I shake with a shiver, throwing an entire day’s worth of crap off my back.
My broken leg is still attached to me like a stiff slab of concrete, and with cramps in all my other muscles, hefting myself off the floor is no picnic. The litany of all things wrong with me skips through my mind. Thankfully my blood test is in two weeks. My bigness will have its proper medical diagnosis of acromegaly and I’ll be fixed. I can’t wait. Shifting upright, I put only the slightest weight on my leg. It’s still sore from the last time I was knocking around the basement, and I don’t want to mess it up any further than it already is. This cast is my plaster symbiote: it needs me and I need it.
I hop upstairs, one step at a time, and shut the light off on the little village once I get to the kitchen. Sleep well, Dad.
The idea is nice, wishing him a good night’s sleep and all, but his body is rotting in a box in the ground. If there’s anything left, that is. Mom went for an all-natural burial. But who knows, maybe the chemicals from years of chemo turned his veins into plastic, and someone dug him up and posed him like a heroic warrior in one of those traveling body shows.
How would I want to see Dad posed? Definitely not with his torso and legs all carved open like he’s a chest of drawers, jeezus. I saw that poor guy when the show came to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Don’t think getting turned into something out of an Ikea catalog was what that guy had in mind when he donated his cadaver, but as for my dad? I’d love to see him on a horse. Sitting victorious atop a horse with his abdomen and chest hollow. Clean of cancer.
I try the pose. Like I’m a general, triumphant over all the shit that’s trying to kill me from the inside out. Arm outstretched with sword, other hand tucked inside coat. I hold very still. Practicing like I’m dead too.
Past the kitchen, Mom sits, very much alive but in a different kind of stasis, in the living room. I lean on the door frame and stare at the TV over her shoulder. Nonsensical death and mangled bodies and strangely intuitive detectives who instantly know everything.
No one knows everything.
Mom looks over to me. Our standoff thaws. “Hi,” I say.
We’re the ones left behind; all we have is each other. “You’re welcome to come sit, if you want to,” Mom says.
I do. I shuffle and hop over to where she’s sitting and seat myself next to her. Mom reaches for me and I lean against her. If I’m crushing her, she doesn’t show it. She lets me and holds me nearly the same way she has since I was little. There’s nothing to say about this stupid show; she and I know I won’t be staying long—my homework sings its siren song and I need to go soon—but for now, it’s just the two of us with no one knowing anything beyond the moment of now.
TWENTY
Mom drops me off at school with a hug, and I don’t stop her. The car door hangs open and it takes me a hundred years to get out, but she’s patient. I asked to come early and Mom obliged.
“Group today?”
“No frigging way; I’m fine. It was all a big misunderstanding.”
She nods a touch. “Guess it’s all for the best. Now you don’t have to see that Jamie girl.”
Dad? Throw me a sign, please? Anything? Flicker a light if I should tell Mom I talk to Jamie every day now? That we text each other in between classes to say nothing but hi? I scan the length of our well-lit school. Nothing.
“Sure.” Jamie said she stopped going to group too, but Mom doesn’t need to know that. Apparently Mom doesn’t need to know anything. Right, Dad? But seriously, Dad, feel free to jump in.
“Have a good day,” she says.
I look for good-luck pennies and see none. “You too,” I mumble, and she drives off.
The halls are slick and bare, and the rubber tips of my crutches make a squish-punch against the linoleum. I wanted to be here early so I wouldn’t have to see anyone, and last night I got a late start on my homework because neither me or my mom wanted to get off the couch. So we didn’t, and now I’m behind the eight ball on trig, but I don’t mind. Someday, during my interview with the Rhodes committee, I’ll tell them that when I was in high school I used to pretend an asteroid was about to crash into the planet and kill everyone, but I solved the impossible calculations to avoid disaster and saved the entire human race in the nick of time.
Thinking about cracking open my textbook and setting the doomsday-countdown clock on my phone sends a little thrill to my heart as I open the door to the library. The place is empty. I’ve got my pick of places to sit, and I go for the quiet corner. I throw my bag down, but I’m not alone. There’s sniffling behind me.
I turn around and there’s Bailey. At least, I think it’s her, she’s all hunched over in a ball, head down and sounding like she’s cleaning out a fish tank with her face. “Bailey?” I ask.