Schizo (7 page)

Gawwghh
is the noise I make. And then, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

And then the vomit comes again.

I lie with my face on the cold, rough concrete.

I spit and punch the ground with my fist.

“Just go away,” I finally say. “I'm sorry. Please.”

Her voice comes out pretty hysterical-sounding. “No. I'm not leaving you.”

But there's barf everywhere, and I'm so sick and disgusted with myself, I yell at her, “I want you to leave, all right? Just go away.”

She takes a step back.

“GO!” I yell.

I hear what sounds like her bursting into tears.

And then her boots running away from me down the street.

SOMEONE CALLS OUT FROM
behind me and I turn, angry at first, just wanting to be left alone.

“I'm all right,” I groan, struggling to get to my feet.

“Jesus Christ,” the voice says. “What happened?”

I turn to see Jackie, wearing a wool hat, gloves, and a big knit sweater, walking quickly toward me.

“Nothing,” I tell her. “I'm all right.”

She smiles and shivers and crosses her arms and says, “Brrr, it's so fucking cold out here. Come back inside. We can hide out in Preston's room.”

The streetlamp overhead switches on so that Jackie is silhouetted by the soft glow and the fog coming down. She reaches out to take my hand and I do not pull away. Not from her.

“I'm sick,” I mumble. “I just got sick.”

“Yeah, no shit. Come on. We'll clean you up.”

I fumble to get a cigarette lit, and Jackie takes one from my pack.

“I gotta go home.”

“Well, then let me drive you.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“What are you doing out here?” I ask. “Did you see Eliza?”

She speaks softly, like you would to a child—which, I guess, is kind of what I am. “Yeah. I ran into her coming in. She told me you were sick.”

“Great.”

“Anyway, I needed an excuse to get out of there.”

“You mean the party?”

“Yeah, yeah . . . the party. And, I don't know . . . Preston, too.”

We cross over in front of the golf course and walk down onto the carefully manicured lawn toward her little Volkswagen.

While I may have barfed on the girl of my dreams and totally humiliated myself, I think, at least I have Jackie.

And she has me.

I walk quickly around to the passenger side of her car. There is vomit still wet on my shirtfront. And I still want to fucking cry.

MY MOM IS AWAKE
when I get home—sitting in the dark, drinking white wine, and watching
Double Indemnity
on TV for, like, the billionth time. She seems a little drunk, honestly, as I stumble in, and I guess that's probably why she doesn't freak out at the sight of me as much as she normally would. Because me coming home covered in puke like this would be just the type of thing to send her into a panic. Seriously, my mom is absolutely the worst person to be with in any kind of crisis situation. She completely loses her shit—going from zero to full-blown hysteria in, like, half a second.

But tonight, surprisingly, she remains relatively calm.

She pauses the movie and stands up, coming around to put her cool hand on my hot forehead.

“I think you have a fever. Are you okay? What happened?”

The smell of her is so familiar and comforting that I choke up. “I got sick,” I say, and then I burst into tears.

“Oh, sweetie. Come here, love,” she says, putting her arms around me.

“But I'm all gross.”

She tells me not to worry, and so I cry into her sweatshirt and the warmth of her as she holds me and I feel so tired—so completely exhausted.

“What happened?” she asks. “Were you drinking?”

I sniffle. “No, it's my medicine. I forgot to eat before going to the party and I took all my meds at once and . . . I got sick.”

“Hey,” she says, kissing the top of my head and shushing me gently. “It happens to everyone, all right? Don't be so hard on yourself.”

Oh, yeah,
I think,
tons of people decide to take their psych meds all at once and then blow their only chance to be with the girl they've loved basically forever by puking on her.

Happens all the time.

I feel like digging a hole in the backyard and then curling up in there and just wasting away until there is nothing left.

“Here,” she whispers. “You go get cleaned up, and I'll make you something to eat, all right?”

“No. Don't worry about it.”

“You need to eat,” she says. “It's no problem.” And then, “Only, uh . . . try to be quiet going in your room. Jane wanted to sleep in there 'cause she was having a bad dream. Is that okay?”

I nod.

It makes sense; she'd been sharing her room with Teddy since she was three years old. No wonder she can't sleep in there.

I go into my room and manage to get out some pajamas from the drawer without waking Janey up. The sound of her breathing is soft and calming in the darkness.

By the time I take a quick shower and brush my teeth and put on my pajamas, my mom's already finished making me a grilled cheese sandwich and some hot chocolate. I thank her, and then we sit down together on the couch. My mom turns the movie back on, and I eat silently and lean against her.

I watch Fred MacMurray climbing the steps to Barbara Stanwyck's Spanish-style house somewhere in 1940s Los Angeles. When he rings the doorbell, I know that she will answer. And I know that by the end of the film she will have killed him.

I settle in to watch the movie, trying not to think of anything else. Fred MacMurray is being suckered into committing a murder for this woman he barely even knows—but has fallen hopelessly in love with. For him, the money is secondary. All he cares about is her—and all she cares about is herself. It's an old story. Adam conned by Eve into eating the apple.

The images flash black and white across the screen.

My mom whispers, “I love you, sweetie.”

I close my eyes and open them. “I love you, too, Mom.”

We watch the movie together.

And for now, at least, that is enough.

THE SOUND OF JANEY
screaming wakes me up early, before it's all the way light outside. She's sleeping in my bed, and I'm on a blow-up mattress, so I get up onto my knees and put a hand on her sweating forehead.

She jerks and twitches in her sleep, yelling, “STOP! STOP!”

“Jane,” I say. “It's just a dream.”

Her eyes open slowly.

“Miles,” she says, wrapping her small arms around my neck and crying out. “It was awful.”

She hugs me, and I inhale the smell of her, which is like peppermint and fresh-cut grass.

“You had a bad dream?”

Her head nods up and down as she pokes her bottom lip out and sniffles. “Sharks.”

A shiver runs through me, thinking about the ocean that day—about Teddy.

“I'm afraid of sharks, too,” I say.

She smiles.

Posters of different jazz musicians are hung up against the patterned wallpaper that looks like some kind of tree with branches like lungs and leaves like a hundred eyes wide-open. There's a mirror on one wall that reflects the wallpaper pattern on the other so it looks like a framed painting. I also have a collection of taxidermy insects behind glass cases. Beetles, mostly, and butterflies—and a bat framed with its wings spread out hanging next to the open closet with no door. There's a replica of a human skull on my dresser next to a set of blown-glass medicine bottles from the twenties or thirties.

“Hey,” I say, standing all the way up and stretching. “You wanna go out for coffee and donuts? Or, uh, hot chocolate and donuts? I have a little bit of money left from my last paycheck.”

She smiles and nods excitedly. Her eyes get brighter.

“All right, well,” I continue, “go get dressed warm and we'll go. But be quiet, okay? So you don't wake up Mom and Dad.”

She pushes the covers back. “No way. I won't wake 'em up.”

She hops out of bed, wearing a flannel nightgown our grandmother sewed for her, and tiptoes over to the next room while I throw on clothes and an army-navy surplus dark blue peacoat. I peer out the blinds and see the tall grass and overgrown weeds are wet and heavy with dew. The sun has yet to rise over the curve of the world to the east, but its rays fill the morning sky with white light turning gray around the edges as it fights to overtake the darkness of night.

It will be a clear day. I can see that already.

There are no clouds. No fog. The sun filling the white-gray sky with the beginnings of color.

I feel an odd sense of hope.

But then I see the crows, gathering on the telephone wires—waiting, watching me through the window.

Their black eyes dart in every direction. They scratch and claw. They call out. They cover the wires, just as the wires cover the skyline.

Janey tugs on the sleeve of my coat, startling me a little. “Wow, look at all those crows.”

I close the blinds, take a step back from the window. “What? What did you say?”

She smiles sweetly. “The crows. Those are crows, right? Or are they ravens?”

I crouch down closer to her. “You can see them, too?”

She laughs. “Of course, silly.”

I stand up straight, feeling relieved.

I take her hand and lead her out into the still, early morning. We cross the street and the sun is bright and I think that here, with my sister, everything is okay.

WORK DRAGS ON FOR
fucking ever.

The manager has me working in the back room, unloading canned goods—checking their different prices and sticking stickers on them with a pricing gun and marking off the quantities on the invoice sheet. It's dark, and I squint my eyes and wish I were home and keep checking my phone to see what time it is, even though that just makes my shift seem to go all the more slowly. Not to mention that a boring-ass task like this gives me that much more time to replay last night's events over in my mind—an endless loop of me saying stupid shit to Eliza and then barfing on her, again and again, over and over.

So I go on unpacking the boxes and pointlessly trying to block the memory out—until I finally check my phone again and I see that I have a text message I somehow missed.

From fucking Ordell.

He writes in all capital letters:
DUDE, DID YOU PUKE ON ELIZA LINDBERG? LOL. CALL ME!!!

I read it again.

I wonder if maybe my mind is playing a trick on me—if this is just some kind of paranoid delusion like the goddamn crows.

But then, as if on cue, the phone chimes right there in my hand.

Another text.

I'm serious, dude. Call me. Everyone's talking about it!!!

Again with the three exclamation marks.

My heart pounds loudly in my ears so that everything else is blotted out around me. A cold sweat breaks out at the back of my neck.

I strip off my apron and the sweater I'm wearing and my thermal undershirt. But still I'm flushed and sweating, and so I leave the boxes there and I go out the back door, not even caring if my manager comes and yells at me.

The day is clear and the wind is strong and the light feels distant and cold and pale. The smell of the garbage from the large metal Dumpster in the alley is sickening, so I walk around to the residential street behind the market, sitting on the curb and breathing heavily, rocking my body back and forth. I rock there and feel the cold and try to figure out what the hell I'm going to do.

Could Eliza really have told everyone what happened? I mean, it's not that I care what other people think, particularly; it's just disappointing that she wouldn't want to—I don't know—protect me?

I light a cigarette then and the smoke fills my lungs and my fingers twitch and shake.

The crows are in the branches of the bare, skinny trees planted in square patches of dirt in the sidewalk. The wires crisscross and crackle across the white stucco apartment complexes.

My eyes close and open. I try to make the images disappear, but it's never any fucking good. My mind unravels like a ball of string rolling down an unending staircase.

There's a dead squirrel lying torn apart in the middle of the street, and the crows pick through the still-bloody carcass, fighting loudly over the very best pieces.

I turn away and smoke and try to focus on the cold and the wind and the gritty asphalt beneath my boots. The curb where I'm sitting has been painted a dark green, but the color is faded and completely washed away in places.

A car drives past out front, and I turn to see the crows quickly scatter—only to reconvene over the mess of dead squirrel a few seconds later.

I stand up then and stamp my foot.

“GET OUT OF HERE!” I yell, feeling this surge of heat and anger from out of nowhere. “GO ON! GET OUT!”

Before I can even think about what I'm doing, I run out and yell louder, and the crows squawk at me and fly off.

I stand over the squirrel's lifeless body and clench my fists as though just daring the crows to try to take another shot at it.

But they don't.

My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I look to see that Preston's calling.

I decide I can't fucking deal with it, though, so I don't answer. A few seconds later, the phone chimes again. A text message. From Preston.

Hey, man. You all right? I gave your number to Eliza. I hope you don't mind. Are you sick???

I laugh at that.

Three question marks.

I don't write him back.

I finish my cigarette and go back inside.

The boxes are waiting.

None of this matters compared to Teddy, of course.

I know that.

I do.

But it hurts fucking bad.

And so I try to figure out what the hell I'm gonna do.