“Happy Valentine’s Day,” my grandmother says as she wraps me in a hug so tight, I almost can’t breathe. “I’m so glad you’re not dead.”
“Beverly!” my mother exclaims. She’s making a cup of tea, and she furiously dips the bag in and out of the cup by its string as she shakes her head.
“What?” my grandmother says. “Are we not talking about it? You know, I read that something like eighty-five percent of cancers are caused by not talking about things.”
“You made that up,” my mother says.
“Maybe it’s only eighty percent,” my grandmother says, winking at me as she reaches into the National Public Radio tote bag she’s carrying and takes something out. She hands me a square metal tin with an image of a laughing Santa Claus on it. “Here. I made these for you.”
I pry the lid off the tin. Inside are heart-shaped sugar cookies. Only instead of being pink or red, they’re rainbow-striped.
“I heard the news that you’re gay,” my grandmother says. “Congratulations.”
“Beverly,” my mother says again, only not as forcefully. There’s a long history of my grandmother getting on my mother’s nerves—often on purpose—with what my mother calls her “outrageous behavior,” and I can tell my mother realizes she’s fighting a losing battle right now.
I pick up a cookie and take a bite. “Thanks,” I tell my grandmother. “These are delicious.”
“That’s the rum,” my grandmother says. “It gives them a kick.”
My father and Amanda come into the kitchen. “Eric,” my mother says, “do something about your mother.”
“I’ve tried,” my dad says. “She keeps finding her way back here.”
My grandmother gives Amanda a hug, then kisses my dad on the cheek. “She’s upset about the cookies,” she whispers, but loudly enough that she knows my mother hears it.
My father looks at the rainbow hearts. “What’s the problem with them?”
“I have no idea,” my grandmother says as Amanda reaches for a cookie and my mother gives a little shriek and blurts, “There’s alcohol in them!”
“It cooks out,” my grandmother says, waving her hand dismissively as Amanda takes a bite of a cookie.
“These are great!” Amanda says as my mother frowns.
The rest of us are used to these kinds of interactions between my grandmother and my mother, and secretly enjoy them since they never turn into actual fights. I think my mother secretly enjoys them too, even if right now she’ll never admit it, because they give her something to be annoyed about and being annoyed at things gives her life.
“It was tricky getting the stripes straight,” my grandmother says. Then she laughs. “Or I suppose I should say getting them gay.”
She comes over and hugs me again. “You’re one of my two favorite grandchildren,” she whispers in my ear.
“You only have two,” I remind her.
When she lets me go, I think maybe I see tears in her eyes. This makes my heart hurt, as it’s a reminder that what I did caused other people a lot of pain and worry. I almost apologize to her, but she turns away and starts talking to my parents.
I take out another cookie and eat it while I think about how weird this all is. Just a few hours ago, I got out of a psychiatric ward after spending forty-five days there in a treatment program following a suicide attempt. While I was in there, I came out, had sex for the first time, and had one of my best friends in the program die from an overdose that wasn’t an accident.
It feels like it all happened a million years ago. And when I think about everything that led up to my (thankfully) failed suicide attempt, it feels like that happened to a different person. But it didn’t. It happened
to me. Only, in a lot of ways I’m not the same person I was forty-five days ago. And now that I’m out of the hospital, I have to figure out how to introduce everyone else to the new me, and I’m not sure how to do that.
“Come on,” my sister says, taking my hand. “Let’s go upstairs.”
We leave my parents and grandmother talking and head up to my bedroom. Inside, I can’t help but stare at the new carpet. My parents put it in after ripping up the one that had bloodstains on it. They also painted the walls. I guess they figured changing things might make us all forget what happened in here.
Amanda sits down on the floor in the exact spot where I was lying when they found me. She sees me looking at her. “I kept a piece,” she says.
“A piece of what?” I ask.
“The carpet,” she says. “When they were cutting it up and throwing it out. You want to see it?”
I hesitate for a moment. Then I nod.
Amanda gets up and goes down the hall to her room. When she comes back, she’s holding a ragged piece of carpet in her hand. It’s maybe four or five inches across. The light blue threads are stained with a darker color, almost like rust. Amanda holds the piece out to me, and I take it from her.
“I don’t know why I took it,” she says. “I just did.”
It’s weird to think that the stuff on the carpet is my blood. I don’t really remember much about the actual event itself. I just remember feeling tired, and sad, and hopeless. I don’t remember cutting my wrists or passing out. I only remember waking up in the hospital and wondering how I got there.
Our dog, Mumford, who has come into the room and hopped onto my bed, sticks his head out, sniffs at the scrap of carpet, and snorts. He shakes his head, then lies down and stares at me with a worried expression, as if he’s afraid that if he doesn’t keep an eye on me, I’ll leave again. Just as I felt like I should apologize to my grandmother earlier, I feel I should apologize to Mumford for upsetting him.
“You can keep it,” Amanda says. “If you want.”
I’m surprised to find that I do want to. I take the piece of carpet and put it in a drawer in my desk. Then, for some reason, I find myself worrying that my mother will go through my drawers when I’m not around and find it, so I take it out again and put it in my closet inside one of the cardboard boxes of Nightwing and Sandman comic books I keep in there.
Amanda watches me do this, but I don’t mind. Even though she’s only thirteen, and my little sister, I know she’s on my side. Not that there are sides in our family. Not exactly. It’s not like being a Barrowman is a team sport or anything. But sometimes it does feel like my mother is on the lookout for problems. And me ending up in the hospital after drinking a lot of whiskey and cutting myself was definitely a problem.
I’m not sure yet whether my being gay is a problem or not. For my mother, I mean. She says she’s fine with it, or at least she did during one of our sessions with Dr. K—that’s Dr. Katzrupus, my therapist
from the hospital. And I think she probably is. But sometimes you just don’t know how people really feel, especially people who think that what they really feel isn’t what you want them to feel.
I sit down on my bed and take another rainbow heart out of the tin, then pass it to Amanda. “Grandma congratulated me on being gay.”
Amanda laughs. “That’s awesome,” she says. “You know, my friend Katrina from dance class has a gay brother. His name is Evan. Maybe you two could go out. Jeff and Evan. We could call you Jevan.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. “I just got out of the hospital and you’re trying to set me up with your friend’s brother?”
Amanda shrugs. “Why not?” she said. “You want a boyfriend, don’t you? That means going out on dates.”
She sounds so sure of herself that I want to laugh. This is something I love about my sister; she always manages to sound confident, even when she has no idea what she’s talking about. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe? At some point? There’s a lot of other stuff I need to figure out first.”
“Like what?” Amanda asks.
I don’t know where to start. “Like what to say to Allie, for one thing.”
Amanda looks confused. “What’s to say?” she asks.
Amanda doesn’t know the whole story about how I ended up in the hospital. I mean, she knows what I tried to do. But she doesn’t know why. Not exactly, anyway. She thinks it’s because I was freaked out about realizing I was gay. And I was. But what I was more freaked out about was that I realized I was gay because I was in love with my best friend’s boyfriend. Allie being my best friend. And Burke being her boyfriend.
That’s a little dramatic. I wasn’t in love with Burke. I was in love with the idea of being in love with Burke. That’s something Dr. K helped me understand. I wanted what Burke and Allie had. What they have. I wanted someone to love me like they love each other. Only, in my head it got all mixed up and I thought I wanted Burke. So one night right before Christmas, when I was drunk at a party, I kissed him. And he told Allie.
“Oh,” Amanda says as if she can hear what I’m thinking. “You think she’ll be upset that you’re gay. Why? It’s not like she was ever your girlfriend.”
Again, she sounds as if she’s sorted the whole problem out. I don’t feel like telling my sister everything. Not right now. So I say, “True. I guess I’m overthinking it. And I guess I’m worried about going back to school.”
As far as I know, nobody at school knows exactly why I’ve been gone. Not even Allie. Amanda says that there are all kinds of rumors and theories, but nobody knows I tried to kill myself, and she hasn’t told anyone. That’s another great thing about Amanda: she can keep a secret when she needs to.
“You can’t exactly hide those,” Amanda says.
“Hide what?” I ask. Then I realize she’s looking at the scars on my wrists. I didn’t realize I’d started rubbing one with my fingers.
“I mean, I guess you could wear long sleeves forever,” Amanda says. “Or wrist bands when it gets too hot for those. Maybe you can start a new fashion trend.”
“Psych Ward Chic,” I suggest, trying to make a joke about it. “I’m sure it will be the next big thing. Maybe I can be an influencer.”
We both laugh at that. This is something else we have in common—a dark sense of humor. We can make jokes about almost anything, even really serious stuff. Dr. K says that while this can be a healthy way to deal with things, it’s not always the best approach, at least if I’m using humor to avoid talking about more difficult feelings.
Right now, I’m kind of doing both. The truth is, I do have to figure out how I’m going to handle going back. All anyone knows is that I was in the hospital. Part of me wants to lie and say that my appendix burst. But not telling the truth about things is never the best thing to do. It’s how I got in trouble in the first place. Even when you start out with good intentions, you end up having to tell more lies to patch up the main one when cracks start to form. Pretty soon you don’t even remember what the truth looked like.
I’m thinking about all of this when my dad appears in the doorway. “Dinner’s here,” he says.
Amanda, Mumford, and I get up and follow him downstairs to the kitchen, where my mom has set out way too many cartons of food from Dragon-Dragon, my favorite Chinese restaurant. I’ve had only hospital food for the last forty-five days, and suddenly I want to put everything in my mouth at once.
“I know I should have cooked something,” my mother says. “I just ran out of time.”
I see my grandmother start to say something. I look at her and shake my head. She frowns a little, then laughs at whatever she was going to say, which makes my mom look at her suspiciously.
“This is perfect,” I tell my mother, distracting her as I spoon orange chicken and shrimp fried rice onto a plate. “Just what I wanted.”
My grandmother, standing next to me, pokes at a container of noodles. “It’s like I always say,” she whispers. “If you can’t make General Tso’s from scratch, store-bought is fine.”
I do my best not to laugh at her terrible joke, which will only encourage her. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” I say, then carry my plate to the table and sit down. Everyone else joins me, and for the next little while all you can hear is the sound of eating.
Weirdly, I find myself wondering what the kids back at the hospital are having for dinner. I wonder what they’re talking about. I thought that I would feel completely happy to be out of that place. Now, though, I find that part of me—a very small part, but still a part—is actually missing it.
As I demolish the pile of fried rice on my plate, I examine this feeling more closely. No, I don’t wish I was back in the hospital. But I have to
admit that there was something nice about having a routine, and about knowing that people were there to look out for me. More than that, it was great to be around people who weren’t afraid of me, especially since I was afraid of myself. I was afraid of my thoughts, of who I was, of how dark things could get in my head. Being around other people who understood that, who had been there themselves and didn’t judge me, was the best thing for me. It made me feel less alone. It made me feel safe.
I’m thrilled that I’m home. And I know my family loves me and wants to do everything to help me. But that’s not the same as having a therapist there to talk to when you need to. It’s not the same as being with other people who understand what you’ve been through. What you’re going through. Strange as it sounds, the bunch of mixed-up kids I met in the hospital are another kind of family. And now they’re not with me.
I feel myself starting to panic. My father is talking, but all I hear is a kind of whooshing sound in my ears. There’s food in my mouth, but I can’t swallow. And my palms are sweating. Then the questions start coming.
What is everyone going to think when they see your scars?
What are you going to say to Allie?
Why did you think things would just go back to normal?
I hear the words in my head. It’s my voice saying them. And now I’m talking over myself, asking a new question before I can even start to answer the last one.
What makes you think you’re okay now?
What makes you think you won’t try it again?
What makes you think you won’t end up back there?
“Jeff?”
I hear someone call my name, and the voices clamoring in my head shut up. “What?”
Everyone is looking at me. My father is holding out a plate that has five fortune cookies on it. “I asked if you want to pick your fortune,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. “Sure.” I choose a cookie at random and open it while my father passes the plate around. I unwrap the cookie, break it open, and remove the slip of paper inside. On it is printed SOMETIMES TO GO FORWARD, YOU HAVE TO GO BACK.
I have no idea what this means. I imagine some worker in a fortune cookie factory, sitting at a desk and coming up with thousands of things to put on little pieces of paper. I can’t decide if that would be the best or worst job. Then I wonder if people ever call to complain about the fortunes they get. Like, is there a Fortune Cookie Complaint Hotline? I decide there should be, and that I would like working at it. “I’m sorry you didn’t like hearing that you won’t be meeting the love of your life anytime soon, Becky. Have you thought about taking some time to work on yourself?”
I’m wondering what educational plan would help me achieve this dream when
I realize someone is talking to me again. This time it’s my grandmother announcing that she’s leaving.
“I have a ceramics class in the morning,” she says as I stand up to say good-bye. “I don’t know what we’re making, but one of you is probably getting it for a gift at some point, so hopefully it’s a naked garden gnome.”
She hugs everyone, even my mom, which is her way of apologizing for anything she might have done that made my mother tense. We all know she’ll do it again, but this is part of what makes us a family. When she’s gone, I help put the leftovers away. I’m about to head back upstairs, when my mom says, “Jeff, hang on. Dad and I want to talk to you about something.”
In my experience, someone saying they want to talk to you about something is usually code for “things are about to really suck for you.” As it’s been a pretty great day so far, I wonder if something is about to happen to make it not-so-great. I look over at my father, who says, “Have a seat.”
This makes me even more anxious. But I figure I might as well get it over with, so I pull out the chair I was sitting in earlier and sit down. My parents sit across from me, next to each other, and suddenly I feel like I’m in an episode of a crime drama, about to be interrogated by the police.
“Do I need to call a lawyer?” I say.
My dad laughs, but my mom doesn’t.
All right, I think as I wait for her to start talking. Let’s get this over with.
“We want to talk to you about returning to school,” my mother says.
For a moment, my worry about this little meeting lifts. “Great,” I say. “I’m ready to go back. How about tomorrow? It’s a Wednesday, so there will only be three days in the week. That feels doable to me.” Despite my momentary panic session from earlier, I think this is probably true.
My mom looks at my dad, who doesn’t look at me, and suddenly I’m worried again.
“What?” I say warily.
My mom smiles a fake smile, the kind you plaster on your face when you’re about to say something you know the other person won’t like hearing. “We think maybe a change of venue would be good,” she says.
“Change of venue?” I say. “You mean a new school?”
My mom nods. “Yes,” she says cheerfully, like a cartoon bird delivering wonderful news. “A new school. A new start. Wouldn’t that be great?”
I don’t answer that question, because I have one of my own. “Where would I go?”
My mom looks at my dad. “There’s St. Basil’s,” she says, as if it’s one of many options she’s just thought of. But I happen to know that where we live it’s pretty much the only option. From the way my mother sounds like she’s reciting lines in a script, I also know that they’ve obviously talked about this already.
“We’re not Catholic,” I say.
“They don’t take only Catholic students,” my mom says. “And it’s a very good school. It would look wonderful on your college applications.”
“I already go to a very good school,” I counter. “Well, a pretty good school. An adequate school. I mean, I like my school. Why don’t you think I should go back there?”
“It’s not just us,” my mom says. She doesn’t sound cheerful anymore; she sounds defensive. Clearly, I was supposed to agree with her reasons for switching schools and make it easy for her. “We spoke to Principal Matthews and—”
“You talked to the principal about me?” I interrupt.
My mother makes an exasperated sound. “We had to tell someone why you were out for forty-five days, Jeff. We couldn’t just keep saying you were sick.”
She has a point, but I’m not letting her off that easily. “And she thinks I shouldn’t come back?”
“It’s not that she doesn’t want you back,” my mom explains. “She—we—think that maybe going back to the place where your troubles began isn’t the best thing for your recovery.”
“And what does Dr. Katzrupus think?” I ask her.
My mother gets a tight look on her face, as if she’s trying to decide how to answer. Or she’s constipated. Like she’s holding in something she can’t let out.
“He said he thinks it should be up to you,” my dad says when my mother doesn’t answer.
“Eric,” my mother says, her voice tense. “We discussed this.”
“Well, it is what he said,” my dad says. He looks at me. “Jeff, your mom and I want you to be safe, and we thought maybe a new school would help with that. But we also want you to be happy, and this doesn’t seem to be an idea you’re excited about. So, what do you want?”
“I want to go back,” I say immediately. “To school,” I add, in case they somehow think I mean the hospital.
My mother looks as if I’ve announced that I’m planning on starting a Satanic black metal band and want to rehearse in the basement. She opens her mouth to say something, but I cut her off.
“Dad just said that my doctor thinks it should be up to me.”
“Yes, well, your doctor doesn’t have to live in this community,” my mom snaps.
And there it is.
This is the thing with my mother—she can only pretend things are okay to a point.
When you push her past that point, the truth comes out. And the truth is that my mom is embarrassed by me and by what I did.
She realizes immediately that she’s made a mistake. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that,” she says.
“Maybe not,” I say. “But it’s the truth. It’s what you were thinking. You just said it out loud.”
Nobody says anything for a long time. Then my dad says, “We love you, Jeff.”
I nod. Because I know they do. “But you’re still embarrassed,” I say. “You’re afraid people will talk about your messed-up kid who tried to kill himself. The thing is, people are going to talk anyway. Kids at school are going to say stuff to Amanda, because she’ll still be there. Or are you planning on making her change schools too? Hell, why don’t we just move? I hear Alaska is nice. And while we’re at it, why don’t we just change our names. We can start over again as the perfect family. The Smithsons, maybe. Or the Jakubowskis. Then you won’t have to worry about what people think. Not until one of us fucks up again, anyway.”
“Don’t swear,” my mom says.
I laugh, because this is hysterical. She’s worried about my language. I don’t know whether I should let out the longest string of swear words she’s ever heard and give her a heart attack or get up and go to my room.
“Maybe we should back up,” my dad says. “Jeff, Mom and I—”
“Don’t forget Principal Matthews,” I say sarcastically.
“All of us are concerned that going back into your former environment might trigger unpleasant associations,” he concludes.
“Of course it will,” I say. “But that’s something I’m going to have to deal with. Yeah, people are going to say shit. That’s what kids do. And some of it will hurt to hear. But I can’t run away from what happened. I just spent forty-five days in a psych ward learning not to be ashamed of who I am and what I did. Going to a different school would make it look like I’m ashamed. Which you apparently are.”
My mother shakes her head. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. And we’re not ashamed of you. We’re worried about you.”
“You mean it’s not getting us where you want it to get us,” I say. “You’ve already decided that I shouldn’t go back to school. You just want me to agree with you. But I’m not going to. I want to go back. I know it will suck sometimes. Maybe a lot of the time. But I want to go back.”
My mom looks like she’s about to argue, so I say, “Maybe we should talk to Dr. Katzrupus about this.”
That shuts her up. My dad already said that Dr. K thinks the decision should be up to me, so she already knows Dr. K will take my side. “Well, you’re going to have to talk to Principal Matthews about wanting to come back,” she says in a clipped tone. “She’ll have to make the final decision. It’s her school.”
“And it’s my life,” I say. “Let’s go in tomorrow and talk to her.”
“We’ll call her office in the morning,” my dad says. “See when she’s available.”
He’s using his referee voice. This is the tone he always takes when he has to get between my mom and me in a disagreement. As much as I hate to admit it, I can be a lot like my mom sometimes. This is probably why when we do butt heads, neither of us likes to compromise. Usually, I appreciate it when my dad steps in because it calms both me and my mother down. Now, for some reason, it kind of annoys me. I want him to be more on my side, and he doesn’t seem to be.
“Great,” I say, although it’s not great at all. I know Principal Matthews. She’s a lot like my mother. They’re both tough, no-nonsense women. The difference between Matthews and my mom is that my mom loves me, while Matthews just wants her school to be problem-free. If she agrees with my parents that my being there is a problem, I’m in trouble.
This is going to be like battling Godzilla. Two Godzillas. Or maybe I’m Godzilla and they’re King Ghidorah, the monster with three heads. My dad could be the third head, although that seems a little unfair to him because I think he actually agrees with me. I’ll wait and see how he acts during the meeting.
“Fine, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
