward and wrap my fingers around his neck, soft in my iron grip. All my hate flows into my hands, and I squeeze hard, the veins in Mark’s neck pulsing in my palms.

  A world away, the truck door slams shut. “Hey! Hey! Get your hands off my brother!”

  Mark grabs my wrists, but he’s helpless. Every muscle in my body is flexed as tight as if I were grabbing an electric fence—I couldn’t let go if I wanted to. Mark’s eyes bulge and his mouth gapes like a fish trying to breathe in the bottom of a boat.

  Mark’s brother runs toward us. “Let go! Get your hands off him, you psycho!”

  He grabs me around the waist but can’t pull me off Mark. Little red veins race zigzag patterns through the whites of Mark’s eyes, and then something hits me in the side of the head and the world comes unglued.

  The blue sky slides past like a fast train.

  The ground rushes up to kiss me.

  I go through a tunnel.

&nbs
p; I come out the other side and stand up spinning. Mark is curled on the ground and Will is standing over his body defensively, brandishing a brick smeared with blood. He looks scared. He’s scared of me.

  He should be.

  I dip down and grab a brick of my own and wing it at Mark’s brother’s head. He ducks and the brick knocks his Phillies hat off, then flies over his head and smashes the windshield of the pickup truck behind him.

  “Whoa!” Will yells, popping back up. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” He cocks his brick back like he means to throw it if I get any closer, but I lunge at him anyhow. Instead of throwing the brick, he drops it and punches me neatly on the chin, a quick clip that stops me in my tracks. It must knock loose a couple cables in my brain, because I totter backward and fall down again.

  I try to get up, but before I can get a knee under me, Mark’s brother sits on my chest. I claw at him and he grabs my wrists in his hard, calloused hands.

  I try to bite his arms, but I can’t quite reach. He stares at me in shock, and I know I’m acting like an animal but I can’t stop myself.

  “Dude! Chill! Dude!”

  Mark limps over, massaging his throat, and kicks me in the side of the face. “Motherfucker!” he croaks.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Will releases one of my hands to hold Mark back, and when he does, I wriggle out from under him and scuttle toward Mark again like Gollum scrambling for the ring. Something deep inside me struggles to emerge. I can hear it growling as it claws its way up my throat.

  Mark yelps and stumbles back just as strong arms grab me around my waist and hoist me up. The sky spins and tumbles past me as Mark’s brother throws me over his shoulder. My glasses go flying off as the ground rushes up once again and fills my mouth with grass.

  Another tunnel, this one longer than the first. Then I roll over onto my back and, with an effort, up onto my hands and knees.

  I stand up unsteadily and am about to rush Mark again, but Will is ready for me. He slams me backward, pinning me against the truck, the engine warm through the grille, but still I struggle to reach Mark.

  “Dude!” Mark’s brother marvels. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

  I can’t speak, and for a moment I panic. I feel like an animal who used to be a man but has lost the power of speech. But finally I remember how to speak, and there’s a hitch in my voice as I point at Mark and yell, “He made fun of my sister!”

  Will stares at me in disbelief. “So the fuck what?”

  “Yeah!” Mark yells from a safe distance. “So the fuck what?!”

  “My sister is dead, you fucking asshole!” And as I admit it, a valve opens inside me and a great pressure is released. I can hear the air escaping in an agonized wail. I’m crying so hard that the sounds coming out of my throat feel like solid things that I’m throwing up. Stones that have been sitting in the bottom of my stomach for a year. Old batteries and rocks and bile tumble out of me.

  Will lets go of me. My eyes are wide open, but I have trouble seeing as the world wavers underwater, Mark and Will shimmering quadruplets backing away from me.

  I shake. Am I having a seizure? I’m falling apart, but it feels obscenely good.

  I stagger away from the warmth of the truck, carried uncontrollably by the force of my crying. The parking lot teeters back and forth, the pitching deck of a ship in a terrible storm.

  I’m screaming. I’m crying. I yell as loud as I can, the wail leaving me like a monstrous bat flying out of a cave, and I realize it was the last thing inside me.

  I’m empty.

  I’m gone.

  CHAPTER 25

  * * *

  I SHARE THIS WISDOM AS someone who has learned from experience: No matter how long or how hard you cry, eventually you have to stop and put your pants back on.

  After stumbling around the woods for I don’t know how long, I circle back to the vo-tech parking lot and find my pants where I dropped them outside the back door to the gym. I also find my glasses—after a lot of nearsighted peering and crawling around on my hands and knees—miraculously unbroken, in the grass a few feet away.

  I peel the cheerleading dress off, not giving a good gosh golly who sees my pale ass. I can’t believe I beat Mark up while I was wearing this.

  I catch movement in my peripheral vision, near the gym door, and I’m ready to explain myself to Mr. Reali, but when I turn, I see that it’s not the janitor; it’s a frog. It hops up to the gym’s back exit and sits there, looking at me with bulging, inquisitive eyes.

  “Oh my God. Are you . . . ? Are you the frog from biology class?”

  The frog doesn’t answer me—no surprise there. But he doesn’t hop away, either. He just keeps staring at me.

  “You don’t want to go back in there,” I say, pointing at the school. “It’s a jungle. Believe me, you’re safer in the woods.”

  I know he can’t understand me. I know he’s just a frog. But still, he starts hopping away from the school.

  I salute him as he disappears into the high, unmowed grass at the edge of the parking lot. “Good luck, little guy.”

  — — —

  With the utmost trepidation, I call Mom. It’s 4:10, right about the time she would expect me to be walking through the front door.

  The phone rings a long time before she picks up, and when she does, I hear water running in the background.

  “Hello? Kirby?”

  “Hey, Mom. Hey, uh, can you come pick me up?”

  “Pick you up?” She’s confused. “From the corner? Are those darn dogs out again?”

  “No, no. Uh . . .”

  “Are you all right?” Her mom radar is very keen. “Your voice sounds funny. Do you have a cold?”

  My throat is scraped raw from screaming. I must sound like a frog myself. “No, I don’t have a cold. I’m at school.”

  “At school?!” She shifts into full mom mode. “Why are you at school?”

  “Well, I missed the bus and ah . . .”

  Mom puts the phone down to turn off the water. “I’m right in the middle of making dinner,” she says. “The roast is in the oven. I’ll have to turn it off. . . .” She sighs dramatically. “Okay, mister. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  — — —

  I wait in front of the school. Cars and minivans are starting to drive into the main parking lot for the game when Mom pulls up in front of me and absolutely flips out, before her car has even stopped rolling, when she sees I’m all banged up. As I limp around to the passenger’s side and catch my reflection in the car’s window, I almost flip out myself. There’s a huge, bleeding lump on the left side of my forehead where Will hit me with the brick, and half my face is covered in dirt and grass stains from one of the many times I hit the ground. My eyes are red and puffy from crying. I look awful.

  Strangely though, I feel good.

  I slide into the passenger seat and wince, discovering new bruises on my hip, my back—everywhere, pretty much. Mom gapes at me in horror, hands over her mouth.

  “My Lord, Kirby . . . what happened?!”

  “I got into a fight.”

  “A fight? Who? Why?!”

  “It’s kind of a long story, but a guy made fun of Melanie, and I sort of flipped out on him.”

  “Melanie?!” Mom is so shocked that she doesn’t know what to say. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time she’s heard me say Melanie’s name since she died. She’s probably also shocked because she just found out that some stranger made fun of her dead daughter.

  “Why would someone make fun of her?”

  “Well, he didn’t mean to, specifically. He just said ‘your sister,’ and I just, ah . . . I kind of lost it, and uh . . .” I can’t help it; hot tears spring to my eyes. I’m surprised I have any left in me. Usually I wouldn’t cry in front of Mom like this—as a matter of fact, I think crying is another thing she hasn’t seen me do in the past year—but I force myself to look at Mom and let her see me.

  Mom gives me that look of concern that alway
s makes me so angry. I’m about to get annoyed with her. I’m about to regret ever having brought up Melanie. But then I see something else in her expression: understanding. Her face softens, and she puts her hand on top of mine on the armrest between the seats, and for the first time in a long time, I don’t pull away.

  She doesn’t say anything, which is good, because it would probably ruin the moment. Instead she pats my hand and then starts the car. I can see she’s crying a little bit too, but just a little bit.

  We both cry, just a little bit, as we drive home together.

  — — —

  After ten minutes or so of quiet communal grieving, Mom breaks the respectful silence and gets down to the brass tacks of who the sorry sack of a shit was who beat up her son. I tell her that I don’t want to say who it was, that it was sort of my fault too, and that I also beat him up. I tell her that no, I don’t want to call the police, and no, I don’t think we should call the young man’s parents.

  She asks ten times if anything is broken, and I say I don’t think so, although “I think I have dirt up my nose.” I don’t tell her that I got hit with a brick. I say the bump is from my head hitting the ground. Even so, she says that we’ll have to go to the doctor tomorrow to make sure I don’t have a concussion, and she warns me ominously that “Your father will have something to say when he gets home.” This reminds me about my notebook, but surprisingly, thinking about the notebook doesn’t make me panic anymore. The fear is gone.

  Mom looks at me sideways and clucks her tongue. “I bet that friend of yours, Jake, was involved, wasn’t he?”

  I remain conspicuously silent, which I suppose is a pretty clear yes.

  When we get home I take a long, hot shower. I feel wrung out, but also strangely cleansed, like I just finished one of those thirty-day lemon juice and cayenne pepper diets where, at the end, you shit out all the toxic gunk that had built up in the bottom of your intestines over the years. A kid told me he knew a girl who did that once, and at the very end, the last thing she pooped out was a tiny green rock, glowing with toxic radiation. I love that story. It’s such a beautiful lie.