Bottled Up

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  Acknowledgements

  Published by Dial Books

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2003 by Jaye Murray

  All rights reserved

  Text set in Meridien

  S.A. on acid-free paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Murray, Jaye.

  Bottled up / Jaye Murray.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A high school boy comes to terms with his drug addiction, life with an alcoholic father, and a younger brother who looks up to him.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04272-4

  [1. Brothers—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction.

  3. Alcoholism—Fiction. 4. Drug abuse—Fiction.

  5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.M9615 Bo 2003

  [Fic]—dc21

  2002013744

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  “The door’s open and we should be able to walk straight through it into the last days without having to count them. What can stop us now?”

  This book is dedicated to

  Richard Peck

  for holding open the door

  and giving me every reason

  to believe I could go through it.

  “And still I’m not through with all I’ve got to say. I haven’t even gotten a good start.”

  —quotes from Father Figure by Richard Peck

  ONE

  I remember when all I wanted was a ten-speed and a six-pack of Hershey bars.

  Now all I want is to be left alone.

  “Mr. Downs, I’ve had it with you.”

  That’s what my teacher Ms. Fleming told me in front of my whole class, and that’s how all this started. At least that’s my story anyway. You see, I was just going along the same as I always do—then Fleming changed the rules.

  I cut fifth period English a lot. But when I don’t, I go right to my desk three rows back, get my arm across the top, set my head inside my elbow, and take a nap. I don’t snore. I don’t bother anybody. Fleming does her thing. I do mine. Nobody gets hassled.

  This was working for me. I figured it was working for her too. Then, out of nowhere, she goes batty with the I’ve had it with you garbage.

  I was asleep. I was so deep into some dream, I could have been drooling on my sleeve. Then I felt something pecking at my head. Fleming was slamming her nail into my skull like I was friggin’ roadkill and she was a crow going at my brains for lunch.

  “Hey, I was sleeping.”

  “I’ve really had it with you, Mr. Downs.”

  With the back of my hand, I wiped off the spit she’d sprayed on my face.

  “Go to the principal’s office,” she said as if she couldn’t look at my mug another second without blowing chunks on my desk.

  “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “Exactly. Having you in class is like having a corpse in the third row.”

  “So let the dead sleep.”

  “Get out. Go to Mr. Giraldi’s office. Maybe he can give you a pillow and send for room service.”

  “Now we’re talkin’,” I said, and stood up.

  “You don’t have any idea what we’re talking about in this class. You don’t even know who Charles Dickens is.”

  I didn’t really care.

  Fleming had her arms crossed. She was trying to get all in my face. She was so close, I could have bitten her fat banana nose off.

  I grabbed my never-been-used-before seven-month-old notebook, good for carrying into any class, and started walking.

  In the front row Jenna was looking at me. She’s one of the good girls—the high-honor-roll, never-get-into-trouble untouchables. She’s really not my kind of girl—most of them have tattoos or nose rings—but there’s something about her smile. She smiles like she’s in love with whoever she’s looking at.

  She smiled at me a few months ago. I’ve been trying to get her to do it again ever since.

  I stopped at the door. I was going to let loose and tell Fleming where she could stick her Dickens.

  “Go to the principal,” she said before I could open my mouth. “You’re wasting too much of my time, sir.”

  People love to call a guy sir when they really mean asshole.

  She rushed up to the front of the room to speed me out the door.

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “Not fast enough,” she shot back, and shut the door pretty hard in my face.

  I thought about my choices. I had two.

  I could go to Giraldi’s office and listen to him give me hell.

  Or—smoke a bone behind the deli across the street.

  Some choices are easy.

  Fleming could make rules. But I didn’t have to follow them.

  I want to get myself real high. I want to get so far off the ground that my hair gets caught on cloud dust.

  Cloud dust is that stuff clouds leave behind when they’re floating real fast across the sky.

  That’s what I want.

  Cloud dust.

  When Fleming shut that door in my face, she gave me a free period. Free period means that I’m the teacher. I run my own classes:Pot Smoking 101

  Joint Rolling 102 (bring your own spit and paper)

  To Hell with Everybody 201 (must have passed 101 first)

  I never even thought about going to Giraldi’s office. Why should I? Most of the time when a teacher sends me to the principal and I don’t show, the teacher doesn’t check up on it later. And if I do get busted for not showing, all I get is a detention. Sometimes I show for that, but sometimes I don’t. It’s all part of the rules—how things have always been.

  So I walked right past Giraldi’s office, went outside, and lit a Marlboro by the front door. I had it half smoked when I got across the street to the Dumpster behind the deli.

  I sat on a milk crate that smelled like cottage cheese, took a tightly rolled joint out of my sock, and struck a match. I watched the tip glow then flake into ash when I inhaled.

  Held it.

  Exhaled.

  I always feel like I’m walking around holding my breath. But when I light up and smoke some weed, it’s like I’m breathing for the first time.

  Pot smells like nothing else my nose knows. My nostrils hug the smoke, and it goes into my throat that’s open like a hungry bird waiting for a worm. I suck in on the joint and hold it. My chest gets so tight, I feel like Superman all puffed out and ready to fly.

  Then I let the smoke out real slow. It covers my clothes like it’s trying to hide me.

  Breathe in.

  Hold it.

  Hold it.

  “Chimney Boy, how the hell are you?”

  It was Tony. I blew out the smoke and turned my head his way. Tony works in the deli making sandwiches for the kids at school and slicing meat for old ladies. Good ol’ Tony. He never puts enough roast beef on your wedge. It’s always lettuce and tomato with a little bit of meat drowning in chunky mayonnaise.

  The first time he caught me blowing smoke next to the Dumpster, he just put out his hand for my weed, took a hit, and went back inside. He didn’t give me any crap for being there. Now every time he sees me getting high between classes, he has to grub off of me and get his spit all over my blunt.

  “How you doing, Tony?”

  “Just was
ting another damn day, kid. Another day of feeding everybody else while I go hungry.” He took my joint and helped himself to two long hits.

  “They don’t give you anything to eat in there?” I asked him.

  “I can eat anything I want. I’m just hungry.”

  Tony doesn’t make a lot of sense, but he never stays long. He comes out, makes a couple of wisecracks about me being a chimney, steals a hit or two, and goes back to work. Fair deal, I guess. Sometimes when I go in for a sandwich, I even get a few extra slabs of meat on my wedge.

  I finished off the joint, lit a Marlboro, and wiped off the ashes that had fallen on my tie-dyed T-shirt. That day I was wearing the one that’s got three different greens with a swirl of blue in the middle. I have a load of tie-dyed shirts—long-sleeved, short-sleeved, sleeveless, and even a pair of psychedelic purple tie-dyed boxers.

  I don’t have a favorite color. That’s why tie-dye works for me. All the colors mixed up and crazy.

  No two tie-dyed anythings are the same.

  I want back all the time gym classes ever stole from me.

  That’s a lot of time when you think about it. Forty-five minutes a few times a week for thirteen years.

  I figured it out once. Thirteen years times forty weeks a year, three times a week. Then multiply that by forty-five minutes and it comes out to having crapped away about 20,200 minutes of my life.

  Twenty thousand two hundred minutes of throwing dodge balls and doing sit-ups, jumping jacks, squat thrusts, and foul shots. Twenty thousand two hundred minutes of physical “education.”

  I want my time back.

  I showed up ten minutes late for gym class—right on time for me.

  Everybody was out of the locker room and in their shorts or sweats. The guys were doing sit-ups and counting out loud like it was damn boot camp.

  I used to be into sports when I was a kid. I know all the rules. The one who hits the farthest, gets the most baskets, scores the most goals is king of the who-gives-a-shit hill.

  Boys playing with their balls is all that’s about.

  I got better things to do with mine, like scratch them. At least there’s a point to doing that.

  The metal bar on the gym door clicked shut behind me.

  “Downs,” Coach Fredericks yelled over to me. He thinks he’s a tough guy, that coach. Big man around the teenage boys. He walks from one side of the gym to the other with a whistle around his neck and one hand going up and down his arm like he’s feeling around for a muscle. He calls everybody by their last name. Calls you Miss if you screw up a foul shot. Throws volleyballs at your head if you’re not listening to him.

  “Downs, the principal is waiting for you in his office. What did you do this time?”

  “I think it’s something about his mother,” I said, not looking over at him. “She wants to go out with me again—I don’t know.”

  I pulled myself up onto the sixth step of the bleachers. I was getting ready to do my Invisible Man trick and finish my nap.

  Fredericks blew the whistle. “Downs.”

  “What?” I was on my back with my hands behind my head. My kind of sit-up—lie down and stay down ’til lunch.

  “Mr. Giraldi wants you in his office now.” He blew the whistle even harder. “Get moving. He probably wants to give you that student of the year award.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” My eyes were closed and I was hoping he’d just get lost.

  But he got louder. “Downs!”

  A basketball slammed into the bleacher next to my head.

  “Move it!” he was yelling at me. “Don’t keep the principal waiting.”

  “Screw him,” I said to myself. Or I thought I’d said it to myself, but I guess after all the weed I smoked, by sixth period I didn’t know what was coming out of my mouth or how loud.

  “If that’s what you want to do, Downs. But you may have to buy him dinner or bring him flowers first.”

  He wasn’t going to let up. Most of the guys on the floor were still doing sit-ups, but some of them had fallen back holding their stomachs. They all looked pretty stupid to me with sweat dripping off their heads. They should be like me—forget all this phys. ed. crap and chill out.

  That would never happen in my almost-middle-class school of suck-ups. Nobody’s got any guts in my high school.

  I stood up, got a good stretch with one hand on my butt and the other over my head.

  “Sometime today, burnout,” one of the guys yelled from the floor.

  I jumped off the bleachers and looked to see which idiot wanted my foot up his ass. No one said anything else. Like I said—none of these guys have any guts.

  “Get out of my gym, Downs.” Fredericks pointed to the door. I walked over to it and pushed it open with my butt. The metal rod on the door rattled when it slammed shut behind me.

  I heard Fredericks still yelling at me. “Don’t forget to bring Giraldi some flowers.”

  Yeah, bite me.

  I remember my father asking me, back when I was eight, why I didn’t like the name Phillip.

  “It’s dumb,” was all I told him.

  “Pip’s any better?” he asked.

  I said something like, Duh.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Maybe you’re just a Pip off the old block.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but I remember hoping he was wrong.

  When I got out of the gym Giraldi was stomping down the hall at me.

  “Let’s go, mister.” He turned right around on his heel like some military dude and stomped back the other way again.

  I took my time.

  “I told you to move it, Phillip.”

  I stopped. “My name is Pip.” I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans and figured if he couldn’t get this much straight we had no place to go.

  Nobody calls me Phillip. Nobody.

  “Maybe you should stick to being called Phillip instead of answering to a dog’s name. Or maybe we should start calling you Pup instead.”

  Or maybe he should shut the hell up.

  Nobody would believe me if I told them my principal talks like this. Nobody would believe Fleming was poking at me with her nail either, or that the coach tossed a basketball right next to my head.

  That’s all right. People wouldn’t believe half the crap I pull either.

  He could call me a dog if he wanted to, he just couldn’t call me Phillip. That’s one of my rules.

  “Come on, Pup,” Giraldi said, heading for his office. “And tie your shoelaces.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to fall—trip and break your neck.”

  “What do you care?”

  He looked past me for a second, then behind him like he was looking for his answer.

  “I don’t want you scuffing my floors. Tie your shoes.”

  I stopped and bent down like I was going to tie them. As soon as he turned around to stomp off, I stood up and left my shoes the way I like them. Untied.

  He had to hear my laces hitting the floor. I know he did. I was letting them slap hard.

  He slowed down when we were almost to the main office. I figured he was going to tell me to tie them again.

  “We need to have a man-to-man talk,” he said with this serious look on his face.

  “Or man-to-dog,” I told him.

  He stopped at the door with his hand on the knob and looked at me. For a second he didn’t look like a principal—not like forty-something-year-old Giraldi, who’s waiting on his pension. He looked like a person. Or maybe he was looking at me like I was a person. But that only lasted a second.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said, looking over my head, then back at me again. “Why would you want to spend the rest of your life being an uneducated, drug-taking wiseass?”

  “What are you talking about?” I put on my best I’m confused look. “I’m not a wiseass.”

  He rolled his eyes and opened the door. “That’s all you can say?” he asked, stepping into his office.


  I answered him the only way I knew how.

  “Woof.”

  I remember this one time when my father took me out for ice cream.

  After the second lick off my strawberry cone, the scoop fell right onto my shoe.

  I stood there holding the empty cone in my hand and watched my father lick his ice cream.

  After a minute of me doing nothing to help myself, he handed me his cone and took mine. Then he bent over, picked the scoop off my shoe, and shoved it on top.

  He ate that one.

  Giraldi sits right down at his desk and tells me, “Shut the door.”

  So I shut it.

  “Sit,” he says.

  Shut the door, sit, roll over, play dead.

  I plop into my regular chair right across from him. I’ve sat there so many times, I think my butt is making its own groove. I stretch out my legs in front of me and let my laces slap on the floor again.

  “Ms. Fleming sent you to my office last period and you didn’t show. Why not?”

  “I came by but you weren’t here.”

  “You didn’t wait.”

  “I had to study. I went to the library.”

  “You’ve never stepped foot into the school library.”

  I stared at a spot right behind him. I wasn’t really looking at anything. I just picked a spot, stared, and blocked him out. I didn’t even blink or move my face or nothin’. I acted like I couldn’t hear a word he was saying.

  He moved some papers around on his desk. I figured it was my file. It always comes back to my file with Giraldi.

  “I’ve got more disciplinary forms on you than anyone else has ever gotten in the history of this school.”

  How the hell would he know that?

  “You ever going to get a haircut?” he asked me, like he figures if I’d just tie my shoes and keep my hair short, I wouldn’t end up in his office.

  “If you’re so desperate to play dress up,” I said, “why don’t you get yourself a friggin’ Barbie doll?”