“For years. Actually four years: one, two, three, four.”
I’m getting dizzy. If she shrugged off this story like a trivial childhood drama I’d be fine, but hearing her voice, agreeing that it means a lot more than it sounds …
“Kissing you with seven guys secretly standing around watching? I’d have killed him. I want to kill him now.”
My chest tightens some more. I can’t talk about this much longer. I didn’t want to kill him when it happened; I wanted to kill myself. I saw a side of the world I knew existed but thought I could protect myself from, and in that moment I saw that I never could. There’s no absolute safety to be found anywhere. Not the kind I want anyway.
“So, yeah.” I sigh. “I knew Scott Kilpatrick. Or I thought I did. Then I found out I really didn’t.”
Because no one can know anybody, really. Not completely.
Molly shifts and jostles me a little. I feel her hand on my shoulder. I get it that she nudged me first so her hand wouldn’t be a surprise, to touch me without startling me and also without having to awkwardly ask permission. I’m so grateful for her understanding Rule Number Two this well after only a week, I wonder if I can keep it together.
I don’t have to wonder for long. Aunt Celia arrives and saves me. The irony almost makes me laugh. Almost.
*
Hey, Dad.
Pretty typical week. Good things happened, bad things happened, like always. I’m sorry we don’t talk after school anymore; it’s too hard to get time to just sit alone. Petey thinks I’m bored or at least not busy. From now on I think I can only talk to you right before bed.
I’m also sorry I’m talking to you like you’re actually listening. I know the universe doesn’t really work that way. If it did, if you were really watching, you wouldn’t need me to explain all these things. Still, this is how my brain wants to do it.
Now I wish I knew what you said to Scott that day you sent him away. Whatever it was, it worked. I don’t think I ever told you how grateful I was for that. If he’d kept after me like we were in some pathetic romantic comedy, I think I might have unraveled.
Except I did unravel. I know that. Mostly on the inside. Maybe you did, too. I could hear it in your voice, how after that you knew you couldn’t always protect me. I tried to get you to believe that it wasn’t your job. I don’t think I tried hard enough.
I cross my room and take the plastic pill bottle out of my scarf drawer, like every night. It’s the bottle of Xanax that was sitting empty on Dad’s nightstand the morning I found him. The bottle I didn’t know existed until that moment but had been hiding in plain sight for a while. The bottle the insurance company used to deny paying out his life insurance that would have kept the house in my name instead of Aunt Celia’s. The bottle I wanted back so much I punched the police detective over and over again until he promised to give it back once the case closed, which happened only a week later. The bottle Aunt Celia claimed proved what she’d always believed, that Dad was the weak one even though it was her own sister who drank too much wine that night and drove the two of us into that bridge support, killing her and making sure her screaming face would be the last thing I ever saw. And most important, it’s the bottle that taught me everyone has secrets. Everyone. No matter how much you love them and think you know them and think they love you back.
I open the bottle, take out a gold star, lick it, and press it firmly on the poster board hanging on the back of my door. A clean white rectangle filling up with stars that, when anyone asks me about it, I just say is tactile art, my Star Chart. Every night I get to add a gold star if I earn it. Tonight’s makes eighty-one gold stars. Eighty-one consecutive days without crying.
I know it was an accident. Oxycodone for your back, then some more when it didn’t work, along with some ibuprofen for swelling, plus some Xanax, and then a couple beers that made you forget you already took them and you took more, and extra Xanax because you were having a bad week, all adding up to stop your breathing sometime between one and three in the morning. I know you wouldn’t have left me here alone on purpose, no matter what the cops or the insurance people or my closest relatives say. I know it.
But I also know you kept your feelings inside, and they were bad enough to need all those pills. I don’t think it would have changed what happened, because I’m sure it was an accident, but maybe if I’d known I could’ve helped. Maybe you wouldn’t have needed the pills in the first place. Maybe.
I take off my scarf and tuck it and the pill bottle in the drawer and slide it closed. I brush the light switch to make sure it’s down—sometimes people don’t turn it off when they leave because it’s too weird for them to turn off the light when someone’s in the room—but it’s down so I know the room looks the same to everyone else now as it does to me. Or maybe not. I dimly remember how the moon and stars and streetlights keep everything from being as completely dark as it looks to me now.
I crawl into bed.
Good night, Dad.
Someone walks into the living room and flops down hard on the leather easy chair. It’s Sheila; she’s the only one who would throw herself down nearby without saying anything. Now she’s texting. I sit with my head back on the sofa, not really listening to the show. I’m not even sure what it is anymore but it doesn’t matter because I can tell by the sudden crazy electric guitar and synth explosion that it’s the closing credits.
Aunt Celia calls from the entryway, “You girls ready?”
“Going somewhere?” Petey asks, sounding hopeful.
Even Sheila can tell he’s angling to come along and she says in her bored voice, “The mall. Shopping. Clothes. You’d hate it. Then we’d all hate it.”
“You’re coming anyway,” Aunt Celia says. “Dad took his car in for an oil change.”
Petey groans.
“It’ll be fun,” I say. “I need new running shoes. You can help me get them.”
“But I don’t want to stand around for hours while Sheila tries on a million pants.”
“Nobody does, sweetie,” Aunt Celia says, walking into the room. “That’s why we’re dropping her off. We’ll come home after we buy Parker shoes.”
“Shotgun!” Petey shouts as we leave the house.
“Uh-uh, in the back,” Aunt Celia says. Dictators don’t follow rules they don’t like. “I’m up front with Sheila.”
“But if—” Petey says.
“It’s a provisional license,” Sheila says. “I can’t drive with anyone in the car unless Mom’s there sitting next to me. Get used to it.”
In the back with Petey, I hold out my hand and whisper, “One, two, three, four …”
He grabs my hand in the proper grip and whispers back, “I declare a thumb war.”
*
In