FIVE
I know it’s really cheesy—crass even—to compare my being dumped to the accident that killed Mia’s family, but I can’t help it. Because for me, at any rate, the aftermath felt exactly the same. For the first few weeks, I’d wake up in a fog of disbelief. That didn’t really happen, did it? Oh, f*ck, it did. Then I’d be doubled over. Fist to the gut. It took a few weeks for it all to sink in. But unlike with the accident—when I had to be there, be present, help, be the person to lean on—after she left, I was all alone. There was nobody to step up to the plate for. So I just let everything fall away and then everything just stopped.
I moved home, back to my parents’ place. Just grabbed a pile of stuff from my room at the House of Rock and left. Left everything. School. The band. My life. A sudden and wordless departure. I balled up in my boy bed. I was worried that everyone would bang down the door and force me to explain myself. But that’s the thing with death. The whisper of its descent travels fast and wide, and people must’ve known I’d become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body. Well, except relentless Liz, who stopped by once a week to drop off a CD mix of whatever new music she was loving, which she cheerfully stacked on top of the untouched CD she’d left the week before.
My parents seemed baffled by my return. But then, bafflement was pretty typical where I was concerned. My dad had been a logger, and then when that industry went belly-up he’d gotten a job on the line at an electronics plant. My mom worked for the university catering department. They were one another’s second marriages, their first marital forays both disastrous and childless and never discussed; I only found out about them from an aunt and uncle when I was ten. They had me when they were older, and I’d apparently come as a surprise. And my mom liked to say that everything that I’d done—from my mere existence to becoming a musician, to falling in love with a girl like Mia, to going to college, to having the band become so popular, to dropping out of college, to dropping out of the band—was a surprise, too. They accepted my return home with no questions. Mom brought me little trays of food and coffee to my room, like I was a prisoner.
For three months, I lay in my childhood bed, wishing myself as comatose as Mia had been. That had to be easier than this. My sense of shame finally roused me. I was nineteen years old, a college dropout, living in my parents’ house, unemployed, a layabout, a cliché. My parents had been cool about the whole thing, but the reek of my pathetic was starting to make me sick. Finally, right after the New Year, I asked my father if there were any jobs at the plant.
“You sure this is what you want?” he’d asked me. It wasn’t what I wanted. But I couldn’t have what I wanted. I’d just shrugged. I’d heard him and my mom arguing about it, her trying to get him to talk me out of it. “Don’t you want more than that for him?” I heard her shout-whisper from downstairs. “Don’t you want him back in school at the very least?”
“It’s not about what I want,” he’d answered.
So he asked around human resources, got me an interview, and a week later, I began work in the dataentry department. From six thirty in the morning to three thirty in the afternoon, I would sit in a windowless room, plugging in numbers that had no meaning to me.
On my first day of work, my mother got up early to make me a huge breakfast I couldn’t eat and a pot of coffee that wasn’t nearly strong enough. She stood over me in her ratty pink bathrobe, a worried expression on her face. When I got up to leave, she shook her head at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You working at the plant,” she said, staring at me solemnly. “This doesn’t surprise me. This is what I would’ve expected from a son of mine.” I couldn’t tell if the bitterness in her voice was meant for her or me.
The job sucked, but whatever. It was brainless. I came home and slept all afternoon and then woke up and read and dozed from ten o’clock at night until five in the morning, when it was time to get up for work. The schedule was out of sync with the living world, which was fine by me
A few weeks earlier, around Christmas, I’d still held a candle of hope. Christmas was when Mia had initially planned to come home. The ticket she’d bought for New York was a round-trip, and the return date was December nineteenth. Though I knew it was foolish, I somehow thought she’d come see me, she’d offer some explanation—or, better yet, a massive apology. Or we’d find that this had all been some huge and horrible misunderstanding. She’d been emailing me daily but they hadn’t gotten through, and she’d show up at my door, livid about my not having returned her emails, the way she used to get pissed off at me for silly things, like how nice I was, or was not, to her friends.
But December came and went, a monotony of gray, of muted Christmas carols coming from downstairs. I stayed in bed.
It wasn’t until February that I got a visitor home from a back East college.
“Adam, Adam, you have a guest,” my mom said, gently rapping at my door. It was around dinnertime and I was sacked out, the middle of the night to me. In my haze, I thought it was Mia. I bolted upright but saw from my mother’s pained expression that she knew she was delivering disappointing news. “It’s Kim!” she said with forced joviality.
Kim? I hadn’t heard from Mia’s best friend since August, not since she’d taken off for school in Boston. And all at once, it hit me that her silence was as much a betrayal as Mia’s. Kim and I had never been buddies when Mia and I were together. At least not before the accident. But after, we’d been soldered somehow. I hadn’t realized that Mia and Kim were a package deal, one with the other. Lose one, lose the other. But then, how else would it be?
But now, here was Kim. Had Mia sent her as some sort of an emissary? Kim was smiling awkwardly, hugging herself against the damp night. “Hey,” she said. “You’re hard to find.”
“I’m where I’ve always been,” I said, kicking off the covers. Kim, seeing my boxers, turned away until I’d pulled on a pair of jeans. I reached for a pack of cigarettes. I’d started smoking a few weeks before. Everyone at the plant seemed to. It was the only reason to take a break. Kim’s eyes widened in surprise, like I’d just pulled out a Glock. I put the cigarettes back down without lighting up.
“I thought you’d be at the House of Rock, so I went there. I saw Liz and Sarah. They fed me dinner. It was nice to see them.” She stopped and appraised my room. The rumpled, sour blankets, the closed shades. “Did I wake you?”
“I’m on a weird schedule.”
“Yeah. Your mom told me. Data entry?” She didn’t bother to try to mask her surprise.
I was in no mood for small talk or condescension. “So, what’s up, Kim?”
She shrugged. “Nothing. I’m in town for break. We all went to Jersey to see my grandparents for Hanukkah, so this is the first time I’ve been back and I wanted to stop and say hi.”
Kim looked nervous. But she also looked concerned. It was an expression I recognized well. The one that said I was the patient now. In the distant night I heard a siren. Reflexively, I scratched my head.
“Do you still see her?” I asked.
“What?” Kim’s voice chirped in surprise.
I stared at her. And slowly repeated the question. “Do you still see Mia?”
“Y—Yes,” Kim stumbled. “I mean, not a lot. We’re both busy with school, and New York and Boston are four hours apart. But yes. Of course.”
Of course. It was the certainty that did it. That made something murderous rise up in me. I was glad there was nothing heavy within reaching distance.
“Does she know you’re here?”
“No. I came as your friend.”
“As my friend?”
Kim blanched from the sarcasm in my voice, but that girl was always tougher than she seemed. She didn’t back down or leave. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Tell me, then, friend. Did Mia, your friend, your BFF, did she tell you why she dumped me? Without a word? Did she happen to mention that to you at all? Or didn’t I come up?”
“Adam, please . . .” Kim’s voice was an entreaty.
“No, please, Kim. Please, because I haven’t got a clue.”
Kim took a deep breath and then straightened her posture. I could practically see the resolve stiffening up her spine, vertebra by vertebra, the lines of loyalty being drawn. “I didn’t come here to talk about Mia. I came here to see you, and I don’t think I should discuss Mia with you or vice versa.”
She’d adopted the tone of a social worker, an impartial third party, and I wanted to smack her for it. For all of it. Instead, I just exploded. “Then what the f*ck are you doing here? What good are you then? Who are you to me? Without her, who are you? You’re nothing! A nobody!”
Kim stumbled back, but when she looked up, instead of looking angry, she looked at me full of tenderness. It made me want to throttle her even more. “Adam—” she began.
“Get the hell out of here,” I growled. “I don’t want to see you again!”
The thing with Kim was, you didn’t have to tell her twice. She left without another word.
That night, instead of sleeping, instead of reading, I paced my room for four hours. As I walked back and forth, pushing permanent indentations into the tread of my parents’ cheap shag carpeting, I felt something febrile growing inside of me. It felt alive and inevitable, the way a puke with a nasty hangover sometimes is. I felt it itching its way through my body, begging for release, until it finally came tearing out of me with such force that first I punched my wall, and then, when that didn’t hurt enough, my window. The shards of glass sliced into my knuckles with a satisfying ache followed by the cold blast of a February night. The shock seemed to wake something slumbering deep within me.
Because that was the night I picked up my guitar for the first time in a year.
And that was the night I started writing songs again.
Within two weeks, I’d written more than ten new songs. Within a month, Shooting Star was back together and playing them. Within two months, we’d signed with a major label. Within four months, we were recording Collateral Damage, comprised of fifteen of the songs I’d written from the chasm of my childhood bedroom. Within a year, Collateral Damage was on the Billboard charts and Shooting Star was on the cover of national magazines.
It’s occurred to me since that I owe Kim either an apology or a thank-you. Maybe both. But by the time I came to this realization, it seemed like things were too far gone to do anything about it. And, the truth is, I still don’t know what I’d say to her.