A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (45 page)

Just a hint of impatience in her voice.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Sorry.”

But I was back in my own head, going over everything I'd just said to her about my own problems.

“The thing with the girl,” I said, after a minute. “In the tournament. You know why it bothered me?”

“I don't know anything,” she said. “But yeah. I can guess.”

“What's your guess?” I asked. Challenging.

“Your dad,” she said.

“Yeah. My dad.”

She gave me a squeeze. “I'm sorry.”

“I have mixed feelings about it,” I whispered, almost to myself.

“Yeah,” she said. “I'm sorry about that, too.”

*   *   *

The rest of the team came out an hour or so later. I handed the keys up to the coach, and everyone else took their seats. Meadow and I stayed in back with the gear, pretending to sleep during the two-hour drive back to town. We dropped a few other kids off, but when we got to Meadow's place, I grabbed my bag and got out with her.

“I'll walk home from here,” I told the coach.

“You sure?” she asked. “It's late.”

“I'll be fine,” I said. “It's a nice night. I'll walk home.”

One of our teammates closed the side door of the van and the coach drove off to the next stop, leaving me and Meadow standing on the corner near her house, under the shadow of a giant maple tree that blocked out part of the streetlight above us.

“You are, you know,” Meadow said.

“What?” I asked.

“Walking home from here.”

“Sure,” I said.

“My mom's home, and I'm not just bringing some guy back with me at eleven o'clock without any kind of warning. That's not what my home life needs right now.”

“I got it,” I said.

“Then why did you get out of the van?”

I stepped closer to her. She was eight inches shorter than me, so I had to set my feet almost a yard apart to get my face anywhere near her level.

“I just want to see what all the fuss was about,” I said, thinking of Brandon and Jane and all the rest of it.

I leaned down slowly and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around my neck and I put my hands on the sides of her rib cage and lifted her up toward me. We kissed for a long time, without either of us taking it any farther.

“Well?” she said, when I finally set her back down. “Worth it?”

I shrugged. “I don't have the same things at stake.”

But I was thinking about Brandon—and how he'd take this. Remembering what I'd wanted when I went out to the van earlier that night. I'd wanted to break something. I'd known what I was asking for when I lured Meadow out there, and now I thought I was probably going to get it.

 

70

Meadow and I negotiated our relationship over the course of a week, playing what I was coming to regard as the usual games about whether we were serious about each other and settling on yes. Once the deal was locked in, I told Brandon about it.

He just started laughing. He said if I wanted to date someone that unpleasant, I was welcome to it. But a week after I told him about Meadow and me, he announced that he was going out with Maria. Or, rather, he didn't announce it. I called him one morning to ask if he wanted to go to a double feature at the Neptune that night, and he interrupted me mid-sentence to say, “Ow! Maria! Stop that!”

Then there was a lot of giggling.

“Hey, Jason,” Brandon said. “I'll have to call you back, all right?”

“Sure,” I said.

I hung up the phone and spent some time worrying.

I didn't mind that he was dating Maria. Or I didn't think I did. But the way he'd told me seemed intentionally discourteous. I'd told him about Meadow in person. I'd offered to talk about it if he had anything he wanted to say to me. This thing with Maria—it felt spiteful. With anyone else, I would have expected it, but I was surprised Brandon cared enough about any of this to get mad. This was a guy who had a key chain with a picture of a cartoon character that was made of nothing but legs, boobs, a butt, and a vagina, and a caption underneath that said
THE PERFECT WOMAN
.

Except, the night I'd asked Maria for her phone number, Brandon and I had both been flirting with her. I'd been the one to make the first move, but if Brandon had been serious about her, then watching me date her—and break up with her like a complete asshole—would have been pretty hard. I didn't think Brandon had a lot of scruples when it came to dating, but if I asked him I knew he'd tell me that he was at least a believer in the bro code: you don't date girls your friend is interested in, and you don't date your friend's ex-girlfriends. So maybe he'd been mad at me for a while, and this was just the first obvious sign. Maybe he was mad at me for breaking the code. Or maybe he just really wanted to be with Maria, and me dating Meadow gave him the excuse he needed to go ahead with it. That last seemed most likely, now that I was looking back at the problem I'd created for myself, rather than forward at the one I hoped to avoid.

Hindsight. Fuck.

I wished I was better at understanding normal people. I wished I could call Brandon and ask his opinion about all this.

*   *   *

My initial assessment of Meadow turned out to be accurate: she was far more trouble than she was worth. It was nice being with someone who had at least a theoretical understanding of my dad's situation, and Meadow was, indeed, very pretty. But she was simultaneously distant and demanding, and shockingly egocentric. After six weeks she told me she needed to take time off from the relationship to deal with an argument she was having with her mom about where she should go to college. I refrained from pointing out that I had some parental issues of my own that I somehow managed to balance while also being attentive to my relationship. When she called me back two weeks later to say she'd worked it out with her mom, I told her that I didn't want to get back together.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Honestly?” I said. “I didn't really appreciate how unhappy this relationship was making me until we took this break you demanded. I've been so much happier. It was like this enormous load was lifted.”

A few weeks later she sent me a letter explaining that she was very proud of herself for having been brave enough to be with someone as damaged as I was, and that I would always be part of her “herstory.”

 

71

I was alone with my dad, but I wasn't alone with his illness. In the three years since he'd been diagnosed, AIDS support organizations had been growing up steadily around the city. As they got bigger, they started helping him out—and, by extension, helping me. By 1988 massage therapists were coming by once or twice a week to give Dad back rubs. The Northwest AIDS Foundation did everything from loaning us the machine that Dad needed to take his AZT to sending a nurse to administer it. They also had caseworkers and social workers who connected us with other services.

One of those services was called the Chicken Soup Brigade. They started working with Dad when he got too sick to take care of himself. In my senior year, they started bringing him cases of a vitamin-enriched nondairy beverage called Ensure, that was designed for people who couldn't hold down solid food. They also brought prepared meals, like lasagna and enchiladas, and loaned us a microwave to cook them in. And at some point, someone decided to send us a housecleaner.

We needed one. As Dad got sicker, time meant less to me. When I was between girlfriends, I could go a few weeks without changing my clothes and not notice until the smell caught my attention. I would forget to go to school, or leave in the middle of the day and go for a walk. I wanted to be around other people, but I couldn't talk to them. I went to parks and coffee shops. I'd sit down, watch the people for a few minutes—then have to leave.

I kept punching walls. I tried to keep it a secret. Brandon was the only one who knew how bad it really was. But sometimes punching a wall or a telephone pole was the only thing that calmed me down; the pain in my hands took the edge off the panic. It didn't make it go away. Nothing did. It was in the background all the time, and it drowned out everything else. Taking care of myself was hard. Taking care of the house was impossible.

So Frank started coming to our apartment. He was a nice old man in his late sixties. He had short white hair, and he usually dressed in slacks and polo shirts. He came about once a week, did the dishes, swept, vacuumed, and sometimes cleaned out the refrigerator.

It bothered me having someone cleaning my house. It was embarrassing, because it was necessary. If I was home when he started cleaning, I came out of my room and started trying to clean ahead of him, so he wouldn't see what the place normally looked like. It was stupid, I knew. A waste of time. And it made me look like a crazy person. I couldn't stop doing it. My dad was in the hospital three weeks out of four, so this was mostly my mess. What Frank was actually seeing was how I couldn't even clean up after myself.

“You don't have to do that,” he said one day, as I was sweeping the kitchen.

“I kind of do,” I said. “I should clean up my own stuff.”

“All right,” he said.

After a couple of weeks, Frank and I got to talking. We talked about all kinds of things, but he mostly seemed interested in what I was going to do after high school. The conversation happened in bits and pieces over time. I didn't like talking about it. I had no idea what I was going to do after high school. I didn't even know how I was going to live. Partly, it was that I didn't believe I was going to. Partly it was just that I didn't understand the mechanisms involved. My dad had always paid the bills. He never had me help him with it or showed me how it was done. I didn't know how to find a straight job or get a place to live. I wasn't even allowed to have a bank account in my own name until I was eighteen. I wouldn't even turn seventeen till a few months after I graduated.

That left a year where I'd be a nonperson, with no place to go and nothing to do. In theory I was supposed to live with my dad's oldest brother, my uncle John, if my dad died before I was eighteen. That was the deal Dad and John had worked out after he was diagnosed. But I knew I wasn't going to do that. There was no point. If I went there, it was only a matter of time before I screwed it up so badly that I'd have to leave. And Uncle John would tell everyone it was my dad's fault, and my fault, and that we deserved everything that had happened to us. That we were beyond help, just like he'd been saying all along. May as well skip the middle part and not give him the satisfaction, was my thinking on the matter.

“Jason,” Frank said one day while he was sweeping, “would you mind if I … offer an opinion?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

He stopped and leaned on the kitchen counter. “You're sure? It's a bit strong. I wouldn't want to make you angry.”

I sighed. “Go ahead.”

“Well, all right. If you don't change course—if you don't have something waiting for you, even if it's just something to occupy you until you turn eighteen, you're not going to make it. You need to make a plan for next year.”

I tried to think about what he was saying, instead of just flying off the handle.

“I don't have a lot of options,” I said. “I can't afford college. And I'm pretty sure I've missed all the application deadlines.”

“Well,” he said, “that's true. But suppose it weren't? Which college would you want to go to?”

“Evergreen?” I said, naming a four-year college in Olympia, eighty or so miles away.

“Why Evergreen?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I hear it's kind of a hippie school.”

“I see,” he said.

Of course, I didn't really want to go to Evergreen in the sense that they had a curriculum I liked, or anything like that. It was just one of two state schools I knew the name of. The other one was the University of Washington, and I knew for a fact that I was short of their admissions requirements. My grades weren't good enough, and I didn't have enough years of foreign language or math.

The next week, when Frank came to clean, he had an application for admission to The Evergreen State College, and a Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

“Listen,” he said, when he showed it to me. “I know this is an inconvenience. But I'd consider it a personal favor if you'd fill these out.”

“Frank,” I said, “there's no way I can get in. The application deadline already passed. Even if I got in, I couldn't afford it. Look, it says right here that the priority filing date for financial aid was last month.”

“I know,” he said. “And you're probably right. Let's call it a contingency plan. Please fill it out. Just to humor me.”

I sighed.

“You know what I did before I retired?” he asked.

He'd told me before, but I'd kind of forgotten.

“Teacher?” I guessed.

“Principal,” he said. “I had a lot of students over the years. Some of them work in colleges. You fill it out and send it in. Let me see what I can do.”

“Fine,” I said. That kind of networking, at least, was something I understood. And it wasn't like I had anything better to do. I filled out the forms and sent them in.

 

72

Grandpa had another heart attack that winter, and this time he ended up in Providence Hospital, in Seattle. This turned out to be sort of convenient. Dad was still technically living at home, but he spent about half his time at Swedish Hospital, a half mile away from Providence. So once or twice a week I could make the rounds to visit both of them in one day. Grandpa looked different this time than he had when he had a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was unshaven and haggard-looking. His toupee was on crooked. And he looked scared every time I came to see him. He held my hand and talked about his first wife, my dad's mother.