This Broken Road

by A. M. Henry

  I don’t answer right away. Outside, clouds slide across the sky and block the sun. “I think about it every day. I never stopped wanting them. But I never want to go back to that place.”

  “You’re a very strong young woman, Angela.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  17.

  I know we’re not friends, and I don’t like him that much, but I haven’t gone anywhere other than my house on a Saturday night since the accident. And I need to get out, even if it’s only out to do schoolwork in Ryan Reagan’s kitchen while his mom bakes chocolate chip cookies that smell like heaven.

  Ryan fiddles with an iPad—his dad’s, he said, as if trying to prove he doesn’t have it better than anyone else—and music starts playing.

  “You like Hillstomp?” I would have pegged him as a strictly top ten radio kind of guy.

  “Yeah, they’re awesome.”

  “My sister calls it redneck music.”

  “Well we are kind of rednecks. Look where we live.”

  “Touché,” I say. “You should check out Black River Delta, I think you’d like them.”

  Ryan finds them on Spotify and plays the first album while we flip through the books we took out of the library, all of them about the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl, and listen to music. Then Mrs. Reagan feeds us cookies and our will to do schoolwork shrivels up and dies.

  “I give up,” Ryan declares at around seven-thirty. “You want to go do something?”

  I almost turn around to check behind me to see who he’s talking to. “Do something?”

  “Yeah. You know, we could go set fire to some abandoned cars, score some dope in Newburgh, and get wasted. I don’t know, Angel, we could just drive around and eat junk food.”

  My heart does something strange when he calls me Angel. Obviously an undiagnosed heart murmur.

  “Driving and junk food sounds good.”

  *

  “No parties tonight?” I ask half an hour later.

  We parked at a rest stop off of Route 84 after getting a deep fried onion and a rack of ribs to go from the Texas Roadhouse in Middletown.

  “I think Jonesy’s having a party,” Ryan replies. “His parents are away. And I heard Hart has something going on.” He shoves about a third of the deep fried onion into his mouth and struggles with it for the next twenty seconds. “Why? You want to go partying?”

  The question catches me off guard. “Not really. I just thought… I don’t know what I thought.”

  “You thought I spend my weekends binge drinking with all the other cool kids.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Not my thing.”

  Since freshman year, I have heard countless tales of Ryan Reagan’s escapades in partying and drinking and sleeping with college girls. This version of Ryan is someone I’ve never met, and I’ve known him for more than ten years. I guess he reads that in my expression.

  “I know what they say in school. And yeah, I told some stories to help it along. Spent a few weekends up at Cornell following Sean around and come Monday, it was a weekend spent drinking and partying.”

  “You want to go to Cornell?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe. Not for college, but if I could afford it for grad school.” He takes another mouthful of fried onion, then fixes me with a frown. “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “Why would I make fun of you?”

  “I want to study at their ornithology lab.”

  “Their what?”

  “Ornithology lab. Birds. They study birds. It’s like college level bird watching.”

  “That’s seriously a thing?”

  “Told you you’d make fun of me.”

  “No! That sounds awesome, actually.” I mean it, too, and it makes me realize I’ll never get to study something that interesting. I’ll go to the community college and my parents will force me to study accounting, or become a paralegal. “Do you go up there a lot?”

  “Not really,” Ryan says. “Not anymore. Felt like I was bothering Sean.”

  “I’ve haven’t visited Rachel,” I say. “She’s in Princeton.”

  “What’s she majoring in?”

  “Math.”

  Ryan makes a face. “Seriously? Math?”

  I laugh. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  We attack the ribs for a while, R. L. Burnside’s music playing from Ryan’s ipod. Then he asks me, “What do you want to do? After school, I mean.”

  It hits me then that after I somehow make it to June, I still have another year of high school. I feel tired. And depressed.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “I’m stuck at Harrowmill for another year, so I guess I have some time to think about it.”

  “You should take summer classes,” Ryan says. “And maybe some classes at the community college. You pass the GED, you don’t have to do another year.”

  That had never occurred to me. I feel like someone just showed me the way to an escape hatch. Until I think of my parents.

  “No way the ‘rents will go for that.”

  “Screw them,” Ryan says. “You’re eighteen in March, right? You can legally drop out of school. Get a job and pay for the courses yourself, and they can’t stop you.”

  “I never thought about that,” I admit.

  “Well you should. It can’t be healthy living with… her. You don’t want to be stuck there after high school.”

  For the first time in months, I feel like maybe I have a future.

  18.

  Before I look up “GED practice test” on Casey’s computer on Sunday, I log into my Facebook account for the first time in over a year. I lost interest in Facebook and Instagram and everything else once Jason and I had lost our souls to drugs.

  When I log in, the homepage tells me I have 212 notifications. I don’t want to click on it, but I do anyway.

  Lauren Anne Hart posted on your timeline.

  “How does it feel to be the nastiest skank junkie of Harrowmill?”

  Kate Pritchett posted on your timeline.

  “Your a disgusting junkie skank I bet you have AIDS.”

  Harper Polowski posted on your timeline.

  “Way to almost murder innocent people because you had to shoot heroin and drive. Your junkie boyfriend deserved what he got.”

  Lauren Anne Hart tagged you in a photo.

  It’s a photo of an elderly woman so aged from substance abuse, she looks like she died a decade ago.

  Jos Astorian tagged you in a photo.

  Another photo of a grey-skinned dead hooker lying in an alley, surrounded by yellow tape proclaiming “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS’”

  All of these posts with at least 50 “likes” each.

  I don’t read anymore. I go into my account settings and deactivate it. I understand why Jason refused to ever use any form of social media.

  I go back to searching for sample GED tests, dreading the results. Sure I can do okay in English and history, but I never could grasp anything in science besides biology; and I can barely count to ten, never mind do complicated math.

  But after finishing three practice tests with pretty high scores, I think maybe I can pass the GED. I won’t have to do an extra year of high school.

  “What are you doing?”

  I almost jump out of the chair. Casey has inherited Mom’s stealth.

  Casey leans over my shoulder to try and look at her computer screen. “Are you actually studying for the SAT’s? Already?”

  I don’t even remember when the SAT’s are. Spring? I missed them last year, because of the accident.

  “Uhh…” I close all the windows open on the screen. “Yeah. Totally.”

  Casey raises an eyebrow and for a moment she looks so much like Mom it scares me a little.

  “What are you really doing?” she asks. “You’re not looking at porn, are you?”

  “You caught me. I saved it all on your computer. Just in case you get curious.”

  “Gross.”

/>   I get up and head for the door. She still wears her soccer uniform. Sometimes I miss soccer.

  “You haven’t been doing your exercises,” Casey says before I reach the hall.

  “How do you know?”

  She gives me a smug smile. “You walk like your leg is stiff when you go for a while without doing them.”

  I scowl at her without much conviction and she laughs.

  “Can you believe Thanksgiving is in like a week?” she asks, taking over the desk chair. She logs into Facebook on the computer, photos of her and her smiling friends appearing on the screen.

  “Already?” I had forgotten about Thanksgiving. I go back over to the desk to look over her shoulder at the calendar on the wall.

  “Mom wants to go to Grandma’s,” Casey says. “Mairéad is going, too.”

  “Ugh.” I try not to cringe. Mairéad, Mom’s older sister and arch nemesis is like Mom’s personality on steroids. We haven’t seen her or her kids in like two years. I feel tired just thinking about it.

  *

  I think back to the vacation we took to Disney World, Thanksgiving when I was eight years old. We had some issues in the airport—all of the luggage from our flight had gone to the wrong terminal, and it took the airport more than two hours to sort out the mess and get the luggage back to where everyone from our flight waited.

  Rachel had gotten sick on the plane and just wanted to sleep. She lay across three seats in the waiting area, using Mom’s and Dad’s jackets as a blanket. Casey, five and a prima donna, had started crying when her boredom got too intense for her to handle. Mom and Dad rapidly reached the end of their patience.

  When the suitcases finally started rolling out into the baggage claim, a massive sea of people surrounded it on all sides. I spotted our suitcases and pushed my way through the crowd, hoping to at least get them off the belt and then Dad could come through and carry them to our cart. A red-haired teenage boy helped me lift the suitcases, and then when I turned back to try and spot my parents through the crowd, Mom had appeared at my side.

  I hadn’t expected her to suddenly be right there. I cried out, dropped the suitcase in my hand, and jumped away from her, colliding with the red-haired teenager. A number of people turned and stared. Mom’s face went from surprised to angry, and I backed even farther away from her.

  She threw down the suitcase she had just picked up. “Wait here for your father then,” she spat, and walked away.

  Dad, cranky and travel-worn, came for the suitcases a minute later. “How can you treat your mother like that?” he snapped at me.

  I don’t remember anything else from the Disney World trip.

  Dr. Allen frowns and purses her lips. “Your sisters,” she says, “do they have a good relationship with your parents?”

  “Rachel and Mom don’t,” I reply. “But they’re not like hostile or anything. Just… neutral, I guess. Rachel and Dad are close.”

  “And Casey?”

  “She’s close to Mom. But she doesn’t know anything about… what happened. They’re not like affectionate. Mom was never into hugging or anything like that. But they’re close. Like good friends, sort of.”

  I can see Dr. Allen clenching her jaw. I glance towards her desk. Though I can’t see them from here, I know she has a bunch of photos on her desk of kids about my age; I’ve caught glimpses of them when I walk into her office. They look like a happy family—everyone always smiling, arms around each other’s shoulders to pose for the pictures. Nothing like my family. I wonder if my stories bother her.

  “If you like…,” she says, and then holds up her hands as though to defend herself. “It’s just an idea; you don’t have to. But if you like, we could have a session with your parents. We could perhaps try to discuss… all of this. Work on repairing your relationship—”

  “No.” I cut her off. “It’s bad enough I have to live in the same house with them. At least at home, we have walls to separate us.” I take a deep breath, feeling guilty for snapping at her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I’m just… not ready to forgive them. I don’t know if I ever will.”

  19.

  “Why wouldn’t you go out with me sophomore year?” Ryan asks.

  “Because I thought you were an asshole.”

  “I am an asshole. That’s not a reason.”

  “Of course that’s a reason.” I can’t help but laugh. “Why did you even want to go out with me?”

  “Are you kidding? You know you’re like the prettiest girl in the whole school, right?”

  I feel like acknowledging that makes me the asshole. But I can’t help raising an eyebrow. “That’s it?”

  “Why else do teenage boys want to go out with girls?”

  “Fair enough.”

  We drove up Route 6 and parked in the scenic overlook, Central Valley spread out far below us—lights from Woodbury Commons and Walmart and all the other masses of shops, cars moving along the Thruway, Routes 17 and 6, and Route 32 like glowing red and white dewdrops dripping down spider webs. A bag containing the remnants of four Happy Meals sits on the dashboard. Two Batmobiles and two miniature My Little Ponies stand next to the crumpled McDonalds bag.

  This feels surreal. Like a dream. And I don’t mean that in a sappy, romantic way. Not at all. More like the way you can be with a person in your dreams—totally unfamiliar people, or people you don’t really like—and yet in the dream it seems familiar. Comfortable.

  Ryan Reagan was the kid who’d silently shoot spitballs into your hair in the third grade, and by lunchtime, you’d be the laughingstock of the school. He’s the kid who found Stephanie Parker’s diary on the library floor in sixth grade, and read it aloud to everyone during recess. He’s the kid who stuffed Mark Malone’s head into a toilet in seventh grade, and stuffed Cam Sullivan into a locker freshman year.

  The kid who threw all of my homework out of the bus window in second grade.

  I never thought of him as a person. A person with feelings and issues just like everyone else.

  “My turn,” I say. “Why were you always so mean to everyone? You were such a bully.”

  He stays silent for a time and I wonder if I’ve crossed some invisible line. I don’t care if I did—he bullied everyone in this town for last ten years; I think he can handle it.

  “I don’t know,” he answers. “I mean… At the time I really didn’t think I was hurting anyone. I was just making my friends laugh. I thought we were just having fun.”

  “You didn’t think reading someone’s diary in front of the whole class would hurt anyone?”

  He laughs like I just told a really good joke.

  “Real nice,” I say.

  “Oh come on, it’s not like she had anything good in it. Except for some bad poems about Derek.” That makes him laugh even harder. He catches his breath and finishes his milkshake with a lot of slurping, and then says, “My turn. Why’d you quit soccer?”

  I quit the soccer team when the season ended sophomore year. Part of it was hanging out with new friends, but mostly I had gotten fed up with practicing for hours after school, getting up at the crack of dawn on weekends, and pretending to like the other girls on the team just so my parents could ignore the trophies and never show up to a single game.

  I shrug. “I just wasn’t into it anymore.”

  “But you were awesome at it.”

  “Didn’t matter. I didn’t like it.”

  He goes silent again, staring off into the distance. Then Ryan says, “I hate football.”

  I don’t know how to respond to that. He’s the best player on the team, next to Derek. I already know why he never quit—no football means no college scholarships—so I don’t know what to say.

  “I always wanted to play rugby,” he tells me. “My dad used to watch it on weekends. He’d find the Irish and English games on the internet and watch them on Sundays. He told me football was like rugby. Told me to start playing when I got to middle school whe
re there was an actual team. Turns out I was pretty good at it. But I never liked it.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. Guess I don’t have to worry about it now, though, right?”

  I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not.

  20.

  Late Sunday morning, Derek’s yellow Nissan comes hacking and sputtering down the street. He pulls into my driveway and Abba blasts so loudly I swear it rattles the windows of my house.

  We were obsessed with Abba for half of fourth grade and most of fifth. Derek’s mom had a few of their albums on vinyl, and some days after school we would take the Abba records out and play them in Derek’s living room. We knew all the words to all the songs, and we sang and danced our little hearts out.

  Derek kills the engine and the last notes of “Waterloo” echo up and down the street. I wait for him in the front doorway of the house and he takes his time putting his phone and wallet in his back pocket, checking his reflection in the rearview mirror, and then he takes his phone back out of his pocket—probably checking his Instagram—puts the phone back in his pocket, and then the driver’s side door squeals open and Derek finally gets out of the car. He starts dramatically stretching his arms like he’s been on the road for the last eighteen hours.

  He knows I have absolutely zero patience when it comes to other people dawdling while I have to wait. By the time he reaches the front door, I’m shifting from one foot the other and my frown will probably cause permanent wrinkles.

  “Hey guy,” Derek says.

  He steps past me and heads for the kitchen. I heave a dramatic sigh and throw the door closed. In the kitchen, Dad still has his pajamas on even though it’s nearly noon. He sips coffee while he waits for his toast to finish toasting. Derek helps himself to a cup of coffee and for some reason I think of all the Saturdays his mom dropped him off here and Dad would drive us to the mall.

  Dad’s smears marmalade on his breakfast, very careful not to get any on the pristine counter. Then he picks up his plate, turns around, and does a double take.