Something Wicked (5 page)

“Then fuck me,” I whisper, moving back toward him and putting my hands firmly on his thighs.

“Hah!” He pushes away my grip. “I can’t do that either.”

I kick at the coffee table in front of us. “Then fuck this.”

I am pissed off at his bullshit. He’s a man. He should do what he feels like, not what society tells him. But I can tell by the look on his face that it’s serious. That maybe he is really about to break up with me. And I just can’t believe it. I feel like I need to walk away, before he actually comes out and says it.

I stand, pick up my jacket, and head down the narrow hallway toward the door. The departure is dramatic. I stomp my PUMA runners as hard as I can. My jacket zipper scratches against the wall.

“Melissa …” Michael’s voice trails behind me. “Melissa …” His voice gets louder and more distressed, so I slow my grip on the apartment doorknob to give him a few seconds, that’s all, the way I’ve seen my mom do it when she’s fighting with a boyfriend and she’s trying to turn things around. She makes them come after her, and somehow, miraculously, has them apologize for nothing they’ve done wrong.

I give Michael just a few seconds to reconsider, but there is a long silence and I know he’s forcing himself to try to say the right thing, do the right thing, be the right thing.

“And fuck you!” I shout, open the door, and slam it behind me. I wait outside the door, listening for his footsteps coming down the hallway. I wait for a few minutes, my heart starting to race. I thought he would call me back in.

He was supposed to call me back in.

As soon as I get to the bus stop, I call Michael on my cell, but he doesn’t answer. Then I call him again when I get home, but he still doesn’t answer. I go to his apartment building early the next morning, but he doesn’t come to the door even after I pound for like twenty minutes. I go outside the building and throw rocks up to his windows. Still nothing. Then I call and call and call all day from school, at least one hundred times. Nothing. I hate myself for getting so mad at him. For swearing and being so mean. I apologize over and over again in every email and text. Nothing.

Then, the next morning when I call his cell, it’s not in service. I leave school and go straight to his apartment, but when I knock, it sounds empty and hollow inside. I pound on all the neighbours’ doors until one old man opens his door just a crack, chain still on, and tells me that the man who lived in 7C moved today.

“Today? You sure?” I stare in his direction, but the opening is so small I can barely even see his face.

“Saw the boxes myself.”

“Where did he go?”

“Now, that I don’t know, little lady.” He starts to close his door. “I mind my own business.”

I walk away, down the corridor toward the stairwell. My head spins. My mouth gets dry. I stop and lean a hand up against the wall, ’cause I feel like I’ll drop.

It’s like my soul has left my body and I am a walking corpse. I just can’t believe he’s gone. Move? Just like that?

I go home, change my clothes, drink four shots of vodka
from the bottle stashed under my bed, and then go to Ally’s house, who’s there chilling with her friend Jasmyn, a skanky girl from Ally’s friend’s group home. I didn’t really like Jasmyn, but I trust Ally’s judgment and give her a chance.

As soon as I walk into the basement, Ally knows there’s something wrong with me. “Watz up?” she asks.

Even almost sober, I can barely hold back the tears, so I just say, “I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just get fucked up.”

She’s cool with that answer. Which is why she’s such a good friend. Good friends are there when you need them and there when you tell them to fuck off too.

The night goes on forever. Actually, it goes on for three days. We go to Jasmyn’s friend’s apartment where these four guys in their twenties live, though I can’t figure out which ones because it’s a full-on party house and random people come and go the whole time. There are tons of drugs. Ally, Jasmyn, and I start out sitting close together on the ratty couch, feeling like we don’t really belong, but then one guy hooks us up and things get going. I’m so upset about Michael that I just want to have fun and forget what happened for a while, so I put everything I’m offered into my mouth or up my nose: two lines of coke, six E’s, five prescription Concertas, two vials of K, and God knows how much alcohol. I lose count. I’ll try anything once. Pills. K. Meth. Coke. Morphine. E. Acid. Whatever. But I won’t do some things twice. Like meth. That’s like suicide a second time. One taste of heaven has to be enough. I’ve seen too many people screw up their lives from that shit.

Time passes. I don’t know if it’s day or night. The blinds are down the whole time and there’s cardboard up against the other bare windows. I don’t eat. All I do is sleep, wake up, do drugs, watch movies, sleep, make out, wake up, do drugs, stare at the TV screen. I’m so messed up I don’t know what’s happening. I open my eyes and find some guy kissing me, but I
push him off ’cause his mouth is all wet and sloppy and stinky. Then I come to again and I’m in the washroom and a different guy has his hand up my top, but I’m too wasted to care. At some point, on the second night, Jasmyn disappears into the bedroom with two other guys for a few hours. Ally, who always seems sober no matter how much she takes, makes a scene and keeps knocking on the door to make sure she’s okay.

“She keeps telling me to fuck off, but I’m not going to stop,” Ally reports back to me.“She’s totally messed up. She’s an idiot to be in there with them alone. You know what kind of shit can happen?” She’s going on and on about it and I nod my head to agree, though I don’t care so much because I don’t really know Jasmyn.

Then, totally randomly, while I’m dozing off on this guy’s lap and Ally is watching TV, Jasmyn comes tearing out of the room. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

Her voice is so loud and terrified that we don’t hesitate to jump up and run out behind her. You don’t need a long explanation when you’ve hung out with people like this before. You know there’s bad shit. Guns. Drugs. Messed-up guys. So we just run, like it is our lives at stake.

When we get to the road, Jasmyn buckles over, laughing hysterically. Her slutty miniskirt is hiked up so high, we can see her thong underwear.“Mother fucka! That goddamn shit.” She turns to us. “You know what he wanted? He wanted me to piss on him. You know? Like sit on his chest and piss. Golden shower? What da hell?”

Ally reaches out and pushes Jasmyn backward. “Fuck you! You terrified me. I thought it was something bad.”

“Fuck you,” Jasmyn retaliates, pushing back. “You don’t think piss is bad?”

Ally kisses her teeth and continues walking down the road. She decides we should hide on the porch of a house because
the guys might follow us since Jasmyn still has some of their weed. Ally’s smart like that. She chooses a dark house with no cars in the driveway and three newspapers sitting outside the door.

“No one’s home here,” Ally concludes. “We’ll chill here for a bit.” She sits down on the battered-up couch on the front porch and we just follow her. I pop the last pill of whatever I have, that I found in my pocket. We smoke a few blunts and soon things are fine, we’re laughing about stupid shit, until Jasmyn decides that she has to go pee and insists she needs a toilet.

“Just piss behind the bush,” Ally says, still annoyed at her.

“Fuck that. I’m no dog. You calling me a bitch? That what you sayin’?”And it’s like Jasmyn gets all psycho and Allison and I exchange looks like this girl is
really
fucked up. I mean, way more fucked up than me. So we know not to argue. Jasmyn’s fake nails alone would scratch our eyes out. “I’m going inside,” Jasmyn announces.

“What?” Ally asks.

“How?” I ask.

“I’m going through this motha-fuckin’ front door,” she declares, flicking off her high-heel shoe, hiking her miniskirt, and giving the door a big kick. “Shit!” she wails, buckling over in fake laughter. “Fuck this shit. I’m going around the back.”

Ally and I keep talking, not too worried about what she’s up to. We figure she’ll have the same problem back there and will end up peeing in the yard anyway.

“What’s her story?” I ask, even though I’m too high to truly care.

“She’s cool. Really. She’s nuts. But she’s cool. I don’t know. I like her. She’ll watch your back. She’s been through some crazy shit.”

“I don’t know …”

The front door opens. “Ladies, welcome to my home,” Jasmyn announces in a bad British accent.

We are so stunned and it’s all so crazy that we rush in and shut the door behind us.

“This is insane,” Ally says as she turns on the hallway light.

“Don’t turn on the light,” Jasmyn shouts, and Ally immediately turns it back off.

It’s my first time breaking in. It’s creepy to be in a stranger’s house. There is a distinct homey smell that’s hard to describe, other than it just isn’t yours. It looks like the people left in a hurry. There are open letters sprawled out across the kitchen table. A man’s suit jacket is on the back of a chair. Some dirty dishes are in the kitchen sink.

It makes me think of when Crystal, my mom’s friend, had her apartment broken into. She was all upset about the violation of her “spiritual refuge.” She spent months trying to reclaim the energy of her personal possessions that the person stole from her just by snooping around. But the thing is, I realize now that when you’re doing it, it’s like you don’t even think of the people as “people.” I remember telling Crystal that the robbers are just looking for stuff to take, they don’t stand there and contemplate the photographs or kids’ toys. But she still called it a “rape of her space,” which makes me feel now that maybe she was right in a way.

Jasmyn finds the stereo, blasts FLOW 93.5, and begins to dance in the living room. The windows vibrate. The last pill starts to hit me hard. I can’t think straight. I start dancing. More like jumping up and down. I pretend I’m more high than I am, and I keep my eyes closed mostly because I don’t want anything to do with stealing. I won’t steal from a person. It’s just not right. Stores are different. They make so much money, and they’re not going to miss a shirt or eyeshadow. But stealing from a person is just hurtful. Unless they’re a bitch or
a jerk, in which case they might deserve it. And this family? They’re probably away at a cottage or something, having a nice time, and they’re gonna come home to find their stuff gone, and I just can’t be a part of that.

A while later, the girls return from upstairs. Ally proudly shows me a fistful of jewellery and shoves it in her jacket pocket. Even though I didn’t really steal anything myself, I’d be lying if I didn’t say the rush feels good. It’s like all of me is alive and tingling and breathing. We laugh and laugh and laugh while marching down the middle of the street, as if we owned the whole world. But it takes only a few seconds for the red flashing lights to appear behind us.

Jasmyn tries to run for it but falls over her ridiculous highheeled shoes and does a face-plant on the pavement. Ally and I just stand there with bewildered looks on our faces. But then, when the police approach, I start to laugh. Hysterically. Laugh, laugh, laugh so hard it’s not until I feel the heat between my legs and the wet between my toes that I realize I’ve pissed my pants. And then I laugh even harder, because life is such a joke. Reality has a way of slapping you in the face over and over and over again, like it’s waking you up from the stupid dream that had you believing your life was actually going to get better. And somehow the predictability of that disappointment, those flashing red lights, the fact that you totally knew the defeat was coming, is just so funny.

Nine

I always stand a moment or two outside the front door to our shitty little apartment, on our shitty little street, in our even shittier neighbourhood. I stand there as if I’m trying to decide whether or not to enter. As if I have a choice. As if I am ever brave enough to just turn and run.

But I do it anyway. Stand a moment or two. Fantasizing about the possibility.

When I open the door, I step into another world. In this world, I am not Echo. In this world, I am Syphilis. Okay, that’s not his real name. I call him that to make myself laugh. His real name is Sisyphus. He showed a lack of respect for the gods, and pretty much any authority. Because of this, he was cursed by Zeus and doomed to forever roll a huge, heavy boulder up a hill. I mean
forever
. When he got to the top, instead of rejoicing in his achievement, or sitting down for a rest, he had to immediately roll the rock back down and then heave it up the hill again. It never stopped. He never finished his task. For all eternity.