“Because school sucks. And so does everybody who thinks it’s funny to humiliate me in public.”
“Ethan!” Cami wrings her hands. “That is so stupid. You are making this into something so much bigger than it is.”
This ticks me off. “I’m thinking maybe I don’t need to be anywhere near friends like you.”
Her jaw drops. She steps back. I can see the shock, the hurt, in her eyes. I went too far. Fuck.
I went too far and now I’m going to lose her. I press my lips together to stop the hysterics that threaten to bubble up. And then I do it.
I step in. Reach my fingers through her hair and pull her close and I’m kissing her. Hard and sweet. Her lips are so soft, so delicious. And she’s kissing me back, I think. For a second.
One second. And it’s over. Then she freezes and whispers, “What are you doing?” Whether to me or to herself, I don’t know. She pulls away and I can see her eyes wide, scared, and I let her go. I do. I just let her go.
She runs. Up the stairs, two at a time. Slams the door behind her. And my feet are glued to the floor.
God. She drives me insane. I hop up on the pool table, shove the balls aside, and lay back before they all bounce off the bumpers and come back to hit me. I stare up at the light fixture until I start seeing black spots everywhere. Knowing I messed it all up.
When I hear Dad come back, I go upstairs to clean up and change my shirt. And when we all sit around the table to eat, Blake has to go and act like an ass.
He’s got a piece of paper and he’s peering at Mama and Dad, then Gracie. And he’s making notes.
“What are you writing?” Gracie asks, eyes narrow. “Don’t look at me. Mama!”
Blake snarls at her. “It’s my science assignment. Sheesh.”
Mama tilts her head. “What is it?”
“I have to chart everybody’s eye color in my family. We just started genetics.”
“Ahh,” Dad says. “I remember that. Good old eighth-grade science. Dominant, recessive genes . . . good times.” He takes a bite of his burger.
But I’m staring at Blake’s chart.
He’s got Mama, Dad, himself, and Gracie on the chart. Not me. He’s not including me in his family. He’s not checking my eye color.
Jerk.
Blake puts his paper on top of his notebook, like he’s done with the assignment, and starts eating.
I look over at Mama to see if she noticed Blake didn’t include my eyes. But she’s oblivious, helping Gracie open a ketchup packet.
I glare at Blake and point to the paper, and he gives me this innocent “Oh, I forgot about you!” look. He thinks it’s a big joke, I can tell.
Well, it’s not. I start to breathe hard.
I’m not going to lose it here in front of him. But this kind of little shit—this is what kills me, you know? It’s so stupid, but I’ve got this thing, this . . . this already broken thing cracking into more pieces inside me. And it hurts so bad, right here in my chest, right inside my ribs. Because what the hell kind of thing is that to do to somebody? I shove my chair back and flee to the basement. In the dark. Ignoring the commotion I’ve just started.
In one simple move, Blake makes me feel like I’m not even a part of this family.
I hear some major yelling, more than I’ve ever heard here before, and I can tell Mama and Dad have figured it out. Blake’s getting mauled, and I’m glad.
Later, Dad sends him downstairs with his stupid chart and he flips on the light. I think about closing my eyes so he can’t even check, but that would be doing exactly what he’s doing.
He’s pissed off, I can tell by the way he’s digging his pen into the paper. He charts my green eye color next to everyone else’s: brown for Mama, Dad, and Gracie. Blue for him. I turn away when he’s had his look. He stomps back up the stairs.
Nobody else comes down. But I can hear Mama and Dad fighting in their room above me again. Dad’s going to make me go back to school. Ugh. I want to pound my head against the wall.
Maybe I’m just not meant to be here, not wired to fit in anymore, after all these years away. I decide to sleep on the floor down here, down where it’s safe and I don’t have to deal with them. Turn off the light, close the ceiling vent so I don’t have to listen anymore, and pull the quilt over me. I start thinking about Blake, and about Cami, and how I just did the same thing to her that Blake did to me. But then I fucked it up even worse. At least Blake didn’t try to kiss me after stabbing me in the gut.
I reach for my phone and send Cami a text message, telling her I’m sorry for what I said. That I was wrong and she was right. And that I didn’t mean to kiss her. I shouldn’t have done it.
She doesn’t reply.
Maybe, in the morning, I’ll run.
CHAPTER 24
A loud whisper wakes me up. “Efan!”
I grunt, lift my head, and peer through one eye. Gracie is in her pajamas, dancing like she has to pee. “What?”
“Snow day! No school.”
I let my head fall again. But I’m relieved. Another crisis averted, at least temporarily. And there’s no way I can run away, not in this weather.
Gracie keeps dancing and looking around wildly.
“Why are you hopping around like that? Because of the snow day? I thought you liked school.”
She looks over her shoulder swiftly, eyes big. “I hate the basement. There’s bugs and momsters down here.”
“Mmm, bugs and momsters. I eat the bugs during the night instead of potato chips. Crunchy.”
She grins, so sweet. “What about the momsters?”
I struggle to a sitting position and wrinkle my nose. “Nah. Too gooey.”
She laughs and hops over and right into my lap, folding her toes up so nothing is touching the floor. She squeaks once, like she’s a little bit scared of things, but she stops bouncing around.
I look at her, and she looks up at me. I can see the kid adores me. And I have no idea why. I wrap the blanket around her. “I won’t let the momsters get you,” I say. I pull Where’s Waldo? out of a nearby box and we look at it together.
Mama comes down after a while with a breakfast tray. She sets it down and hops onto the pool table, across from us. She has a little smile on her face. She likes that at least two of us are getting along, I think.
“Did you sleep all right down here?” she asks. “I was worried about you.”
“It was fine. Better than being in the room with that jerk.”
“Ethan,” Mama says, and Gracie echoes in the same reprimanding tone, “Efan.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“It’s hard for Blake,” Mama says. “He had a tough time while you were gone.”
“And that’s my fault? Are you going to blame me for going with those guys, too?”
Mama just looks at me. “No, of course not.”
I shrug. It seems pretty obvious that Blake’s a jerk, then, since he is blaming me, but I’m not going to press it. I pick up a bagel and spread some cream cheese on it, still balancing Waldo on my knee.
“So,” she says, “Ethan. We need to talk about school.”
“Snow day today, no school,” Gracie says. She bounces in my lap.
“Yes, today. But tomorrow, if there’s not a snow day, everybody needs to go to school again. Like usual.”
I frown and shake my head slightly. I’m not going. I feel the panic rev in my gut. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say.
“Why? Because of what happened Friday night at the game?”
Duh, I want to say, but I am earnest. “Seriously, I just don’t think I can handle that right now, Mama. This is hard enough.”
“Dad says you need to go to school and that’s final.”
“Dad doesn’t understand,” I say, and I can feel that panic in my stomach come out as a whine in my voice. I set the bagel down.
Mama presses her lips together. She’s hesitating. “Well, we have our appointment this afternoon with Dr. Frost.
We can talk about it then.”
I let the book drop, and Gracie scrambles with her jelly toast to get it, spilling a glob of grape on my bare knee. “Watch it,” I say, and it sounds mean. I see her sad face as I wipe it up, and even though I’m still mad, I feel bad.
I don’t want to go to a shrink. I don’t want him tricking me into talking about Ellen.
Unless, maybe, there’s a chance I can get him to back me up. Convince him I can’t go to school. I sigh. “Okay,” I say. “Fine.”
It takes us forty minutes to go five miles to the other side of town in this ridiculous snow. I’m hoping there’ll be another snow day tomorrow. Buy some more time. When we get to Dr. Frost’s office, Mama fills out a bunch of paperwork, and then we get called in. My hands are quivering and my stomach hurts. I don’t want to be here.
Until I see Dr. Frost.
She’s maybe thirty, if that. She’s tall, and she’s got this gorgeous flowing hair, and this rack. Jesus. I’m so distracted I don’t even hear what she says.
“Ethan?”
“Uh, hi.”
“I asked if you want your mother to stay in the room, or should she wait in the waiting room?”
I start fantasizing about what could happen if Mama left us alone. And then I desperately start pinching myself. Thinking about dead puppies. Grandma De Wilde. “She can stay,” I manage to say as I pull out my leg hair through my pockets.
That does it. Having Mama stay in the room is definitely enough to put things back in order.
Dr. Frost talks about herself a little bit, and how she likes to conduct the fifty-minute session, and then she asks me some easy questions—name, date of birth, age at the time of abduction, crap like that. She seems to know some things about me already.
And then she says, “Tell me about Eleanor.” She sits back and shuts up.
I cross my legs. “I don’t know, like, what do you want to know?”
“You lived with her until she abandoned you in Nebraska?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like her?”
I glance at Mama and shift in my seat. Mama stays quiet and looks at her folded hands in her lap. “She was all right.”
“Did you call her Eleanor?”
“Sometimes,” I say. It’s a lie. That’s not even her name.
“Something else?”
I stare at the floor.
Nobody moves.
“Does it really matter?” I ask finally.
Dr. Frost smiles and changes the subject. “How did you feel when Eleanor left you at the youth home in Nebraska?”
I feel that stirring, and it’s not the good kind. “It was fine. It is fine. Because that’s what helped me find my real family.” The words spill out of my mouth like sawdust.
“Yes,” Dr. Frost says. “Still, at the time, you didn’t remember you had another family. So it must have been a little bit hard. Unless Eleanor treated you badly.”
“She wasn’t bad.” I say it too fast. Mama glances at me. “She wasn’t bad to me. She didn’t abuse me or anything. We just . . . we had a hard life.”
Dr. Frost leans forward and doesn’t speak.
It’s quiet again, and I feel pressure to continue. I try to think of something that will satisfy them. Something big. The minutes are creeping by. I start sweating. “She was an escort,” I say. “You know. She hung out with . . . men. For pay. I called her by her first name because she didn’t want anybody to think she was old enough to have a kid my age. She pretended she was my older sister and said our parents were dead.” I pause, my mouth dry. “She got bigger tips that way.”
Dr. Frost nods. “What else?”
I groan and lean my head against the wall. “Sheesh. Nothing. That’s all. That’s all there is. Then she got too old-looking and used up. She couldn’t get work anymore and had to get rid of me.”
Dr. Frost pauses. And then asks, “Are you mad at her?”
“I don’t know.” Hell yes, I am.
“Why do you think she abducted you, Ethan?”
I’ve thought about this a lot over the past year, once I realized what had really happened to me. But I knew. I know. “Because she couldn’t be pregnant. You can’t be pregnant and have that job, you know. That’s what I think.”
“But she wanted a kid?”
“I think she just wanted a kid, yeah. I think she was just real lonely. And she wanted a bigger kid, like I was. I could feed myself, take care of myself when she was out, you know?” I’m just going with it now, but it feels right. It does. I think that’s probably the way it was with Ellen.
“She left you alone a lot?”
“No. Well, I mean, in the evenings and during the night when I was just sleeping anyway. She was working.”
“Did Eleanor ever abandon you before Nebraska?”
I don’t like this question. I chuckle softly for a minute, and then it gets louder, and I feel the hysterics coming up my chest, my throat. I hold them down. “Like, not forever. Ha-ha-ha. Of course not.” I laugh again, thinking how absurd it is. How ridiculous. And this time, the laughter is caught there, not stopping, not softening. I bend forward and move around, trying to interrupt whatever the fuck it is that keeps it going.
Mama looks concerned. I wave her off.
“For a short time? Did she ever leave you for a few days? A week?” Dr. Frost asks.
I shrug in answer to her question and raise a hand to let her know I can’t speak, not right now. The laughter comes in a rough pattern, and I try to think of a song that would go to the beat of it. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, anyway. I just want to go home, go down to my basement, and finish my bedroom. Stay in there.
Mama stands up and comes over, holds my shoulders. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”
It’s much worse than the time after the TV interview. I shake my head and the hysterical laughter won’t stop. It grows. I stand up and see Mama’s frightened look. She’s obviously not sure what to think.
I’m fine! I want to tell her. I’m fine! I hold my forefinger up to Dr. Frost, who doesn’t seem alarmed at all.
“Try some deep breaths if you can,” Dr. Frost says.
I try. But it’s like laughter asthma. Once you start going, it’s hard to bring it back down. Tears are running down my face now, and Mama’s hovering, and finally she just hugs me so tight and rubs my back, shaking right along with me, and whispers to me, over and over again.
“It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay.”
What it is, is fucking embarrassing.
We drive home in the early snowy darkness, Mama leaning over the steering wheel, concentrating on not crashing. “We’re going back for family counseling on Thursday. All of us. Okay?”
I shrug. I have no control anyway; why bother fighting it?
“Do you know how to drive?” she asks suddenly. “Did you ever learn?”
“No.”
“Do you want to? It would be so convenient to have another driver in the house. If you’re interested, that is.”
My eyes widen. “Yeah,” I say. “I think that would be awesome.”
“Winter’s the best time to learn,” she says. “If you can drive in messes like this, you can drive in anything. I’ll sign you up for a class tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.” I like that. And that reminds me. “What about school? You saw me in there,” I say. I start blushing. It’s so fucking embarrassing. “That’s what’ll happen at school when they start making fun of me. And once that happens, I’ll be branded a freak for life. Seriously, Mama. I’ll never hear the end of it. That’s why I can’t go. Plus,” I add, “I know I’m going to get stuck in a bunch of freshman classes because I missed so much school, and all my friends are juniors. It sucks.”
Mama’s quiet. We inch along the road. And she says quietly, almost to herself, “I don’t know, Eth.”
When we finally get home, Mama stops me on the step as we go inside, and puts her hand on my coat sleeve. “Don’t say anything. Let me
handle this one,” she says. And then she smiles and goes in.
I feel a surge of warmth toward her and, at the same time, new energy in my weary body. After having to fight every battle for myself for so everlastingly long, it’s such a relief to have her. I finally have an ally.
“Thanks, Mama,” I whisper, but she’s already humming in the kitchen, getting ready for whatever’s next.
CHAPTER 25
Dinner is more awkward than ever.
“We’re all going to family counseling on Thursday,” Mama announces, and that sets the pace for the rest of the evening.
“What?” Blake says. His eyes are blazing.
“You said we never go anywhere as a family,” Dad says. “Well, here’s our chance.”
“No way. I’m not going.” Blake throws his fork at his plate. It sticks in his mashed potatoes with barely a sound.
I think he sees me smirk. I can’t help it. He’s so amusing, getting upset about such little things.
“Shut up, Ethan.”
“Hey, I said nothing,” I say. “Touchy.”
“Back off!”
I tsk. “Sounds like you could use a little counseling session all to yourself.”
“Boys,” Dad says, pushing his chair back to let us know he means it. I think he might be a little nervous about having to break us up if we start fighting.
I look at Gracie and she’s eating happily. She sees me looking at her and she squinches her eyes shut in a long blink. She’s still working on the wink thing. She thinks she’s doing it, though, which is enough to crack me up just a little again.
Blake hauls off and slugs me in the arm.
I shove my chair back and get this huge rush of heat boiling up in my head. I want to get right up in his face and scream at the top of my lungs. My body reacts before I can think, and within two seconds, I’ve got Blake around the throat with one hand, pinning him against his chair, my other fist back and ready to pound the jerk in the face.
Mama screams. “Stop it!”
And that stops me. I look at Blake, his little round face, his usually icy blue eyes now filled with fear, staring back at me. I lower my fist and let go of his neck, shake out my hand.