by Will Walton
There was a knock on the door. “Come in!” Luca called, like he had some authority. It was Mom. “Hi, Kris,” Luca went, which I’m sure was annoying. She had a scented candle. Green, palm-sized, palm(tree)-scented candle; when I made the association, between palms, I laughed.
“You are laughing at me. I feel helpless,” she said. “I don’t know what else I can say to you now, except I am sorry, and I have already said that.”
When she walked out, Luca looked at me, eyebrows raised. I couldn’t meet him. I was too bummed out.
He kept talking. “I mean, I guess eventually we’ll have to talk about other things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like, you know, we’ll have to talk about who wants to bottom and who wants to top.”
“Yeah,” I said. “At some point.”
“Like, do you have a preference?”
“Um.” I thought about it. I thought about Mom being somewhere in the house, even though the door was closed.
I was looking at his boner. He started laughing, because we were suddenly so exposed. I shushed him. I was laughing too, but quietly. It felt surreal to be talking about sex in a real way—when it had been jokes, mostly, beforehand. Even the deal, when we struck it, had felt like a joke. Luca picked up the Feel Better mix and slid it into the computer drive. The first song—“Pretty Hurts,” by Beyoncé—started. “Want me to leave it playing for you?”
“Are you about to leave?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “But I’ll be back.” And I couldn’t believe he was just leaving. Like we had just talked about that stuff, and now it appeared we were done, so he was leaving, and it felt a little like abandonment, even though it wasn’t—at least not any real kind of abandonment. I knew what the real kind was. But it got on top of me. And in a little while, I started to ache. I couldn’t locate it all the way, at first. But it was real and full, like when Sia belts out, “I’m aliiiive!!” in that song. Thrilling because, beneath the pain of it, you get the sense there might be something else. Whatever the thing is that pushes. It’s urgent and unstoppable, and it holds you. It’s the same with masturbating, when you get to that point. And even after, your head’s in that quiet place—you’ve come from the sun, so this must be the ozone—and in that state, it hits you: I’m alone. And you think, If I could just bring this back with me.…
A squirreled dirty pair of gym shorts beneath the mattress. I fell asleep—“Ave?” I woke up. Mom was outside the door.
“I’m going to a meeting in a little while with Gia, okay? I’ll be back tonight.”
“Okay.” I shut my eyes. Sleep again.
I woke to Pal’s heavy steps in his rubber-soled boots coming up the hallway, and behind his footsteps, his grunting.
he was always, sort of, grunting
(some people laugh, familiar)
He opened my door and crossed my room and, bless him, I know he was trying to be quiet. He sat at the computer desk. We shared the computer. This was not a violation.
He jiggled the mouse. Began to click a little, type a little, click a little, type a little, clicked some more and typed some more, and then got quiet while scrolling.
I rose up, loud—“Pal!” (“Pow!”) Pal jumped.
“Ho—!” (“Ho—,” as he said it, was short for “Holy” maybe, but if that’s true, then the “Holy” was short for nothing, because Pal never cursed.)
He tried clicking out of whatever webpage he was on (so frantic). The window kept minimizing, maximizing. Again and again, at such high speed (I couldn’t begin to tell what he was looking at). When it finally disappeared, his hand went to his chest. His arm trembled.
“Partner …”
He gasped.
“Mom!” I yelled. “Help!”
But then Pal started laughing, not dying.
“Teach you to ease up on me a bit,” he said.
“I’ll ease up when you’re eighty,” I said. “Can’t be too careful when you’re eighty.”
“You mean I’m not eighty yet? You mean, that wasn’t the birthday we had the stuck pig?”
Now he was joking again. He knew—
“That was your seventy-fifth. Your seventy-fifth and don’t remind me about that pig.” Charlotte, I remembered, the pig’s name—and it bugged me how they got it wrong, if they were making a Charlotte’s Web reference. Charlotte was the spider. Wilbur was the pig.
“Why is it so quiet in here? Seems like every time I come in here, there’s some music playing.”
“There was some playing when I fell asleep. It must have played through, already. Luca dropped off a new mix.”
“What’s on it?”
“Songs Sia wrote but didn’t record.”
“She didn’t record them?”
“No, she sold them to other artists for them to sing. Like ‘Pretty Hurts’—did I ever play that one for you? The Beyoncé song?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, here, put the mix in. It’s track one.”
a thing I got to know about Pal that I feel lucky to know, that not everyone who knew him got to know, was that he had a real pop music sensibility
(some people laughed)
he just had really good taste in pop music
(a few people nodded their heads, knowing, but they didn’t know)
(he subscribed to HBO, so we could all watch Lemonade, for instance)
(how I learned about Warsan Shire, the poet)
(whose work Beyoncé reads in all the voice-overs)
(woke something inside of me)
“How’s the old patellar?”
“It’s fine. I’ve got that good medicine.”
“For two more days, then we quit it. That stuff is strong.”
“I hate to mention this, but I peed earlier.”
“You peed, huh? You use your thing?”
“I used it, all right. The worst.”
I stretched to open the big bottom drawer of my desk. Inside it, The Alibaba sat capped, a third filled.
“ ‘The Alibaba.’ Gotta wonder what white person decided to call it that. I mean, the hero of a classic work of Middle Eastern literature, and they go and name a urine receptacle after him? Why not name the urine receptacle after an American? How about a straight, white, cis, American dude? Name the urine receptacle after him—”
“What classic work did they name it after?”
“ ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ you know, from One Thousand and One Nights. Like, they could have gone with ‘The Gatsby’—I mean, it looks like a cocktail mixer, for crying out loud, a clear cocktail mixer. ‘The Gatsby.’ That would have been genius!” I was nervous-talking, sort of loud. Embarrassed about having to pee in the container all the time, and Pal having to empty it out, and all.
“Well, it’s clear, so the doctors can check real fast and see if you’re hydrated … I think you’re fine, by the way! Ha-ha!”
He looked at me, a corner of his mouth lifting. Something leapt into my throat, jagged like a piece of rubble. I swallowed it back.
“Piece of Doublemint?” Pal asked. He pulled a pack from inside his pocket. “Chew on this, help you get back into rhythm.”
“You want to split one?” My hands shook as I unwrapped the foil.
“Nah, you can take a whole.”
I ripped it in half just the same. I’d chew the second half later. As I started to smack the first half, Pal instructed, “Go on and chew it slow, now.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, like I just forgot.
“Laid up like this, you’ll have time to think. Some mornings I just lay there and think of my granddaddy, my grandma, my sister, my daddy, my mama, Nell … You could watch your whole life in your mind like it was a movie.”
Or not. Why would I want to watch that?
Pal took the silver wrapper from the gum and folded it into a silver jighead. He put it on the nightstand beside me.
I smacked on the gum.
“Chew slow, remember?�
� he said.
The good news: I really only wanted to read and write all summer anyway.
So, day one in the patellar cast wasn’t really even all that bad. Pain meds. A little Emily Dickinson. I was a fan of this band called Sorority Noise, and they put out an EP called It Kindly Stopped for Me, which I knew was an Emily Dickinson reference, so she’s where I started.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886); death after death, after death, Emily Dickinson’s loved ones kept dying, and after months in bed, Emily died of Bright’s disease
virtually unknown & having written 1800 poems in her lifetime
and when I had my fill of reading, I put my headphones in and listened to It Kindly Stopped for Me, Sorority Noise, tracks: 1. Either Way, 2. A Will, 3. Fource, 4. XC. Luca introduced me to Sorority Noise, but he has a higher threshold for full-on emo. Emo can really get to me, if I don’t parse it out right. It can make me feel really very sad—I think because I pay more attention than he does, to the lyrics and stuff.
I want to be a poet for that reason. I’ve got no interest in writing actual “music” music, but at the same time, I think it’s incredible that poetry really is—music.
Or music is poetry. Who’s to say, really?
“We passed the School, where Children strove / At Recess—in the Ring— / We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain— / We passed the setting Sun—”
Later, Luca came through the window. I read him some Dickinson. “Mm,” he went. So maybe Emily wasn’t for him. He pulled a Tupperware container from his backpack: some quinoa and vegetables. “You’re my hero,” I said. We ate together. We didn’t really say much, and I wasn’t horny so I did not mention Bio again. I did ask Luca to check on the computer for me, under the History tab, to see what Pal had been looking at earlier.
He made a joke about seeing what kind of porn I was watching. “Oh wait, I wonder if this is it.
“ ‘The High Tides, Low Tides Retreat, for those seeking relief and recovery from the disease of addiction.’ ”
There was a video. Sort of like a low-budget movie trailer. Fuzzy, synthy strings + grainy resolution. An older white woman touches the shoulder of a younger black woman. “Because today is the day
to make a change!”
White savior (I criticize, a white dude). “Because today is the day.
Is the day.
Is the day!”
Luca read aloud from the About page: “ ‘For those seeking relief and recovery from the disease of addiction, The High Tides, Low Tides Retreat is here.
“ ‘Our mission is to provide a heaven for those seeking relief and recovery from the disease of addiction, fostered in a culture of interpersonal support and a wireless, communal environment.
“ ‘High Tides, Low Tides seeks to reinforce the necessity of human connection, as well as rest, meditation, and communion with the natural world.’ ”
“A ‘heaven’ or a ‘haven’?” I asked.
Luca looked.
“A ‘haven.’ Did I say ‘heaven’?
“I mean, it’s a good thing, right, if your mom wants to go to this because it will help her. I mean, it sounds kind of rad, doesn’t it? Even badass, honestly; I’d go in a heartbeat.”
He was overcompensating because, at this point, I was upset and it was obvious. I had turned my back to the computer screen and to him. I didn’t want him to convince me. It was okay.
She had a sponsor. She was going to meetings. She was taking the steps it takes to get better. But “Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint!” Or so the card said.
The card was stuck to our fridge for the longest time, from when Mom first started going to meetings. “Hello, my name is Krissanne, and I’m an alcoholic,” as I would imagine. Sometimes reenact.
A man in AA had given her that card, and it was a weird situation from the start, had an airbrush feel. The Tortoise and the Hare with red eyes and bloated heads. A card for alcoholics.
They were seeing each other for a little bit. One morning in the kitchen, he was making breakfast. A cliché: adolescent kid coming into his sexuality confronts what is, to him, sexuality—a man wearing boxers and a tank, unencumbered because the only other party in the house (who hasn’t seen it) is male.
Those were actually pretty happy times, though. Mom doing better, Gia encouraging, and while this guy was around, it was like she had a way to see the future.
It didn’t last.
A week before the car/cake crash: Mom hadn’t gone to a meeting in almost a month, and Gia was calling and calling the house and leaving messages on Susannah.
It actually showed me how, in a certain way, Gia was as dependent on Mom as much as Mom was dependent on Gia. We turned out the lights in the house like we were hiding from trick-or-treaters because we’d forgotten to buy candy. I thought it was funny, and suggested maybe we could watch a scary movie. But Mom’s mood was sunk.
Gia stopped by the house and knocked. We continued to hide. “Are you sure you don’t want to go?” I asked, because the meetings generally did empower Mom. She felt less alone, it seemed. She felt better once she had gone.
“Avery, please don’t try to guilt me, okay?”
I wasn’t trying to guilt her. That was on her, in her own head. She’d been prepping dishes all day for the Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, and something had gone wrong. They had asked if she would donate them for a fund-raising event, and of course Mom had said yes.
I had been at school all day, but when I came home the kitchen was a total wreck. She had left out a simple ingredient. It had messed up the whole thing, she said. She’d had to make it twice. All day she was back and forth between our kitchen and Pal’s, had the ovens in both houses going, and had gotten so overwhelmed she found herself crying, she told me. Then she had gone to lie in the bed for a little while, when Babs called to report that the dish inside their oven was burning. Mom had shot back, “Well, take it out, then!” and rather than get up and walk over to Pal’s house to inspect the burning dish, she pulled the quilt up over her head and lay in bed for another hour.
It had cost a lot for her to make those dishes, for which she would make nothing.
And though she had wanted to do it, it’s like at the end of the day all she could see was the waste.
Mom cooked with liquor sometimes, so it was still around. I think she went for it. “Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint!” Gia banged on the door. We waited it out. She wouldn’t go. She was drunk. The last time it happened, before this time, I’d been instructed to tattle on her. The last time it happened, before this time, she had yanked the top tray of the dishwasher off its track and then fallen against the counter.
It had scared me. I’d called Pal. He and Mom had had a long talk, and Babs sat in my room with me. We ate Domino’s. When Mom came in later, once they were gone, she asked how my pizza was, and I said it was good. She sat at the edge of my bed. “Avery, I really am—” She shook her head. “Sick.”
We had a conversation about how she was really going to commit to getting better, avoiding triggers like stress and self-neglect, and how she would exercise, how she would read, how she would take time to cook “for the love of it” every once in a while, to remember why she loved cooking in the first place, for the experimentation of it, and how maybe she would journal, or start a blog, or make collages out of cutouts from magazines, which she loved doing as a kid, and how she would try not to miss an AA meeting again. And the whole time I couldn’t keep from looking at her earrings, shaped like tiny leaves, each with an emerald, her birthstone, nestled into them.
I was thinking about how we might be trapped, my family. And how maybe I didn’t believe in recovery, after all. How Pal originally had bought those earrings for Babs, but how he’d gotten the wrong stone, not Babs’s amethyst but Mom’s emerald. I’ve read somewhere that emeralds have the power to protect, but did they? How much could they stand?
“Let’s get a Top 25 check,” Luca said, to che
er me up: “Oh oh, coming in hot, it’s ‘Green Light’ by Lorde! About to breach the Top 10, so let’s see, how many listens? 89! 89 listens to ‘Formation’ too, but that’s probably stalled out. You’ve moved on—only to come back to it, some day, of course. Let’s see, do we have any dark horses encroaching? Hmm … hmm … okay, Perfume Genius is up a few slots, but no surprise—he’s good to study to. Call me crazy, but is ‘Cranes in the Sky’ up a couple notches from before?”
“It might be,” I said. “I put it on loop to help me sleep one night, and I think it played the night through.”
“Yeah, it’s in the ninth slot now, so—
“ ‘XC’ in the Top 10 now, so.” “What’s that one again?” “That’s the
soft Sorority Noise one that kind of builds.” “Oh yeah, oh yeah, those lyrics.” “See, here is my breakdown of you, Avery. It’s all here.”
He points to the song “Heartbeats” by The Knife. “You’ve got The Knife’s version of ‘Heartbeats’ securely in the Top 5 with 111 listens. Meanwhile, you’ve got the José González version bringing up the rear of the Top 25, with 63 listens—that’s just it to me, Ave, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s just something I notice; in your heart of hearts, you’re a big-production pop music guy. You’ll choose the pop song every time.” He double-clicked “XC”
and we listened—“I mean, I love this song, Luc,” I said. “Love. I’m just not exactly sure you’re correct. Softer songs are great—”
“Yeah, but you don’t exactly give them repeat listens—I guess that’s all I’m saying, and again, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with it.” He clicks “Heartbeats” by José González. It
really is a pretty cover of the song, but now I’m teasing him because he’s giving me a hard time about how I like pop music, like pop music makes me simple or something, when pop music is the greatest because it helps you not only process the most complicated emotions, but dance to them—even with them— as well.
I snaked my hand over to the mouse. I was going to try to click The Knife’s version. Luca grabbed my hand, and then we were wrestling, to the extent that we could wrestle. Him on the bed, his legs around my waist, me in my cast.
