Only Child(26)

I never ever peed in my bed before, except when I was three and I stopped wearing diapers at bedtime. Mommy said I only had a couple of accidents then. Mommy used to wake me up in the middle of the night and carry me to the bathroom. She told me I peed in the toilet when I was still asleep, and the next day I didn’t even remember it. But now I always wake up and go to the bathroom by myself.

My cousin Jonas pees in the bed all the time, he’s six, too, and he’s not my real cousin—he’s the son of Aunt Mary’s sister, so he’s kind of my cousin. One time he had a sleepover at our house, and he slept on an air mattress next to my bed. He peed all over the mattress, and Andy made fun of him and said only babies pee in the bed. I made fun of him a little, too, but then I felt bad because Mommy said it wasn’t his fault, and we shouldn’t tease him about it. He probably peed in his bed because he was scared and missed his mom, and he was probably ashamed.

And now I peed in my bed like Jonas. When I was thinking about it my face got really hot, and I know that meant it was getting red from being embarrassed, and that happens to me a lot of times. In school it happens all the time, like when Miss Russell talks to me and I didn’t know she was going to, so it’s like a surprise moment, and everyone looks at me when I have to answer. When I know I’m going to say something and I have time to think about what I want to say first and I’m sure I know the right answer, then it’s fine. But when it’s a surprise, I turn red and I call it the red juice spill, because it’s like a cup of red juice spills up my neck and then up my face. I try to hide my face when that happens and wait until it doesn’t feel hot anymore, and then I know the red juice spilled back down my neck.

Red-hot juice. Sometimes it leaves red dots on my neck for a while after. It spills back down fast most of the time, but not if someone says something about it or makes fun of me. Like Andy knows I hate it when someone talks about how my face looks red, so of course he loves to say it really loud so everyone can hear it, and he thinks it’s so funny. Then it takes forever for it to go away.

I thought about what to do because I didn’t want anyone to know I peed in the bed. I peeked up at Mommy and Daddy’s bed and I only saw Mommy’s back, and she didn’t move so she was still sleeping, and Daddy wasn’t there in the bed. I got up really fast and went in my room and took my PJs off, and that was gross because I was touching my own pee. I didn’t want to put the wet PJs in the hamper because the other clothes would get wet, too, so I put them in the bathtub behind the shower curtain instead. I thought about how the mattress was still really wet, but maybe it was going to dry during the day?

I got dressed and then I sat on my bed for a little while and waited for the hot juice feeling to go away. I noticed my trucks. They were still in front of my bookshelf and this whole time I didn’t even play with them one time, and they were still all mixed up and not in a row. It was weird that I was just leaving them there like that.

I got up and checked in the bathroom mirror that no red dots were left on my neck. I went in Andy’s room to look at his top bunk and then I went downstairs. No one was in the kitchen, and Daddy was in his office on the phone. His office has a glass door, and when he saw me through it, he did a tired smile and pointed at the phone. I went in the kitchen and I sat down on the barstool. I was hungry, but no one was going to make me breakfast.

I noticed the iPad on the counter and decided to play my fire truck parking game. That’s my favorite game on the iPad. It’s a parking simulator where you have to try to park a huge fire truck, and it’s hard because you can’t bump into other cars or the walls of the firehouse, but I’m really good at it. I swiped the iPad and Daddy’s newspaper came on.

Daddy always reads the newspaper on the iPad now or on his phone. He used to get the real newspaper and it came rolled up in a blue bag and got left on our walkway. It was my job in the mornings to get it for him—only on the weekends, because on workdays he took it with him to work before I got up. But then he stopped getting the newspaper in the blue bag and started reading it on the iPad instead, and that always takes a long time. I wished he was still getting it delivered so I could play on the iPad.

Daddy’s newspaper came on and right away I saw it was about the gunman, Charlie’s son. I scrolled down and there was the same picture of him I saw on TV yesterday. I felt like I shouldn’t be looking at it anymore, because Daddy would get mad at me again. But Daddy was on the phone in his office, and Mommy was still sleeping, and I didn’t know where Mimi was, so no one would know. I started to read what the news said about Charlie’s son. In big fat letters it said “Killer’s Motive,” and underneath in smaller but still fat letters it said, “The act of a madman or a troubled child’s cry for his father’s attention?” and then a lot of smaller, not-fat words under that.

It was hard to read, but I understood some things, like that Charlie’s son brought four guns to McKinley to shoot people, and at his house, Charlie’s house, the police found more guns, and they didn’t know yet where he bought them, it said.

There were pictures of the guns when I scrolled down, and a few of them looked like regular guns, like the ones policemen have on their belts, and some looked big and long in the front, they looked like army guns. Under the pictures it said what the guns were called, and they had cool names. Under the regular-looking guns it said “.45 caliber Smith & Wesson M&P pistol” and “Glock 19 9mm semiautomatic handgun,” and under the army-looking guns it said “semiautomatic Smith & Wesson M&P15” and “Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun.” I whispered the names of the guns when I tried to read them, but they were hard to say.