Seven Ways We Lie(70)

7:15 COMES AND GOES, AND DAD DOESN’T WALK through the door. I don’t ask where he is. Something’s wrong with my throat.

Russ, swinging his legs at the dinner table, says, “Mommy. Where is Daddy?” and I say, “Come on, Russ, eat your dinner,” and Russ turns his big, round eyes on me—Dad’s eyes—and says, “Where is Daddy?” and I swallow and prod his little fork toward his hand, like, “Hush, just—here.” Mom’s jaw moves mechanically as she chews, her eyes trained on the saltshaker as if she’s trying to count every grain inside.

I watch Russ eat, my head filling up with worries. Maybe it’s stupid to worry about my brother when a million kids get brought up between two houses and turn out fine, but it’s still weird to think about how different his upbringing is going to be than mine was, how maybe Mom or Dad will remarry and Russ will call somebody else his parent, or he’ll be my age and look back and never remember living in the same house with the three of us. And maybe it’ll fade from my memories when I’m older, too, and from Mom’s and Dad’s, if they can ever forget, and once we all forget what this place felt like, it’ll be like this family never happened at all. We’ll be a new, different set of people, only me and Russell binding us together.

After dinner, I walk Russ up to his room. We hop up the steep steps in rhythm. “One, two, sound off,” I say, a little marching tune, and his hands spread out, bouncing by his cargo shorts.

A tiny bathroom, an angular closet more than anything, sticks off to the side of Russ’s room. As we hunker down in it, brushing our teeth, I look down at the top of his head and get this rush of light-headedness, like vertigo, and I remember my dad standing beside me, brushing his teeth, back when I was a kid. He never missed a night, not for years.

I look back up at the mirror as my eyes start to burn, and I blink a few times, spit, rinse, swish, spit.

I usher Russ out and into his pajamas. “Read a story,” he says as I tuck him in. Mom just switched him from a crib to a twin bed a couple of months ago. I settle on the fading quilt beside him, scoop up Where the Wild Things Are from the dark space under the bed, and crack it open to where we left off last, a page with yellow eyes and a tiny scarlet boat and a set of loving, angry, wild things gnashing their terrible teeth. As I show him the illustrations, I say in my best growl, “We’ll eat you up—we love you so,” and Russ’s eyes are round and solemn, and he lifts his hand like the boy in the monster suit, stepping into his private boat, waving good-bye.


I WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING AFTER THE LONGEST sleep I’ve had in months, dreamless, no yelling down the hall. I shower under water so hot, my skin flushes, I drive to school under the speed limit, I take actual notes in US History, I walk through the halls steady and clear-eyed, and the whole time, my head feels so empty, it’s as if somebody went in through my ear with a hook and tugged my brain out in one long string.

The lunch bell rings, reminding me how little appetite I have. I don’t even want to smoke. Now that I think about it, I haven’t wanted to smoke since, what, last Friday? That’s a long gap for me, but for some reason, I’m not missing it much.

I walk to García’s classroom—empty until 1:00 for his lunch period—and dump my stuff in my seat. The back of the room, where García has a sign reading BOOK DEN, has a huge bookshelf that I always see the Poetry Society kids ogling. I draw a chair up to the front of the bookshelf and stare down the spines, all the names in alphabetical order, deep-sounding hardbacks like The Satanic Verses and Crime and Punishment mixed in with thin paperbacks in big, goofy fonts that hardly look longer than chapter books. I run my finger over the spines, remembering that half hour on Sunday when I was finishing Inferno, when I’d gotten so used to Dante’s poetry that it slid over my eyes as gently as silk over skin, and I only had to search for word definitions a handful of times. I’d forgotten how reading felt when I was young, mental images burning brightly in my mind, my imagination smoldering above the flint and tinder of the turning pages.

I pull out a gray-jacketed book called The Black Glass Monarch and open it.

On Vern’s eleventh birthday, the Monarch’s Chief Lieutenant came for her.

The story pours over me like water, drips down onto my head until I’m immersed head-to-toe, transported between the covers. I’ve never read this fast, and it’s no Dante, but every time the main character outsmarts a soldier or discovers something about her past, my grip tightens, and this world sharpens until I’ve left my own world altogether.

“Matt?” says a voice, jerking me out of the weird reading haze, and I look over my shoulder. Olivia stands in the doorway, her head tilted, her lips glossed cherry red.

I stand. “Olivia. Hey.”

She heads to her desk and drops her backpack in her seat. “What are you reading?”

“It’s, uh, called The Black Glass Monarch,” I say, and she says, “Oh, I’ve heard of that. You like fantasy?” and I’m like, “Apparently.” She approaches the Book Den shelves, glancing from title to title. I take a paper clip from the shelf and mark my page, shutting the book.

“Listen,” she says, “I didn’t want to say it over text, but thanks for Saturday night,” and I say, “Sure. Would’ve taken you two forever to clean that place alone,” and she says, “Oh, that, too, but I meant with Dan.”