It’s Tuesday. It’s slow. Jared and I are covering the whole place.
“You know,” he says, when we meet back at the waitress station (still called the waitress station even though it’s only us two waiters tonight), “this thing with Henna only really came up when she started dating Tony. And now she’s going to Africa after graduation. And then Nathan comes into our lives to catch her eye when she’s single and you’re still ‘gathering your courage’.” He eats a french fry off a plate. “Ever thought you only really like her because there’s always something in the way of actually getting close to her?”
“I think that all the time.”
“Seven wants more raspberry lemonades,” Tina, our manager, says, looming into the waitress station. She sets down the two pots of coffee she’s used on her refill run and takes a slice of cheesy toast off one of my plates. “I swear they put crack in these,” she says, eating it.
I deliver my plates, I get three more raspberry lemonades for table seven, I bring enough extra cheesy toast into the restaurant to feed the entire population that has ever lived on this planet. Grillers is high volume, fast turnover, and even if the tips are cheap, there are a lot of them. It’s a great job. It keeps gas in my car. It gets me out of the house. I work a lot of shifts with Jared. I’m lucky, too: Mel works the tills at a twenty-four-hour drugstore, fighting off meth heads who’ve lost track of what year it is, and Henna makes coffee at a drive-in Java Shack that doesn’t even have its own bathroom.
It’s a great job. I’m lucky. It’s a great job.
(But do you have any idea how dirty restaurants are?)
I start washing my hands early in the shift, and five hours later at the end, I’m washing them almost every two minutes, which by then doesn’t feel like often enough after touching one of the sponges we use to wipe the crevices of the booths after we close.
“One hundred and thirty-five.” Jared counts his money, sitting on the steps down from the storeroom. “One hundred and thirty-six dollars and … seventy-two cents.” He straightens all the bills into a neatish pile and shoves them into his polyester uniform pocket. “Not bad for a Tuesday.” He looks over to where I’m standing at the prep room sink. “What about you?”
“A hundred and seventeen even,” I say, rinsing off the soap. I leave the water running. I’ve washed my hands so many times tonight two of the fingertip pads on my right hand have cracked and started bleeding. The skin from my fingers to my wrists itches and burns because I’ve washed every bit of natural oil out of it. I grip my hands into fists, bearing the pain.
Then I squirt some more soap on them and start washing them again.
“You guys are the lucky ones,” Tina says. She’s in the closet-sized office they give to the managers. The door is open, and she’s basically sitting next to Jared, her cheek resting on her computer keyboard, volumes of blonde hair splayed out over the desk. “You’re so young. You’re so lucky and young.”
“You’re only twenty-eight,” Jared says.
“I know,” Tina moans.
Jared gives me a quizzical glance as I wash my hands again. “Tell your Uncle Jared what’s wrong this time, Tina.”
She shoots him a dirty look, her face still moulded onto the keyboard. But she answers anyway. “I think Ronald’s cheating on me.”
“With who?” Jared’s a little too surprised.
“Hey!” Tina says. “Ronald’s an attractive guy!” She hesitates. “A little short, but…”
Ronald, who stops by every Saturday afternoon for a free lunch, comes up to Tina’s shoulders. And Jared’s belt.
I’m only slightly exaggerating.
“Is it revenge for your thing with Harvey the Chef?” Jared asks.
Tina sits up, a cluster of keyboard squares embossed on her cheek. “Probably.”
I squeeze another blob of soap on my hands. I can feel my chest start to constrict, actual tears welling up in my eyes. I’m just burning with rage at myself.
But I rinse off the soap and start again.
“He’ll come back,” Jared says, standing. “He always does. So do you.”
“He hasn’t gone anywhere,” Tina says, locking the safe and picking up her purse. “That’s kind of the problem. If he left, I’d at least be able to clean up the house a little before he came back.” She flicks off the light in the office. “You know he actually once lost a whole frozen turkey? And not even in the kitchen.”
“Mm-hmm,” Jared says, his eyes on me.
“You guys done?” Tina asks, locking the office door.
“Almost,” I say, hoping she doesn’t hear the crack in my voice.
She doesn’t. “Good. I’m going to go set the alarm and then we’re outta here.” She heads out into the main restaurant where the alarm pad is, disappearing past the walk-in freezer.
In two steps, Jared is behind me, putting his bigger, longer, stronger arms around me to pin my own against my side. He turns it into a kind of imprisoning bear hug, lifting me up and away from the sink. He just holds me there for a second, a few inches off the ground, neither of us saying anything. His forehead’s against the back of my head and I can feel his breathing on my neck. I’m not exactly a small guy, but I’m thin and a bit wiry, while Jared is enormous, tall and broad and just big, big, big.
Thank God he’s not a bully or he’d terrorize the school.
“Okay?” he asks quietly, after a minute.
“Okay,” I whisper, swallowing the huge lump in my throat.
He sets me down and slowly, gently, in the way that he has, he lets me go. I don’t move. He steps around me, turns off the tap and hands me some paper towels. I wince as I grab them, leaving several drops of blood against the white.
Tina yawns her way back to us. She scratches a spot on her scalp with one long fake fingernail. “I wonder what Harvey the Chef is up to these days?” she says.
Jared keeps looking over at me as he drives us home. He’s got a ridiculously tiny (and old) car for such a big guy, but it’s just him and his dad and they aren’t overflowing with money.
They’re happy, though. His dad’s the nicest grown man I’ve ever met.
“It really has gotten bad again,” Jared says, a statement rather than a question, as we drive deeper into the dark woods towards our homes.
“I know,” I say. “I’ve been getting stuck in these kind of … loops lately and it’s getting harder and harder to get out of them.”
“Even when it’s hurting you?”
“Even when I know it’s stupid. In fact, knowing it’s stupid, knowing that I’ve already washed my hands a hundred goddamned times, actually makes it worse. Because knowing that and doing it anyway is like…”
I don’t finish. We drive in silence for a little longer.
“Your fucking parents, man,” Jared whispers. He raises his voice. “If you ever need a place, Mikey. I don’t care how mad they get or how it affects her stupid career–”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
He hits the steering wheel with his fists. I feel kind of shy about how upset he is on my behalf.
But that’s Jared for you.
“Four and a half weeks,” he says.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH, in which Satchel and Dylan sit in a coffee house with understated live music and discuss what Satchel’s uncle told them; Dylan also tells her it’s clear that second indie kid Finn has feelings for her; Satchel doesn’t see that this is Dylan’s way of saying that he has feelings for her, too; later, the Messenger of the Immortals makes a surprising offer to indie kid Kerouac.
Okay, look, I gotta get some stuff out of the way. I wish I didn’t, but it’s necessary. This doesn’t define me or any of the people I love, okay? It’s just life. And we’ve moved on.
But you gotta know.
So.
Four years ago, when I was thirteen and she was still fourteen, my sister had a heart attack. It was caused by arrhythmia, which was caused by
Mel starving herself to death.
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, she died. They were able to revive her, obviously, but the fact remains that, for three or four minutes, she was gone, we’d lost her. She says she doesn’t remember anything about it: no lights, no tunnels, no angels or old relatives or prickly-faced Labradors to help her with her journey to the other side. But weirdly, she doesn’t remember the opposite either. She doesn’t remember nothingness or emptiness or oblivion. Her memory stops before the heart attack and picks up again in the hospital.
“Don’t you wish you could remember?” I once asked her.
She looked at me as if I’d suggested murdering a duckling. “Absolutely not.”
Where were we at this point as a family? Mom was in the Washington State Senate and was running for Lieutenant Governor. I’m going to guess that your knowledge of/interest in state and local politics is as non-existent as most people’s, but it’s enough to know that this was something she considered both extremely modest and a big, big deal. She’d planned it for almost three years, way more than the other candidates seemed to, and we’d been photographed a lot in the run-up to the Primary to see if she’d be selected as her party’s candidate.
Because weren’t we all perfect and adorable? Weren’t the Mitchells exactly what the state needed? Look at us with our healthy and unthreateningly average smiles. Our hair that spoke of middle-class prosperity but wasn’t (too) much better than yours. The modern political husband, super-supportive and perhaps a bonus extra behind the scenes. The two older children with their polite attitudes and good grades, and beautiful little Meredith, precocious and funny as a later Disney heroine. Wouldn’t Lieutenant Governor Alice Mitchell be your friend as well as your humble public servant while hanging around in case the Governor died?
The problem was that hardly anyone had heard of her, the campaign had no money, and polls had her at a steady but distant fourth in the Primary.
It wasn’t my mom who told Mel she was looking “a little fat” in some of the press photos; it was her one-day-a-month campaign advisor, a chain-smoking beard called Malcolm. But Malcolm did say it, and my mom didn’t fire him.
Was that enough to make Mel stop eating? Maybe. But we were hardly a hotbed of mental health before then. We didn’t have nearly as much money as it looked like we had, for one thing, because my dad was still paying back the thousands he embezzled from my Uncle Rick’s car dealership, where he used to be top sales manager. My dad stole, under Rick’s nose, all the money to buy the house we still live in. He should have been arrested. He should still be in jail.
But Rick is my mother’s brother and this was even earlier in her career, when she was trying to move up from the State House of Representatives to the State Senate. A scandal would have ended her political career, so she and my dad not only stayed married, but she somehow convinced Rick to keep it secret and – if you can believe this – actually let my dad stay employed there. No access to any accounts, of course, but still selling cars until he’s paid back all the money, plus interest. Which will probably take him up to retirement. As I said, Uncle Rick doesn’t come around much any more.
So pretty much every day back then we were about an hour away from losing everything: money, careers, house, a father, all the while pretending we were the highly functioning family of an up-and-coming politician. My dad drank every day (always did, still does). My mom threw herself into politicking, and Mikey Mitchell – your humble narrator – was so tense I’d started to get trapped in compulsive loops for the first time. Counting and re-counting (and re-counting and re-counting) the contents of my sixth-grade arts cabinet. Driving our poor dog Martha crazy (pre-porcupine death) by walking her over the same length of road four dozen times because I couldn’t seem to get it exactly “right”, though I could never have told you what “right” was. I was sent to a psychiatrist called Dr Luther and was put on medication. And this was all before my mom decided to up the stakes by running for a bigger job.
So all I’m saying is that the ground was clearly fertile for craziness to grow. My sister just got stuck with one that was particularly shit.
One that killed her.
Killed my mom’s campaign, too. Malcolm tried to keep the press to a minimum (and this was at the start of the vampire romances, so there were plenty of “mysterious” deaths among the indie kids to be writing about anyway), but enough got out that my mother was forced to withdraw to support her daughter through a “crisis that could hit any family”.
We all started this thing called FBT, family-based treatment, where we were supposed to show ourselves as resources for Mel, instead of the cause of the problem. And for a time, we did. Mom set up a gradual eating routine that Mel, eventually, accepted. Me and Meredith were instructed on how to refer to food and Mel’s condition in non-judgemental terms, which we were happy to do. We were so freaked out by maybe losing her we would have burnt all our clothes in a bonfire if it would have helped. Dad drank a bit less.
And Mel got better. She gained some weight, not a lot, but an amount that made her healthy again. It took a while, over a year, which is why we’re both seniors now instead of her already graduating, but she braved it out and nobody gave her much shit when she went back to school. That’s when she and Henna got so close, now that we were all in the same year. Meanwhile, my mom went back to the State Senate. Someone else won the Primary for Lieutenant Governor and was subsequently slaughtered in the general election by the incumbent, so my mom started calling it a “blessing in disguise” with a hard, faraway look in her eye. I finished my own counselling with Dr Luther. I stopped the anxiety medication. Things got kind of back to normal again.
And that, I think, was the problem. They could absolutely deal with Mel getting so sick. But I don’t think they could quite deal with her getting better. I did about eight hundred hours of anxious research on the internet and tried to tell them that almost ninety per cent of anorexics do recover, but as time passed, they seemed to start resenting the healthy daughter just sitting there, the one that they’d sacrificed so much for, no longer needing the sacrifice, if she’d ever really needed it in the first place. (She did. We could have lost her. I could have lost her. And then what?)
My mom started making vague references to “missed opportunities” and stopped coming to FBT sessions because she was doing important work down in Olympia, the capital. She handed control of Mel’s diet over to Mel four full months before the schedule suggested. Mel asked if I would help her, and I have, every day since.
We went back to barely seeing my dad. He’s either in his office at work or his office at home, usually smelling of alcohol, often asleep. To be fair, as alcoholics go, he’s pretty low-maintenance. He gets to work most of the time, he’s never violent or scary, and he lets my mom do most of the driving. I think she keeps him out of trouble, mostly by being clear about what she would do if he were ever in trouble.
So here we are now. I make sure my sister eats, she helps me out of my tics and loops, and we both watch over Meredith and try to stay out of our parents’ way.
But this, all this, isn’t the story I’m trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people’s stories and there’s nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you’re still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that’s what we did. Me, Mel and Meredith all moved on, and we’re the stories we’re living now.
Aren’t we?
“It’s on the twenty-fourth,” Meredith says, staring at us like she’s trying to light us on fire with her mind. Which maybe she is. “So three weeks from today. Aren’t you going to write it down?”
“Eight hundredth time you’ve said it,” Mel yawns, leaning back into our couch. “It’s in my phone, on the calendar in my room, on TV every five seconds, and I have a feeling you’ll probably remind us as the day approaches.”
“It’s the week before your prom so it won’t get in the way
and there’s enough time for you to get off work–”
I grab Meredith’s fingers where she’s counting off her points. “It doesn’t matter if we’re free, the concert’s gonna sell out in like two seconds.”
Meredith opens up her computer pad and reads. “‘As a thank you to their local fans for this special show, Bolts of Fire have made tickets available for purchase to any fan’” – she looks up at us – “‘between the ages of eight and twelve living in the 98— zip code.’” She closes the pad. “You just have to be one of the first to register.”
“Let me guess,” I say.
“Done and dusted,” Meredith says, copying a phrase from our dad. “They let fan-club members in there first.”
“Now all you have to do is talk her into letting you go,” Mel says.
“I will,” Meredith says, “with your help. But you know she won’t take me, so you guys have to be ready.”
Our mom started avoiding large public gatherings she couldn’t leave several years ago because they just turned into abuse-fests by people who hated politicians in general and politicians who supported a non-lethal speed limit in particular. Thirty minutes anywhere, even church, is her maximum, and on this one, I have to say I can kind of see her point.
“I’m in,” Mel says. “Even though I hate country music. I’m the best sister in the world.”
“I’m in, too,” I say, “though as your brother, I’m probably only the second-best sister.”
“But,” Mel says and raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t need to explain further.
Mom’s aversion to public events aside, Bolts of Fire have toured near us twice before, both times in the even bigger city that’s an hour away from the city that’s an hour away from us. Meredith tried to beg, bribe, tantrum, reason, sweet-talk, extort, demand, and panic my mother into letting her go. But after Mel’s rough time and my thing with the loops, Mom isn’t taking any chances on her last remaining possibly non-messed-up child. Meredith was too young for the “atmosphere” of a rock concert (which is stretching it, as far as Bolts of Fire are concerned; they’re so meticulously clean and goody-goody, the bars at the venues only serve orange Kool-Aid) and she was too young to stay up that late anyway. So no, no, end of discussion, no, don’t make me take away your internet privileges.