How Are You Going to Save Yourself by JM Holmes

Author:JM Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

WE GET BACK to the La Quinta late in the afternoon. The day is hot, summer sun still high. There is no sign of Dee. Mom calls her behavior childish but then backs off and tries to finesse the situation. My mom is a schoolteacher and has always been good with kids. She decides my sister and I need some alone time and leaves the hotel to give us space, disappearing into the strip-mall wasteland near the hotel. We crank the AC and watch High School Musical.

I talk to Whit about school for a while. She says she hates it, every single fucking subject. She was suspended for throwing a textbook at a racist redneck boy, then for spitting on another one, and again for cussing out a teacher she thought was racist. She lies close to me, her eyes slanted like all the women on my pops’ side—face wide and flat with smooth skin. Dee looks different, has those big eyes, full of changes.

Whit says her mom isn’t answering her texts, asks me to hit her up. I do, then I put my arm around her and she tucks her chin against my chest.

“What was that girl’s name?” I ask.

“What girl?”

“The one that climbed the light.” I watch her face for a reaction. I’m thinking about Whit climbing. We all have our edges. Dee and I are two pills away from ours, or two pills safe from it. I kiss the top of Whit’s head. I hated her blond highlights, am glad that her weave is black now.

“Hannah.” She keeps her eyes on the TV. “I didn’t know her well.”

“Still.” I turn the volume down. “You gotta think about it.”

“My mom talks like that sometimes,” she says.

“Like what?” I ask.

She picks at her gaudy nails with rhinestones in the polish. “I don’t know.” She is backing out on me. I keep silent and just let her lie still awhile. “She cries a lot.” Whit is too big to really curl up, but she brings her knees in tighter. “Sometimes she says no one will ever love her again,” Whit says. She tilts her head to face me and I don’t know how to respond.

The pills in my pocket feel like mints in the cellophane wrap. At thirty dollars apiece, I’ve seen houses get pawned clean for the high. It’s the only drug that’s ever pushed me to a place where hunger—real, spiritual, or otherwise—doesn’t exist, like a pocketful of Tibet.

When I visited Dee and Whit over Thanksgiving, instead of spending time with my sister like I should have, I got faded on Crown Royal with Dee and hit the Strip with some artist types I knew from Cornell. I took the benzos Dee’d given me and lived a second life. I threw up in the sand and drove home. Dee tucked me in on the couch and cranked the heat to eighty like we weren’t in the fucking desert.

I rock Whit awkwardly. “Were you scared?” I feel like a shrink.

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