Afterward Page 3

  My heart is pumping so fast I start thinking back to the drug movies they made us watch in Human Growth and Development last year and I wonder whether any of them showed 16-year-old girls dying from pot heart attacks. Pot sometimes makes Jason chatty, and normally I don’t mind getting high with him and talking shit about people we know before we start making out. But now I’m so jittery I slide off the fence and start walking parallel to it, away from Jason toward the back of the property.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Jason’s behind me. For a second I think he’s concerned about me. Then I realize I have the joint in my hands.

  “Here,” I say, turning around to give the joint back to him. He scratches under his neck and looks at me, and his eyes look beady and tired all of a sudden in the darkening sky.

  “What’s going on?” he says, and suddenly his free hand is around the small of my back and he’s tipping his face into mine. He asks me this question in a soft, worried voice. I think he’s sincere, too. But the trouble with Jason McGinty is that he only gets sweet and gentle when he’s high.

  “I don’t ever want you to talk about my brother again, okay?” I say, and my words are a whisper. They sound like they’re coming from far away, like they’re floating down from the black walnut trees above us.

  “Okay, fine,” he says, confused. “It’s cool. I’m sorry. I was just asking if he was okay.”

  “Okay,” I answer. “But seriously. Don’t bring him up again. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he says, his voice turning even softer, which makes him sound more appealing somehow. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad.” I don’t know where the joint is because now both his hands are around me, holding me around my waist. I press a cheek into his chest, which feels like a warm, safe wall I can hide behind. I listen for his heart. Maybe it’s beating slower than mine. Maybe if I listen to his long enough, mine will slow down, too.

  But I never do find out if his heart is beating fast or slow because now Jason is kissing my neck and the back of my ear. And like I said, he’s a really good kisser. He delivers these tiny, goosebumps-inducing kisses and nibbles all over that make my hair follicles go electric.

  He doesn’t look like the type of guy that could kiss like this, but he is.

  It’s nice being high and kissing Jason McGinty. And that’s all I’m trying to think about when he takes my hand and pulls me down to the ground underneath the trees and the moon and the dark Texas sky. That’s all I’m trying to think about as I stretch out on my back and give in.

  ETHAN—132 DAYS AFTERWARD

  Today I woke up and headed downstairs to find my parents waiting for me in the kitchen with a pancake breakfast. My mom made a smiley face on the pancakes with chocolate chips and whipped cream, and there’s a bowl of fresh fruit and a big glass of orange juice to go along with everything.

  “Happy birthday, Ethan!” they shout. My mom has her hands clasped together under her chin, and my dad is standing there with his hands on his hips, nodding. They look so eager. So happy.

  “Hey, thanks,” I say, trying on a smile. I’m not hungry, but I sit down at the breakfast table anyway and start taking a few bites of the pancakes.

  “I remember how much you liked these,” my mom says, reaching out to pet my arm. I tense up and close my eyes briefly until she stops.

  “This is really nice,” I say. I feel like they’re watching me eat, so I try to chew with some enthusiasm. But I’m pretty tired. I slept really bad last night, waking up every hour with my heart racing and feeling sick to my stomach, too.

  It’s October fourth. My birthday. I’m sixteen. And I haven’t celebrated my birthday since I turned eleven. I shove another mouthful of pancakes down my throat and remember that day. How Jesse and Eric and all the guys came over to play video games, and my mom made us tacos and Jesse told us about how he’d spied with his dad’s binoculars on his babysitter who lived next door to him and how he’d seen her with her top off and everything.

  I never told Marty when my birthday was, and he never asked. It was hard for me to know the days when I was there, and even now when I think back there are blanks—long stretches where I can’t remember anything. I can’t figure out if the not remembering makes me anxious or relieved or both. But I do know that just thinking about Marty makes my breathing tighten up.

  Don’t think about it, Ethan. Don’t think about him. He isn’t here. He isn’t even alive anymore.

  I run my thumbs over my knuckles a few times and then shove another mouthful of pancakes into my mouth and make myself chew. They taste like dirt and air and nothing. My parents are still watching me. My mom is still grinning so hard I think she might break her cheeks. Her eyes are tearing up, too.

  “Buddy, when you’re done there, we have something for you in the garage,” my dad tells me.

  “Great,” I say, shoveling another bite in my mouth and wondering how much I have to eat before I can say I’ve had enough. This would at least be easier if they were eating, too. But ever since I’ve been back they just seem to like watching me do stuff. Even boring stuff like eating.

  Finally, after a few more bites I tell my parents I’m full, and they lead me out the back door to the detached garage at the end of our long driveway. We never park our cars in the garage. We just keep them in the driveway, so mostly the garage is a building full of my dad’s tools and random Tupperware crates full of Christmas decorations and other junk. When I first got back I saw a whole stack of posters with my eleven-year-old face on them and the word MISSING stamped across them in big red letters, but pretty soon after I got home they disappeared. I don’t know where they went.

  This morning my dad uses the clicker to open up the garage door, and sitting there in the middle of the garage is a brand new drum kit.

  My eyebrows pop up. My mouth drops open.

  It’s not just any kit. It’s a Ludwig. Deep blue with Zildjian cymbals.

  Shit.

  “Wait, is this for me?” I ask.

  “Yes, it’s for you!” my mother cries, and she claps her hands.

  I want to touch it, but it’s like I can’t move my feet. I can’t believe what I’m looking at. I mean, it’s a Ludwig. A fucking Ludwig!

  “Wow,” I say, and I finally manage to move forward and touch the cymbals just a bit. They feel so solid in my hands. So sure of themselves.

  “Play us something!” my dad booms, and suddenly my stomach crumbles a little.

  “Oh, he doesn’t have to,” my mom says super fast in this high, singsong voice, and she looks at my dad with a You should know better than to ask that, honey look like I’m not even there. Like I’m still eleven and wouldn’t get the meaning.

  “Oh, yeah, there’s no rush,” my dad says, shaking his head like he was being silly to ask me to play this instrument that they had to have dropped serious cash to get.

  I let my fingers circle the cymbals again. “What happened to my old drums?” I ask, thinking of the cherry red Pearl set that used to live in here. I’d messed with it a couple of times since coming back, just to see if I could still play. At Marty’s I only played drums in my mind. He doesn’t like rock music or punk. I mean, he didn’t.

  Stop, stop, he’s dead and he’s not here.

  “The old drums are in the attic,” my mom says, and her voice is cracking. “Is that okay? We can get them out for you. It’s no problem. It’s just that we thought this one would be so much nicer.” She does that silly, high voice again, and it sounds forced enough to annoy me, and as soon as it does, I feel bad.

  “No, it’s okay,” I say. I’m glad the Pearl kit is gone. I like that this one is new. Brand new. “I love this,” I say. “Thank you.”

  And I look at my parents and I want to start crying all of a sudden, but I don’t. I just stand there, uncertain, and then my mom walks over and pulls me to her, and she smells like pancakes and soap and that perfume she keeps on her dresser—Shalimar. She kisses me on the temple. Once. Twice. Over and over again. Th
is time it doesn’t bug me as much as it did when she petted me at breakfast, but I still find myself holding my breath.

  “Oh, Ethan, it feels so good to tell you happy birthday,” she says. “Happy, happy, happy, happy birthday!” She’s crying now, which she does three to four times a day. Which is a few times less than when I first got home. Sometimes they’re sad tears and sometimes they’re happy tears, but I think lately the happy tears have been winning out.

  My dad is standing there in his tie and jacket, all dressed to leave for the office. He’s not crying but he is nodding and smiling, like he could stand there all day and watch my mom hug me.

  Finally I pull away because I know my mom will never pull away first, and my dad says he has to get going, but what about driving into the city tonight for a fancy birthday dinner? I think about making that drive on I-10, and my heart starts to pick up speed a little.

  “Maybe we could just stay home,” I say. “Maybe we could make our own pizzas.” The idea just comes to me. It’s something we used to do when I was little. Before. Until I say it I realize I hadn’t remembered it in a long time.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” my mom says, nodding, dabbing at her red eyes with her fingertips. “We’ll go to the store today and get everything.”

  “Sounds good,” dad says, nodding.

  Finally my dad gets going to work, and my mom goes inside to make a shopping list for the pizza stuff. I tell her I’m going to mess around on the drum kit. I know she’s going to watch me through the kitchen window, checking on me every five seconds. She can’t help herself. She has a real hard time letting me out of her sight even though I’m sixteen now. Even though I figure the odds of anything awful happening to me again are a million to one.

  Then again, the odds of the first awful thing happening to me—of Marty taking me—were a million to one, too. And it happened anyway.

  Maybe my mother doesn’t believe in luck or chance anymore. She just needs to be sure.

  I’m biting my lip so hard I can taste blood. I wince and shake my head a little, and then without thinking about it too much I grab the sticks and sit down at the Ludwig and adjust the stool so I’m at the right height.

  Like I said, I messed around on the Pearl kit a little when I first got back, but I haven’t really played the drums in over four years.

  Four years.

  A quarter of my life. Twenty-five percent of it lost.

  I rub my thumbs up and down the wooden drumsticks. I nurse my bit lip a little with my tongue. I close my eyes …

  And suddenly I’m drumming. I can’t tell if I’m any good even though I’m pretty sure my fills are for shit, and I wonder what my old band teacher, Mr. Case, would say if he were listening to me play right now. But all that really matters is I’m drumming. I’m drumming and I’m a drummer and I’m drumming. I hear Green Day songs in my head and I’m pretending I’m Tré Cool, and I give the kick drum a couple of smacks and whomps and wallops. I keep at it until I feel sweat starting to bead up under my hairline and my shoulders start to ache. And for the first time since I’ve been home, my mind blanks out but it’s not a bad thing. Not like the blanks from before, from when I was gone. These blanks feel good, actually. Almost peaceful. And, yeah, I probably need to build up my stamina, and maybe I’m good, and maybe I’m not.

  But that Ludwig, man. I’m telling you, it sounded fucking awesome.

  CAROLINE—140 DAYS AFTERWARD

  One of the good things about being the normal one is that I can get away with my room being an absolute shit show, and no one seems to bother me about it too much. Like right now I have what most geologists would define as a mountain of dirty laundry in the corner of my room, and my bookshelf is covered in empty cans of Coke Zero and stacks of old BUST magazines my cousin in Chicago mailed me, and my floor is decorated in spiral notebooks full of homework I might or might not do, depending.

  My closet is a train wreck, too. The other day in some pathetic attempt to make room for the dirty clothes I might someday get around to washing, I tried to empty it out. I still had my sixth grade All School Spelling Bee trophy in there, which shows you how long it’s been since I cleaned out my closet. It also goes to show you how much I’ve changed since the sixth grade.

  I shoved the trophy back on the shelf along with my favorite black Converse high tops and the teeniest, tiniest little bag of weed I bought from Jason McGinty, and then I covered it all up with some random T-shirt and a bunch of junk.

  I really didn’t have to cover the weed because no one goes in my closet but me. Like I said, there are perks to being the normal one. The one who met her milestones and didn’t have meltdowns in public places. The one who didn’t have to be carted around to a million doctors from birth only to have them all give the same diagnosis. Autism. Low functioning. Cause unknown. Therapy available but sorry, your insurance doesn’t cover it. And anyway, the closest therapist is over a hundred miles away.

  I remember when my parents told me I was going to have a little brother. I was five and in Ms. Sweeny’s kindergarten class at Dove Lake Primary, and when my parents sat me down in the kitchen and my mom put my chubby little girl hand on her belly to try and explain, I immediately pulled away, ran to my room, and came racing back carrying Slumber Party Barbie, my favorite.

  “What is this for?” my mother asked, confused.

  “For my new baby brother,” I said. “I want to share.”

  It’s one of those stories that gets told over and over again at family reunions and everything. One of those cute things kids say or do. A little anecdote to prove how precious I am.

  Or, rather, I was.

  There are no stories like that about me anymore.

  When Dylan was born I loved that I got to hold him (as long as I was sitting on the couch with my mom or dad next to me), and I loved how his baby heels were so soft and smooth, and his skin smelled better than my fruit-scented markers. He was my baby brother. Mine.

  But it didn’t take long before my parents noticed something was wrong. Mostly my mom noticed it. I was too tiny to put it all together, but I remember my parents sending me to my room when they talked about him. I remember my mom hovering around while he was in the crib or in his high chair. I remember her long conversations with her sister in Chicago and her crying as she talked in soft whispers. And as he got older, I remember being dragged around to doctors’ appointments, stuck in waiting rooms on vinyl couches, doodling in old Highlights or Ranger Rick magazines while we waited for another doctor who was running late.

  Later on, I took my homework to those doctors’ appointments, especially when we had to drive all the way into the city to go to them. I’d show my mom the stickers my teachers gave me, like the one with the funny parrot on it that said, “Awk! Good job, matey!”

  “That’s so nice, honey,” my mom would say, her eyes on Dylan as she tried to get him to stop sucking on his fingers or making some strange noise over and over again.

  It would be a lie if I told you Dylan didn’t frustrate me sometimes. He did. He does. But Dylan and me, we have our own thing going. Or at least we used to before everything that happened to him in May. I could get him to laugh when I made him his breakfast. I would put his favorite blue plastic bowl on my head (it’s the only bowl he’ll eat out of, so we have, like, ten of them), and then I would say, “Where’s Dylan’s blue bowl? Where’d it go?” And he would do this high-pitched laugh that’s totally his and smack the kitchen table with both fists.

  And I could distract him. When he threw fits in the middle of the Wal-Mart because he wasn’t allowed to climb inside the shopping cart or he decided he didn’t like the feel of his new socks, I could distract him by whistling. Mostly David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” but sometimes that “Dock of the Bay” song my grandfather likes a lot. If I whistled loud enough and long enough, he would sometimes calm down. And if people in the Wal-Mart stared at us, I gave them the business right back with a dirty look.

  It felt good knowing Dyla
n depended on me. Which only makes what happened that morning he wandered outside worse.

  In the months he’s been back, my whistling doesn’t help. Bowls on my head don’t help. Nothing seems to be helping Dylan. He still wakes up shrieking. He still wakes up crying. There are moments when he doesn’t want my mom or me to touch him even though we were some of the only people who could touch him before, and this makes life hard because Dylan still needs help with basically everything from washing to dressing to eating.

  And he’s really scared to go outside, even though it’s October now and the Texas summer is finally over and the weather is actually nice and cool. This means my mom has to practically drag him to the car to get him to go to school, where he spends his time in a special classroom for other kids like him. He used to like going there, but not anymore.

  You would think my mom would want to take him to the doctor. Now, more than ever. But after that first checkup at the hospital, it’s like my mom wants to act like everything is going to be okay if she just says it over and over enough. (“Let’s just get Dylan back in his regular routine. Let’s not make anything about this bigger than it is. He was barely gone from us.”) It pisses me off the way she seems to want to pretend nothing happened. And my dad spends so much time taking extra calls for the exterminating company he works for, he’s not around enough to give an opinion. He spends most of his days in people’s attics chasing rats, which is a probably a heck of a lot more satisfying than taking care of a kid who’ll never get better. Who’ll never change.

  But Dylan is changing. For the worse. Like tonight. Tonight was crazy awful. We were eating dinner and my dad got up suddenly to go to the refrigerator to get something. Probably another can of whatever cheap beer was on special at the Tom Thumb.

  Slam!

  Dylan’s blue bowl was on the floor, spaghetti everywhere. Then he scooted into the corner of the kitchen like some sort of hurt animal, crouching into a little ball, and he wet his pants, a little yellow pool forming underneath him on the floor.