T R I S T A N
It was 7 a.m. and already Sam was knocking on my door, asking for help. I needed help too, but Sam wasn't exactly someone I would go to for help. I looked around at my little brother all the same. He had pushed the door slightly open and was sticking his blonde head inside my bedroom.
Most days, he wasn't allowed in without a valid reason.
"What?" I had been throwing textbooks into my backpack. I doubted I would use any of them, but it was better to have something in front of me in class. I couldn't really pretend to do something if I had an empty desk in front of me, could I?
"Can I come in?" Sam asked. He always wanted to come in. I caught him going through my stuff at least once a week.
"Do you have to?" He didn't. Except if he wanted my help tying up his shoes. I was sure he didn't. He was old enough to do it himself. But then again, he was old enough to read and he was still blind to the sign on my door that said, keep out.
"Please?" he asked, his little hand wrapping around the edge of the door.
I rolled my eyes. He took it as a yes. I rolled my eyes again.
"Right," he said once inside. "How do I convince mom not to take me to school?"
Mom. Why the fuck did he call her mom?
I reached for the pack of cigarettes on my nightstand and shoved it in my pocket, "Why would you want to?"
"My teacher wants to talk to her," he said as he scratched the back of his head. He was wearing his school jumper inside out. I didn't tell him.
"Do I wanna know why?"
"Probably not." He smirked. "But I can tell you anyway."
"You usually do, don't you?" I said, throwing my bag over my shoulders. Everything hurt. I wasn't surprised.
"I just need her to stay away until the end of this month," he said all the same, sitting on my unmade bed. "Then she can know all about how I'm disruptile in class."
"You mean disruptive?"
"I guess." He shrugged, looking at what else I had on my nightstand. I threw the bottle of vodka into one of the drawers.
"What did she promise you this time?" I asked. He opened his mouth. "Actually forget I asked. I don't care."
I could probably guess. She'd told him she'd buy him a new video game if he behaved for at least a month. Maybe even a car. Or a yacht. Something ridiculous. Something she wouldn't be able to afford if she wasn't a human leech. I was surprised she hadn't signed a book deal yet. Parenting for Dummies: How to Fuck Them Up.
I looked up from my junk drawer. It was things like this I wanted to keep Sam away from. There were three packs of cigarettes there, a small bong, two bags of weed, a flask of months-old scotch (I had to throw that away), a pocketknife (I liked to scare kids at school), and condoms (could condoms go bad?).
Sam was trying on my leather jacket. It was too big for him. Obviously.
"Did I tell you-"
"Nope," he said before I could finish, making a scene out of taking it off and folding it perfectly over my bed.
"Good," I said. He watched me grab it and put it on.
"Any advice then?" he asked, swaying his legs where he sat on the very edge of the mattress.
"Just take forever to get ready," I said.
"But I'm already-" I just looked at him.
"She hates being late. If you decide you need to take the longest shit right now, she might just leave without you."
Sam had a world-eating grin on his face. I thought if someone were to eat the entire world one day, it would be him. Not out of spite. Just the way a kid juggled down an entire plate of cookies over a glass of milk. He was hungry, and they looked good.
"Does that mean you'll take me to school?" He raised his eyebrows at the you. I raised mine at the no that followed. He asked, "Why?"
"Because I don't want to."
"Why?"
"Because I don't."
His shoulders dropped in disappointment, and his eyes fell to his shoes. "Okay then. I'll just take the bus."
I patted him on the shoulder and walked my way to the bathroom. I avoided the mirror, washed my face, brushed my teeth, ran a hand through my hair, and left.
"Hey, cutie pie!!" Fuck! "How are you feeling this morning?"
She was walking over to me, arms wide open, bright yellow shirt matching all the colorful knickknacks she wore all the time. As if the world had to know when she was coming. As if it wasn't bad enough that she'd come. As if we had to suffer through the anticipation too. Her smile was the kind people saw on someone who was about to lose their shit. I didn't want to be here for the day she lost hers. She had plenty of it to lose.
"Baby," she called again when I just walked back into the bathroom. I was almost eighteen years old. She still called me a-
"Baby?"
She walked into the bathroom.
"Can't you hear me?" I could always hear her. She'd worked in a nursing home for years and years and forgot people outside of it could usually hear just fine.
"What?" I rolled my eyes, and hoped she saw it.
If she did, she ignored it. Linda was always the one to decide how people felt about her, never the other way around. She'd decided I loved her.
I didn't. What I felt for her lived oceans away from love. It didn't even know love existed.
"How are you feeling today?" she asked.
I didn't love this question either. How are you feeling? What the fuck was that supposed to mean? How are you feeling? We all knew how I was feeling. What was the point in asking? How are you feeling? Fuck you.
"Same old shit but a different day." Someone had written that on a lunch table at school. They had a point.
She hugged me. She knew it would hurt me, so she did it exceptionally well, wrapping her arms around my shoulders and squeezing me as if I was a bag of air she wanted to pop.
"I love you, honey. You know that, right?" Ridiculous. It wasn't even eight o'clock yet and she was already being annoying. Someone had to put her down.
I didn't answer her, unzipping my pants instead. Would she leave if I just pulled my dick out?
"Do you mind?" I asked, glancing at the toilet.
"Oh no, not at all," Linda said, going for the door. She stopped herself before stepping out. "Do you need anything at all, my love?"
"I really need you to leave me alone." I said it as slowly as I could so she could understand every word of it. She smiled like she did, not what I wanted her to understand, but what she wanted to instead, which was that boys would be boys, and that didn't mean I loved her just as much as she loved me.
I rolled my eyes, and she finally stepped outside, closing the door behind her, and shouting something at Sam, probably that they were going to be late if he didn't hurry. I walked closer to the door to hear them better.
"I have a tummy ache," Sam shouted in response. He only called his stomach a tummy in front of Linda. He said it made her think he was younger than he actually was. Made her let him get away with almost anything. "I need to use the bathroom before we go!"
"Not mine!" She screamed when she realized where his voice was coming from.
I waited to hear her walk down the hallway to her bedroom, then I sneaked out of the bathroom and left the house. Mr. Gregory had been living next door for years and I'd been getting rides to school ever since. Why? Well, because 1) I didn't own a car. Richard thought I wasn't in the right mindset for one, and Linda was just so afraid something would happen to me. 2) I refused to take the school bus. It was crawling with idiots and throwing a knife at someone first thing in the morning would probably ruin the rest of my day. 3) There was no way I was going to walk to school. It would mean half an hour of walking to hell and thinking, oh, right, I woke up at 6.30 to go to hell. Plus, it would hurt everywhere. And finally, 4) Mr. Gregory had a pick-up truck and a daughter in sophomore year. It just made sense.
"Again?!" he groaned when he saw me jump out of the bed of his truck through the rearview mirror. Usually, he didn't see me at all.
I ignored him, looking at his daughter instead.
"Why the fuck do you tell him to drop you off here?" I looked around. "We're a block away from school."
She'd started doing this a week ago. I would never understand what was so embarrassing about having her parents drive her to school. Wasn't being a privileged little shit something to be proud of?
She shrugged, eyes stuck to the ground, "I like walking."
"No, you don't," I said, grabbing my backpack from the inside of the truck. I walked past her, stopping by the passenger door to look at Mr. Gregory. "She's embarrassed of you, John."
Mr. Gregory's wrinkles dug deeper into his skin in a frown. He'd lost his hair years ago. I wasn't surprised. Even his daughter ran away from him and every time he walked his dogs, one of them did too.
"My name's not even John," he pointed out. He'd no idea what was happening and was too tired to even try and understand it.
"Yeah, whatever." I was already walking away.
"It's Carl. John doesn't even sound like it."
"Are you sure?" I shouted back, "Sounds pretty similar to me."
I walked the rest of the way. I had no other options. This girl needed to get over herself fast. It hurt to even stand up by the time I walked into school. I had to sit down on the steps to the first floor. My legs were shaking when I stretched them in front of me. Some kid tripped on them and hit another girl in the back, almost making her drop what she'd been sipping from.
"What the fuck?" she cursed.
"Sorry," the kid mumbled, walking away, all of him an apology.
I looked at the girl â Kylie Green, president of the student's association (not because of my vote), and captain of the cheerleading squad (again, not because of my vote).
"You shouldn't even be drinking that," I told her. I didn't care if she did. I was just thirsty.
She looked down at her bubble tea, then up at me with cold eyes. It didn't impress me.
"And why is that?" she asked, twirling a strand of her hair with a manicured finger. She knew she was easy to look at and she wanted people to look.
I was looking at her drink. She'd gotten it from the new shop across the school, a mint-colored place that hurt just to look at.
"Well." I shrugged. "It probably makes you fat, doesn't it?"
She stopped twirling her hair.
"It's bubble tea. It's practically a fat-free drink."
"It's a 200 calories drink." I was making this up. I had no idea how many calories a bubble tea had. I didn't even know what it was. "It doesn't seem fat-free to me."
Kylie looked down at her drink again, thought about it for a while, and eventually shrugged, "Fuck it. Just take it."
"Don't mind if I do," I said as I grabbed it and took it up to my lips. She didn't wait to see what I thought of it, walking away instead.
I took a sip, "Fuck. This tastes like shit."
"How do you know what shit tastes like?" someone asked a few feet away from me. I opened my eyes. The taste in my mouth was so bad, my whole face had shut down.
In front of me, Caitlyn was wearing a black top with jeans that ended just before the top of her combat boots, showing a slice of her ankles. She'd had the back of them tattooed a few months ago, one eye in each with large bags underneath. Whoever walked behind her was always watched by a set of eyes forever awake, forever tired.
I looked up. She had two cigarettes between her lips. She threw one at me.
"I don't want a soppy one," I said, grabbing it from where it landed on the rip of my jeans.
"I don't â"
"You do," I said, feeling the soft edge of the cigarette where she had held it in her mouth. "You totally do."
"Well, it's my last one, so." She shrugged, lighting hers up. Caitlyn liked to set off the fire alarm every other month. The school wasn't big on fire drills. Caitlyn thought they were important. I thought burning to the ground could do us all some good.
I pulled my own pack of cigarettes from my pocket. "You disappoint me."
I didn't mean it. Caitlyn smiled because she knew.
"Right," she said. "I don't really feel like learning today."
The bell was ringing. She didn't even have her backpack with her.
I smiled, "What do you have in mind?"
"Aquarium?"
"That's hours away."
She looked down at the cracked screen of her phone. "If we go now, we'll get there right after it closes."
"After?" I was smiling again.
"After."
"You'll have to jump." She shrugged, her hands planted on her waist.
I leaned over the edge of the ceiling window of the Aquarium and looked down at the fall ahead of me. There had to be more than ten feet between me and the aluminum ground where Caitlyn was standing.
Granted, she had done it. She had all the same bones I had, and gravity worked on her the same way it did on me, but she had done it. Except Caitlyn had done it for so long as a child, it came naturally to her now. Once, her father had chased her all the way up the stairs of their apartment building downtown before she had finally lost him jumping off the roof into the neighboring building. It hadn't been a one-time thing.
"I'm not that fucked yet," I concluded. It seemed like a good enough conclusion for me.
Caitlyn narrowed her eyes at me, "Is this what I think it is?"
"What?"
"Are you really gonna be like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like a little bitch."
I jumped. I didn't usually give in to peer pressure, but here I was, landing on my feet, so abruptly, I thought for a second my knees would pop out.
"Finally," she said when I did, holding her hand in front of me. I took it, instantly feeling the cold of her skin against mine. I was up in a second. She didn't let go of my hand, instead turning it around so she could have the palm.
She traced a question. 0 - 10? She knew I didn't like to hear it. She thought she had found a loophole in doing this instead. I let her think it. It was more about her than it was about me. I turned her own hand around and traced down the answer. 3
She pursed her lips together in thought, then said, "You'll live."
"I figured," I said, my lips curving.
She smiled back and walked into the staff-only door to our left. We weren't staff, but we weren't sober either. The bus ride here had been done over beer and a happy meal each. We weren't quite happy yet, but we still had enough weed with us to change that.
We sat at the edge of the aquarium, feet dipped in the body of fluorescent water underneath us, hands passing a joint back and forth. Caitlyn's eyes were red, but she was the color blue.
"Can I drink the tank water?" I asked. My mouth was made of cotton.
"Please don't." She frowned, picking at her black nail polish. "There's beer left in your backpack."
I reached for it behind us and cracked it open, downing half of it in one go. Relief washed over me. I had never loved beer, but I loved this one. Not this brand, just this one bottle. I suspected the weed had something to do with it. Caitlyn looked entertained. I passed the bottle to her and looked down at the tank.
"You think they know it's all a lie?"
"What?"
"They think this tank is the world," I said.
"Well." She looked down at it too, "It's their world."
My feet were one with the water and everything around us was blue.
"We're the same, aren't we?"
"We are," she said, like she knew it all along and had been waiting for me to figure it out. "Except fish don't think."
"We made everything up if you really think about it." I could tell she was. I could tell a lot of things suddenly. My mind moved at a different speed than my body, like subtitles ahead of the images.
"Religion," Caitlyn said with a nod as she finished up the joint and set it aside. "Freedom."
"Love."
"Happiness," she went on, and then, as if this new idea was so good, she couldn't help but pursue it right away. "What would you give me if I jumped in?"
I frowned, "Nothing."
And she smiled, and said, "Just what I wanted."
Then she jumped in. Water splashed the space where she had been sitting, and I thought for a second, she hadn't jumped but turned into water instead, but she came back up before I could entertain the idea. Waves of light rose over the surface of the water and all around her, and her hands started playing with it.
"Nice," she said, as if to the world.
"I can only imagine." I didn't mind the feeling of the water around my feet, but even that was stretching it. I didn't like not knowing what was under me, and I suspected there was plenty right now.
Caitlyn pushed herself underwater again. Her hair disappeared as it swallowed her, and I watched, my ribs somehow smaller, pressing everything in my chest closer together. Then she came up all at once, arms breaking through the surface in desperate strokes, legs kicking hard and fast.
"What is it?" I asked, leaning into the tank, my arm already stretched out to her.
"There's a huge fucking shark in here!" she said in between breaths, taking my hand in hers and pulling it hard.
I thought for a second, she was so afraid, she didn't realize she was pulling me in instead of just letting me pull her out. But she was laughing. I'd fallen into the water where there was a huge fucking shark, and she was laughing.
"I hate you," I said, looking her dead in the eyes as my clothes clung to my body, suddenly heavy enough to make it hard to even stay afloat.
"We made that up too." She smiled. She meant hatred. I smiled because she had a point and then turned around to leave. My ribs kept shrinking.
"Holy shit," she said. I didn't turn around. I was high, not stupid. She sounded pleasantly surprised, "I think there's an actual shark."
How was this a pleasant surprise for her?
"It might have been funny before â"
"I'm serious," she said. I still didn't turn around. I was about to reach the edge again, when she said, "It's right underneath you."
"Stop." I wasn't moving anymore. "It's not funny."
"I'm not trying to be funny," she said. All the pleasant surprise was gone from her voice. "Don't look down."
I did. Underneath me, a six-foot-long shark swam in small circles.
"Fuck."
"Tristan, don't freak out," she said. Too late. "It's not gonna â"
"What do I do?" I stopped her. My breathing picked up the same pace as my legs, kicking to keep me afloat. The shark kept circling me.
"Don't move," Caitlyn whispered. She was swimming closer to me.
"I'm not," I whispered back.
"Why are we whispering?"
"I don't fucking know!" I was still whispering, but in my head, it sounded like a scream.
I guessed in hers too, "You're stressing me out. Please calm down."
"I can't," I said. My mouth was coated in cotton again. I couldn't keep swimming for much longer. Something touched my foot. I looked down. The shark was swimming so close, it touched me every now and then.
"Kick it!" Caitlyn said, and she was suddenly next to me, pulling herself over the edge, reaching for something in my backpack. Her voice was nothing calm anymore. It followed the tempo of my breathing.
I kicked the shark. I didn't want to look down again, but I thought I did. I felt it.
"Now get out of the water!" She was stressing me out. Or maybe I was stressing her out. I didn't know where I ended, and she began.
I looked down. I thought I saw the shark's teeth. Or maybe I imagined it. This was such a stupid way to die.
"Hurry up!" Caitlyn's voice was far away. I didn't think I could swim that far. I did. I pulled myself over the edge, laid as far away from it as I could, and finally took all the air in. Caitlyn crawled closer to me, "Are you okay?"
"I thought I was gonna die," I managed, opening my eyes to see her kneeled next to me, all of her dripping. The thought from before came back like easing into a stop at the train station. "Is death something we made up too?"
"No." She smiled. It was a sad smile. The question had been a bad one. It hit too close to home for the both of us.
She grabbed my hand and turned it around. 0 to 10? I exhaled heavily. 5
She pulled her hand away, "We should go then."
We did. We took the bus home, left water stains on the seats and poodles under our feet, but we did. I couldn't stop thinking that I could have died. Caitlyn said if we hadn't been so high, it would have been fine. I thought I could have died all the same. It would have been a stupid way to go, but I would have gone. I had been thinking of going to that other place since I knew I could. Had been on this headlong rush to death since I knew it existed for me.
Not today, I thought when I crashed in bed that night. Just like I did every day.