Twisted (3 page)

Chip leaped up, balled his fists, and screamed, “Yeah!”

The crowd around us fell silent. A couple lacrosse players congratulated Chip and jumped in the pool. The dweebs reached for new beers. Mrs. Milbury drifted towards the band. Dad watched the guys in the water. Bethany was the only person who looked me in the eye.

“Good job, fair fight,” said Mr. Milbury. “He almost had you there, Chipper. Better watch your back! Ha-ha. Now shake hands like men.”

Chip ignored his father and shadowboxed one of his henchmen, a kid named Parker with perfect teeth and acne scars.

“Chipper,” Mr. Milbury repeated, a little louder.

The last thing Chip wanted to do was shake my hand. Instead, he shoved Parker, who backpedaled and fell into the pool, hitting the water with a loud smack.

“Son!” Mr. Milbury’s voice snapped through the air like a wet towel in a locker room.

Chip froze for a second, then walked back to me, his hand extended. “Fair fight,” he said.

“Something like that,” I said. I smiled and squeezed his hand until the bones rubbed together like dry twigs. He grunted and covered his pain with a cough. I kept squeezing.

Mr. Milbury had no clue. He patted me on the back. “Maybe we should have Tyler do our landscaping,” he said. “I bet he’d work faster than those illegals Doreen is always hiring.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Milbury,” I said, releasing Chip’s hand.

Dad stepped forward. “Brice, I don’t think this can wait until Monday. If we could sit down for a few minutes…”

“Ah, time for a toast.” Waiters were hurrying through the crowd passing out champagne. At the microphone, Mrs. Milbury tapped her glass with a spoon.

“Have a drink, Bill,” Mr. Milbury said, waving over a waiter. “Whatever the problem is, I know you’ll fix it. Relax. Enjoy being out with the family.”

One of the dweebs snickered. That’s why I wasn’t ready.

Chip reached out and patted me on the back, like his father had. But instead of a friendly pat, he smacked me as hard as he could. The blow sent me flying towards Bethany and the waiters loaded with champagne trays.

The world downshifted to slow motion.

The waiters stumbled, and their trays flew up. Bethany stepped backwards, then fell. My arms tried to catch her. My legs fought for balance. All the dads and dweebs stood, frozen, mouths open. The trays came down, and fifty champagne glasses hit the patio.

A million shards of glass and champagne exploded.

Bethany screamed.

As time sped up, just before I hit the ground, I noticed one more thing.

Bethany was barefoot.

She screamed again.

We went down in a heap speckled with glass and blood. Chip vanished into the roses.

Half of the Milbury Brothers Trust’s board of directors were doctors. By the time the ambulance arrived, they’d stopped the bleeding and taken out most of the glass, but Bethany needed a shot and stitches in the bottom of her left foot.

The ambulance left, lights flashing, no sirens.

My mom retrieved her pasta salad from the bushes and put it in the car. Then she came back and patted my hand while one of the doctors looked me over and patched me up with a half dozen butterfly bandages. Hannah stayed next to me.

Dad had disappeared. We finally found him practicing spin control with his boss, trying to convince Mr. Milbury to sue the company that laid the slate around the pool because they clearly did a shoddy job, which had led to such dangerous conditions and the unfortunate accident.

Before we left, I found one of the doctors who had helped me and quietly asked him to slit my throat.

The guy said no and suggested I talk to my family doc about antidepressants.

I spent most of Friday night playing Tophet. The graphics weren’t that great and it made my computer freeze regularly, but it was better than lying awake and loathing myself for hurting Bethany.

Tophet was Hell. The point of the game was to make your demon as powerful as possible and survive through the sixty-six Levels of Torment. After that, I wasn’t sure what would happen. Either he’d escape to Heaven or descend to the Final Pit and be crowned Lord of Darkness. It was unclear which option was better.

As soon as I opened the game, a herd of fallen angels swarmed my demon, Gormley. They tied him up and stuck him in one of the boiling cauldrons. It took forever to annihilate them. My fingers hit the buttons in the right sequence over and over. It normally sounded cool when he scored a kill—lots of hissing and yowling—but I had to keep it down so Dad didn’t hear me playing.

See, that was why I was a bad son. Lack of respect.

Miller men were disciplined. Miller men followed rules. Miller men toughed it out; they ate dirt and went for the kill.

That last one was a real quote. Dad said it to me when I was eleven, after I lost the Little League championship. The ball had been hit square to the shortstop and I took too much of a lead so I was trapped between third and home. Dad screamed for me to go, so I went, and I slid and was tagged by the catcher.

Grandpa Miller told Dad I was a pansy for not taking out the catcher’s legs and I didn’t want it bad enough and Dad agreed with him. Mom lost it in a very controlled way and told them they were both lunatics. She dragged me and Hannah home so I missed going with the team for hot dogs after the game.

I got stuck on Level Forty-Two. Gormley couldn’t get past the sulfur pits. Every time I tried to teach him how to swim, he drowned.

Stupid demon.

I made a note to myself to look for a lifejacket he could buy, swallowed four ibuprofen, and went to sleep just before three thirty.

My alarm went off at five the next morning. First thought:
It was a bad dream.

Second thought:
No, it wasn’t.

Third thought:
Crap.

I tried to eat some potato chips for breakfast, but I couldn’t choke them down. I threw a bunch of lunch stuff in a grocery bag, grabbed a gallon of iced tea out of the fridge, and headed outside.

Yoda was waiting for me on the steps, holding the lunch his mother packed for him in an insulated bag. His energy drinks were in the cooler that he was sitting on. He looked up from his comic book. “Thought you might have left the country.”

Yoda wasn’t his real name, of course. Calvin Hodges was renamed Yoda after he flipped about
Star Wars
in fifth grade. He spent way too much time gaming (more than me, even) and he could mind-meld hard drives. But
Star Wars,
that wasn’t a geek thing for him. It was his religion. When the assholes of the world beat him up for this, he’d act like a Buddhist monk being tortured by Communist soldiers. He’d smile. Freaked them out. The Force was with him.

“You heard?” I asked.

“Everybody heard, moron.” He picked up the cooler and followed me down the walk. “They heard that you went on a rampage and attacked Bethany Milbury. That you got hauled away in handcuffs again. That Bethany almost died.”

“It wasn’t like that at all. It was an accident. But I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did you punch Chip in the mouth?”

“I’m going to punch
you
in the mouth if you don’t shut up.”

“All right, all right. God, you’re so touchy. There’s the truck.”

It was a fifteen-minute ride in Mr. Pirelli’s pickup to Evergreen Haven, the nursing home where we sent my grandparents to die.

Pirelli gave out the assignments. The Honduran guys were in charge of mowing. Yoda had to edge the flower beds and blow the sidewalks clean. I had to run the weed whacker and dig a hole for a blue spruce using a pick and a shovel.

“Ask your buddy for help,” Pirelli said when I complained.

We both looked at Yoda slathering SPF-50 sunscreen on his arms. He was hired out of desperation after most of the regular crew went back to college.

“Good luck.” The boss chuckled as he jumped into his truck.

I decapitated dandelions all morning, leaving carnage and death strewn in my path.

When Yoda whistled for our lunch break, I walked over to a white oak that would give us some decent shade. I stripped off my shirt and hung it over a branch, then poured ice water over my head and let it cut through the sweat and dirt caked around my neck.

Yoda was eating the white-bread-mayo-lettuce-bologna sandwich cut into four pieces he’d had every day since first grade. I pulled out the half loaf of bread and peanut butter and jelly jars from my grocery bag and slapped together three sandwiches which I inhaled, stopping only to guzzle iced tea. The Honduran guys found their own patch of shade to eat in.

I dumped out some Oreos and tossed the package to Yoda.

“So, like I was saying,” he said as he pulled out a cookie, “everybody thinks you got busted again.”

“You weren’t saying anything, and we’re not talking about it.”

He twisted the Oreo open. “Are we talking about school?”

“Hell, no.”

“How about my new Sith Lords in Congress theory?”

“Not.” I looked in my bag again. I’d forgotten the Doritos.

“Can we talk about Hannah?”

I put the jars back in the bag and drained the last of the iced tea. “Friends don’t date friends’ sisters. It’s a rule. Back to work.”

“Rules are made to be broken. We’ve been IMing every night, you know.” Yoda scraped the icing off his Oreo. “She thinks I’m ‘sweet.’” He stuck the two cookie halves together and devoured them. “Look, this Bethany thing will blow over. Relax, you should.”

“Shut up, Yoda.”

I left my shirt hanging on the tree and went back to work.

The five-foot circumference of the hole I was supposed to dig was marked with pink spray paint. I just had to make a hole as deep as the circle was wide.

I used my boot to push the shovel blade into the dirt, bent my knees, put my back into it and lifted. Ten minutes into the work, I was sweating. Half an hour and I was dripping. After a while my cuts and bruises stopped hurting, and the whine of the edger and mowers faded away. It was just the slice of the shovel into the ground and the pounding of my heart as I muscled it out of the hole. An inch at a time, a foot at a time. I was good at digging holes. It was the rest of life I sucked at.

Then I hit rock—check that, rocks—and the dirt turned into dried cement. I had to use the pick to loosen it. The mowers swept by, blasting cut grass and exhaust. I kept digging, pick first, then shovel. Pick and shovel. Break, then dig. An inch, three inches, another foot down. The sun was roaring overhead, cooking everything. Sweat ran down my back and arms. Salt penetrated the bandages the doc had given me. The sting was sweet.

Days like this I thought maybe I should just blow off school, move to Minnesota or something, get a job that let me sweat, and never, ever think again. I swung the pick harder, putting my back into it until the sun and the stink and the buzz and the pain blurred together.

And then Yoda was standing above me with Mr. Pirelli next to him. Somehow the afternoon had vanished and it was time to go home. I handed up my tools. The two of them reached down to help me out of the crater I’d dug.

“Isn’t that a little deep?” Yoda asked.

“It’ll help the roots get established,” I explained.

“Established where? China?”

The truck stopped at our corner and we crawled out. Mr. Pirelli reminded me to call him about my schedule now that school was starting. He’d take as many hours as I could give, he said, especially if I wanted to dig holes. It might have been a compliment, but I was too tired to be sure.

I trudged next to Yoda, my boots clomping on the sidewalk like monster feet.

“You want to come?” Yoda asked.

“Where?”

“To my house, to take over the galaxy, duh. Or we could just hang out. Whatever. We have leftover lasagna.”

“No, I’m good. Thanks.”

We stood there for a second, gnats swarming in front of our faces.

He swatted at them. “I think you should come.”

“I’m okay, really,” I said. “I’m going to bed. But if I can’t sleep, I’ll come over.”

He nodded. “You riding with me Monday?”

“Nope. I’m taking the bus with Hannah.”

“Cool. May the Force be with you, my friend.”

“We’re seniors, Yoda. You gotta stop saying that.”

My house was dark and quiet.

No dinner, no notes on the counter. Maybe my family had joined the witness-protection program in exchange for testifying about what a loser I was.

I stood in the shower until the water swirling around the drain wasn’t black. Two of the butterfly bandages on my left forearm peeled off. I poured peroxide on the gaping cuts until they went numb.

When I went back down to the kitchen, I saw the thin line of light under the closed door to the basement. I filled a mixing bowl with an entire box of Lucky Charms and ate it with a serving spoon. The goal was to finish the cereal before falling asleep facedown in the milk.

After I put the bowl in the dishwasher, I opened the basement door. Dad was down there typing on his computer and talking to himself. Opera was playing low in the background.

“Tyler?” Dad called. “Is someone there? Linda?”

There had actually been a time when Dad was cool. Like when I was in third grade, when he was an accountant at a tiny hole-in-the-wall company. If you were going to make a documentary about our family, that would have been the year. Nobody had a shrink. Mom worked part-time at the school library and took photos for fun. Hannah only bit me if I made her really, really mad. And Dad and me won first place in both the father/son knot-tying competition and the three-legged race at the Cub Scout Wilderness Weekend.

Those were the days, by golly.

Now he was a dragon hiding in the skin of a small man. In public, he’d act like a human being, all handshakes and “good to meet you” and grown-up BS about the stock market and going bald. In private, the skin slid off and all you saw were slime-colored scales and poisonous claws because a branch office was in trouble or new regulations were hurting the bottom line.

“Hello?” Dad demanded.

I closed the door.

Mom’s room was to the right at the top of the staircase. Dad’s was at the opposite end of the hall. Hannah and I were in the middle; her door closest to Mom’s, mine next to Dad’s.

I flopped on my stomach. My feet hung over the edge of the mattress.

It was the last Saturday night before my senior year of high school and I was alone in my room.

The curtains moved.

Kids were playing kickball in the street, yelling about fouls and do-overs and who was safe. Engines raced and tires peeled out a couple blocks away. Music came from open windows. The train whistle blew. If you took the train to Cleveland, you could pick up the Capitol Limited and ride it to Chicago, and from Chicago, transfer to anywhere.

I rolled over onto my back and prayed again to every god I had ever heard of to let me die. Quick and painless.
Please.

Death is funny, when you think about it. Everybody does it, but nobody knows how, exactly how. My grandpa Miller just wouldn’t die, no matter how sick he got. Grandma Barnett dropped dead in front of the canned vegetables at the Safeway.

Did they like it? Was it a relief?

I wasn’t supposed to think about that, but it was like porn. The idea would sneak in and—
boom
—I was off. Like when they put me in the holding cell after they arrested me for the Foul Deed, and the guard came back and took the laces out of my sneakers. And then the door locked and my sneakers looked pathetic and I couldn’t walk in them. And I thought about it.

As soon as it started, I’d go:
I’m not going to think about this. No matter what. I am thinking about something different now, thinking, thinking…

And the pictures would flash over and over in my mind like a demented video with no music, just bodies falling off bridges and planes flying into skyscrapers and fires and ropes and guns and driving very fast. Unbuckling my seat belt. Aiming for the cliff at the granite quarry. Stomping the accelerator. Passing ninety when I hit the edge. Flying, then plunging to the bottom, the car bouncing off the slabs of granite, spinning, crumpling. The explosion.

Thinking about death relaxed me, as usual.

My open cuts dripped on the sheets.

Gone.