Rage

Rage

            There wasn’t any food in the house, so my mom and I were going out to eat. By not any food, I mean we were out of TV dinners and cereal. We had plenty of rice, pasta, and potatoes, but those have to be made. My mom never liked cooking. She said that since she was a single mother with a two-hour commute, she shouldn’t have to cook. This was problematic because we lived in Concord, a village in rural Jackson County, and there weren’t many options for eating out. So we were going to the only restaurant within half an hour of our house, the Cadet Tavern, even though every meal eaten there significantly shortens your life span.

The Cadet was a bar that had one kind of whiskey, one kind of rum, one kind of vodka, and one brand of beer. All the food served there tasted the same because it’d all been soaked in the same grease vat. But the Cadet was only a five-minute drive from our house, past some cornfields, the cemetery, and my middle school. Because it was the only restaurant in town, kids could be in the Cadet at all hours, running the length of the tiny establishment over and over, knocking into adults, and flipping the plastic pages of the jukebox full of bad classic rock and hits from the Nineties. I was twelve, and had grown out of that behavior, but found it more interesting to watch than the drunken adults in their camouflage shirts and John Deere hats playing pool or having rowdy conversations about how much they hate ethnic minorities.

            It was winter and dark when we left at six in the evening. My younger sister Emily was at some sports practice and would be staying at our Dad’s that night, so I was sure my mom saw the dinner as some kind of special bonding opportunity for the two of us. I wished she would drive us somewhere better to eat. I’d recently declared that I’d never eat meat again—I’d always liked animals better than people—so the only thing on the menu at the Cadet I could have was grilled cheese and fries. There were three cars parked on the street in front of the place and I was shocked by how busy the bar was that early. I knew all the cars belonged to patrons of the Cadet Tavern because the other businesses on that side of the street were vacant. The Cadet used to be between a hardware store and a place to rent DVDs, with a family-owned grocery store further down the block, but was now between empty storefronts. My mom parallel parked her burgundy Buick that my sister referred to as an “old lady car” across the street from the bar, on the side of the road where no cars were parked. Mom was never very good at parallel parking, but skilled parallel parking was never necessary in Concord.

Mom and I entered, her heels clicking on the stained tile, and sat ourselves at a place next to the pool table, nearest the door and furthest from anyone smoking, on the bar’s signature dark-green plastic lawn chairs. Mom was still wearing her work clothes and complementing jewelry. She had a light-brown bob, which currently had grey poking through at the roots, revealing that she needed a dye job, and never went anywhere without putting on make-up. Her tailored navy-blue pantsuit looked out of place next to tall men and women in torn jeans and t-shirts with the Mudflap Girl or “Get Er Done” printed on them. There were no menus; everyone who went there already knew the options. While we waited for the waitress, my mom pulled a bottle of Vernor’s out of her purse. Her drink was rum and ginger ale, but the Cadet didn’t have ginger ale, so she habitually brought her own. I told her she should only have to pay for half the drink—she ignored me.

The only waitress was fat with straight brown hair that dangled past her belt. She looked as though the atmosphere weighed more heavily on her than it did on other people. She never wrote anything down; I’m not sure why she bothered to carry the pen and paper in the pocket of her apron. I ordered my grilled cheese, and my mom ordered a cheeseburger even though on the car ride there she’d complained about needing to lose weight. She only weighed a hundred and ten pounds, but she was less than five feet tall, and I don’t think she’d been over a hundred pounds until she had kids. She complained and obsessed and wrote “exercise” on her to-do lists, but still ordered the artery-clogging cheeseburger every time we went to the Cadet.

I tried to avoid looking at the taxidermy animal heads on the walls between signed photos of NASCAR vehicles so I wouldn’t lose my appetite. The Cadet was very proud to display taxidermy animals shot by none other than Ted Nugent himself. Ted Nugent lived in Concord before he decided to move to Texas, which is one of the reasons I cited when explaining to my mom why she should never have moved there. I didn’t look at the animals, but remembered there was a deer, some kind of antelope, a pheasant, and a wild boar. One summer, some wild boars escaped from Nugent’s hunting-amusement-park-ranch-sadistic-fairyland-home and roamed around the forests and fields of Concord and the surrounding villages. I searched for them in the woods around our house, but my mom stopped letting me play too far from the yard after rifle season started because she worried I’d get shot by accident, which happened every year to someone in Jackson County. Nugent told everyone that he caught the boars, roasted them, and fed them to his family like a true American, but I didn’t believe that for a second. I thought they were still out there, forming some kind of giant wild boar colony.

            “How’s school going, honey?” my mom asked. I never knew how to answer that question. I hated school. Because I got straight A’s and all my teachers thought I was a genius, my mom refused to believe me when I told her I hated school. When I explained that my teachers and classmates all had extreme mental deficiencies due to generations of in-breeding, she told me I was acting like my father, but that I may be able to use the traits I unfortunately inherited from him as a writer of satire someday.

            “I hate school, Mom.”

            “Well, what do you hate about it? How can you do so well if you hate it?” She asked those questions in a tone that suggested they’d never been asked before, that she wouldn’t hear the same answers I’d given her at least sixty-two times previously.

            “Mom, a chimpanzee could get A’s at Concord. It’s boring and Mr. Bauman’s a moron.”

            “Jean,” she snapped, and glanced around to make sure none of Mr. Bauman’s relatives were in the bar. They wouldn’t have been able to hear us over the raucous conversation, laughter between drags on cigarettes, and pool balls clinking together anyway. The few people in the small bar filled it with noise. “Don’t be mean.” After we were silent for a few minutes, I changed the subject in an attempt to appease her.

            “I’d give anything if Kurt Cobain was still alive.” I realized that was only a good conversation starter when I was talking to myself, but I didn’t think about much else. I’d recently become obsessed with Nirvana. I’d collected enough over-sized Nirvana t-shirts to wear one every day of the week, stopped brushing my hair, bought my first pair of black Converse sneakers, and stole some of my dad’s flannels out of his laundry basket during a weekend visit to his house. Kurt Cobain was my soulmate and understood exactly how I felt about everything. He came from a hick town with divorced parents, too. I spent most afternoons in my room, screaming along with Kurt on my stereo, cutting out pictures of him and taping them to my hideous yellow walls I hated. No matter how hard I tried, I could not make my room look cool, could not get rid of my mother’s horrible taste in country-chic decor.

The only thing cool about my room was the old stereo and my green and white knock-off Stratocaster that I played along with my Nirvana CD’s. I’d read every book written about Kurt and memorized the glossy pages of photos in the biographies. The most recent one I’d read was called “Love and Death.” It insinuated that Courtney Love murdered Kurt, and that the suicide was a set-up. I decided the conspiracy theory was absolutely true and wrote a research paper about it that was basically a summary of the book, which was my only source. Mr. Bauman was impressed with it anyway. Most of my classmates wrote about deer or football, painfully exhibiting that their vocabularies hadn’t grown since first grade.

            My mother was worried about my obsession, but when she questioned it, I told her she just couldn’t understand artists. She listened to Nevermind, In Utero, MTV Unplugged, and all the B-sides, outtakes, and covers along with me, but she said she was always more of a Pearl Jam fan, which made me want to throw up.

            “He was a very talented man. Imagine how the world would be different if Jimi Hendrix, or John Lennon, or Janis Joplin had lived longer. If we could only reach out and help talented, troubled people instead of pushing them away, the world would be a much better place,” Mom said in an awkwardly raised voice while still trying to use her polite, we’re-in-public tone—straining to be heard over ACDC’s “Back in Black” which was playing for at least the third time since we’d arrived. It sounded fake when she said things like that, as if she were half-quoting some new-age book on parenting difficult pre-teens, but it meant a lot to me that she at least pretended to share my all-consuming interest.

            I wanted to respond, But Kurt was better than them. And he was murdered by his psycho wife. He was totally over his heroin addiction after he almost OD’d in Rome nearly a year before Courtney had him killed. How could you pull the trigger of a shotgun with your toe after shooting up that much heroin, anyway? It’s physically impossible, but I refrained. She’d read my essay, she knew.

            The waitress finally brought our food, which sat on waxed paper in red plastic baskets. I dabbed the grease off my toasted Wonderbread, pulled the sandwich apart, and shook red pepper flakes and parmesan onto the melted American cheese to provide the illusion of flavor. The Cadet was getting more crowded. The stench of cheap cigarettes became more oppressive as the evening progressed, and every time the door opened, the icy air gave me goose bumps. My mom finished her single cocktail and paid the bill, leaving too big a tip like always. Her glass—which she left neatly placed in the center of a cocktail napkin—had small, pink crescent moons around the rim from her lipstick. We climbed into her impeccably clean, poorly parked car and I could tell she thought I was in a bad mood. I wasn’t, but I didn’t know how to explain that to her. I didn’t know how to tell her that liking Kurt Cobain and hating school didn’t mean I was suicidal. I didn’t know how to tell her that daydreaming about being an artist in the Seattle grunge scene with a bunch of awesome, flannel-clad grunge friends was the only way I could get through the school day. She didn’t want to tell me that I was too young to like Nirvana or to decide to be vegetarian, but I knew she was thinking it.  

            There were lots of things my mother and I didn’t want to tell each other, and usually we didn’t. When I was criticizing Concord, I didn’t tell her that I knew we lived there because she’d made a huge mistake. I didn’t tell her this because the mistake involved my sister and I, and I knew Mom would feel guilty, knowing that I knew we were as much a part of her mistake as Concord was. My dad was the real mistake, but since his DNA was now part of mine and my sister’s, since his anger had passed from his semen into me, if he was the mistake, Emily and I were irremovable from it. My parents moved around Michigan after they were married, trying to find happiness somewhere before they realized what caused their discontent was not location, but each other. They came to Concord because it was half-way between their jobs, and stayed when I was born because they felt Concord was a good place to raise kids. How they came to that conclusion I’m not sure. They both despised the town, which didn’t really allow my sister or I room to develop our own opinions of it.

            My dad stayed in Concord after the divorce, which occurred the summer I turned ten. He moved into a house a three-minute’s drive from ours and never missed an opportunity to tell Emily and me what a martyr he was for not ditching us, an option Mom never had. I liked that he had a house in town close enough to walk to from school, so on the nights Emily and I stayed with him I could hang out at the library or buy candy bars from the gas station or play on the elementary school playground during the two hours between school ending and when he got home from work. I thought Dad seemed younger and smarter than Mom, when really he was just irresponsible and intellectual—which is not the same as being smart. He lectured Emily and I about World War II and rock music history and I absorbed every word he said. He wore flannels like Kurt—he liked to tell me that he was grunge before grunge was cool—and I stole my favorites, shoving them into my backpack, hoping that he wouldn’t notice.

Dad’s miniscule one-bedroom house, with its wood paneling and neighborhood cats, was a fun place to hang out—mostly because it was new—but it never felt like home. It became a home to Emily, but for me being there felt like I was on vacation, or having a sleep over at a friend’s. He tried to make it that way, renting movies and taking us ice skating on the weekends that were his, while the weekends with Mom felt normal, ordinary, nothing special.

One overcast spring afternoon in the first year after the divorce, my sister and I walked back to Dad’s house together after school. It was cold and damp, and water soaked into my sneakers. When we walked up the dirt driveway we were startled to see a group of four young dogs playing in the small backyard. They were too old to be puppies, but not full-grown. They were mutts, clearly not from the same litter, but had probably all come from the same place since they were traveling together. Two looked like some kind of shepherd-lab mix, one was more like a boxer or a pit-bull, and one was smaller and more like a spaniel. They were all muddy from playing in the cold rain. To me they were a pack of wolves sent from some benevolent force to relieve me of every problem or sadness I ever had. I dropped my backpack in the mud and approached them warily. They came when Emily and I called them to us, sniffing our hands and our clothes. One of the shepherds licked my palm, a pagan gesture of trust I wouldn’t feel again until I lost my virginity. Emily and I ran through the neighborhood’s backyards with them, rough-housing and playing fetch with damp sticks. I admired how the dogs observed no boundaries between the yards and ran into the street carelessly. I was awash in an ecstasy I’d never felt before and wouldn’t again for years, not until I fell in love. Their wildness made me nervous and joyous and I wanted it.

When Dad got home and tracked us down the first thing he said was, “We’re not keeping them.” He corralled the dogs into the garage and bought a small bag of dog food from the family-owned grocery store on the corner that hadn’t yet gone out of business. He said he was going to take them to the Humane Society in the morning. Jackson didn’t have a Humane Society. Jackson had a pound. Dad had the easy excuse that since he was renting he wasn’t allowed to have dogs. I knew it was ridiculous to want Dad to keep four puppies that would all grow to be large dogs, but I couldn’t take the loss of that ecstasy, that wildness, I’d found with those animals. I refused to leave the garage until well after dark, when Dad came to get me. “Me and Emily are going to bed, so you’re coming in now, unless you want to sleep out here,” he threatened.

“I want to stay out here and make sure the dogs are ok.” I loved the idea of us huddled to together to keep warm, like wolves do on freezing Yukon nights.

“Get inside. Now.”

I went, leaving my joy behind with the dogs. The next morning, when Dad piled them into his van, I cried. Post-divorce I’d acquired an intense morality that categorized everything as either goodness or pure evil, black and white that couldn’t mix. I felt my father had committed an incredibly cruel sin by taking away those dogs, even though they weren’t mine to keep, and I hated him for it. In my ten-year-old imagination, I’d gained and lost the one place I belonged and all my best friends in a single day.

When I got home from Dad’s one night, two years after the dogs had come and gone, Emily having elected to stay at his house, Mom looked relieved that at least one of her children had returned and asked me to check the mail. Even though I was thirteen, I still got spooked walking down the dark driveway in the cold, afraid someone was hiding behind a tree in our yard or watching from the woods across the street. The turkey vultures that roosted in the trees made the conifer branches creak when they shifted their weight, and the sound of groaning wood terrified me even though I knew what it was. I grabbed the mail, slammed the mailbox shut, and ran back inside, throwing the stack on the kitchen table before kicking my shoes into the closet. I automatically went to my room, wondering what I should do with the couple hours before I went to bed, and wished I had something to do. I knew it was late enough that Mom would yell at me if I played guitar. The boredom was already choking me and I’d been home for five minutes.  

            “Jean, there’s a magazine for you,” Mom called from the kitchen. My Aunt Heidi had gotten me a subscription to a Christian teen magazine called ‘Ignite Your Faith’ for my birthday. Heidi and her husband Derrell were kind of pariahs in the family because, while my entire family was Catholic, when Heidi married Derrell she moved to Houston and became Baptist. This created a culture clash within the family, which was particularly and hilariously obvious at my grandmother’s funeral the previous spring. My Uncle Derrell felt it was necessary for us to sing “Amazing Grace,” and proceeded to perform a passionate rendition of it alone with his wife accompanying timidly, while everyone else stared uncomfortably, waiting to say some more Hail Marys and get the hell out of there.

Heidi and Derrell had been trying to convert my sister and me behind our parents’ backs since we were infants. Our dad refused to allow us to attend catechism classes like my mom wanted, because he wanted us to be able to make our own decisions instead of being brainwashed by a bunch of child-molesters. So I suppose, since we were unaffiliated, we made good targets for Baptists desperate to increase their numbers. There were dozens of Veggie Tales VHS tapes and illustrated Bibles we received for Christmas each year in a box somewhere in the basement. The magazine subscription was a shrewd tactical change. It reminded me every month what a heathen I was and how awesome it was to be a Christian teen. I paged uninterestedly through each issue—the articles were sometimes hilarious—and then threw them away.

            I went out to the kitchen to get the magazine and sat on the red and white plaid loveseat in the living room to read it. Our TV was closed in a black faux-antique chiffarobe-turned-entertainment-center, because Mom liked it to look as if we spent more time playing board games or talking than watching TV. If she hadn’t been gone ten hours a day between her job and commute, this plan might’ve been fulfilled. I hoped my mother would see me curled up in the loveseat and take it as a more social gesture than just returning to my room. I’d recently freaked her out by writing “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” in pen on a pair of my jeans while bored at school, and I felt like I needed to make up for it. I explained that I wasn’t depressed and calling for help, that it was just the title of a Nirvana song, but she was so worried about it she actually spoke to my father. When he brought it up, he told me to go easier on my mother, the nicest thing I’d ever heard him say about her. I was still feeling a little guilty about it, though I thought she shouldn’t have been so dramatic. But my attempt to be nice failed when she started picking out her outfit and making her lunch for work tomorrow, moving restlessly around the house, instead of coming to sit with me in the living room.

That issue of ‘Ignite Your Faith’ had the typical stories about cool Christian rock bands, some teen persevering through some illness through their personal faith and supportive church community, and fashion spreads of girls wearing conservative pastels with frosty blue eye shadow. An article at the end of the issue had a picture of a girl, who looked just like the girls from the fashion section, holding a fluffy orange cat. I was desperate for a pet—for an animal to recreate the same connection I’d felt with the dogs in my father’s yard—but hadn’t yet convinced my mom to let me have one, so I started reading.

The article was about a good Christian girl who found out some of her heathen guy friends had been abusing stray cats in their city. I was ripped from my boredom with horrible violence. It felt like someone had ripped my chest open with a giant, rusty, clawed hand. I was unable to move, and I couldn’t stop reading. The boys caught the cats in alleyways and beat them with whatever objects were lying around. The boys cut out the cat’s eyes and ears with pocketknives and lit off fireworks shoved into the cat’s anuses. One of the boys would grab the cat’s head while the other grabbed the tail, and they’d pull in opposite directions until they heard the cat’s spines pop. I could hear the cats shrieking in agony and the evil boys’ dumbass laughter. My eyes wouldn’t stop going over the words until I was finally able to slam the magazine shut, blind with fury. I screamed, and it sounded like an animal, like no sound I’d ever made before. I felt like I’d been hit in the chest. The pain felt so real that I didn’t understand why there wasn’t a muscular man with a sledgehammer in my living room, poised to swing again. My mom rushed in from the kitchen where she’d been finishing her evening chores, going through the bills aloud, talking to herself about whether she should cancel our cable and how we should be better about keeping the heat turned down when we’re not home.

            “Jean, what’s wrong? What’s going on?” She sounded panicked, but I couldn’t say anything. I had no breath. When I tried to speak, I only ended up howling and crying.

 “They can’t. They can’t. They can’t. Why would they do that? Why?” My heart was hammering against my ribs, tears and snot pouring down my face and neck. “Why?” I screamed at my mom and ripped the page with the picture of the girl and the cat on it to shreds. I tore up the whole magazine while my helpless mother watched in terror. I knew she thought I’d finally lost it, but I couldn’t explain, just kept pulling out the pages. When the magazine had become confetti, and I could no longer rip the tiny pieces with my shaking fingers, I fell forward onto the rough, grey carpet. Pieces of the glossy paper stuck to my face, and I slammed my fists against the floor, wishing it would hurt more.

The images wouldn’t stop and I shrieked louder each time a fresh one appeared. I knew they wouldn’t ever stop, that I could never delete them from my brain, and I was terrified of the future, of having to live each day with the sick images some demented Christians had forced into my head. I was afraid that I’d hurt my mom, but I felt I needed to hurt something, anything. I needed to kill those boys, it felt like if I didn’t I’d die, it felt like a physical need, it felt like hunger. I imagined myself shredding their flesh with my fingernails, bashing their skulls against cement, slashing their faces with a dull knife, but no violence I could imagine satisfied me. No violence I could imagine could come close to the violence the article had just committed on me. Childishly, naively, I was afraid I’d lost my mind. I hadn’t yet learned how the body can pull through most horrors, ones worse than I’d ever experience, even when the mind wants to stop. When my strength failed and I stopped thrashing, my mom sunk down to the floor next to me and pulled me into her lap. Her pearl necklace was cold against my face. “Jean, please tell me what’s going on. What happened?”

            “They were hurting cats, Mom. They were torturing them. Why would they do that? Why?” I was screaming again, and I liked the way it stung my throat, like the first time I sang along to “Heart-Shaped Box.” My “why” sounded as desperate as Kurt’s “wait.”

            “Who was hurting them?”

            “Those dumb, fucking, piece of shit, dumbasses. Someone should kill them, Mom. Why can’t someone just kill them? They deserve to die. They should die like the cats. Someone should do that to them. Why?” My sobs cut me short, and I liked the sharp pain they caused when I gasped for air. I felt calmer, too weak and too empty and too confused to scream anymore, though the images were still there, playing in front of me while I tried to focus on my mother’s face, her wrinkles and the make-up to cover them. I couldn’t stop hearing the pop of the cat’s spine. I crawled out of my mom’s lap into the bathroom to throw up. I made myself dry heave after the food was gone, hoping to get rid of what had invaded my mind. My mom rubbed my shoulders and held the sleeves of my oversized flannel back while I kneeled on the soft burgundy rug, my head in the toilet. She told me it was going to be okay, but her words only sounded like a ritual, like a Hail Mary. She thought it would—my mother and her incredible power to pretend to forget until she actually forgot—but I know for me it wouldn’t.

I crawled back into the living room and she went into the kitchen to get me a glass of water. I leaned against the loveseat and stared vacantly at the pieces of the magazine around me, remembering from their colors which article they came from. I noticed a piece from the cat article and picked it up. It was a bigger piece than the others. I’d probably been sitting on it when I tore the other bigger pieces up. I couldn’t stop myself. I started reading while I heard the refrigerator dump ice into a glass in the kitchen. It was the end of the article. The good Christian girl decided to forgive her friends for their depravity, because that’s what Jesus would want her to do. My lips curled back over my teeth in disgust, and I shredded that piece, too. I added the fucking stupid Christian girl with her silver cross necklace and perfect teeth to my hit list. I imagined strangling her with the necklace, then shoving it down her throat after ripping her teeth out. My mom came in and tentatively set the glass of ice water on a coaster on the black coffee table.

            “Honey, are you all right? Do you want to talk about it?”

            “I just read the end,” I said in a hoarse voice that reminded me of Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.”

            “Did that give you some closure? Do you feel better?”

            “The stupid, dumbass, piece-of-shit Christian bitch forgave them. She just forgave those boys for doing that and kept being friends with them. They stopped, and nothing happened to them, and now they’re all going to fucking nasty heaven where I never want to go. They should die. Someone should do to them what they did to those cats. And that fucking moron girl, too.” My mom wasn’t supposed to know that I said the word “fuck” so much. She winced but I couldn’t care. It was the only word that came close to what I was trying to say, though nothing I said sounded like what I was thinking, and my inability to explain myself infuriated me.

I thought about all the Christian kids at school, the Catholics cutting through the shrubs separating the playground from the Catholic Church for CCD, the Methodists walking two blocks into town to the Methodist Church for Bible School. I thought about their hypocrite parents who shot deer for fun. “I want to kill them all,” I growled in my possessed voice. My mom had no response—not even pretentious, inapplicable advice from her parenting books—and I was terrified. I thought she’d tell me everyone deserves to be forgiven, or that torturing human beings wouldn’t make up for what the boys did to those cats, but she said nothing. I looked at her and she was crying into her hands, manicured fingers smearing her mascara. And I knew there was nothing to be done for my rage.

Twins

Twins

“Don’t tap it against the ashtray like that. See, it comes unpacked here.” Kale pointed out the dents in the side of the Marlboro Menthol he’d given to his sister. “Just tap on it with your finger like this. Or flick it with your thumb. Some people call it ‘flicking the cherry,’ but that just makes me uncomfortable.”

            By some people, you mean the meth-mouth white-trash brats you hang around now, Colleen thought, squirming on the sticky red vinyl of the diner booth. A pubescent girl gyrated on the flat screen TV on the opposite wall, pop music video on mute. Kale was teaching Colleen to smoke. This introduced a new dynamic in their relationship because previously Colleen had taught him everything. She was older, after all, and the age gap was bigger than the mathematical reality of one year and twenty-two days. Now she felt like his child as he taught, as if Kale knew all and she knew nothing, and she liked it, even though it made her feel inferior.

Kale taught Colleen to place the cigarette slightly to one side of her bow-shaped lips, because if you put it in the center, you look like you don’t know what you’re doing. She’d quit letting him light cigarettes for her because she thought it made her look dumb, and though he said buddy lights were more intimate, she used her own lighter. Kale told her how to judge someone by the brand they smoked. Boring sluts smoke Marlboro Lights. Hipsters smoke American Spirits because they’re organic. Black men and slutty white girls who want to sleep with black men smoke Newports. Badasses smoke Lucky Strikes. Colleen became obsessed with watching people smoke, especially since, on her healthy college campus, smokers were ostracized for being a public health risk and polluting the environment.

The fat, slouching waitress came to refill Kale’s coffee and bring Colleen more hot water for her tea. “Thank you, Chelsea,” Kale said loudly, so that everyone in the establishment would know he was in with the staff. Chelsea looked at them with suspicious curiosity. New weird girl in the diner. Chelsea was probably trying to figure out if they were related or if they were dating. That was generally what that expression meant. Kale and Colleen had a vague physical similarity which hinted they were siblings, but were also physically affectionate, communicating through hand squeezes and eye contact, which made it difficult to read their relationship. The two wouldn’t have looked anything alike if they didn’t have the same attitude about beauty. Kale was a full foot taller than Colleen, Colleen had brown eyes and Kale had blue ones, but since they dyed their hair black and shared oversize black T-shirts advertising punk bands, strangers could sometimes guess they were siblings. They avoided the sun like the plague, which was reflected in their milky white pallor, and ate little. They often ruminated on the attractiveness of a fully visible rib cage and egged each other on in their efforts to look like skeletons. Every pants size dropped triggered a celebration and a challenge to the other.

Kale had never actively taught Colleen anything before. Knowledge wasn’t gold to him as it was to her, and he thought Colleen was smarter than he was anyway, or at least not interested in learning the kinds of things he might know that she didn’t. He was better at painting and drawing than she was, but he never endeavored to teach her. Just encouraged her, bought her art supplies for Christmas, painted his grotesque cartoonish ravens and skeletons sitting across from her, but never taught her. Kale used various mixtures of thick black, white, and red oil paints, and Colleen’s still lifes paled in comparison to his abstract horrors that bled before her. She’d taught him to play guitar, drilling each chord, offering the perfect tidbit of advice when he got stuck, but that was forever ago. Now Kale was better than Colleen at guitar too. She told him all about different musical and literary movements—the punks, the Beats, the Lost Generation in Paris—and he retained some of those facts through sheer repetition rather than interest. She taught him to write poetry simply by forcing him to do it. He hadn’t beaten her at that yet, but although she’d recently won some money for a poem she’d written, she was sure her brother would soon outstrip her in that area, too.

They offered each other the art they created like presents, and each time he outdid her all she could do was scoff and snarl, “Remember, if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even know who Sid Vicious is.” Colleen had given him all the artists she loved like gifts too, so Kale was better than Colleen at everything, but she had a bigger impact on his life than he had on hers. There was no way to tell what he’d be like without her, while she’d more or less be the same, and she saw this as another defeat. Colleen would’ve still been an artist if he hadn’t been born, as their parents hadn’t intended on him being born. He couldn’t say the same. He had no way to conceive what his life would be like without her, although such a life was peeking out from around corners since she’d abandoned him to go to the university.

All the employees at Denny’s appeared to know her brother intimately. The hostess gave them his favorite booth in the smoking section, knowing already that he’d be expecting more people. The waitress, Chelsea, only asked for Colleen’s order and automatically brought Kale coffee and buffalo chicken wraps with extra sauce. He put two regular sugars, one sweet-and-low, and a generous helping of cream into his coffee while she drank her tea black. Colleen had already been dumb enough on one occasion to ask for soymilk; the waitress looked at her as if she had just attempted to order in a different language, and Kale nearly shot coffee out his nose with laughter. He thought the incident was cute, but she would never ask for anything not on the menu again.

Colleen thought Denny’s was one of the most depressing places the youth of their hometown could choose to spend their time. The waitresses stank of prescription drugs, trailer parks, and terminated pregnancies. There was nothing on the menu Colleen would allow herself to eat. The place was too strongly air conditioned and had violent florescent lighting, but you could smoke there. That was all that mattered. The only other thing young people in their blue-collar town could do for fun was loiter in Walmart or brew methamphetamines. Their hometown was predominantly working class, if you were lucky enough to even have a job, and recent declines in the economy had ravaged the small city. There were as many abandoned businesses as there were operating ones, but still many people who’d been born there never left—including their parents.

Their parents were hicks, but Colleen hadn’t learned to hate that about them until after the divorce. They split up when she was ten and Kale was nine. The worst thing about it was realizing she’d been too dumb to see it coming. The family never had any money to begin with, so the drop to relying on a single income destroyed the slight degree of stability their parents had been able to provide. Growing up, Colleen had hero-worshipped their father, while Kale was closer to their mom. Their dad was an artist, a writer, and a musician, but was also angry and melancholy, prone to mood swings and alcohol abuse. All his faults that Colleen had been too young to see surfaced in the wake of the split. After the divorce, he took a job that required him to spend six months of the year installing security systems at research bases in Antarctica, and the other six months unemployed in the States, living in a four-hundred-dollar-a-month hotel room. The job doubled as an escape from all responsibility related to his children. When he moved out, Colleen, Kale, and their mother couldn’t afford to stay in their house, which began their period of drifting. They moved ten times in the next eight years, but their living situation had stabilized some after Colleen left for college. Their mother still worked sixty hours a week between two minimum-wage jobs, and they still lived in a dilapidated basement apartment in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the dying city, but one fewer mouth to feed eased the financial burden, and they hadn’t moved for the two years Colleen had been at school.

The city where Colleen went to college was only forty minutes from where she and Kale grew up, but it might as well have been the opposite side of the earth. The college town was prosperous and thriving on the money brought to it by overpaid professors and wealthy out-of-state students; a fake utopia of the Midwest. People there renovated unique, old houses and filled them with expensive art and tastefully ironic kitsch. Adults and students held public protests against war, education cuts, and pollution. Wealthy ex-hippies who liked to pretend they were still radical grocery shopped at Whole Foods and sent their kids to prestigious public schools with lovely facilities. They hung out and drank sustainable coffee in cafes, used book stores, and ethnic food restaurants.  There were no cafes, book stores, or ethnic food restaurants in Colleen and Kale’s hometown. But you could get unlimited coffee for two dollars at Denny’s, which at least attracted some business from the adjacent highway and by being open twenty-four hours.

Kale’s friends trickled in and out of the diner—they knew to look for him here—while Colleen smoked and plunged her tea bag in and out of the hot water. She said hello to everyone, if they hadn’t met her before they knew her by reputation, and listened to the conversations, but didn’t feel she had anything to say that wouldn’t be a thinly veiled insult. She watched Kale interact with the others through a curtain of smoke. Unlike her archaic heroes from old films—James Dean, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall—he didn’t look sexy with a cigarette. Maybe it was the glow of black and white in the movies, maybe the lack of smell, but she thought it made her own flesh and blood sitting before her look strange. People Colleen knew and didn’t know came and went, and she observed the new phrases and facial expressions Kale used when interacting with them. He’d picked up a few annoying catch-phrases, including calling anything he liked “hot” and referring to girls as “tricks.” He cocked his head to the side at a sharper angle and with more arrogance than he used to after saying something he thought was clever, but still rubbed his nose with the back of his hand the same way he always had, with a lack of the self-conscious narcissistic mediation she hated that’d invaded his other movements. He was changing, but she wasn’t going to lose him.

Kale refused to learn the importance of education no matter how hard Colleen tried to teach it because evil education, which he’d always associate with the rich people who filled the city she lived in with their superfluous possessions, had taken his beloved sister away. Colleen, on the other hand, did not associate education at all with her rich neighbors whom she too despised. She felt education was saving her from becoming a white-trash teenage bride like every other girl she’d graduated high school with. Without the university she thought she’d have to start abusing prescription medication to cope with existence, and so being away from Kale was just an unfortunate side effect of having her life saved. Neither could come close to fathoming the other’s point of view, just as neither could understand how they’d come to be so dependent upon each other.

Colleen had taken up smoking conscious of all the negative health effects, conscious of how her university friends would turn up their noses in disgust, in an effort to remain close to her brother, a desperate attempt to salvage common ground. Colleen kept herself estranged from her peers by acting more white-trash than she actually was, much as she’d kept herself estranged from her high school classmates by acting more cosmopolitan than she actually was. Her fellow university students reeked of money and easy living, with their smart phones and designer bags that their parents paid for along with their tuition. Colleen said she couldn’t relate to these people that didn’t have to work for anything, but was really just a loner who avoided any connection with others. She had a very low opinion of human beings. Her brother escaped this filter because, at the age of one year and twenty-two days when he entered into her life, it was not yet in place. Kale was the only one who got past it.

Seeing Kale and his friends, people who’d made the incomprehensible choice not to leave, contentedly hanging out at Denny’s reminded Colleen of how odd her simple decision to get the hell out of there was. Neither of them was quite sure how she’d come to the revelation that she could leave. The act of leaving is simple. The realization that it’s possible to leave is the hard part, the part her brother couldn’t accept even with her ecstatic ravings about classes and city life. He came to visit her sometimes. Colleen pushed her second mattress onto the floor, though they sometimes slept next to each other on the same bed anyway. They walked around the city, him holding her hand even though it reduced his chances of getting hit on, staring at the cars and people and businesses as if they were at the zoo. They both felt that the bustling humanity before them was something outside themselves.

Colleen was loneliest after Kale left, maybe because of his eagerness to do so. He made walking out the door of her apartment look so easy, so natural, that she was forced to understand he didn’t belong there. She’d mope around her apartment when Kale left and clean up after him, cataloguing the things he left behind: crumbs from lime-flavored tortilla chips, dirty dishes, guitar picks, empty packs of cigarettes. The most interesting and annoying findings were the ones he left in Colleen’s bed. His random pocket change imbedded itself in her space, continuing to turn up long after he left. She’d wake from an afternoon nap with a nickel stuck to her bare thigh, former president’s face pressed into her flesh. She’d pull back the sheets to find Abraham Lincoln glaring up at her. Change on the kitchen table, bathroom sink, under rugs—she didn’t know how so much money could flow from a kid so poor.

Shortly after Kale got his tattoo he left behind black skin peelings on her blue-and-white checkered sheets. The tattoo was a quotation from Dr. Seuss, one of Colleen’s favorite authors. On the inside of his bicep in Gothic black lettering he had printed the word “UNLESS.” Their entire lives she had to whine incessantly to get him to read The Lorax with her, so the tattoo was a small victory. There was no way he could look at it or tell someone about it without thinking of her. Kale left dyed black hairs too, but Colleen’s were longer. Their dead hairs sought each other out on the floor of her apartment to form tangled black knots. Once he left his rotting black leather wallet, full of the forgeries of Denny’s coupons that he lived on. Kale left things behind wherever he went because the tight jeans he loved were meant for women, who were meant to carry purses, and everything spilled out of his shallow pockets.

Kale had picked Colleen up from the Greyhound station earlier that evening. Colleen didn’t have a car because she was terrified of driving and had no use for one in the city. She had to take a city bus from her apartment to the Greyhound station, then the Greyhound to their hometown where Kale had to pick her up. This stretched a commute that could’ve taken half an hour to almost two, but Colleen felt she met interesting people riding buses, so she didn’t really mind. Traveling alone made her feel self-sufficient, and the long journey increased her anticipation of seeing Kale, so as long as the bus didn’t smell too strongly of urine, she found the trip pleasant.

Kale’s enormous, fifteen year old, green Lincoln was sitting in the parking lot when Colleen arrived, music blasting from the cassette player, and she clumsily ran out of the bus with her acoustic guitar on her shoulder. Kale got out of the car to let her in—the passenger door didn’t open—and gave her a hug and kiss. The pack of cigarettes bulging out of the pocket of his flannel crushed against her cheek. “I wish you’d clean some of this shit out of here,” she said as she shoved fast food trash and empty cigarette packs onto the floor. “Maybe you could get a girlfriend if your car wasn’t so nasty.” He ignored her. 

Though Kale had one of those fancy car ashtrays that could hold hundreds of butts and put the cigarette out for you, the front seat of his car was still covered in ash. The backseat was full of everything he needed to live: a guitar, a banjo, his entire wardrobe, a Tupperware container full of tobacco and cigarette tubes, a blanket, and more trash. Rarely did Kale return to the apartment he shared with their mother. He ignored his hunger pangs and crashed at friends’ houses, napped in a booth at Denny’s, or went without sleep.

Colleen was glad of her decision to skip dinner as they drove away from the bus station. The Lincoln had no suspension, so she became horribly nauseated if she rode with him for longer than twenty minutes. Every bump felt twice as high as it should have. Each time Colleen visited their hometown things looked different. More businesses had gone under, so places where there should’ve been neon signs, advertisements, and parked cars were vacant. Walmart was reliably well-lit and crowded. The movie theater was still there, though it had been reduced to showing only the two biggest blockbusters at any given time. The street they drove down was lined with fast food joints, some operating and some empty.

“So, what do you wanna do?” Colleen asked. “We have a while before you need to be to work.” Kale made some vague I-don’t-know-what-do-you-wanna-do type noises in his nose. “We can go to Denny’s if you want. I don’t know why you think I hate all your friends, but I don’t, okay? Let’s just go there until you have to work.”

“Okay.”

She was kind of lying. Something about Kale’s new friends put her on edge, but she couldn’t figure out exactly what it was and decided to try and be diplomatic. Through their childhood and until she moved away they’d spent most of their time together and had the same friends. Partly Colleen was jealous because Kale’s new friends got to spend more time with him than she did, which she realized was irrational but still didn’t seem fair. Partly she felt they were replacing her, and this filled her with rage. Partly she felt that his new friends were unintelligent and not very interesting, but she wasn’t sure whether she wasn’t just being a snob. When Colleen visited home, she was always self-conscious about acting like a snob, because she thought the spoiled rich brats she went to school with had turned her into one.

Subconsciously Colleen blamed the new friends for their new rifts in communication that scared her so much she’d erupt in tears if Kale didn’t hear something she’d said or misinterpreted a facial expression. The real cause of the problem was distance. They both knew it, but refused to do more about it than complain about how little the other visited. She’d been shy her entire life, but for the first time she felt her brother was misreading her shyness. Kale should’ve been able to distinguish between her I-hate-this silence and her I’m-ok-with-this-I-just-have-nothing-to-say-right-now silence. Kale should’ve known that Colleen not saying a word the entire time she was with him and his friends didn’t mean she wanted to leave. Sitting at Denny’s for hours on end was the thing to do for community college drop-outs in her town, and Colleen sometimes found it interesting from a purely ethnographic standpoint.

The caffeine was making Colleen more nervous than usual; she bit at her cuticles and tore the Lipton tag dangling off the side of her stained mug to shreds. There was a new girl in her brother’s life who was bound to show up. Kale wasn’t good with girls, he’d never had a serious girlfriend, but every new bimbo he became infatuated with put Colleen on edge. Being displaced in her brother’s affections by a community-college drop-out with the IQ of a Barbie doll wasn’t going to happen. Sure enough, Jane strode into Denny’s with a confidence inappropriate for a shitty highway diner, obnoxiously well-dressed in an artsy-bohemian vein, clothes purchased from Urban Outfitters with her parent’s money.

“Hey! Look at us. We spend, like, everyday here. We’re, like, best friends.” Jane giggled, but stopped abruptly when she noticed Kale’s discomfort. “I mean, except for your sister. Everyone knows she’s your best friend.” Jane laughed another fake female laugh and was saved from the fury staring back at her by the waitress. “Hi, Chelsea. I’ll just have an order of chili cheese fries and a Coke.”

The bitch can eat nasty food and still be that thin, Colleen thought, hunger gnawing at her, giving her the shakes of low blood sugar that her brother never got. Colleen knew this little goddamn blonde whore idiot was trying to fuck Kale, or at least manipulate his affections to her own advantage, but she had the nerve to try to cultivate a friendship with him first, maybe in preparation for some deep, meaningful relationship. Stupid slut. Since finding out about Jane and spying on her Facebook page when Kale accidently forgot to log out on her laptop, Colleen had started having the dreams again. Kale’s male friends never caused them, but they posed less of a threat. Colleen believed women, and especially Kale’s crushes, were demanding shrews who’d suck every ounce of a guy’s time and personality until there’s nothing left. In the dreams, Colleen murdered his female suitors, ripping skin and hair to shreds, beating flesh against concrete, left with nothing but an inanimate bruised body like a bruised fruit. These dreams made her question her sanity sometimes—was she capable of doing anything that violent? Colleen knew that their father had spent some time in jail when he was young for almost killing a man with a golf club, and she felt that same blind rage passed to her through his semen heat in her veins. Glowering at the dumb blonde before her, imagining the myriad of ways Jane could hurt her brother, Colleen was scared she might be. 

Colleen saw Jane’s relief when Kale’s new best guy friend, Ben, came in, greeting the entire staff of Denny’s before coming to their table.

“How’s it goin’, man? Hey, Chelsea, get me a coffee and a cup of ice.”

“It’s goin’ great, man. I came up with this new guitar thing today. I’m tellin’ you, it was some hot shit.” Ben’s arrival was a relief for Colleen too because she was under less pressure to talk. Over the next hour, five more of Kale’s friends showed up, crowding into the red booths. Kale’s conversations with his friends irritated Colleen because they were full of ridiculous narcissistic posturing, tasteless jokes, and references to different situations in which they’d gotten fucked up and done something stupid. His words, tone of voice, and subject matter were completely different when he talked to her, which made everything he said over his Denny’s coffee sound fake. 

After sitting in the sticky booth for a couple hours they went out to Kale’s car so he could get high before starting his night shift.  He used the same excuses to justify his marijuana habit he’d used when he started smoking cigarettes; it helped his anxiety, he needed it to stay awake, his stomach hurt without it. Colleen had succumbed to the cigarettes, but she hated the weed. She thought marijuana makes people stupid, and the loss of her intelligence terrified her more than anything. She wasn’t pretty, or nice, or funny; being smart was the only positive quality Colleen possessed. She recognized the hypocrisy of refusing to smoke pot because it’s bad for you while she starved herself, but decided to ignore it. Maybe she smoked cigarettes instead of pot for no other reason than because she thought one would make you skinny and the other fat, but she stuck to her familiar excuses. She knew her brother was just as intelligent as she was, and if Kale could do something stupid on purpose, so could she.

Kale lit up with his stupid penis-shaped lighter that he thought was funny, but Colleen hated. It was made of fleshy rubber, had huge veins sticking out, and she found it repulsive. Colleen sat next to him in the Denny’s parking lot and stared out the car window, covered with ash and reeking of marijuana. “I fucking hate that lighter—it’s disgusting,” she said, not turning to look at him.

“Fine. You know what? I’ll just get rid of it then.” Instead of chucking it out the window like she hoped, Kale began to pick the rubber apart and throw the pieces at her, until nothing but the metal tube was left. “Happy?” Tears streamed down Colleen’s face, but she was turned away and didn’t make a sound. She felt trapped by this malevolent person she no longer knew, her own hometown a strange foreign country she had no way to navigate without him. “I have to go to work now.” Kale started the car and waved at his friends milling around the parking lot as the Lincoln bounced over the curb and drove away.

Since Colleen worked at the library and had class during the day, one of the only ways they could spend time together was if she accompanied Kale to his night shift at the hotel. Colleen was afraid she’d get him fired, but Kale insisted it was fine and he didn’t care if he did get the axe. She sat on the couch in the lobby reading classic works of literature for her English classes while he worked, and he came to sit next to her when he didn’t have anything to do. They didn’t talk as much as they used to, just sat next to each other, her head on his shoulder, his head on her head, dyed black hair blending together.

The new physical tics and facial expressions her brother had developed in Colleen’s absence made him more fascinating to watch. She’d always been obsessed with watching his hands. They were odd-looking; large, flat, with incredibly long fingers that ended in nails bitten to the quick. Tobacco stains had appeared between the first two fingers on each hand. Kale’s hands looked new to Colleen when they cradled a cigarette, confidently flicking the end with his thumb. They were too large for his pockets, and she loved the strange, uncomfortable way he rummaged about in his pants, spilling spare change in the search for his lighter.

There was a deep, jagged scar on Kale’s right thumb from an incident with a hand saw when they were in high school. He’d been cutting branches in the yard as Colleen watched, and they were discussing their mother’s new boyfriend. Bad thing to do while using dangerous tools. He sliced his thumb open and looked up at her in shock. Always useless in emergency situations, Colleen cursed and screamed while Kale spattered blood all over them, the yard, and the kitchen. Their mother attempted to remedy the wound by closing it with glue used to apply plastic fingernails, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding. After putting in ten stitches, the nurse at the free clinic said he’d come close to cutting a tendon that would’ve rendered his thumb useless. The scar still hadn’t lost its raised, purple presence.

Their father abandoned them, but their mother was no paradigm of perseverance either. She nursed her loss with a new sexual promiscuity both frightening and disgusting. She courted men in online chat rooms designed for people looking for sex. It wasn’t uncommon for her to send Colleen and Kale a text in the day telling them not to come home after school until she called them. Kale was angry, but he was so good at pretending, deluding himself that there was nothing there. Colleen became homicidal, picking fights with her mother’s boyfriends until her mother stopped bringing them home, then stopped coming home herself. Sometimes Colleen thought Kale was being reasonable and handling things better than she was; other times she thought he was just a coward. When she saw him slice his finger nearly in two, she realized they shared more rage than she’d thought.

His hands might’ve seemed foreign to her while he smoked, but Colleen hated watching them fiddle with his phone. She considered herself pretty anti-technology, but Kale was the opposite, and Colleen was more jealous of his phone than of any friend or girlfriend he had. Kale was constantly stroking it, touching it, reading its work, listening to its stories, checking its various bodily functions to make sure it was all right. She’d glare at him as soon as she heard its vibrations, curled up in his pocket, begging for attention. Kale knew she hated it, but thought she was being unreasonable, so he ignored her rolling eyes and frustrated sighs. He’d spend his free time at Denny’s with Ben while both of them texted other people and barely said a word to each other. This pastime seemed completely useless to Colleen, but that was the key to their difference—he didn’t need all his time to have a use.

While it was a bizarre way to spend time together, Colleen enjoyed accompanying her brother to the hotel. She loved being awake while everyone else was asleep, the intense solitary feeling of early dawn. Only the hotel’s strangest occupants were awake during Kale’s shift, standing outside to smoke and taking dozens of the complementary cookies he baked. She read the old issues of Time and Newsweek sitting in the lobby, took an occasional cat nap on the couch, and sat next to him on the benches outside during his cigarette breaks. She loved how eerie the streetlights looked when the sky was beginning to lighten in the morning.

The night shift at the hotel consisted of hours of boredom punctuated by moments of incredible weirdness. Around one a.m., Ben stormed into the lobby, completely drunk, freaking out about having lost his credit card at the local bar. He’d stolen the card from his mother that very morning and now was without funds to buy cigarettes. Though Colleen found him mildly amusing and they shared an interest in Edgar Allen Poe, she regarded him as if he were from another planet. Colleen couldn’t understand how one could still be sneaking out of one’s parents’ home at the age of twenty-five and not be too addicted to hard drugs to have friends. When a handicapped hotel guest limped out the front door for a cigarette, Kale and Ben sat in the lobby and waited until the guy was out of earshot to laugh at him. Colleen laughed meanly too, but at them, not the disabled man.

After Ben stumbled drunkenly away to go steal more money from his parents for cigarettes, a tall man with an afro came down from upstairs, told Kale he was expecting a guest, and that, if she wasn’t blonde and cute, not to give her his room number. The woman in question appeared not thirty seconds after the man disappeared up the elevator. She must’ve passed inspection because she was directed to the man’s room. After she left, Colleen and Kale raised eyebrows at each other from across the lobby and Kale mouthed, “She’s gonna have sex with the afro guy.” When the woman re-appeared two hours later to weave her way back out to her car, they exchanged the same glance behind her back and smothered their laughs. That night it was raining while they sat outside for four o’clock cigarettes. They wore leather jackets, and his arm was around her shoulders. The droplets fell hard and straight down, and Colleen thought the rain in the parking lot was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.

Around five she drifted off on the couch, crushing her Shakespeare anthology beneath her, but Kale shook her awake soon after. “I’ve gotta make breakfast, and people are starting to come down. You gotta get up,” he whispered. A reporter on the television in the breakfast room was re-glorifying the horror of September 11^th for the disaster’s tenth anniversary. Kale let her eat the breakfast he made if Colleen pretended she was a guest and didn’t let on that she knew him. They never had any problems because, with her head stuck in a book at 5:30 a.m., no one said any more than good morning. When she finished, she pretended she was leaving and sat in Kale’s car in the far corner of the parking lot before his shift ended, striding confidently out of the too eager automatic doors as if she had somewhere important to be.

He’d agreed to drive her back to her apartment that morning. He could sleep there in the day, then drive back to work that night. Neither of them was in a fit state to drive, both so exhausted they felt as if their bodies were made of cement. Colleen offered, but since the car had no title, plates, or insurance, Kale refused. He didn’t want her to get in trouble if they got pulled over. If you got arrested, I’d make them take me with you, Colleen thought. Where else would I go?

Colleen preferred when Kale drove. She’d been terrified of driving since she’d totaled their mother’s vehicle, nearly killing the both of them, a month after getting her license, in one of the moments of intense stupidity that punctuated her high intelligence. The four a.m. rain hadn’t diminished, and the windshield wipers smacked at it pathetically, smearing water across the window and making it even harder to see. Colleen’s heart raced with the sickening mix of terror and excitement she loved about reckless driving. Kale wasn’t a very attentive driver, but riding with him was exciting because then she felt her life was in his hands, and she liked being unsure what he’d do with it.

“Will you roll me a cigarette?” Kale asked. Colleen’s heart raced as they dodged traffic cones and semis, the road before them a watery blur. That highway was in a constant state of construction from March until November every year. The sedentary cranes and bulldozers rose regally above the muddy median like dinosaurs. She reached into the back seat for his plastic container. Colleen was horrible at rolling cigarettes; she ruined at least three tubes before managing to do it correctly. “It needs some more tobacco. Here, turn it upside down and clean it out. No, no, leave the thing open while you’re doing that.” Kale tried to coach her, but she was pathetic.

“I can’t do it.” She threw the container into the trash pile at her feet.

“Ok, then I’m gonna have to stop and do it myself. I’m falling asleep.”

The sun strained to get out from behind the clouds, but it was losing, and the white sky turned everything grey. Colleen stuck her left thumb in her mouth, peeling off chunks of her cuticle with her teeth. Kale hated this nervous habit of hers and yanked her bleeding hand out from between her lips. He held it firmly—the same way their father used to grasp the back of their necks so he wouldn’t lose them in crowds. She’d done it this time, the sticky blood slid between their hands and dripped into the cup holder, giving off the smell of dirty metal. They clutched each other’s hands as they flew. 

Swamp Song

           

Swamp Song: A True Story About Mud, Adolescence, and Wrecking Automobiles

The house I grew up in bordered a man-made swamp, as did most of the homes in rural Jackson County. These swamps weren’t supposed to be swamps. They were supposed to be canals that led into lakes, which were not man-made, so residents could keep their pontoon boats and canoes in their backyards and have easy access to the lake during the one or two months of the year warm enough to fish or swim. They say that in Michigan you’re never more than half-hour’s drive from a lake of some kind. Our lake was called Swain’s Lake. I don’t know who Swain was. The canals were dug to increase property value in a part of the world where property was nearly worthless and homes sold for as much as mini-vans or tropical vacations. The canals fought their own existences, silting up, growing shallower and muddier each year, turning themselves into swamps.  

It would’ve been poetic if my first love had come from the swamp—like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who I’d imagined would make an ideal husband when I was six—but he didn’t. Spencer came from school, where all first loves come from. Spencer grew up on a swamp a few miles away from mine. I never imagined I’d have a boyfriend in high school. I created elaborate fantasies about the beautifully tortured punk rockers I’d meet in college, but there was no way, no way I’d find anyone to like, much less like me back, among the hundred-fifty redneck losers I suffered through high school with. When I was young, I forced myself to ignore my classmates, but that forced blissful ignorance could only last so long.

Spencer noticed me because I was weird and because his older brother Steven, whom I was in marching band with, told him I had nice legs. I met Spencer at marching band camp a few weeks before school started in the fall. By then I’d cut my hair again—as my mother had when I was young, but of my own accord this time—and bleached it blonde. I let the dark roots stick out, like some kind of hybrid between Courtney Love and Debbie Harry. I was almost as short as my mother, and thin, with oddly large hazel eyes that I thought made me look like a bug, or an alien. Spencer was tall and as skinny as I was, with long light-brown hair that hung in his eyes, which could be either blue or green depending on his mood. I saw Spencer—a new freshman, a percussionist like Steven was and his younger brother, Skylar, would be—watching my sunburned and bug-bitten thighs while I marched with the flutists, and was caught off guard by the idea that someone would be attracted to me. As the only punk rocker in my high school, guys were generally too intimidated by my feminist babblings and confused by my outfits to like me, which suited me perfect because I hated nearly everyone I went to high school with.

I noticed Spencer because he wouldn’t stop noticing me, and because for his first day of high school he bought a pair of black Converse sneakers in imitation. Mine were rotted from years of overuse due to my refusal to wear any other shoes. His were new, the black and white contrast still sharp. I wrote “I wanna be your dog” on his in black pen at lunchtime, and he wrote some dumb quotation from a Fall Out Boy song on mine during a water break from marching band rehearsal. I ignored the stupidity of his taste in music, then fell in love with him when he let me change it.

            The sixteenth summer of my life was nothing but Spencer and me visiting each other’s homes and swamps, begging our parents for rides between houses. I got my driver’s license in June, but had no car. I stared out the kitchen window at the swamp and read outside in the hammock while Mom was at work, pretending to do things I enjoyed, but really waiting for business hours to end, for Mom to come home so I could whine and plead until she allowed me to drive the five miles to get Spencer, as long as I promised to return him to his own swamp and be home before midnight. Sometimes Spencer would catch a ride to my house from Steven or his parents, and I’d sit on the cold concrete of the front porch, pretending to read The Catcher in the Rye for the twelfth time, heart racing like a caffeine overdose with every car that passed.

The suddenness and severity of our attachment to each other scared me because it was outside of my control. It was as if my affirmative response to his whispered “Will you go out with me?” on the way to our separate school buses had deliciously cursed me. We fell into a wild, intolerable selfishness. We wanted to care about the people around us, but couldn’t. I was fifteen when Spencer gave me my first kiss. My lips were small and bow-shaped; his were full and covered small crooked teeth. I was in bed, sleeping off one of the chronic migraines I still suffer from. The Nirvana and Green Day posters on my pale yellow walls swirled from prescription pain killers and lust.

Mom, my younger sister, Emily, and I took a short vacation to Saugatuck that summer, and that trip was when I realized I was in deep, so much deeper than the mud of our swamp, deeper even than Lake Michigan. It’d been two months and many hundreds of kisses since he’d kissed me for the first time. I spent my family’s only summer vacation daydreaming about home, about the first time he put my breasts in his mouth, pulling apart my white bikini top while we lay half-naked in the sun on the picnic table, pulses throbbing with the thrill that someone could’ve been watching. In Saugatuck, my family and I stayed in a cheap, rustic motel for five days, and I missed Spencer so much I thought I was going insane. I wanted to enjoy the beaches and kitschy shops—I told myself in my adult voice that it was good for us to spend time apart—but the thought I wish Spencer was here kept surfacing no matter how hard I tried to ignore it. I have carried that thought into every stressful moment and period of depression in my adult life, years after we broke up. It sits in a pile with my other knee-jerk ineffective responses to catastrophe, along with I need a cigarette and I wanna go home.  I wish Spencer was here: a mantra that still brings no comfort.

When we got home and I’d washed the Lake Michigan sand out of my hair, Mom let me drive her white Ford Escape to pick up Spencer and Skylar, and bring them back to our house for a campfire. I drove seventy miles an hour on the un-policed back roads because that’s how my older friends drove and I thought it was what I was supposed to do. Emily rode in the passenger seat, window rolled all the way down, her naturally blonde hair whipping across her round face. She frowned in disapproval at the speedometer, but I was high on recklessness. Spencer and Skylar lived down a meandering dirt road where the houses were a mile apart. Driving out to their place made my neighborhood feel cosmopolitan. The summer had been dry. I thought of Steinbeck as I watched the pale dust fly up behind us in the rearview mirror.

The people living on Swains Lake spent most of their time outdoors in June, July, and August—no one had money for any other kind of entertainment. The swamp’s smell became overpowering by mid-August—you were reminded of the water’s presence even in the front yard where you couldn’t see it—but its odor of rotting matter was ignored or masked by the smell of campfires. At that same time, when the swamp smelled the most putrid, the snapping turtles mated. They writhed and rocked under the duck weed, and it looked as if the swamp were boiling. The snapping turtles would traverse the empty country roads slowly to cross from swamp to swamp. When Emily and I were kids, if we came upon a snapper while driving, Dad would pull over and pick it up by its dragon tail. He would distract the dangerous mouth with a stick, then place it on the side of the road toward which it had been heading—Emily and I thoroughly impressed with his heroism. I would watch the water swirling in the snapping turtles’ fornication from my rusty, yellow swing set on the top of the hill, knowing the frogs I loved to catch had been scared off, and that I wasn’t strong enough to net one of the ancient snappers.

Spencer and I offered to clean up the campfire when the others decided the mosquitoes were becoming too oppressive despite the smoke. It was cloudy and there was a new moon. After Spencer put the fire out, and Mom had pulled down the blinds in the house, there was no light. Graham crackers, marshmallows, and Hersey bars piled awkwardly in my arms, I turned to walk towards the house guided by memory, not sight. Before I made it to the foot of the hill, Spencer grabbed a fistful of my hair and threw me under him on the damp ground. The dew soaked through my red Stooges t-shirt and tattered jeans. Spencer was thin, but wiry; each of his ribs was visible, but he always defeated me in wrestling matches. I couldn’t see anything, only heard the graham crackers crunch when they hit the ground and felt his fingers digging into my hips, his lips on my neck.

One of the most exciting events of my childhood was the summer our canal, which led into Swains Lake, was dredged. The canal had grown so shallow that, while canoes could still float atop the mud, pontoon boats couldn’t move. They rested, idle and rusting, on the fetid brown sludge until the neighbors were able to pool enough money to have the canal dredged. I was five years old and shell-shocked from my first year of kindergarten, which brought the painful epiphany that I wasn’t like other kids, an epiphany that had been delayed by a solitary childhood. Cranes drove through our backyards to scoop out the mud and force the canal to fulfill its purpose. I imagined the machines were brachiosaurs and walked along the muddy ridges they left behind as if I were tracking them, as if in my backyard a portal to the Jurassic period—a time and space where I’d have rather been—had opened. The adults complained that the dredging had left our backyards as muddy as the canal. The swamp was growing in revenge for that rape, crawling towards the houses on the top of the hill. Our house was yellow. It had a carport instead of a garage, and a red wooden deck in back with the grill and a picnic table. Mom would call out, Jacqui, Emily! to my sister and me from our house, and I’d pretend not to hear her, that her call was the shrieking of a pterodactyl from above.

Dad, Emily, and I pathetically fished in the canal when he still lived with us, catching the bluegill and sunfish hiding from the fishers on the lake, the occasional small bass. We threw everything back. The fish disappeared under the pale green duckweed when my father tossed them in. They always looked dead to me, lifeless after suffocating in the air while being unhooked, but Dad explained that, if you tossed them up so that they smacked when they hit the surface, they’d come out of shock and swim away with nothing more than sore lips. I thought my dad was tall, but he wasn’t really. He had black hair, grey stubble, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. Dad loved fishing, even though the fishing on the canal was miserable compared to how it’d been when he and my mother lived up north, before Emily and I were born. The fish we caught most frequently were what Dad called “Madagascar weed fish,” which weren’t fish at all, but long trails of prehistoric-looking weeds from the bottom of the swamp. He’d pretend to struggle with them, impersonating the wildlife adventurers from the Discovery Channel that I idolized, and I’d laugh, wishing they were real.

We also caught the painted turtles that sunned themselves on logs. Dad would groan when I dragged up a turtle on my yellow Snoopy child’s reel. Dad hated catching them because they often swallowed the hooks. He’d pull his fishing knife out of the front pocket of his flannel shirt, cut the line as close to the turtle’s mouth as he could, and let the struggling creature with its long, sharp nails slide back into the water. I asked, Will they be ok? What’s gonna happen to the hook? He’d say, They’ll be fine. It’ll just rest inside their stomachs. Like silent anchors, like waiting death, I thought, and realized he was lying for my sake.

After the fishing stopped, I spent most of my summers with the fishing net slung over my shoulder, capturing frogs and turtles. I mentally catalogued their traits, and let them ago, convinced I’d be able to recognize individuals if I caught them again. The most important thing was to be observant. I’d let the evidence of my parent’s unhappiness through my filters; I hadn’t paid close enough attention. I thought everyone’s moms and dads ignored each other. I thought everyone’s moms and dads slept in separate bedrooms. Dad had told me he had trouble sleeping, so he had to sleep by himself, and I bought it—hook, line, and sinker. It wasn’t until my first friend slept over in the third grade that I realized something wasn’t right. When I gave her a tour of the house, she’d asked me three times, confused, why don’t your parents sleep in the same room? I should’ve seen it coming.

Spencer was the first person I ever wanted to be around more than I wanted to be left alone, and our affection made me understand how frigid, how non-existent my parents’ marriage had been. I knew that because we were so young, because we had just fallen in love, our affection was exaggerated, but I also knew my parents hadn’t had an inkling, not even a shred, of what Spencer and I did. Six year later, I was glad they had split up. Six years later, though I could hardly comprehend my own behavior, I understood my parents.

So I went catching to make up for the lost fishing, because I had a compulsive need to hold wild things. The duckweed grew so thick and the water was so still that the canal looked like land covered in pale grass, what it originally had been and was trying to become again. Mostly I caught frogs and painted turtles, and sometimes I caught garter snakes sunning on the bank. Those were the most exciting catches because they were the hardest, they required the most skill. I couldn’t use the net on snakes. I snuck up as close as I could, then in a strike I thought was fast as lightning, I’d grab them just behind their heads, they way the men on the Discovery Channel caught venomous adders and rattlers to avoid being bitten.

Emily and I had never spent much time playing together, at first because of the three-year age difference and later because we shared no interests. Emily would swing back and forth on the rusted yellow swing-set next to our deck and jump on our neighbor’s trampoline while I’d venture out catching. Our yard was large with at least a dozen gardens holding different varieties of flowers, fastidiously maintained by my mother. Each week-night, when she got home from her job as a secretary at a law-firm, she changed out of her pants-suits and into matching sweatshirts and sweatpants to work in the yard until it was too dark to see. I smelled always of mud and excrement from the Canadian geese that lumbered freely through our backyards, goslings in tow, despite the efforts of the neighbors to deter them. I counted the yellow fluffy babies and ran in terror from the hissing adults when I got too close.

Mom grew so tired of trying to brush my hair after my days spent catching that she chopped it all off. She was always tired of everything; intrinsically fatigued. The yard work was like meditation for her, she said it didn’t feel like work. What felt like work was holding me down, enduring my screams while she tried to force a comb through my dirty hair. My mother was so short I realized she was short even then. She had high cheekbones, thin and arched eyebrows, and a gap between her coffee-stained front teeth. Mom never went anywhere, not even to the grocery store, without applying perfume and a face full of makeup. She was disappointed that her oldest daughter refused to wear dresses or play with dolls. I let her convince me the haircut would be like hers—short, stylish and perfectly quaffed—but I only looked even more like a thin boy. As is the case with many young children, my long hair had been the only signifier of my gender, so I spent more time alone, refusing the companionship of the neighbor kids, after my brown tangles fell to the bathroom floor. I could feel the ugliness like a permanent grass stain when friends, family, and neighbors saw me, and I felt the first shame associated with my appearance that I can remember. This, even more than my belief that all my classmates were ignorant and ugly, might’ve been why Spencer’s arrival and unabated lust surprised me so much. I was and still am that skinny, lonely, nearly bald little girl no matter how long I let my hair grow. I wanted that shame to spread to my mother, who’d done this to me, but she just kept smiling, spreading painted lips, flashing her gap teeth. I couldn’t decide if she was oblivious, or if she just didn’t care because she’d saved herself some time and effort.

But I got older. I realized what time and effort means for a single mother. I let my hair grow long again. I allowed myself to make a few friends I didn’t care much about. We’d go out onto the lake in our neighbor’s borrowed paddle boat, swimming if it was warm enough, just drifting if it wasn’t. Mom built campfires almost every night in the summer; there was always debris in our yard that needed burning. We’d roast marshmallows while she tended the flames, adding dry leaves and kindling, manicured fingers encased in thick leather gloves. When it got too dark to see the swamp from the fire-pit on top of the hill, we still felt its presence in the millions of swarming mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were so numerous that even the ample bat population didn’t stop us from being covered in itchy bites from mid-May through September. Apparently whoever had made the decision to dig out the canal hadn’t known that mosquito larvae develop in stagnant water. We slathered on DEET and lit mosquito candles, but to this day, I don’t feel it’s really summer unless my shins are covered in swollen red bumps, runny with blood from the scratching Mom told me not to do.

I want to say Mom, Emily, Spencer, Skylar, and I became like family my sixteenth summer, but that didn’t come until later. I never had much capacity for family or friends, and I let everything become Spencer. I constructed elaborate fantasies in which everyone in the world was dead except Spencer and me. We’d go everywhere and do everything—somehow visiting the Eiffel Tower and the Coliseum even though there’d be no one to operate a plane to get us there. I recognized it was a sick thing to fantasize about, and that if it somehow actually happened, we’d both end up miserable, but I didn’t stop.

That summer was Spencer, but also Spencer and I trying not to break my curfew, which could result in disaster, which could result in us not being allowed to see each other for a few days. My learner’s license forbade me from driving past midnight, which gave my mother a perfect excuse to enforce a rule she would’ve imposed anyway. My relationship with Spencer scared her more than it scared me. Spencer and I begged the clock to move more slowly between five in the evening and eleven-thirty when I had to take him home, but it didn’t. I’d never seen time pass more quickly. We watched movies on the couch, hands frantic under unnecessary blankets, and played hide and seek with our younger siblings, scrambling to find separate hiding places long after the countdown ended. I cursed the minute hand: Stop moving. Stop moving.

The night of the accident was a movie night. Emily and Skylar played volleyball outside before dark and a board game in the basement afterwards. It wasn’t easy to watch movies with Spencer and me. I don’t remember a single film the two of us watched that entire summer. For purely selfish reasons I was glad our younger siblings had become friends; they could entertain each other and leave Spencer and me alone. Emily and Skylar were in the same grade, loved sports, and even kind of looked alike: athletic build, hair lightened and skin darkened by the sun, sweaty t-shirts bearing our high-school mascot and basketball shorts. Now, when I think of them, I say family, but then I thought obstacle avoided. The transition amazes and humbles me.

Spencer and I started out sitting up, but were horizontal on the red-and-white checkered living room couch the instant my exhausted single mother said goodnight and closed her bedroom door. I watched the minutes fly on my watch, thinking, It can’t be ten already, It can’t be eleven already. Spencer lifted my black Sex Pistols t-shirt over my head and pushed my purple bra up to my chin. Spencer had a long torso; his hip-bones peeked out of a gap between his small black shirt emblazoned with the Ramones’ logo and red skinny jeans. I counted his vertebrae with my fingers. I knew we had to leave—I was already on slippery ground from being a couple minutes late the previous night—but I didn’t do anything. I stayed on that couch and screamed in time’s face, Watch me defy you.

At ten to twelve, we heard Emily and Skylar coming up the basement stairs and hurriedly adjusted our rumpled clothes. “Shouldn’t we, like, leave soon?” Emily asked, glancing nervously at the wooden clock in the kitchen.

“Yeah, let’s get going!” I was glad that she was having too much fun to pay attention to the time as well, even though I was older, and only my head would be on the platter if we screwed up. We piled into the car, filled it with nervous energy. I drove fast. Too fast, and I knew it, but didn’t slow down. All the windows and the sunroof were open, and the air smelled like swamp and cattle. No one said a word. We were bracing ourselves for whatever it was that we knew was going to happen.

When we tore onto the dirt road from the paved one, we were in the final stretch, but the digital clock read 12:03—I was already dead. The bullfrogs and katydids from Spencer’s swamp were deafening even over the roar of the engine. The gravel was loose under the tires. Somehow I knew, but didn’t stop—pushing fifty on a road that should’ve been traveled no faster than the Amish in their horse-drawn wagons that passed Spencer’s house each morning before dawn.

Rounding the final turn, the dirt slid out from under the tires, and everything was suddenly darkness, vertigo, and clamor—glass shattering, metal scraping metal. I heard the car noises, but not my sister screaming, Spencer yelling. When we stopped rolling, luckily landing right-side up, I thought I’d been hallucinating. I thought maybe we’d just gone off the road a little, that I could put the car in reverse and continue as if nothing had happened. People later asked me what my mistake was: Did I slam on the brakes? Was I not watching the road? I don’t know. It happened so fast I don’t think I had time to stomp down on the brake pedal (which, they said, you’re not supposed to do when losing control of a vehicle). I wasn’t messing with the radio or distracted by conversation—none of us had been talking. Like Bambi on the frozen pond, the car’s legs slid out from under us.

When my vision stopped spinning and I saw the crack in the windshield, I realized there was no getting out of this. Scared shitless, I played the adult. I was the oldest. “Ok, are you guys ok? Anybody bleeding? Check and make sure you’re not bleeding. Can you move everything? Check and make sure you can move everything.” My top lip and front teeth throbbed from my face slamming into the steering wheel. The airbags never went off, and I’m still not sure whether that made it better or worse. Mercifully, no one was seriously injured. We climbed out of the wreckage and stared at the crippled automobile, counting our hit points. The headlights were still working and the brights bathed the embankment in harsh light.

I had a swollen lip, two cracked front teeth, whiplash, a burn cutting across the left half my neck from the seatbelt, and my hands had gripped the steering wheel so tight I could barely straighten my fingers. Spencer had cuts on his face from broken glass, a knot growing on the side of his head where it’d hit the ground after the passenger window shattered, and a black eye from a fallen branch that’d struck his face through the hole where the window should’ve been. Skylar and Emily, who had sat in the back, suffered less severe injuries—bruises on their ribs from being shoved back and forth against the door handles and sore jaws from clenching their teeth. We were all covered in dirt and glass. Dust was in the pockets of my jeans, in my bra, tangled in my hair, crunchy between my teeth.

The swamp had not fallen silent out of reverence for my mistake. On the opposite side of the road was a steep tree-covered hill sloping straight down into the muck. On the side of the road where the car had landed, a small embankment covered in thick weeds led up to some undeveloped property. No houses for a mile. As soon as we’d figured out everyone was all right, Emily started crying. I wanted to join her, but felt strangely emotionless, hollow. It was all my fault, and I would’ve felt like a cheater crying for something I’d done to myself.

There was no cell phone service. We knew that so well none of us bothered to check our phones, undamaged in our pockets. Spencer headed toward the nearest neighbor and Skylar ran toward their home to wake their parents, while my sister and I stayed with the car, frozen and pathetic females. It didn’t hit me until later how brave Skylar was, running a mile alone through the pitch black night, thick with swamp and bugs and animals. I stood, leaning against the back bumper, crunching broken glass under my sneaker. Looking more scared than hurt, Emily kept asking, “What’re we going to do?”

“I don’t know, Emily. We have to call the police and get Mom.”

“What if they don’t come back?”

“They’re going to come back, ok?”

The twenty minutes we waited for the boys passed slower than the evening had been fast. Spencer returned first, with our high school history teacher, who happened to be his closest neighbor, in tow. If I hadn’t been in so much shock I probably would’ve passed out in embarrassment. I prayed that Mr. Renieche would forget all about this before school started, but still had horrific visions of him re-telling the whole thing to the entire teacher’s lounge. Then headlights appeared from the direction of Spencer and Skylar’s house. Seeing that we were all right and had help on the way, Mr. Renieche walked back through the mosquitoes, down the dirt road to his house. The boys’ mother, Barbara, who’d always made me nervous with her own reckless behavior and unpredictable morality, hugged Emily and me. I wanted to be an adult, to make a real apology, but I could scarcely bring myself to whisper, Sorry, into her hair, messy from sleep. Spencer’s dad, Steve, had called the police from their home phone when Skylar arrived, and he instructed me to get anything we wanted out of the car. Maps, registration, and a safety kit were all Mom kept in her vehicle. Both of Spencer’s parents wore oversized t-shirts and plaid lounge pants. I was so embarrassed I could hardly speak. Barb left us with the ruined Escape to wait for the police, and drove to our house in her ancient blue Cadillac to wake Mom and bring her to us. I later found out that Barb had to go in through our unlocked door and roust Mom out of bed; she was sleeping so deeply she didn’t hear Barb knocking—that’s how much she trusted me. I wouldn’t have been caught even if we’d gotten in late.

I didn’t know what to expect in Mom’s reaction, but was numb and ready for anything. She ran toward my sister and me, wearing a nightgown and her work boots, glasses and no make-up. She pulled each of us to her chest, thanking God that we weren’t hurt, and I realized she knew the accident was a better punishment than anything she could’ve come up with.

The police arrived and interrogated me. I didn’t know how fast I’d been going, only that it was too fast. I hadn’t been drinking, I was just stupid. The vehicle had rolled more than once before it stopped. They issued me a ticket for “driving too fast for conditions” and made it a point to tell me how charitable they were being for not giving me one for “reckless driving.” They made a few condescending comments about how the middle of nowhere was a bad place to get in an accident. It had gotten cold enough that the humidity turned to dew, coating the wrecked car in tiny droplets, leaving goose bumps on my bare arms.

While the cops were scolding me, Steven pulled up with his girlfriend of the moment, coming back home from town. His jaw dropped as he went past the wreckage and the cops, but there was also a smirk in his wide eyes, the same color as Spencer’s—watch the perfect student misbehave because of my brother. He and his red-headed girlfriend, Erin, the two most popular, well-liked and well-hated seniors at our high school joined the gathering crowd. Party at two a.m., corner of nowhere and the swamp. Before Spencer, I would’ve hated both of them, but post-love I envied their freedom—Steven had his own car, so they could have sex and drive places—and the legitimacy their relationship seemed to have even though it would be short-lived.

One of the cops was a tall, blonde woman, and Steven made raunchy comments with his eyes at Spencer and their father behind her back. Of course I couldn’t get a fat, ugly cop—I had to endure the humiliation of having Officer Barbie chastise me for my sins, Steven making obscene gestures in the background, undermining her credibility. I almost felt bad for her.

            Did we know what would’ve happened if we’d crashed on the other side of the dirt road? Of course we did. You all would’ve had to be airlifted to the U of M hospital. The SUV would’ve wrapped around the trees like I wrapped myself around Spencer. The swamp would’ve sucked us in.

            Policewoman Barbie and her average-Joe partner told Mom the car was totaled. There was no saving it. Out in the wild staring at the wreck, being eaten alive by insects of all kinds, I couldn’t think about logistics—not in swampland. Standing on the dirt road, I thought about death, what it meant to kill someone else accidently. I thought about the phrase “love kills”— how ironic that we’d been watching Sid and Nancy before we went veering off the dusty path. Barbara gave Mom, Emily, and me a ride home. Once I was inside a civilized house with lights and indoor plumbing and screens on the windows to keep the bugs out, I thought about logistics. I thought about how Mom would get to work, if she could afford a new car, the inevitable spike in insurance premiums. These things caused me the most guilt because, no matter how much luck it had taken, none of us were hurt. It was the real-life shit, most of which would fall on the shoulders of my fatigued mother, that would matter.

            I asked Emily if she’d sleep in my bed with me. I was scared and didn’t know how to react, how to apologize. She wrinkled her nose at first, then agreed. When I awoke the next morning, for an instant, I thought I’d dreamed the accident. A cool breeze deceptively carried no scent of mud through my open window, and I wrapped the comforter around my shoulders. Then my little sister, whom I’d almost killed, stirred next to me and I knew it was true, true, true.