Life’s a fucking bitch though. Why do they make movies and books about people overcoming the odds when death is a noose always hanging around your neck, and it tightens if you turn left or right, and it chokes you if you try to slow down and step back, or if you try to get too far ahead. And you’re always on your toes. Death doesn’t kill you, but those toes give up and you’re as good as a corpse by the end.
Life isn’t a circle or a matter of waiting for karma. Or what’s another inspir-fucking-ational saying?
Life’s about learning from your mistakes.
You’re living in a glass jar—go out and see the world!
Crap.
I punch a pillar that has been made by Hercules himself. I punch until the pain isn’t in the white-hot fire ripping through my tendons.
I punch the pillar until I’m about to snap my teeth off. And long past the point the tender skin reopens from when I’d ripped it open from Charlee’s front bricks.
Unclenching my jaw, which I never asked to grind shut, I wash my hands until the water runs clear. I wrap toilet paper over my knuckles as I exit the bathroom, rest my hand on the reception counter, and lean over.
Smiling, I say, “Hi ma’am, I’m here to discharge Charlee May on behalf of her grandmother.”
* * *
Day five I catch the bus to Charz’s like usual. I walk through the front door to the kitchen. Betty has a bowl full of potatoes in one half of the sink. The bowl sitting in the other half is empty. She is frozen, slouching over the stainless steel, peeler poised as if about to murder someone and doesn’t move as I say hi over her shoulder. I grab a bottle of Coke and a bottle of water from the fridge to take into the living room to Darcy.
Peeking back around the corner, my leg still in the hallway, I see Betty staring at the floor.
“Thank you,” she mumbles. Finally she looks at her hand, snaps her head up when she realizes what she’s holding, and peels the entire potato by the time I look away a moment later.
“For you,” I say, handing Darcy the Coke.
He sips at it today, at least. But he pulls back with this God-awful look as if I’ve handed him piss. He sets it on the coffee table in front of the couch.
“I don’t know why it doesn’t taste good anymore,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. He looks to me for the answer when I can’t figure out how to tell him this is what death does to everything around you. “Is it off?” Darcy adds, leaning forward to finger the bottle.
“It’s brand-spanking new, dude.” I pick it up and take a gulp. After years of only drinking water and fruit juice, Coke is inordinately bubblier than I recall it being. I gag and pinch my nose to press out the bubbles, finishing with a burp.
“See!” Darcy says, “It is bad.”
“No, I just don’t drink Coke.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like the taste.”
Darcy’s jaw drops.
“I’m kidding,” I lie. My head is spinning so much from the stress that chokes me in this house that I’d rather streak down the street than have to explain, well, anything, really. “It’s not good for me.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason as it’s not good for you,” I say, tapping his cheek where his teeth lie behind.
“Oh.” Darcy traces squares around the outside of his game controller, while I sit next to him as usual.
His pa is watching TV in the other room. He’s there so much I think he must press a button to change the seat of the recliner into a toilet so he can shit. Either way, Darcy’s nana cooks dinner for them, cleans and then sleeps in the guest room with out so much as seeing a potato, dish or bed.
It’s ‘cause of me. We don’t say it through a look or consoling words, but I know it. The guy who murdered Mr. and Mrs. May is now the glue keeping what’s left of this crumbling family from flying off in the wind.
“Why are your muscles so big?” Darcy says.
“It’s good for me.”
“Are you a body builder like The Rock?”
“No, I just like to stay healthy.”
“Why did my dad have to die, Dexter?”
I have to swallow my mouthful of water before I can answer, but my throat clamps shut and prevents it from going down. I wrestle with my mouth and throat for a good minute before I splutter and half swallow, half spray it over my clothes. I stand up and use my sleeve to pat down the couch, my sweats, and hope I haven’t ruined this coffee table, which must have cost more than every bed in my house.
Remembering Darcy’s still hanging there, waiting, I say, “Sorry about that. I’ll be honest, water is pretty horrible too.”
Darcy holds up an invisible sword. “Victory!” But he slumps down, tracing squares around the game controller again. And it’s definitely not me imagining; the kid’s fingers move as though he’s drunk. He can’t trace a neat square and probably couldn’t walk the line of shame down a road. He slips all over the place.
“You must like my sister to stay here when she won’t come out of her room.”
“That’s what friends are for.”
“But why did my dad have to die? He was my friend.”
Darcy’s voice is strained, as if those words are wrestling to stay inside him. Heresy, they sound like, coming from his mouth. How does a ten-year-old even feel that? I don’t feel that.
“I reckon he was tired of being a sook, Darce,” I say, knowing his head will whip around with the same slack-jaw thing Charz does before he even does it. “He told me when I visited once that he was tired of whining about being sick, so now he’s moved on to the Godly realm. You know, all shields and capes, and golden gates. He fights and wins battles against the lesser Gods in this realm, which he’s happier about.”
“I’m ten,” Darcy says flatly.
“I’m twenty-one,” I mimic in the same tone.
“Well,” Darcy says, “I’m not falling for that.”
We stare at each other out of the corners of our eyes as he finally continues playing his game.
“But that was rad,” he says, smirking.
I click my tongue in satisfaction, pretending to be parched as hell as I gulp down more water just to not look at him.
That’s when I notice it. My hands are trembling. As I put the bottle down, the world sways, so I pretend to be all slick and cool as I stop myself from almost stumbling.
“Your hand is shaking…are you sick?”
“Hey, I’m God and if you mock me again, sir, I’ll order your head,” I say standing and slowly walking off, careful not to hold onto anything or stumble at the same time.
“Sounds painful,” Darcy mutters into the game controller as I rest my head on the wall outside the living room and feel my pockets. No sugar as per usual. I stumble reaching for the pantry, my stomach churning for food and my mouth all creamy and my thoughts in a knot. I grab two chocolate cookies and some rum balls from the containers, with Betty poised to murder a potato and not even noticing me come. Or leave.
Without knocking, I slip into Charz’s room after dusting the crumbs off on my sweats.
I curl myself around Charz’s body but with a gap between us, resting her head in my hand on the pillow for fifteen minutes. She looks peaceful, at least, when sleeping.
But then she tugs on her shirt, smoothing it over her pants, and curls up into the same position without saying a word to me, so maybe she just pretending to sleep.
* * *
Walter is lowered into the ground while Betty and Jim throw their hands out to hoist him back up, all the while sobbing to the sky. Between the hundreds of others here to send him off, I notice most people shake their heads in their hands, or slump onto the shoulder of the person next to them, or put on their sunglasses and pretend the silent tears rolling down their cheeks aren’t there.
Darcy is one of the few here crying how he should. He stands by my side, swiping tears from his cheeks, snot on his sleeve and maki
ng grunting, shrieking sounds that make a scene no one has the strength to pay attention to.
But what sticks from Walter’s funeral, two and a half weeks after his death, and after the autopsy and all that, is his daughter walking away muttering, “asshole” to herself so many times the words become nothing but meaningless hissing sounds.
22. Hot Mess Wreck
Dexter
“Dex…” Tahny calls, but pokes her head through my bedroom door anyway. “Are—” She gives me a once over then stomps down the corridor mumbling to someone, “he’s there.”
“Tahny!” I yell as Charz steps in, knocking on the open door at the same time. “Oh.”
I throw my guitar strap over my head and push the thing away on my comforter. Charz gives me an odd look as she hops over a mound of dirty clothes. She gives up trying to figure out where to go and stands on the spot. Still, she doesn’t look at my eyes, or my body.
Body. I look down and realize I have my gym shorts on and the only thing covering my top half are tats and even more bare skin. Awkwardly, I pick up something made of material and put it on, which, naturally, seems to take five whole minutes with my arms getting tangled in every place but the holes where they’re supposed to go.
“Count to a million,” I tell Charz, while she watches me do laps of my box of a bedroom. “I’m serious! One, two,” I say, starting.
“Three, a thousand,” she says.
“Quit cheating and count properly, Charz. Now,” I growl, a smirk threatening on my lips. She presses her lips together and turns, combing her long blonde hair back from her face to reveal that smile that melts my insides.
In the end she counts to one million by thousands at a time. I’ve thrown one pile of clothes in the laundry basket and have hand-scooped another pile of I-have-no-idea-what-it-is junk into my closet and shut the door when I turn to collapse on the bed.
Charz is sitting with the edge of her butt on the corner of the bed, leaning over to read my paperboard. My pape—
I rush over, yanking it from the wall and flipping it around so the words are hidden.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
Crap. Her chin is hidden from how far it’s dug into her neck. She begins pulling her hair back behind her ear, although it’s already there. So instead she flicks the ends over her shoulder again and again.
I come beside her and touch her arm, just because I need to, and she looks up at me through her eyelashes.
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“This room is a fucking mess,” I say, understanding why my mom can’t stand to walk in here anymore.
Charz chuckles into her fingers. I love when she does that.
You love when she does that? Take that back, you idiot.
“Why are you here?”
Her face pales in a second. I swear it does.
“It’s just that you’ve…I wanted to, um…”
She meets my eyes. “Yeah, I’ve got no idea what I’m trying to say, actually.”
I throw up my hands to protect my face. “Whoa! Stand back. Charz is stepping out.”
She falls stiffly, on her side, back on my bed. Unsure what I’m meant to do, or what I’ve done, I shuffle back a bit. She’s on her side as she was sitting, with her hands shoved between her knees. Staring? I’m not sure, because her thick eyelashes cover her gaze from this angle. Suddenly she sobs.
I take a step off the bed and flick the door shut with my hand, crawling back beside Charz half on my knees and half on my stomach.
“Hey, what’s—” I begin saying, only to find my voice seems to spur on even more of something from her. This can’t be crying; it’s her soul breaking apart, I’m sure. Her spine twitches but she remains mostly stiff, refusing to pull her hands out from her legs, and so with her head planted in my bed she cries out the word asshole about, oh, ten or eleven times, before breathing in deeply and sighing the tension out.
It’s gone. Her eyes are red and so is her face but you’d never be able to tell she just lost it.
“Okay,” I say, clenching my hands between my legs and falling stiffly to face her. She tries to keep back a laugh as I hold my back stiff, and scowl with my eyes, and then do a girly sigh. It’s a crappy imitation of her. “Okay, you have to teach me how to do that,” I say, in all seriousness.
“What?”
“Flip the switch the way you did.”
“You need to learn how to stop crying?”
Shit, crap, shit. I happen to know that girls do not like guys who cry and weep about all their problems. I hope she doesn’t think I’m a wimp or anything. “No, no—I mean that control. Usually I just punch things until some part of my body gives up, so, really, a skill like yours would save my skin. Literally.”
It doesn’t occur to me until now how close we are. With her sitting there all quiet, thinking, licking her lips and looking through me, our noses just inches apart, well, it’s now that I estimate there’s less air to breathe as my pulse picks up. It’s now that with red and puffed up eyes she’s never been more beautiful. I reach out to touch the spot at her temple, just to see if it feels the same as it looks.
She closes her eyes in anticipation when I stroke her face.
“I’ve missed you,” she says.
“I missed you too.” I missed your waist, which is the place my hands fit around you. I missed you pulling me down, your hands linked behind my neck. I missed seeing that tiny, corner-of-the-mouth smile and the way you brush back your hair out of your face that way.
“I need you. I need your lips, and the feel of your waist, and that sexy leg wrapped behind mine, but…”
But my head is racing with the possibility of us. I don’t want to push her away anymore, but when I don’t she’s so fucking hot I want to rip off her clothes and slam her against a wall because anything else will not satisfy this hunger in me. And that scares me because I’ve rushed things and I don’t want this thing between us to crash just as quickly. She’ll get over the sex, I’ll never get over the sex, and I swear to God after five years of crushing, this sudden thing with us is a damn whirlwind.
Her answer to my “but”, the worst filler word in the world, is a gaping glare, so huge and painful for her more than me, but she doesn’t hide her shock. I know the feeling. She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. You can tell by the blank look on her face. Charz finally curls her toes up on the bed and scoots back, resting her weight on her elbow.
I roll onto my back and rest my head on top of linked fingers, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. I can’t see that hurt I put on her face anymore.
Suddenly, her head blocks the crack and casts a shadow over my body. She straddles my hips and leans down to rest both forearms by my shoulders, since she’s too short to reach higher. Omigod our lips would be touching if she were taller. Instead, she lines up our hips, which shows that at least some part of me meant more than a “but”.
I hold her waist. Her weight would be easy to lift clean off me while I lie on my back. I practice this at the gym every session, so it should be just as easy to lay her body down beside me as it is to do my bench press reps.
She’s hovering an inch from my body. We both peer down to estimate the gap between me and her leggings. Actually she just shamelessly stares at me and I’m frozen with her above me, torn between her boobs in my face and the edges of her ass that I can see from behind her shoulders.
I snap my eyes shut and pull her beside me. “Charz…” I let out a breath and press back my stupid hair from my eyes. “What’s up with you?”
She shakes her head and presses a finger to her lips, telling me to shut the fuck up. I shut the fuck up. She leans in.
“No, no, no,” I rush out, leaning back.
Lily, the last girlfriend I had, was wrapped around a tree along with my brother by some random whose name I’ll never know. Since then, I’ve hurt more girls than I’ve meant to trying to eliminate the possibility of more pain that my heart doesn’t have the abilit
y to take.
Charz isn’t Lily and she’s not those random girls I’ve hooked up with, which scares me. “Friend” doesn’t suit what she is to me, and neither does “girlfriend” because I can’t put a label on something this intense. I don’t know what Charz is but she always consumes my thoughts, and I can’t take her along for a ride while I figure out what we can be.
“This is a mess,” I say, not knowing what I mean by it.
“We’re a mess,” she says quietly.
“There’s no us, so don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of guys loving you.”
I look away, hearing my mistake as it came out of my mouth, too fast for me to stop, and so slow that I wondered what was taking so long, and why I didn’t just say that I love her.
Charz begins crying again, the same cycle as before, but this time she puts her back in to it, crying into her forearms crossed over her face and into the bed.
That’s when I hear the sound, an echo of days before.
Asshole.
Shit!
I cover her with my body, breathing apologies over and over into her ear. She eventually stops crying again, but this time she won’t meet my eyes and her cheeks are beet red.
“I should go.” She clambers off the bed and realigns her bed hair and messed up low-cut top. Her leggings hug every bit of her ass and legs, and I realize watching her like this right now is just wrong so I’m the one now looking away.
At the bedroom door, she says, “Did you write those lyrics yourself?”
“Um, yeah.”
“She must be a sweet girl.”
I look down to my socks. “Yeah, she is.”
“Wait, please?” I say, scrunching my eyes shut, because I don’t know what to do or how to say what I need to say.
“I don’t wanna screw around with anyone else, in case you’re wondering. I never even think about touching another girl, Charz,” I say, slowly forcing my eyelids apart.
She’s been looking at my face the whole time; I just sense it. “But?”
Drowning in You Page 17
