Rooms(13)

Minna glares at her. “Are you serious? You really have no f*cking idea, do you? About anything.”

Caroline widens her eyes. “I don’t know why you’re being so hostile, Minna,” she says. “We’re just having a conversation.”

Minna stares. “Have another drink, Ma,” she says finally, then slams down a plate so hard it cracks in two, and storms out of the room.





TRENTON

Trenton was disappointed by the gun Minna had found. He’d been expecting something sleek and black. He’d pictured tucking it into his waistband, swaggering around with it for a bit, getting the feel. He’d pictured the kind of gun that would make you think twice about messing with someone—guns evened the score, turned losers into big shots.

This gun was old, first of all, and it was heavy. He couldn’t even fit it into his waistband, and if he did, he thought he’d probably blow his balls off accidentally. It looked more like something you would see at a museum than at the scene of a crime. Plus he didn’t know if it was loaded, and he wasn’t sure how to check.

He’d seen a gun only once before, at the disastrous party last winter that had earned him his nickname. It had been, without doubt, the worst night of his life. Most people probably thought the accident had been the worst night of his life, but for Trenton, that had been a kind of liberation.

Everything afterward—the pain and the pills and the metal rods holding his shins together and the wire in his jaw and the shitty power shakes that tasted like sand sipped through a straw—had been awful. But in the moment of the accident, the sheer blazing terror of it and the certainty, just then, that he would die, he’d found a kind of peace he’d never known, or at least hadn’t felt in years.

This is it, he had thought, just before the scream of metal on metal and the sparks and then the darkness. And he was, purely and simply, relieved. No more failing, no more f*cking up, no more loneliness like a constant pressure on his bladder that he couldn’t piss or sleep or drink away.

And then he’d woken up. He had never thought about suicide before. But lying in the hospital, it had occurred to him that suicide was the only possible solution. Clean. Elegant. Brave, even.

Suicide, he decided, had integrity.

He supposed he could just shove the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fire, but Russian roulette lacked integrity. If you were going to kill yourself, you had to know, in advance, that it was going to work. Chance was for idiots.

That’s what Derrick Richards had suggested at the party: that they all play Russian roulette. Trenton had kept his mouth shut, like he did at every party, hoping that if he stayed quiet, no one would notice that he didn’t belong. Derrick was dumb enough to do it and his friends were dumb enough to follow along. Fortunately Derrick was so drunk he’d stumbled backward and sent a bullet straight through the window, and after that someone had taken the gun away and everyone had moved on to strip poker, even though it was December and flakes of snow were swirling in through the shattered window.

From upstairs, Trenton thought he heard laughter, faintly, and shoved the gun quickly into his dad’s desk drawer, where he had found it, where Minna had casually mentioned it would be—almost like she knew what he was planning and was encouraging it. Well. Why wouldn’t she? Nothing was worse than being a disgusting pock-faced freak with a sister who looked like Minna. He was sure she suspected him of being a virgin.

If only she knew the truth: that he’d never even been kissed. At least not in a way that counted.

The laughter stopped. Maybe he was hallucinating. Last night, before falling asleep, he thought he’d heard whispers, voices in the creaking of the floorboards, the sighing of a woman. He would have blamed it on the painkillers, but he’d stopped taking them. He was saving them up, just in case.

He opened the drawer and removed the gun once again. It was heavy. What the hell had his dad used it for? What had his dad used any of this stuff for? Pencil sharpeners in weird shapes, antique toys, old radios. Craziness.

He was suddenly aware that the whole house had gone silent. His mom had left, he knew, probably to go buy more booze. Minna had gone to the kitchen to make Amy lunch.

He could do it. Right here. Right now. Could bite down on the metal, taste iron on his tongue, say boom, and head toward that place of calm again, where he wasn’t such a nothing. Where he was nothing.

But he couldn’t bring himself to lift the gun to his mouth. He kept thinking of stupid Derrick Richards and his salmon-colored pants pooled at his ankles, comfortable as anything, his pale chest exposed, already curling with a man’s worth of hair, his fleshy thighs splayed like two fat white fish, losing hand after hand in strip poker and not caring. And Trenton, who wasn’t even playing, sitting stiff as an arrow, mortified, desperate that no one move or even breathe in his direction, because Angie Salazar was sitting on his right (he’d never even thought she was hot) and down to her bra and underwear, and every time she moved to take a card the fat swell of her boobs moved with her, and he could see where her butt was compressed by the chair, and imagine the heat of her thighs pressed together, and he had such a raging boner he thought he might die or, worse, explode right there in front of everyone. Bang.

When he finally couldn’t take it any longer, when it was too much, he’d gotten up stiffly, bowlegged as a sailor, holding his cup in front of his crotch, and hurtled into the bathroom. He’d slammed the door shut and locked it—at least, he thought he had, but in his desperation to get his pants down and release the explosion that had been building inside of him like some awful time bomb ticking away to social humiliation—well, he hadn’t double-checked. And so when Lanie Buck had stumbled into the bathroom less than a minute later because she had to puke, the whole party had caught Trenton mid flagrante delicto, if you could be in flagrante delicto by yourself—head back, pants around his ankles, cock in his hand, eyes closed, and practically crying with the sheer, tremendous relief of it.