Bottled Up (17 page)

“Barbie-Q-Chicken.”

He laughed his head off, and I pulled the pillow tighter on my ears.

“Great, Bugs, now go downstairs and have breakfast.”

“Knock-knock.”

“Who the hell's there now?”

“Don.”

“Don who?”

“Don just lie there. It's time to get up.”

He pulled the blanket off of me and ran out of the room.

Butthead.

He forgets pretty fast sometimes how scared he is. It's like he wakes up every day trying to play the family game of let's-pretend-nothing-happened. He tries to play it, but by the time we're halfway to school he still ends up shooting a million questions at me. I'd have to help him grow out of that. Teach him the rules: Say nothing. Expect nothing. Ask nothing, and nobody lies to you.

I took a quick shower, got my coolest purple-and-blue tie-dyed T-shirt on. I grabbed five dollars off my dresser and shoved it into my pocket with the bottle cap. This bottle cap thing was getting to be a habit. At school I kept pulling it out of my pocket and tossing it as if I was playing heads-or-tails. Sometimes I'd just stick my hand in my pocket and rub my thumb around the edge.

Down in the kitchen I figured everybody would be playing the pretend game. Nobody would say anything about what happened with Mikey and the bottle. Mom would be cooking some big breakfast and Dad would be whistling and reading the paper.

I was wrong.

Mikey was sitting at the table stomping his feet and crying about how it wasn't fair.

“You just watch your mouth,” my father was saying.

“Then
you
do it,” Mikey said to Mom.

“I can't. I have to work,” she said.

“This sucks,” he yelled.

“You're lucky I'm letting
you
go,” the Grinch said. “But I'm not taking time off work to reward you for the crap you pulled last night.”

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Oh look,” my father said. “Here's Superman now. Maybe
he'll
bail you out.” He grabbed his keys and briefcase, and walked out of the house.

“Don't ever come back!” Mikey screamed. “I hate you!”

I couldn't believe it. I'd never seen him like this before. Bugs was buggin' out.

“Stop that,” my mother said. “Finish your breakfast.”

“No. And I'm not going to school.”

“What's going on?” I asked again.

“You were right,” Bugs said. “He wasn't ever going to go to the zoo with me.”

Mom picked up her purse and looked inside, probably to check how many pills she had left. She took a twenty-dollar bill out and put it on the table for him.

“Get yourself a souvenir,” she said, and started playing with his hair. “You'll have a better time without your father anyway. Trust me. He's no fun at these things.”

“I hate him,” Mikey said.

“No you don't,” she said. She kissed the top of his head. “You're just disappointed.”

“How do you know?” I asked her. “Maybe he does hate him.”

Mikey didn't look up. He was staring into his bowl of soggy frosted flakes.

“I'm late for work,” she said to me. “You need to get your brother to school.”

She smiled at Mikey, but he didn't look at her.

“Enjoy your trip,” she said. “You'll be fine.”

Then she left.

Mikey had this look on his face I'd never seen before. He was trying to be real angry. Trying to push the sadness way down into his belly where he wouldn't feel it.

“We better go,” I said.

“I'm not going on the stupid trip.” He had his arms across his chest.

“What are you acting so surprised about? I told you he wasn't going to go to the zoo with you.”

“So what? You don't know everything.”

“Stop being a baby.”

I grabbed him by the shoulder of his shirt and got him to the door. “Move it,” I said. “I got to get to school too.”

All I needed was Giraldi on my case for being late.

Mikey went out the door without his lunch or his backpack. I grabbed them both, then took the money my mother had left on the table and shoved it into my pocket. There was no way Mikey was going to buy a souvenir, but I could do a lot with twenty bucks.

“You got to be tough,” I told him on the way to school. “You can't let this stuff get to you.”

He didn't answer me. It was the first time he'd ever gone the whole way to school without talking. He didn't say a word. He didn't ask me a single question.

All the kids in the first grade were piling onto the buses when we got to the parking lot. Mikey's teacher yelled for him to hurry because they had to leave.

“Where's your father?” she asked.

Mikey walked past her and got on the bus.

“He got sick,” I told her.

“I'm sorry to hear that. Is your brother feeling okay? He doesn't look well.”

“He's just bummed about our father.”

I looked up at the bus and saw Mikey getting into a seat by the window right next to where I was standing.

“Thanks for getting him here,” she said. She got on the bus and the driver pulled the door shut.

I slapped my hand on the window where Mikey was sitting, but he didn't turn his head to look at me.

The other kids were all squealing and laughing, and then they started singing.

Mikey wasn't singing. Hell, I wouldn't sing that stupid song either.

He finally turned his head and looked right at me.

We knew what that song was about.

We knew the deal—

“You're in no position to come to school late.”

Giraldi was sitting behind his desk looking at me as if I'd just robbed a bank. “You have detention today,” he said.

“I can't do it,” I told him. “I have to get my brother from school.”

“You'll have to make other arrangements.”

“This is messed up,” I said. “You keep talking about being responsible, but it's okay for me not to get my brother from school when I'm supposed to.”

He tapped his pen on the desk. “There isn't anybody else who could get him?”

“Like who?”

Giraldi didn't answer me.

“I want you to see Ms. Butler today—get a urine test.”

“What the hell for?”

“I want to make sure you weren't cutting school this morning to get high.”

“This is such crap.”

“You won't tell me why you were late, just that something came up. That's not a good enough reason. Since you can't do detention, then you find a way to see the counselor.”

Then Giraldi the control freak dialed her number with me sitting there, and made me get on the phone to set up a time with her for after I picked up Mikey.

I wanted to jump out of myself. I felt as if I had this extra layer of skin that I needed to shake off. I wanted a joint so bad. No, not just a joint—a whole bag of weed. I had plenty waiting for me at home but I had a urine check waiting for me too. I had to find a way around all this. There had to be a way.

Without a buzz, I didn't feel like me. A clean me wasn't the real me.

I didn't
want
it to be either.

“How was the zoo?” I asked Mikey on the way home from school.

“Stupid,” he said, not looking at me.

“You hungry?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I got to go talk to that lady again today, so I figured we'd grab a couple slices of pizza on the way.”

“Whatever.”

He wasn't talking. He wasn't goofing around. No knock-knock jokes. No questions. Not a word about M&M's. Something was up with the kid. I was hoping some soda and pizza would set it right.

We ate the slices while we walked, but he still had nothing to say. After a few minutes I stopped thinking about it. It was kind of a break for me not having to listen to him yap for a change.

We sat on the couch in the waiting room. My cigarette pack was digging into my front pocket, so I pulled the box out and put it next to me. I had a book of matches in the plastic around the pack, and I slid it in and out while I waited. There was nothing else to do. Mikey was picking at his fingernails. Claire was taking her time getting out there to me.

Between seeing her twice and the two group sessions coming up, I was going to have been in that damn office four times in one week.

“Hello,” Claire said, coming down the hall.

I got up to go to her office but she stopped in front of Mikey. She put a hand out for him to shake and he sort of took it.

“My name is Claire,” she said. “You're Pip's brother?”

“I'm Mikey,” he said.

“Nice to meet you, Mikey. Do you have something to do while you're out here waiting for your brother?”

“I have to read a book.”

I took
Jekyll and Hyde
out of my back pocket and threw it on his lap. “Try this one,” I said.

I was done with it. I'd read the whole thing and taken the quiz. He could have it.

“He's got your eyes,” Claire said when we got into her office.

“No, he doesn't. His are blue.”

“He's got your look.”

“What look?”

“That look that says back off.”

“Mikey? He's like the friendliest kid in the world. He'd follow anybody home if they had a bag of M&M's.”

“Hm.” She started swiveling in her chair. “I don't see it. He looks—I don't know—angry, I guess is the right word.”

“He's having a bad day.”

“Is that it?” She let her eyebrows go up. “I don't think one day teaches you how to have eyes like that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind. Tell me why we're having an extra pow-wow today.”

“Giraldi has nothing better to do than bust my chops.”

“What happened?”

“Why should I tell you? So you can call him and let him know you got it out of me?”

“You know I can't tell him what you say in here.”

“So why'd he say he wanted me to come here for a urine check? To hear from you whether or not it's clean, right?”

“Come on, Pip. A dirty urine wouldn't prove anything anyway. That could mean you got high last night, not necessarily this morning.”

“Give me a cup anyway.”

“I'm not taking urine from you today. I'm more interested in knowing what happened this morning. Whatever it is had to be pretty damn important for you to risk blowing things for yourself at school.”

Did she really think I'd ever give up the whole story—that I'd ever tell her anything about me or my family? She had me confused with those punks in group.

“My brother was screwing around and got us both late. That's all.”

She sort of looked me over for a second. “What happened to your hands?”

For a second I didn't know what she was talking about. Then it hit me—the Grinch pushing me down into the glass in the kitchen, falling down in the street with Bugs. Even when I took a shower that morning I hadn't been thinking about my hands until the soap stung like a son of a bitch.

Then I forgot all about it again.

It's not like how Mikey pretends nothing ever happens. What I do is stuff it in my head with all the other pictures. The counseling thing was like having somebody trying to pull the pictures out of my head—forcing me to look at them. Who the hell needs that?

“How did your hands get all cut up like that?”

“I fell.”

“It must have been a nasty fall.”

I didn't say anything. I didn't have to.

“Pip. How come after seeing you, what is it now, four times, five times? How come I don't feel like I know you any better?”