Bottled Up by Jaye Murray

Author:Jaye Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

I tried. I tried not to smoke—I tried to get through the whole day of school without a joint. I had to. If I showed up at group and gave a dirty urine, I was toast. I knew Giraldi was waiting for me to screw up. He called me into his office just to ask if I was doing the right thing.

I told him to call Claire and ask her. He said he was just about to.

Go ahead. Have a friggin’ party trying to screw up my life.

I couldn’t sit still in school. I was ready to kill somebody. I kept taking bathroom passes just so I could get out of my seat—walk the halls. Kirkland kept me after class again to see if I was all right. If he thought I was going to tell him how I got my shiner, he was the one smoking too much weed.

Coach Fredericks threw me out of gym. I didn’t want to play the stupid floor hockey game anyway. Some punk, Steven, hit me with the stick right in the friggin’ shin. I wasn’t my regular cool, chilled-out self, so I popped him one. Not too hard. I mean, I just shoved him into the wall and gave him a sucker punch right in the gut.

Giraldi loved it.

“I just spoke with Ms. Butler,” he said. “She told me so far you’re in compliance with counseling. And you’ve been going to all your classes too, but I can’t tolerate you getting into fistfights.”

“Our deal had nothing to do with that.”

“Don’t you think you get into enough fights, Phillip?”

“Pip.”

“Look at you. Look at that shiner. You’re going to go through life wearing your bad attitude on your face forever.”

I just stared at him.

“You’re making some changes. You’re going to all your classes. But if you’re going to continue to get sent to my office I won’t be able to ignore that. You have to toe the line—the whole line.”

He had no idea that by getting on my back, he was making it harder for me not to smoke that joint I had waiting in my sock just in case.

But I did it. I got through the whole friggin’ school day without one toke of weed.

I picked Mikey up. Took him to T-ball practice. Read some more of that Jekyll and Hyde book, then took Mikey home.

He wanted me to shoot hoops with him outside in the driveway. Instead I smoked a cigarette and sat on the side while he took shots. He was running up and down the driveway with his Superman cape flapping over his back.

“I know why Daddy drinks those bottles on top of the fridge,” he said out of nowhere.

“Why?”

“He drinks them because he’s sad.”

I didn’t tell him how stupid I thought that was. “What makes you say that?”

“I can just tell.”

“And drinking makes him so happy, he yells and chases us into the garage?”

Mikey put the ball under his arm for a second and thought about that.

“Maybe it can’t make him happy,” he said.

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