Sometimes, when I was staying at my dad’s for the weekend, it would get late, and he’d invite me to stay the night and drive me to school the next morning.
This meant spending one more night on the sofa bed or squeezing into my brother’s twin bed with him, which I think we both liked better.
Even though he was barely 13, my brother had black satin sheets that snagged my calluses and toenails. His room was a bit sad to me: the only bedroom in the house that was downstairs, and it had these awful closet doors that lined the entire wall and windows on the other walls, so he had to float his bed out in the center of the room like an island. You could fall off in any direction. The headlights of the cars flashed across the walls and ceiling.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stay.”
—–
My brother’s alarm clock had the most brain-piercing beeping sound imaginable — one of the many signals to remind me how far outside my routine I was.
Dad made me soft-boiled eggs and asparagus, and asked if I did my homework. Everyone else did their morning things around me – make coffee, hum while waiting for the toaster to pop.
I sat at the table, levering a spoon up and down with my index finger, trying to hold it there without it spinning on the porcelain table, and then trying not to let it make a sound when it came back down.
My dad came at me with a pan and a spatula.
“More asparagus?”
It wasn’t my goal to be morose, but I was 11, and I didn’t have my backpack, my favorite jacket, Mom’s Cream of Wheat. And I didn’t know the song my stepbrother was humming.
Dad held open the screen door with the perpetually broken spring. Sally handed me a bagged lunch without my name on it. She meant well. I think.
——
Dad knew Connecticut like the back of his hand, so we’d take country roads all the way to school, which, althought I got a bit sick, I preferred it to the highway because you have to cross a bridge when you take the highway, and crossing a bridge was a surefire way to force me to feel something.
I’d worked hard to get rid of my feelings, cranked myself off like a faucet, turned that damn thing so hard it got stuck there.
We’d loop and dip through the country roads while the sun came up, passing 3 or 4 towns, all stacked up next to each other. My world became the size of a car window: people’s faces, road workers, kids at bus stops, overgrown basketball court, house, house, house.
And I wouldn’t feel a thing.
——
Dad’s car door was heavy. He gave a big smile, but I probably didn’t look.
By lunchtime, I was feeling normal again: the comfort of old routines, familiar voices, the school bell. My inner world became a safe place to play again.
Usually I’d be good for the rest of the day, the faucet safely turned all the way to the right, but sometimes something would hit me. It didn’t have to be a big thing; in fact, it was usually a small thing, because small things were the only things that could get through.
This time, it was my sandwich.
I wondered if my best friend saw it in my face when I bit into it.
The bread, the mayonnaise, the meat, the lettuce.
Completely unrecognizable.
It sounds like a small thing, like something a spoiled brat would say, but I wasn’t a spoiled brat; I was a kid with a broken heart, a kid who had silently promised to kill himself if his parents got divorced but who instead pretended it didn’t matter when it happened.
As hard as I tried to completely eliminate my feelings from my body, they were still there.
Sadness creeps up out of you from the bottom to the top. You can feel it gurgling in your stomach first, then it climbs up into your throat, into your head, and hides out there until your eyes start burning. And then you only have a few seconds.
If you’re well-practiced, you can blink it away, swallow all that hurt right down back into your stomach.
So I did.
I wish I hadn’t.
I wish I’d told my best friend everything in that moment, about the creaky floorboards in that weird house that was so full of stuff it trembled when you walked; that new weird family that kept rolling toward me like an avalanche, the long car rides between the houses, where it didn’t really matter which way you were going; you were always far from home.
I wish I told him all of it. Or just leaned into him and cried. I could have leaned into anyone and it would have worked..
But instead, I looked away, blinked, and put the sandwich back in the bag without my name on it.
I went through lunch like nothing had happened inside of me.
I went through class like nothing had happened inside of me.
I got on the bus like nothing had happened inside of me, picked the first open seat, moved all the way to the window, and pressed my forehead against the cool glass, away from all the kids, away from everything, staring at the peeling letters on the rough brick of the school building and reading slowly, just to do something.
M-O-R-A-N-M-I-D-D-L-E-S-C-H —
Finally, the bus jolted and pulled away, bounding around the traffic circle, its tired engine groaning, and that little rectangle of window, once again, becoming my world.