Me, Dead Dad, and Alcatraz by Chris Lynch

Author:Chris Lynch [Lynch, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0450-2
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2013-01-16T21:08:00+00:00

6 The Wednesday Trick

“I CAN’T GO TO school. Alex broke me.”

“Elvin, that was two days ago. It was really pushing it to stay home yesterday; today is out of the question. For goodness’ sake, you worked out at a gym; you weren’t in a train crash.”

I knew I was going to school, obviously. I was dressed for school. I had my school stuff with me. I had my note explaining that I was absent the previous day because I had to care for my sick mother—I wrote it, she signed it—and I had my hand on the doorknob. I never minded going to school, and truth was my body didn’t hurt all that much anymore. I didn’t expect to win the debate, but I was hell-bent on prolonging it.

And I had no idea why.

“Elvin?” Ma asked.

“Yes?”

“You are going to be late. You’re not even trying at this point. Stop staring at me, and get to school.”

I stared at her a little more.

“What’s wrong, pet?”

Maybe twice a year she called me pet. Made me want to pull in and retreat from the world. Retreat back into about 1995.

“I don’t know, Ma,” I said. “I don’t feel right. I don’t feel like myself. I feel like I don’t know.”

“Like you don’t know what?”

“Nothing in particular. Just, like I don’t know. Usually, even when I don’t know, I kind of feel like somehow, I know, you know? But right now I don’t know, at all. You know?”

She took in a deep breath through her mouth, whistled it back out through her nose.

“It’s Alex, yes?”

“It’s Alex, yes. But it isn’t. It’s me. It’s me and everything else. Alex is stirring stuff up, that’s for sure. But it feels even bigger than that. Like up till now I had a fairly clear notion of myself and how I fit into everything and how everything fit around me. I mean, I wasn’t master of any universe by any stretch, but I didn’t feel lost. Now? Right now, I don’t have any clear notion, any sure view of myself and everything else.”

There was a pause. I gripped the doorknob harder. I could at least be master of the doorknob.

“Oh, shut up, Elvin.”

That was me, speaking. I suddenly got sickened by me and my running mouth and I wished I could suck it all back in.

“No,” Ma said, and grabbed my hand as it twisted the doorknob in a lame attempt at fleeing. “There is nothing wrong with speaking your mind, Elvin. I’m glad you did. I would be terribly worried for you if I thought you were bottling all that up. And... now, don’t get angry here... I have to say, what you just described to me was a pretty fair definition of puberty.”

“You promised not to use that word,” I said, rattling the doorknob like a prisoner.

“Fine,” she said, “fine, I won’t. I just wanted you to be aware, that there is a lot of stuff probably at work on you now. That this is all terribly hard but perfectly normal, and you aren’t going crazy.

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