What We Kill by Howard Odentz

Author:Howard Odentz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks Inc.
Published: 2017-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

36

MARCY IS SITTING in the driver’s seat of her car. She’s staring straight ahead, but she’s probably a million miles away on a planet where only she and Anders live. Myers is curled up in her back seat. We haven’t decided what we’re going to do about him yet. Even though we’ve already covered ourselves and he’s not going home for the night to his fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck of a mother, part of me thinks that he needs to go to a hospital.

None of us do drugs, but we’re not stupid. His pupils are dilated so much they look like they are going to give birth at any moment, and what will crawl out of them is an abomination.

Even though I know a hospital is probably the right thing to do—even the smart thing to do, I know we’re not going to bring Myers to one. That’s too many cans of worms being opened at the same time, all wriggling around in a sad mass, addled and confused like the gray matter inside our heads.

Anders is in the back seat of my truck. Like before, he’s staring out the window, also a million miles away but probably light years from the planet that Marcy is on.

As for me, I’m leaning against my door. I don’t want to get behind the wheel yet. I need to process what just happened. I need to know what it all means.

Everyone lives through one bad day. I don’t mean bad like you get a B on an important paper when you think that you are going to get an A. I mean, a really, really shitty day that will never leave for good. For years to come, when you least expect it, a particularly terrible part of that day will crawl its way to the surface of your memory and play over again, just enough for you to be reminded how miserable you felt having ever lived it at all.

Today is that day for me.

As I lean against the driver’s side door of my pick-up, I close my eyes and squeeze the muscles on my face really hard. Like an epic zit, I imagine that if I apply enough pressure, the grossness that’s inside will shoot out and I’ll get some temporary relief.

No matter how hard I try, my face won’t pop.

I need my memories. I need them to come back right now so I know what to do next. How can they be gone? How can they vanish into thin air?

Anders with a skanky girl from another town is old news. He’s done that dance before. Myers and I aren’t quite ready for that sort of thing yet. Myers is still a child. As for me, I’m not the same person that I was a year ago. I’m somebody newly minted, who’s half the size I used to be, and I don’t know who that person is.

I might very well be someone who picks up strangers, parties with people he doesn’t know, and gets shitfaced with the popular burnouts.

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