Chapter 10
Robert
I don’t kill them. I want to kill them, and they’re lucky that we don’t have band the same period, but I don’t seek them out.
At lunch Andrew pulls up the fan page again and reads some of the comments out loud. He laughs so hard that tears stream down his cheeks. And then in sixth-period Calculus, he has to leave the room for a minute when he gets the giggles right in the middle of some practice problems. There’s a bunch of tittering in the classroom as my classmates speculate on what’s so funny all of a sudden.
He just stumbled across it, I think as I head home later. Right. I didn’t have to play around on Facebook long last night to know he totally searched my name. Somehow, that kind of makes up for the humiliation of having a fan page in the first place.
Aunt Whitney’s and Aunt Olivia’s SUVs are both parked in the driveway, so I park on the street. I feel a little spark of hope in my chest that maybe while I was at school, Dad checked out. What would Andrew say about that?
Mom shoves a tray of chicken tenders and Tater Tots in my hands when I come through the garage door. “Take these to your cousins, please. They’re in your room.”
“Why are they in my room?”
“Because I had nowhere else to put them,” she says sharply. She looks frazzled and pissed.
“Where are Aunt Whitney and Aunt Olivia?”
“Holding court. Where else?” She dumps a pan in the sink and turns on the water, squirts too much soap in, then viciously starts scrubbing.
My room is dark and stuffy, the way it gets when there are too many bodies in there. One of my cousins—Franny probably—has found an old GameCube in my closet and the twins are sitting on the floor playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. Franny is at my computer, and Noah and Aunt Whitney’s two kids—Jude, five, and Brian, eight—are doing God knows what on my bed. I flip on the lights. And that’s when I see it—a black line circumscribing my room, cutting across framed certificates, the photos on my bulletin board, my closet doors, my band hoodie that’s hanging from a doorknob, my bookshelf, my books.
I drop the food on my desk and storm back to the kitchen.
“They Sharpied my room!”
“What?” Mom says. She turns off the water.
“One of the kids took a Sharpie and ran it all around my room.”
I’m showing Mom the damage when Aunt Olivia appears in the doorway behind us. “Oh my goodness,” she says.
One of the four-year-old twins looks up guiltily. “I didn’t do it.”
“You little—”
“Robert,” Aunt Olivia says sharply. “Mark would never do that. None of my kids would. I’ve raised them better than that. And watch your mouth.”
I stare at her like she’s lost her mind. If not them, then who? Perhaps she’s suggesting I did it myself, in my goddamn sleep?
Mom takes my hoodie from the doorknob. “I think I have some Ink-Out that might get this out, or at least fade it.” Her voice is tight, and it occurs to me at that moment that she is just as angry as I am, perhaps more angry. And then the smell hits me.
“Did one of you pee in here?”
The other twin, Matthew, looks up at me with these big pathetic eyes. “I had to go potty?”
“Where?” I demand.
Sharpie kid—perhaps happy to have the spotlight off him—points to the corner behind my papasan. I turn on Matthew. “Why didn’t you go to the bathroom?”
“I did,” he says, big tears welling up in his eyes. “Right there.”
“Don’t yell at him,” Aunt Olivia says harshly, picking up a Sharpie from the floor along with a half-eaten Ding Dong. “He’s a little kid. And as I recall, you were still wetting the bed at twelve.”
I am speechless.
“Robert,” my mom says quietly. She grabs my arm, but I turn and go, fumbling for my keys as I slam the garage door behind me.
The doctor told my mom it was nothing to worry about.
But it was humiliating. I didn’t do sleepovers. I didn’t go to summer camps.
Every time Mom had to wash my sheets, she’d try to reassure me that I would grow out of it. I had a hard time believing her, but she’d have those sheets washed, dried, and back on the bed, smelling mountain fresh so fast that I didn’t have much time to dwell on it.
Dad never said anything.
Then one evening my computer wouldn’t boot up. I had some research to do, and Mom told me to use Dad’s. He was sleeping in anticipation of whatever it was he did all night long. He was nocturnal even then.
I was just about to log Dad out of his e-mail account and log me in just for a quick check when it struck me that there were no e-mails in his in-box. None in his sent box either. He e-mailed all the time, and everybody had e-mails lying around in their boxes. And then I checked Trash. There were pages of e-mails to Aunt Olivia mostly, and some to Aunt Whitney and Grandma.
Out of curiosity, and with a sense of dread, I opened the first e-mail. He’d written it to Aunt Olivia just that night.
Whitney thinks he needs to see a psychiatrist, too, or maybe a psychologist at least, but Kathryn’s dug in. She refuses to take him. It pisses me off that she won’t listen to you guys. You’re doctors, for Christ’s sake. I’m starting to agree with Whitney—she’s a lousy mother. I’d drive him myself if I could. I mean, he’s twelve years old and still pissing his bed. I can hardly stand to be around him. His room stinks. He stinks. I can’t help it. My own son disgusts me. I wish he was more like your kid, Liv. And then all that hip-hop dancing, or whatever it is he’s doing in his room. I swear sometimes I think he’s not mine.
My ears hear only screams.
I don’t know that one.
I got ice in my veins, blood in my eyes.
Lil Wayne, right?