antimatter
I was already in a foul mood the morning my father showed up. Keith and Charlie had snuck away the previous evening and taken the train into Boston without telling me. Phoebe was the one who let me know where they’d gone when I called over to her house looking for him. Keith slunk back in after midnight with his hair all rumpled and promptly kicked me out of his bed, where I’d finally fallen asleep. I tried asking him about our parents, about what Phoebe had said to me the night of the carnival, but he just told me to shut it. Then he turned his back on me.
But I knew something was up the moment I pulled on my tennis clothes and court shoes and skipped down the back stairs to the kitchen. Instead of encountering a quiet, darkened room, flipping on the overhead light, and scrounging for something to eat, I padded into a kitchen where two figures stood talking.
I balked. The lack of sunlight draped the room with a frigid atmosphere, and deep shadows stretched from every corner. But I knew those voices.
“Dad,” I said meekly. He stood beside my grandfather. I hadn’t seen him in weeks. Yet nothing had changed.
“Drew.” His long fingers drummed against the bottom of his coffee mug. An ominous tattoo. A tropic storm of unease gathered inside of me. I began to sweat.
“I d-didn’t know you were coming,” I said.
“I wanted to surprise you.”
My voice didn’t sound right. My mouth felt cottony with sleep. I walked to the refrigerator to get some orange juice. My father stepped in front of me, blocking my path.
“We’re going to be taking a trip in a little while.”
“A trip?”
“To New Hampshire,” said my grandfather, standing there in one of his ridiculous dresses. He referred to them as “sleeping gowns,” but they were definitely dresses. “We’ve got a cabin in the White Mountains. Half mile from Crater Lake. Beautiful spot. Whole family stays up there every summer.”
“New Hampshire?” I squeaked.
Two generations of restrained Winters males stared at me in silence. From the corner of my eye, I made out my Phenergan prescription sitting on the countertop, and the storm inside my head took on strength. My mind flooded with a wild blackness. I hated that they had been talking about me, planning how to get me to Crater Lake. And now no one was going to let me have breakfast. I knew it. Something snapped within me, some internal racket string that’d been wound far too tight, for far too long.
“I’m not going.”
“What?”
I said it louder. “I’m not going!”
My grandfather gave a low laugh. A you don’t know anything laugh.
Cheeks flushed hot, I stormed from the kitchen to the living room, where I threw myself onto an antique love seat that creaked beneath my weight. I buried my face in the musty seat cushions like an ostrich.
They followed me. Even worse, my grandmother thudded down the stairs to join them. I heard her ask my father in one of those hushed tones she usually reserved for finding out the neighbors were gay or had garden gnomes or spoke English as a second language, “Winston, what on earth is going on?”
When I looked up, they’d crowded around me. Waves of their displeasure and impatience washed over me. I had no room to breathe. I had no room to think. They closed in tighter, trapping me with their claustrophobic contempt. I saw my grandfather stretch out an arm to reach for me, and I knew he had the Phenergan in his other hand. In one frenzied motion I sprang from the couch, cracking the top of my head against my grandmother’s chin as I did so. She reeled backward with a bleat of horror. I darted to the right, scrambling into the formal dining room and diving beneath the table onto all fours.
“Drew!” my father bellowed, his fury, humiliation, and utter confusion embedded in that one word. He thundered after me, hot on my heels, reaching under the table and grabbing for my legs. Too late. With a panicked cry, I came out the other side and launched straight for my grandmother’s cherrywood hutch. My body crashed against the cabinet with a thud. The whole thing shook and rocked forward. Pieces of crystal and china rained down on top of me. I slip-crawled across piles of broken glass as wild, gasping sobs poured from deep inside my body, then I wedged myself beneath an antique secretary resting against the far wall. When I looked down, a long, crescent-shaped shard of glass was grasped between the fingers of my right hand. I brought my arm up. Pulled the shard across my own throat. Then I reached up to do it again.
“Stop!” Something grabbed hold of my arm. “Stop that!”
I shrieked and bucked backward but had nowhere to go. My left shoulder drove into the wall and I writhed like a creature in a petri dish.
“Drew, Drew,” said a voice. “What are you doing?”