Three
Eleven years later…
I’m probably the only person in school that dreads the final bell before summer vacation. Summer for me equals ten weeks of wandering around town or hiding in my room with the door locked, hoping against hope my father will work extra hours at the paper mill and James will work less.
From my desk in the back of the room, I watch my classmates swap yearbooks for the last time as they walk out the door, happily chattering about the usual lake parties and summer jobs and hour-long road trips down into California. They don’t notice me, the skinny girl with stringy hair and eyes too big for her head. They don’t ask me to come along or wonder aloud why I don’t have a yearbook for people to sign. I’ve made it a point to be invisible.
The room clears within seconds. The seniors got out three days ago, so it’s like everyone is in a hurry to join them. Even my American Lit teacher, Mr. Carter, seems eager to escape to wherever teachers spend their summers. Maybe I’ll stay in my seat until the janitor kicks me out, or maybe I’ll move from room to room until he locks all the doors and I have nowhere else to go.
The school is probably peaceful at night.
I can’t stay, though. I won’t. James gets off work early on Fridays—four instead of four thirty, a whole half an hour before our father—and I don’t dare worry James by not being there when he shows up. He already worries too much. Plus, he’s always starving when he gets home, and he’ll burn the house down if someone’s not there to guard the stove.
And then there’s our father. He expects dinner ready and waiting.
With a sigh, I heft my backpack onto one shoulder and trudge into the hallway, empty save for open lockers and leftover papers that flutter and scrape across the linoleum on the breeze coming through the open doors. Out in the parking lot, cars honk and engines rev as my classmates spill into the streets. Their freedom tastes sweet on the air. I breathe it in and wish it was mine, too.
Next year it will be. James and I are moving out the second I graduate—three-hundred and-sixty-three days from now—that’s the promise he makes every time something bad happens. He’s been saving the money he makes at the mill for almost a year now while I write out budgets, and fish the Sunday paper out of the neighbor’s plastic recycling bin every week to look for places we can rent. So far, we haven’t found anything cheap enough.
I cannot wait until we do.
After glancing at my watch, I decide to take the long way home, the one that winds through the nicer neighborhoods east of school, past the seventeen stores that make up the Granite Falls strip mall, and into the park just outside the paper mill’s gates. It’s deserted, of course. No one goes there because of the gritty haze that drifts down from the stacks and coats the trees in a layer of silt. Our neighborhood is two blocks past the park, and once I skirt the pond and pass the picnic tables, I can see our street.
It’s 3:42. And by the time I get to our driveway, I still have thirteen minutes to get dinner started. Perfect.
It’s hard to ignore the peeling beige paint on our house. This isn’t a “nice” neighborhood by any stretch of the imagination, but nobody else has a house that flakes paint like dandruff.
The low hum of my mother’s television and fresh cigarette smoke greets me when I step into the kitchen. I close the door quietly and hope she doesn’t hear the click. Some days, when there isn’t any smoke and the house is too quiet, I creep down the hall and listen for her breathing. It’s a weird feeling coming home from school, wondering if this is the day I’ll find my mother’s dead body. Part of me is terrified of that happening. The other part—the darker half of my heart I keep smothered for James’s sake—wishes she’d just overdose and be done with it.
After tossing my stuff into my bedroom, I head back to the kitchen, grab a pot from the drying rack by the sink, and set about boiling some water for mac ‘n cheese.
James remembers the way our mother used to be, back when she still smiled and didn’t take pills or smoke cigarettes all day. He hates our father for what he’s done to her—what he’s still doing to her—because of us. Sometimes I think picking up her prescriptions and leaving cartons of cigarettes outside her door is James’s way of making up for being born.
My father hasn’t always been like this, though. Ask anyone who doesn’t live with us and they’ll tell you he still isn’t. Our house is a shrine to the famous ex-boxer who has it all: a close-knit family, a successful athletic career in a former life, and a solid job at the mill.
It’s amazing how much people overlook when you’re a local celebrity.
Title belts painted an unconvincing shade of gold adorn our living room walls, faded, red boxing gloves dangle from sheetrock nails, and newspaper clippings yellowing in their cheap, tin frames line the fireplace mantle. In the center of it all is an enormous publicity poster from the Armory, the local boxing arena, featuring a man with a crooked nose and a busted lip. He waves triumphantly at our empty living room from atop the crowd’s shoulders.
James “Knockout Jimmy” O’Brien, Granite Fall’s very own boxing legend—a title he held until a young groupie poked holes in the condom she made him wear “for protection.”
My brother was born nine months later, fists already swinging.
I sink into a chair and stare at the pot of water, willing it to boil. Our father only married our mother because he had a public image to maintain—an image that didn’t include an abandoned son that might make him proud someday. Desperate and thinking a second baby would make things better between them, our mother seduced him again, lied about not needing birth control while breastfeeding James, and wound up with me.
Two babies in little more than a year and a half. Knockout Jimmy was forced to give up boxing and take a job in the paper mill.
It broke him, and in turn, he broke us all.