Thicker Than Water (7 page)

“Cecelia?”

I sigh. Jennifer isn't letting me off the hook anymore. We're two weeks away from court and now she wants me to bare my soul.

“Some people at school asked about Cy,” I begin. “They knew what he had. They said they'd be interested in buying.” Jason's face flares, then fizzles before my eyes.

“So this was a deal between you and Cyrus?”

I shake my head. “No. I just took them.”

Jennifer looks surprised. “And he didn't notice?” She frowns. “Addicts keep track of their stash. How could he not notice?”

I shrug, then look back over at the fence. The inmates are gone now and the fence is just a barely there border. A chain-link wrinkle in time.

“He was high. Like, all the time—too high to see straight, let alone count. I didn't take that many at a time, and he was constantly upping his dosage anyway. I guess it never occurred to him that the disappearing pills weren't his own fault.”

“So, do you think he was taking other drugs?” she asks. “To supplement?”

“Maybe.”

“Any idea what kind?”

I think about that for a second. “No. I only ever saw Oxys.”

“That's okay.” Jennifer clicks the recorder off, then makes a note on her legal pad. “I can pick up the autopsy report from the medical examiner. It'll tell me what I need to know.”

Here's what I see when she says
autopsy
: Cyrus's remains, as though a century has passed.

The borders around my hardened heart sort of fizzle inward and I can feel it—the thick, syrupy grief I've ignored since the moment I knew Cy was gone. Despite all the pain, the things I still see when I lie down to sleep are the moments when we were closest—when we were the kind of brother and sister who wanted to be in each other's space.

It was hard to transition to something less than that. But once I had, it was like I'd lost that need to link myself to another person.

And now, it's his body I think of—mummified, calcified, whatever would make it crumbly and impossible to recognize. His bones are brown and his flesh is gone. There's nothing left to love and that's good, since I'm not sure I want to anymore.

“Speaking of reports . . .”

Jennifer's holding a case folder—manila, unmarked, nondescript—in her lap. She flips through it and pulls out a yellow paper. It's thin, like tissue, and it sort of glows when the light filters through it.

“Family medical history can often be a big clue to behavior. If it doesn't answer our questions, it usually helps us ask the right ones . . .” She trails off, squinting at the form.

“So, we've also been going through
your
medical records, CeCe.”

Jennifer hands me the paper; I try to soften the edges of my breathing before it accidentally tears it in half. She points to the address at the top left section.

“Do you remember this place, CeCe?”

Yes.

“No.”

“We got these from your house. Your father said your mom had a great filing system.”

My mom had a great everything.

“Okay.”

“So, you don't remember when you went to see this therapist? After your mom passed away?”

Of course I remember. Dr. Marks was young, too young to be taken seriously. He had a nervous habit of clearing his throat, and I must have made him nervous because he did it a lot. I think he was worried I'd slice myself open and bleed on his beautifully upholstered wingback chairs.

“It was a long time ago.”

“Four years.”

“A long time.”

Jennifer takes back the paper and scans the page. She starts to read.

“Patient exhibits extreme depression related to deceased mother. She is lethargic and unemotional, possibly self-imposing isolation to cope with loss. Major concerns—possible suicide potential.”

She looks up at me. I set my jaw.

“What did he mean by ‘possible suicide potential'?”

“If you're asking if I tried to kill myself, the answer is no.”

“Did you ever
think
about killing yourself?”

I shrug. “Sometimes.”

I glance at Jennifer's watch, then nod at the door.

“Trina's waiting for me—I should go.”

Jennifer shifts in her seat. “Just tell me something.”

“Sure, shoot.”

“Is that something you still think about?”

“What?”

“Killing yourself.”

I look at the fence again, the metal netting separating here from there. There's nothing on the other side but asphalt and emptiness; the only difference over here is that there's grass.

Somehow, there's still life on this side of the world. And, somehow, that still includes me, despite all my desires to the contrary.

“No,” I finally sigh, standing up and stretching. “That window of opportunity seems to have passed.”

I point up at the cameras aimed in my direction. Jennifer grimaces.

“Death isn't the answer, Cecelia,” she says, eyes narrowed.

I huff out a little laugh. “Please. Tell me something I don't already know.”

Death is
never
an answer. It's an end result. It's a finale. But it certainly doesn't lay questions to rest. In fact, the only
thing it lays to rest is people—and, even then, I'd replace the word
lay
with
disintegrate
.

And I'd replace the word
rest
with
dust
.

June 21

For a brief moment in time, Cyrus and I wanted nothing more than to harmonize. There were whole afternoons we spent scream-singing along with the music video for Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Cy would drape himself in Mom's scarves and use her round hairbrush as a microphone. The perpetual second fiddle, I settled for a black Magic Marker.

His wild, spastic dancing made me giddy. I wanted to be just like my big brother—I wanted to move and sing and breathe like him. If he jumped up onto the couch, I followed. If he knelt down, I joined him. Cy never accused me of being a copycat. It was the only time he wanted me to be his shadow.

During the slow moments, we'd shift to a rocking
sway. As the music rose to a crescendo, we traded our moves for louder and louder voices. Standing in the middle of the room, we'd face each other and yell the lyrics.

Inevitably the music would wane to a close. Our tradition always ended the same way—a plop on the couch. A deep breath. A final, slow lyric we could barely sing.

C.P.

AN AFTERNOON OUTSIDE WITH JENNIFER FELT ALMOST FOREIGN IN
its unfamiliarity, considering I hardly ever get fresh air anymore. But when the therapy session Barnes has been touting all week turns out to be a field trip, I find myself almost excited. The idea of going anywhere in a vehicle feels suspiciously like possibility, and it's a little intoxicating.

Of course, a junkyard is the last thing I expect to see when the Piedmont van rolls to a stop in front of Bertie's Scrap Metal. Nothing good can come out of me being surrounded by so much death, even if it's just the riddled carcasses of old cars.

Barnes, sitting in the passenger's seat, directs the driver through the front gate before turning around and smiling at us.

“This is where we're going?” Aaron asks. He sounds as skeptical as I am. Barnes nods.

“I told you we were going on a therapeutic journey.”

“Yeah, but I thought that meant we were going to a Zen garden or yoga studio or some shit, not Trailer Trash Central.”

Barnes shushes us as a very round woman lumbers out of the shed-like office. He hands her some cash and we pull forward between two rusty Oldsmobiles.

Minutes later, I'm standing between Aarti and a dilapidated Camaro IROC, shifting from foot to foot like I have to pee. All around are stacks of bricks, a half-dozen bowling balls, a metal bat, and a bunch of concrete pavers.

“Welcome to Destruction Therapy,” Barnes says, something like triumph or pride icing his words. He is clearly pleased with himself.

“Bertie has donated this lovely piece of machinery,” he continues, patting the IROC's hood, “for us to use for today's exercise. Here are the rules for Destruction Therapy:

“Everyone gets a turn.

“Use your words to communicate.

“Don't hit each other.”

“If they sound familiar,” Tucker says, “it's because I think they're the same ones that are posted on the wall at Chuck E. Cheese's.”

“This is ridiculous,” Aaron mutters.

“Eh, look at it this way—we're out of Piedmont. And we get to throw things and scream,” I tell him.

He smirks. “I can do that whenever I want to.”

But, in reality, no one wants to be first to attack the car.
We all spend a few awkward minutes shuffling our feet and kicking at the dirt before Aarti picks up the baseball bat. Her thick hair shifts over her face and she approaches the car cautiously, like it could wake up and snarl at any moment. The whole junkyard is eerily quiet. It's like everyone's waiting for Aarti to snap.

And then she does.

She goes for the headlights first, jabbing at them with the butt of the bat. The glass cracks on the first blow and shatters on the second.

“That's for my husband,” Aarti says, “who thought I was his property.”

She flips the bat around and swings hard at the hood. The clang is like a thunderbolt that echoes off the metal around us.

“Who thought he could touch me anywhere he wanted,” Aarti is saying. “Who said I needed a real man to show me how to do it right.”

Soon the bat is forgotten in favor of a paver, which she struggles to throw at the back window. It misses, landing with a crunch on the trunk. The paint scrapes off, leaving a skid of gray-blue primer behind. Aarti's panting and she bends over to catch her breath. Then she looks up and gives us a rueful smile.

More people go, choosing the pavers and bricks as weapons against their ex-boyfriends, their teachers, their parents, themselves. Tucker attacks his drug dealer and Leslie wails on her stepdad. Aaron goes after a friend who introduced
him to meth. By the time Barnes hands me the bat, it seems sort of pointless. There's hardly an untouched surface on the car; it's been destroyed beyond recognition.

“Give it a shot,” he urges. “It can't hurt, right?”

It's a weird question to ask someone wielding a bat.

I walk up to the driver's-side door and yank on the handle. When the door creaks open, I reach down and pop the hood. As I walk back to the front of the car, the air around me turns thick with buzzing, like some sort of feedback. I try to ignore it, the way you ignore the too-close rush of highway traffic beyond a strategic but too-thin line of trees.

Under the hood, the IROC is almost pristine. Someone took care of this car before it kicked the bucket. I hold the bat from the top, at the place where a home run begins. I look back up and see Tucker give me an encouraging nod. Something like irritation sears through me; this guy's still trying to be my therapist, and there's no room for another one of those in my life. So it's Tucker's face I see when I take my first swing.

“Who are you angry with?” Barnes calls out over the blows. I grit my teeth and try to concentrate.

“My dad,” I finally say, dropping the bat and heading for the yet-untouched bowling balls.

“Why?”

Before I shut down and retreat, I see a handful of balls sitting side by side in the dirt, each one a marbled purple or blue or green. I pick the one closest to me and head back toward the car. I stare at the spiderwebbed cracks in the windshield
glass. They've spread to both sides like a disease. I see Cyrus's face in the middle, and all the jagged lines coming from it.

“This is for being an enabler,” I say. “This is for letting it all go down.”

And I launch the ball toward the glass. The shatter has barely subsided as I'm picking up the next one.

“This is for my mom, for dying. For leaving me alone to fend for myself.

“This is for my college fund that doesn't exist.

“This is for my pile-of-shit future.

“This is for my past.”

My arms are wobbly with exhaustion as I heave the last ball up with both hands. I come around to the back of the car and find a partially intact taillight to aim for. I watch the way the sun flashes over the fragmented surface. The red plastic rectangles wink like they're flirting, and I know there's only one thing left to say.

“This is for Cyrus.”

I want to throw it hard, but my arms are too tired. Instead, I launch it underhand, but it's like a weak substitution for what I should be doing. When the ball hits the dirt instead of the car, I feel like a failure. Tears prick at my eyes. I take a step back, away from the group. Then another. Then another.

And then I turn around and start to run.

Surrounded by the forest of abandoned vehicles, I try not to compare the piles around me to Cyrus's basement bedroom. I stop next to an unrecognizable, rusted-out car
carcass and sit down on the ground, my back against a tire. I let the tears fall. They are slick on my face—nothing like water and everything like blood. I want to drink them and take them in. I want to reject them and spit them out.

“CeCe?”

I ignore Tucker, even though his voice is like lace—soft and practically transparent. I try to forget the ever-changing texture of his eyes and how I can't stop comparing them to things I've touched. I don't look up when he sits down next to me, pulling his knees up against his chest.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I'm fine,” I lie.

When I finally look up, his eyes mirror the rust around us. They've somehow aged and are completely overwhelming. He puts a hand on my shoulder and I can feel the joint melt under his touch. My bones turn to something liquid and, for a second, it feels like a memory.

“Who's Cyrus?”

Here it is—an opportunity to be honest. Still, I don't answer. I'm waiting for someone to interrupt us, for Barnes to come around the corner and scold me for “stifling my process.” But another minute goes by without a sound, save for the metal-on-metal racket echoing in my mind as I stare at the wrecked cars around us and imagine their accidents. Head-on collisions, T-boned passenger doors—the physical brutality, like bruises, are easy to see. It's the internal damage that is still disguised.

Maybe it's better to tell the truth, to confess. Maybe when
you expose your injuries, you give them a chance to heal.

“My brother,” I finally say.

My mouth is dry and cottony with a coating of gummy saliva. I want my tongue to lasso the words back in. Tucker moves his hand from my shoulder to my knee and my whole body shudders. He feels me quake and pulls back a bit.

“You don't have to talk to me, CeCe,” he says, pulling himself up straighter, “but I hope one day you will.”

Then he grabs my hand and I forget how to ask questions. Around us, the cars and trucks are so corroded, they're almost crumbling. I'm reminded of avalanches I've seen on TV, how the ice and snow become something broken-down and terrifying. Here, though, the potential threat is just a field of windshields and roofs. When I squint, we're in a movie theater parking lot or at the post office or stuck near the bus station. When I squint, I don't see anything but what's normal and I'm soothed for the first time in weeks.

But when Tucker's thumb, with its dry, scratchy hangnail and callused tip, brushes my palm methodically, I remember that normal isn't a state of mind. It's a place I don't live anymore. I start to pull my hand away, but he tightens his grip.

“Don't.”

I look at him warily, then narrow my eyes, remembering his swift departure from the guest speaker's presentation.

“You're such a hypocrite,” I say, shaking my head.

Tucker sort of rears back. “Excuse me?”

“You act like you want to help me or something, but
when you dragged me to that guest speaker yesterday, it took you all of twenty minutes to disappear. What the fuck is up with that?”

He drops my hand like I've burned him.

“I guess . . .” Tucker begins. Then his eyes start to close. Not close via eyelid but close via access to thoughts. He's cutting me off.

“It was all stuff I've heard a million times before,” he finishes, sighing. Then he stands up. “Come on. Let's go back.”

“Was it something I said?”

He smiles, and it's the first time I've noticed his teeth. They're white, but not fluorescent, Hollywood white. Natural white. Like he just inherently has good teeth. Somehow, this makes me want to trust him more than ever.

“Don't want to miss the bus,” he's saying, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Not to mention I promised Barnes I'd bring you back in one piece.”

“Right. Well, thanks for not hacking me up or whatever.”

Tucker looks at me sideways. “You're a little morbid, you know that?”

I snort a laugh just as, out of nowhere, he swoops in and presses his lips against mine. It's a chaste, easy kiss. It feels dry and reminds me of tissue paper. When he pulls back, I blink rapidly, then open my mouth. No words come out. Tucker's smile turns from toothy to sexy in a matter of seconds.

“I've been wanting to do that,” he admits, saying the words slowly, “but I didn't want to get in trouble.”

One of the floor rules in BT is no romantic fraternization.
Considering how fucked up most of us are, there are days when everyone just wants someone to cuddle or grope or make out with. Sometimes a lack of human touch feels like an ache in your belly. Sometimes all you want is for the pressure squeezing your body to be coming from the outside and from someone's arms rather than from the cliché, self-imposed torture.

I force myself to inhale and the air stutters along my tongue. Tucker is watching me carefully, as though he's afraid I might combust or burst into tears. Instead, I give him something I haven't given anyone in a long time—I smile. It's a slow process, an upturn that almost hurts since it feels so foreign now. As my lips curve up, I find myself missing the sensation of grinning—the kind that makes your cheeks ache. I wonder if I'll ever be allowed to be that happy again.

I can't remember what it's called, but something makes you feel sort of high when you're happy. Endorphins, maybe? Dopamine? Regardless, there's something frenetic and unbridled coursing through me as we walk back to the bus. I'm a little frightened of the frenzy, of the out-of-control-ness. Tucker's body is so close to mine that his hand brushes my arm more than once. I try to remember what it feels like to kiss someone back. It's a giving over, if I remember correctly. I imagine Tucker kissing me again.

It's the most alive I've felt in months.