Juliet the Maniac by Juliet Escoria

Author:Juliet Escoria
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

BEDTIME STORIES

Since everybody else was so busy with the Julia drama, Alyson and I sat together on a couch in the great room, late. The lights were off and I didn’t think anybody knew we were in there.

We talked and talked, about all the times we’d gotten fucked up and all the crazy things we did before we arrived. Alyson told me how she used to wear big baggy guy jeans, take a shoelace and tie it around the cuff, walk into stores and shoplift by putting bottles down the waistband. One time she got greedy, tried to put four forties in her pants, two in each leg, and a shoelace came untied. The forties fell out and broke all over the floor. She took off running, the beer and glass sticking to the bottoms of her shoes. Her friend was waiting in the car, and they peeled out before Alyson could even shut the door, laughing hysterically over what had happened. It’s the nights you get the beer that blend together, she said. I knew exactly what she meant.

Alyson told me that she and her mother were best friends, and her father couldn’t stand it. She would go over there and they’d play checkers till 4:00 a.m. in the garage, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. She showed me a scar on her forehead, a perfectly white crescent moon curving up to her hairline, the lasting result of a drunken argument they’d had where her mother hit her with a beer stein. She seemed to think this was funny. By then her father was so sick of her mother not taking care of herself, and of Alyson coming home from her visits tired and hungover. The custody arrangement was modified. Alyson was forbidden from going over there. He didn’t care that her mother was dying; if they wanted to see each other, they were only allowed supervised visits at a special center that felt like jail.

The great room was so dark I couldn’t see her face, only her outline and the glow from the hallway light glinting off her blond hair. But her voice cracked in a way that made me think she might be crying. I couldn’t blame her.

And so, like the time with Holly, I told her my story.

About the hallucinations and the suicide attempts and how I had found myself here, incapable of functioning like a normal person in normal society. She said nothing the whole time I was talking. When I was finished, she touched my hand, just for a second, saying without saying that she got it.

By the time anyone noticed us absent from our rooms it was an hour past lights out. But even then I couldn’t sleep, so we continued to talk, gossiping about the other students. Eventually her breaths slowed and steadied. When I went to sleep that night, I closed my eyes, my own breath settling into the rhythm of Alyson’s, and for the first time since I’d arrived at the school, I didn’t feel alone.

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