Darling Days by iO Tillett Wright

Author:iO Tillett Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

JOAN PULLS SOME STRINGS higher up and I start changing into my sweatpants in her office twice a week before I go to play basketball with the boys. This act of kindness solidifies a bond.

Then I miss six days in a row. When I get back, Joan seems genuinely worried about me.

“Where have you been??”

“I got sick.”

“What did you get?”

“A tonsil infection.”

“That bad? You were out for a week!”

“Yeah. It was pretty bad.”

“Did you see a doctor?”

“No.”

“No? How did you get rid of it?”

“I gargled with tea tree oil.”

“Tea tree oil? What the hell is that?”

I laugh. I like how abrasive she is. I see her outside smoking alone. Her fingertips are yellow from it.

“It’s an oil . . . from the health food store. It’s good for tonsil infections.”

“An oil, huh. Okay. Who told you to do that?”

“My ma.”

“Okay . . . did you take anything else for it?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t go to a doctor.”

“No.”

“You just stayed home and gargled with this tree oil?”

“Yeah. Mostly. I went to some auditions and two dance classes, too.”

“You went to dance class while you had a tonsil infection?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Okay.”

She takes a deep breath. Coffee. Nails. She cocks her head and flips her curls over with the back of her hand.

“You want to tell me about your home life?”

It’s like a car crash; one minute you’re driving along, singing to the radio, and the next minute your head is split open.

Just like that, there is the question I have been silently prodding her to ask.

This is the moment where I go from being trusted to being a rat; where I step out from the animal pact with my ma and enter the system. The establishment will turn me into yuppie scum and I’ll rot in a hole, it’s that big a betrayal. But it dawns on me I might have options.

I just want to live with my poppa. Just . . . please . . . woman with the curls and the coffee and the many nervous ticks . . . find a way to read my mind so that I don’t have to say it and betray her but you will still know how bad it’s gotten. As I telepathically communicate with Joan, it dawns on me how little I eat, how little we sleep, and how much we fight. I realize that I hate my world and I want to be with my dad.

My mind bats around the possible outcomes of telling Joan the truth.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes . . . I do.”

I’m in free fall. I’m a dead man, stepping though one of those movie doorways into the light. I’m stabbing my mother, my best friend, in the throat. I’m tearing up her greatest work of art. Have I become a horrible person? Or is it like the final scene in a tragedy when the hero drives off the cliff ’cause there is no other way out of his twisted, fucked-up life? Looking at Joan, a hornet of fear buzzes up and down my insides.

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