The Art of Breaking Things, page 16
“Over the fridge,” she whispers, even though Emma is nowhere nearby. Then louder she says, “Make sure Emma doesn’t stay up too late.”
“I’ll try.” I should ask her why she’s not going out with Dan, but that would be hypocritical because I’m actually relieved.
Mom kisses me on the head before she leaves.
* * *
—
For the rest of the night, Emma and I watch Grease together and sing all the songs. After she goes to bed, I head downstairs to create some fairy lanterns that I saw online. I’d been collecting pieces to make them for the past few weeks, and now I set about putting them together. With the help of a YouTube tutorial, I re-create the fairy lantern as best I can with real moss and a little battery-operated tealight and a cutout silhouette of a fairy. And glitter. While I’m working I think about Ben and how it’s only been two weeks since the Saturday night when he was here. So much has changed so fast.
When I’m finished, I turn off the lights in the basement to see how the lanterns look in the dark. They are magic. I stare at them for a while, wishing that I could fix my life as simply as I make projects. I wonder what Ben’s thinking tonight locked in that rehab. Is he thinking about missing his recording session? Chilling in his basement? Me? I wonder how long I’ll have to wait to find out.
I’m cleaning up my project area when, at 1:42 a.m., my phone buzzes with a text from Judy: Need some help with your mom. We r outside.
I groan and shove my phone into the back pocket of my jeans. There is only one reason why Judy would need help with Mom. In the parking lot, Judy’s souped-up van is chugging exhaust into the cool night. She rolls down her window.
“Sorry, kiddo. You know I’d help if I could.”
Of course Judy can’t help because she’s paralyzed from the waist down, but the fact that she brought my mother home at all in this condition is a testament to the fact that Judy and Mac have no children. Or a testament to what she thinks I can handle, I guess. But come late August, I won’t be here to help in this way. I hope all the adults get their shit together before then because nothing is keeping me from MICA.
“I know you would,” I say. Mom slumps against the passenger window. “Can you roll down her window?”
I walk to that side where the open window is reviving Mom somewhat.
“Mom?” I say, leaning into her window.
Mom looks blearily at me. “Skye,” she slurs. “What’re you doing here?”
“I’m here to help get you inside.” I open the car door, and Mom spills onto the ground. “Come on, Mom. You’ve got to get up.”
I grab her under one arm and wish, not for the first time, that I was taller, stronger, bigger. But I manage to get Mom to her feet. I hope none of the nosy neighbors are peering at us through their blinds to see the latest episode in the Murray House Drama. And I hope that Emma’s not looking either. I glance at her window and breathe a sigh of relief that it’s dark.
“Now I just need to get her up the steps and we’ll be good,” I say to Judy.
“Can’t you just leave her on the couch?” Judy asks in a way that says she’s trying, but she knows she’s helpless here.
“Yeah, nothing says Happy Birthday to a middle school girl like her mother passed out on the couch still in her clothes from the night before.”
“Emma’s birthday. Right,” Judy says.
“What happened?” I ask as I struggle to balance Mom’s weight against my body. Mom gets really drunk sometimes, but she hasn’t been this bad since the time she found out that Dan was seeing someone new. And the time she went out with Judy and some others for her birthday. Emma had Julia sleeping over that night and Mom fell over the coffee table.
“Margaritas,” Judy answers.
That doesn’t seem to tell the whole story, but Judy doesn’t say more.
“Ahgottapeee,” Mom mumbles.
“Okay, I’ve got it. You can go,” I say to Judy.
“Okay, hon. If you have trouble, I’ll send Mac over,” Judy says, and then she leaves me with my sloppy mother.
But it’s fine. I don’t want someone around while I deal with Mom when she’s like this. Somehow, I manage to get Mom upstairs and on the toilet. While I’m in her room, turning down the bed, I hear a thump and run to the bathroom. She’s fallen off the seat. I shut the door so that we don’t wake Emma and I wrestle my mother from where she’d wedged herself in the narrow space between the toilet and the wall.
“Did you go?” It feels weird to ask my mother this question.
She bobbles her head in a yes. In her room, I can’t deal with undressing my own mother, so I take off her shoes and tuck her into bed. I’m turning to leave when I hear her speak.
“He doesn’t want to be with me after all.” Her words merge and sigh together.
So, it is about Dan, but this is not the time to engage Mom in a real conversation. “It’s okay, Mom. It’ll all look better in the morning,” I say automatically.
She starts crying in that messy drunk way. “He says I drink too much.” She hisses. “Can you believe that?”
Cannoobeeleefdat? Then she starts wailing.
Quickly, I kneel by the bed. “Shhh,” I say in a soothing voice, brushing her hair from her face. “Shhhh.” I want to yell at her to shut up and get herself together, but again, I know where that will lead and all I want in this moment is to keep Emma from waking up and seeing Mom messed up. I grab two tissues from the box on her bedside table. She blots her eyes and then bunches them against her mouth and moans into them.
“Go to sleep, Mom,” I whisper. “We’ll talk in the morning. It’ll all be better in the morning,” I say again.
She nods and rolls to her side, the tissues falling from her hand to the floor. I pick them up and watch her, squeezing the used tissues into a smaller and smaller shape. By the time Mom’s breathing becomes regular and I’m fairly sure that she won’t fall out of bed, I toss the balled-up tissues in the trash and leave, shutting Mom’s door whisper quiet. At Emma’s room, I stop and press my ear to her door. Certain that I hear nothing, I creep away, letting out a lungful of air.
The gifts for hiding, as Mom had hinted, are in the cabinet above the fridge. Her favorite hiding spot. In addition to the little gifts for Emma’s birthday there are a couple bottles of booze. Mom’s baggie of weed and bowl are gone, I notice with surprise. Maybe she realized I was poaching a little bit from her now and then. Or maybe after Emma narc’d on me, she figured she’d better get rid of her own “paraphernalia.”
The decorating supplies are in the little closet on the other side of my bathroom in the basement: swaths of tulle in different colors, twinkle lights, fairy balls that have seen better days, and long strands of fake flowers. I start with the tulle, draping it over the sliding glass doors, weaving it through the chandelier and winding it around the stairway banister. I work the twinkle lights around the tulle. Two fairy balls dangle from the chandelier. Next, I tuck the small items Mom bought in the brightly colored glitter boxes she’s saved over the years and hide them all around the house. When the living room/dining room looks sufficiently “fairy’d,” I creep up the stairs.
Holding the last of the decorations, I open Emma’s door as quiet as a mouse and hope that she doesn’t wake. In sleep, she’s curled into herself like a larger version of the stuffed animals that line her windowsill. Even though she’s replaced some little kid stuff on the walls with band posters and photos of her friends, the stuffed animals have stayed. I allow the door to click shut behind me and she doesn’t move.
I get to work.
* * *
—
“Skye . . . Skye.”
My name is a whisper weaving into my mind.
Then a jostle of my shoulder and “Skye,” a bit louder this time.
I fight against the tendrils of sleep binding me in place.
“Skye,” the impatient voice says. “Wake up!”
My eyes flutter open to find Emma about six inches from my face, a huge smile spreading across hers. “You slept with me!”
I rub my eyes and stretch. “Happy birthday, Em,” I mumble. Emma was brokenhearted when I wanted my own room. So brokenhearted that I almost changed my mind. But I was thirteen and didn’t want to be in a little girl’s room anymore. I’ve had my own space ever since Mom got Mac to build it for me.
“And the birthday fairy came,” Emma says in a singsong voice that tells me that she knows it’s not real, but she wants to pretend anyway.
I squint at my handiwork and smile. “You’re right!” I say.
Tulle is festooned across her headboard and footboard. The fairy lanterns line the space from her bedroom door to her bed. They barely glow in the daylight, but they still look pretty. The fake flowers are wound along with twinkle lights through the tulle. A fairy headband sits on one bedpost, dark green, purple, and blue silk ribbons streaming from a woven crown of flowers.
“Put on your crown, Birthday Fairy Princess,” I say.
Emma places the crown on her head. “Do you think Mom’s up?”
“I’ll check,” I say. “The birthday princess should stay right here.” I want to make sure Mom is coherent enough to remember that it’s Emma’s birthday.
“I heard you guys last night,” she says, as if she’s read my mind.
“You did?”
“Yeah, all that banging and then . . . crying.”
“Mom wasn’t feeling well,” I say quickly. “She must have eaten bad shrimp at the restaurant.” No idea where I got the shrimp idea from, but I hope Emma buys it.
“Mmm,” Emma says noncommittally and I wonder how much she realizes.
“Give me a quick minute. I’m sure she’s fine.”
* * *
—
I tap on Mom’s door and then enter. It stinks like a hangover. “Mom,” I whisper. “Wake up.”
Mom rolls over and squints at me.
“Here.” I hand her a glass of water and two aspirin. “It’s Emma’s birthday.”
“Right,” she croaks. “I know.” She pushes the covers off and looks down at herself, still fully dressed. I see a question forming in her mind. “Here,” I say, this time handing her something comfy to put on. “I’ll leave so you can change.”
In the hallway, I pull my phone from my back pocket. Luisa has sent a bunch of texts telling me what a party I missed last night, but all I can think about is Ben spending his first weekend in rehab and how happy I am that Emma has at least one un-hungover person to celebrate her today. I peek in on Emma and ask her to wait two minutes. Then I rush to the kitchen to start coffee for Mom and hot chocolate for Emma. By the time I return upstairs to hand Em her hot chocolate, complete with whipped cream and chocolate shavings, Mom is curled on Emma’s bed. She’s brushing Em’s hair from her face like she’s six and not just-turned-twelve. But I get it. Even I want to keep Emma young.
As we head down to the kitchen, Emma loops one of my fairy lanterns over her arm as she takes each step with care, running her hand along the tulle woven with flowers and peering over the banister to see the living room. I pour a cup of Mom’s black sludge and hand it to her. Emma on the couch, with the ribbons of the fairy crown flowing into her own long hair, could be an actual fairy. I’d call this sketch The Fey Princess Before Her Wings Came In.
“Ready to start looking for what the birthday fairy hid?” I ask Emma with a smile.
“Yes!” Emma says, handing Mom the lantern.
Mom holds up the lantern, examining it. I realize that I was too light with the glitter on one side.
“This is beautiful!” she says. Then she looks up at me with her red-rimmed eyes and mouths, Thank you.
I like that something I created can make the people I love happy and I like that I’m feeling closer to my family than I have in a long time. But it doesn’t escape me that I feel this way in part because Dan is not here.
24
How Do You Fill an Abyss?
ON MONDAY AT school, despite fourteen hundred students milling around, the halls feel empty. There are murmurs about Ellen and Ashton fighting. Again.
Sunday night, we’d had a fun little birthday dinner for Emma. Dan wasn’t there. Mom didn’t seem to remember what she’d said to me about Dan on Saturday night. She made an excuse about him grading papers and I didn’t push for more. I did notice that she didn’t drink any wine.
After dinner, we’d all tucked up on the couch to watch Beauty and the Beast. Again. For Emma’s research. I have to admit that it was fun, though. It reminded me of how we used to spend Saturday nights, after Dan and Mom broke up but before I started going out every weekend with friends. We’d watch musicals together, like Grease and Hairspray, and then we’d download the soundtracks and listen to them over and over until we could sing every song by heart, even though we only really liked the fast songs.
But now, at school the thing looming in my brain is the lack of Ben. Ben not in the hall. Ben not in the nook where our group hangs out. Ben not in art class. My day is a Ben-shaped hole, and by the afternoon, I sorely need a distraction.
“Want to come over?” Luisa asks as we’re heading to last period. “Miguel’s got therapy, so he won’t be home till late. Shelby and some others are coming too.”
Emma won’t be home until five thirty. “Sure.”
* * *
—
We sit around listening to music. Not Ben’s and my music, just pop music. They’re all sharing a joint, but I’m trying to honor Ben. If he can’t party, maybe I shouldn’t either. Besides, I don’t need Emma commenting on my red eyes. I laugh at all the right times and act like the girl hanging with her besties, but the hole inside me is still there. I need something else. My phone chimes a text and I pull it from my pocket to look.
Ashton: Keith says you can pick up your car.
Why wouldn’t Keith text me? I was expecting to hear from him about working off my bill. Not to mention that I owe his dad money.
Skye: okay . . .
Ashton: I can come get you
Skye: okay . . .
Ashton: where are you?
Skye: Hangin’ with the girls at Luisa’s
Ashton: r u all making out w each other?
Luisa is telling Shelby all about Matt. How dreamy he is. How he laughs at all her jokes. Vi and Lex are surfing their phones for funny vids.
Skye: um, no. you wish
Ashton: I do. Haha
It’s weird for Ashton to be texting and even weirder for him to be so . . . nice. If that’s what you call this.
Ashton: I’ll be there in 10 mins
Lex announces she’s got a good one. Everyone crowds around her phone to look. Luisa squeals in delight while Shelby rolls her eyes.
Ashton: 10 mins. Okay?
These are my girls, so I don’t know why I feel so alone despite being with a bunch of people—it’s just like the night I went to that party after seeing Dan at my house. That night, Ben gave me an out. Ben’s not an option today. All I’ve got is Ashton. But at least I’d be getting my car back.
Skye: Fine.
“I’ve got to head out,” I say after a few minutes. “Ashton says he can take me to pick up Lucy.”
Luisa raises her eyebrows in skepticism. “Ashton?”
“Weird, right?” I say to her.
She nods. “Text me later.”
* * *
—
Ashton’s SUV cruises to a stop in front of Luisa’s house as I’m walking out. No Keith. I climb in and Ashton flashes me his Hollywood smile before pulling back into traffic. It takes me a few turns to realize that we aren’t going to the impound lot.
“What’s the deal, Ashton?” I say.
He pulls into the parking lot that borders the quarry, puts the SUV in park, and shrugs. “I was bored. Thought we could have a little fun. Pick up where we left off on Saturday.” He offers me another grin. Those hazel eyes grab me. We’re not drunk or high, so he’s not trying to hook up with me because one or both of us is wasted. The unfamiliar thought that he actually likes being with me for me creeps in. My eyes drop to his lips and I force them back to his eyes.
“This is a booty call?”
He reaches out and traces the seam of my skinny jeans from my knee up to my hip where he rests his hand. My body wakes up at his touch. I can’t help it. Ashton leans in, kisses my neck with those lips and whispers, “All I know is that I need you today.”
Ashton needs me. And I need an escape. And he’s sort of asking permission. Sort of. Sure, Ashton’s a jerk, but he’s the devil I know and I’m clear-eyed today. Maybe what I need right now is a little bit of devil.
He leans toward me to kiss me. I kiss him back, but I can’t relax. He starts to undo my bra and I stiffen.
“Aw, come on.” His voice is husky. “I fantasized about this all day.” His hands rove my bare stomach beneath my shirt, his touch raising goose bumps in their wake. Is this really what I want?
“No,” I say, with a firmness that surprises both of us.
“You don’t mean that, do you?” he says.
Usually I don’t think much about what I’m doing with boys. If some guy thinks I’m hot, it makes me feel special, like they see me. The way they can’t resist me makes me feel like I have power. Sometimes what we do makes me feel good too. But usually, I’m messed up and not thinking much at all. Today is not like that.
