I never ever peed in my bed before, except when I was three and I stopped wearing diapers at bedtime. Mommy said I only had a couple of accidents then. Mommy used to wake me up in the middle of the night and carry me to the bathroom. She told me I peed in the toilet when I was still asleep, and the next day I didn’t even remember it. But now I always wake up and go to the bathroom by myself.
My cousin Jonas pees in the bed all the time, he’s six, too, and he’s not my real cousin—he’s the son of Aunt Mary’s sister, so he’s kind of my cousin. One time he had a sleepover at our house, and he slept on an air mattress next to my bed. He peed all over the mattress, and Andy made fun of him and said only babies pee in the bed. I made fun of him a little, too, but then I felt bad because Mommy said it wasn’t his fault, and we shouldn’t tease him about it. He probably peed in his bed because he was scared and missed his mom, and he was probably ashamed.
And now I peed in my bed like Jonas. When I was thinking about it my face got really hot, and I know that meant it was getting red from being embarrassed, and that happens to me a lot of times. In school it happens all the time, like when Miss Russell talks to me and I didn’t know she was going to, so it’s like a surprise moment, and everyone looks at me when I have to answer. When I know I’m going to say something and I have time to think about what I want to say first and I’m sure I know the right answer, then it’s fine. But when it’s a surprise, I turn red and I call it the red juice spill, because it’s like a cup of red juice spills up my neck and then up my face. I try to hide my face when that happens and wait until it doesn’t feel hot anymore, and then I know the red juice spilled back down my neck.
Red-hot juice. Sometimes it leaves red dots on my neck for a while after. It spills back down fast most of the time, but not if someone says something about it or makes fun of me. Like Andy knows I hate it when someone talks about how my face looks red, so of course he loves to say it really loud so everyone can hear it, and he thinks it’s so funny. Then it takes forever for it to go away.
I thought about what to do because I didn’t want anyone to know I peed in the bed. I peeked up at Mommy and Daddy’s bed and I only saw Mommy’s back, and she didn’t move so she was still sleeping, and Daddy wasn’t there in the bed. I got up really fast and went in my room and took my PJs off, and that was gross because I was touching my own pee. I didn’t want to put the wet PJs in the hamper because the other clothes would get wet, too, so I put them in the bathtub behind the shower curtain instead. I thought about how the mattress was still really wet, but maybe it was going to dry during the day?
I got dressed and then I sat on my bed for a little while and waited for the hot juice feeling to go away. I noticed my trucks. They were still in front of my bookshelf and this whole time I didn’t even play with them one time, and they were still all mixed up and not in a row. It was weird that I was just leaving them there like that.
I got up and checked in the bathroom mirror that no red dots were left on my neck. I went in Andy’s room to look at his top bunk and then I went downstairs. No one was in the kitchen, and Daddy was in his office on the phone. His office has a glass door, and when he saw me through it, he did a tired smile and pointed at the phone. I went in the kitchen and I sat down on the barstool. I was hungry, but no one was going to make me breakfast.
I noticed the iPad on the counter and decided to play my fire truck parking game. That’s my favorite game on the iPad. It’s a parking simulator where you have to try to park a huge fire truck, and it’s hard because you can’t bump into other cars or the walls of the firehouse, but I’m really good at it. I swiped the iPad and Daddy’s newspaper came on.
Daddy always reads the newspaper on the iPad now or on his phone. He used to get the real newspaper and it came rolled up in a blue bag and got left on our walkway. It was my job in the mornings to get it for him—only on the weekends, because on workdays he took it with him to work before I got up. But then he stopped getting the newspaper in the blue bag and started reading it on the iPad instead, and that always takes a long time. I wished he was still getting it delivered so I could play on the iPad.
Daddy’s newspaper came on and right away I saw it was about the gunman, Charlie’s son. I scrolled down and there was the same picture of him I saw on TV yesterday. I felt like I shouldn’t be looking at it anymore, because Daddy would get mad at me again. But Daddy was on the phone in his office, and Mommy was still sleeping, and I didn’t know where Mimi was, so no one would know. I started to read what the news said about Charlie’s son. In big fat letters it said “Killer’s Motive,” and underneath in smaller but still fat letters it said, “The act of a madman or a troubled child’s cry for his father’s attention?” and then a lot of smaller, not-fat words under that.
It was hard to read, but I understood some things, like that Charlie’s son brought four guns to McKinley to shoot people, and at his house, Charlie’s house, the police found more guns, and they didn’t know yet where he bought them, it said.
There were pictures of the guns when I scrolled down, and a few of them looked like regular guns, like the ones policemen have on their belts, and some looked big and long in the front, they looked like army guns. Under the pictures it said what the guns were called, and they had cool names. Under the regular-looking guns it said “.45 caliber Smith & Wesson M&P pistol” and “Glock 19 9mm semiautomatic handgun,” and under the army-looking guns it said “semiautomatic Smith & Wesson M&P15” and “Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun.” I whispered the names of the guns when I tried to read them, but they were hard to say.
I looked at the pictures for a long time, and my heart was beating fast because guns are dangerous, I know that, but they’re a little exciting, too, except I had to think about how Charlie’s son used these guns to kill Andy, and I wondered which gun it was that the bullet came out of that killed Andy. And I wondered how Charlie’s son brought four guns to the school, and how do you even use four guns at the same time? It must have hurt really bad when the bullet went in Andy’s body, and I still didn’t know where on his body it went in, and then he died from it.
Under the pictures of the guns it said Charlie’s son put a message on Facebook when he was on his way to McKinley. I know Facebook from Mommy’s phone. She goes on it a lot to see what her friends are posting, and she shows me pictures and funny videos on it. She posts pictures, too, mostly of me and Andy at sports and stuff like that. Daddy doesn’t like Facebook and doesn’t go on it and once Mommy and Daddy had a fight about it because Daddy said Mommy shouldn’t post pictures of us for the whole world to see, and Mommy said, “Well, that’s just a little ironic considering how much you like to show off.”
This was the message Charlie’s son put on Facebook:
Charlie’s angels, today is the day I’m coming for you. See you soon, Dad! Pray for me.
That’s what Charlie’s wife called us at the party, “Charlie’s angels.”
The alarm box behind me said “Front door!” in the robot lady voice, and I almost dropped the iPad. I pressed the button on the top fast to turn it off, and I put it away. My heart was beating at super speed and my face felt like it was having the red juice spill. Mimi came in with bags from the food store, and I thought she was going to notice right away, but she didn’t.
“Good morning, sweetie” was all she said, and I couldn’t say anything back, only make a “Mmmmm” sound.
Mimi unpacked the bags and I watched her take out milk and eggs and bananas, and maybe she forgot that no one in our family likes bananas except Andy. Andy loves bananas, but now he wasn’t here to eat them, so who was going to eat all the bananas Mimi got from the store? The bananas sat there on the counter, and I couldn’t stop looking at them. In my head I was saying in a really loud voice, “Who’s going to eat all those stupid bananas?” I was like screaming it in my head: “Stupid, gross bananas, they’re all mushy inside!” And I gra
bbed them and threw them in the garbage. It felt good to do that. I walked out of the kitchen and didn’t even listen to Mimi, who was calling: “Zach, honey, what was that for?”
[ 17 ]
Feelings Pages
I NEVER KNEW YOU COULD FEEL MORE than one feeling inside of you at the same time.
Especially feelings that are opposites. I know you can feel excited, but when you do what made you excited, the excited feeling goes away and you feel happy because it was fun. Or sad because it’s over already, like right after everyone leaves from your birthday party. But more than one feeling at the same time, right next to each other or on top of each other and all mixed up inside you? I never knew that could happen.
But now it happened to me, and it was hard because when you’re happy, you know you want to laugh or smile at least, and when you’re mad or sad, you want to yell or cry, but when you feel all of those together, then you don’t know what you want to do. I walked around the house and kind of went this way and that way, upstairs and downstairs, and it was like the inside of me couldn’t settle down, so the outside of me couldn’t settle down either.
I walked past the family calendar in the kitchen, and it made me stop. It still had all the activities on it from last week. Daddy’s row is at the top, then Mommy’s, then Andy’s, and my row is at the bottom, because it goes by age and I’m the youngest. The names were on the calendar in permanent marker, they don’t get erased when Mommy erases everything on Sundays to write down the activities for the next week. So now Andy’s row was going to be empty, there was going to be an empty row between mine and Mommy’s, but his name would still be there, so he was still part of our family, except not really.
I stared at Andy’s row and what he was supposed to do last week, and he only got to Tuesday (lacrosse) because he died on Wednesday. He didn’t get to do soccer on Thursday. For Friday it said “lacrosse game, 7 p.m.” in his row. I wondered if Andy’s team still had the game without him there on Friday. Maybe they got one of the players who normally stands on the side of the field and he played instead of Andy, and it was like Andy wasn’t even missing and nothing changed. I started to feel mad about that, that they had their game anyway. Although Andy plays really good and scores a lot of goals, so maybe they didn’t win without Andy.
Today was Tuesday and on Tuesdays I have art at school. I love art and I’m a really good artist. I was this close to finishing my portrait of Frida Kahlo, and it was starting to look good, like it’s one of her own portraits. Frida Kahlo was a famous artist from Mexico we learned about in school. She painted a lot of colorful pictures of herself, and in them she has really big eyebrows, they meet in the middle, so it’s like one long eyebrow, and she has a mustache, but she’s a woman. I like to use a lot of different colors, too, when I paint. I was sad I couldn’t go to art today, but I was happy, too, that there was no school. Sad and happy. See? That’s opposites in feelings.
Frida Kahlo died a long time ago, and she wasn’t old when she died, but she was really sick. I didn’t know what type of sick, maybe cancer like Uncle Chip. She painted all the time because of her sickness and because she was lonely in her life. Painting helped her with her feelings. Our art teacher, Mrs. R, told us that. She said art is always about expressing your feelings and it’s a good way to deal with feelings. Thinking about what Mrs. R said made me decide to do that, too: make art to deal with my feelings.
I went upstairs and got out my big bag of paints. I got my painting paper, too, and laid it out in my room. Then I sat there for a while, and I didn’t know how you make art to deal with your feelings. Maybe paint a picture of myself, like Frida Kahlo. I got a cup of water from the kitchen, and Mimi made me promise I wasn’t going to make any messes painting, and I wondered if Frida Kahlo had to try not to make any messes when she was painting, too.
I dipped my paintbrush into red, which is my favorite color, and I moved the brush up and down on the paper, so it wasn’t going to be a picture of myself, but something else my hand decided to make, and I didn’t know yet what it was going to be. A line up and a line next to it down, and then up and down again, like a long zigzag snake. The red started out really red when I still had a lot of paint on the brush, and then it got like thinner when I used up all the paint, and in the end it looked like light pink. The way the snake-line looked on the paper made me think about the red juice spill on my face after I peed on the mattress.
So red looks like an embarrassed feeling. Maybe I could pick one color for all the opposite feelings that were inside me and paint a lot of pieces of paper with only one feeling-color, and then the feelings would be separate and not all mixed up together, and that would help.
Red—embarrassed. Put that paper over to the side.
I thought about what feeling was next. Sad. Sad was everywhere inside our house, especially where Mommy was. Mommy was so sad, and you could feel it when you got close to her. The closer you went to her, the more you could feel the sad feeling. Mommy cried and cried all the time, and mostly she lay in her bed, and she had big red circles around her eyes from all the crying. I looked at all my paint colors. Sad could be gray. Gray like the sky outside and like the rain clouds. I washed my paintbrush in my water glass, and no water splashed on the carpet, and I painted gray all over a new piece of paper.
Sad piece of paper, next to the embarrassed piece of paper.
Scared. I was having a lot of scared feelings now all the time. Definitely black. That’s how everything looked in the closet at school, black, almost no light to see the other colors. And everything is black at night when I wake up and think the gunman is coming back, except it’s always just a dream. I made a paper black, and all black really did look scary.
I had to find a color for mad, too. Mad/angry. That’s a feeling you have to use your words for, Mommy says, not your hands, like for hitting. “I’m mad at the gunman,” I said. I thought mad/angry had to be green. Green because of the Hulk. The Hulk starts out like a regular person with beige skin, but when he gets mad he turns green all over, even his face. When the Hulk gets mad, he gets really mad. And he gets bigger with muscles all over, and he gets super strong. And green all over for some reason. So the color green reminds me of mad/angry, and I made a green page and put it next to the other feelings pages.
OK, so far:
Red—Embarrassed
Gray—Sad
Black—Scared
Green—Mad/Angry
And what color is for lonely? I thought that lonely had to be like a see-through color, so no color at all, because when you’re lonely it’s like you’re invisible from other people, but not invisible in a good way like a superhero, but in a sad way. But the piece of paper is white, so how do you make a see-through color on a white paper? Then I had an idea for that. I got out my scissors and cut out the middle of the paper, so there was like a picture frame around a rectangle of see-through nothingness in the middle. Lonely—see-through.
I thought I was also feeling happy. I felt happy that I didn’t die from the gunman. And I was a little happy because Andy wasn’t here anymore to be mean to me, and I could have my secret hideout in Andy’s closet now, and he couldn’t tell me to get out. In the hideout I felt good/happy. Now it was a little happy feeling, it was just starting out, but when Mommy was going to feel better from the shock and her sadness, and the bad feelings were going to go away—mad, scared, and lonely—then it was going to be a bigger happy feeling. Me and Mommy and Daddy could be together with no fighting and we could have fun.
What color is for happy? Yellow. Yellow like the sun in the sky. A warm yellow sun in a pretty blue sky in the summertime, not the gray-sad sky we had right now.
Red—Embarrassed
Gray—Sad
Black—Scared
Green—Mad/Angry
Lonely—See-Through
Yellow—Happy
I wa
ited for my feelings pages to dry, and then I went and got tape from the kitchen and hung them up on the wall inside my hideout. That was a good spot for them. I could lie down on Andy’s sleeping bag and look at the feelings. Now they were separated and that made it easier to think about them.
[ 18 ]
Real-Life Bad Dream
THE GUNMAN CAME and real life went away, and now it was like we were in a new fake life. I was there, Daddy was there and Mommy, and Mimi was staying with us in the guest room so she could take care of Mommy, and Grandma and Aunt Mary came over every day, and that’s how you know it was different, because usually they’re not all at our house all the time.
Outside of our house it looked like everything else stayed normal and the same. When I looked out of my window, I noticed that real life was still there on our street, and it looked like before. Mr. Johnson was still taking Otto for walks around the neighborhood, and the garbage truck still came, and the mailman still brought the mail in the afternoon at four, always at the exact same time almost. All the people outside our house did the things they always do, and I wondered if they even knew that inside our house everything was changed.
The only thing from the outside that matched the inside of our house was the rain. It rained and rained, and it was like it was never stopping, like Mommy cried and cried and she was never stopping.
All the same stuff was still on TV, and they were still talking about the same stuff in the commercials, like how awesome Froot Loops are, like everything was how it always was and it still mattered. I thought that maybe watching my normal shows would make it so that it didn’t feel like this fake new life anymore, but now the jokes on Phineas and Ferb didn’t sound funny to me anymore, and even when there was a funny one, I didn’t laugh. Because mostly everything inside me felt like the opposite of laughing.
I started to pretend like I was in a bad dream and that I was watching myself walk around and do stuff in the dream, because this was not how I wanted real life to be like. I didn’t want Mommy to always lie in bed and cry. I didn’t want to keep walking in Andy’s room in the mornings to check the top bunk, just in case. Every morning I did that, I couldn’t help it. Right before I looked up I thought, “What if he’s in his bed and it all wasn’t real? What if he was playing a stupid joke on us and he will sit in his bed and laugh at me because I thought he actually died?” Because it was like POW!—like someone put his fist in my stomach every time I saw his top bunk was empty.
Only Child Page 9
