Read an Excerpt
Part
One: Strain
One minute you’re
at your spot in the enormous kitchen, a chrome-and-leather stool at one end of the
gleaming granite island. The desert island, you privately call it. You’re alone
there so often you may as well be marooned.
Down-island: a clamshell.
Actually a laptop, slim, silver, screen gone black, the only sign that another human
has crossed this strip of land. The human: your mother, who abhors crumbs and unrinsed
coffee cups, drips and stains, crusts of toast—all the messes of human life. Your
mother, who moves through each day leaving no trace other than some random electronic
device. Hurricane Charlotte, Dad calls her, a strange name for someone who glides
cold and robot-like through life. Your mother, who never listens, who doesn’t understand
the first thing about you, who is too oblivious to even know that she doesn’t know.
One
minute you’re sitting there, empty Mountain Dew can at your elbow, the drink having
edged you into another reluctant day, along with the fatty-sweet bitsu-bitsu May
made fresh this morning. Breakfast of champions, Dad said when
he strolled in. He swiped a couple of the chewy doughnuts himself, trailed sugar
like white sand all the way to the kitchen island. Your mother glared.
One
minute you’re on your stool. On your phone, scanning Instagram posts from Rebecca
Lee, who used to hang out with you. You’d go to the mall, split a frozen yogurt,
one topping your choice, one hers, get high, steal nail polish, steal, once, a pair
of jeans you shoved under your jacket when Rebecca said no way, you never would.
Rebecca, now a stuck-up slut who has quit talking to you.
It’s
not like she’s the only one. Lots of people won’t acknowledge you now. You creep
along the hallway outside chem lab—which used to be your spot between classes, you
owned that spot—and your so-called friends fold into a tight
whispering knot, no words for you. You angle toward your place in the cafeteria,
the table where you’ve sat for the past two and a half years, and find every chair
occupied. In class, it doesn’t matter which one, the person in front of you hands
papers back without turning all the way. When you enter the washroom you clear the
place out.
It’s fine. They talked about this in group. Reintegration,
they called it; also redrawing. It’s hard for the people in your
life to redraw you. They want to see the same you they’ve always seen. The group
counsellor, Drayton, too earnest and granola for your liking though he always gave
you respect, would trace a rectangle in the air with his forefinger. For most people,
he said, the world is a tidy box. Step outside the box, disturb their sense of order,
and they feel profoundly uncomfortable. When that happens, you’ve got to remember
the discomfort is their problem, not yours.
Redrawing. You like
that idea.
One minute your earbuds are pulsing Taylor Swift, a
not-bad song years ago when it came out, the video with all the ballet dancers,
now just lame, an embarrassing scrap of childhood. Like the frilly canopy bed you
hung on to until you were fifteen and woke up one day to realize you were no one’s
princess. Time to make a new playlist. Taylor Swift is so . . . yesterday.
One
minute you’re on your desert island, scrolling, scrolling, looking for a better,
more meaningful song, a more mature song, one that suits your mood this boring Tuesday
morning, wondering if you should post something about that skanky Rebecca Lee, because
you know stuff about her no one else knows, or if you should just let it go, the
way you’re learning to let things go.
The next minute—how?—
You’re
on your ass, the heavy stool you were sitting on tipped over beside you.
What—?
Pots
and pans sail off copper hooks. Crash all around you. Bounce.
Holy
shit! Dad?
Instinct kicks in. Make yourself
small. You curl up like a snail, hold your bandaged hand close to your
belly. Be a snail. Be a snail. Only you’ve never had a shell.
The
blender flies off the granite island, smashes onto the terracotta floor. Glass sprays.
Another barstool falls.
Dad!
You
wait. Wire-taut, every nerve screaming run. But you don’t. It’s the one thing you’re
not supposed to do.
Below the treble of smashing glass and clanging
metal, a bass line builds, like no sound you’ve ever heard before. Deep rolling
thunder, but louder. Close. A jumbo jet landing on the roof.
You
wait. Terrified.
You wait, like you’ve waited for so much in life.
To be understood. To matter.
You wait. For everything to end.
For something else to begin.
