What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  “Hmm?” she mumbles. She’s no longer with me anymore. She’s lost in whatever fucked-up labyrinth is inside her head. “Yes,” she says. “Coffee is on the stove.”

  I’m used to her perpetual attention deficit disorder so I mumble a thank you, turn, and walk out of the kitchen, rubbing my triangle-burned arm again. I don’t even stop in the pink-tiled bathroom to strip off my clothes, pee, and weigh myself, which has become an obsessive morning ritual over the past year.

  It would be great to say I have a love affair with the scale because of sports.

  It’s more about fat.

  I was—fat.

  I probably still am. Everyone says differently, but I don’t care about everyone. I care about the scale.

  Somewhere down deep I can intellectualize that I’ve already reached and surpassed that magic 70-pounds-lost mark and I’m going to have to stop soon. If I lose any more, I might get lost along with it.

  Certainly the idea of slipping away would be a welcomed relief today, but the strange turn of events that have occurred since I first opened my eyes in Prince Richard’s Maze are weighing heavily on me.

  I can’t even begin to imagine how they must be weighing on my friends.

  My bedroom door has a ‘Keep Out’ sign on it. My mother encourages free expression. Lately, her indifference to the fact that we share the same air has caused me to express myself a little too overtly with that sign. I don’t know why it matters. She doesn’t care.

  She never has.

  Once inside my bedroom, I turn and lock the door. Beryl says that every human being deserves their own private space. To that end, she installed a lock for me a long time ago. Maybe she knows what it is that I do behind that locked door at least a dozen times a day, or maybe that’s why she put the lock on in the first place.

  What does it matter?

  With a locked door between us, I slowly sit on my bed.

  The mattress is dented from too many days eating Tasty Cakes in the exact same spot, but there is less of me now, so the dent doesn’t press down to the springs like it used to do.

  The stinging on my arm starts calling attention to itself again, right as I hear another police car off in the distance.

  What’s going on? All I know is that I can’t stay here and wallow in brain fog with my friends stuck in The Maze. I get up, go to the shelf, and pull down the pirate coconut that my grandparents gave me when I was little. The eyepatch it sports is held in place with a black, elastic cord. I easily peel it off and fold it into my pocket. Then I make a mental note of what I need—something for Marcy to cover herself with and clothes for Anders.

  I stand up and go over to my desk, piled with books for school and applications for next fall. I’m going to leave Meadowfield and Beryl Kahn and go someplace far away for college. I’m thinking Stanford. Beryl went there and Grandpa went there, too. Palo Alto is so far to the left of Meadowfield, Massachusetts that it might as well be in another country.

  Of course I’m not worried about the grades, and thankfully I’m not worried about paying for college either.

  Beryl’s not the only one with a trust fund.

  I have one, too.

  Thanks for thinking of me, old dead people.

  Thanks for giving me a way out.

  8

  TWO MINUTES LATER I’m in the pink bathroom again, throwing up and dizzy. I guess that’s why I don’t hear the phone ring. By the time I wipe my mouth and gargle, Beryl is on the other side of the door.

  “Mrs. Myers is on the phone,” she says.

  Something ugly crawls out of my stomach and lodges itself in my throat.

  “I’m in the bathroom,” I mutter.

  “I told her. She’s insistent.”

  I pull open the door. My mother is standing there, thinking about lint, or kittens, or her next client, and obviously bothered that she had to expend the effort to answer the phone.

  I take it from her and gingerly put it to my ear because I’m starting to brew another headache.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Weston, this is Mrs. Myers, Robbie’s mother.” Right off the bat, I cringe. I’ve known Mrs. Myers my entire life. I’ve known Myers my entire life. I don’t understand why his mother needs to announce herself. She’s so goddamned proper, it’s unnerving, especially when she’s not proper at all.

  “Hi,” I say, then wait for an onslaught to pour out of her mouth. Nothing is ever easy with Myers’ mother. Everything is an ordeal. Everything is high drama. Propriety can disappear in a heartbeat.

  “Can you please tell me where my child is?” she snaps. I can feel the hair on the back of my neck start to prickle. To say that Mrs. Myers has an anger management issue is like saying that a shark has a carnivore issue. Anger is a way of life with Myers’ mother. That’s how she copes, I guess.

  It must be so hard to be a doctor’s wife.

  “Um . . .” That’s about all I get out before the bubbling pot of anger on the other end of the line starts to clink and clatter and just plain explode.

  “You’re supposed to be his best friend, Weston. I don’t know what the rules are in your home. I don’t know what Beryl is thinking, but the rules in my house are that my child is supposed to be under my roof by 11:00 at night, no exceptions, and if he’s not under my roof then he better have . . .” Her voice starts rising in octave and pitch. “He better have a fucking good reason for not being here, because I fucking do everything around here and no one helps, and the least thing my fucking child can fucking do is to have the fucking courtesy to call me and tell me where the fuck he is.”

  I stand there in the doorway to the pink bathroom, my arm burning and my head aching, waiting for her tirade to end. Her outbursts are usually short and punctuated with four letter words that would make most truckers blush. Still, I have to listen to the litany of profanity spew out of her because that’s how she deals with life.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “Um . . .” I say again, but she barks back at me lightning fast.

  “Are you there, Weston? Are you even listening to me?”

  “Myers told you we were all staying at Marcy’s house,” I hear myself lie.

  “What?” she snaps, and this is the part I’m an expert at. The truth is, Mrs. Myers is about as effective as Beryl at keeping track of things.

  “At Marcy Cole’s,” I say as quietly and evenly as I can, even though I can feel that it would be so easy to tell Myers’ mother to go shove it along with her sewer of a mouth. “We told you yesterday,” I continue, conjuring up an image of exactly what Myers’ mother was doing yesterday after school when I stopped by his house a few hours before my memory disappeared. “We told you while you were making cookies for his Boy Scout troop.”

  She had been baking several batches at once when Myers and I walked into the kitchen. She immediately starting yelling that she didn’t have enough and we couldn’t have any, and that we were making a mess of her kitchen and had to leave.

  Poor Myers.

  I hear a deafening silence on the other end of the phone as Mrs. Myers tries frantically to remember the nonexistent series of events I laid out for her, then weigh whether or not she actually spaced what I told her, and she’s wrong.

  Not that it matters. She’s one of those people who will never, ever admit to being wrong, so I sit and wait on the phone for her manic brain to do whatever machinations it needs to perform so she can say what comes next.

  “You tell my child to pick up his goddamned phone,” she hisses at me.

  As muddied as I am, I’m quick as a whip. “I think he might have turned it off,” I tell her. “We stayed up really late last night. I only stopped back at home to get a change of clothes.”

  She’s quiet on the other end of the line. I know Myers’ mother well en
ough to know that she is rapidly moving from anger, to denial, to some sort of state where the events of the last minute never happened in the first place.

  I’m right.

  Her voice softens and slows. “So how are your college applications coming?” she asks like she didn’t just swear at me a zillion times.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “My mother needs to talk to me. I have to go.” Then I hang up on Mrs. Myers with a click of a button, which at the moment is about as satisfying as taking a good, long dump. “Bitch,” I mumble under my breath, hoping that releasing that little observation will somehow paint over how terrible I feel.

  It doesn’t help.

  I need some of her special four-letter-words to do the trick, but even then, I know that all the swearing in the world won’t fix what is going on with the four of us.

  Maybe nothing will.

  9

  I’M ALMOST OUT of the front door when Beryl says, “Why are there sirens?” She is back at the kitchen table, her pill bottles in front of her, looking out the kitchen window at Anders’ house across the street.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her as I roll my shirt down to cover the Band-Aid I’ve put over the tiny triangle on my arm. Little dabs of Neosporin are still seeping out from underneath. No matter. They’ll dry soon.

  “Must be a fire,” she says dreamily with her eyes half-lidded.

  “Must be,” I echo, waiting for Beryl to say something else, anything else. Maybe I’m waiting for her to reach down deep into her pool of nonexistent psychic energy and ask me why there is a triangle burned into my arm.

  Nothing.

  “Hmmm,” she says.

  “Hmmm,” I reply. Then I’m out the door.

  I’m carrying my backpack that I bought last year from L.L. Bean with the money my mother gave me for Hanukkah. We don’t really celebrate the holidays at my house, mostly because there’s only the two of us. We light the candles, though, and say meaningless prayers in Hebrew that we don’t even know how to translate. Then, on the last night of those very long eight nights, Beryl usually gives me a check for $250.

  That’s what I used to buy the canvas and leather backpack that I’m now carrying. It’s empty, except for the eyepatch that I took out of my pocket.

  I’m wearing a different oxford shirt from last night and a different pair of jeans, but I look the same.

  I wish I could say that I feel the same, but I don’t.

  I walk over the grass on our front lawn, perfectly kept by our lawn man, Mr. Rozelle, and cross the street to Anders’ house. My brain is still filled with clouds and I don’t know quite what I’m going to say to his mother, but Mrs. Stephenson is so preoccupied with her own life that I probably won’t have to say much. She’s not like Beryl in the absolute absence of the knowledge that she has a child. Mrs. Stephenson is more consumed with the fact that someone in her socio-economic status should be dating in the Ivy League pool.

  In truth, she’s more apt to be screwing the guy who’s cleaning the pool.

  Ever since Anders’ dad left, Mrs. Stephenson has dated a lot. Non-bloody Anders often jokes that his mother probably owns stock in many of the dating sites on line. Bloody Anders probably just wants his mommy right now.

  That’s a scary thought.

  As I walk across the front lawn of Anders persimmon-colored house, I hear the gravelly sound of tires on pavement and turn to see Mrs. Stephenson’s red corvette maneuvering up the street and into her driveway.

  She watches me watch her, her oversized sunglasses covering three-fourths of her thin face framed in blond. I stop, not quite sure what’s going to come out of my mouth once she gets out of her car. There are the unlikely scenarios in which I blabber all over the place that Anders is stuck in The Maze with Myers and Marcy, and all he is wearing is underwear because his clothes are covered in blood, all the way to a litany of colossal lies, each one more improbable than the last.

  What finally comes out is this: “Is Anders home?”

  Mrs. Stephenson is a talker. She’s always been a talker. She completely evades my question as she gets out of the car, reaches in the back seat and pulls out a huge plastic bag filled with dry cleaning.

  I don’t even know why she gets her clothes dry cleaned. It’s not like she works.

  “West, have I told you how good you look?”

  “Thanks,” I say, feeling a little uncomfortable. I don’t want to have this conversation again.

  “I mean, really,” she says. “You were getting quite out of hand.” In translation, that means she is fully aware that I was enormous and approaching the point where one of those shows about fat teens might be interested in me.

  “Thanks,” I say again. Any more than one word responses might get Anders’ mother talking more, and I don’t want to talk. “Is Anders home?” I ask again. It’s a woefully poor attempt to try and hide the fact that Anders isn’t home at all, and hasn’t been since yesterday, but I hit pay dirt, like I did with Myers’ fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck of a mother.

  “I’m sure he’s still sleeping,” she tells me, then winks. “I didn’t come home last night.”

  If Myers were here, he’d grumble something to me about going deaf. No one wants to hear that Mrs. Stephenson ‘got some’ last night, least of all her son’s friends. A messed up image of two raisins smooshing themselves together bubbles to the surface.

  Gross.

  I don’t know how Anders can stand it. His dad isn’t much better. Every time Mr. Stephenson comes into town, which is becoming less and less of a habit, the women on his arm are getting younger and younger.

  I guess some guys would think that’s cool. Anders doesn’t. He’s embarrassed by his father. For that matter, he’s embarrassed by his mother, too.

  “Can I go wake him up?” I hear myself say.

  “Good luck,” Mrs. Stephenson says as she tosses me the house key dangling from a pink, rhinestone-encrusted fob. I’m totally unprepared and not even a little coordinated, so the fob hits me in the chest and falls to the ground. “Sorry,” she laughs.

  A real mother—a mother who is more concerned about her son instead of finding Mr. Right for the second time—would realize that it’s Saturday morning and Anders has soccer practice on Saturday mornings.

  I tuck that little tidbit of knowledge away because I’m going to need it soon.

  Inside Anders’ house, I dash through the foyer and down the hallway to his bedroom. I wrinkle my nose. His room reeks of sweat and guy shit, like the locker rooms at school. With seconds to spare, I shove my arm into the depths of his laundry basket and pull out a change of stinking clothes then stuff everything into my backpack and turn around, just in time to meet Mrs. Stephenson in the hallway.

  “I’m so stupid,” I say pulling the virtual tidbit back out. “He’s at soccer practice.”

  A dim expression passes over her face. She knows that she’s supposed to be on top of things like that, but she’s not.

  “Oh,” she says and shrugs. Then she gets this wistful look in her eyes. I guess she’s thinking that she could have gone a couple more rounds with Mr. Whoever-last-night-was, instead of coming home for nothing. What did she think she was going to do for Anders, anyway? Make him waffles?

  “I’ll catch up with him later,” I say as I hand her back the house keys and leave before her brain can even come up with the notion that Anders never came home last night in the first place.

  As the brisk morning air slaps me in the face in front of Anders’ house, a funny thought slips through my head.

  It must be hard to be a good parent. It’s too bad that most of ours will never know.

  10

  WE’RE COVERED for last night.

  Beryl couldn’t give a shit where I was. Anders’ mother was too busy getting laid, and Mrs. Myers bought the whole idea
that he slept over at Marcy’s with the rest of us. As for Marcy’s mom and dad, they’re down at one of the casinos.

  No one will ask where we were, why we didn’t come home, or if blood washes out of clothing easily.

  Dodging a very large and potentially ugly bullet, I cross back to my side of the street and walk up the gentle climb of Primrose Lane to Marcy’s house.

  The Coles are actually pretty cool. They’re involved, but not too involved, and they hover, but not too much like Myers’ parents. Marcy has just the right balance of parental supervision and freedom. That’s why her parents let her stay home alone this weekend even though there’s some sort of stupid law in Massachusetts that says you can’t leave your kids home overnight and unattended until they are seventeen and a half.

  Marcy had her seventeenth birthday this past May so she’s close enough that her parents gave her a free pass last night.

  Mr. and Mrs. Cole trust Marcy and they trust me, Myers, and Anders. We’re the good guys. We’re safety in numbers.

  Marcy’s house isn’t a sprawling ranch like some of the others on Primrose Lane. The dark, wood-stained structure is set back from the road and covered by overgrown bushes, but the foliage still can’t hide the paradox behind it.

  Sometimes it hurts my head to look at Marcy’s house. I can’t really tell what shape it is. There’s a huge, round room on the second floor that hangs out over the first floor like one of Myers’ fictional flying saucers perched on top of a beer can.

  Mr. Cole is an architect. I think he designed it.

  Mrs. Cole is a therapist, like Beryl, but that’s where the comparison ends. She’s actually a real psychologist, with a real job, and real clients who have issues, like cheating on their spouses or drinking way too much. I’m only privy to some of the gory details because Mrs. Cole shares the crazier ones with Marcy, and Marcy shares them with us.

  How else would I know that old Mrs. Easterbrook, my middle school Social Studies teacher, refuses to put her dementia-ridden husband, who’s prone to wandering, in a nursing home? Although nobody realizes it, she’s been using her dog’s invisible fence to keep him from leaving the yard.