AnnickPress

...Sean’s voice whispers in my ear.Animals just trust you, he says. See how they let you touch their paws? I want to curl up in his voice, pull it over me like a blanket, and let his words burrow their way into my skin.
Sometimes, when I think about love, I imagine the kind you see in movies where two people look at each other and their eyes seem to dissolve into their faces and you can feel the tension, those little sparks zipping between them. When I was younger and watched movies like that with my sisters, I would wonder if love really could travel across a room from your body to a stranger’s until the two of you were hopelessly entangled. Or if someone you knew suddenly looked different to you one day, like the way ice cream tastes gross early in the morning but by the afternoon it’s all you want.
Sean is my ice cream.

...autoerotic asphyxiation. He hanged himself with a necktie in his closet, accidentally suffocating while he jerked off over a porno mag. I wouldn’t need any of that, just the tie. I probably sound like a major psycho. Maybe I am. But if I am then it runs in the family. My mom thinks about killing herself all the time lately. Except Marlene thinks it out loud. It’s crazy. She used to be so cool—and I was her kid so I felt like it rubbed off on me in a way. Not so long ago, it was her and me against the world. Now look at us: a pair of defectives. How did we get this way?
It’s Sam’s fault, the way I figure it. If my dad hadn’t screwed up, he wouldn’t have landed in jail and they never would have split up. And if my parents hadn’t split up, we wouldn’t have been so broke and if we hadn’t been broke Marlene never would have tried the bullshit con-job that sent her off the rails in the first place. I am sitting on the edge of Marlene’s bed, watching her breathe. Watching her gives me a weird buzz in my guts, like a bee in a jar.

I could say it was a long time ago. I was young...stupid...just fifteen. I didn’t know any better. That’s what I’ve been saying to myself every day since it happened. “I was young.” That’s the kind of thing people say. To make themselves feel better, I suppose.
I know I have to forget it. But how can I?
It’s not an easy story. It’s hard to explain and probably hard to understand. But I still want to try.
Her name is Susie Peterson. But she was called Susie P. She was in my class in high school.
It was the 1980s. She’d always been there— ever since play school. But still I couldn’t say I knew her. Probably no one in our class really did.
We thought she was pretty hopeless. A real head case.
Quiet. Pale. Terrified eyes hiding behind thick bangs. And alone—she was always alone. She sat in the front row by herself, chewing her lip.
Those strange clothes she had... There were rumors about how her mother, a home-care worker, got the clothes from the old people and altered them for her daughter. But nothing was for sure when it came to Susie P.
She was the sort of person who is always the odd one out. Honestly, I can’t remember a single time when I saw her with someone else. “You can work in pairs,” the teachers would say. “Two people for every basketball!” or “In pairs in science lab.” And she was always the one without a partner.
But one day—it was in ninth grade—some guys in our school decided to tease Susie P.

But then, I don’t talk about much to anyone—except for Evan, sometimes. Maybe that’s why people at school like me: I’m a guy without baggage. I haven’t failed or skipped a grade; I’m not good or bad; I’m not the best student or the worst. I’m just in the middle. I get invited to parties, and I go once in a while. I let people copy my homework and don’t ask for anything in return. I stay cool.
I moved here from the other side of the country last year, near the end of the semester—my dad got a job transfer —so no one really knows me yet. But they like me. Girls have started to hang around me. They’re nice to me. They say I understand them. They’ve convinced themselves that I’m sensitive, even though they have no reason to think that. I never reveal anything. I know how to keep my mouth shut. And how to observe people. That’s what I like most of all—observing.
I watch women in the street get angry when their husbands aren’t listening to them. I see the disappointed faces of mothers whose children don’t need them anymore. I notice how guys and girls try to get each other’s attention when spring is coming—shorter skirts, tighter pants, thin T-shirts showing off muscles. I can spend hours just watching the world.
My mother always nagged me about it when I was younger. “Stop daydreaming,” she’d say. It was like her motto. My mother thinks you should always be doing something. Because my dad’s at work all the time, she complains that she has to work twice as hard—first at the office, then at home. Obviously, it’s not true—not for the last few years, anyway, because I help her out a lot. But she’ll never admit it. She really loves to complain. Complaining makes her feel alive.
My mom’s a secretary. At the beginning of my first year in junior high, she told me the teachers would need to get information about our family, and I’d have to fill out some forms. “On the forms, there’ll be a spot where it asks about your parents’ profession,” she said, and then she told me it was very important to put down that she was an executive secretary.
My mother has never been an executive secretary.
She’s tried hard enough, though.
Once, on a job interview, she even tried to pass herself off as trilingual —English, French, and German—even though she can’t say two words in a foreign language without laughing.
But, as she never stops repeating, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
My mom is a cliché factory.
She just slides them onto the end of every sentence, effortlessly. It’s like they wait in her mouth, hiding, and at the last moment they spring on her helpless victim: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. April showers bring May flowers.
Except right now, it’s April and there aren’t any showers. And life is too complicated for clichés.
For two weeks now, it’s been really warm. Abnormally warm for April—though who knows what normal is anymore. On the radio, they go on and on about seasonal norms, but what does that mean? Most of us just try to enjoy the weather while it lasts, without thinking too much about what it means. We live for the moment, even though we know the planet is being destroyed and, sooner or later, we’ll have to deal with it.
I’m sixteen.
I’m in my last year of school.
In sixteen years times three, the scientists say, Earth will be a very different place. The planet we know today will be just a distant memory.
I already miss it.
Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I imagine myself in three or four decades. Shut up inside a stifling house, unable to go outside because of the brutal heat of the sun. I’m lying on a dirty mattress, waiting for darkness to bring relief. When night falls, the humans go outside. They breathe in the air. They kiss and make love and fight. Sometimes they kill each other. Human contact has become urgent. I spend all day lying in bed, flipping through the novels I’ve rescued from people who don’t want them—people who say books are frivolous, who say now that we have science, we don’t need fiction.
I daydream.
And my mother’s not there to reprimand me.
My mother is lying under a tombstone that she had inscribed to read Executive Secretary.

Natural banana-flavored gum, 100 percent organic; surely Mom, if she had been there, would have bought it for me. So I put it in my shopping bag and got in line to pay.
The cashiers in this grocery store are so slow at the checkout; it has to be on purpose, like they’re trying to prove some point about being anti-corporate and anti–fast food. So while I was waiting, I had lots of time to drift off and forget about my gum. I thought about how I would have liked to have had the starring role in Victor/Victoria, the big play at the end of the year that we were working on with the English teacher. I imagined myself on stage in the Julie Andrews part, singing my solo, “Alone in Paris,” the room silent, all eyes fixed on me, everyone enraptured: the students, the teachers, the principal, Dad and Mom.
And I’m enraptured, too, to the point where I have tears in my eyes when the cashier asks me to put my things on the counter. Silly! Dish soap, tofu, sausage (yes, I checked the expiration date), dates, broccoli. The cashier is new, and there’s so little room on the counter for the groceries that you have to hurry and put them back in your shopping bag, otherwise they spill over and the cashier can’t tell what’s been rung through or not. I panic a bit at the idea that the people behind me are getting impatient because I’m not fast enough (as if they don’t have anything better to think about, I’m so self-centered), and it’s at the moment when I’m about to put the dish soap back into my shopping bag that I see the package of chewing gum at the bottom. Little slender package, yellow on a yellow background, almost invisible—I had forgotten about you! And then everything goes too fast; no sooner do I realize it’s still in the bag than I’ve already put the dish soap on top of it. It’s not that it’s too late to tell the cashier, but I get this feeling in my heart and it feels good.
I’m not going to say anything; I’m going to steal it.

My name is Celia. I’m sixteen years old and I was accused of killing Alex.
Her son. My boyfriend.
***
I’m ashamed to be happy. I’m ashamed of this wave of joy that makes my legs feel warm, that rises up through my body and just wants to gush out of me. I’m ashamed because Alex is dead and nothing, nothing at all should make me happy. But I can’t help it. I can’t not feel relieved at being acquitted. It’s my life, after all. A fucked-up life but a life to live anyway.
I can see in her eyes that she hates me for the future I have ahead of me, that my youth wounds her, that she tells herself I’ll find another boy in time, but for her, it’s over—she’ll never have another son to love.
But she’s wrong. Her son is inside of me, forever.
***
I don’t know how I would have coped if he had suffered.
If Alex hadn’t died instantly.
Stupid deaths always amused him. He sure would have laughed at his own.
If you had the choice, would you rather die from a lump of frozen excrement falling out of an airplane and hitting you on the head, or from a window shutter flying off in a storm and hitting you in the face?