Skin

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  The crowd doesn’t exactly part as I push through, but it doesn’t push back against me either.

  The long-like-a-ruler kid is saying into the phone, “Here he is . . .”

  He hands me the phone and walks away. The hall is emptying out, and the bell rings. I’ll be late for English. I press the phone to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  I wait for the voice of Chris or Bean or whoever it is that’s calling to tell me my break from being whipping boy is over.

  “Donnie?”

  Maybe they got Bean’s sister to call.

  “Yeah. This . . . This is Donnie.” I grip the phone, ready to slam it back down on the receiver.

  “It’s Amanda!”

  I drop the receiver. It cracks against the wall before I can pick it up again.

  “. . . you all right, Donnie?”

  “I’m fine. Sorry. Dropped the phone. How’d you get this number?”

  “Karen got it last year. We used to call each other when one of us was home sick. How are you?”

  I have no idea how to answer the question.

  “I’m—”

  I’m interrupted by someone yelling “Woo doggie!” into the phone. I have to pull it away from my ear. I press it close

  again when I hear a familiar voice.

  “What’s up, kid?” I don’t believe this. “Bobby?”

  “Yep.”

  I’m speechless.

  “Dude, he’s speechless,” Bobby says to Amanda. She gets back on the phone.

  “He’s just passing through, Donnie.”

  In the background I can hear Bobby yell, “Yeah, that’s one way to say it.” Amanda laughs.

  “We wanted to check up on you. How’s school?”

  I shrug.

  “Do you hate us? I didn’t want to tell you about . . . us.” I hear her whisper to Bobby, “He’s really mad!”

  “I’m not mad,” I say, which falls only partly in the total-load-of-crap category.

  Bobby gets back on the phone.

  “School okay?”

  I laugh.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Stupid question.”

  “That’s all right. School’s fine. Three more years, right?”

  “Drop out now and it’s no more years.”

  I can almost feel whatever it is Amanda has thrown hit him in the head.

  “Ow! I take it back, Donnie. Be cool, stay in school. Don’t do drugs . . .”

  “Donnie.” Amanda’s back on the phone.

  “Amanda,” I say.

  “You should come visit me.” There’s a muffled shout behind her, and then she says, “Us. You should come visit us.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Call me and tell me when you’ll come. Dad can talk to your mom, tell her it’s all right. Now, go to class.”

  “All right. Bye.”

  They shout good-bye multiple times, till I hang up.

  Ha! I think. Phones for me.

  44

  I think back on things that happened. And I think about how if you were to tell stories about us, about our family, you might raise up your eyebrows, and you might say, “Well, no wonder.” I bet you think you can pinpoint where it started for her. It’s easy to think that, when you can look back at something as a whole. But when you’re living it, day by day, it’s like you’re in the belly of something and you can’t see its whole shape from the inside. You don’t know that what you’re inside of is really a monster. Part of me wants to never tell anything about Karen because people will wonder how none of us really saw what was happening. And because I wonder the same thing.

  45

  Dad’s home. I wonder if eventually he’ll be home enough for me to not be surprised when I see his car in the driveway. He switched his shift at work. He leaves way early in the morning now and is home when I get back from school. He misses the traffic this way, and it cuts down his commute time. But he still has the apartment by the plant. I never really thought about how weird it was that Dad had another home that I’d never seen. I guess it’d have to have furniture and dishes and sheets. Stuff I wouldn’t recognize.

  Mom and Dad are in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table. I’ve interrupted something. They both say “Hello” without looking at me. It’s what you call being there for your son.

  Mom looks surprised. “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say—” I start to say, but realize she’s talking to Dad.

  “You heard me.”

  They stare at each other across the table.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  Mom looks at her hands and then back over at Dad.

  “That’s not true. Why are you doing this?”

  Dad doesn’t answer, he just looks at Mom like he’s waiting for her to say something. Mom starts crying.

  “I’m not doing this with you,” she says. “I don’t want to do this.” She hides her face in her hands and Dad leans forward over the table.

  “Why? Afraid of what you’ll say? Say it, Diane. Say what you want to say to me.”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Then I’ll say it—”

  Mom is up out of her seat, pulling the fabric on Dad’s shirt and pleading with him, “Don’t—Don’t do this.”

  Dad shrugs her hand away and juts out his chin. “All I said was if you didn’t want to have kids, you shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have married me, Diane. You shouldn’t have had babies with me if you weren’t going to take care of them.”

  Mom’s sobbing now, shaking her head. Her knees keep bending a little, like she’s going to crumple to the floor, and I can’t understand how she’s still standing.

  “You have nothing to say to that? You killed my daughter, Diane. How is that?”

  At first Mom doesn’t even scream words, she just screams, her fists clenched and head down and eyes closed. When she looks up, it is like everything opens—her eyes, her mouth, her whole body is exploding right in front of me.

  “Fuck you fuck you fuck you!” She’s shaking her finger in his face. “I take care of my babies! Where were you? Where have you been? She’s getting skinny, she’s not eating, something’s wrong something’s wrong something’s wrong! Where were you for me to tell you that? You weren’t here! You are never here! You are a monster! And you come and drag my baby out of here like she is a criminal? Why would you do that to her? Why did you think that would help?”

  Dad watches Mom scream at him, like he is waiting his turn before he says calmly, “Somebody had to do something, Diane. You weren’t doing anything, Diane. You were letting her waste away and hoping that she would get better. You know what they say the causes are. You dieted, you obsessed about your weight, you wouldn’t let her eat sweets after school, you made her feel like she had to be perfect.” Dad’s been reading pamphlets on anorexia.

  “Monster,” Mom says. “You will rot for what you did to our family. You don’t get to be with her when you die, miserable and alone. You will go to hell and you will rot there.”

  “You—” Dad begins, and Mom opens her mouth, ready to eat whatever he is going to say. They could go on like this forever, living just on their own worst fears.

  I use both hands to smash the pan against the stove. I hit it three times, denting the stove right down the middle. On the third swing the pan flies off its handle and crashes into the sliding glass door. Shattering it.

  “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” I’m screaming. I’m crying. I can’t even see. “I am right here. I’m standing right here! LOOK AT ME!”

  Dad stands and tries to pull me into his arms. I shove him away.

  “You never see me! You only see her, even when she’s gone, you only see her. I disappeared so she could get better! I never asked you for anything! I disappeared and you didn’t even notice! And now she’s gone and I’m here! I’m here!”

  Dad and Mom are watching me, crying.

  “My name is
Donnie! My favorite color is blue! I like macaroni and cheese and I hate oatmeal and you have to see me now!”

  My throat feels like it’s bleeding. There’s a breeze through the shattered door. I throw the pan handle into the sink and leave them in the kitchen. I say over my shoulder, “Dad. You should go. You don’t live here anymore. I want you to be my dad, but you can’t do it here.”

  I ride hard at first, pushing through the resistance of the pedals, wishing it were harder. I ride blindly, seeing what just happened instead of the road in front of me. When I think about what I just said to them, I yell “HA!” and it feels so good I yell some more. It sounds like, “YAYAYAYAYAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

  I stand up on the pedals and pump harder. The bike rocks from side to side every time I try to slam the pedal through the pavement. It takes a long while for me to calm down, to feel like I’ve gasped and sweated out every last bit of what happened. When I finally slow down, I can feel the blood still buzzing through my veins, my heart still banging in my chest. I coast and concentrate on breathing slower. I hear what Karen used to say to me when I’d get worked up over Mom and Dad fighting, trying to break through the front door with my five-year-old knees. She’d sit me down on the steps and say, “I’m going to turn you into a snail. A slooow, slimy snail. Watch. Your breath is slowing down. Your heart is slowing down. Your blood is slowing down. You are a slooow, sloooow snail.”

  I stop pedaling and let the bike slow down, trying to stay upright until it is almost standing still. I totter till I’m finally forced to take my feet from the pedals. I get off and let the bike drop by the side of the road. I sit next to it on the curb, and pull my knees up under my chin. This is what they call staring blankly ahead. It’s harder than it looks. I try to keep my eyes unfocused, but they keep honing in on details of the house across the street from where I sit. White shutters upstairs and down. Potted plants shaped like upside-down cones on either side of the front door. I close my eyes. I want to be quiet. I want this to be the quietest the world has ever been. I make myself numb to the hard curb under me, to the rough fabric of my knees under my chin, and to the drying sweat that’s chilling on my skin. I numb my nostrils so that the smell of chimney smoke and my own sweat fades to nothing. I imagine skin growing over my ears so that there is no sound of distant traffic or garage doors opening or back doors closing. I know how to disappear. I know that I can close my eyes and curl myself up into my mind where it is dark and I am alone but not alone. My numbed body could unattach itself from the earth and float away and it wouldn’t matter. I can just . . . disconnect myself from my body, and my body will disconnect itself from the earth. Did you see the boy floating, arms and legs spread wide, light like a balloon, did you see him floating up till he was a dot in the sky?

  It is like someone grabs my shoulders and shakes me once, hard. My eyes snap open and an enormous shiver quakes my body. I jump up, my palms are sweating, and my heart is tripping over its own quick beats. I gulp air and shiver again and fight the urge to dig my hands into the frosted grass and hold on with all my strength before the soles of my feet are facing the sky and I am tethered there like a snagged balloon.

  My eyes click from left to right, up to down, trying to find something to focus on, something heavy enough to anchor me. They move so fast it is like watching a slide show stuck on fast forward: the crooked way the bike is lying, a penny caked with mud in the gutter, another front-porch light flicked on in the darkening dusk, a cloud shaped like a cracked walnut. Bike, penny, light, cloud. Bike, penny, light, cloud. They flick in front of me again and again until I wrench my eyes away and force myself to look straight ahead at the house across the street. I count the white shutters again and again until I feel less like someone with a questionable grasp of gravity and more like a loony counting window shutters by the side of the road. I’m really starting to feel the cold. I want Karen to be here. I want her to take me home. I want her to stand up to Mom and Dad for me.

  I count the white shutters again. I look at the mailbox imbedded in a squat stone pillar in front of the house. There’s a name printed in careful block letters on the mailbox door. I know that name.

  You know how when somebody dies, the people that loved them always say things like, “I know Grandpa Eddie is watching over me” or “I know my mom was smiling down at me” or “I could hear my brother laughing right along with me”? You walk around with this feeling that whoever it is that died is with you all the time. Here’s a secret: I don’t feel a damn thing. At least not till now. Not until this very moment as I read the name on the mailbox, over and over again.

  “Okay,” I whisper. “I get it.”

  The doorbell plays a jingly song I don’t recognize. I look behind me to where I dropped the bike at the foot of the front walkway. I could get on it and ride away. Inside the house I hear someone hurrying down the stairs. I wipe my palms on my T-shirt. The front door swings open, and Sheila looks surprised at first and then gives me a wide, toothy smile.

  “Hello!” As she opens the door wider, she calls over her shoulder, “Rodney! Donnie’s come over!”

  I hear Rodney call, “Hey, Donnie!” from somewhere inside the house.

  “Well, come in! You must be freezing! You’re just in time for band practice. We’ve decided to start a band, and we’ve decided that you’re in it. We’ll have hot cocoa first. Well, come on, then!” Sheila reaches out, takes my wrist, and smiles as I let her pull me inside.

  This is the Book of Donnie. And this is Chapter One.

  ADRIENNE MARIA VRETTOS grew up on a mountain in southern California, where she rode dirt bikes and made a mean double-mud pie. She moved to a picket-fenced apple town in Massachusetts for high school, where she managed to find happiness and friends despite her lack of the apparently requisite pricey pants and fancy car. She now lives with her wicked-talented writer/musician husband in Brooklyn, New York. Skin is her first book.