Something Wicked (17 page)

Jessica raises her eyes as if she’s finally listening to me and carefully assesses my appearance in the mirror.“No it doesn’t.” She reaches for the hairspray. “Here. Close your eyes.”

She doesn’t just dab a little here and there, she lets it all go. I pull back. “Jesus Christ, Jessica! Spray my hair, not my face. Fuck!”

She starts laughing hysterically again. “Stay still, then.”

“I wasn’t even fucking moving,” I snap, heading toward the washroom to rinse the sticky crap off my face. Afterward, instead of going back to her room, I just head out the front door. I don’t say goodbye. Not because I’m angry about the hairspray, but because I’m just generally feeling pissed off. Even the ganja buzz doesn’t soften my mood.

Thirty-Five

My
anger is like a festering cancer that just grows and grows. Unfortunately for my mother, she’s on the receiving end of it all. I don’t know why I hate her so much. I can’t really pinpoint any one thing, but for some reason she’s the incarnation of all that makes me furious. Even little things will set me off, like when I’m sitting on the couch watching TV and I lift the converter to switch the channel and nothing happens. I smack the thing a few times, but still nothing happens.

“Fuck!” I yell, and whack the converter against the coffee table to shock it back to life. I try again. Nothing. “Fucking shit!” I yell, stomping my foot hard on the floor. I turn it over, open the back, and roll the batteries around a little, which sometimes helps. I try again. Still nothing. “Bitch!” I shout, and throw the converter across the room, where it hits the wall then rebounds and smacks one of Bradley’s framed photos off the corner table.

My mother tears out of her room, her face all panicked. “What happened?”

“There are no fucking batteries in the converter!” I snap.

“For God’s sake … then change them.” Her face changes
from alarm to annoyance. She storms over to the table, sees the frame on the floor, and bends over to pick it up. “You broke it.”

“Change them with what? With the batteries that are under my ass?”

“You watch your mouth,” she warns sternly.

“There are no fucking batteries in this house. There never are. Just like there’s no toilet paper. Or milk. Or laundry detergent.”

“What are you so angry about?” my mom shouts, holding the pieces of the frame in her hand. I don’t answer because I hate her standing there with that stupid picture of perfect dead Bradley with his immortal sweet smile. “Seriously, Melissa. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
Are you kidding me? You have no idea? Haven’t you taken a look at our lives?
I’m so stunned at how clueless she is that I don’t know what to say. And I can’t believe she swore. Can’t believe she’s angry at
me
.

“What? Tell me,” she persists.

“I don’t know.” I back off, unable to tell her the truth: that I’m pissed she’s having a baby. “Everything.”

“Like what? Say something. Say one exact thing. One exact thing that you’re so goddamn angry about. Come on, I’m waiting … Something exact.”

I so want to tell her. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I know it will make everything worse. “I can’t. You can’t ask me like that. It’s just shit. It’s everything. I don’t know. This shit, here. All of it. I’m just angry.”

“Well, you need to chill,” my mom warns, starting to cry. She walks past me and into the kitchen. I don’t know what’s happening with her and Scott, but she’s completely unravelling. “I can’t live like this.”

“
You
can’t?
You
can’t live like this? Is every fucking thing about
you
?” I shout behind her, but she turns on the tap and drowns me out.

Part of me feels bad for being so mean to her. A baby isn’t the end of the world. And I know my anger is more than just about the baby. It’s not her fault that I’m a totally miserable human being. Not entirely, anyway. But the more miserable I am, the more angry I get and the more cruel I am to her.

She doesn’t talk to me the rest of the day, which makes me feel totally guilty, as usual. Even though I don’t know what for. She’s my mom. She’s supposed to take my crap. Then, after a bit of time has passed, I try to think more about her question. Why
am
I so mad? And I just don’t know. I just am. Always have been.

Thirty-Six

The
party on Friday night is at some girl’s house. I’m with my friends Ally, Jess, Jasmyn, Liz, and Shayla. I’m ready to get wrecked out of my mind. Around midnight, we are all chillin’ in the living room when I decide to go to the kitchen to get some more vodka. When I’m there, minding my own business, this guy’s little sister I barely know gets all up in my face like she wants to rush me. She’s talking about Fortune being her boyfriend and how I’m a “skank.” She’s a little taller than me, a little fatter, and has these pathetic cornrows, and I’m sure she thinks she’s going to kick my ass. But what she doesn’t know is that I feel like killing someone right now and that it takes me zero to ten to lose it, and by the time her adrenalin gets to six, she’ll be on the floor. Which is what happens before any of the skank’s friends can even cross the room and come to her rescue. It wasn’t even that hard. Just a few pushes and she was down.

Before I can do any more damage, Jasmyn and Ally have appeared at my side to shout shit at the girl’s friends, who are shouting back. It’s all so crazy.

“Let’s go,” I command, and turn, knowing my girls will
have my back as we go down the hallway and leave through the front door.

It ruins our night. Ally, Shayla, Jasmyn, and I hang out at Coffee Time to sober up, while the others go home.We sit at the table near the back, by the toilet, where the owner lets people smoke late at night. The place is full of scum and drunks and crazies, so we’re actually welcomed in comparison. Shayla and Ally both have coffees while I just sit there keeping to myself. They know it takes me some time to come down from fighting and they won’t leave me till I’m okay. I sit there half listening to their conversation as I fiddle with my lip, ’cause the bitch somehow got a punch in. I can feel it swelling, and when I suck hard on it I can taste the blood.

“She might charge you,” Jasmyn says, who has new-found respect for me now that she’s seen me lose it on someone.

I ignore her ’cause I don’t feel like talking. Instead, I light a cigarette.

“No she won’t,” Ally answers for me. “We know her brother. He’s got a grow op in their basement. She can’t say anything and she knows it.”

“I’m not that stupid,” I add. It’s important you figure this shit out before you throw the first punch, otherwise you’ll get charged.

“Actually, the skank’s brother will probably beat her more when he finds out it was Mel,” Shayla adds, laughing.

“What about her friends?” Jasmyn asks.

“They’re nothing,” Shayla dismisses. “They won’t even bother. They know who Mel’s friends are.”

I keep my eyes on my burning cigarette during the whole conversation. I don’t know why this had to happen tonight. It’s the last thing I need. It feels good to be with my girls. We’ve been friends a long time. It’s nice to have people who will always watch your back. Sometimes it’s more important than family.

I
continue listening to them blah-blahing, but I turn my body to stare out the window. A man walks by and then just stops in front of me and looks in through the window. He’s middle-aged. Conservative. White. Wearing beige trousers and a boring sweater. Brown hair. Totally nondescript. At first I think he’s staring at me, like he’s some pervert, but then he licks the tips of his fingers and pushes his thinning hair back into its contained side part. I realize he doesn’t even see me. And for a moment, seeing him seeing his reflection, it’s like I am witness to how he truly feels about himself. A totally raw and naked, honest appraisal, something you would never show others. It feels so personal that I’m embarrassed. I almost turn away, but really, I’m too intrigued to pull my gaze.

At first there’s hope in his gaze. He touches up his hair, squints his eyes, and bites his lower lip like he’s pleased with his face. But then there’s this pause, an exhale of air and slight shake of the head, like he’s experiencing some kind of despairing defeat. And then he just walks away into the night. And it all strikes me as so sad. ’Cause I get it—that awareness that you just have to deal with what looks you have, and that your attempts at improving them better barely matter in the long run.

But then I think about it more, because it actually runs deeper than being disappointed with his looks. It’s like I saw how disappointed he was with himself. How unhappy he was in life. And it’s so weird to see someone, a grown man, so vulnerable and raw like that. Normally, he’d just be any boring person walking down a boring street. You would never guess all that pain was on the inside.

And I think that’s what Michael and I were all about. It was like he caught me staring into my reflection and he saw what I saw: the real me. My true and honest gaze. Someone slowly falling apart. Like those people in the Renaissance
portraits at the art gallery: when you look up close, you can see the hairline cracks breaking their faces apart. Only instead of running scared away from my broken pieces, Michael held my gaze and made me realize that maybe something good was there between the cracks.

It’s so early when I get home that I watch a movie, because I’m still wound up and won’t be able to sleep. My mom and Scott show up at three o’clock in the morning and my mom is pissed drunk, which is totally scary because, little does Scott know, she’s pregnant. She’s all loud and obnoxious and is bitching at Scott in the kitchen. Apparently everything he is doing is wrong. She lays into him relentlessly: he drinks out of the milk carton, he wears those “gay” jeans, he talks like an idiot. It starts out harmless enough—I’m so used to my mom saying that garbage when she’s drunk that I don’t really even hear it anymore—but then they start talking about her ex, Dirk, whom they must have seen tonight. I hear something new in Scott’s voice. An edge. Something sharp. He starts fighting back. He drills her, asking how she knows Dirk and when she last saw him.

When I go into the kitchen to get some orange juice, they don’t even say hi. I walk around them like a ghost. They don’t even comment on my swollen lip.

“I don’t know … he’s … it’s not like …” My mom slurs her words. “I don’t know … maybe I saw him … at … once … it’s not like … shit … Crystal speaks to him … she told … I guess once I saw … but what the hell is it to you? Dumb-ass … you …”

She’s so drunk she can’t even curse right. She starts to get up in his face. And you can tell Scott is confused and
uncomfortable with it, so he sort of pushes her aside. Not really hard, but because she’s so drunk, she ends up completely crashing into the kitchen chair, which pushes into the table, which topples the glass vase that’s on it, which comes down, barely missing her head and smashing into pieces beside her.

We both stand there. Silent. Staring at her, a crumpled mess on the floor.

My mom looks up at Scott, absolutely horrified. Like he flung her into all this, intentionally banged her up. As if she’s some innocent victim of abuse. But he’d never do that. He’s not that kind of man. Then she looks at me. I cross my arms and tower above her, unmoved by her pathetic gaze. Instead of helping her up, or picking up the glass, or yelling at Scott, I walk out of the kitchen. Because I sort of think she deserves it. And I’m kind of glad Scott is here to put her in her place. Because I can’t lift her up anymore.

Thirty-Seven

Eric
sees my swollen lip the moment I walk into his office, even though I tried to cover it with lip gloss and kept my hair dangling down in front of it. “Whoa. What happened to you?”

“Got in a fight.” I throw my backpack and jacket on the floor and plunk down into my chair. I tell him what happened. How it wasn’t my fault. How this girl just came up to me and caused shit because she was jealous of Fortune and me.

“How serious are you with Fortune?”

“Not.”

“You’ve been seeing him awhile.”

“A few weeks. But not serious.”

“How badly did you hurt her?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t stick around to see. I caused her damage, I’m sure. But nothing permanent.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

Please
. “Are you asking if I feel bad?”

“I’m just asking how you feel about it.”

“Well, I don’t feel bad, because she’s the one who got up in my face. She asked for it. I don’t randomly go and beat
up people, you know? And if you get up in someone’s face, you better be ready to accept the consequences.” I start to get angry, because I don’t get why I have to justify myself to him. “Why do you care about her? She rushed me. What, you think she gives a shit about me? She thought she could take me. She was wrong. And if she did kick my ass, she wouldn’t feel bad either.”

“It’s hard for me to accept that there isn’t any feeling when you hurt someone. You’re not a robot. Is there anything at all that doesn’t sit right with you?”

“Well. Maybe if I sat and forced myself and made it come out of me, maybe it would be there. But right now …” I pause and look up into my head as if searching my brain, “… there’s nothin’.” I shrug my shoulders. “Sorry.”