Even though I was the target, I could see Coach was taking it in the gut. In previous times she’d get on her jag about school, and Coach would wink at me behind her back. Now he was not looking me in the eye. Mr. Dick hung his head. Angus had her gray manga eyes boring into me, sending some instructions in code that I was failing to pick up on. My stomach felt like I’d been eating rusty nails. I was short on focus.
My grandmother though was loud and clear: no more support checks. “My reversed fortune,” she called it. She said I shouldn’t let it scare me, I’d just have to live it down. Some good was known to come out of bad luck, if you met it head-on. I said thanks for the advice.
Dori’s position for some while had been: Screw them. They didn’t love me like she did, so I should move in with her and be done with them all. I won’t deny I’d considered it, to live with Dori for real, as a couple. But that was with Vester still alive, just idle thoughts. I had even asked questions testing her out on the practical side. Like, what if we wanted to cook a real dinner, not just microwave or frozen. She said what do you mean cook, and I said, you know, on the stove. Like a roast or something. Grill cheese. She said if I was hungry we had Slim Jims, and some of those juice packets. I told her it was more of a theoretical. She made her little frown that ran a line between her eyebrows and said the burners on the range were hard to light and she’d never tried out the oven, so I should probably go take it up with Mattie Kate.
But Dori was eighteen, and that’s an adult, whether you know how to work the range or not. People come at it from any number of angles. Some have buried both parents, some have their own kids. Some few probably get to that age without ever having worked any job or gone a day hungry or seen anybody die. Nobody gives you a test, is the thing. The day comes, they hand you a new rule book. Dori was living in her own house with a plastic fucking horse on the roof and her name on the deed, and I could live there too if I wanted. Miss Betsy was all gloom and doom about me going over the adulthood cliff with nobody’s support checks to save me now. Like that was so scary. Ain’t no hill for a climber, I said. I’ve been doing this all my life.
I came back right away to tell Dori. We microwaved some Xtreme butter flavor to celebrate and put the radio on, and she shut Jip in the kitchen so we could sit on the floor of the empty living room of the big house that was all ours now. I had some stellar weed from Maggot, and she’d saved back one of Vester’s fentanyl patches for a rainy day, which this was, still yet and always. We leaned together with our foreheads touching and arms around each other and dipped off like that, listening to Tammy Cochran sing “Life Happened.”
I still had to go back to Coach’s house and get all my stuff out of there. Angus helped. She was peeved as hell, not at me. At my grandmother. “That bitch, lecturing you of all people about bad luck.” She was emptying out the bureau drawers, throwing my T-shirts and balled socks into Jim Beam boxes. They had suitcases in that house, but it seemed like a complication.
“That’s just old people shit,” I told her. “The cost of doing business with them. They’ve got their rock-hard stools and dried-up old poon, what else are they going to wave in your face? They press the know-it-all thing as their sole advantage.”
Angus worked through the bureau from bottom to top and slammed the drawers, bam bam bam, in a practiced way. Like she moved people out of her house for a living, and got paid by the job. “She was asking you to stick up for yourself. And you didn’t even try.”
“Try what?”
“Self-defense! What’s happened to you, Demon? Somebody cut your balls off?”
“She had my report card in hand. I could have bled honey out of my balls, it wasn’t going to change the permanent record.”
Angus sat down on my sheetless bed, now former bed. I can still picture her there, in her khakis and white sleeveless T-shirt and one of those old-fashioned paper-boy caps. Watching me. She tucked one foot up under her. She had really high arches, like a person born with leaf springs. “You’ve had a serious injury. You’re still limping around like Quasimodo.”
“I don’t really know what that is. But thanks.”
“You need surgery. She’s giving you no grace. Cutting you off in your time of need.”
“I don’t need any surgery.”
I had almost nothing left to pack. I went over to the tall triple windows, the views I knew so well. Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.
“Your girlfriend’s father just died. People miss school for a death in the family. Goddamned stuck-up old fart-breath bitch, where is the motherfucking compassion?”
Angus cursing somebody out was not casual. She applied herself. She became a creature of fierce beauty, like a thoroughbred running the Kentucky Derby of cursing. You just had to get out of the way. I let her run my grandmother up the devil’s flagpole while I sorted out the weirder CDs she’d loaned or given me from the ones I wanted to keep. She wanted me to promise I would go back to school in the fall, but I couldn’t see the point. She said it was only two more years, and would make all the difference in my future, etc. I asked her to name one great job I could do around here with a high school diploma, that I couldn’t do now.
I watched her press both thumbs into the sole of her bare foot, thinking. Finally she admitted she couldn’t come up with anything off the bat, but that didn’t prove she was wrong.
Her eyes darted to the doorway. Coach was there, leaning on the doorframe with one outstretched arm, looking at the floor. He wanted me to know the money my grandmother had been sending was of no consequence, this was still my home if I wanted to stay. I said nobody was holding any gun to my head, it just seemed like it was time I moved out.
A gun would have been kinder than the truth, that I was too messed up for football. He knew it. I’d kept myself thoroughly trashed of late, but occasionally I caught sight of it myself, lying out there in the weeds: what small greatness I’d had, I was not getting back. No further success lay ahead for me, and if I stayed here pretending it did, I’d be lying to Coach. Taking advantage of his free ride. I wanted to be a better man than that.
He said he wished things could have turned out different, but he accepted that I wanted to move in with my girlfriend. He wished me well, and ducked out.
Angus was roaming around the room now, touching the few things of mine still left. She picked up the bottle-ship she’d given me. Then set it back on the desk. “How deep are you into the junk?” she asked. Prissy but trying to sound cool, the way a child would say “dog-doo.”
I told her I was still on the painkillers Dr. Watts had prescribed, and that I still felt a lot of pain if I stopped taking them, so. I took them.
She just stared. “You don’t have to bullshit me, Demon. I’ve got no power here.”
I’d never perfected lying to Angus, so I went ahead and told her I was in a little deeper than that. It wasn’t about my knee anymore. She asked, were we talking about meth or heroin. This may have been just DARE officer info, rather than real life, but she wasn’t completely ignorant. I told her I was kind of all over the place, but not meth. And that I wasn’t shooting anything because needles made me want to puke. She didn’t seem surprised. She suggested maybe I could start backing out of this mess the way I got in, step by step. Maybe if I talked to an adult, they could give me advice. Not Coach obviously. Maybe June. Or Ms. Annie.
“Adult,” I said. Ticked off, all the sudden.