Bottled Up (11 page)

I walked Mikey to school, and told him that I was going to drop him off at Eddie's house later.

“Okay,” he said. He didn't put up a fight or whine this time.

Smart kid.

“How's your eye?” he asked.

“I put some ice on it—”

“Dad say anything?”

“What do you think?”

“Mom?”

“Nobody said a word, Bugs. Nobody ever does after something like last night.”

“Mom asked me if I was okay,” he said.

“What did you tell her?”

“I said I was fine.”

“So you lied?”

“I don't know. I guess.”

We crossed the street to his school. All the other kids were laughing, trading baseball cards, tossing footballs. They didn't look tired like my little brother. He didn't look so much like a kid that morning. He looked different.

He was probably the only kid in his school who woke up on a toboggan in his garage.

“See ya later, Bugs.”

“Listen to this,” he said.

He took his time finding just the right rock off the ground, then he threw it up as high as he could, letting out a grunt when he did.

“Hear that?” he asked when it clanked. “The higher it goes, the harder it falls when it hits the bottom.”

“What happened to you?” Jenna asked as soon as I walked into class.

I didn't know what she was talking about. I sat down in the seat next to her.

“You didn't get that at the party the other night. It would have shown up yesterday.”

“What?”

Then she touched me.

She put her fingers under my right eye and left her hand there a couple of seconds. I thought my whole body was turning into oatmeal. I couldn't talk.

“Who punched you in the eye?”

“Oh—that.”

“You get into a lot of fights, don't you?”

“Not really—”

“Well, you didn't do it yourself,” she said.

Then Kirkland came in and started right up about the Jekyll and Hyde book.

I didn't listen. I was too busy looking at Jenna. I was watching the side of her face—the way her eyes were following Kirkland as he walked around the room. The way she flipped her hair off her shoulder. Her eyes were smiling even though her mouth wasn't. I thought that was a cool trick.

“Pip,” Kirkland said. He was leaning his hands on my desk. “When Jekyll turns into Hyde, he becomes smaller in stature.

Why do you think Hyde is smaller than Jekyll?”

I didn't know what to say. I figured I wasn't far enough in the book to know what he was talking about.

I took my best shot and tried making a joke out of it. “I guess maybe 'cause Hyde is hiding.”

A couple of people in the class cracked up. They do that a lot when I say stuff—even when I'm not trying to be funny. It doesn't bother me because I could always kick their asses later.

Kirkland pulled back from my desk and crossed his arms. “That really wasn't the answer I was looking for,” he said.

I figured.

“It's got me thinking, though. It reminds me of a line in the book where I believe it's Utterson who says, ‘If he be Mr. Hyde I shall be Mr. Seek.' We're meant to consider that the evil that exists within each of us is only a small part of who we are. No matter how big and ugly the evil may seem, in reality it's only a smaller, crouching version of our true selves. It is not who we are. Jekyll is not Hyde. But he has a part of him that, as Pip points out, is hiding.”

I said that?

I checked the clock. It was time to go.

I got a hall pass from Kirkland so I could go to the bathroom. The hall was empty—everybody was in class pretending to listen. I caught up with Slayer just when he got to his locker.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“Nothin'. Just trying to get through the day without killing somebody.”

He took a swig from the Snapple bottle behind his jacket. He handed it to me, and I looked up and down the hall, then took two long pulls from it.

“I don't know how you're doing it, man,” Slayer said as he took back the bottle. “I could never make it to every class—I'd go nuts.”

“This helps,” I said, taking another slug from the bottle, the alcohol hitting the back of my throat in a way that hurt real good.

“So what the hell happened to your face?”

“My eye? I got it banging my damn head against the wall.”

“You get into a fight?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

He knew what I meant. “Don't sweat it, man. Meet us at the Site after school. Johnny sold some weed to a couple of girls who want to hang out with us.”

“What girls?”

“I don't know—Sharon something and Alison somebody.”

“You selling for Johnny?”

“I'm selling with him. He thinks if he gives me a bag to sell on my own, I'll smoke it all.”

I took another drink and told Slayer I had to get going.

I walked back into class with my best
everything's cool
look on my face.

“Pip,” Kirkland said, putting his hands on my desk again as I sat down. “Why do you suppose Jekyll drank the potion to begin with?”

Good question. I shook my head.

“Can't hear you,” he said.

“I don't know.”

He took his hands off my desk and stepped back. He asked somebody else the same question and that kid had no idea either.

The bell rang.

I was thinking of what I was going to say to Jenna—how I could maybe get her to touch my face again.

“Pip,” Kirkland said, “can I see you?”

Damn.

I went over to his desk as everybody else walked out. I looked for Jenna, but she was already gone.

“That was an excellent answer you gave in class today,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Are you enjoying the book?”

“It's okay.”

“As far as books go, right?”

“Right.”

“I find the whole concept of the potion really interesting.”

That's nice, I'm thinking, but I gotta get to my next class.

“We all have our thing we turn to so we can cut loose. I turn my stereo up way too loud when I'm driving sometimes.”

What a dangerous, on-the-edge kind of guy.

“Some people eat a lot, some gamble, some even drink a potion they can buy at the mini-mart.”

“The bell's going to ring—”

“I'll give you a late pass.” He crossed his arms and leaned back against his desk. “Everything all right, Pip?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The black eye, the alcohol on your breath when you came back from the bathroom?”

Damn. Couldn't blame this one on wood shop.

“You okay?” he asked.

“A kid I know was passing a bottle around the bathroom. I took one sip—”

“But are you okay?”

“I'm fine.” I looked at the clock.

“Don't ask for a bathroom pass in my class anymore,” he said.

“Sure.”

I got off easy.

He handed me a late pass, and I started to walk out.

“Pip,” he said, “your laces are untied.”

I didn't want to shoot my mouth off to him. If he sent me to Giraldi, my father would be getting that phone call.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, and walked out.

Mikey was dragging ass on our walk to Eddie's house. I had to slow down a couple of times so he could catch up.

“What's going on with you?” I asked him.

“Nothin',” he said. Then he asked me, “Do I have to go to Eddie's today?”

“Yeah, you have to go.”

“I don't want to. I want to stay with you.”

“You'll have a better time with Eddie than you would hanging with me.”

“No I won't. Let me come. I won't bug you.”

“No.”

“I just want to go home. I want to be with you.”

“Shut up already. You're going to Eddie's.”

I didn't look at him again for the rest of the walk. I left him on Eddie's front step and lit a cigarette while I listened to him go inside. I really didn't need his kind of crap with everything else I had going on.

I ran all the way to the Site, thinking about the four joints I had lined up in my sock. I was hoping I could smoke two or three of them before going to Claire's stupid group.

Johnny and Slayer were already there with four girls. They were all smoking and drinking and laughing. Johnny was leaning against Hahn's headstone, holding a joint to one of the girls' lips. Slayer was kissing another girl next to Agnes Jaffe. I wondered if I'd ever get Jenna to come to the Site.

I lit up and put my head back on Beattie's headstone.

“Pip,” Johnny said, “grab a beer, some chips and cookies. We're having a party.”

I tossed him his jacket.

“Do any business today?” he asked me.

I shook my head, and got into the drinking and smoking and eating. I don't remember too much about it.

I do know that I forgot all about the pictures in my head. All that stuff left me alone for a little while. Nothing was bothering me. I wasn't feeling any pain. I wasn't feeling anything.

I didn't even care when Johnny told me he was going to give me a matching shiner for my other eye if he didn't see some money for all the weed he'd given me. He was too wasted to punch me. He'd never do it anyway.

“Is it four-fifteen yet?” I asked about a hundred times.

“What the hell are you in a panic about?” Slayer asked.

“Yeah, where you gotta be?” Johnny wanted to know.

I still wasn't telling them about the counseling. But I had to cut out of there and make it to that stupid-ass group. I had to keep that phone call from happening. As much as I hated my house, I wasn't looking for a ride to rehab.

I could do this. I could get high. I could drink. I could get a buzz and still sit through all my classes. I could pull it off. I could keep that call from happening. I could.

I walked to the counseling office without any pictures crowding up my head. No thinking about getting punched in the face, no checker games, no promises for driving lessons, no Superman capes, no beasties.

I was doing all right.

I even had a stomach full of Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies.

I was king.

Claire swiveled back and forth in her chair. “So let's take a minute to explain to Pip how group works,” she said.

We were all sitting in a circle in some other counselor's office. There was no way six people were ever going to fit in hers.

“How about you start, Paco,” she said to the guy sitting next to me. He had an American flag bandanna around his head and a ponytail that hung down to the middle of his back.

“It works like this,” he said. “You come here, talk about whatever, and piss in a cup before you leave. If it ever comes up dirty, you know, with any drugs or anything in it, you're screwed 'cause then Claire gets everybody in group on your ass. And 'cause nobody really wants to talk about themselves, we're cool to jump on you if you're using.”

“If everybody's clean,” the guy on the other side of me said, “we talk about what's going on—how we're all doing with stuff.”

“Let's introduce ourselves before we get too far into everything,” Claire said.

“I'm Darius,” the guy who was just talking said. His head was shaved like a marine's. There was a tattoo of a dragon on his neck and he had silver rings on every finger. “I'm eighteen and I've been clean eleven months.” That was hard to believe from the looks of him.

“I'm Mark,” the guy next to Darius said. He was wearing overalls with the bib part hanging down on his lap. He was holding the straps in his hand and a couple of times I saw him put one in his mouth. “I been coming here a couple of weeks. How long am I clean? I don't know. Claire, was it good last week?”