Every Visible Thing, page 14
After what feels like hours but is probably about twenty minutes, Sebastian comes thundering down the back stairs, a Carhartt sweatshirt added to his layers of leather and wool coats. I step away from my stool, not wanting him to see how I’ve been sucked in by the enemy. And that all it took was tea.
“Hi, Dad,” Sebastian says, in an exaggerated imitation of a cheery young boy. Sebastian’s father says nothing, doesn’t look up, just continues to page through the magazine, no longer pausing to read the captions. Sebastian might as well be invisible. Which is weird, since I was sure his dad was waiting, with the tea and the mail, desperate for a glimpse of him. Sebastian’s mother stands behind him, red-faced, as though she’s trying to think of one last thing she can say that will change everything. But Sebastian is looking at me now.
“Let’s go,” he says, and we leave the way we came in. As I turn to close the glass door behind us, both of his parents are looking, and it’s up to me to give a small, weary smile, as if I’m apologizing for a lifetime of disappointing them.
Outside I have to jog to catch up to Sebastian’s angry stride. Things are quiet for a while, until Sebastian finally senses that he’s not the only one fuming.
“What’s your problem?” he barks. I take a breath, trying to steady my real voice.
“Why didn’t you tell me Lionel was your brother?”
He was in the family pictures. The same blond spiky hair and mischievous grin as in Hugh’s photos. I’d always assumed Sebastian’s brother was off at college like everyone else’s. He’d only mentioned him that once. I never suspected he was the drug dealer I am sure knows something about the night Hugh disappeared.
Sebastian ignores me for the rest of our trudge through dirty snow to Harvard Square. Back in the Pit, he turns his charm on full blast, flirting with every girl there. I’m left sitting in a corner, my killer looks ignored. When Sebastian disappears with a tiny punk girl, without a word to me about when he’ll be back, I decide to leave. My father is probably home by now, and the drama club excuse is running thin. But I can’t make myself go. Even when it starts hailing I sit huddled in the T station stairs, waiting for Sebastian to come back. He is my only friend, he knows the only person left who might remember something different about my brother. He comes back after seven, with a Tootsie Pop to offer in apology.
“I’m just moody. I hate running into the ’rents,” he says.
“Why won’t your father talk to you?” I say. I’ve been thinking about his parents a lot, the way his mother looked sad but acted angry and his father looked as if he had no choice but to be so mean.
“He’s given up on me. Wish my mother would, too. She’s a child psychologist. It would look really bad if she fucked up both her kids.”
“Do your parents talk to Lionel?” I ask.
“No,” Sebastian says. “They don’t even say his name. They say: ‘Do you want to end up like your brother?’ Like he’s dead or something.”
I’m quiet after this. No one has ever said this in my house, though they think it, I’m sure, all the time.
“Can you get out tomorrow night?” Sebastian says.
“Yes,” I say. I know how to sneak out. I’ve just been waiting for the invitation to do it.
“I’ll meet you here and bring you to Lionel’s party,” Sebastian says. He lights his Zippo and extinguishes it again, repeating the movements on the thigh of his jeans.
“Thank you,” I say. He shrugs and avoids my eyes. I can’t stop thinking about his parents in that big, beautiful house. How they let them go, both of their children, one after the other out the door, just like that.
All I’ve been developing lately are pictures of Emily Twickler. There are endless rolls of them, all basically the same. During his freshman and sophomore years, Hugh and Emily broke up and got back together eight times. Every breakup was like the end of the world, with the phone ringing in the middle of the night and Hugh mopey and bleary-eyed, chain-smoking and refusing food. Their reunions were quieter; sometimes Emily would show up at our house like nothing was wrong when we thought they weren’t speaking. My parents had fake, worried smiles around her, and they stopped taking Hugh’s side, because he always held it against them when she returned.
Hugh’s schoolwork suffered for the first time in his life. When a report came from the school that he had too many unexcused absences, my parents confronted him. I listened from the hallway.
“Where were you on the days you missed school?”
“Emily needed me. Some things are more important than school.”
“Nothing’s more important than school,” my parents said in unison.
“Spare me the ‘first in your families to go to college’ speech,” Hugh said. “Everybody cuts sometimes. Don’t worry about it.”
“Your chemistry teacher says you’re failing.”
“I just have some homework to make up.”
“This relationship with Emily is starting to worry us.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s not a stable girl.”
“Fuck you. You know nothing about her. Or me.”
I had never heard my brother swear at our parents before. Everyone was silent for a minute, not sure what this meant. My father wouldn’t even say God or Jesus Christ, but instead said Jiminy Crickets, which never failed to make us laugh.
My parents reminded Hugh that Emily had broken his heart half a dozen times. That she had cheated on him with other boys and then told him about it just to make him mad. That she called screaming in the middle of the night. That she might be involved with drugs and had been hospitalized for depression. I was impressed by this list. Emily was a lot more interesting than I’d thought. Hugh just got angrier the longer they went on. He repeated over and over that they didn’t understand. Not Emily, or him, or anything about real life.
“If you try to break us up,” Hugh said, “you’ll regret it. I’ll make sure of that.”
“Who are you?” my mother asked, but Hugh refused to answer that. Like he didn’t even know himself.
All of this ended when Emily was sent away. Her parents sent her to a boarding school for delinquents in western Mass when she failed out of Brookline High and was caught doing drugs. At first, Hugh claimed they kidnapped her to keep them apart. (Emily’s parents were as tired of Hugh as mine were of Emily. They had telephone conferences together, all trying to decide what to do with their love-blind teenagers.) She was taken away one night with no warning, and they wouldn’t tell Hugh where she was. He found out the name of the school from her younger sister, but when he called there, a week before Christmas, he was transferred and cut off so many times it was almost an hour before someone leveled with him. Emily was not allowed to receive phone calls.
“Is she in a school or a prison?” Hugh yelled before slamming the phone down. He barked at his parents’ attempts to comfort him and locked himself in his room for days. He came out for half an hour on Christmas morning, only after Owen made a special request. He went back to bed while our mother was still stuffing wrapping paper into a garbage bag.
Hugh asked my father to drive him to see Emily and screamed and threatened to run away when he was told no. Then Emily sent him a letter. It was eight pages long. She told him she thought their relationship was unhealthy and asked Hugh not to contact her anymore. She mentioned a new boyfriend and a writing class and seeing inside herself. The letter, on peach-colored stationery, was dotted with perfectly formed tear splashes and tiny sketches of her pouting face. I read it when Hugh, who carried it around for days, accidentally left it by the sink in the bathroom.
Hugh stayed in his room for the rest of Christmas break, but the morning school started again he was up early, his backpack and camera on his shoulder, ready to face the world. He didn’t mention Emily again, and the rest of us, relieved, didn’t bring her up. One morning after he left I overheard my parents whispering.
“Maybe now we’ll get our son back,” my mother said.
And my father said, “I hope so.”
On the night of the party I get ready in my room, avoiding the bathroom, which is sandwiched between my parents’ and Owen’s doors. All I have for a mirror is the little beauty station my grandmother gave me for Christmas in the seventh grade, a plug-in three-way mirror framed in light bulbs that can be switched to mimic different situations: daytime, nighttime, or fluorescent. I’ve never liked the way the mirrors reflect on one another, showing my profile. The first time I saw it, it made me feel lonely, because I didn’t look anything like I pictured myself. Tonight I have a cluster of pimples on my chin that I wish I could put tinted Clearasil on, but boys don’t wear it.
My mother is on call tonight and my father can sleep through our fire alarm, so I’m not too worried, but I sneak through the kitchen in my socks and put my boots on in the back stairwell. I can see my breath in the moonlight shining through the window at the bottom of the stairs. I tie triple knots in my boots. The house doesn’t protest as I leave it, just vanishes behind me like it’s seen this a million times before.
Sebastian is waiting for me in Harvard Square, which is much more awake than Brookline. He tells me his brother is house-sitting for a Harvard professor spending a semester in England. Normally, Lionel lives in an apartment in Somerville. We trudge away from the sounds of buskers and into suburban streets.
In all the movies I’ve seen about teenage parties, there are hundreds of kids crammed like sardines, kegs on lawns, noise pollution, and permanent damage done to the house. Lionel’s party is nothing like this. The only difference from other houses on the street is that more lights are on, including the one on the back deck. Here there are four guys sitting around a wicker table, the sun umbrella still open and slick with ice. They are passing a bong around and, though they nod at Sebastian, they are all in various stages of holding or expelling breath, so no one says anything. Sebastian opens a sliding glass door that leads into a kitchen. This looks more like I’d imagined; it’s trashed. The counters are a mess, piled with bottles, dishes, and takeout containers of food that were clearly opened days ago. Every utensil in the house looks like it’s been used and left to gather mold. There is another group around the kitchen table playing cards. At a sign from one of them, they all hold a card to their foreheads, facing out. The one girl in the group is giggling so hard the boys are annoyed and clearly want her to shut up. But her giggling also wobbles her chubby breasts, so the boys sneak peeks in between rolling their eyes. There is a couple by the refrigerator, the girl sitting on the counter, the boy standing in between her long legs. He is telling some story and every few words she leans in and interrupts him with a kiss. I wonder what that feels like, permission to kiss someone whenever you want. Instead of waiting for something that never comes.
The girl looks up and squeals with delight. “Sebastian!” She waves, leaning so far off the counter the boy has to hold tight to keep her from falling off. He doesn’t look pleased.
“You guys seen my brother?” Sebastian says.
“I think he’s upstairs,” the girl says, smiling and leaning back in a sexy pose. She bangs the back of her head on the cabinet behind her, and the guy with her laughs and squeezes her thigh.
“Shut up,” I hear her say, then the sound of smothered mouths as we move to the next room. Every room has between five and ten kids in it, some stoned, their legs draped across furniture, others bouncing on the balls of their feet, waiting for something to happen. In one room there’s a pool table, and there’s a game of tackle football going on in the snow in the backyard. In the hallway, two boys are playing hockey with intense concentration, not holding back shots even when people walk through. Someone hands us plastic cups of yellow beer from a keg. I take a sip without thinking and spit it back into the cup. I hate the taste of beer.
Sebastian shakes his head and takes my cup away, abandoning it in the soil of a ficus plant.
“Why is it all high school kids?” I say. It’s louder near the back of the house, a stereo blaring Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” while a group of small-pupiled kids sitting on the floor sing along and point out details of the blue-flowered wallpaper to one another. “I thought your brother was twenty-one.” Sebastian shrugs.
“He never grew up,” he says. “He hates the Harvard kids he deals to. And most of his friends from high school are gone now.”
Sebastian asks a few more people where Lionel is, and is told that he’s off in a bedroom with a girl.
“Might as well have fun while we wait,” Sebastian says. He hands a few tabs of what I know is Ecstasy to a group that comes asking, and downs one himself with what’s left of his beer.
“I know what you need,” he says, grabbing my hand and leading me back to the kitchen. On one counter is a cutting board strewn with triangles of lime and lemon. He cuts the puckered edges from two slices of lime, pours two shot glasses full of brown liquid from a squat, thick glass bottle, and tells me to give him my hand. He licks the spot on my hand between my thumb and first finger. His tongue is slightly rough and my palm immediately starts to sweat. I try to pull my hand away, but he holds tight, raining salt from a plastic picnic shaker onto the damp spot. He repeats this on his own hand. He hands me a wedge of lime and the overflowing shot glass.
“What is this?” I say.
“Like so,” he says, grinning. He licks the salt, downs the shot, then shoves the lime in and sucks, screwing his face up. He waits for me.
I barely taste the alcohol, just feel it burn my throat and warm my stomach. Suddenly, I feel great, more alert than I have in months. I lick the remaining salt from my lips and smile at Sebastian.
“I think she likes it,” Sebastian says. I do my own salt this time, and we swallow two more shots. He stops me from pouring a fourth.
“Tequila’s a great high, but it’s the worst sick,” he says. “Take it easy.”
At first I think the shots haven’t affected me, but when we leave the kitchen I know I’m drunk. It’s not the kind of drunk I’ve been before, which made me feel alone and foolish and even less like everyone else. This drunk is magic. It’s making everyone smile at me, making me not wish I was somewhere else, but perfectly happy to be right here, right now. I’m not even anxious about Lionel anymore.
Sebastian starts flirting with two girls from Arlington and calls me over. He lights a joint and passes it around. I take it without thinking. I know as I inhale that I have some big reason for boycotting it so far, but I can’t really remember it. My conviction to remain drug-free seems childish and very far away. The pot sears my lungs as if I’m inhaling the ember as well as the smoke. I hold it in and pass it along. When the joint comes to me again I take an even deeper hit. One of the girls, the one wearing a red plaid miniskirt with combat boots, settles herself into my lap. It doesn’t occur to me to argue. I don’t even know what we’re saying, just that I’m laughing like we’re the funniest people in the world. The sharp happiness of the tequila has turned into a hazy film between me and everything potentially serious. I feel like I’d be calm in the face of a nuclear war. Like I know better than anyone that none of it matters. I wonder if Sebastian feels like this all of the time.
The girls take our hands and lead us upstairs, and Sebastian shushes me when I try to confess. We end up in a kid’s room, a blond bunk bed broken into two singles across the room from each other, one with an Empire Strikes Back comforter, the other with scenes from E.T. The girls leave for a minute, escaping into an adjoining bathroom that barely muffles their excited voices. I pull Sebastian over to the window. I’m feeling suddenly sober, and sick.
“This isn’t funny,” I say. “Tell them I’m a girl and let’s get out of here.”
“Relax.” Sebastian laughs. His pupils are the size of pinpricks. “Think of it as educational.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I hiss. The toilet flushes once, then again.
“Whatever you’d want done to you,” Sebastian whispers. As he says this he puts two fingers just at the edge of my army fatigues, lifting my shirt an inch and grazing the bare skin of my stomach. It’s like being punched. I can’t speak or move, and when the girls come tumbling back into the room, I let one of them take my hand and lead me to the E.T. bed, while the other pulls Sebastian away. I don’t have to make the first move, since she kisses me pretty fast. For the first few minutes I keep my eyes open, watching across the room, as Sebastian holds himself above his girl with his arms taut, and how this makes her squirm and pull on his hip bones to get him closer. Then my girl asks why I have my eyes open. So I close them and imitate what I’ve just seen, hovering and kissing her into the mattress until I hear a little gasp in her throat, holding myself away until my arms are shaking and she pulls me down and our identical hips press together in a way that promises to never be enough. At some point the ringing in my head focuses to a single realization: I could make this girl crazy. Just like Sebastian does, with a mouth that smiles while holding back a kiss. The thing is, I’m not sure I want to.
She passes out before I have to do much. I fall asleep for a couple of hours, then get up to use the bathroom. I walk in on someone, a guy standing and peeing into the bowl in the darkness.
“Hey,” he says sleepily, nodding in my direction. I try not to look as he shakes himself dry. He turns to wash his hands in the sink. The moonlight reflecting in the mirror from the window illuminates spiked blond hair and a gaunt face barely recognizable as the one that once smirked for my brother.
