Bottled Up (19 page)

He shrugged.

Something crashed downstairs, and Mikey blinked hard.

“I'm going back to bed,” I told him. “You want to come?”

He shook his head, and I started walking out.

“Pip?”

I stopped.

“How come Daddy didn't go to the zoo? Because of the bottles?”

“I don't know,” I told him. “It's just how it is.”

He didn't say anything else, so I went back to walking out of his room.

“Close my door,” he said when I got to it.

Mikey was still acting funny on the way to school the next day. He was walking a few feet in front of me, and he wasn't talking. Fine. My head was full of enough garbage without having to take on his too. I had four joints in my sock, and that was all I could think about. I had to figure out a way to get high without cutting classes and getting a dirty urine.

He started to cross the street without me, and I jogged a few feet to catch up with him.

“Wait up,” I said. I grabbed the strap on his backpack to keep him on the curb.

“What do you got in here?” I asked him. The backpack was stuffed so full, the zipper looked as if it was going to bust.

“My T-ball mitt, my lunch, a sweatshirt, my cape, and show-and-tell,” he said.

“What do you got for show-and-tell?”

“Man, you say
I
ask too many questions?” He shook his head—my brother the up-and-coming wiseass.

He walked into the building without tossing a rock in the hole the way he'd been doing every morning. The kid was way off.

“See you after school,” I yelled, but he didn't look back. Maybe he was getting tougher. Maybe I wasn't going to have to wipe his nose for him for the rest of my life.

I ran fast. I figured if I got to the deli and Tony didn't bug me, I could get enough of a joint smoked to take a little of the edge off. This staying clean wasn't easy. It's like all of a sudden telling a baby that he can't have his bottle, or his daytime nap or his pacifier.

I sat on a milk crate, pulled a joint from my sock, and lit it. It was the longest inhale I'd ever taken. It filled my lungs and filled my head. I thought it was the smartest thing I could do for myself. Nobody knew what I needed better than me. Nobody lived in my house but my family, and nobody lived in my head but me. What did Giraldi or Claire or any of those punks in group know about what I needed to get by?

Nothing.

“Chimney Boy,” Tony said as he slammed out the back door.

I took another drag as deep as I could.

“Where've you been?” he asked, putting his hand out for the joint.

“Come on, man. Let me smoke my bone. I don't have a lot of time. I'll just leave you whatever I don't finish.”

“What's with you? All of a sudden you can't be late for school?”

I didn't answer him. I didn't even look at him. All I cared about was pulling that smoke into my lungs and letting it cloud the pictures in my head.

“Life getting to you, Chimney Boy? Huh?” He shook his head. “Yeah, you got a rough life. School all day with pretty girls in tight jeans walking past your locker. Getting high with your buddies and, oh yeah, sitting next to a Dumpster while you figure out which class to cut next.”

“Shut the hell up, meat cutter. Nice life
you
have. Can I have a half a pound of
stupid
sliced thin, please?”

“You're dreaming if you think you'll do any better than me. The way you're going, you'll be lucky if you get a job sweeping floors.”

“What do
you
know about it?” I inhaled on the joint again and shut my eyes.

“I know you don't get anywhere in this life, not even a deli job, if you spend your spare time next to Dumpsters and in cemeteries.”

He took the joint out of my hand and took two drags before throwing it on the ground.

“That's all you'll ever be if you keep going like you are, Chimney Boy. Just a punk that hangs out next to garbage and with dead people.”

I nodded like he didn't know what he was talking about, and picked up my joint.

“You know what they say.” He opened the back door to go inside. “You are who you hang with.”

“So we've all finished
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
” Kirkland was saying. “I'm always curious to know if a book was effective or not. Did it affect you in any way and if so, how?”

Nobody said anything. I don't think anybody knew what he was talking about.

I stared at the back of Jenna's head. I'd sat three rows behind her today. I didn't want her asking me why I was at the counseling center, and I sure didn't want her looking at my eyes and seeing I was stoned.

Kirkland let us all sit there saying nothing. He did that a lot. If we didn't answer his question, he just waited. Or sometimes he'd come out with some crazy quote.

“‘It was a night of little ease to his toiling mind,'” he said this time. “‘Toiling in mere darkness and besieged by questions.'”

Some girl giggled.

“Does anyone remember that quote from the book?”

More silence.

“My whole class is toiling in darkness besieged by questions.” Kirkland smiled and walked in front of Jenna. “Did this book affect you?” he asked her.

“I liked it,” she said.

“Did it affect you?”

“It made me think, I guess.”

“Then it affected you. What did it make you think about? Anything beyond the pages of the book?”

“Secrets,” she said. “We all have them. Jekyll was no different. He was embarrassed about his, I think. We all have those kinds of secrets too. It just got me thinking about that, is all.”

Kirkland moved on to bother somebody else. I caught Jenna turning around to look at me. I put my eyes on the clock as if I didn't see her. I was planning to book it fast out of class when the bell rang so she couldn't stop and ask me why I was at Claire's. She already figured me to be a pothead loser. I wasn't going to turn her off even more by saying I was in counseling.

Kirkland bailed me out of talking to her. As soon as the bell rang he called me over to talk to him.

“How's it going, Pip?” He put his arms across his chest and leaned back against the radiator.

I shrugged my shoulders, hoping like hell he couldn't smell the pot on me.

“I was very impressed with your answers to the Jekyll and Hyde quiz.”

A teacher had never said anything like that to me before.

“I have a feeling that book affected you.” He smiled and took a piece of paper off his desk.

“Question number three,” he said. “Is Jekyll good and Hyde bad? Part of your answer is ‘Jekyll is like everybody else—showing one face and having another. I see people all the time saying one thing and doing something else. Girls wear makeup so nobody sees what they really look like. People smile when they want to cry, go places they don't want to go, stay places they want to leave—' ”

“Mr. Kirkland, I read this already.”

“Wait. The rest of your answer is very strong. ‘Jekyll needs a way out. His potion lets him off the hook. He can do what he wants. He can be who he really is—a pissed off guy.'”

“Did you take points off for the curse word?”

“‘If he could be Jekyll and Hyde at the same time—do and say what he really thought—he could be one person. No potion. No Hyde-ing. No good or bad.'”

I looked up at the clock. There was no chance of grabbing a couple of hits off a joint in the bathroom before my next class. “I'm going to be late,” I said.

“Mr. Giraldi checked in with me this morning to ask how you're doing in class.”

I rolled my eyes.

“I told him I thought you were a great student and didn't understand why he was even concerned.”

“He must've fallen over when you said that.”

“Now that you mention it, he almost did.” Kirkland let out a little laugh. “He told me you were in some trouble and that he was keeping a close eye on you. He wanted to know what I observed in class.

“I told him I saw a young man who was struggling, but with what I didn't know. I told him you were brighter than you thought and could probably use a little guidance. He told me that was being taken care of, but he didn't say too much more about it.”

I looked at the clock again.

“I didn't mention you were drinking in school last week.”

I looked right at him. I don't think I blinked.

“I won't tell him you smell like pot right now either.”

“What are you talking about?”

He shook his head. “I just want to invite you to think about something. From what Mr. Giraldi told me, you're taking a lot of chances. I want you to think about the book. Think about whatever way it affected you—the way it appears in the answers to your quiz questions. Think about who you want to be. You're in control of you—nobody else is.”

Who was this guy? A teacher or a preacher?

“I recently saw the Jekyll and Hyde play,” he said. “There's a line in it that I loved. About how chances are something you don't take when you're lost.”

The late bell rang, and I tipped my head to the door to say I had to get going.

“If you need anything—” he started to say.

“I need a late pass,” I told him.

He wrote it out, and I headed for the door.

“Pip,” he said when I was almost out of there. “Think about that, okay?”

“What?”

“‘Chances are something you don't take when you're lost.'”

He was as bad as Claire—talking in bumper sticker language.

What did he know about it, anyway? I wasn't lost. I knew exactly where I was.

Even stupid Tony knew.

I couldn't stop thinking about Johnny and Slayer and what had happened to them. I'd heard something about Johnny doing time and Slayer's parents sending him to rehab, but I didn't know for sure. If they were around, though, they'd show up at the Site.

I had to go there.

And I had to smoke another joint. Everything was up against me like a sharp knife cutting through my skin to the bone. I had to stop it before I bled to death. And I'd figured out a way to get around that next urine check too. I'd go in the cup just a little, enough to make it yellow, then I'd put some tap water in it. I'd water down any traces of the pot. Besides, even if it didn't work, I'd still have another dirty urine coming to me before I'd get thrown out of counseling. You get three, they said.

I ran to the Site after school and smoked all three joints left in my sock while having a long talk with Beattie and Agnes. It was just me and them now. Johnny and Slayer didn't show. I closed my eyes and told Beattie about school—about how Kirkland was trying to play counselor with me. I told him about Jenna still looking as hot as ever, but that I couldn't talk to her.

Beattie didn't give me any advice or ask me stupid questions I couldn't answer. He just listened and didn't grub any of my pot off of me.

This was the best I'd felt in a week—maybe longer. I had nothing to worry about—nobody to think about but me.

Then I remembered Mikey.

I forgot to pick him up from school.

You can't run very fast after a few joints—you just can't. But I moved pretty quick.

My mind was going even quicker, worrying that he wouldn't still be there when I got to the school. I knew he was too smart to go off with a stranger or anything like that, but what if he just took off by himself? What if I couldn't find him?

I almost got hit by a Buick as I tore ass across the street to the school. I didn't see Mikey anywhere, but I did see an ambulance pulling out of the parking lot. Two cops were talking to each other by a patrol car.

I looked around for Bugs.

“You see a boy here?” I called to the two cops. “He's about this tall, has a Superman backpack—”

“Like this one?” One of the cops, a tall guy with a mustache, took Mikey's pack off the hood of the patrol car he was standing next to.

“Yeah.” I was out of breath. “That's it.”

Both cops walked over. They were crowding me as if I had to get ready for a fight or something.

“You know the boy who belongs to this backpack?” asked the other cop, who looked like a linebacker.

“That's my brother's. You see him?”

“Yes, we saw him.”

“Where is he?”

Then I thought about the ambulance I'd just seen.

“What happened to him?”

My heart was beating the hell out of my chest. My head felt like it was swelling up, and my hands were shaking.

“We've already called your mother. She's on her way to the hospital—”

“Will you tell me what the hell happened already?”

If they didn't tell me something quick I was going to start swinging.

“He was playing around over by this hole,” the linebacker cop said, walking over to it. “Somebody saw him tossing bottles up in the air—one of them hit him in the head and he fell into the ditch.”