I Will Be Okay

by Bill Elenbark

  “Nice shirt,” Cara says.

  “Thank you,” I say. “I think.” Her sarcasm is too thick to tell.

  “Yeah, I mean the actual design is pretty stupid—is that a cat?” She shakes her head. “And the lack of style is burning my retinas, but my brother likes that band and he’s pretty great so …”

  She leans back on Jarrett’s bed, against the wall with her beer. Her hair is cut tight around her neck, but her eyes are light and free of the layers of makeup that the girls in my school all wear.

  “You want to hear them?” Sticks says, shifting into my shoulder.

  “I’m good. I’ve heard them before,” she says.

  “But it’s their new album, they just leaked it.”

  “I’ll pass,” she says, staring at Sammy now, almost daring him to take a seat. I steal another sip of my beer, more than a sip maybe and it doesn’t taste too bad, it’s slightly metallic but less rancid than before, and I don’t remember being this close to empty.

  “What’s wrong with your wrist, Matt?” Sammy says.

  I didn’t give Stick all the details because they’re way too embarrassing to admit to him and I’m not going to now, in front of a girl—I mean, a woman—I know women don’t like being called ‘girls’ and I don’t want to be sexist because I’m very pro-woman, except for the sex part. But that shouldn’t count.

  “Is it broken?” Cara says.

  “I hope not. I don’t know.”

  “Hmm.” She shakes her head and finishes the beer. “You might want to get it checked by a doctor… Matt, is it?”

  “Oh um… uh, yeah,” I say, stammering a little or slurring maybe—have I drunk enough to be slurring?

  “And your friends?” She’s up off the bed to grab another beer but I’m not sure what she means. I never know what women are thinking.

  “I’m Sammy and this is Stick,” Sammy says.

  “And what are you—freshmen?”

  “Sophomores,” Sammy says. “About to be.”

  “Yeah.” She rolls her eyes but does it so quick that she disguises it with a smile. “Hang on—did you say Stick?”

  Stick nods.

  “You mean like a ‘stick’?” She holds her hands together with clenched fists, motioning like she’s waving a wand, or an imaginary stick.

  Sammy laughs. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know, a ‘stick’.” She swings her arms now more like a bat than a stick. “It’s a weird name.”

  “Yeah,” Stick says. “I was crazy skinny as a kid.”

  “As opposed to now?”

  “Huh?”

  “Exactly.”

  Cara looks to me again and it’s weird I think, it’s almost like she’s into me, the way she keeps looking at me or catching me looking and yeah… no—I must be drunk. Stick leans back along the mattress, this brief electric touching at my shoulder. My wrist is numb.

  “Well, here you are.”

  A taller girl with lighter skin and longer hair than Cara comes crashing into the bedroom. I’m guessing she’s Rhonda because Jarrett’s trailing behind her, his massive frame filling the doorway.

  “Oh, thank god,” Cara says.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Bored out of my mind,” Cara says.

  “Anyone want shots?” Jarrett says, lifting up a bottle of vodka. I watched him play football last fall, Stick and me in the stands at Woodbridge High, and Stick would point out him out during the games, whenever he flattened a defensive lineman who attempted to get past him.

  “We need cups,” Cara says. “I am not sharing spit with you idiots.”

  “Okay,” Stick says and he’s up off his bed, out into the hall and back with a fistful of Dixie cups.

  “Fuck yeah!” Sammy shouts and we lift up our shots to do a chug in unison, raspberry vodka that spreads like flames down my throat and I almost choke, it’s too much liquid at too quick a pace and I grit my teeth to keep from gagging. Stick pours us another round.

  “Damn, that’s nasty. What did you buy?” Cara says.

  “Stoli,” Jarrett says, holding up the bottle again.

  “No wonder. That’s trash.”

  Sammy laughs and I wait for the room to settle—I mean it’s not spinning yet I just know it’s coming quick—as Jarrett pretends to pour the bottle down the back of Cara’s shirt. I have no alcohol tolerance, like literally none, a single beer gets me buzzed and hard liquor is like a gaping wound at the side of my head that needs the Yin Healing Wound Destruction to keep me from fainting. I take a second shot.

  “Sammy, go get more ice.”

  “For what?”

  Cara pushes Jarrett away and climbs off the bed, ripping the watery baggie off my wrist and tossing it to Sammy. It smacks him in the leg.

  “Come on, vite vite,” she says and shoos him away.

  “My mom’s a nurse” is her only explanation as she yanks me off of the bed, down the hall into the bathroom where she doesn’t wait, she just rips off the bandages and shoves my wrist into the sink. The water starts to sting but she won’t let go, she pushes down harder when I try to pull back, and the frigid water numbs my fingers. My wrist has turned purple, or sort of bluish-black, thirty-eight shades of I should be afraid, and I haven’t drunk enough to manage the pain, the way the water keeps stinging.

  She finds a first-aid kit in the cabinet above the sink and sprays my palm with clear liquid, which pierces the skin like a syringe or something stronger, a punch to the face. She uses fresh gauze to wrap the wrist once it’s dry, across my skin from the thumb down the back of my hand, much tighter than my mother, or much better than she did. She says she wants to study pre-med in college next year, so she’s a senior I guess, even though she seems much older. Or cooler.

  “Are you okay?” Stick asks when we get back to his bedroom.

  “I think so.” The wrist hurts like shit but I’m back next to Stick so it’s all good. Everything is. “It’s mostly just numb.”

  “That’s the numbing spray,” Cara says and Rhonda laughs. Jarrett’s gone from the room. “But you should really get that checked by a doctor. Like tomorrow.”

  I don’t know why she’s taking care of me—maybe she really is flirting but I don’t really know flirting and I don’t know why she’d be flirting with me. Stick’s leg slides against my knee on the bed.

  “We need to leave soon,” Cara says to Rhonda, looking down at her phone, and I don’t know what happened to Sammy. Stick sweeps his hair left to right like he does all the time, and I wish we were alone again, without the girls again, he’s drunk and I’m horny and I don’t care about my wrist.

  “Is that my fucking cooler?”

  Rhonda looks up. “Coop?”

  The giant freak with the red beard from the garage stands lopsided in the doorway, looking between Stick and me.

  “Who the fuck took my cooler?”

  He takes two shaky strides across the room to the window and I scan for my beer but I must have lost it or finished it and there’s a stack of empties piled up against the wall. Coop staggers toward the bed, red-eyed and wavering. He spots Jarrett’s machete.

  “Stick!” I shout as the Bushy-bearded lunatic climbs on top of Jarrett’s bed. Rhonda jumps up to stop him and I grab Stick by the arm, pulling him out of his bed because we need to escape, and he isn’t reacting. There’s a drunken giant with an ugly red beard and one hand on Jarrett’s machete.

  I push Stick ahead of me into the hallway down the stairs and I can feel Coop at my shoulder, breathing down on me, so I’m ducking as we’re running, sticking the landing in the kitchen and wheeling around to the left. I stumble a bit as Stick pushes into a crowd of drunks half blocking the path to the garage, so we veer past them through the living room, the sectional upturned and divided to make room for the beer pong, and we plow through empty bottles on our way to the foyer. Coop is still behind us, like right fucking behind me, and I glance back for a second, to check that a swinging sword isn’t swi
nging at my head, catching his stretched-out face stretching out with the machete raised. Stick opens the door to outside.

  He decides to skip the steps, leaping straight over the bushes around the porch, pulling on my arm so I follow, catching my foot on a branch halfway through, spilling sprawling on the lawn at the front of the house. The pain shoots up my wrist immediate and quick, but Stick yanks on my arm, yanking me up from the wet hot grass before we launch into a sprint to get away from him, Bushy-beard bounding the normal way down the stairs in bare feet.

  Stick spins from the street, angling left toward the woods, this brief stretch of trees that separate his yard from the field beside his house, the one where we kissed on the Fourth of July. I glance back but there’s no sign of Coop, just Stick and me through the trees in the dark, escaping.

  We keep running until we hit the tracks, deep into the field closer to the trees that surround my development. Stick is breathing hard, I can hear him in the dark, and he collapses to the grass beside me. I follow.

  “What the fuck was that?” Stick says.

  I shake my head, trying to find my hand, it’s too dark to see but I can feel the blood on my fingers, slipping through the gauze onto my wrist. I must have caught it on the bushes and broke the skin.

  “No seriously, who the fuck was that guy?” Stick looks at me, struggling to focus. I shake my head.

  A car passes down the road into my neighborhood, but we’re further from the street than last time, far enough to hide from the headlights. My wrist is throbbing now—this sharp stinging pain from the cut or the sprain, and I’m pretty sure it’s broken.

  “You’re bleeding,” Stick says.

  “I’m okay,” I say. He noticed.

  “Let me see.” He leans closer, using the flashlight on his iPhone, his elbow brushing into me as I lift up my wrist. It doesn’t look as bad in the light but it hurts worse than before. “Does it hurt?”

  “Not really. It’s still numb.” I don’t know why I lied.

  “I should have come over to your house. I just can’t be at home with my brothers anymore. I can’t.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  He looks behind us for any sign of a machete-wielding redhead, and I hear a train in the distance, like the last time we were here.

  “At least we got to hang out,” I say. “It’s been a while.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

  I wonder if I could kiss him, just reach right out and kiss him. And I know I can’t, but I can’t think of anything else. The train speeds up along the tracks.

  “Everything’s such a mess you know. I can’t even figure out what to do. And every time I think about my dad, I just—”

  He looks into my eyes and I can see his tears forming in the lights of the train, speeding past so fast it breaks his speech if he’s speaking because I can’t hear him. I just want to hold him.

  “I thought I’d be okay. After the funeral I thought I’d be okay.” His leg settles on the grass next to mine. “But it hasn’t happened, and it isn’t going to happen, and I don’t know when I’ll be okay again.”

  I reach out to touch, it feels okay to touch—my hand on his back, wet from the sprint in the heat.

  “It’ll take time, Stick. You just need time.” It sounds like something my mother would say—or a fortune cookie—but I’m totally useless in this type of situation when all I can think about is kissing him.

  “I just miss him, you know. He’d ask me every day how school went, or this summer how work went, he wanted to know how I was doing at the restaurant. He got me the job, you know—he knew the owner from church so they did him a favor. And it’s not like we had these in-depth conversations or anything, but it was every day, we would talk every day, and I miss that. I can’t believe how much I miss him.”

  He lets me hold him.

  “I miss this,” he says, his voice almost a whisper. “I miss you.”

  He looks up all of a sudden and I’m too dazed to react, I don’t even move when he lurches back, wheeling his head to the right as he vomits all over the grass.

  “Fuck,” he says as the stench fills the air and stabs at my gut, but I manage to hold it in.

  “I think I drank too much.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”

  He laughs.

  “It’s okay, Stick,” I say, picking him up off the grass and away from the sticky chunks on the field. “You can crash at my house tonight.”

  He wraps his arms around me, and we stumble forward, slow but steady across the wet smooth grass, through the field where we kissed. I don’t want to let go.

  EIGHT

  I have a theory that waking up in a car

  means you’re still dreaming.

  So if you ever change your mind and

  decide that it might be worth the drive.

  Then just drive. Then just drive.

  So we just drive.

  Careless and full of smiles

  While the radio plays on the way to some basement.

  I will be okay.

  I will be okay.

  EVERYTHING.

  Stick squirts the glue into a rag and folds it into a paper bag before taking a hit, the first hit, always the strongest. The lights are off but the television buzzes in front of us, and I’m still feeling the beer so I feel good, it feels good, in the basement, our basement, this quiet place our personal space, no one else but us. He hands me the bag and I breathe it in deep, letting the spike smack the back of my skin.

  We got in through the kitchen, approaching the house from the back as quiet as we could so only my brother could possibly hear us and he wouldn’t, nothing short of the apocalypse would wake him from sleeping. Stick is still wasted, even after the puking, and he raided the refrigerator for snacks. We keep the glue hidden back behind the furnace, model cement I used to use for crafting spaceships and rocket ships with Danny Jensen in grammar school, back when Danny lived down the street from me and rode bikes with me and we had a not-so-brief obsession with Dungeons & Dragons and model spacecraft building. He had curly red hair and deep brown freckles that formed intricate patterns on his face. One night in my bedroom, I tried to wrestle with him. He totally freaked and stopped spending time with me.

  “What was up with that Cara chick?”

  Stick stripped off his shoes and we’re sharing the couch in the finished part of the basement, an infomercial playing out in muted scenes on the screen.

  “I think she was into you.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, she was. She’s looking for some Puerto Rican action.”

  “Stop.” I reach out to slap his side and he laughs, we both laugh. This is nice.

  “I’m just saying,” Stick says, a slick smile sneaking across his lips as he munches on the chips.

  “Clearly,” I say and touch him again. This is perfect.

  No one uses the basement but Stick and me—I forbid Nico from even entering—so we set up speakers from this ancient system we used to have in my old house, tacked onto the wall at random spots around the room. A crazy fat man in a lab coat is singing the praises of a plastic chopping device on the screen.

  “Are you gay, Matt?”

  “What?”

  His eyes meet mine, and I don’t know what to say, no one’s asked me that before, not so direct.

  “I mean, the fireworks night, was that your first—I don’t know, ‘time’ with another guy or …” He pauses after the air quotes and takes the bag from my hand. “Have you ever kissed a guy before?”

  He sucks in another hit, and I flash to the moment in my bedroom with Danny Jensen—a quick stab at touching—and the smile that scared him from the very idea of our friendship. I hadn’t been that close to anyone since.

  “No. Not before.”

  He hands me back the bag and our fingers touch, this delicate touching. “Me either,” he says.

  The man on the screen with t
he chopping machine shows how fast he can turn ordinary vegetables into salsa, like ten whole seconds quicker than a knife, and I think I feel drunk, or maybe just high. I can’t think of what to say.

  “Last summer my dad picked up my phone. It was just sitting on the table next to my dinner plate, and he said he needed to call one of my brothers and I was daydreaming or something so I didn’t notice. I can’t believe I left Tumblr open.”

  I place the bag on the couch after taking the hit, the images on the screen flickering between highlighting and hiding Stick’s face.

  “He saw pictures of boys and naked men—I mean, women too, there’s a bunch of naked women on my Tumblr feed but way more men than should be on a straight guy’s phone.” He’s quiet, almost whispering, but I can hear him. “So he sat me down and asked if I was gay and I just broke down and cried, I totally denied it. I said I was curious but it didn’t mean I was gay or I didn’t know what it meant—it’s just that it scared him or something and he started avoiding me for a bit, like even our daily talks stopped all of a sudden.”

  He stops and shifts back on the couch, and I see his lips begin to quiver.

  “But we never talked, you know? I never talked about it to anyone. I thought he’d tell my sisters, or Sherry at least, but she never said anything. So I vowed, like I vowed right then and right there to stop, completely stop looking at dudes and their bodies because that can’t be natural—there’s no way it’s natural—and I didn’t want my dad to know me like that, like—he wouldn’t understand. So I never did anything—I didn’t even look at guys again—not until the night before he died.”

  I lean closer on instinct but Stick jerks back, the tears about to crack.

  “It’s just that he was really religious, I mean, it’s not that he was homophobic or hateful it’s just, I don’t know … I’m not sure. I think I was hoping it was a phase, like it would go away when I got older and I’d only want to be with girls, but now … I don’t know what to think.”

  I want to pull him closer, wrap my arms around him, make him forget all the pain slipping down his face.