What is Real (7 page)

She may be glaring at you, but probably she's not even seeing you, she's seeing something else. Numbers, most likely.

Ratios.

Patterns.

Proportions.

I can't really explain what it is because I have
no
idea. Math and I are mortal enemies, but Tanis is like this mathematician-artist freak. She does stuff with math. She makes it into art. I'm not explaining it well, mostly because I don't understand it. I'm pretty fucking stupid in a lot of ways.

She wants to be a model, right? But she's borderline too-short, and there's the thing of her face being half normal and half frozen, some family trait with a name I've forgotten. But she's a girl who does what she wants and then figures everything out, so she's studied all these models— her bedroom walls are papered with magazine pictures of gorgeous models, and on each one she has listed their proportions. Leg length to torso. Head size to hips. Like somewhere in there is a magical formula, which actually she says there is and if she can grow two more inches of legs, she 'll have it all in the right proportions, which I believe because she really does have a fucking incredible body.

You wouldn't guess to look at her that she 'd ever analyze anything that closely. That she 'd know how to do statistical analysis of breast size. Or that she 'd want to.

Or that she's wrong, because in Tanis's case, her perfect proportions don't mean jack because of her
face
.

Anyway, her dad is mentally challenged and her mom is gone and her life is as shitty as mine when you look at it up close, which I try not to do because I have enough problems, right? But then she measures something and calculates something and draws it, and
bam
, it's in its place. She has control. The numbers and patterns and all that crap, it makes her feel okay, so whatever.

Good for her.

Tanis is a perfect girlfriend. She never asks too much. She never wants to “just talk.” She's just weird enough to be interesting. And she thinks she's in love with me.

She thinks she knows who I am.

As
if
.

Right now her curly hair is hanging forward over her face and she really is killer sexy, even her crookedness is hot, so why do I hate her right now? Her hand is in my pocket, rubbing in a circle, and I push it away.

“Hey,” she says.

“Gotta have a slash,” I mumble and dart into the boys. I sit down on a toilet and try to feel sane, which fails. On the wall in the washroom it says,
FOR A HOT HAND
JOB, CALL TANIS B
. I try to rub it out with toilet paper, but it's permanent ink. I scratch at it with a ballpoint and then give up. The number is wrong anyway.

Mr. V is a pedophile
, the wall says.

And
FUCK YO MOMMA
.

The walls are this really pale shade of mucous yellow, and even though it's the first day of school, the bathroom stinks of sewage. I press my cheek against the cold metal just for a minute and close my eyes and remind myself that this is easy.

School is the easiest place to be.

So why am I so freaked out?

Olivia couldn't possibly exist in a place like this.

She doesn't, right?

I mean, how can she?

chapter 7

By Christmas of last year, Feral was in rehab, Dad was out of rehab, I had moved back to Hell and my life was shit.

The Christmas before that, I was in Vancouver and the silver tree was nearly hidden behind a mountain of presents.

It's like a game of Spot the Differences, made easier by the fact that everything was different.

I haven't talked about Feral much. Not yet. He's my brother. My stepbrother. Feral is a heroin addict. “Recovering,” they said. We were to call him a “recovering addict.” Frank the Recovering Addict.

Fuck that. He was Feral and always would be.

When I moved, I didn't tell him. He was “working through his issues” and apparently his issues included me. I wasn't allowed to see him, speak to him or contact him. SD seemed to think that all of it was my fault. That Feral's addiction had something to do with me.

My mom agreed.

My own fucking mom
agreed
.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream. I wanted to do a lot of things that I didn't do. Smash things. I wanted to smash glass. All the glass. Everything. I wanted Feral back. I wanted I wanted I wanted, and no one fucking cared.

Feral was the alpha, no doubt about it. I would have followed him anywhere. I did follow him everywhere. He was FERAL. I was just Feral's stepbrother.

Without Feral, I was nobody.

I tried to tell them, but no one was listening.

Feral's addiction erased me.

The thinner he got and the more strung out, the less anyone cared what I was saying. Even Feral started to squint at me while I was talking, like he couldn't quite remember who I was. We still did shit—played our crappy music, hung out—but he was mostly gone. Just gone. At school, I started to fade. Without him next to me, kids talked through me. Past me. Even Glass started to drift. She was still with me, but I could tell she was gone.

I needed Feral.

We did everything together. Every. Fucking. Thing.

And he left me and I was alone and I stopped caring about everything. I know how that sounds.

And I know that it's true.

And when school started again that fall, St. Joe's without Feral was stupid. And he bounced in and out of rehab like neither place could hold on to him. I stopped talking. No one noticed. I started making movies every day, miles of movies, more and more movies. And I wasn't talking—why didn't anyone notice? Or care?

I was making a documentary. “The Disappearance of Dex Pratt” it was called. Then I changed it to “The Invisible Dex.” Then I changed it back.

Then I deleted it.

Then I dragged it out of the trash and saved it in a file called
Fuck You
.

Then it was November and my dad was out of rehab, and I was being called home. Imagine there were trumpets. There weren't, but if you imagine them, it's more dramatic. In real life, there were just a bunch of phone calls and “arrangements” and the strange set of my mom's lips when she said, “You should go.”

The gray hairs that freckled her haircut like lines of disappointment.

The way her hand shook when she reached for the milk.

SD said, “It's not your fault.” He said that. SD is a big guy. When he hugged me, I could hardly breathe. But I didn't believe him. He thought it was my fault. I know he thought that because he gave me a check. The number of zeroes on it said, “I feel guilty for blaming you for all of this shit, but I
do
.” I'm not stupid. I know how it works.

I put the money in the bank. “For college.”

Yeah, right.

I was glad to leave that glass house. I would have been gladder to blow it up, watch all that glass fall down on the city like diamonds or snow. I don't know if I told you about the house. The way it splayed out over the cliff and the wall of glass made it so that any room you were in allowed you to see the whole glittering city below you. Feral used to say that when we flushed the toilets, it rained on the people. “The people.” Like we were not included.

Feral was kind of an asshole that way. Entitled prick. Doesn't mean I didn't love him, just means I could see what he was like.

I used to think that it was like living in a fish tank with everyone down below staring up into our windows, watching us swim from room to room, blowing bubbles as we went. But by the time I moved out, it was still like that, only I'd forgotten how to breathe underwater and every inhalation was like drowning.

Every time I think about Feral, I lie. I am lying right now.

I am lying. I am a liar.

I have a tattoo on the inside of my arm. It was my idea. It wasn't even an idea. It was a thing that I did. I thought it was cool. I
am
the one.

It was me.

I drowned, but Feral died.

See, I could do heroin for fun, once or twice. It didn't matter. He couldn't. Some people are like that. From the very first time, it owned him, creeping through his veins like mercury, turning him into a robot who existed only for more.

And Feral, he was gone.

And I was “home.” But it wasn't my home.

And Vancouver wasn't my home.

The truth was, I was only “home” when I was behind my camera. And without it, I was too light, like any minute I might just float up into the sky and never come down. I saw the whole world through that lens; it kept me just far enough away to be safe. And now that it was gone, it was like looking at everything through binoculars. The world was too big and there was too much of it.

It didn't help that this shitty town felt like a sweater I'd outgrown years ago that I was trying to pull back on and it wasn't working. It itched and I don't think it was really ever my sweater, ever. I never would have chosen it.

In March, I lost Feral.

In June, my dad jumped.

In September, I began disappearing.

In December, I moved back and started over. As someone else. Another Dex. If I still had the camera, I'd be filming “The Evolution of Dex Pratt.” Or “The Rebirth.” Only, that sounds good, and there was nothing good about this.

And then there was the house. My dad thought it was
genius
. I couldn't argue with him even though there were lots of good, decent arguments. I just didn't have any left. And I wanted some drugs, something, anything to shut out all the noise. And that was the fucking irony because I wanted and I wanted and I wanted, but I didn't mean…

You know how they say, “Be careful what you wish for?” Yeah, it was like that.

Anyway, even broken, my dad was not someone you argued with.

Even in the pictures in the ad, the house looked like the kind of house where you end up. Not one that you choose. It was not the kind of house where the Dad that I thought I knew would ever live. Where were the polished wood floors and the fucking stainless steel appliances? Where was all the
stuff
? Soaker tubs and a front lawn? A deck?

“It has a perfect basement,” he said. “Think about it. It's on a working farm so no one will question the power use, and it has a huge basement. It's perfect.”

This was the New, Improved Dad™.

The New, Improved Dad™ had had it. He 'd had enough lawyering, he said, for ten lifetimes. The dealers made the money and ran, and he made shit and stayed. And now he was going to rake it in. He knew people. He knew everyone. He knew loopholes. It was like his whole life had been building up to this decision and he was going to fucking go for it whether or not it cost him everything. Because he had nothing left to lose.

And now it was his
turn
. And, oh, by the way, son, all that hydroponic equipment from the old house is about to be very, very handy.

“Our Joe is a psychopath,” I said flatly. “This is a nightmare.”

“I know Our Joe,” said Dad. I stared at him.

Everyone knew Our Joe, like you know the bad guy in every town. Rich as fuck and always doing things like riding his bike into town naked and handing flowers to “the ladies.” Then the next day sending the newspaper letters about how the government was affecting our minds through radio waves, and the next burning down his neighbor's barn. He was the guy who you'd guess would end up with bodies in the basement or at least a mysteriously dismembered dog. He was Stephen King–creepy, but this wasn't Maine, or a novel. This was our life.

He was one tinfoil hat short of an insane asylum, one more crime away from jail, and living on his land sounded about as good an idea as rooming with a werewolf.

Never mind that the house he was renting out was pretty much appropriate only for the set of a horror movie.

“Yeah,” I said finally. “You know him. So why are we moving in with him?”