Something Wicked (16 page)

I sit here for the longest time. People come and go. The sari lady eventually gets up and strolls the kid away. The black car tears off around the building. And I keep sitting here, not really thinking about much, other than how sorry I feel for myself.

Then, after the self-pity and my fifth cigarette, I finally get to the truth. I’m surprised about what is really making me upset. Because I realize that what kills me, what absolutely rips my soul apart, is not actually that I’ll never see Michael again. It’s the realization that Michael, even the mere thought of him, was what was helping me get by in this pathetic life.

And without Michael, without the dream of him, I have nothing.

Michael saved me.

He was like this unexpected gasp of breath above water before I submerged again. A second chance. But I’m beginning to think it wasn’t a good thing. I’m beginning to think he just prolonged the slow dying. It would have been better to just let me drown.

I go sit on a swing beside some little girl who’s swinging high, kicking her legs up and up, trying to fly like a bird. I think of Bradley and how I’d push him on a swing set just like that for hours. “Higher! Higher! Higher!” he’d shout. How I wish I was that young again.

It’s hard to explain the presence of an absence. I wasn’t aware that the idea of Michael was colouring everything for me, making life richer and more beautiful. It’s only now that he’s gone from my mind and I’m left to face the stark, bare, chilling reality that I see it for real …

My fucking ugly life.

I don’t go home until after eleven ’cause I know I just end up fighting with my mom when I’m so upset. So I sit in the park and then go walking around the streets, thinking about stuff. At some point I feel calm enough to go to sleep, because I’ve made a decision about my life: I’m not giving up. I’m giving in. There’s a difference. I give in to the destiny I’m being pushed toward. There’s no point in changing. I give in to my shitty life with my shitty friends and my shitty future. But it’s not a surrender; it’s more like I’m stopping the resistance. Why fight it if you always lose in the end? Why believe in that little bit of hope? There are only so many times you can get knocked down before lying on the ground becomes more enticing than the fight.

Why was the Lady of Shalott cursed, anyway? They don’t say what she did to deserve it. It’s just a given that she’s doomed to this life of solitude, and the story goes on from there. No one questions why. Sisyphus’s mistake was clear: he didn’t obey the gods. But it seems the Lady was just born into it. Like me.

Thirty-Two

Jasmyn arranges it so that I bump into Fortune again at one of her friends’ parties. We see each other the moment I walk in the door. He’s sitting on the couch, his arm up around some fat blond girl whose tits are hanging out of her shirt. He nods coolly in my direction, like I’m almost a stranger, and then turns back to the boobs.

I’m so pissed off and tell Jasmyn I’m not staying.

“Take it easy,” she coaches. “He’ll come to you. He likes you. Markus told me so. Just chill. Here.” She passes me a beer from out of her backpack.

The whole night goes by and I talk to losers while Fortune hits on every girl in the room but me. I tell myself I don’t care, but the more drunk I get, the more upset I am about it. At three o’clock, now thoroughly drunk, I tell Jasmyn I’m going to the washroom and then I’ll be leaving.

After I’m done in the bathroom, I open the door and find Fortune’s face right up in the crack. He smiles, all chilled. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I say coldly, and try to push the door open to leave, but he’s holding it still. “You gonna let me out?”

“You gonna let me in?” He smiles so damn sexy I want to kill him.

“No. You fucking kidding me? Where is your girlfriend?”

He laughs. “Which one?”

“Yeah, exactly,” I say, pushing harder on the door.

“I’m coming in,” he warns, and pushes through, starts kissing me, and locks the door behind him. I’m so weakwilled, I don’t even fight him off. “Oh, babe. I wanted to kiss you all night,” he whispers.

I push him back. “You didn’t even look at me once.”

He ignores my comment and leans in to kiss again, hard this time. He wants me so badly, I feel it all over. It’s like he can’t get enough of me. And I’m so happy that he chose me. Of all the girls he could be with tonight, he chose
me
. And I’m going to make sure he knows he made the right choice. I welcome his warm, soft lips, and then his hands, and then he pulls down my jeans and underwear and lifts me onto the bathroom counter.

Later, when Fortune drives me home, he’s like a different person, all mellow and sweet. He tells me about his family and I realize he’s not as big a jerk as I wanted to think he was. Which is a damn shame, because it means I might end up liking him for real after all. He tells me he lives at home because he takes care of his mom and his little brothers, who are something like eight and ten. His mom is sick, she’s got chronic fatigue syndrome, and he says sometimes she doesn’t get out of bed for days. He’s basically the father around his house, which for some reason he doesn’t seem to mind. All that makes me like him even more.

Even though he gets all soft talking to me on the way home, he doesn’t kiss me goodbye like last time. He basically just stops the car and keeps his hands on the steering wheel, like he’s in a rush to go somewhere else. I pretend everything is cool, and tell him I’ll see him around. I watch the reflection of his car lights in the lobby window as I walk away.

If I can’t be with Michael, then I might as well be with Fortune. I promise myself that I’ll try to give him a chance, even though my heart is somewhere else. And to be honest, it feels good to have someone wanting me.

Thirty-Three

Today
was Bradley’s birthday. It’s probably why I’ve been thinking about him so much lately. He was cremated, so there’s no grave to visit. Instead, we go every year to the park behind our old apartment complex, where he used to play. It’s a few blocks away from where we live now, but we might as well just go outside our own home because all the apartment playground parks look the same, with the same rundown equipment and dirty gravel ground, as if a nuclear bomb had wiped out all trees, grass, and anything vibrant and just left behind a skeleton of metal.

We bundle up and sit on a bench. My mom sets up a framed photo of Bradley, her Discman and speakers in between us, and we have to listen to this sad Cat Stevens CD. I don’t mind this tradition, but I don’t understand why we can’t celebrate his birthday in a restaurant or somewhere normal. It seems so morbid here in the park.

There are a few kids in the playground, running around, laughing and shouting and tripping over themselves. They are all about how old Bradley would have been, which makes the whole thing even sadder.

I
try to lighten the mood by talking about something happy. “You remember that wacky ice cream truck with the handpainted cones and soft drinks on the side? It would play that out-of-tune music?”

“Yeah.” My mom smiles.“‘The ants come marching two by two.’”

“And Bradley would go berserk. Jumping up and down, shouting,‘Ice cream! Ice cream!’ ”

“Ha!” my mom laughs, slapping her hand down to her thigh. “He was so damn excited, it was hard to say no.”

“And he’d smear the chocolate all over his face …”

“I swear it was on purpose …”

“And I tried to smear it on my face once—”

“— until you saw that boy you had a crush on.”

I whack my mom on the arm. “Did not! It just didn’t feel good.”

“Whatever,” my mom teases.

I don’t make a big deal about it, but she’s wrong. I remember that day well. I remember the ice cream on my face because I was disappointed I couldn’t just forget it was there. I remember being sad that I couldn’t go back to the freedom of being a kid anymore.

We stop talking ’cause the memory is over and neither of us has anything left to say. My mom starts to raise a hand to her face and I know she’s crying. I get tears too, but I hold them back. Afterward, we plant a chestnut tree seed somewhere in the barren field, because Bradley liked squirrels and chestnut trees. Usually after that we just head home and order something nice for dinner, like Swiss Chalet, but this time my mom says she wants to go back and sit on the bench again. So we do, and I wonder what’s up. Until she speaks …

“Melissa, I’m pregnant.”

“What?”

“About two months or so. I didn’t know. That’s why I’ve been feeling so rotten.”

“Two months?” I’m trying to do the math. She’s only been with Scott for about two months. “So whose is it?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Hopefully Scott’s.”

Hopefully? “Does he know?”

“No.”

I don’t go there. I don’t want to know what will happen. The silence grows between us, and in its emptiness I place all the things that will go wrong. He will leave her. She will have a nervous breakdown. She will lose the baby. She will start drinking again. We will lose the apartment. My life will be fucked. I feel the anger rising up inside me.

“Well. Congratulations?” I ask.

“Don’t be mad, Melissa.”

“I’m not,” I reply weakly, and scowl up to the sky. I just can’t believe it. What kind of god is supposed to be up there?

Thirty-Four

A
baby?

I don’t talk to my mom for a week. I can’t help it. I’m mad. How can she be so stupid? She can’t handle a baby. She can barely take care of herself. I hate her growing belly. I hate her tired, lazy-ass body crashing on the couch early every night in front of the TV. I hate her pathetic voice when she talks to Crystal on the phone, telling her all her problems and woes, like she wants everyone to feel sorry for the choices she’s made. She’s so weak it makes me sick. I avoid going home. I spend a lot of time at Fortune’s place, or I go to Jessica’s or Ally’s. Whoever’s house I can crash at.

My mom buys fruits and vegetables and puts them in a big bowl on our kitchen table, and then comments on it every time someone comes over. “I’m on a health kick,” she explains proudly, and I know she’s dying to tell them about the pregnancy. But then she hides in her room and smokes cigarettes. She thinks I can’t smell it. She thinks the incense she burns hides it. She thinks I’m as stupid as she is.

I feel sorry for her kid. I feel sorry for that little baby.

I wake up angry, every day, so I go to Jessica’s place in the
mornings before school to smoke a few joints because her mom goes to work early and she has the apartment to herself. Jess is usually who I go to if I want to talk about my mom, and Ally’s for when I want to talk about guys. I sit on Jess’s bed and roll the joints while she sits at this princess vanity table with bright lights all around the mirror, doing her hair and makeup. It takes her like an hour, and in the end she pretty much looks the same: plain Jane, except with a bit of shimmer around her eyes.

I light up the second joint, take a few drags, and then continue my thought.“I mean, how can she take care of a baby when she can’t even take care of herself? She can’t pay the rent herself—she needs a man to do it for her. But she can’t keep a boyfriend. Can’t even cook. I do everything for her.
Ev-er-ything.
I do laundry, make dinner. You know what? She doesn’t even know how to clean an oven. You know what she did? She pushed the automatic cleaning button. She thought it would just clean itself. She’s such an idiot.”

“How’s she gonna clean her baby’s ass? Is she gonna push a button for that too?” Jessica starts laughing hysterically, like it’s the funniest thing humankind has ever said. She can be nerdy when she’s high. I roll my eyes and wait till she stops, because I know when she’s laughing like that there’s nothing you can do.

“Sometimes you’re an idiot,” I say.

Jess scowls. “What’s your problem? What’s the big deal, anyway? It’s not like she’s told you she’s dying or something.”

“’Cause I’m not taking care of a stupid baby.” I move over to stand behind her, push her head to the side, and check out my own hair in the mirror. “I’m not changing one fuckin’ diaper. I’m not picking it up from daycare. I’m not staying home every night shaking little jingly toys in front of its face. If I wanted to fuck up my own life, I would have had my own baby. Shit. Look. My hair looks terrible.”