Trigger (7 page)

The djinni looked ready to curse me. “What, you’re chicken-shit enough to cop out on life, and you’re too chicken-shit to admit it?”

“I’m not chicken-shit!”

“You’re something.” Mama Rush flicked her ashes on the ground near my feet. “Just lucky you aren’t black. Whole family would have thrown you out. Church, too. Everybody who knew you wouldn’t even talk to you—black folks don’t commit suicide.” She took a drag, blew out the smoke. “Pat Parker, she wrote a poem about that after Jonestown. Black folks don’t commit suicide.”

My eyes dropped automatically to the whiter than white skin on my arms. Maybe I was secretly black, since nobody but Leza and Mama Rush was speaking to me, unless you wanted to count my replaced-by-aliens parents.

“They do, of course. Black folks kill themselves, I mean—but nobody talks about it.” She glowered at me. “You’ve got to talk about it. Before I saw you, I was thinking I’d have to tell you not to be so serious like you used to be, not to try so hard to be perfect. Now I’m thinking I need to say the opposite. You’d better be serious about this. Now.”

And she went right on glaring. Glaring and waiting.

I sighed. Felt like I was prying out the words with a crowbar. Still, I said them. “I shot myself.”

There. That wasn’t so hard. I still wasn’t sure I believed it, but Mama Rush did, and I said it.

“Okay. There’s a start. You were an athlete, and before you got all crabby your sophomore year, you were popular. Then you shot yourself. Now …”

She trailed off, waiting again. She wanted me to tell her how I had changed. I knew that, but I was mad, and I really didn’t want to answer her. Like I had a choice.

“Now I’ve got stupid-marks. I look like somebody took a hammer to my head. The left side of my body doesn’t work. I can’t see out of my right eye. No more sports.”

Mama Rush nodded slowly. I could tell by the way she drew on the cigarette that I was on target, but not hitting the mark yet. “Leaving something out, aren’t you, boy? Something more important than how you look?”

My left hand cramped. My fingers pulled into a fist because I didn’t think about keeping them relaxed. “I’m good at forgetting.”

“That’s an excuse.” She flicked the cigarette into the stand-up ashtray. “Your right-now memory isn’t that bad
if you slow down and concentrate on what you need to remember—and you told me you still had some smarts.”

This time, my right hand made a fist. The anger came so fast my face burned, but I bit back a bunch of ugly comments.
Going off
. That’s what they’d call it back at Carter. Brain-injured patients don’t get mad. They
go off
.

After a few seconds of breathing, I calmed down enough to say, “The other kids might be mad at me, treat me weird and stuff, like Todd. A lot of them might not want to be around me.”

Mama Rush nodded. “Like Todd, and maybe Leza, too. She went through a lot over what you did, but that’s hers to tell you. And those boys you knew from football and golf and R.O.T.C., back before you got your ill temper and ran most of them off—they may have things to say. And the ones who talk to you, they’re eventually going to ask the question.”

My breath came in a short jerk. “Don’t know. I really, really don’t know why.”

She gestured toward my memory book. “Leza said you keep your remembering in there, like some of the folks around here at The Palace. In notes and lists.”

She read things. Leza read what she’d picked up. Heat trickled across my face again, this time because of embarrassment. Snot, snot, snot! Go off.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t, no matter what, not at Mama Rush. I shoved the memory book over to her.

Raised fuzzy eyebrows. Another slow lighting of a cigarette.

She flipped open the book and glanced at things. After a few minutes, she pulled out one folded sheet from the
pocket and laid it to the side. She even weighted it down with her lighter and pack of cigarettes. Then she handed the book back to me.

“Tell you what, boy. We’re gonna start right here. While I open my presents and lay them out on this table, you take that pen on a string attached to that white book, and you make me another list. A list of
why
. You understand?”

“Possibilities.” I made myself breathe slowly, try to think slowly. “Not pragmatics. Not platitudes. Not credit cards or djinnis.”

“Right.” She tapped the piece of paper she had taken and weighted down. “This is your To-Do List from the hospital. It’s good, but I think you have to make a better start. So, I’m going to keep it for now, and go over it with you later when the time is right. In the meantime, you’ll make me a Why List and work on that.”

“Pragmatics.” I tried to smile, but my throat and lips felt tight.

“Good enough. Now you get busy, and so will I.”

I got busy. All the while, in the background, I heard the rustle of plastic, the clink and crunch of pottery, and Mama Rush mumbling to herself. No way would I look up, though. She might have smacked me right in my stupid-mark.

In between chewing on my pen and trying not to look up, I wrote a new list.

1. Secretly gay
.

2. Did something awful I felt guilty
.

3. My life sucked
.

4. Heard voices telling me to off myself
.

5. Parents really brother and sister/aliens/abusive
.

When I was finished, I dared to raise my eyes.

Mama Rush was between cigarettes. She had covered the left side of the table with pieces and lumps of what had been seven or eight things I had made for her in recreation. I recognized part of an ashtray, pieces of the trivet and ceramic flowerpot, bits of a toothbrush cup, even halves of a really funny-looking pig that I had intended to be a bank—I think I made it way back at the first or second hospital.

“Broken,” I said, miserable and not miserable at the same time.

Mama Rush gave me the fuzzy eyebrow treatment and said, “You first.”

I passed her the list. My heart started to beat really hard. Maybe she knew something I didn’t. She was smart, and she’d known me for a long time.

She read, her eyes moving line to line, back and forth. I think she even read the Why List twice. After a few seconds, she grunted. “Is that the best you can do?” She shoved the list across the little round table, crashing it into my bad left hand. I felt the paper crumple against my stiff fingers. Her dark, wrinkled skin pulled tight with her gigantic frown.

I winced. I’d grown up hating to make her frown like that. It usually meant a call to my parents, being banned from her yard for a few days, or a lecture that made me wish for a beating instead.

“You put a gun to your head, shoot your fool self right
in the brain, and all you can come up with is incest-alien parents?” She grunted again, like an exclamation point.

“There’s other stuff.” I squirmed in the metal chair. “What about gay? Or guilty? Credit cards! Thick head.”

“If you’re gay, I’m big black Santa Claus flown down from the North Pole. Think. When did you ever want to pinch a boy’s butt?”

“I don’t remember almost a whole year.” I shrugged. “Maybe things changed. Everything changed After. Maybe Before, too?”

“Well, nothing changes that much.” Mama Rush snatched out a cigarette and lit it with one motion. “You were acting funny, but not that kind of funny. More mad and snappy. Didn’t eat much, didn’t sleep much, looked all tired and grungy. Stayed to yourself, too. Todd wouldn’t tell me why he quit hanging around with you, but I knew you were depressed. Figured it might be drugs or something. You sure were trying to do a lot, and some kids take stuff to speed up or slow down, or get stronger—you know.”

I uncrumpled the list, picked up the pen on a string, and revised the first item to read,
Secretly gay Maybe on drugs
. What kind of drugs, though? Pot, steroids, heroine, meth—lots of choices. I wondered if I should make an entry for each one.

“Course, it could have been a woman. Well, at your age, a girl.”

Moving down, I dropped one more line and wrote,
6. Elana Arroyo
.

Mama Rush glanced over to my list. She saw what I had written, went very still, then nodded. “That’s the girl you and Todd fought about. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Why did we fight over her? Do you know?”

“No. Wish I did, but Todd kept the girls and dating part of his life private. You’ll have to ask him.”

I started to ask her how, when he wanted to break my jaw, but she had already turned her attention to all the broken stuff from my bag.

“These gifts—thank you for trying, Jersey. You come back here this weekend on Saturday—every Saturday for a few hours—and we’ll see what’s what.” She lowered her cigarette, letting the smoke make a haze all around us. “I suspect we’ll find some things can be fixed, but some things are just too broken.”

I thought about Elana and Todd and Leza, and Dad and Mom, and school and assemblies and the credit card woman in the red dress, and I really thought about my stupid-mark.

Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken
.

“Credit card blue,” I mumbled.

Mama Rush took a deep puff and gave me a slow, solemn nod.

chapter 6

I have this dream where both legs work and both arms work and I don’t have any scars on the outside. I’m sitting on the edge of my bed in dress blues holding a pistol. Sunlight brightens the dust and sand in my room and darkens all the places where I’ve nicked the walls and doors. The football rug, the one Mama Rush gave me when I made the team my freshman year, is folded neatly on my dresser so it won’t get messy. I give it one last look before I turn back to what I’m doing. My fingers tingle as I lift the gun to my mouth. It tastes oily and dusty all at once as I close my lips on cold gunmetal
—
but I can’t. Not in the mouth. I’m shaking, but I lift the barrel to the side of my head. The tip digs into my skin. I’m thinking about drugs and girls and how the tip feels, and my hand’s shaking, and I feel guilty for a lot of stuff and my life sucks, and that my room has so much dust and sand in places I didn’t even know. Then I’m squeezing the trigger and looking at the dust and sand and feeling my hand shake and thinking guilty thoughts
and there’s noise and fire and pain and I’m falling, falling, my broken head smashing into my pillow …
.

Why do you stay in this room?

J.B.’s whisper woke me from my constant dream of killing myself. My head throbbed hard enough to make me think about throwing up, and my bad hand was curled up so tight I had to pry the fingers open. With a sigh, I glanced at my closet, where my hand and foot braces lived.

Why do you stay in this room?
J.B. sounded more demanding this time, like he might get mad. In the three days since I had seen Mama Rush, he had talked more and more and more, hardly shutting up when I was in my room—especially when I was on the bed, trying to sleep. Especially when I had a headache.

I sat up slowly, blinked, and wished it was a rainy morning instead of being so bright. The sunlight felt like ice picks in my eye.

Or bullets
.

“Shut up, J.B.” I put my hand over my ear, but that didn’t work. When he talked again, I heard him inside my brain.

The bullet felt like a sword in the head. Like somebody stuck a knife right in front of
—

I stood up too fast, overbalanced, and fell back on the bed with my head near the bottom. “Shut up!”

This time when I blinked, I thought I saw a silvery outline standing in the sunlight. The outline looked like a tall, shimmering boy. The boy looked strong and healthy, like an athlete.

No way. Couldn’t be. It was only sunlight, brightening
the dust. Darkening all the places where I had nicked the walls and doors—

The image vanished.

Biting my lip hard enough to block the pain in my head, I sat back up and flexed my bad hand. Then I stretched my weak leg to be sure I didn’t fall again.

“I don’t know why I stay in this room,” I admitted as I slowly eased to my feet. “Maybe the answers are here, at least some of them.”

It’s a bad idea. You hurt yourself in here
.

“No, I didn’t. You did.”

Maybe if you didn’t have this room, you wouldn’t have shot yourself
. J.B.’s voice was distant, floaty. He sounded like he was talking through a pipe or a vent, with the hollow way the words drifted through the room.

“Pipe.” I looked around, but I didn’t see any pipes. My vent was on the floor, and nothing was coming out of it. “Vent.”

You should move to the guest room
, J.B. insisted.
Things would be easier there
.

“Pipe-vent platitudes.” Ignoring him was hard, but I needed to do it. He was like some sort of demon, poking and poking all the time. Between him and my headache and my bum arm and hand, it took forever to get my pants and shirt on right.

Why won’t you move to the guest room?
J.B. asked as I pulled on my left sock.

“The same reason I won’t go to a different school.” I was imagining him now as that silvery athletic boy, twinkling dust in the sunlight of my room. “Platitudes. I need truths, and things—well, things don’t need to be easy.”

This shut him up long enough for me to pull on my right sock and get the Velcro fasteners on my tennis shoes opened. His next question was calmer, with lots less whine.

Why can’t things be easy? Do you feel guilty?

“No. Well, yes, maybe a little? I don’t know. Easy.” I rammed first one foot and then the other into my shoes and worked on fastening the Velcro. “I don’t remember doing anything, and I don’t know why I did it. Easy. I shouldn’t feel guilty if I don’t remember anything, right? I mean, it’s not like I’m a criminal pretending stuff to get out of jail. Guilty. Easy.”

J.B. stayed quiet the rest of the time as I combed my hair, straightened my clothes, double-checked to be sure I had remembered my deodorant, and checked three times to be sure I had cab fare to The Palace for later in the day. Mama Rush had said we should meet around three p.m., and I planned to be early. I had gone over and over the first item on the Why List, even talked Dad into giving me my old emergency room records to read my lab tests. I was almost 100 percent sure I hadn’t taken drugs, at least not on the day I killed myself. I mean, tried to kill myself. Just a few more things to check out, and I’d be ready for Mama Rush’s grilling.