Crash and Burn

by Michael Hassan

  Me: “Actually, it seems to me that you are making a big deal out of nothing. Like every kid, virtually every kid in my high school, has gotten high from time to time. And it’s just not in my school, it’s every school throughout the country. And it’s every college. And it’s probably every office and business too. If you polled the people around us right now, like probably half of them are still getting high. Probably even you, like I said before. Even my father still smokes weed now and then. Even at his age. So why are we making such a big deal out of these pictures?”

  OK, here there is a superlong pause. Long enough to fit an entire commercial between what I just said and the next sentence.

  Newsguy: “Are you saying that your father smokes marijuana? How do you know this?”

  As soon as the newsguy repeated what I said, I know that I have just gone too far, and I know there’s no turning back. I know immediately that this is worse than totaling my car or burning down the house, this is worse than getting arrested for some major crime. This is Bad, with a capital “B,” as in bringing Jacob into this is a mistake that I know I will be living with for a very, very long time. I have nothing left to say this guy, this motherfucker who ambushed me with kindness and a chocolate shake.

  Newsguy: “Steven, how do you know this?”

  Me: “Same way I know you smoke weed. It’s in your eyes.”

  This is exactly what they played on the morning show at exactly 7:42 the next morning, cutting to a commercial after my last line. By the time the segment aired on national television, I knew I was fucked. No one had to tell me that I was fucked. I had been up all night preparing for the consequences.

  At 7:48, the house phone started ringing, but no one picked it up, being as my mom was already at the gym and Jamie was still sleeping. I stared at the phone and then stared back at the TV screen, where some middle-aged lady was trying to cope with her joint pains and was advised to take a medication with a gazillion side effects.

  The machine ended up picking up the call; no way was I touching the phone. I expected to hear Jacob’s voice on the other end. What I heard was an unexpected female voice, identifying herself as “Olivia Swanson, your father’s publicist.”

  The message she left was: “Your father has been informed about your failure to comply with his instructions. He has advised me to inform you that you are on your own. In case you are not clear what that means, you shouldn’t expect any financial support of any kind. You shouldn’t attempt to contact him or his wife again because he is done with you.”

  All I heard were the words “or his wife.”

  These words echoed in my mind.

  Fuckme. Fuckme big-time.

  Chapter Thirteen

  How Poker Saved Burn

  “You’re getting fat, Steven” was the way Jamie put it between TV shows, staring down into my bowl of cold spaghetti. “Maybe you should stop eating crap all the time.”

  OK, so I started to grow a bit of a gut.

  It was a few months after the fox incident, after the holidays, well into winter, and I was constantly hungry. After months of not being able to eat from the Adderall and getting practically anorexic, my appetite had returned with a vengeance, and I couldn’t stop myself from grabbing stuff out of the refrigerator and the pantry every afternoon after school, after dinner, and late into the night. Hard pretzels, soft cooked ones, chips, nachos, cookies, brownies, string cheese, peanut butter and jelly on rice cakes, cream cheese on a bagel, pita chips, ice cream, Lunchables, Hot Pockets, Tastykakes, Funny Bones, Pop-Tarts, Cap’n Crunch, Frosted Flakes, Golden Grahams, Froot Loops, Waffle Crisps, Fruity Pebbles, and practically every other snack or cereal you could name. Nothing was safe if it was in my house.

  As expected, my doctor decided against trying me on any other ADD medications, so I was pretty much on my own, which wasn’t making school any easier. Instead of medication, I had to see her once a month. Mostly we talked about school and she tried to get me to tell her how I was feeling, but except for school, I was starting to feel pretty good again, so we didn’t have much to talk about.

  Jamie started seeing the same doctor as me. Not because she had ADD, but because she lacked friends, which shouldn’t have surprised anyone being as she spent most of her time in front of the television (which was what she did even when her friends came over, whenever one came over).

  Point was, the bar mitzvah and party cycle had started for her grade, and she wasn’t getting any invites, which made my mom nervous about Jamie’s ability to socialize, so my mom took her to my doctor, who recommended talk therapy and some kind of mood medication, saying that she thought that Jamie was suffering from depression. To me, she was just Jamie, and that was the way she was for as long as I knew her.

  Also, she couldn’t have been depressed, as she was always laughing at SpongeBob.

  Plus she did good enough in school, so what did anyone want from her?

  Plus she was totally captivated by Medusa, and took total responsibility for feeding and walking her, even though we all secretly knew that since we got the dog, Medusa had basically bonded to me as her master and followed me everywhere and never got all that excited playing with Jamie on her own.

  Lindsey was also being nice to her, which meant that my mom must have put her up to it, because Lindsey was never nice without a motive. Speaking of Lindsey, her friends were always over. But, unlike the year before, now they had no interest in me, which didn’t matter to me one bit because none of her friends were anywhere near hot anyways. Instead, they had basically accepted Jamie as if she was one of their group, which also meant that my mom must have put them up to it, because no way had they ever paid any attention to her on their own.

  “I am not,” I told her, scooping the last of the spaghetti into my mouth. “I’m just putting on the weight I lost.” I didn’t want to say it, but Jamie had also put on weight. Maybe it was the new medication, or maybe it just an age thing, but she had always been a superskinny kid and was now getting fuller looking.

  She leaned over and grabbed my belly flab, which pissed me off, and we were in a full-on fight when my mom came home, with Medusa barking away at both of us, stepping in to join us, then stepping back cautiously.

  “Enough!”

  My mom yelled this, peering into the family room, packages in hand. One look at her face and we both knew, we totally knew that something was very wrong. So we immediately cut out the physical stuff and sat there, not moving. Even Medusa quickly laid her head down on the carpet, playtime most definitely over.

  “Shouldn’t we find out what happened?” I finally asked, thinking that whatever the news was, it was definitely a major thing, like a life-changing thing.

  Jamie either wasn’t as paranoid as me or just didn’t want to know. She was back to switching channels and came across a Simpsons episode. “Did you ever notice how much Maggie looks like Lisa?”

  I looked hard at her. She couldn’t be depressed. The doctor definitely must’ve gotten that wrong.

  Lindsey was first with the question. All of us in the kitchen, with our mom being uncharacteristically quiet, doing her supercleaning thing, which is what she always did when something bothered her.

  “OK, so, what’s going on?” Lindsey finally asked.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t you heard,” she answered, as if accusing Lindsey of something, in a tone that she never, ever used on Lindsey. “I would have thought the news would be all over school by now,” she added, working with her special polishing spray and rag, shining the kitchen counter, instinctively following whatever path I took during an eating binge. As usual, I had left several food containers out, along with multiple forks and spoons, each with half-eaten samples of whatever was in the refrigerator. Usually, she would make me clean up after myself. Not today. Today, everything was already cleared off, gone.

  “What news?” Now even Jamie was full-on curious.

  “Roxanne Burnett is in the hospital,” my mom said, looking at Jamie l
ike she wasn’t sure if Jamie should be included in the conversation. But no way was Jamie leaving now. This was getting as interesting to her as a Nickelodeon show.

  “She tried to . . . hurt . . . herself.” My mom, choosing her words very carefully. Too carefully for me, as I wasn’t understanding what she meant.

  “Ugh,” Lindsey said with a typical sigh. “She so craves attention.”

  My mother dropped the polishing rag and practically yelled, “Lindsey, this is not a joke!”

  I was in momentary shock. Like maybe I was missing something. So Roxanne was in the hospital, I was sure she was fine. Still, Lindsey’s comments irritated me to the point of almost hitting her for being such an uncaring bitch. My mom actually looked like I felt, and I thought for an instant that she was going to reflexively let her hand fly, but Caroline Prescott always maintained control and never actually hit any of her kids.

  “Do you understand the seriousness of this?”

  Lindsey was smart enough to get the point. I was not, however, and was still not clear on the whole thing until my mother explained it more simplistically:

  “She tried to kill herself.”

  So now it all made sense in a rush of logic to my brain, which left me dizzy, queasy, unable to move, as if someone had sucker punched me in the solar plexus. I started to gag, which I suppressed, then thought about the last time I talked with Roxanne in the halls of Meadows, with me leaving, thinking that there was something different about her, not just in the way she talked to me, but in the total lack of energy behind her voice. Should I have known?

  We all asked different questions at the same time.

  Jamie: “How?”

  Lindsey: “Was it one of those goth things?”

  Me: “Is she OK?”

  The answers, all at once, were “pills, I don’t know what a goth thing is, yes.” My mom took a deep breath. “She’s alive. They said that she’ll be all right. Someone found her in her mom’s car this morning with a bottle of vodka and an empty vial of pills.”

  “I heard that she was into weird stuff,” Lindsey said casually, not backing off her uncaring tone, as if to defy my mom. She didn’t realize how close she came to being beaten to a pulp. I would have hit her, except that I didn’t understand why the news was so upsetting to me. After all, this was Burn’s sister. They had a history of crazy, so why should I be so surprised? I had a momentary flash of an image of Roxanne, lying across the front seats of her mother’s Prius, unconscious, with her head on the passenger door armrest, her hand outstretched and open, inches from an empty Grey Goose bottle, drool seeping into the seats as someone (a cop?) peered into the driver’s side window. The vision startled me back to reality and made me gag again.

  “Elaine is beside herself,” my mom said, referring to Mrs. Burnett. I had forgotten that Mrs. Burnett had a first name, not remembering when or whether I ever heard it before. “She’s at the hospital with Roxanne. Really, she’s been through enough, losing her husband, then having to deal with David, and her health issues. Now, Roxanne. Although, in my opinion, she should have seen this coming.”

  More cleaning, leaving us to think about what happened.

  Then directed at me:

  “I hope you don’t mind. I told her that David could stay here for a few days.”

  Immediately, my intense panic gravitated from Roxanne to her brother. The type of panic I was having now was a different type of panic, but the level of panic was about the same, as in off-the-charts panic. Off-the-charts because Burn was, well, Burn, and you couldn’t predict what he was going to be like at any given time. So even though he had become subdued, almost sleepy, in school recently, I more or less knew how his mind worked, the way it twisted things sometimes. I didn’t know what kind of relationship he had with his sister, but his mind had to be spinning beyond any measure of control.

  I had another momentary flash of an image, this one of him lying in our guest room in the dark while the rest of us were asleep, with his eyes open and unblinking, staring at the ceiling, maybe cracking under the pressure of having a suicidal sister. And it crossed my mind, what if he went completely over the edge when he was here, and decided to kill himself or, worse, kill my entire family in the middle of the night? I couldn’t say that this was impossible. In fact, in the psychic part of my brain, the part that was able to concoct these clear images, I believed we were all in danger if he stayed over.

  And so my heart was beating with a totally uncomfortable drumroll, and I wasn’t about to let this happen.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told my mom. Lindsey echoed my sentiment, looking like she was thinking what I was thinking, and adding some pretty harsh words on her own.

  But Mom didn’t listen to us, not to Lindsey, not to me, because I couldn’t exactly describe to her the real problem of having Burn sleep under our roof.

  Because he wouldn’t.

  Sleep. I mean, he didn’t. Sleep.

  So neither would I. Not for as long as he stayed here.

  A few hours later, there was Burn, in a red University of Maryland sweatshirt, hood over his head, practically covering his face in shadows, with his laptop and his backpack, following my mom into the house, nodding to me from under the hood.

  He sat at the kitchen counter, opened his laptop, and waited for it to boot up.

  “Thanks for having me,” he said to my mom, not at all convincing. “Although, as my mom probably told you, I prefer to stay at my aunt’s house.”

  “Well, we are here for you, David,” said my mom in her most articulate mother voice, overpronouncing every word, which she sometimes does and which I always found supremely embarrassing.

  She fed him. Warm plate of leftovers. I felt obligated to sit across from him while he ate, even through he never looked at me. He didn’t look at my mother either. Only at his laptop. So I continued to watch, thinking about what would I do if it was me and I had to go to his house for some reason.

  “Sorry about your sister,” I told him when we finally talked.

  He was cross-legged on the family room floor, his laptop in the circular space between his legs, typing away, staring both at the computer screen in front of him and the TV above his head on the wall of the family room. Jamie was in her usual position, at the corner of the couch. On TV, DJ was yelling about something that Michelle did, so everything was normal on Full House.

  But not in mine.

  “She doesn’t want to see me,” Burn said, banging on his keyboard.

  “How come?”

  “She knows I will have questions for her, and she’s not going to want to answer them.”

  “You mean like why she did it?”

  “No. I know why she did it,” he said. “She was always talking about it, so I figured one day she would try.” He sat up. “No. I need to know how far she got. And whether there was anything on the other side. Have you ever thought about it, Crash?”

  “Thought about what?” As always, I had no clue.

  “Suicide,” he said, and I told him “no way,” because trust me, it never once entered my mind.

  “I have,” he said. “But mostly, I would like other people to die.” Which confirmed all the more that I should be uncomfortable with him under the same roof as my family. “You know, the ones that fuck with us.” He tried to rationalize his thoughts, but to me they sounded crazy as always. “You know, like Connelly. Don’t tell me for a minute that you haven’t thought life would be better if Connelly just went down.”

  OK, actually, I had thought about that, but not in a realistic way, just like, in the middle of class when he picked on me for no apparent reason, I did wish him dead, and sometimes I even visualized him going down suddenly midsentence with an extreme heart attack that would leave his twitching body clinging to life. So I kind of got what Burn was saying.

  “Well, maybe Connelly,” I confessed.

  “What about you, Jamie,” he asked. “Did you ever think, what would it be like if you kil
led yourself?”

  I was sure that Jamie would only be annoyed. After all, Burn was interrupting Full House, and you had to know that no one ever talked to Jamie during Full House.

  Except that she actually seemed interested in our conversation.

  “I used to,” she said, which blew me away. “When I was younger.”

  I wondered if maybe the doctor was right after all, in giving her drugs. I also wondered if I should tell my mom, except that would only panic her more, because lately all of her panic seemed to be focused on Jamie.

  “Sometimes I think about really creative ways to do it,” Burn said, and I didn’t know if he meant killing himself or others. “Like driving off a cliff or jumping in front of a speeding train, you know, where you are instantly killed. I wouldn’t want to pull a Roxanne and fuck up the attempt.”

  “Me neither,” said Jamie, and I was beginning to get beyond freaked at this conversation.

  The next day, Burn decided that he would go to school, and rode in with us in my mom’s car. He was still in his University of Maryland sweatshirt, and you could hardly see his face. I’m sure he hadn’t slept at all.

  As expected, I hadn’t slept much either. I lay awake most of the night, listening to every creak and crack, waiting for sounds to come out from the guest bedroom, waiting for footsteps in the hallway, thinking all the time that Burn would be getting up and checking us out, standing over us as we slept.

  I had to be ready for him.

  The news about Roxanne, was, of course, all over school. People were coming up to Burn, saying that they were sorry to hear about his sister. He mostly ignored them, never removing the sweatshirt hood, and while normally some teacher or the assistant principal would have said something about the hood thing, no one was going to fuck with Burn under these circumstances.