What is Real (27 page)

This is my life. My life is ordinary.

Stacey waves at me from the office. Her sweater is fuzzy and pink and hangs off one shoulder, revealing a fat bra strap. Mr. V stands behind her desk, leaning, like it's an effort to stand up. He's leaning on her shoulder, and she looks up at him and smiles and nods.

They are ordinary.

This is an ordinary place where ordinary things happen, and I'm just an ordinary kid and ordinary is one of those words that, when you repeat it, begins to sound like something it isn't.

Then Coach is in front of me.

“You're expected to go to the games, even if you're injured,” he says. He is a man who says everything like a question. A question there is no answer for.

“I know,” I say. “Sorry.” It's simple and I am sorry. I smile at him. For the first time in ages, I feel almost happy.

“Did you have something to do with that crazy crop circle?” he asks. His breath is bad, like coffee and sausage. I reel backward, bang off a locker.

“Coach,” I say. “No. NO.”

I lie so easily now. It's all I do. Everything is a lie. People want to believe lies. That's why movies work. Bullshit is better than reality. The lies help everyone to believe in something.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, I believe you. But don't let it get in the way of your game, son. The GAME is the THING.”

I say, “Coach, I'll be at practice today, I swear. I've been…my dad was sick.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay. Fine. How's your knee?”

“Better,” I say.

“Better?” he asks. “Don't bullshit me, kid. Never bullshit a bullshitter.” He laughs like he's made the funniest joke of all time.

I try to laugh too, but it comes out wrong, an air bubble, a balloon of something sad.

“Funny,” I say, instead of trying the laugh again.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Let's see it then.”

I roll up my pants and show him. “It feels okay.”

He leans over close and puts his hand on my leg. His fingers are warm and I jump.

“Sorry,” he says and pulls back. They aren't supposed to touch us.

“You can come to practice,” he says. “But the second it starts to hurt, you're out, understood? But you stay. You don't get to slack off. Understand me?”

I nod. I am not dizzy. I am fine. My knee is fine.

I sit down in the foyer. The benches are stomach-acid green vinyl with years of words written in ink. Holes made by a million fingers. They are browning with dirt that will never come off. It's quiet. I can hear the clock tick.

I wait. I watch through the glass for a familiar car, and then, suddenly, there it is. I run outside. The air is cold like it has finally let go of summer and resigned itself to the Octoberness of the now and become autumn.

I grab Olivia's arm hard and pull her like a little kid over to the tree, the big oak tree. The leaves are as red as blood, outlined with migraine-shimmer silver, and I am…

“Stop it,” I say.

“What's got into you?” she asks. “Wow.”

“Wow?” I say. “You KNOW what it is.”

She doesn't look in my eyes. She won't look at me at all. Her eyes are whirling from one thing to another. Never landing, a hopping bird, intent on not being caught.

I'm still hanging on to her arm. Probably my fingers are leaving marks, or would be if there was anything to leave a mark on, my own nails digging into my own palm. Where does the lie begin and end, and why can I still see her?

I drop her arm and she lets it fall, looking at it like it's something that just happened to be in her coat.

“Why are you fucking with me?” I ask. “You aren't real.”

There's a long silence. A crow flies from the fence to a branch overhead and starts to call. His beak is open, and he's staring at Olivia. She is a small bird and he is a crow, and she is small enough. The crow stares and calls. She gives a small, low cry.

“Sorry,” she says. “Crows freak me out.”

“Yeah?” I go. “Well, you know what freaks
me
out? You.”

“Really?” she says. Her voice is faint. Scratchy. Like a recording. “You don't like me?”

I want to shake her. I want to hurt her. I ball my hands up by my sides. What is happening to me? I can't kill someone who's not there. I imagine my hands around her throat. My hands on my own throat. I want I want I want.

I don't know what I want. She's what I wanted. I think about Tanis. New York City, right? I want New York. I don't know what I think I'd do in New York. Work in some shitty restaurant? Who would hire me? What would I really
do
?

“I love you,” I say. “But you aren't really here.” I am crying. My tears are fish and they roll down my cheeks and into a lake that I'm standing in. There is water around my feet. I'm standing in water. What is it with this water?

Olivia opens her blue eyes wide and turns to look at me. I force myself to look back. Her eyes are not blue. They are a color that is not a color. An oil slick on a rain-wet road. A tar pit. A mermaid's call.

“You,” I say. I want to run, but I stand my ground. “You aren't real. I made you up.” I'm really bawling. The kind of crying you do when you are a kid and your dad tries to kill himself, that kind. The kind that almost kills you and doesn't. The ugly kind with snot bubbles and blinding tears. “I don't want to drown,” I say.

“I have to go somewhere,” she says. She flickers. She frowns, like she can't think what it is she is meant to be doing. Where she has to go.

I blink. Squint. My eyes are blurry. The tree is draped around us like a curtain.

The tree is draped around
me
like a curtain.

I am alone. I am sitting on the ground, which is cool and damp. An empty chip bag is beside me and the wind moves it and it rustles. I can see the writing on the bag so clearly, it's like all of a sudden I can see. I couldn't see before. I can see. There is nothing between my eyes and the bag. I look at my hand. It looks like my hand. My hand that I can always remember seeing, holding a book in front of my face. A camera in front of my face. A joint in front of my face. My hand that is always holding something in front of my face. It's empty. I turn it over and look at the lines on my palm, clear and precise, like they were drawn there. Turn it over again, and I can see each hair, a pattern of veins. Normal. I have a normal hand.

“Olivia,” I say. There are crows in the tree and they call. It sounds like they are saying my name.

The crows are not saying my name.

There is an orange stone in my (normal) hand, and then there are a hundred orange stones spilling out between my fingers. They rain down out of my hand and onto my feet until I'm standing in a puddle of orange pebbles but the pebbles turn into leaves before I can throw them at the birds, which is what I was going to do.

I was going to.

I was…

I lean over and vomit. My vomit soaks into the ground, covers the leaves, spatters the tree. I vomit myself inside out. I vomit until I can't stop.

I don't understand, I think. But then again, also, I do.

I understand enough.

I'm lying.

I don't understand a fucking thing.

I sit down and lean my back against the tree, but the smell of my own puke is too much. A crow swoops down and eyes the puke, digs in.

Through the veil of leaves, I can see T-dot running toward me, so I get up. I wipe my mouth. I take a breath and push aside the branches that are hiding me.

“I got to tell you something, man,” T-dot says. “It's important.”

I squint. Everything is important.

“Yeah?” I sigh. “What?”

He goes, “Lundstrom's saying that his dad is gonna bust up your place. So it's going to happen. Just like we…I was just thinking, maybe you don't want it to happen? I don't know, man, it doesn't feel right.”

“Thanks,” I manage to say. “I gotta go.”

I am trying to think.

Can I think?

I don't know which way to go. I get in the car. Dad's car. I have the car. I don't remember driving here, but I must have because now I'm in the car and the engine is roaring and I'm driving faster than I should, but now is not the time to slow down. Not yet.

chapter 34

My dad is in the basement. He is on the floor. He has gathered up all the plants, dumped them from their pots. There is a pile of dirt on the floor beside him and empty plastic pots tossed into the corner. The plants are in his arms. How many plants? Ten? Twelve?

Gary is with him. Of course Gary is with him; Gary is always with him. Only Gary isn't helping him; Gary is helping himself to the plants. I want
Gary
to get fucking caught. Not Dad. I am on the stairs, out of breath—my lungs are empty balloons and refuse to fill up. I gasp and gasp. But I am just trying to say what they already know. How did they know?

I thought I was the director. This film didn't end this way. It just didn't. It ended with Dad being caught, Dad paying the price for his goddamn choices. And me and Tanis in New York City and Our Joe in jail and and and…

Then the credits, rolling.

I forgot about Gary.

Gary is taking what he can, and Dad is grabbing it back, but why?

I see Gary push my dad, and then my voice comes back and I say, “Don't fucking touch him.”

“Yeah?” says Gary. “Like you can stop me.”

My fists curl up by my sides like I am going to do something, which I don't do, and instead Gary pushes past me roughly and I fall the last three steps to the floor, jarring my knee.

Something pops in my
knee
.

I feel a tearing, deep inside. But this has already happened, I think.

I hear Gary's bike roar to life.

My dad is cradling an armful of plants, and only when I look closely do I see that they are tomatoes, not pot. I think he is laughing or maybe he's crying. I grew those plants.

Because he used to. I don't know why, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

“They are just plants,” I say. My breath tastes like stomach acid and eggs.

I help Dad up. Of course he can't stand. His legs buckle. I push him onto Chelsea's old bed in the corner.

“I forgot,” he says. “Tomatoes.” He looks dazed. “I'm sorry. I ruined your crop.”

“Dad,” I choke. “Dad.”

“Open the back door,” he says. “I can't reach. We aren't done here.” He puts the tomato plants down on the bed beside him. The bed still has a pink bottom sheet on it. He lays the plants out like they matter. He smoothes the sheet. He looks so pathetic and small. When did he get so small? Maybe he is the tiny one in all of this, maybe when he jumped from that grain elevator, he just got smaller and smaller until he hit the ground.

I forget for a minute that this is my doing, that I wanted him to get caught. And to be taken away and for me to be set free of this.

This.

But this is my home and this is my dad and I don't know what I was thinking and I don't know what I'm thinking now except, No, I don't want this after all.

I go and open the door, and the cold, bright air rushes in on a wave of watery light.

The doorbell rings upstairs. I freeze and my blood runs cold. I think maybe I'm going to pass out again, the floor pounding into my skull.

But Gary didn't take all the plants. There is a whole table behind me of pot plants that are just starting to bud. Rows and rows.

“Fuck the tomatoes,” I say. “Do something.”

I hear the front door opening. Footsteps on the stairs. I'm frozen. I can't move. My legs don't work. I have a ghost of a memory, so faint I can hardly see it. It's like looking through milk, opaque, impossible. I think I remember a plan. I can see Kate, nodding. I can hear Kate saying, “They'll find the Christmas boxes when they find the pot.”

Was it Kate?

An arm draped around my back. The smell of beer and laughter. A drawing. A piece of paper. Tanis's cheeks and how they flushed while she explained.

“Our Joe is going to pay.”

“Your dad is going to pay.”

I have a taste in my mouth. Bile. Acid.

There are footsteps on the stairs.

My psychiatrist has a name for what I do. He calls it “selective editing.” As soon as he gave it a name, I started doing it more and more. Is that how it's supposed to work?

I have been lying. Lying and editing are the same thing. A few edits can change a story into something else. Edit someone in. Edit something out. It's so easy. Stories change as you tell them. You think, “Okay, this is the screenplay that I'm writing.” But even as it's being acted out, you're the director. You can still change shit. And so you do. It's never done until it's done.