Lesley Anne Cowan

by Something Wicked (v5)

  After that, sometimes we’d order a pizza. Or sometimes we’d play Scrabble, and I’d joke how it made me feel a million years old, until I started to kick his ass at it. Sometimes we’d be silly. I’d play tic-tac-toe with a pen on his stomach. Or he’d try to balance a pepperoni slice on my nose. But most of the time we just talked about stuff like our childhoods and friends and parents. And about heavy shit. Like him having to deal with his mother, who has an eating disorder and was hospitalized. Or his depression, which forced him to drop out of university. Or about my father, who left my mom when I was small, and how I wasn’t interested in finding him because I knew it would only be a disappointment.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I searched my head, thinking about his question. “Yeah. I know that’s not an exciting answer. But it’s like, ‘Fuck you.’ You know? What am I going to do, ruin my life because he’s a loser?”

  “Sometimes I’m amazed you’re only sixteen.”

  “Just turned …” I reminded him.

  “Well, anyway. You’ve lived a lot of life already.”

  “How come you’re the only one who thinks that I’m amazing?”

  His answer was to pull me closer. Which was the perfect response, because sometimes words aren’t the best way to answer a question.

  And I’d wished I could stay there forever. On that bed. In those sheets. In that summer. I wished that I could just lie there in my underwear and play silly games and bare my honest soul to someone. But eventually and always, I had to get dressed. And with each piece of clothing, I felt myself disappear under the layers.

  Socks / daughter.

  Shirt / whore.

  Jeans / student.

  Hoodie / friend.

  Studded belt / bitch.

  Fifeen

  Michael made me a different person. He made me want to be a better person. Sometimes I’m embarrassed at how stupid I was with him. I used to make him greeting cards out of construction paper and glue on ribbons. And I cried in front of him all the time. About nothing. It was like I was my mother. I’d just come through the door and fall into the cushy couch and bawl while he’d get me some juice and whatever food he had around. Then he’d sit beside me, pull me close to him, and just rub the back of my head. And when I finally stopped my blubbering and was calm enough to tell him what was wrong, I couldn’t think of anything to say because my words would have sounded so dumb by that point: Ally was being a bitch, I failed a science exam, my mom got drunk last night. Big deal.

  Usually I’d start to tell him all this but then, in the middle of it, I’d just start laughing at my own pathetic self, and he’d start laughing and then we’d kiss, and my mouth would be on his, sucking in his happiness like he was some kind of helium making me light again.

  Even my voice would get all squeaky and high-pitched, and I’d giggle like a little girl.

  “I just don’t get how he could leave me,” I tell Jess over the phone after going over it for the millionth time.

  “Don’t be a stupid idiot,” she comforts me. “You are twelve years younger than him. He couldn’t take it, Melissa. The fact that he left you proves he loved you. It was too much for him. If he didn’t love you, he would have stuck around and just duped you. You see? He had to leave. Put a barrier between your love. It’s so romantic, really.”

  “Yeah, tragic.”

  “Yeah. Tragic. Anyway, he’ll probably come back,” Jess speculates. “He’s probably just confused. You guys were really in love.”

  I want to believe what she says, because of all my friends, Jess knows the most about love. She has a good boyfriend. She and Devon have been together for eight months and they’ve never had a fight. But that’s because he’s so dull he could never bring his heart rate up high enough to get upset about anything.

  I call Ally next. Big mistake.

  “You need to forget about him,” she blurts out, and then puts me on hold to answer the other line. She was always jealous of Michael and me. I know she’s tired of me talking about him all the time. Even I am getting sick of me. “He’s a loser. It’s his loss,” she adds when she comes back.

  “You can’t stop loving someone just like that, you know. You can’t just turn it off.”

  “Well, he did.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Well, he did.”

  “He was good to me,” I persist.

  I can hear Ally’s eyes rolling. “Whatever.”

  I make up a reason to get off the phone. I don’t need to hear that. I know he loved me. What we had here was real. And even if it wasn’t, I’m still grateful for it all, because my heart isn’t dead like before. Sure, it’s a pathetic, wheezing, oozing open wound, but it’s not dead. And I’d rather it be whimpering than numb.

  Sixteen

  I come home after the day program and my mother’s bedroom door is closed. I see our superindendent Giovanni’s grimy shoes in the front hall, and his dumb-ass waist pouch on the couch.

  I grab a Coke and chips and go back out. I don’t want to be in there when they’re together. I don’t want to see Giovanni come out of the room, his hairy fat belly hanging over his ugly tighty-whiteys, shuffling off to the bathroom.

  Giovanni and my mother have been screwing for years, almost ever since we moved in. I don’t know what to make of it. I used to not have a clue, but now that I’m older, they don’t hide it. It’s like he’s the man around the house without being the man in the house. He fixes our toilet. He bleeds our rads each fall. He hooked up our cable TV to the new satellite dish. And when my mom’s car got smashed up in the parking lot, Giovanni had the guy in a headlock until he coughed up his ID and insurance papers.

  “He’s a nice person,” my mom explained one night. “We have a good time together. But it is what it is. It’ll never be more, and we’re both happy with that. There are some men who just can’t be in a relationship.”

  “So why are you with him?”

  She pauses, fluttering her long, overly mascaraed eyelashes, which means she’s thinking hard about this one. “Because it’s easy, I suppose.” She takes a long, pensive drag on her cigarette.

  What I don’t ask is if she tells her boyfriends about him. Or if she’s getting a reduction in rent. Or if she’s fucking him because she’s using him. But I don’t think it’s as clear as that. I don’t think they even spend much time worrying about it. It’s just this unspoken thing that happens. And I suppose that’s what sex is sometimes.

  “Sometimes sex is just sex,” my mom said one time. “Sometimes it’s love. Sometimes it’s a physical need. Sometimes it’s a barter.”

  “Barter?”

  “You know. Like a currency. That happens even in marriages. You know, the wife wants a new kitchen, so she puts out. It’s sort of weird.”

  “Weird,” Echo repeats, pretending not to know what she’s talking about. But truthfully, I get it.

  It’s like me having sex with Sid, the boy in my building whom I’ve known for a thousand years. He likes me. He always has. So every once in a while, before I met Michael, we’d screw around. Why? Because there’s some kind of obligation, some kind of guilt, I suppose. He’s always giving me alcohol or weed, whenever I want it, so it’s sort of just understood. I try to find other sources, but it’s hard to give up something that’s free. I suppose, if I were honest, I’d say I sleep with him because of all this. But it doesn’t feel that way when we’re together. It doesn’t feel icky, though most of the time I’m high. It just feels, well … like sex. A climax. A shudder. An absence from my life. And then a beautiful, beautiful stillness.

  It’s ironic that the one person I love, the greatest love of my life, won’t have sex with me. Michael said it wasn’t right. That we’d wait until I was eighteen, when he’d marry me. But we did mostly everything else, which was confusing at first, because I didn’t see a difference. But the longer we went without having sex, the more I realized just how amazing sex was. How much I longed for him to be inside me. Not i
n a sex way, but in a love way.

  Now I know there’s nothing more beautiful than sex between two people who are truly in love. That’s real sex. And the longer you wait, the more sure you are, the act becomes something so much bigger than any physical sensation. And I think even if Michael had changed his mind, even if he wanted to, I’d have said to wait until we were married. I think I loved him that much.

  With Michael, I didn’t see love happening. It’s like one day, out of the blue, he kissed me, or rather we kissed each other. I don’t think it was premeditated in any way. It simply happened. At work, by the sterilizing machine. When we were both bending down to check if the surgical utensils were ready.

  “Wow,” I reflected like an idiot after it happened.

  “Yeah. Wow.” Was he making fun of me?

  “What was that?” I asked, still bewildered.

  “I think it was a kiss.” Now he sounded like the idiot.

  Then we did it again. More. I pushed my face onto his, opened my mouth. My whole body was on fire. I fell in love, right then. It felt so right.

  “How did you learn to kiss like that?” he said, pulling away and simultaneously wiping his mouth.

  “Do I kiss by the book?”

  “What?”

  “Am I good?” I paraphrase, smiling proudly.

  “Too good for eighteen.”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “Shut up,” he said, putting his finger over my lips.

  I opened my mouth and took his whole finger inside, sucking.

  “Ughh!” He pulled away his finger and made a face like I was the Devil.

  I’d done something wrong. “Sorry.” I was embarrassed. Was it childish? Normally a guy would have liked it. They always do.

  “It’s okay.” He opened the door of the sterilizer and pulled out the tray. The room instantly smelled sanitized.

  “I’m not a virgin, you know,” I said, following him down the hall to the operating table, where poor Dexter the daschund was spread-legged on his back, ready to be snipped.

  He laughed, stopped, and looked at me. “It was just a kiss.”

  “I know.”

  But it wasn’t just a kiss. We avoided each other for the entire next week, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. It wasn’t like I was thinking about his body or kissing or anything like that. I went over every conversation we’d ever had. I imagined living with him. Making him dinner. I imagined marrying him. Having his children. Growing old together. Dying together, and then being buried side by side in the same cemetery. It was going to be perfect. Like it all made sense now, as if everything in my life had been leading up to us getting together.

  The next time we kissed was when he gave me a lift home in his hatchback Volkswagen that stinks ’cause its diesel. We talked the whole way about music and work.

  Finally we pulled up to my apartment building. “It’s ugly,” I remarked apologetically.

  “It’s just a building,” he said. “Everybody has the same four walls. It’s what’s inside that matters.”

  “Yeah. Well. The inside is pretty much the same. Thanks for the lift,” I said, pulling my knapsack onto my lap. I looked directly at him, waiting for him to kiss me.

  “You’re welcome.” His hands remained fixed on the steering wheel.

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

  He laughed. “I wasn’t thinking about it.”

  “Liar.”

  I waited, but he didn’t move, so I leaned over and kissed him. He kissed back. And we kissed for a long time. The sloppy wet sounds were unavoidably awkward until he reached out and turned up the radio. We kissed some more. Then he stopped, like he was suddenly aware of something, and started to look around outside the car.

  I pulled back. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” He sat up and put his hands back on the wheel. “I better go.”

  “Okay,” I said in my “whatever” tone, pissed off that he couldn’t face up to what he was really thinking. What—I’m too young? I’m poor? Ugly? Dumb? Slutty? “See ya when I see ya,” I said, and slammed the door shut before hearing his response.

  The passenger-side window went down. “Melissa!”

  “What?” I poked my head into the car.

  “We could meet for coffee sometime. Or a movie?”

  “Movie’s good.” I smiled. “Give me a call,” I said coolly, but my heart was racing.

  Seventeen

  I decide to cut my appointment with Eric today. I’ve gone to school every day, every period, this week, and I’m tired and I feel too busy to make the effort.

  I’ve been seeing Eric for almost two years, ever since I started skipping school more, getting into fights, and doing more than just pot. My social worker, who until lately only talked to me once a year, hooked me up. She used to do more when I was about twelve, for a couple years after my little brother Bradley died, and then it was only a phone call or visit every once in a while until I got my charge.

  Eric’s office is on the main floor of a creaky old house that is now a family services agency. He’s an okay guy. I’m sure there are better counsellors out there. He’s nice enough. Honest. He’s got a good sense of humour and he’s sort of simple. Not “simple” as in stupid, but simple as in “easy.” Anyway, he’s definitely better than the last counsellor I saw for only two sessions when I was twelve, after Bradley died. All I did with her was draw pictures and play with dolls, which was pretty much a waste of time.

  I don’t know what I’m actually getting out of the whole thing. It’s not like I’ve got some major trauma that can explain me. Sometimes people are just not explainable. Even if your parents are great and you have a nice house, you can still be messed up.

  It’s annoying that people like Eric or my teachers keep asking me why I’m making the choices I make. I have no answer for them. I just do. I don’t sit around and think about why. It just happens. I think it’s just that some people are born a bad crop. Born wicked. And there’s not much anyone can do to steer you off the path you’re destined for. Wait—I take that back. Maybe they could nudge you a little from side to side to keep you steady, but generally, I think people are driven by something mysterious inside.

  My mom tells me to consider going to Eric like going to a job, that I’m making an investment in myself which will pay off later. Jasmyn tells me to think of it as a stay-out-of-jail card. “Judges like that counselling shit,” she advises.

  Usually, Eric and I don’t talk about anything really big. It’s not like in the movies, where you see people lying on a couch and confessing life traumas. It’s normally just about my week or what’s happening with friends or guys. Sometimes we talk about my mom. Once we talked about my father and why I don’t give a shit about his existence. Most of the time, if we talk about anything real important, it’s about my little brother Bradley. I suppose that’s my trauma, if I had to pick one.

  Bradley was only six when he died of leukemia. We had spent two years going back and forth to the hospital, and for a while it looked like he was going to be okay. I remember doing arts and crafts, watching videos, and playing Sorry on his hospital bed. A few times he came home, and things would be fine. But then, just before Christmas, he got really sick. We took him back into the hospital and he never came back out.

  Over the two years, my mother spent a lot of nights there with him, sleeping on a squeaky plastic-coated bench in the room. Crystal would stay with me at home. I’d be so jealous he got to spend time with Mom alone. Sometimes, on weekends, I got to sleep in the room too, but the nurses had to keep it quiet because only one person was allowed to stay over. I’d sneak into his bed and curl up next to him, and when the nurses came in to check his vitals, they’d just give this adoring look at the two of us.

  Before he got sick, Bradley was a pain-in-the-ass little brat, but as soon as he went into the hospital, he became pale and cute, and I felt bad for being so mean to him all the time. As time goes on, the cuter he becomes in my mem
ory, and the guiltier I feel about giving him such a hard time.

  The thing with Bradley was that when he was around, we were a family. It wasn’t just him being an innocent little kid that made our home happy. It was that we were all linked, connected in some way. Grounded, I guess. It didn’t seem to matter we didn’t have a father around. We felt complete. My mom was happy almost all the time, so she didn’t miss work or get fired. And I guess I was happy too. I can’t entirely remember, but it’s like I think of myself then and I can see my face in the memories; I can see my smile. And I don’t know what the hell I was so happy about, except that there was nothing yet to be miserable about. I think that’s just growing up—you grow into misery and complication.

  My mother and I don’t talk about what happened next. After Bradley died, she got depressed and began drinking and was a real mess. She couldn’t work. She couldn’t do anything. We lost our apartment, and we had to live at a shelter for a few months until Crystal got us an apartment in her building and helped my mom get back on track. Except my mom never really went back to “normal,” the way she was before. And I don’t think I ever felt we were a family after that.

  So it’s no wonder it’s a time my mom and I just want to forget about. But it’s not like we ever forget Bradley. There are photographs of him all over the apartment. Other than doing something special on his birthday, though, we rarely mention his name. We don’t need to. He’s always there. He’s always here.

  So instead of going to see Eric, I meet up with Ally to blaze in the alley behind her house. We sit inside an old wood garage where she and people in her neighbourhood go to chill when it’s cold out. It’s got some plastic jugs to sit on, and a little table made of plywood propped up on milk crates. Usually someone’s in there, smoking or drinking or just chilling, but this time we’re alone. Ally just got her nose pierced and wanted me to see it. It doesn’t look good. Her nose is sort of pug-like and you need a nice pointy nose for a piercing to look good. She says she’s trying to look more girlie because she thinks she looks too much like a guy. Truth is, I think she’s gay but she just doesn’t want to admit it yet.