Crazy Love You (9 page)

But the really scary thing was, I didn't remember it that way. All I remembered—all I remember to this day—was crying like a girl, being carried out. I remember wailing, hurting. The coach had me under the arms, his assistant was holding my ankles. They'd picked me up off the ground where I had lain roaring in anger and carried me down the hallway to the nurse's office. I lay on a cot, curled in a ball, while she called my father from an adjacent room.

“Poor thing,” I heard the nurse say to my father. “He must be under so much stress. How's his mom doing?”

“Oh,” she said after a pause. “I'm so sorry.”

•  •  •

My mom had problems, big ones. She'd had them all her life. Brutal bouts with depression, a psychotic break in college. She had been on and off medication most of her life since late adolescence. The early years of her marriage to my father, when she was working, were the most stable and productive she would have. She'd suffered postpartum after I was born, but apparently she'd snapped out of it pretty quickly. Still, she was a prime candidate for postpartum psychosis after a second child. But The Hollows was a backward place, a small town in the sticks. So maybe the doctor didn't know to be watchful. Maybe my father was in denial. Maybe that's why no one helped her. Poor Ella.

But as a kid, I didn't think about any of that. All I knew was that my mother killed my sister, and she would have killed me, too, if I hadn't run from her. And worse than that, everyone in The Hollows knew it, too. Even though everyone pretended to think that Ella had died from SIDS. It was one of the Whispers. The secret truths of that town, only spoken of in hushed voices, that carried on the wind and lived deep in The Hollows Wood. The Hollows knew how to keep a secret, forever.

My father came to the school a while later after my gym class meltdown and picked me up.

“Feeling all right?” he said when I got in the truck. I shut the door and fastened the seat belt around my big belly.

“I'm fine.”

“What happened?”

I gave him the recap as I remembered it. He nodded, seemed to search for words then opt for silence. We drove home that way, with him looking straight ahead and me looking out the window at the passing landscape, hating every tree and leaf and wide green field and pretty house.

I was a kid who needed help. I needed someone to talk to, to work out all the pain, the dark thoughts, the twisting anger and fear with which I lived daily. I needed my father to step in at school about the bullying. I needed him to come home at night and have dinner with me, throw a ball around the yard. But he wasn't that kind of man. He was a blue-collar guy, a hardcase. You shouldered the burdens of your life and you didn't complain. You worked hard and you walked off whatever blows were dealt you. That's what he expected of me, and I knew it.

“Your grandmother's home,” he said in front of the house. I got out and he drove away, back to work.

My grandmother had moved in permanently to take care of me while my father worked. She was a funny old woman who played cards on Thursday night, said novenas at the church on Mondays, and thought the Crock-Pot was the best invention of the modern age. I would come home to find her reading a romance novel beneath the dim light of a reading lamp—unless she was out playing poker with her girlfriends at the rec center.

She looked up when I walked in, peering at me over her reading glasses. I knew that both my eyes were black, but she didn't say anything. Her gaze just lingered longer than normal.

“How was your day?” she asked carefully.

“Fine,” I lied. I waited for her to say something about the incident or at least to ask why I was home early. But she just pulled herself to her feet.

“Learn anything new?”

“Nope.”

“Good.” She issued a smoky laugh, gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Want a snack?”

You might be picking up on the fact that my family was not big on talking. No, we liked to bury our pain deep. We took the bumblebee approach to life's problems: ignore them and hope they will go away.

“Sure,” I said.

The kitchen was always stocked: shiny, crinkly bags of Doritos; orange dusty Cheetos; greasy, salty Ruffles potato chips. Crisp white boxes of Twinkies, Pop-Tarts, Moon Pies, Devil Dogs, and cellophane-wrapped bulk packages of Snickers and Mars bars lined the pantry shelves. The freezer was full of Pizza Rolls, Hungry Man meals, ice cream sandwiches, Fudgsicles, chocolate-covered bananas. There were hot dogs, chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, onion rings, crinkle fries. My grandmother thought Fruit Roll-Ups were healthy.
Have some fruit
, she'd say, unwrapping one. I ate them by the dozen.

Did she notice that I was growing obese? That my face was a minefield of acne? I think, in her way, she was trying to comfort me. She could do nothing else. She couldn't bring my sister back to life, or bring my mother home, or make my father pay attention to me. But she could give me treats after school.

And it
was
a comfort, all that fat and sugar and chemical flavor. I looked forward to those junk-food feasts. I missed my mother desperately, was still crying myself to sleep at night. I would dream of my bawling baby sister, and wake up wishing I could hear her crying. I was a pariah at school, taunted, beaten. Fatboy, Psycho, Blubber Butt, Pizza Face. They were afraid of me; I could see that. I had been touched by something unthinkable and it frightened them. It frightened me. But gorging on junk food was pleasure. It was my first drug.

My grandmother was beside me. She put a hand on my shoulder, gazed at me through thick glasses. She had a light down of fuzz on her upper lip.

“If you let them hurt you now, they'll hurt you all your life,” she said.

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. She pushed herself to standing and walked slowly out of sight and then returned. She handed me a bag of frozen peas for my black eyes and another plate of Chips Ahoy! for, presumably, my bruised psyche.

What was she suggesting I do? I didn't ask. How was I supposed to keep people who hated me from hurting me?

“You have no reason to be ashamed,” she said. “What happened wasn't your fault.”

“I know,” I said.

That's what grown-ups always say to kids and no kid yet has ever believed it.

•  •  •

After I had stuffed myself, my grandmother went back to her reading. Our big talk concluded, I left the house and she didn't stop me. Priss was always there, waiting by that falling-down gray shack. That day, she stood by a tall oak and I remember thinking how she seemed such a part of the place, like she could just sink into the tree and become a shadow in its trunk or a small dark hollow. She was wispy and ephemeral, always just about to slip away somehow.

“What happened to your eyes?”

I told her about the dodge ball, the hard trip to the ground.

“Who?” she asked.

“A kid named Mikey Beech.”

She nodded, as though she knew him. But she didn't go to school with me.

“You can't let him get away with it,” she said.

I knew that even though she was just a girl, there was something about her that was older, wiser, more worldly. She played games like a kid, but talked like a grown-up sometimes.

“If you let him get away with it, things will only get worse.” She kicked at the ground, dusting up some sticks and leaves.

“What can I do?”

“Hurt him worse than he hurt you.”

Some people have the capacity, even the desire, to hit back at their attackers. Others just curl up in a ball and wait for the blows to stop falling. That was me, even then. I didn't want to hurt people, even when they hurt me. What does that make me?

“I can't,” I said.

What a pussy!
I heard Mikey say as they carried me away weeping, even though he'd been cowering from me just moments earlier. What can I tell you? School, at least where I grew up, was an unforgiving playing field.

Priss looked at me, a darkness shifting behind her eyes. But she wasn't angry or disappointed.

“Then
I
will.”

I didn't know what she meant or what she thought she could do. She was a little girl in a dress, skinny and dirty, with scraped knees and a wild head of hair that looked as if it had never seen a brush. I thought she was just talking. Kids have no real power—so they brag and lie, make up stories.

“Just forget it,” I said. But there was something in her face, a kind of hard determination that I found a little frightening.

“If you let them hurt you, they just keep hurting you.” It was a weird echo of my grandmother's words.

She rubbed at her arms; it was cold and she was shivering. I took off my sweater and handed it to her. But she just shook her head.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked again.

I didn't want to hear what she had to say, and yet I
did
want to. I wanted someone to tell me what to do about my life. But in the end Priss didn't say anything. She tilted her ear up to the wind. Those voices, their rise and fall, their giggles and howls, gossipy titters and knowing laughter . . . I heard them all the time now but was only distantly aware of the sounds, like a kind of white noise in my life.

“Listen,” she said.

And I did.

•  •  •

That night I dreamed about fire—great licking orange flames reaching into the starry sky. I heard screaming and smelled the burning wood, felt the ache of smoke in the back of my throat. I was happy in that dream, watching those flames. Fire was all energy, all power, using the very air around it to grow stronger, burn brighter. I felt the heat of it on my face.

When I woke, I heard sirens far off in the distance. I walked to my window and there was Priss standing in my front yard, smiling. She looked tiny and white. I thought if I ran down to see her, she'd be gone by the time I got there, evaporating into the mist that hung in the air. Or was it smoke? I felt a mingling of fear and glee.

Someone burned down Mikey Beech's house that night. Over the next couple of days, the rumor started at school that it had been me. And eventually, the police came knocking.

There are a couple of recurring characters in my comic. One is the detective who has always suspected that Fatboy is responsible for all the crime and mayhem that seems to surround him, and not Priss. The detective is a little bit obsessed with Fatboy, because the kid has been getting away with things for too long. There's never any real proof, always an alibi or some conflicting evidence that gets Fatboy off the hook. The detective—tall and big through the shoulders with a jaw like a mountain and fists the size of Volkswagens—lurks, like a haunting specter. He's always in the shadows watching, waiting for Fatboy to fuck up and reveal himself as the psycho the detective believes him to be.

Then there's the shrink who acts as Fatboy's voice of reason. He is small and thin and I always draw him in his chair, with lots of sharp angles, with a big notebook on his lap. He has a shiny pate, and wire-rimmed glasses. He makes affirming noises, and says things like: “Ian, have you ever considered that Priss is your way of expressing the anger you won't allow yourself to express against your mother?” He doesn't believe in Priss either, thinks she's a product of Fatboy's shattered psyche. Fatboy, according to the doctor, never recovered from the trauma of having his mother try to kill him.

There's Fatboy's mother, whom he visits in the mental hospital once every book. She is characterized by her wide, dark eyes. I draw her thin and pale, hair ragged and wild as lightning bolts. She has peered over the other side of sanity, and seen things there that have destroyed her. She is a walking ghost, eaten alive by guilt and fear. She always has something cryptic to say, which later winds up making sense.

Then there's the psychic who talks to the dead. She is gray and birdlike, wasted by a life spent conversing with spirits. I find her to be the most unsettling character in the series. Because she
does
believe Ian. And she knows exactly who Priss is.

All of these characters are
based
at least in small part on real people from my life, though each of them is his or her own thing. The characters in my books are not real people, but real people serve as the seed from which they grew.

The books are dark, really dark. Graphically violent and ugly, and getting worse. Lately my editor has been asking me to tone it down. He is worried that Fatboy is not as sympathetic as he used to be. He used to be the victim, and Priss his avenger. But something about that energy has started to change—because Fatboy isn't a kid anymore.

He is a grown man now, and quite a successful one at that. He isn't picked on and abused. He really doesn't need Priss to fight his battles anymore. And she's a little upset about it; the balance of power has started to shift.

Lately, she's been picking fights and making trouble for Fatboy—like the whole thing with his writing partner. And Fatboy is starting to wonder whether Priss really has his best interests at heart anymore. Maybe he was just her excuse to do bad things. He no longer wants her to do those things on his behalf. But she still wants to do them. And he is not doing anything to stop her.

“So where are we going with this?” my editor, Zack, asked over lunch at the Noho Star, a post-trendy eatery on Lafayette. Big and roomy, always crowded with arty types, square-paned windows looking out on the gritty avenue, the place served everything plus awesome Chinese.

“What do you mean?” I asked. There was a weird energy to this lunch he'd called, like he had something to say. I didn't really have time for it, because I was past my deadline for the next book (which he should know since he was e-mailing me every Monday asking how it was all going), and I was completely stalled.

I hadn't talked to Priss since she burned those pictures of Megan. And a big part of me was hoping that she was gone for good. But, to be honest, since she
had
gone, I was having a hard time working. She was slipping away from me on the page. I couldn't hear her voice. I had developed an eye twitch from stress.