I don’t know who he is, what his past looks like. I can’t know, because he won’t tell me. But his present is ugly enough to make me starkly, painfully aware of my own naïveté.
I’m shaking, clutching cold porcelain, crying.
West crouches down beside me. “Let me look at your head.”
I let him. Even though I’m sick, sobbing more for him than for me. Even though I hate myself.
I curl up in West’s lap on his bathroom floor and let him look at my head, test me for a concussion, wrap his arms around me, and lean against the wall, holding me. Holding me.
Something is wrong with both of us, but I don’t ever want him to let go.
WINTER BREAK
West
My mom has a thing for The Wizard of Oz. When I was a kid, she found these blue-and-white-checked curtains at Fred Meyer and hung them up in the trailer, where they made everything look shabby. It was only a few months after Dad’s most recent vanishing act, and she was still wearing these cheap sparkly red shoes he’d given her. You know the kind of shoes with a wide toe strap and a stacked heel like a wedge of cheese?
She loved them. Wore them everywhere, even though she was constantly turning her ankles. One night she put them on to go out drinking with Dad, and she came back three days later wearing new clothes, with a tattoo of Toto on her ankle and a shot glass that said Reno. She gave it to me as a souvenir.
After Dad left and Mom lost her job because he took the car and she couldn’t find a reliable ride to town, she had this running joke where she’d click the heels of those shoes together and say, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
Then she’d look around the trailer and frown like she was disappointed.
“Still a dump,” she’d say.
But she would lean into me if I was nearby, her shoulder against mine, our hair touching. “At least we’ve got each other, Westie.”
All her jokes were like that—the humor at our expense, the silver lining in the fact that we were a team. A family.
There’s no place like home.
But you can’t go home again—I learned that from being at Putnam. Home changes while you’re away, and you change, too, without noticing. You get in your car, watch the shapes of your mom and your kid sister get smaller in the rearview, and you think it’ll all still be there the next time, as though you went out for groceries or worked two eighteens at the golf course, back to back, then pulled right into your spot in Bo’s driveway like you’d never left.
It doesn’t work that way. You come home on a plane. You land in Portland, hitchhike to Coos Bay, walk to the school to surprise your sister when she gets out for the day—and then when the group of kids with her in it goes by, you don’t even recognize her.
You’ve never seen her clothes before. Her ears are pierced. Her face is different.
And the worst part is, she doesn’t recognize you, either. She walks right past. You have to catch her sleeve, say her name.
I’ve never felt more like two different people than I did that Christmas.
One of me lived in Oregon, with Frankie, Mom, and Bo. Uprooted, worried, frustrated, cautious—but there, where I belonged.
The rest of me was with Caroline.
I fall asleep after my last final and wake up to sharp knocking at the apartment door.
Caroline’s already left, on an airplane by now to the Caribbean with her family, so I know it’s bad news.
I’ve been expecting bad news ever since I knocked Nate down the stairs two nights ago.
There’s no way he’s not going to retaliate. I humiliated him. Twice.
She’s mine. That’s what I was thinking when I did it. I don’t care what happens to me—I’m not going to let anybody talk that kind of shit about Caroline in front of her, to my face, on my doorstep.
The worst part is, I knew she’d fuck with my priorities, mess with my head. I knew she would, and now that she has, I like it.
It’s perfect. I want her to move into my apartment, sleep in my bed, shower with my soap, wear my old shirts around. I want to eat her out before breakfast every morning, rub off on her ass, bury my face between her tits, and come on her hip.
I’m two inches from being so whipped I’ve turned into one of those guys who does whatever his woman tells him to do and grins all the time, like he’s high on the smell of pussy.
I’m a fucking goner for that girl. She owns me.
Which is why, when the knock comes at the door, I’m almost glad for it. I can’t stand myself. Can’t stand that she hit her head, bruising her temple. Can’t stand remembering the wretched, ugly sound she made throwing up in my bathroom.
After she was asleep, I texted Bo, telling him there was a good chance I’d end up behind bars before I made it home for Christmas.
Don’t let nobody in your place without a warrant, he wrote.
By the time I’ve got my boots on, the knocking has turned to pounding, but I take the time to pick up the book Caroline gave me off my pillow, dog-ear the page, and tuck it into my duffel bag.
It’s a good book, and I don’t want it trashed.
There are two of them at the door, a beefy guy with curly blond hair in a black Putnam PD uniform and a skinnier, shorter black guy wearing a red Putnam College Security polo. “Are you West Leavitt?” the blond one asks.
“Yes.”
“I’m Officer Jason Morrow with the Putnam Police, and this is Kevin Yates from campus security. We received an anonymous tip that you’ve been engaging in the illegal sale of marijuana. We need to come in and have a look around.”
I can tell by the way he says this that it usually works. They knock on college kids’ doors—twice a year, three times, whenever there’s a serious complaint. They act civil and ask nice, and these other kids roll right over.
I’ve got nothing in the apartment for them to find, because, despite what Nate seems to think, I’m not fucking stupid. The amount of weed I’m holding—that’s a serious misdemeanor for possession all by itself, a class D felony if they can prove I’m selling it. Which they can, of course, because nobody could smoke that much and function as a normal human being. I keep it in a locker at the rec center, and I go by there two or three times a week, run around the track, lift weights, shower, pocket a few eighths, a few quarters, whatever I know I’m going to be able to sell.
I haven’t grown a plant on campus since the beginning of last year, when I did it more as a stunt than anything. I wanted people to talk. He’s the guy who’s growing the good bud. He’s the one who can hook you up. Once that first crop was harvested, I shut the whole thing down. Too risky.
I know what I got myself into. I know my rights.
“No,” I say to the cop at the door.
No, he can’t come in.
No, I can’t get out.
I’m trapped in this mess I made, and I have a month away from here—from her—to figure out how I’m going to escape.
My mom throws her arm around my neck from behind me, leaning close to plant a kiss that glances off my ear and lands mostly on my baseball hat.
“Ugh. Mom. You smell like steamed meat.”
She’s just home from a shift at the prison. I’ve never seen the cafeteria where she works, but if the way she smells when she comes off work is any indication, I’m not missing much.
I don’t really mind the kiss, though. The cafeteria smell is in her clothes, but I can smell her skin, too, some flowery soap or lotion. Bo’s bathroom counter is cluttered with Mom’s beauty supplies.
I’ve been away so long that the strongest impressions when I walked in a couple days ago were all smells. Stale cigarette smoke, the plug-in air freshener, the waft of air that came off the couch when I sat down—dog hair and aging foam cushions layered over with Febreze.
The first time Mom hugged me, her scent made my throat catch, a physical reaction that wasn’t quite tears and wasn’t quite allergies, either. The boy in me saying Mom at the same time my hands itched to push her away, put a little distance between us.
“I just can’t get over how good it is to have you back.”
“Quit hanging on him,” Bo says from across the table. “He’s too old for that crap.”
Mom takes off my cap and musses up my flattened-down hair. “He’s my baby. You get something to eat yet, Westie? I can make you chipped beef if you want.”
She’s been plying me with my favorites. “Nah, I ate in town. Me and Frankie picked up Arby’s after I took her to Bandon.”
Bo looks up. “What’d you go to Bandon for?”
He was gone when we left, gone when we got home. I guess he didn’t know. “I took Franks to the clinic for her physical.”
His eyes narrow, and he turns to my mom. “You let him take her for that shot?”
My mom blinks a few times, too rapidly, and I realize she’s stuck me in the middle of something. She said Frankie needed a physical in order to be allowed to do some kind of after-school indoor-soccer thing come January. When we got to the clinic, the nurse told me Franks was overdue for a hepatitis booster and that she needed to get it or she wouldn’t be able to stay in school next year.
I figured it was a fluke. The state health plan covered it, so I told the nurse to go ahead, scrawling my signature across the form she handed me.
But now I remember, too late, that Bo doesn’t believe in vaccines. He’s got a book about it, a ready lecture about the fallacy of herd immunity and the toxicity of the stuff they put in those shots as preservatives. He’ll go on about blood aluminum levels for an hour if you get him going.
“Did Frankie get a shot?” Mom asks.
When Mom had walked in the door, Frankie showed her the Band-Aid, first thing.
I glare at her, and she gives me this weak smile. Her eyes are pleading with me. Come on, West. Take my side.
I don’t want there to be sides. Not between Mom and Bo.
“I went by what the doctor said.”
Bo picks up his Camels from off the table and peers in the open mouth of the pack. Frowns, slides out the last cigarette. He’s got a long fuse. If he and my mom are going to fight about this, it won’t be now.
But he’s not going to forget it happened.
“I’m going to grab a Coke,” Mom says. “West, you want anything?”
“I’ll take a beer.”
“Get me another pack from the freezer, would you?” Bo asks.
Mom heads toward the fridge. “Didn’t you just open those this morning?”
“So what if I did?”
“So you’re supposed to be cutting back. For Frankie.”
Frankie’s out in the living room, not visible from the kitchen, but Bo’s house is small, and she can hear. She calls, “You’re supposed to be quitting, Bo.”
“Maybe next week.”
Mom snags a beer for me. She doesn’t ask Bo if he wants one, and when she twists off the lid and says, “You want a glass, West?” he makes a disgusted noise and pushes up from the table.
“Where are you going?”
“Out to the greenhouse.”
He opens the freezer and takes a pack of cigarettes from the carton.
“You got some dinner?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
The corners of her mouth turn down as she watches him push out the back door. It makes her look old. My mom’s only thirty-seven, but in her shapeless prison uniform she’s middle-aged, the lines in her face deep-set, the disappointment at the edges of her mouth never quite disappearing.
She hates that uniform. In a little while she’ll take a shower and do her hair, put on tight jeans and a nice shirt, chasing a youth that’s getting away from her.
She was always more like a friend with a driver’s license than a parent. A friend whose bad habits and flaws are obvious to everyone who knows her, but the kind of friend you forgive because she’s got a good heart, and she can’t seem to stop herself from getting it crushed.