The Adults (12 page)

“That’s not how it works,” Richard said. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing. Maybe a book?”

One of his friends got his Spanish book with
¡Bienvenidos!
on the cover and Annie the Bird or Bear looked scared for the first time since I had met her. “Uhhhhh,” she said, “nobody is breaking my nose.”

“What’d you think was going to happen?” Richard asked. “That it wasn’t going to hurt? I’m changing your entire face.”

“You can’t just throw a book in my face! This is supposed to be precise, do it
surgically
!”

Annie the Bird or Bear went to sit up, but Leroy had his hands on her head and held her to the table. “Don’t move,” Richard said, holding the book above his head, and a sudden panic striped my heart. “Don’t you move!”

Human Fart’s hand was on the door. “Guys, I hear Ms. Nailer coming down the hall. I’m going to open the door.”

“You open that door I’ll kill you myself!” Richard shouted, his face red, the book high in the air.

“Get away from me!” Annie shouted.

“I’m opening the door.”

“You can’t open the door!” Martha shouted. “We’re in a lockdown! That could be a
school shooter
on the loose. We’ll all get shot. And
die
.”

“I’m opening the door!”

Richard slammed the
¡Bienvenidos!
book into Annie the Bird or Bear’s face and she cried out exactly as we imagined she would, she squawked and squealed and howled. The moan was loud and never-ending, like a wolf watching the moon explode in the middle of the night, the blood we never knew she had instantly dripping off the sides of her face. “See, I told you she has rabies,” one of the Other Girls whispered behind me.

Annie wildly kicked at Richard and Leroy and we were all searching for something to do, some way to help her without moving. Leroy held her down, and Richard approached her with the scalpel. “Now,” he said. “We can shave the bump off.” And still, nobody was doing anything, not even me, who was standing there, me, who was always just standing there watching with my mouth open wide.

Richard pressed the knife against her skin.

Afterward, in Dr. Killigan’s office, everybody agreed:

Annie’s blood was so red, it looked just like a girl’s.

Annie’s blood was so red, it was like she was alive.

She was just a girl with her wrists pinned; she was a girl with hair and eyes and a mouth and in the end, I couldn’t bear it. I grabbed the Bunsen burner that was still lit on the table. I waved it in front of Richard and shouted, “Richard, stop it!” He ignored me. So I put the flame to his arm, and the flame caught on his shirt. He looked at me with wild surprise, and then, in the time it took for a single flame to turn into a fire on his chest, he shouted, “Fuck,
you stupid cunt
!” He grabbed his shirt by the collar and tried to rip it off. He couldn’t. He ran to the emergency shower and someone pulled the cord. The smoke rose off his body toward the ceiling, and everybody was so distracted, Annie sprang free, her blood preceding her out the door, where Ms. Nailer was standing, suddenly, tucking her shirt into her white pants.

“What the hell has happened?” she asked.

Nobody spoke. Then, from the back, there was a voice.

“Human Fart lit the flame.”

The Other Girls couldn’t figure out why I lit Richard on fire. They kept saying, “But he’s an honors student.”

When my mother got the call from Dr. Killigan, she kept asking, “What?” and then,
“What?”
My father asked me if this was about what happened in October. “Do we need to be worried about you, Emily?” and I yelled at him from behind my bedroom door: “I don’t know! Probably!”

My mother told me I had to see Ron the psychiatrist. When I refused, she looked at my father, who said, “We’ll all go, as a family.” It almost sounded pleasant. I agreed.

Mrs. Trenton threatened to put me in jail for the rest of my life. She tried to hold a town meeting about it, until Dr. Killigan threatened to sue the Trentons since Annie’s parents were suing the school. Dr. Trenton was so afraid of what this negative attention would do for his reputation in the medical community, he urged his wife to calm down. Let it be. Kids will be kids.

I took a sigh of relief, a verbal slap on the wrist. Dr. Killigan expressed extreme disappointment in me, and then I was sent to lunch. Punishment enough, I thought.

At lunch, everything that happened during the lockdown came out slowly, like bedbugs crawling to a warm body at night:

Richard Trenton cut off ABOB’s nose.

Emily Vidal lit Richard on fire.

A human fart lit the flame? Is that at all related to the group fingering in the girls’ bathroom?

“I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean,” Janice said to me, biting down on her carrot.

She explained what really happened during the lockdown: Principal Killigan got a call saying someone had a gun. “But it turns out,” she said, “just one of the special ed kids. He saw a security officer with a gun in his belt, called the main office, and said he saw someone in the building with a gun.”

I stared at her blankly.

“I know,” Janice said. “I didn’t know retards took everything so literally either.”

A
ll I remember about Ron the psychiatrist was that we went right before my father left us for good, and his house was decorated with silver New Year’s streamers, and we sat down underneath them on the couch in his living room. A long peacock feather bursting out of a vase tickled my ear, African masks lined the fireplace, and there were books on everything from Christ to Andy Warhol to why men hate whores to Italian cooking. There was an entire wall made of glass, purple velvet couches flat as pancakes, a television emitting a virtual fire, lights that weren’t supposed to look like lights but rather boxes, and a painting of an Asian woman handing a white woman a dildo over the fireplace, and on the way home, my father drove faster than the speed limit and got angry at stop signs. “What kind of lunatic hangs pictures of Asian women holding dildos?” he asked.

My mother swatted my father and mouthed “dildos” accusingly.

“And that book on his bookshelf,” I said. “
Why Men Hate Whores
. Did you guys get a load of that?”

“He must not have any children,” my father said.

“Three,” my mother said. “I saw a photo.”

“Well I’m not going back there,” my father said. “I don’t trust a man who decorates his house with genitalia.”

“I thought he was nice,” my mother said.

On New Year’s Eve, we took down our tree together for the last time like it was a celebration. We spent the night recognizing the origins of ornaments—Nana, Jane’s Boutique, Russia—and the ends of ourselves.

“You know,” my father said, sprinkling nutmeg on his brandy Alexander, “if you sniff too much nutmeg, you could die.”

“You can die from anything, really,” my mother said. “You can die from eating too many apricots.”

They were officially divorced. Relief jingled in the air.

“Too much vitamin A,” my father said. “Makes sense.”

“How
many
apricots?” I said, afraid that the World’s Most Pathetic Death could happen to me.

“Some inhuman amount,” my mother said.

“Blowfish,” my father said. “Now, they have poison sacks. Tons of people die every year in Asia from eating blowfish.”

“Or get paralyzed!” I added. “They’re called fugu zombies. Sometimes, people think they’re dead, and they get buried alive.”

Nobody even flinched. We were taking comfort in the ways death could find us, beating it to the punch.

When the clock struck twelve, my father put down his brandy Alexander. We clanked my mother’s new pans together, jumped up and down. My mother stared at the television, which was turning into virtual confetti, and put her hand over her mouth, as though she understood exactly what would be lost if she cried out, “Do you two know how much those pans cost?” She would have been accusing us of not understanding the value of things. So she was quiet, even though we all felt something drain out of us during the celebration. And then the phone rang.

“What?” my father shouted into the phone.

Mrs. Resnick was in labor. “This is two months too soon,” my father said. He was worried, but I couldn’t tell what exactly about. He had the same look on his face when the dishwasher leaked water all over the floor. My father kissed me on the forehead. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, grabbing his coat. I sipped on my apple cider and thought that if I didn’t know my family at all, it would have been nice to see my father at the coat rack and my mother sad to see him go.

I woke at six in the morning to a cold frost covering our lawn and my father making a loud noise in the living room. He was sitting on the couch, with his hands on his knees. My father’s face was always wrinkled, regardless of whether he was laughing or crying, and on a morning like this, it was hard to tell what he was doing.

I did not touch him or ask him any questions. I just stood at the window.

“Things will be different now,” my father said, wiping his tears.

“Things have been different for a long time now,” I said.

I put my nose to the window and everything outside looked so vacant, even the icicles, Ms. Nailer had told us once, were made primarily of nothing. The weather was the circulation of invisible forces, colliding over and over and over again, throwing dead leaves against the sides of our house like a stoning.

“I love you, Emily,” my father said. “That’s one thing that won’t ever change.”

My mother walked into the room with a bag of soaps, and my father suddenly clammed up and said, “Well I don’t suppose anyone cares, but it’s a girl.”

My mother put the soaps down on the table.

“Her name is Laura,” my father said. “We can all go see her if you like.”

“No, thanks,” my mother said.

“No, thanks,” I said, and followed her out of the room.

My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn’t bear to watch him leave with so much luggage. I closed my eyes and rubbed the poinsettias between my thumbs as I listened to his heels click the cement, the hush of the cab tires taking him away. When I opened my eyes, the street was silent, only the exhaust still suspended in the air.

M
r. Basketball stood green-collared and tall next to the projector, wrote
Welcome to English
on the board, and asked us to please settle down. It was January, a new semester of freshman year, and already Mr. Basketball was employing pedagogical methods Ms. Nailer had not. Janice walked into the room with her breasts sticking out in the air as if she got points for hitting things. She snapped her gum as she walked by Mr. Basketball’s pointy face and then quickly explained how she didn’t mean to; popping her gum was an accident that happened because she felt so comfortable all the time. She blushed so deeply, Mr. Basketball was forced to forgive her. “All right,” he said. “Please take a seat.” He smiled a bit and then made eye contact with me, as though he needed my permission to start class. I nodded.

“I’m your English teacher,” Mr. Basketball said. “Can you all speak English?”

Nobody spoke, nobody moved.

“Apparently not,” he said.

We laughed. Everyone was already in love with him. We stood in small circles every chance we got, just to talk about him.

Mr. Basketball was so funny, he could split your spleen just by looking at it.

Mr. Basketball was so smart, you got smarter just by looking at him.

“No,” Janice said at lunch, correcting us. “You have to get to third with him.”

My father was in Prague, discovering the joys of smoking cigars in public rooms. My mother was at home, discovering the joys of Arbor Mist and White Russians at noon. Since my father had left, she had watched enough movies starring Sally Field to know that having a dead husband was the preferred option. It was perfect because nothing was ever your fault, not even loneliness, and nobody would ever come up to you at the funeral and say, “Now, at which point do you think he stopped breathing?”

My mother developed a heart murmur, or as I asked, “Maybe you always had one? Maybe the house is just quieter now?” Sometimes, when I walked by her in the kitchen, she put a finger to her lips and said, “Shh, Emily. Can you hear my heart? It’s not working properly.” Sometimes, I thought she looked too beautiful to be sitting at the counter all by herself, developing palpitations.

“I’m busy, Mom,” I said.

She eyed me as I moved across the kitchen.

“You’re not busy,” she said. “I can see you. You’re just drinking lemonade.”

That made me want to cry so hard, I can’t even explain it.

Sometimes, my father called our house from Prague to say,
“Dobrý den!”
Sometimes he called just to say, “Where’s your mother?” My mother was always sitting at the kitchen counter, and she never wanted to talk to him, even though she always wanted to talk to him. “She’s not here,” I said, and when I hung up the phone, she stuck her hand in a box of Cocoa Puffs and said, “Did you know that your father hired the neighbor to assemble your tricycle when you were three?” My mother loved to revisit the fights she’d had with my father, as though this was a form of keeping him present. “And I said, ‘What, are you going to hire someone to love her as well?’ God. What a fool.”

My father left us enough money in the divorce settlement so my mother would never have to attend another thing she didn’t want to attend. “A gift,” he said. But it felt like punishment. Some weeks, she didn’t even leave the house. She quit her volunteer job at the hospital. She spent the day running her fingers across photographs of us at Hershey Park, Disney World, St. John’s. She talked about memories she said she wasn’t sure she even had. She made meatloaf and threw it to the ground. She tried to learn the piano. She played the first three chords of “Row Row Row Your Boat” and then quit. She blew off bikini wax appointments, PTA meetings.

She started taking antidepressants. Prozac at first. When I found the bottle and confronted her, she said, “It’s just for three months, Emily. It’s not permanent. It’s like, well, sometimes when you get older you forget how to be happy. You probably don’t understand this, but it happens. And these pills remind you how it feels to be happy. So then when you go off them, you know how to create the feeling on your own.”