Bottled Up Read online

I went back to staring in front of me. I wasn’t listening to him anymore. He was going on about how he was sick of me, tired of wasting his time—same old stuff.

  Then he said, “No detentions. No suspension. No long talk. You’re out of here.”

  He moved some more papers, then I heard him lift the phone receiver.

  I still didn’t look, because I’m too cool for that.

  He dialed, then waited.

  “May I speak with Mr. Michael Downs, please? Yes. I’ll hold.”

  My head snapped from where I was staring. He could see the oh crap look in my eyes.

  He didn’t blink.

  I jumped up out of my seat. “What the hell are you doing?” My heart was pounding so hard under my shirt, it made my armpit hurt.

  “I’m calling your father to let him know you’re being expelled and to recommend some good rehab programs.”

  I reached across the desk and slammed my finger on the phone button.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked me with the receiver still in his hand. I’ve pulled a lot of crap, but hanging up his phone was a new one.

  I just stared at him. I blew the hair out of my eyes and watched to see if he was going to dial the phone again.

  “Sit back down,” he said. I couldn’t move. I was stuck in that spot and I needed to be close enough to click the phone again if he dialed.

  He was staring at me. Hard. Not like he was mad, though. It was the way he looked at me outside in the hall—like I was a person. And he saw something. He must have, because he put the receiver back down.

  “Sit,” he repeated.

  I sat, but on the edge of the seat. I was ready to jump up at any time.

  I didn’t go back to staring at the spot behind him. I looked right at his face. I’d never noticed that the guy had green eyes.

  “I have no choice but to expel you. You cause more trouble than anyone else, and you take up too much of my time and your teachers’. I can’t keep chasing you, talking to you, trying to get you to shape up. You’re beyond help—my help, anyway. I have enough disciplinary forms here to wallpaper my office.”

  “You can’t.” I think my voice even cracked then. I’m sure I sounded like an idiot.

  “Tell me one reason why not.”

  I nodded toward the newspaper on his desk next to the phone.

  “You read the paper?” I asked him.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You call my father, tell him I’m expelled, and you’ll be reading about me on the front page tomorrow.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Father Kills Teen Son—”

  “Phillip—”

  “You don’t get it.” My voice was shaking. “You make that call and I’m a dead man.”

  He sat back in his chair, picked a pen up off the desk, and started twisting it. We sat there for I don’t know how many minutes.

  I waited. What else could I do? Waiting him out was my only shot.

  He finally spoke up. “I said before that you were beyond my help. Now I’m thinking that maybe there is one other choice we have. I’m thinking that you need someone to talk to. With the right guidance maybe you can learn to use the brain you’ve got hidden under all that hair.”

  He pulled a little white card out of his desk and handed it to me. “Call her by the end of the day. Have an appointment set up for tomorrow and I’ll hold off speaking to your father.”

  It was a business card: Claire Butler—Jensen Family Counseling Center.

  “I don’t need counseling.” I put the card back on his desk.

  “Just your saying that to me is proof of how badly you need it. This is your only ticket off the front page of the paper and you’re not even giving it a moment’s thought.”

  He shook his head and kept talking. “You need to learn that the things you do and don’t do have repercussions. If you’re this afraid of your father, you should stop getting into so much trouble and make some right choices. Start with this one.”

  “I don’t have any money for counseling.”

  “It won’t cost you money.”

  He was holding the card out for me. I took it from him.

  “Your parents don’t have to know you’re going. The services are confidential.”

  I shoved the card in my back pocket.

  “Make the right choice. Go to counseling and attend all your classes or I’ll expel you. According to your story, that means you die. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.”

  All I wanted to do was get out of there. I needed a joint. I needed to smoke Giraldi out—blow all this up into the air.

  I needed a bone. I needed it bad.

  Fetch.

  I want to be six years old again—just for a day. It’s not that things were so much better back then. They sucked. But I was the kind of kid who knew how to laugh about it all. That’s what I want. I want to laugh.

  My brother’s name is Mikey—Michael Downs, Jr., really. But I call him Bugs because that’s what he does to me.

  People say I’ve got an answer for everything. I don’t think so. But my little brother has a question for everything.

  Why do they call them Band-Aids and not Cut-Covers?

  Why does Ronald McDonald have a white face?

  Do the Yankees wear blue-pinstriped pajamas?

  And he has eight million questions about everything you’d never need to know about M&M’s.

  How do they get the shells around the chocolate?

  How do they know which ones are supposed to be yellow and which ones are supposed to be green?

  I almost always give him the same answer.

  Shut up, I tell him.

  He’s got a whole load of questions about our family too. Same answer.

  Shut up.

  After getting rattled by Giraldi and having to sit through the rest of my classes without a buzz, all I wanted to do was smoke a joint. I wasn’t in the mood for a pain-in-the-butt six-year-old and his stupid questions. I just wanted to kick back and forget things for a little while.

  He was standing next to a tree in front of the school, looking at his hand.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Look at this.” He put the back of his hand in front of his face.

  “It’s a ladybug,” I told the little genius. “You’ve seen a million of those.”

  “Not like this one. This one doesn’t have any spots.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m naming her No Spots.”

  He was just standing there, not listening to me. I should call him No Ears.

  “Come on.” I grabbed the top of his shirt and pulled him to start walking.

  “Look over there,” he said, pointing with his other hand behind him at a yellow backhoe and a dump truck. “They started digging today. I think they’re fixing something. Cool, right?”

  I pulled on his shirt a little harder and got him crossing the street.

  “Stop,” he yelled, and bent down to the double yellow line, feeling around with his hands. “I dropped her.”

  “Who?”

  “No Spots.”

  The light turned green and a car honked at us. I gave the lady a good look at my middle finger, and pulled my brother across the street.

  “She’ll get squished,” he yelled at me.

  “Forget the bug, we’re going to get flattened.” I pulled him the rest of the way across the street. “You couldn’t find her because she probably flew away.”

  His Superman backpack was falling off his shoulders and I yanked it up when we got to the sidewalk.

  “Pip? Why do ladybugs fly?”

  “Because their legs are too small to walk on all day.”

  “They got a lot of places to go?”

  “Maybe.”

  “God gave them wings so they wouldn’t get tired?”

  “I don’t know about God.”

  “So how’d they get wings?”

  “Could you just shut up and walk?” I needed a joint more than I needed to breathe. I felt like some extra layer of skin was growing on me and the only way to lose it was to get stoned. I pulled a pack of Marlboros out of the front of my jeans and shook out a cigarette.

  “Pip? Are you taking me to Eddie’s house again?”

  “Yeah. His mother is gonna watch you for a little while.”

  I lit the butt and took a breath in.

  “How come you don’t take me home anymore?” He was whining. “I’m sick of going to Eddie’s house. You’re supposed to pick me up and take me home.”

  I blew out the smoke. “Eddie’s your friend. You two can hang out—”

  “I want to hang out with you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “So why can’t I come?”

  “Shut up, Bugs.”

  The kid was mad at me. He was sick of getting dumped off, but I didn’t care. I wanted to finish that one joint I had in my sock, even though it wasn’t going to be enough to un-rattle me.

  I took a long drag on my cigarette.

  “Can I try that?”

  “Try what? My cigarette?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No way.”

  “Why not?”

  I squatted down and blew smoke into his face. He started coughing and waved his hands to push it away.

  Sometimes I wonder who Mikey’s going to be in ten years. I could really come up with some ideas around that, but none of them would be good. Crap. I don’t need any of it on my head, that’s for sure. There was no way he was getting his first butt off of me.

  I pulled his backpack up on his shoulders again when we got to Eddie’s front door.

  “Tell Eddie’s mom I’ll pick you
up at four-thirty.”

  “Pip?”

  I could feel that joint in my sock. I would have lit it right there if I could.

  “What?”

  “Who puts the m’s on the M&M’s?”

  I should have seen something like that coming.

  “An elf,” I told him. “A purple one with lots of paintbrushes.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  Mikey looked at me like I had something growing out of my forehead.

  “What are you gawking at? Go on. Eddie’s waiting for you at the door.”

  He kept standing there, so I took off. I flipped my cigarette butt into the street, then looked back to see if he’d gone in yet. He was still watching me.

  Man. Sometimes he looks so young—so little.

  “What?” I asked him, and put my hands up over my head.

  He waved to me and I nodded back real quick before breaking into a sprint. I pulled another cigarette out of my pack and lit it on my way to the only place I can ever go where nobody hassles me.

  I want to hold my breath for as long as it takes.

  I want to stop breathing just long enough to know what it would be like to be totally still.

  Like being just a cough away from death.

  Not really there—not really here.

  I got a lot of friends. Some of them are dead. Some of them are on their way. All of them hang out at what I call the Site. It’s this one part of the Mountain of Hope Cemetery where there’s a whole slew of real old graves nobody visits anymore. I bet anybody who knew these people is six feet under now too.

  One of my friends at the Site is George Beattie, Beloved Husband, Loving Father, born 1875, died 1925. He knows me as good as anybody. There’s Agnes, who I’m pretty tight with too. Agnes Jaffe, Devoted Wife and Friend. She’s right next to George.

  After I dropped Mikey off at Eddie’s, I went to the Site. I knew my guys were going to be there. We’re always there. It’s where we hang out and nobody can find us—not that anybody is looking. It’s also where Johnny passes out the stash, and I was pretty low on supply that day. The joint in my sock was all I had left.

  “Pip, man,” Slayer yells to me from in front of Robert Hahn, 1817-1878. “Where the hell you been?”

  Frankie got the name Slayer after he dyed his buzz cut and his eyebrows white. His skin is almost gray and he’s got the reddest freakin’ lips you ever saw on a guy that wasn’t wearing a dress. He looks just like the skinny guy on that Buffy the Vampire Slayer show. None of us knew his name so we just started calling him the Slayer guy. Frankie thought it was so cool, he got Slayer tattooed on his arm, right over his wrist, with a dagger going through the y.

  “I went over to the Dumpster looking for you after sixth period,” he said. “Friggin’ Tony came out and grubbed my last roach.” Slayer took a drink from a bottle he was holding, then passed it up to me.

  I grabbed it.

  “Got snagged by Giraldi today,” I told him. “I had to hit all my classes.”

  “No way.” Johnny stood up in front of George Beattie and we knocked shoulders.

  “I’m in deep, man,” I told them, then took a drink from the bottle. I didn’t even care what I was drinking. I had an edge on me so sharp, I could slice something just by looking at it. It was going to take a hell of a lot of drink and smoke to keep from cutting myself on me.

  “Giraldi’s after my ass.”

  “What’s his problem?” Johnny dropped back down on his butt and leaned against George. I sat in front of Agnes.

  “If I don’t go to every class, he’s kickin’ my ass out of school and calling the old man to tell him about it.”

  “Then we’d have to dig you a nice hole in the ground right here next to George and Agnes,” Johnny said, and Slayer started laughing.

  “No joke,” I said, thinking about how I almost wet my pants when Giraldi had my father’s office on the line.

  Johnny lit up a joint and held it out to me. “So just go to classes for a couple of weeks. Then he’ll forget you just like everybody else does.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, hoping my head would stop racing. “Not this time.”

  I didn’t tell the guys about Giraldi blackmailing me—nothing about the counseling. If those guys thought I was going to talk to anybody, they’d start looking over their shoulders. They wouldn’t trust me anymore.

  They weren’t going to know about the counseling—if I went.

  “Don’t let Giraldi get to your old man,” Johnny said. “Just do what you got to do to keep that phone from ringing.”

  Johnny knew what he was talking about. He’d seen my father in action a couple of times. You don’t forget that. Back when me and Johnny were in the seventh grade, right after his father split, he came over a lot. He saw things. He heard. He knows.

  I don’t go to Johnny’s apartment too much anymore either. Somewhere around the eighth grade his place started smelling funky. Everything was always a mess, old pizza on the table, dishes and cruddy pots in the sink. His mother is a garbage-head who keeps herself in supply by trading her body for drugs.

  I’m the only one of us guys who knows about that. Me and Johnny go back to junior high. We go back to when we didn’t know enough to keep our mouths shut and our front doors off-limits.

  “What are you going to do?” Slayer handed me back the bottle and I took another long pull on it before answering him.

  “After I drop my brother off at school in the mornings, I’m gonna get myself behind the Dumpster and smoke as much weed as I can before first period. I’m going to try and grab a few hits out the bathroom window between classes.”

  Slayer shook his head. “You’re going to have to, man. You’ll never make it all day without a buzz. I keep a bottle in my locker and get a bathroom pass so I can take a few swigs when the hall is empty.”

  “See you tomorrow fourth period?” I asked him.

  “I’m there.” Slayer put his fist out and I hit mine on top of it. Then he put his Walkman headphones on and leaned back against Robert Hahn’s cement pillow. He had the damn music cranked so loud, I could hear the exact song he was blasting.

  The pictures in my head were slowing down. I didn’t see Fleming anymore, with her finger slamming into my brain. Giraldi’s hand on the phone was a blur. I couldn’t see Jenna watching me walk out of class . . . Coach Fredericks blowing his whistle . . . Mikey waving good-bye.

  “Pip,” Johnny said, sounding like he had cotton in his mouth. “I figured out a way you can get some driving lessons.”

  “Hm?” I had my eyes closed. I took a couple of quick inhales on the joint.

  “We can get some cash together real easy for you if you want. One of those dorky driving schools, you know, with the signs on the roof, could take you on the road.”

  “How?”

  “Mo is setting me up.”

  “With a driving school?” I still had my eyes closed. I didn’t really want to talk.

  “I’m going to sell for him.”

  Mo is this guy in the Bronx who Johnny takes the train to see once or twice a week to pick up stash. I went with him a couple of times. Slayer takes the ride once in a while. But Johnny goes every week. He gets enough product to sell to the two of us, but I never heard of him dealing to anybody else.

  “I’m going to get me some serious money, Pip. I’m going to unload so much weed and coke and ecstasy for this guy, I’m going to be rich. You can get in on this with me if you want.”

  I opened my eyes and looked over at Johnny. He was staring at me like he really wanted me to go in on it with him.

  “I don’t know,” I said. We never say no to each other, me and Johnny. If he wants to sneak into a movie, we go. If I want to kick somebody’s ass for giving me trouble, he’s right there. We don’t say no. We say I don’t know.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know. Forget money for driving lessons. You could get enough cash to buy your own wheels. Hell, if Giraldi kicks you out, we’ll buy you your own school.”

  “I’m so wasted right now, Johnny. I can’t think about nothin’.”

  “I hear you.” He leaned back against the headstone.

  “I could use another bag now, though,” I told him.

  Johnny shook his head and shoved a small bag of pot at my chest.

  “Here,” he said. “But I’m not covering you forever. You’re going to have to get a job. Go price peas at the damn Stop and Shop if you’re not going in on this with me, but I’m not covering you forever.”

  “I’ll get you money for the bag.”