Two in the morning, and I was wide awake. It was like there was something in the room with me, something lurking in the darkened silence of my bedroom, but not under my bed, not outside the window of my balcony.
Just beneath the blanket, near my feet, something cold against my toes if I touched it, but soft. Soft, smooth plastic, holding in it something else very valuable, something I knew no one should see. The big, round, white pills were one thing. These ones, though -- tiny, orange, and delicate -- could not be wasted. They could not be seen. There were few of them, and they were evil. Amoung the pills, inside the little bag, the creature was lurking, rustling violently about.
And soon, I knew from habit, it would wrestle its way out of the bag. It would crawl, pushing through the blankets like nothing more than a puddle of water, until it found me. Like always, it would cling, sharp little fingers digging into my throat, sending shockwaves to my fingertips. My fingers would itch for the feel of a straw between them, my lungs for the cold flush of powder in them, my entire body for the humming relaxation of lingering between life and death, the comfortable space of the purgatory I created.
The monster was tiny, but it was powerful, wherever I went. Even without the bag, it was there with me, just close enough to grab me when it wanted to the most, and never, never, never going away -- not until it got what it wanted.
Without the monster, tonight, though, I questioned what I was doing.
Shivering cold, in a tank top and shorts I had always gone comfortably to bed in, I was sitting up, a cold sweat leaking over my whole body, worsening the tremors. Thoughts passed in a scattered way through my mind, first at point A, then point C, then back to A again before moving to B, then C, A, D, B, A, A, A, C, D, B, A...and on.
Point A: There was a pair of scissors in my hand. With the blade splayed wide open, I had half of the tool buried into the beside my bed.
Point B: Tomorrow -- no, today? At the next available ten PM -- was the party. Drinking, older kids, party, and I was "un"-invited, by Sam. All week, I'd heard Sage fawn over him. Friday morning, she realized no one had "un"-invited her.
Point C: Sam.
Point D: Evan was far too asleep to hear me. Sawing with the scissors, a steady, quick, and breathless back-and-forth motion, something told me Evan would hear, and Evan would ask.
But I could make it at a party -- after all, things only went wrong when you expected them not to. I could manage myself, and I'd told my parents I was staying over at Sam's house for the night for a study session, in case I did drink.
I had no idea how to explain to Evan what I was doing. I didn't even know what I was doing.
There was something in the way Sam smiled.
I was cutting a hole in my wall. That's what I was doing, I realized finally, sitting back on my knees. Successfully, actually, I had cut a hole in my wall, about as big as a coffee mug and just big enough for me to get my hand through. Pulling out the circle of wall, I could see the orange-brown wood grain behind it, the support beams, the dust, the insulation, and the floorboards.
If I could lock the monster away, maybe it would leave me alone.
I leaned to the end of my bed, scooping the bag up carelessly and dropping it inside the hole. Then, once more, I covered it up, and clambered out of bed, pushing the furniture as quietly as I could against the wall. It was as if the hole had never been made.
Except, once I had crawled back into bed, covered my face, hid myself from sight, it was still there.
Now, it was just closer to my head.
--
I didn't sleep.
It's hard to sleep when something you know doesn't exist is whispering in your ear. Around six, Teresa had texted me anyway asking if I'd talked to Jonny recently. I promptly responded to her with a no and not to text me so early on a Saturday.
Whatever the case, I couldn't go back to bed, so I had wandered downstairs, rubbing my eyes, and stood in the kitchen, fixing coffee.
I couldn't bring myself to even add sugar or cream, instead simply standing there, staring at the far wall, sipping from the black emptiness of the white cup. My lips burned, my tongue felt numb, but recently I'd learned to like the feeling. Across from me, beside the wall telephone, which I would forever wonder why we still had, a clean, sleek clock ticked away. Like something from a diner in the 1950s, when everyone was obsessed with space, it had always hung there. There was nothing special about it, and in all truth it was just a clock my mother had picked up from a furniture store.
But, at six o'clock in the morning, staring it down like my worst nightmare, I began to realize there were no heirlooms in my family. The clock was nothing special. Nothing in this house was special. Every time we visited my grandmother, she would show Evan and I old family heirlooms she brought with her when she moved our mother from Sweden to America. She could show us wardrobes her grandparents owned, plates some distant relative used, tarnished and sour-smelling jewellry her mother gave her, and would tell us we would inherit them. Grandma also called us Crabby and Eric because she couldn't remember our real names. I don't know why I got stuck with the name Crabby and Evan got something normal.
Regardless, something was missing. I liked the idea of heirlooms, even if they were ultimately useless. Even if we had the first paper airplane my great-great-great-great grandfather made in school, or even the decimated remains of it, I would have been happy. But there were no keepsakes here. Everything was new. New furniture, new paint, new electronics and wiring and plumbing and paper. If something got old, you threw it out. If something didn't work, you got a new one. If someone close to you was broken, you did the same thing: threw them out and got a replacement.
I woke up two hours later to my mother's houseslipper being pushed into my side.
Unsure of how I had gotten on the kitchen floor, or why there was cold, black coffee staining the white tile floors -- thank God the mug had only chipped -- I stared up at her. Pale, dry hair like straw hung neatly around her face, framing dark and tired eyes, her nightgown and robe both hanging off her loosely.
"Colin Gabriel Pelley," she scolded, a half-asleep slur in her voice, no real conviction in her voice. "What the hell are you doing sleeping on the floor?"
"If I knew, I'd tell you," I replied, groping the tiles for a feeling of stability. My head was spinning, empty and worthless, more teased now by two unsatisfying hours of solid sleep than absolutely none. "I came down and made coffee. I must have fallen back asleep."
"Well, clean it up."
Smoothing a hand through my hair, I watched her for a moment. I was realizing more through every motion she took. Her fingernails were immaculately clean, all the same length and smoothed with thick, solid and clear polish. The fuzzy white robe around her seemed to envelope her, a small woman by more standards and where Evan and I got our "height challenges," and swallow her whole, covering even the silken pastel colours of her nightgown.
Some of the pictures of her in my parents' bedroom, from when she was young, showed her with dark hair like my brother and I, not this golden blonde. They showed her without wrinkles around her mouth like a cigarette smoker, without false smile lines from false smiles all day, without tired crow's feet or mascara so thick her eyelashes looked shorter.
Something the pictures would never show was her thin limbs, knobby fingers reaching out and wrapping, serpentine, around the crystalline perfection of a wide bottle. Its contents seemed unreachable behind the thick glass, but reach it she did, uncapping the diamond shape at the top. There was a coffee mug on the counter in front of her, and, fearful, I watched her. Fearful, not for me and not for her, but for the girl in the photographs, that girl that never looked like she could even uncork the bottle, as she did just that, pouring a heady stream of thin brandy into the coffee mug. As her lips touched the mug, drinking deeply from it, I remembered then the phrase wolf in sheep's clothing.
Sometimes in a world full of perfection, a blemish needed to be covered. And if you kept covering it, it would disappear, at least in your mind's eye, and you could pretend it was never there at all.
The poison you used to cover up the blemishes was just a matter of choice.
Rolling her lips, she turned suddenly, looking with wide eyes at me.
"Can I help you?"
"I-I'm not awake," I excused, looking down. A coffee stain was dark on my shirt and boxers, and I could feel where it had dried in spots against my leg. "Sorry. I'll clean it up."
So I spent the morning cleaning up my mess, watching my father move around me to make a fresh pot of coffee and not once look up at me, as if I was invisible.
I was a blemish, damn it, I was supposed to be noticed.
Yet, he didn't. He tiptoed carefully around me as if I wasn't even there, as if I wasn't moving about the kitchen dangerously, as if I wasn't worth his notice. No hello, no good morning, nothing, simply dancing around a little spot in the middle of the floor that happened to be his son. And, introspectively, I felt nothing. Only looking back on it did I think, perhaps, something was wrong. That was always how we interacted, ignoring one as if neither existed, like two alpha males bristling in the others' presence. That was always how I was taught to interact with other men. We were big. We were strong. We were tall, we were caretakers, we were the one who owned the house and the car and the responsibility and made kids, we were the leaders of the pride.
My appetite escaped me. I spent the afternoon upstairs, in my room, at first consumed into a book. I had found it a year or two prior, exploring with Ronny and Teresa in the ruins of an old barn. Only recently did I care to pick it up -- only recently did it occur to me how to pronounce the name on the faded blue cover. The Brothers Karamazov.
My English teacher had sworn up, down, left, and right it was a horrible book, but I became engrossed in it, fascinated by every little word. Sticky notes of different colours were marked nearly every page, quotes I liked, things I found interesting, and often times when I got high, I would sit down and reread the first chapter, over and over, never comprehending it. Every time I reread it, it was like a new book, and it made more sense, but by the time the high wore off, nothing made sense.
And the evening finally rolled around.
Having disappeared downstairs, I took to bustling around the kitchen again, this time tending to a small potted plant I had purchased and left in the kitchen. Against the stark white of the room, the plant was a beautiful little dark mark, a purposeful ruining of the perfection. All around it, loose topsoil spilled onto the counter, drawing a white and dark freckled shadow at the base, and I made no effort to clean it up. Instead, an eyedropper between my fingers, I was taking what water was in my glass and giving it, via the eyedropper, to the small thing. Inside its little plastic basin, it was barely a few inches tall, with proportionately wide leaves, each one surprisingly dark and waxy. They couldn't tell me to get rid of it; I told them it was responsibility for me.
My father was writing out a grocery list.
"Don't forget I have that study group tonight, Dad," I murmured, fixated on the little plant. I crushed one of its tiny leaves between my index finger and thumb, a pale chartreuse one near the top. Immediately, I felt awful: What if it wouldn't bloom now? What if, because I had crushed that one little leaf's dreams of becoming a beautiful flower, I would never know what sort of plant it was? But it was just a new leaf, I reminded myself, another would grow through and replace it, as if the first had never been there to begin with. Oblivious, the plant wiggled when it was touched, simply pleased to have someone touching it, near it, caring for it.
He spoke through pursed lips, calloused middle finger pushing up at his thick glasses. "Right. Did you explain to Evan you're gonna miss his game?"
"Huh?"
They never spoke about Evan. It was rarely as if Evan even existed in this household.
I glanced up at him, staring for a moment, observing the calculated way he extracted a cigarette from his mouth, smoke drawing curling lines in the air before they disappeared. His eyes met mine, body still bent over his list. "God damn, can't you remember anything? Evan's soccer game is tonight, I told you that last week. Your grandmother's going to go watch him."
My heart skipped a beat, then another, my mind going blank. Evan's game? Evan had a game? Evan did play soccer, and soccer practices usually led to soccer games...
But tonight!
"A-Aren't you and Mom going?"
"Colin, we went to probably sixty games for you. We've seen enough. He knows he's good at it, he doesn't need us there to tell him that."
They weren't going to his game!
Neither was I, but that wasn't the point.
"Stop looking at me like that," he swore after a moment of horrible silence, my mouth gaping in confusion. Again captivated by his grocery list, he removed his glasses, smoothing his fingers over his tired features. Once upon a time, maybe he had had a broad jaw like Evan and I, a soft nose, square face, round cheeks, maybe he had been any less put-together than he was now. Maybe once upon a time he hadn't been so uptight. "Come on, I have to teach him to man up somehow. I can't have him being a pansy." Maybe he had been a blemish too. "You start out letting them be a pansy, next thing you know they're turning into divas and fags."
On second thought, I hoped to hell he had never been a blemish. The shame of admitting that we were ever the same was too much to handle. Could I have a perfect image of imperfection?
"I guess I need to go talk to him."
Tonight was the party. I couldn't miss it, I just couldn't, because this was freshman year, and there was a degree of depressing namelessness of being 'new' that didn't sit well with me. Older high schoolers already knew Teresa's name. They already knew Ronny's, they knew the names of their distant friends, but not me. No one knew me. I needed a name.
Even if it was "the drama club's tag-along."
I couldn't miss the party.
Leaving my little plant to disappear into the living room and up the stairs, I fearlessly let my knuckles rap four times against Evan's door, greeted by his voice telling me to come in anyway and why did I knock to start with.
My brother was laying across his bed, feet shoved underneath his pillow, arms stretched out wide. His hands worked furiously with a pen and paper, writing something that had already -- by the looks of strewn pages and stacks -- consumed much of his time.
A few months prior, Evan's teacher had assigned them a piece of homework on writing. All it required them to do was write a story within three pages, be it fictional or true. He had written a story about Cookie and her adventures in space as an astronaut. His teacher gave him a one hundred percent, complimented his creativity, and called home to applaud our parents, and receive a verbal beating from my father. Writing was for girls.
But I encouraged him. It made him individual.
"Hi, Colin."
He didn't look up, still busy scrawling out letters and words and phrases. Someday, I hoped, someday he would go somewhere with his writing. He would write up and over and around our father with words I could never even dream of.
Quietly, I pushed the door shut behind me, offering a small smile he wouldn't see.
"What'cha writing?"
"Stuff," came his simple answer. "Things. I dunno. Whatever comes to mind."
Fumbling fingers pushed the page into a roll, forcing it over until it turned.
My heart was thudding heavy in my chest, and not the warm, comfortable thudding of a high, but the distasteful, almost painful thudding of fear. Why was I afraid to talk to Evan?
Because he was eight years old, and already better than me in every way.
"Did you put new batteries in your camera? I want you to get a really good picture of me at the game tonight."
"W-well, that's the thing, Evan..."
Lips pursing into a frown, his eyes shot up, staring at me like an owl for a few moments.
"I-I'm not going."
Silence. And, oh, the silence only made it worse! Suddenly, my heart was in my stomach, in my chest, throbbing and thudding in a way that threatened to churn up bile. In a quiet whisper, he begged why.
"Um...I have...plans, plans I made a few weeks ago..." A lie! I was lying to my brother! God strike me dead, I pleaded, before I could say anymore! But He didn't. "And they start at ten. And your game's an hour and a half away, so we'd have to leave at six to get there in time for the game, which lasts up to two hours, and then another hour and a half back...I can't do both."
Helpless, hopeless, I watched his face fall, further and further, quickly descending from a look of concern to one of simple sadness.
"I thought you were gonna go."
"I would if I could. I-I can't, and I can't back out of these plans..."
Carefully shuffling papers around and setting them on the floor, I sat next to him, pushing one hand through the mop of his dark hair. He needed a haircut, but he always did this time of year.
"Look, um...I know you're mad..."
"I'm not mad--"
"You're disappointed?" He nodded. I was a shitty brother, I decided, the shittiest brother in the history of shitty brothers and this was the first step toward the ultimate level of shittiness. "Look, um...you know how...how they say if you love something, let it go? Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. Sometimes there's things you love, and then there's a lot of things you love, and sometimes they go together. But you have to remember that even the things you love have things they love. That doesn't mean they love you any less."
For a few moments, the pen sitting next to him, he was silent, until he let out a long sigh, wiping away tears I hadn't even noticed.
"It's like balancing love," I continued. "And I know you love soccer, and you love me, but these plans I made with friends that I love, and I still love you. I don't make plans often."
Again, I got nothing in return. That was it! I'd fucked up, I'd ruined it, Evan was scarred for life. His first soccer game, ruined by his shitty older brother and his shitty plans because he had some shitty party to go to! Twenty years from now, Evan would be sitting on his therapist's couch, crying with tissues in hand, whispering to some college-educated and logic-pumping drug dealer about how it all started with his abandonment issues when his brother didn't go to his very first ever soccer game at eight years old, and how the drugs made his brother lie.
The thought came and went as quickly as a breath: drugs. My monster.
Brow furrowed, I looked down at him for a long moment. The paper he'd been writing all over was freckled wet and grey with tiny tears.
"You'll come to the next one?" He asked finally, looking up to me.
"Yea," I answered before I could even put thought into it. What if they had another party? What if I got invited again on a soccer night? "Yea, of course."
And I thought back to the book sitting on my bed...
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to the passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.
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