The Impossible Knife of Memory(3)

So that day after detention, I made it home from school in one piece, pissed and hungry and determined to ignore all my homework. Dad’s pickup was parked in the driveway. I put my hand on the hood: stone cold. I checked the odometer: no extra miles since I left that morning. He hadn’t gone to work again.

I unlocked the one, two, three, four locks on the front door of our house. (Our house. Still felt weird to put those two words together.) Opened the door carefully. He hadn’t put the chain on. Probably slept all day. Or he was dead. Or he remembered that I had gone to school and that I was going to come home and that I’d need the chain to be off. That’s what I was hoping for.

I stepped inside. Closed the door behind me. Locked back up: one, two, three, four. Slid the chain into its slot and hit the light switch. The living room furniture was upright and dusty. The house smelled of dog, cigarette smoke, bacon grease, and the air freshener that Dad sprayed so I wouldn’t know that he smoked weed.

Down the hall, Spock barked three times behind the door to my father’s bedroom.

“Dad?”

I waited. Dad’s voice rumbled like faraway thunder, talking to the dog. Spock whined, then went quiet. I waited, counting to one hundred, but still . . . nothing.

I walked toward his door and gently knocked. “Dad?”

“Your bus late again?” he asked from the other side.

“Yep.”

I waited. This was where he should ask how my day went or if I had homework or what I wanted for dinner. Or he could tell me what he felt like eating, because I could cook. Or he could just open the door and talk, that would be more than enough.

“Dad?” I asked. “Did you stay home again?”

“It’s been a bad day, princess.”

“What did your boss say?”

Dead. Silence.

“You called him, right?” I asked. “Told him you were sick? Daddy?”

“I left a message on his voice mail.”

Another lie. I leaned my forehead against the door. “Did you even try to get out the door? Did you get dressed? Take a shower?”

“I’ll try harder tomorrow, princess. I promise.”

Death deals the cards. They whisper across the shaky table. Hernandez sticks a cigar in his mouth. Dumbo tucks his

wife’s letter in his helmet. Loki spits and curses. Roy sips his

coffee. We pull the cards toward us and laugh.

I don’t remember what my wife looked like, but I recognize

Death. She calls for our bets, wearing a red dress, her beautiful

face carved out of stone. My friends laugh and lie, already deep

in the game.

I remember what my little girl looks like. I remember the

smell of her head. The scar on her left knee. Her lisp. Peanut

butter and banana. I don’t think she remembers me. Death rattles bone dice in her mouth, clicking them against

her teeth. She spits them on the table and they roll.

We bet it all, throw everything on the line because the air is

filled with bullets and grenades. We won’t hear the one that gets

us, but it’s coming.

She tells us to show our hands.

We have never been so alive.

Lunch. First period.

Lunch served at o-dark-thirty. I couldn’t figure out why more high school students hadn’t risen up in armed rebellion. The only explanation was that the administration put sedatives in the chocolate chip cookies.

The eraser end of a pencil was shoved into my left ear. “Leave me alone.” I pushed away the pencil and the hand holding it, turning my head so that my left ear lay flat against the cafeteria table.

The pencil attacked my right ear.

I gave the classic one-finger salute to my tormentor. “I hate you.”

“Twenty vocab words.”

“I’m sleeping, watch. Zzzzzz.”

“Just my Spanish, Hays. And a little English help for Topher. Pesadilla. A quesadilla with fish, right?”

I sat up with a groan. Across the table sat Gracie Rappaport, the casserole-and-muffin-girl. Draped over her was her boyfriend, Topher, Christopher Barnes. (You might have heard of him. When he dumped some girl named Zoe on Labor Day weekend she blasted a disrespectful description of his man-parts all over the Internet. Topher responded with photographic evidence that Zoe was lying. When I asked Gracie about it, all she did was giggle, which was way more information than I wanted.)

“What is ‘denotation’?” Topher asked.

“Denotation is when a plot blows up,” I said. “And yes, a pesadilla is a quesadilla stuffed with fish. You are a genius, Gracie.”

“Don’t write that down.” A shaggy-haired guy with expensive teeth and dark-framed glasses sat down next to me. “She’s messing with you.”

Topher looked at the newcomer. “Where you been?”

The guy pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket and dangled them.

“You got it running?” Topher asked. “What was it this time?”

“I don’t know, but Mom said it cost a ton of money. I’ll be doing chores forever to pay her back.”

“Dude,” Topher said.

“Right?” answered the guy. “So, I’m broke. Feed me.”

Topher handed him a ten-dollar bill. “Bring me back a bagel, too.”