Skin

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  “Fine,” I say. “Be that way.” And I lie down on the couch.

  “His fever must have broken. He sweat through his shirt. Donnie . . . Donnie . . . We’re back.”

  I wake up, curled in a ball at one end of the couch. My shirt’s sticking to my back, but my fever is gone.

  “Hey,” I say. “What happened?” Dad is kneeling down next to me, his hand on my forehead.

  “You’re not warm now. And you’re not swearing at me, so you must be feeling better. Some night, eh?”

  I nod. “What happened with Karen?”

  “Go change, and well tell you at breakfast.”

  They are all at the table when I come back downstairs. Karen keeps trying to bite off the plastic bracelet they gave her at the ER, until Mom gives her a pair of scissors. Karen, Mom, and Dad look exhausted, but not unhappy.

  “What happened?” I say, sitting in my place. Mom puts a plate of eggs in front of me.

  “Your sister,” she says, with a sharp look at Karen, “let herself get stressed out about school, got herself dehydrated, and didn’t give herself time enough to eat.”

  “I aced my test, though,” Karen says, swallowing egg.

  “What did they do to you?” I ask Karen. Dad pours Mom coffee, and she gives him a small smile.

  Karen shrugs. Dad says, “They hydrated her with an IV.”

  Karen sticks out her arm to show me the Band-Aid with a cotton ball under it.

  “The important thing,” Mom says, sitting down, “is that now Karen knows not to push herself like that. Right?”

  Karen nods obediently.

  “Well,” Mom says with a look around the table, “I don’t know when the last time we all sat down to breakfast together was.”

  “Me either,” I say, because hers is the kind of comment you have to give a nothing answer to fast before someone says something like, “How could we eat together if Dad’s never home?”

  “How could we eat together? Dad’s never home,” Karen says.

  The clock is ticking. I can tell they’re all too tired to fight.

  “I was home,” Dad says, getting up, “and it’s a good thing I was.

  He kisses Karen on the forehead. “I’m glad you’re okay.” Karen looks at her plate and then grabs Dad around the waist to give him a quick squeeze and says, “Have a good day at work, Dad.”

  Dad ruffles my hair. “See ya.”

  He winks at Mom, and then he’s gone. I should have asked him when he was coming home again.

  “You kids can stay home from school if you want,” Mom says. “You both had long nights.”

  Amanda comes up the back porch steps, waving before she opens the sliding glass door.

  “Good morning,” she says, and then to Karen, “Ready?”

  “Just a second, I have to run upstairs.”

  “Karen, you should stay home today and rest.” Mom’s clearly not pleased.

  “Why? Are you sick?” Amanda asks, taking a piece of toast off my plate and flicking my ear. I look at her throat as she swallows.

  “No. I’m fine. Donnie’s the sick one.” Karen rushes out of the kitchen.

  Amanda looks at Mom. Mom purses her lips and then says, “Donnie’s fine, it’s just an ear infection. Karen’s the one that had to go to the hospital last night. For dehydration. You kids push yourselves too hard.”

  “IT WAS NOTHING!” Karen yells from upstairs.

  Amanda looks at Mom for a long moment, about to say something. But Karen comes back into the kitchen with her backpack.

  “Donnie, you were funny last night. I could hear you from my room telling Dad he was a prick. You should have a fever all the time, it makes you honest. Let’s go, Amanda, we’ll miss the bus. Two more months, then when we’ll have our licenses and can drive ourselves to school. That’ll be the best,” She manages to kiss Mom on the cheek and talk at the same time. “I’ll buy lunch at school. Dad gave me money. Bye, Donnie. Feel better.”

  Amanda is still looking at Mom. She finally says, “Bye, Donnie,” and follows Karen out through the sliding glass door.

  “Well, you’re not going to school,” Mom says. “I’ll make you a bed on the couch and you can watch TV.”

  15

  “Donnie, why do you hang out with those guys?” Karen demands, her hands tight on the steering wheel. “They treat you like crap.”

  “Shut up,” I say. I think they accidentally put some sort of jerk juice in her IV in the emergency room last week, because she’s been a pain in my ass since she got home.

  “Why should I shut up? It’s true. Right, Mom?” Karen looks at Mom.

  “Karen, don’t look at me, look at the road. I think you should concentrate on driving and not on talking,” Mom says, her hands spread on the dashboard in front of her. We come to a stoplight, and Mom says, “It certainly wasn’t a very nice thing to do, Donnie, inviting you to the movies and then not showing up. What if Karen and I weren’t out practicing? You’d be stuck out there in the cold for two hours! And you’re just getting over an ear infection. I don’t see why you didn’t call us.”

  I slump down in the back seat. I wish Dad were here.

  “It was just a joke,” I mumble.

  “Real funny joke,” Karen says as the light turns green. She stomps on the gas, flattening Mom and me against our seats.

  “Slow down!” Mom yells, both of her feet up on the dashboard. “Slow down!”

  Karen takes her time slowing down, and says calmly, “Donnie, they made you stand out there like some sort of reject. Mom, I’m going to park at home and go over to Amanda’s. You don’t need that, Donnie.”

  “Karen, what about dinner? Slow down, please.”

  “I’ll eat at Amanda’s.”

  “Karen, it’s eight o’clock. They eat at six. This is our street, slow down.”

  “I know this is our street! You think I don’t know where we live? Amanda and I’ll make something. Get off my back.”

  “You need to slow down when you’re making a turn. And don’t speak to me like that, Karen. I’m just concerned.”

  It’s funny when you think about it, how you never know what’s going to change Karen from a normal person into a screaming psycho. Karen pulls into our driveway and slams on the breaks.

  “I made a mistake, Mom! One fucking mistake and you won’t let me forget about it!”

  “Karen,” Mom says quietly, “watch your language.”

  Karen ignores her and opens the car door. Before she gets out, she says, “It’s not like I did it on purpose, you know! It’s not like I said, ’Know what would be fun? If I stopped eating and passed out in front of Mom and Dad so they could take me to the ER and treat me like a fucking half-wit for the rest of my life.’ For fuck’s sake, I’m eating! I eat all damn day long! I’m going to be a fat fuck, and then you’ll be happy, right?”

  She gets out of the car.

  “Yes, Karen,” Mom says, “I’ll be happy when you’re a fat . . . fuck.”

  Karen makes a noise that sounds like a laugh and stares at Mom from outside the car.

  “I know your father and I didn’t teach you to talk like that,” Mom says.

  “Yeah, well, you and your husband aren’t the only people I learn things from. You don’t get to decide what I know and what I don’t.” Karen slams the car door shut, leaving Mom and me in the car.

  16

  Mom calls over to Amanda’s as soon as we get inside.

  “Hi, Amanda, it’s Karen’s mom. Is she there?”

  Mom opens the drawer by the phone and pulls out a stack of menus from restaurants that deliver. “Donnie, pick something out.”

  I lean against the counter and flip through the menus, stopping to watch Mom on the phone as she says, “Amanda, I don’t care if she doesn’t want to talk to me. Put her on the phone.” It’s weird to hear her use her mom voice on someone who’s not her own kid. The mom voice works.

  “Karen, I want you home. Now.” Mom listens to Karen respond, and say
s, “Actually, Karen, I am the boss of you. Yes, really. Karen! If you think I am going to let you talk to me the way you did in the car tonight, you are sadly mistaken. Get home. Now.”

  • • •

  Mom makes me go upstairs when we see Karen stomping across the back porch toward the sliding glass door. I head for Karen’s room to look for the photos from the lake. She used to just keep them piled on her desk, but she hid them last week after she caught me flipping through them. She’d dragged me out of her room by my shirt and slammed the door in my face. I’m in most of those pictures, and the ones I’m not in are ones where I was taking the picture. She has no right to keep them from me, like it was just her summer and not mine. I’ve checked under her mattress already, but I realize now that I never checked the mattress of the rollaway bed that slides under her bed. I can hear Mom and Karen start in on each other downstairs, and I pull the out the rollaway bed. I slide my hand under its mattress and rip open my palm on a bedspring. I press my hand against my shirt to stop it from bleeding all over the rug, and reach in with my other hand, avoiding the spring. I pull out a spiral notebook. Ha! Her journal. Even better than pictures. I open it up, ready to read every secret she’d ever wanted to keep from me, everything she and Amanda would stop talking about when I walked into the room. The notebook is set up like a regular journal, with a date on every page, but instead of secrets there are lists of foods for every day since we came home from the lake. As the dates get more recent, the lists get shorter and shorter.

  I hear Mom and Karen laughing downstairs. I bet they re hugging now. I put the notebook back under the mattress, and shove the rollaway bed back into place. When I get down to the kitchen, Karen eyes the Band-Aid on my palm for a second and then says, “Donnie, sorry I was such an A-hole in the car.”

  I shrug. “It’s all right.”

  Mom and I order Chinese food, but Karen says she had it for lunch so she makes herself a can of soup.

  “Karen.” I’m surprised by the harshness of my whisper. I don’t want to wake up Mom.

  “Karen!”

  “What? Is it your hand?” she sits up in bed and puts a hand in front of her face to block the hall light. I step into her room and shut the door. We’re in the dark.

  “I found your book tonight.”

  “I know. You bled on it. Why do you think I asked about your hand?”

  “What is it? What’s that book?”

  I hear her lie back down in bed.

  “It’s for home economics. It’s not what you think. We only have to keep track of certain foods, not everything we eat. We have to keep it all year and turn it in at the end. It’s a quarter of our grade.”

  “Oh,” I say, and I think, Believe her believe her believe her.

  “Don’t go through my stuff anymore, okay, Donnie?”

  “Okay.”

  I’m about to walk out of her room when she says, “Mom’s making me go to a counselor because she thinks there’s something wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with me, Donnie. You know that, right?”

  “Sure. I know that.”

  17

  Mom calls Dad back as soon as I’m off the phone with him. He didn’t ask to talk to her. He’s taking me to the indoor stock-car races tomorrow. He said he might come by for dinner afterward. I report this to Mom, who is staring at the phone, like she can’t believe he didn’t want to talk to her. She squints her eyes and says, “What?”

  “Don’t yell at me. I’m just telling you what he said.”

  “I didn’t yell at you.” She has a point, but I think she’s pissed off enough to yell, and I don’t want her to do it at me since I didn’t do anything but answer the phone.

  I shrug. She looks at me for a long moment and says, “So this is the way it is.” I know what she means. He hasn’t come home since the trip to the ER. Mom calls him back and doesn’t even say hello, she just snaps, “What?”

  She listens, opens her mouth, and I think she’s going to let him have it. Then she looks at me and says into the phone, “We’ll talk about it tomorrow night. . . okay . . . see you then.”

  Then she claps her hands once and says, “So what should we make for Dad tomorrow night?”

  I have no idea why she’s asking me until I see her eyes are glassy and she has this huge fake plastic smile on her face, and I realize this is what she looks like when she’s trying not to fall apart. I say, “I don’t know. Spaghetti?”

  She claps her hands again. “Yes! Spaghetti!”

  Karen comes into the kitchen. “Don’t make spaghetti for me. I’m eating at Amanda’s.”

  Mom is opening cabinets and making a grocery list. “Karen, we’re talking about tomorrow night. Tonight were having chicken.”

  “I ate already. I’m going over to Amanda’s.”

  Mom sighs. “You didn’t eat already. You can see Amanda after your dinner. Set the table, please.”

  Dad picked me up this morning. He just beeped the horn in the driveway, didn’t come in. He did wink and wave at Mom and Karen, who were standing in the doorway. I guess that’s something. Mom will take Karen to counseling today, her first appointment. I’m not supposed to know.

  Here’s a secret: Dad sometimes talks to me about when he was little. It’s a secret because everyone acts like Dad didn’t even have a childhood. It’s so weird, the family rules that you learn without ever being taught. Asking Dad about when he was a kid is against the rules. Ask him about it, and he’ll stand up and walk out of the room. Or if you’re in the car, he’ll just turn on the radio and act like you’re not even there. Ask Mom about it, and she’ll say it’s not your business and it’s no big deal, there’s no big story to tell. Ask Karen about it, and she’ll either snap “I don’t care” or we’ll compare information and try to put Dad’s past together, like a puzzle. The other rule is that even though we’re not allowed to ask Dad about his childhood, he can sometimes bust out with a story from when he was a little kid. When this happens, you have to sit quietly and not ask questions, or he’ll clam up and not say any more. I don’t tell Karen everything he tells me, I keep some of it for myself.

  Five minutes into the ride to the races, I wish I hadn’t come. It’s like being in a car with a stranger. He’s wearing a winter coat I don’t recognize, his hair is different, and his face looks kind of fat.

  “Your mother says you’re not friends with Chris and Benjamin anymore.”

  Way to get right to the point, asshole.

  I’m almost yelling, “I’m still friends with them! Did Mom tell you that? That I’m not friends with them anymore?”

  Dad calmly shakes his head. “I must have misunderstood. She just said you never got together with them after school or on weekends anymore. She told me about that night at the movies.”

  “So?” I say. “We still sit together at lunch.”

  “Oh. Well, then.”

  I hate that the few times Mom talks to him, she talks about me. I hate that she thinks she has any idea what’s going on in my life and that she passes her bullshit theories on to Dad. He has no idea what’s going on in my life. That’s fine by me. I don’t know him now. I debate telling him Mom told me not to talk to strangers. But I shrug instead, hoping he’ll shut up about this.

  “What happened, son, you just don’t get along with them anymore?”

  Way to completely miss the point, asshole.

  “I told you, we’re still friends. We just don’t hang out as much,” I say, and realize it’s a lie. Chris and Bean barely acknowledge my existence anymore. The lunch table we share is divided in half. They’re at one end and I’m at the other. They haven’t talked to me in weeks. Apart from Mom and Karen, no one’s really talked to me in weeks.

  Dad nods. “School is hard.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. What a stupid thing to say.

  “Dad, you are a true master of the obvious.”

  It’s fascinating. You can actually see the blood rush up his neck and into his face. I bet he’s countin
g to ten so he doesn’t push me out of the car.

  “When I was a kid, we’d say ’No shit, Sherlock.’” The red goes out of his face.

  “Like Sherlock Holmes, right?”

  He nods and says again quietly, “No shit, Sherlock.”

  We don’t talk for a long while. When we pass a rusting VW bus with surfboards strapped to the top, Dad says, “Wow, they must be really, really lost.” I say, “Let’s make a sign that says, ’Landlocked state, asshole’ and wave it at them.”

  Dad smiles. I watch the VW get smaller and smaller behind us in the side-view mirror, a cloud of black fumes disappearing behind it. I could be a surfer. Cousin Bobby surfed when he was out in California. His band was on tour and all of their L.A. shows got canceled. They met these surfers that let the band stay at their house and taught them all how to surf. We got a picture in the mail of Bobby on the beach. Karen laughed when she saw it. It did look kind of funny. Made up, almost. Bobby on the beach, looking out at the ocean, a hand shielding his eyes from the setting sun, like he was scoping out the waves. He was tan, healthy looking. Karen snorted and said, “When did Bobby get muscles?” His hair was wild, the way hair gets when you swim and then let the sun dry it. It’d be salty if he put it in his mouth.

  After graduation I could leave for California. No, Hawaii. Right after the ceremony. I’d be in my gown, and underneath I’d be wearing surf shorts. No one would have any idea. The ceremony would end, I’d hug Karen and Mom and shake Dad’s hand. Everyone would be throwing their caps into the air, hugging each other, crying, and ignoring me. Then this ancient VW bus would rumble up, beep, and the side door would open and I’d jump in. And I’d be gone. Everyone would stop what they were doing and watch us drive away. I’d never satisfy their curiosity. I’d never talk to any of them again.

  “Your grandmother was tall.”

  I’m not in the VW anymore. I’m not peeling off my graduation gown. I’m in a car with Dad and he’s just said something.