You and Me and Misery
Page 1
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Louis-Charles, Rayel.
Title: You and me and misery / Rayel Louis-Charles.
Description: New York : West 44, 2020. | Series: West 44 YA verse Identifiers: ISBN 9781538382776 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781538382783 (library bound) | ISBN 9781538383391 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Children’s poetry, American. | Children’s poetry, English. | English poetry.
Classification: LCC PS586.3 L658 2020 | DDC 811’.60809282--dc23
First Edition Published in 2020 by Enslow Publishing LLC 101 West 23rd Street, Suite #240 New York, NY 10011
Copyright © 2020 Enslow Publishing LLC
Editor: Caitie McAneney Designer: Rachel Rising
Photo Credits: Cover cifotart/Shutterstock.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer.
Printed in the United States of America
CPSIA compliance information: Batch #CS18W44: For further information contact Enslow Publishing LLC, New York, New York at 1-800-542-2595.
Gin
I Think...
I’m falling in love. But, how can I be sure about her if I’m not even sure about myself?
Johnny
I Hate Myself
but I read that if you hate something that means you still care. And I don’t believe I still care so maybe I don’t feel anything at all. Because I don’t care... I don’t. I say this the whole walk to school. Trying to convince the birds, the cars, and the trees. Maybe even the sidewalk. And especially myself.
Gin
I Know No One Worth Knowing Here
and no one cares to know me. It’s the beginning of the year and I’m sure this class is just as pointless as I believed it would be. The air in here feels like dozens of dull pencils pressed against my skin. Everything about these walls is too familiar. A cracked blackboard and a white-faced clock with a black rim. Loud creaking chairs that attach to loud creaking desks. Only 249 days to go and then ta-ta junior year.
Honeymoon Phase
Being with Nila is different. Not because she’s a girl. (Though she is the first girl I’ve ever been with. The first anything, really). It’s different in a cheesy movie kind of way. A “spark” of sorts. When she goes to hold my hand, my heart doesn’t stop. Doesn’t skip a beat or anything. But wow, does it hurt. Not the kind of hurt like when Mom died, though. No, not that kind of hurt at all.
The First Time Nila Kissed Me
I was on my way out from a party. We’d just met that night. She walked me home up to the front porch. When she leaned into me, I asked her, What kind of a girl wears cologne? The kind who wants to, she replied. Then she kissed my cheek and hopped off the top step. Night, Ginny, she shouted. I hate that name, I shouted back and went inside.
Fifth Period
I drag the boulders that are my feet down yellow-tiled halls. When I arrive to my fifth class, I slop over a front row desk like sludge. I sit like I’m spineless. My boneless body folds between the desktop and the cold, green chair. I jump when my back touches it. Slam my knee against the desk. Heads turn and look at me. I hate this place. I wish Nila was here.
Seating Chart
To my right sits John. He’s gone to school with me since I can remember. He hasn’t changed since then. Story is, his dad is a drunk and his mother’s a ghost. A living, breathing one, though. Story is, he has parents and I don’t.
He’s Been John
since I can remember. Creepily quiet, but smart. He wears the same three sweatpants every week. And I can’t remember the last time I saw him out of a sweatshirt. His round dimpled chin is constantly tucked behind the collar. It reminds me of the game Whac-A-Mole. He takes his chin out to answer a question in class, and then quickly tucks it back in.
Johnny
Peppermint Patty
Gin stinks of cigarette smoke. Bitter and choking. The smell makes my eyes water until my nose is used to it. She wasn’t always a smoker. Gin used to smell like peppermint. Like the soft peppermints that unfold and crumble when you hold them in your cheek for just a few seconds.
Gin
My Place
I bring Nila here. I skip my last period. Meet her outside school just before football practice starts. I take her hand. Guide her into the forest behind the sports field. I have never taken anyone here before and I tell her this. She smiles and squeezes my hand. Welcome to my place! I say. And then we lay on a bed of red leaves.
Is this...
confusing? Nila asks. But this is more than that. I remember confusing. Confusing was the first time I bled through my jeans. Confusing is breaking down Shakespeare for my AP English class. This is not confusing. This is that strange creep of déjà vu, as familiar as a recent dream. This is that rich, salty taste of adrenaline after a race. This is that warm prickle of the sun on your skin during a summertime rain shower. This is the “A-ha!” moment.
This is...
home.
Nila Always Says Things
Spits “truths” she swears by—her self-made bible. Like she says it’s better to “be out,” to exist in the open. She says this for the first time as we lay beside each other on the grass. Crossing pinkies. When I imagine being free, I imagine I’m a tree and the sun is my truth, bouncing warmth across my leaves. The branches, my arms, are wide and open. I’m saying, look at me, look at me. I am free. But we both know trees can’t talk.
Nila Doesn’t Say
how the choice of her story wasn’t really her choice at all. At least not for a while. That the “coming out” she speaks of was more like she was thrown out. And when I see her as a tree, I imagine her truth like a forest fire. Her leaves lit and burned. Her fire spreading onto my branches.
When I Think About Truths
it makes me uneasy. Like church confessions. I never quite understood confession. But I was too afraid not to do it. Father, forgive me. I stole two dimes from Mommy’s dresser. Go and pray four Hail Mary’s and help your mother with dinner. Even the smallest of things were the biggest sins I had.
I Haven’t Seen Nila
for nine days. I’ve kept track with stonelike magnets on my locker door. I slide a dark green one beside the others to count 10. I wonder if she’s mad at me. If it has something to do with my not being out. My phone dings. She sends me a text. Wants to meet.
The Day Nila
Dumps Me
I sneak out of school. She dropped out a couple of years ago. She often asks me to skip, so I do. When I meet up with her, she’s with her friends. She says we are over. She says, You bore me. Says this in front of everyone. We just don’t mesh anymore, she says. When I turn to leave, all eyes are on me. Kids, man, I hear one person say. In that moment, I feel like a kid. I feel like a toddler. I feel so small.
Johnny
Bulimia Confessions
Sometimes, I want to confess to my mother. I want to tell her the truth about this. The dark, heavy thing in my chest that pulls me to the toilet like a magnet. Pulls my fingers to my throat like a forced habit. Makes me throw up every day again and again.
Gin
Pufferfish
I am taking off my backpack when John turns his body to face me. Why are your eyes so puffy? he asks. Why are YOU so puffy? I snap back. That was mean. That was mean, I say out loud. He mutters, Yeah. It was. Then he turns to face the front of the class. The starting bell rings. Only 231 days.
Johnny
She’s Mean
an
d she smells even more like cigarettes. Which I didn’t even know was possible. She keeps coming in with red, puffy eyes. They remind me of home. At the end of almost every day, my mother has those same eyes. Red and puffy. Like she stuffed them with cotton balls. Like she filled them with helium.
Gin
The Afterlife
I feel as though I am mourning a dead cat or my first goldfish. Nila was my first goldfish. Bright orange was her laughter. Her voice, smooth and velvet like waves. Fishy were her lips. She was my first goldfish. And rather than die, she leapt out of her bowl. Swam through my chest, passing my rib cage, out from between my shoulder blades, into bigger waters.
Johnny
Fifth Period
When I walk into class the next day, Gin is not there and I am late. I am staring at her empty chair when Mr. Ruzza slaps a book onto my desk—Romeo and Juliet. The loud slap of the book makes me jump up, lifting the desk with me. Someone snorts. And then the whole class starts to laugh. If Gin were here, she wouldn’t be one of them. She never laughs when the others do.
Gin
I Had to Get Out of There
I couldn’t handle the idea of class notes or pop quizzes or gum popping. The gossipy whispers or judgy glares. So when I got to second period, I walked right back out and went to my place. But it only reminded me of Nila. And the way the red leaves tangled in her hair looked like the red freckles that speckled her cheeks. It was just too soon.
Uncle Leon
I just get home. And Uncle Leon is standing with a paper in his hand. A letter from the school about my “lack of attendance.” The first time they sent it, I ripped it up. But they must’ve sent another. He turns and faces me. He looks so tired whenever he gets home from his end-of-the-month business trips. And when he is disappointed, there is this look of betrayal and a reminder of his trust in his eyes. And I can’t tell him how oddly glad I am to see that face. How it reminds me of Mom.
Johnny
Home Sweet Home
Each day I open our front door and I never know what to expect. There are times I find Father passed out in front of the TV. There are times I find Father passed out at the dining room table. Today, he is standing in the kitchen archway. And my mother is standing in front of him. He’s holding an ice pack in his hand. And when he lifts it from my mother’s face, her eyes are red and puffy. With purple rings to frame them.
Father
When I turned 10, my father asked me, Do you want to be a man or do you want to be a boy? Confused by the question, I didn’t respond. He grabbed my arms, shook me hard, and said, No man calls his father “Daddy.” You want to be a man? From here on out, it is father or sir. Do you understand? Yes, I said. And then he squeezed harder. Yes, sir, I said.
Gin
Mom
pulled people in like a lasso. Drew smiles out of faces that would rarely bend out from their natural frowning form. She was charming that way. Beautiful and warm. Everything about her was fire. Her dark brown eyes were like mine. Her coily black hair was like mine. Her laughter. Her voice. Her exit, though, was like Nila’s—harsh, fast, unexpected.
How She Left Things
How Nila left me reminded me of Mom. It was unexpected, unfair. It reminds me of a GIF I saw that went viral across the school one day. A toddler is on the beach by the shoreline and a tall wave smashes into him. Nothing bad happens, but when the tide pulls back, the little one cries, sitting on the wet sand.
Everyone Laughed
when they saw the GIF. But I didn’t. I know how scary the wave must have been. And when the toddler sits on the wet sand, I imagine it is me. And it is quicksand I’m sitting on. And I am stuck and sinking.
A Promise
I can still feel Mom’s hand wrapped around mine as she walked me to my first day of school. I made her promise she’d walk me every first day after. I made her promise she’d hold my hand right up to my classroom door. Blue and red paper hand cutouts all around its window frame.
When Mom Died
I begged her to take me with her. I leaned over her casket, took a hand that was colder than ice. And I begged that she walk me through my first day without her. I begged her to take me to the door where “things get easier.” I begged her to take me.
Never
I was never warned of all the ways my heart could pump against a surface other than my rib cage. Like, for instance, the ground right outside the door labeled “first breakup.”
Rather Than
Mom’s hand to guide me through it, maybe brace me for what was behind that door, for what happened beyond its frame, I felt my body thrown. I felt my body fall. No hands to catch me. Not even my own.
Johnny
Lately, When I See Gin
in the hall, I try smiling at her. Because I figure if her eyes are anything like my mother’s, then she must be sad about something. Miserable, even. And I’m not sure how to show her kindness any other way. But she hardly notices most people. And if she doesn’t notice them, she definitely doesn’t see me.
Gin
Crooked Smile
That kid, John, keeps smiling at me in the hallways. His two front teeth are crossed like mine. And it makes me uncomfortable. Each time, I look away. But it makes no difference. He keeps smiling anyway. So, today I stare. I stare so hard that when his face crumbles into sadness I almost believe I broke it.
College Applications
I walk into an ambush. The guidance counselor leans back in her chair. She repeats the same question she asked me last year: What are your plans for college? She hands me a pile of pamphlets with strange faces. Faces that look like they know actual happiness. And college is their source.
But the Smiles
look fake the longer I look at them. Their lips stretched so wide I imagine them as a rubber band that eventually snaps from the tension.
When I Leave the Guidance Office
I look at my reflection in the door window. I try to remember what that looks like across my face—a smile. I wonder if it’s even possible to do again. Maybe somewhere fresh. Somewhere new. Maybe college? Anywhere other than here.
College Plans
Nila would say wasting money on college is pointless. Because you could always “self-educate.” That never made much sense to me. Because it was more than that. My mom would tell me stories of meeting new people, learning new facts, making new things. When I asked Nila if she thought these stories were true, she laughed in my face.
Johnny
I Was Sure He Wouldn’t Find Them,
but when I walk into the house, I find the papers spread out across the dining room table. A large brown bottle is tipped over. Father takes a college application—he has been waiting for me to see—and uses it to soak up the spill. His eyes are on me. A smirk slides across his face.
Dinner
Father rants about everywhere I’m not going. And everything I won’t be. My mother’s lips part and then quickly press together around her fork. I can’t imagine what she would’ve said. I can’t imagine much of anything in her voice anymore.
When Father
pierces the chicken on his plate, I think he imagines it’s me. He laughs, mocking the applicant requirements for an Ivy League school. He laughs so hard he chokes on a piece of chicken. And it’s then that I imagine it’s me, stuck in his throat, forcing him into silence.
When I Was Little
we’d gather around the TV and watch Jeopardy! Father used to throw popcorn in my mother’s hair every time she answered. Shushing her loudly through her response. And when she got it right (which really felt like always), my mother’s chin would tilt up. This is how she’d show her closeted genius. Quietly, and to herself.
Jeopardy!: Literature Edition
Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet was published in what year? Mr. Ruzza asks. What is 1597? I say. Correct, John, Mr. Ruzza says. This was believed to be Shakespeare’s first play. What is King Henry VI? Mr. Ruzza nods and claps, which makes me smi
le. Oh, we have ourselves a genius,Gin mocks. She looks particularly miserable today. A boy named Ricky laughs. Then the rest of the class laughs. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t, but she made them. And I don’t know what hurts most.
Gin
When I Was Little
my mother would shout from our house. Come down, she’d say. Come down from that wall. The wall set the property line between the neighbors and us. You can crack your head open falling from up there, she’d yell. I’d always burst into laughter, knowing her head would poke out once she saw me through the kitchen window. And when I’d lose my footing, only then would I get scared. Like Humpty Dumpty, I would crack. Like an egg, I’d splatter.