A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  “Did you look on the ground?”

  “Dude,” he said. “You bounced for about fifty fucking feet. You flew all the way across the fucking street and partway down the next fucking block. I fucking—I checked in all the places I saw you skid, but—fuck, dude. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Can you move your toes?” the medic asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, wiggling them.

  “Fingers?” he asked.

  “Sure. I’m really worried about the tooth though.”

  “Don’t be,” he said.

  “Eddie,” I said. I was starting to panic, thinking about my tooth. And my braces. My dad was going to kill me. I started crying.

  “Jason,” Eddie said. “You need to be quiet. Your mouth—I’m worried you’re gonna tear it.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to think about what else might be wrong. I could feel all my parts. I could breathe. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to be.

  “How’s my brain?” I asked the medic.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Or it seems fine. You mostly landed on your face.”

  I almost laughed. Then I stopped.

  “Someone called my dad?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “Someone called him. He’ll meet us at the hospital. Now seriously, dude. Shut the fuck up.”

  * * *

  When we got to the hospital, a doctor came and looked at me. He flashed a light in my eyes and checked my reflexes. He told me I seemed to be in surprisingly good shape, all things considered. My spine seemed fine, but they needed to do some tests before they let me move. Then he took off and left me taped to the gurney in the hallway. Eddie was leaning against the wall a few feet away, looking exhausted. I was about to say something to him when I heard my dad’s voice, calling my name. Eddie glanced up, and his face went scared again. Dad was coming from the direction my feet were pointing so I couldn’t look at him, but he was saying my name over and over again, and then his face came into view. It was his purple-bulging-vein face, more than his oh-son-how-are-you face.

  “Jason!” he hissed at me as he got closer. “What. The. Fuck?”

  “Dad, I’m sorry. I—”

  “Let me see your—oh shit! Goddamn it!” He fingered my mouth to move my lips around, looking at the condition of my teeth. “What the hell? Your braces. Your tooth. Oh my fucking—after all the money I spent on these? Are you kidding me?”

  “Dad—” I said, when he took his hand away from my mouth.

  “And you!” he shouted, turning on Eddie. “You motherfucker, I knew something like this would happen if he just kept hanging out with you long enough! I fucking knew it! I told him a million times you were a bad influence—and now look at him!”

  “Dad!” I said.

  “You shut your goddamn mouth!” he yelled at me. “And you,” he said, turning back to Eddie. “Don’t ever let me see you darken my door again. I mean it, you piece of shit. I ever hear about Jason so much as walking down your block, I’ll be calling Child Protective Services on your junkie mom faster than you can say what the fuck happened!”

  “Dad!” I shouted again.

  Eddie looked from me to my dad. His face was red and clenched, and I could see that Dad had just said what Eddie had been thinking the whole ride in the ambulance. He didn’t even say anything back. He just turned around and left. I was sobbing by that point.

  “Dad!” I said.

  “Mr. Schmidt?” I couldn’t look up, but I knew the doctor was back.

  “Mr. Schmidt,” the doctor said again, as he walked up next to me. “I’m going to have to ask you to wait outside. You’re upsetting him.”

  “I’m upsetting him?” Dad sneered.

  The doctor surprised me by grabbing Dad’s arm. Hard.

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “You’re upsetting him. Whatever you think happened here, I assure you, he’s been through enough. Can I talk to you outside, please?”

  The doctor physically dragged my dad down the hallway, toward the same door Eddie had just gone out of. I expected the doctor to come back, but he didn’t. I was alone in the hallway for so long that I was starting to fall asleep when I heard footsteps nearby. I opened my eyes and there was a cop standing over me. Cop uniform, cop face. Dark brown hair. Dark brown mustache. Glasses with thick plastic frames.

  “Jason Schmidt?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. My throat seemed to have gotten dry while I was lying there.

  He held up a pad and tore a piece of paper loose, then put it on my chest.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Jaywalking ticket,” he said. Then he turned around and left.

  * * *

  The doctors wanted to keep me overnight for observation, but they couldn’t stop talking about how incredible it was that I was even alive, let alone so relatively unharmed. I didn’t feel unharmed. I felt like I’d been dragged over a mile-long cheese grater. I had a scab that went from my forehead to my chin. My lips were puffed up to three times their normal size, and my face was full of tiny pieces of gravel. The insides of my lips had been ground into raw meat by my braces. My nose was completely crushed. My hands, knees, and elbows were all shredded. I had a cut on the side of my left knee that went past the skin, down to some kind of white material that was either fat or cartilage. Everything hurt. On the other hand, except for my nose and my tooth, I hadn’t broken a single bone, and I’d nearly totaled the car that hit me. So maybe it was another miracle tale of survival after all.

  On the morning after my overnight observation, the hospital brought in a dentist to look at my face. She was Swedish.

  “Ya,” she said, peering into my mouth with her little penlight. “We’re going to need to do some major work in here. Get this old cement off. Put in new braces. But there is no point replacing that tooth right away. I am not even sure you will keep the ones around the missing one. They are all completely shattered. Like a teacup? The kind with all the cracks, that holds together anyway? That’s your front teeth. The only thing holding them together is what’s under the enamel.”

  “So I have to just … have no tooth?” I asked, when she was done.

  “For a while,” she said.

  “How long is a while?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “A year or two.”

  Dad picked me up that afternoon. He’d called my school and told them I’d be out for two weeks, and asked them if they could send my homework to me. Brandon and Ethan came by after school the next day to drop off my assignments.

  “Wow,” Brandon said, staring at my face.

  “Dude,” Ethan said. “Did the car hit you, just, like, right in your face?”

  “Is that my homework?” I asked, nodding at the paper Brandon was holding in his hand.

  “Uh,” he said, glancing down. “Yeah. Are you okay?”

  “Great,” I said, plucking it out of his hand. “Thanks.”

  I did my homework for the week in a few hours. Then I went to bed for three days. The accident had happened on a Saturday. I went back to school the following Thursday, as soon as the swelling in my lips went down. My teachers were all surprised to see me. I said I was fine. It looked worse than it was. And, unlike at home, at least nobody at school was yelling at me about my fucking braces.

  51

  Some kids at school started right in on me about the missing tooth. A guy in my history class started calling me Gappy, which, fortunately, didn’t stick. But the accident seemed to earn me some cred with Ethan and Brandon, who, having seen me in the immediate aftermath, were loudly amazed by how little I bruised and how quickly I healed up. They were especially impressed when I squeezed the odd piece of black gravel out of a healed cut, which I was able to do pretty regularly for a few weeks.

  “You’re like that Wolverine guy, in the comics,” Brandon said.

  If we’d been on a date, that line would have gotten him to at least third base.

  I eased into my friendship with the brothers, p
laying it as cool as I could given how desperate I was to make friends. We started out in the backyard, messing around with a throwing knife their dad had brought back from Indonesia a decade before. We could spend hours taking turns hurling it at a piece of plywood that we’d leaned up against their back porch. Then I had the idea to bring down some of the cheap bullwhips I’d bought in Tijuana, and that was another skill set we built together. We practiced on milkweed and thistles at first. When Halloween rolled around we tied pieces of braided copper wire to our whip tassels and used them to slice pumpkins to shreds.

  In between all the wanton destruction, we watched movies on their fancy top-loading VCR. Summit Foods, the corner store down the street, had a selection of VHS tapes they displayed on an old wire rack designed for paperback books. They only carried a dozen or so movies we ever wanted to watch. Star Wars, Time Bandits, and Escape from New York featured prominently in our rotation, plus a few things Ethan and Brandon had recorded off HBO at their cousin’s house, like The Terminator and War Games, both of which we regarded as deeply philosophical.

  Like a lot of people, we were mostly just caught up in the novelty of being able to watch whole movies, on demand, at home. Until about two years earlier, if we’d wanted to rewatch one of our favorite sci-fi adventures, we’d have had to wait for it to come around at the Neptune, a repertory movie theater in the University District that showed double features, grouped by theme, Sunday through Thursday—and The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight every Friday and Saturday. Calliope had taken me to Rocky once when I was ten. The police searched us at the door to make sure we weren’t bringing any glass bottles into the theater. I was a fan of the repertory theater model, but Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark came through there about once a year, so getting to watch it three times in a day at home, where we could pause it for bathroom and snack breaks, felt like a bizarre futuristic luxury to us.

  I didn’t have a clear picture of which of the brothers I was actually friends with at first. Brandon was in my grade, and he was only a year older, while Ethan was three years older and an eleventh grader. But Ethan and I had more in common: he was the one who liked weapons and Dungeons & Dragons and was more of a committed sci-fi geek. Unlike Brandon, he also liked to wrestle. I still suffered from my inexplicable desire to jump up and down on people, so Ethan’s willingness to scrap with me was a major plus—until it wasn’t. Ethan liked to spar, but he also liked to physically intimidate people during arguments. And because I was always looking for something to push up against, I didn’t back down. It only took about a month for us to end up rolling around on his kitchen floor, trying to hurt each other without being obvious about it. Ethan, who was older, with an adult’s muscle density, was the clear winner.

  The next day at the bus stop, Ethan studiously ignored me, but Brandon stood next to me on the corner.

  “I was thinking we should take the whips down to Discovery Park this weekend,” he said. “Kill some plants. Maybe jump down those cliffs by the sewage treatment plant.”

  “That’d be great,” I said. “It’s not going to … cause a problem for you?”

  “Dude,” he prison-whispered to me, “Ethan’s been pushing me around since I was five. You see this scar here?”

  He pointed to a horizontal line between his bottom lip and his chin, very similar to the one I had left over from the car accident.

  “Ethan did that when we were kids. Tied a giant Tinkertoy on a string, swung it around, hit me in the face with it. My bottom teeth went right through my lip. The only thing you could have done the other day that would have made me happier was if you’d kicked his fat ass from one end of the house to the other.”

  “I … will work on that,” I said. “Next time.”

  “Cool. Meanwhile—Discovery Park? Saturday?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  52

  I waited a few months to try to reach Eddie again. Partly it was to give my dad time to cool down, and partly it was to give Eddie some breathing room. Things Eddie had said to me back when I lived in Ballard, things I’d seen him do, I knew he’d always worried in the back of his mind that he was a bad influence on me. He knew I was no normie, but he also knew I was clean by choice, and he worried that me hanging out with him was going to work against all the other good decisions he thought I was making in my life. So Dad had really gone right for the nuclear option head-fuck with the stuff he’d been screaming at Eddie in the hospital. I figured giving him some time to walk it off would make it easier to get past it.

  Not such a good plan, it turned out.

  I started calling him in mid-November, but it always went through to the answering machine. I left messages, but never got a call back. Finally I gave in and just went over there to see him on my way home from a weekend sleepover at Ryan’s place.

  Eddie’s mom’s boyfriend, Dan, was in the driveway next to the house, working on his van. I’d met him a bunch of times—even gone trailer camping with Dan, Eddie, and Eddie’s mom once, on some land Dan owned out on the Olympic Peninsula. But he didn’t seem to recognize me until I asked him if Eddie was around.

  “Oh,” he said. “Jason, right? Eddie’s friend.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Eddie doesn’t live here anymore, man.”

  “I … what?”

  “Shirley just got too goddamn strung out,” he said, fiddling nervously with a socket wrench. “Coke, man. Bad news. She still calls me asking for money. That’s why I never answer my phone anymore.”

  “You know where they went?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Up north, I think. Shirley was hooking Eddie up, too. That was part of why I told Shirley to leave. It happened fast, man. One day it was just a line or two every once in a while, the next day Eddie was breaking into places and stealing shit to sell, to buy coke for him and his mom. Didn’t figure it was safe to have them around anymore. Fucked up, but I had to do it.”

  I looked at his van and his house. The van had the full A-Team muscle kit: a GMC V8 with red detailing and a spoiler on the roof. The house was a mansion, by Ballard standards. Maybe by anyone’s standards. He made good money as a contractor, and Eddie had been living in his basement for three years. What did it take to make someone a parent? It didn’t matter. He and Eddie had never really gotten along.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I walked to the nearest bus stop. It was the same stop where I’d gotten hit by the car.

  I never saw Eddie again.

  53

  I came home from school one day in December, and Dad said he needed to talk to me in the kitchen. He was dressed like he’d just come in from outside; he had on a black wool coat, a brown scarf, jeans, and his broad-brimmed brown Stetson hat. It was dark out. That time of year, between the overcast skies and the early sunset, it was nearly full dark by four o’clock. The kitchen was lit by a bank of fluorescent lights set into the ceiling behind a warped cover of beaded plastic. The plastic was impregnated with decades of grease and smoke. It gave the blue-green fluorescents a comforting yellow cast, like a bright incandescent bulb.

  I sat down at the kitchen table, and Dad sat across from me, with his back to the living room.

  “I went to the doctor today,” he said.

  I said, “Oh yeah?”

  I knew what the rest of the conversation was going to be. I had no idea what to do about it, but I knew where it was going.

  “You know I’ve been sick,” he said, like he was explaining something to a five-year-old. “Last month, the doctor drew some blood for a test. There’s a test for AIDS now. It’s—the virus that causes AIDS is called HIV, and people get antibodies if we’re infected. They can’t find the virus, but they can find the antibodies. So they test for those.”

  He looked at me like he wanted me to say something. I had no idea what to say, but I figured I should do something. I narrowed my eyes. I chewed my lips and crossed my arms. I was wearing too many layers. Crossing my arms
pulled my jacket and shirts tight across my shoulders. It all felt too bulky. Too constricting. I couldn’t move.

  “I got the results today,” he said. “When I went to the doctor, they told me. The test was positive.”

  “Positive?” I asked. “Positive good, or positive bad?”

  “Bad,” he said.

  He was starting to lose it. His face was getting red. His eyes were welling up. It made me uncomfortable, so I looked at the table.

  “Is there…” I said. “Do they ever get false positives?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “But not this time. The—I guess the numbers were pretty high. The number of antibodies. Conclusive.”

  “What’s that mean?” I asked. “Conclusive. What happens now?”

  “Most people…” He stopped to catch his breath. He was having trouble getting it out. “Usually most people last about six months. That’s what usually happens. About six months.”

  I looked up at him. His face was a wreck. When our eyes met he started gasping and crying.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t want to die. I’m so sorry. I won’t be here. I don’t want to die.”

  I took a deep breath. I was starting to panic, because I wasn’t having any kind of reaction. I didn’t feel anything. I tried. But there was just nothing there. I couldn’t tell him that. He was sobbing across the table from me, and I had to do something or he’d realize I wasn’t going to cry. I moaned and put my elbows on the table and used my hands to cover my face so he wouldn’t see that I wasn’t crying. I tried to think of things that made me cry. I cried in movies all the time. I cried over that Coke commercial. None of it gave me so much as a stuffy nose while my dad was telling me he was dying. I couldn’t feel anything. I bit the insides of my cheeks, but it just hurt. Finally, the combination of the pain and the fear of getting caught caused enough anxiety to elevate my breathing and my pulse. I’d have the right expression on my face. My cheeks would be flushed. I took my hands away. Dad and I looked at each other and stood up to hug. I was thirteen. I was two inches taller than he was. He sobbed against my shoulder. I stood there, holding him, and thinking about myself.