What They Always Tell Us (3 page)

He continued to drink beer that night, but he also took a few more shots of rum. Then things get foggy in his mind. He was in one of the back bathrooms, he had just peed, and in the medicine cabinet, instead of finding pills or Band-Aids, he found the Pine-Sol. It looked so safe—the liquid was the color of apple juice, housed in a simple plastic bottle with a green and yellow label. He twisted off the yellow cap, paused, and then took a swallow. His throat burned after he took the swig. He took another and then another, though each swallow was hard—much harder—than taking a shot of the cheap rum. The burn felt like little needle pricks down his throat. He felt like he needed to vomit, and he did manage to puke out a little bit. But his throat felt scalded, so he held the rest in and started coughing. He remembers someone finally opening the door to the bathroom—he hadn’t locked it. He remembers a lot of cussing from some of his classmates and a blond girl he didn’t know who kept calling him Alan and asking what his last name was: “Last name, I need your last name!” Commotion, the awed faces of those who had ignored him, jolted out of flirting and boozing into something surreal. He doesn’t remember seeing Kirk or Tyler or the girls, though they must have been there. He remembers the paramedics, and then the bizarre stares of anguish he got from his parents at the hospital. Oh, and James, the look on his face—pure disgust. The hospital psychiatrist, a pinched-looking man trying so hard to be kind, even he seemed baffled.

The psychiatrist he ended up seeing was a different doctor named Tim Richardson. He specialized in dealing with adolescents, supposedly. His office was in the shaded front room of a house he shared with his wife and young child, whose pictures Alex saw on his desk, framed portraits of familial bliss. At first Dr. Richardson—he said to call him Tim, but Alex felt weird calling an adult by his first name—would mostly chat with him about school and stuff and then slowly work his way to questions about the incident: “Why did you want to end your life, Alex? Is this something you’d thought about a lot? What made you feel like you wanted to die? Do you still want to die, Alex?”

The questions exhausted Alex, because he didn’t think he knew the answers. He just remembered how he felt that awful night, and the days and nights leading up to it. One day he’d felt as if he fit into the world, and the next he felt badly out of place. Still, even though therapy and all the talking seem pointless to him, Alex shows up each Wednesday after school, right on schedule, to sit there and talk with Dr. Richardson, trying to convince the doctor—and everyone else—that he’ll never hurt himself again.

Coming up on Burger King, Alex almost drives right by, but at the last second he slows and turns into the parking lot. “Is this okay?” he asks Henry.

“I don’t have any money.”

“I’ll spot you.”

Henry nods.

Alex sits in the car a moment before shutting it off. He scans the lot for familiar cars—Lang’s bumper-stickered (
MEAN PEOPLE SUCK
) Mercedes, Tyler’s maroon Explorer, Kirk’s gray Bronco. But none of their cars are here—the coast is clear.

They get out and enter the heat and fried smell of the place. Mostly solitary diners on this Saturday night, maybe some travelers, though this franchise is miles from I-59. Alex takes a closer look around only after he has ordered his chicken sandwich and onion rings, Henry’s fries and chicken tenders. There are no teenagers, only two kids who look Henry’s age, maybe a bit older, throwing fries at each other in a booth.

“To go,” he tells the cashier, an older woman with a pleasant and effortless smile that reassures Alex.

“To go?” Henry asks.

“I don’t want to eat here.”

Henry accepts this with a shrug, and Alex fidgets while he waits for his order to be bagged and handed over.

And then they come in: Tyler and Kirk. He knew this would happen eventually, maybe he even hoped for it to happen: to run into his old friends, to see them away from school, and for them to see him.
Them
—they have become a collective unit in his mind.

With these two here, Alex thinks that the girls can’t be far behind, some of the other guys, too. Alex watches as they walk in, their eyes looking up at the glowing menu. They haven’t noticed him yet. Alex looks away, anywhere but where his old friends are. The cashier scoops his onion rings. The drive-through alert beeps, and one of the cooks shouts something to someone farther back in the kitchen.

Alex can sense their eyes on him now, like the shine of a flashlight in a dark room. Alex turns and Kirk lets out a tiny wave, almost just a hand raise, nothing more.

“Oh, hey,” Alex says.

Tyler just jerks his chin up, ever so slightly. Tyler has dirty blond hair that is long on the top, parted to the left, but short on the sides. Kirk is shorter than Tyler, but his dark hair—almost black—is styled in exactly the same way. They both wear T-shirts over long-sleeved shirts, and ratty ankle boots. Alex, luckily, took off his robe at home, but he’s sure he looks absurd to them anyway, in his jogging shoes and loose jeans, his thin and corny eighth-grade T-shirt, especially when it’s cold outside.

“How’s it going?” Kirk asks.

“Fine.” Alex looks down at Henry. “Just grabbing some food.”

“Cool.”

The woman hands Alex his bag, smiles at him, and moves to take Tyler’s and Kirk’s orders. Alex pauses before moving, thinking that Kirk is about to say something more, ask him to stay, sit down, join them, call him later, something. But Kirk just looks at Tyler and says, “You ready to order?”

Alex motions for Henry, whom Kirk and Tyler seem not to have noticed. “Bye,” Alex says.

“Bye,” Kirk says, giving him one last quick glance as Tyler scrutinizes the menu like he hasn’t eaten there a million times before.

At the door Alex pauses and hears Kirk snicker and say something under his breath, and Tyler joins in and snorts out a laugh. Right then Alex pushes open the door and enters the coldness and the twilight.

In the car Henry munches on a French fry and asks, “Who were those boys?”

“Nobody.”

“Okay.”

After a few minutes, Alex says, “They were my friends.”

Back home, after eating his food straight from the bag, Alex stretches out on the couch in the parlor, still wearing his jogging shoes. Henry stands by the window. It’s dark outside now, and lights are popping on in the neighboring homes.

“Your mom home yet?” Alex asks.

Henry just shakes his head side to side and sniffles.

Alex sits up and looks at Henry. He listens as Henry begins to sob, his body shaking, his hands held over his ears as if he is trying to block out the sound of a loud siren. The vodka—which Alex resumed drinking once he got home—has made Alex feel tired, but he stands up and walks over to the window. “Don’t,” he pleads. “Henry,” Alex says, touching him on the shoulder. He takes a deep breath. “Stop.” But Henry keeps going, a near-silent cry. “Henry? I think it would be kind of okay if you stayed here tonight. If you want. Until your mom gets back.”

Henry, like a windup toy slowing down, stops shaking and looks up at Alex. Although it’s dark in the house, Alex can see his wet, blank face, the tears streaking it like little inlets of salt water. Henry rubs his eyes with his fingers, sniffles, and, struggling to catch his breath, says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Alex says. “I’ll be right back.”

Alex leaves Henry in the living room and walks into the kitchen. He carries the bottle of Mr. Clean back upstairs to his parents’ bathroom. He opens the cap and sniffs around the edges of the bottle and the ammonia smell tickles his nostrils.

He thinks back to a few weeks earlier, in late October. James had come home from some party drunk, very drunk, drunker than Alex had ever seen him. He burst into Alex’s room, where he was lying in bed but not asleep.

“Alex, are you awake?” he said, his words slightly slurred. James sat down on his bed and grabbed Alex’s wrist, like he was half pinning him down.

“I’m awake.”

“Good.” In the greenish glow from the digital clock by his bed, Alex could barely make out James’s face. “Because I’ve got something to tell you, okay?”

Alex said nothing.

“I just want to say, that…you better not do anything fucking stupid again.” He paused as if waiting for Alex to protest. But he didn’t. He was shocked into silence. “I mean, I could…I couldn’t care less what you do. If you want to fucking hurt yourself and throw your life away, fine. Fuck you.” Alex could tell James was about to cry, but that he was fighting it. “But…but, Mom and Dad would…If you do something like that again, and if this time you succeeded…well, you’d ruin our lives. You’d ruin their lives. You do realize that, don’t you?”

Alex heard James start to cry, and it was weird, because James never cried.

“Fuck,” James said, like he was pissed at himself for bawling in front of Alex. After all, Alex was the one who cried, the weak one. “Just remember that,” he managed to mutter. Then James left, leaving Alex where he’d found him, sleepless in bed, his heart pounding, his mouth growing dry.

Now in the bathroom, he pours the bottle of Mr. Clean out into the sink and runs his fingers over the sticky remains on the ceramic basin, listening to the liquid escape down the drain. He puts the bottle back under the sink, knowing that his mother will eventually discover that it is empty and probably suffer a moment of fear. But then she’ll find Alex sitting reading a book or watching TV, not passed out on the floor, and her fear will subside, though it might never disappear, at least not for a while. Alex knows he may never be trusted again, but here he is alone—well, mostly alone—and he’s fine. A little vodka-buzzed but fine. They’ll see that, they all will, eventually.

Back in the living room he finds Henry sitting on the couch, still staring outside.

“You want to watch a movie or something?” Alex asks.

Henry nods.

“Cool.”

“Alex?” Henry says.

“Yeah?” he says.

“I’m not a baby.”

“Oh, I know that.”

“I didn’t mean to cry.”

“It’s okay. I cry a lot.”

“You do?”

“Sure. All the time.”

Henry looks at him, like he can’t imagine Alex crying.

“And so does James, my brother. So do lots of people. It’s normal.”

Henry sniffles and nods and then breaks into a relieved grin.

At midnight they sit at the kitchen table drinking hot milk, because Henry said it’s what people in the movies drink to help them sleep. The curtains of the bay window are pulled. Alex has put sleeping bags on the floor in the den, but they aren’t tired yet. The dictionary lies open on the table and Henry thumbs through the thin, tissuelike pages, reading definitions aloud.

Soon Alex hears a car pull up outside, and then the engine stops, but it’s hard to tell where the sound of the car is coming from. It could be James, or Henry’s mother, or just a neighbor returning home late from a party. Maybe even Alex’s parents, returned early. When the car’s engine starts up again, Alex looks over at Henry, but neither of them rushes to the window to see who it is. Then he hears the car drive away.

For a moment Alex wonders what James is doing. Is he even thinking about him? Or is his mind focused solely on Alice? Then he thinks about Tyler and Kirk. Alice. Henry’s mom. Everyone’s out there, living, and here he is, at home with a kid.

He should feel sad, like he’s missing out on something. But he doesn’t, not really. He’s not alone, after all, and tonight that feels very good.

James

E
verything is boring, James thinks. This town. This day. This night. Even this girl, Alice. He’s known all this for a while, but tonight it hits him even harder. Hits him like a punch to the gut.

It’s a Saturday night, and he’s in a hotel room with Alice, whom you might call his girlfriend, though he’s not so sure. She’s pretty but in that cheap sort of way—big boobs, fleshy body, dyed-blond hair. She goes heavy on the makeup, heavy on the perfume she always wears. Today, since they checked in, they have fooled around twice, and as far as that goes, she is good at it. And yet James is still bored.

Since the Alabama football team isn’t playing this weekend, he doesn’t really care about the other games on TV. The movies on cable are stupid, or else they’ve seen them before. They ran out of beer—kept cool in the small ice bucket provided by the hotel—an hour ago. Why he only brought a six-pack, he has no idea. And he forgot his stash of vodka.

Now what?

That is what Alice is asking. “What should we do?” she says, drawing out the “do” like it has three syllables or something.

“I dunno,” James says, pretending to watch the movie on TV. It’s a comedy with teens, though James knows that all the actors in this movie aren’t his age at all, but twentysomethings, probably living fabulous lives in Hollywood, not stuck in high school hell.

Alice lies next to him, on her back, wearing just her bra and panties—both lacy and a pink color that she probably thinks looks classy but doesn’t. James is just in his boxers, though he sort of wants to put his clothes back on. Alice is not touching him, but any minute now he is sure she will start rubbing his body—his mostly smooth chest, tight tummy, then down farther, to try to get him excited. She’s very touchy-feely. “We could go somewhere,” Alice says.

James doesn’t respond. He wishes
she
would go somewhere: home. He thinks he’d rather be bored on his own. But the hotel is paid for, and Alice paid half, and he knows they are both here at least until the morning. Besides, they’d planned this night weeks ago, when James found out his parents were going to be away at a wedding. At the time, the idea excited him, the “badness” of it all. At the time, he liked this Alice a lot more than he does now.

“I know a girl from Hillcrest, and she’s having a party in Northport somewhere,” Alice says.

Alice, James knows, doesn’t have many girlfriends at Central High. It’s probably because she stole some girl’s boyfriend during freshman year, and the girls all turned on her in an act of female solidarity. Alice mostly just hangs out with the guy she happens to be dating. So he’s surprised to hear about this other girl at Hillcrest. Maybe girls at other schools don’t know about her reputation. “I’m not going to some hick’s party,” James says.

“She’s not a hick. Don’t be such an asshole.”

“Hillcrest?” James says. “Yeah right.” Hillcrest is a county school, about six miles south of the city limits off Highway 69, and everyone knows all the kids who go there are hicks and rednecks. Alice isn’t a hick. But James knows that people—even his own friends—think she’s sort of trashy. Low class. She’s not like the other girls he has dated—Helen, Mary Margaret, and Clare—all girls from good families, with good taste, nice things, outwardly good manners. This is why he is with Alice now. He was bored with those girls, with their fake primness and shallow vanity. But now he is bored with Alice. He can’t win.

“Why can’t I just come over to your house?” she’d asked when James had told her that his parents were going to be out of town all weekend.

“My brother will be there,” he’d said.

“So, won’t he stay out of your hair?”

“Yeah, I guess. But he’ll still be there, hanging around. He gets on my nerves. Just his presence.” He couldn’t really describe this, not to Alice, at least. She doesn’t have siblings, and she barely knows a thing about Alex—except what everyone else at school knows. Alex the nutcase. That’s how everyone thinks of him now, though they’d never say so to James’s face. Because James knows he’s considered “popular.” He plays soccer and tennis, though he gave up soccer last year after making varsity tennis, because he’s better at tennis anyway. He knows he is good-looking—not because he’s full of himself or anything, but because girls and other people tell him so. He makes really good grades. People laugh at what he says. They think he’s cool.

And so here they are, at the hotel. Maybe it’s not even a hotel. Maybe it’s a motel. What’s the difference? It’s called La Quinta Inn, but James has never taken Spanish and he doesn’t know what
la quinta
means. The building is all off-white stucco with a red-slate roof. A little touch of the Southwest right here in Alabama.

James is spent, irritated, and just as he’d predicted, Alice starts touching him. And of all the things in the world he wants right now, her touching him is
not
one of them.

He shuffles away from her on the bed, toward the phone. He picks up the receiver.

“Who you calling?” she asks, sounding annoyed but not angry.

James shakes his head. He is calling Greer, one of his best friends. But the phone rings and rings, and he figures Greer is out with Julie, the college girl he met at a frat party a few weeks back. Everyone thinks Greer is this big stud for scoring a college girl, but she’s not that hot—James has met her. What kind of girl would date a high school senior anyway? James wonders.

It’s a different story for college guys. Lots of girls in his class have college-age boyfriends. For instance, his ex Clare—she’s now one of these girls, dating some guy from Cullman who is a sophomore Phi Delt at Alabama. She probably thinks she’s hot shit now. Sure, she acts as nice as she always did, but James can sense the smugness underneath.

“I knew I should have brought some of my mom’s booze,” Alice says.

“I wish you had, too.” He scoots back onto the bed and flips the channel, hoping against hope that something new is on.

“We could go get your stash at your house,” she says. James guesses she is bored, too, desperate for the energy in the room—or lack of energy—to change.

“I’m not going there.”

“Because of your brother?” she asks.

James doesn’t reply. He stops the remote on a sports channel. Football is on, two schools he doesn’t give a shit about. Still, it’s better than a stupid movie or an infomercial. And at least it’s noisy.

“Seriously,” Alice says, nuzzling closer to him, her clammy hands on him again, her long fingernails scratching his shoulder. “What’s the deal with you and your brother?”

James doesn’t want to answer. He doesn’t know
how
to answer. So he grabs Alice closer to him and starts kissing her. He can feel her relax now, and even if he’s not in the mood, at least this will keep her quiet.

The night of the incident with Alex at the party—James can’t call it an accident, though that is how his parents sometimes refer to it—James had been hanging out with Nathen Rao and Preston Atkins. They are his other best buds. Greer had had a date that night or something. Greer always has dates, always has a girlfriend—he’s one of those guys.

They were all seniors, newly minted, and refused to stoop to showing up at Marty Miller’s party. Marty was a junior, and most of the kids at his party would be, too. Or younger. James knew that Alex was going with his own friends, and that was just one more reason for him to skip it. To be honest, Alex put him on edge. At home he was quiet and closed off, like he was hoarding misery. Not that he had ever been loud or rambunctious, but he used to be good-natured and outgoing, fun to be around. People had liked him. But in the spring, soon after he turned sixteen, something in Alex seemed to shift. He became morose, even lazy—his usually tidy room was littered with dirty clothes and stray sheets of paper, magazines, and dog-eared books. He seemed awkward, too, like he was unable to function in social situations. After school ended James dragged Alex with him to Greer’s house for a small gathering, and he didn’t say a word the entire night, just drank like a fish and stared off into space. “Dude, your brother is a drag,” Greer had told him before they left. He
was
a drag.

“Is something wrong with Alex?” his parents asked James a few times.

James shrugged. “How should I know?”

“Maybe he’s going through the whole sullen teenager phase,” Mom had said, sounding reassured.

All summer Alex kept mostly to himself, closed up in his room. He never seemed to go out with his friends, nor did they ever call him. It was like, all of a sudden, Alex had turned into a new person, and not in a good way.

So that night, instead of going to the party, they smoked pot at Preston’s house, drank Maker’s Mark on ice, watched a movie, talked about girls, smoked more pot, thought about crashing Marty’s party after all, and then thought better of it.

Really, it was a boring, do-nothing night—unavoidable and constant in this city—but because James was with his friends, it felt comforting and fun in a low-key way. They had all year for parties and football games and dates. Plus, the pot had been good stuff—“really nice shit,” as Preston called it. Preston’s older stepbrother had given it to him before heading back to college.

They smoked it in Preston’s pipe, which was a ceramic replica of a cigarette, hollowed out for the weed. Preston said he liked this pipe because you could drive around getting high and no one would know you were smoking anything worse than a Camel. James was mostly new to pot, and he still had trouble lighting and inhaling at once. Sometimes he’d inhale too quickly and burn his lungs, coughing out any good puffs and looking like an all-around idiot. But that night, he’d sucked down hit after hit like he was breathing sea air. It made him feel euphoric and profound and silly, not paranoid and woozy like it had on past occasions. They started watching episodes of
Three’s Company
on cable and it was more hilarious than ever.

“Dude, I’d love to lick those tits,” Preston had said, about Suzanne Somers. Nathen and James cracked up.
Everything
cracked them up—Mr. Furley, the bad 1970s haircuts and too-tight pants, Chrissy’s airheaded brilliance. James had made a mental note to watch this show more often. It ruled!

Preston lived in the garage apartment of his parents’ house on the lake—on the opposite side of the lake from Marty Miller’s place, the more developed side. His garage apartment was a big, nice space, with a little kitchen, like he had his own apartment already. His dad and his stepmom never seemed to be around or to care what he was up to. James envied this freedom to a degree—Preston could do what he wanted, when he wanted. James’s mom, meanwhile, always wanted to know what he was doing, where he was going, and who with. She said she could never truly fall asleep until he was safe at home in bed. The woman either never slept or was an insanely light sleeper. His dad slept like a rock; James could have blasted his stereo all night and never woken
him
up. But it’s not like James was invisible to him, either. Quite the opposite. He always grilled James about school, his girlfriends, tennis, everything in his life. James kept few things from him—except for the pot, his sex life, and, really, how much he drank and how often. Some secrets parents can never know. They wouldn’t want to know, probably.

At some point that night, James had fallen asleep on Preston’s couch. The jarring ring of the phone woke him up. He opened his eyes quickly. The lights were still on in the room, but Nathen had gone home and Preston was zonked out, lying on the floor with his head on a pillow. The phone rang again and again and then the machine picked up, but no one left a message. James checked his watch: it was only 12:03. His curfew was 12:30 on weekends, though he had said he was sleeping over here. But now that he was up, he wanted his own bed.

He let Preston sleep and laced up his sneakers.

Then the phone rang again. This time Preston stirred and mumbled something. James smiled and grabbed the cordless and passed it to him. “Here ya go, buddy.”

“What the fuck?” Preston said before answering with a half-assed “Hello.”

After a few seconds, Preston said, “Yes, ma’am, he’s here.” Preston passed him the phone, giving him a look of stoned indifference.

And so, half-stoned, a little drunk, and for sure tired, standing in his friend’s garage apartment, James found out from his hysterical mother that Alex had swallowed something poisonous while at Marty Miller’s party and was in the hospital and would he meet them there as soon as he could? Mom was a worrier, but he’d never heard her voice like this—scared and panicked, maybe anger mixed with shock.

James doesn’t remember how he responded on the phone, nor does he recall hanging up and driving the curvy roads from the lake back to town, to Druid City Hospital’s emergency room, somehow arriving without wrecking the car or killing someone. He only remembers thinking, at some point,
I should have been at that party.

After a few minutes of kissing and groping, Alice says, “What’s wrong?”

James pulls away from her. “What do you mean?”