I look back up at the mirror as my eyes start to burn, and I blink a few times, spit, rinse, swish, spit.
I usher Russ out and into his pajamas. “Read a story,” he says as I tuck him in. Mom just switched him from a crib to a twin bed a couple of months ago. I settle on the fading quilt beside him, scoop up Where the Wild Things Are from the dark space under the bed, and crack it open to where we left off last, a page with yellow eyes and a tiny scarlet boat and a set of loving, angry, wild things gnashing their terrible teeth. As I show him the illustrations, I say in my best growl, “We’ll eat you up—we love you so,” and Russ’s eyes are round and solemn, and he lifts his hand like the boy in the monster suit, stepping into his private boat, waving good-bye.
I WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING AFTER THE LONGEST sleep I’ve had in months, dreamless, no yelling down the hall. I shower under water so hot, my skin flushes, I drive to school under the speed limit, I take actual notes in US History, I walk through the halls steady and clear-eyed, and the whole time, my head feels so empty, it’s as if somebody went in through my ear with a hook and tugged my brain out in one long string.
The lunch bell rings, reminding me how little appetite I have. I don’t even want to smoke. Now that I think about it, I haven’t wanted to smoke since, what, last Friday? That’s a long gap for me, but for some reason, I’m not missing it much.
I walk to García’s classroom—empty until 1:00 for his lunch period—and dump my stuff in my seat. The back of the room, where García has a sign reading BOOK DEN, has a huge bookshelf that I always see the Poetry Society kids ogling. I draw a chair up to the front of the bookshelf and stare down the spines, all the names in alphabetical order, deep-sounding hardbacks like The Satanic Verses and Crime and Punishment mixed in with thin paperbacks in big, goofy fonts that hardly look longer than chapter books. I run my finger over the spines, remembering that half hour on Sunday when I was finishing Inferno, when I’d gotten so used to Dante’s poetry that it slid over my eyes as gently as silk over skin, and I only had to search for word definitions a handful of times. I’d forgotten how reading felt when I was young, mental images burning brightly in my mind, my imagination smoldering above the flint and tinder of the turning pages.
I pull out a gray-jacketed book called The Black Glass Monarch and open it.
On Vern’s eleventh birthday, the Monarch’s Chief Lieutenant came for her.
The story pours over me like water, drips down onto my head until I’m immersed head-to-toe, transported between the covers. I’ve never read this fast, and it’s no Dante, but every time the main character outsmarts a soldier or discovers something about her past, my grip tightens, and this world sharpens until I’ve left my own world altogether.
“Matt?” says a voice, jerking me out of the weird reading haze, and I look over my shoulder. Olivia stands in the doorway, her head tilted, her lips glossed cherry red.
I stand. “Olivia. Hey.”
She heads to her desk and drops her backpack in her seat. “What are you reading?”
“It’s, uh, called The Black Glass Monarch,” I say, and she says, “Oh, I’ve heard of that. You like fantasy?” and I’m like, “Apparently.” She approaches the Book Den shelves, glancing from title to title. I take a paper clip from the shelf and mark my page, shutting the book.
“Listen,” she says, “I didn’t want to say it over text, but thanks for Saturday night,” and I say, “Sure. Would’ve taken you two forever to clean that place alone,” and she says, “Oh, that, too, but I meant with Dan.”
I meet her eyes, which are careful and shaded by her short brown lashes, and I say, “Sure. He was out of line,” and after a second, she says, “Everything okay? You sound sort of . . .”
“Of what?”
She shrugs. “Distant, I guess,” and I say, “Yeah, well.”
“Something happen?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, yeah, but you don’t want to hear it,” and she says, “Sure I do.”
I lean against the bookshelf. “I found out last night that my parents are getting divorced.”
A dark gap parts her lips, her eyes crease with sympathy, and I stare down at my shoes. “I’m sorry,” she says, and I try to sort my thoughts, which have rushed back in an eager herd, all jockeying for place. “My parents—I want them to keep trying,” I mutter, embarrassed to say it, embarrassed even to want it. “They make each other miserable, so it’s stupid. But I feel . . . I don’t know. Betrayed? Not for me. I wouldn’t give a shit, but it’s Russ. I mean, they had a kid three years ago. I feel like that’s some sort of promise to him, and they broke it.”