I rear back and punch Wallis. I try to hit his face, but my knuckles skid off his jaw and strike his shoulder. Despite my lack of aim, the force knocks him back. Just like in the movies, his feet lose solid contact with the ground and he falls in slow motion. I look down at my hand and then back at Wallis on the ground. Cool air inflates my lungs, mingles with the boiling anger inside and then releases as steamy breaths. As I breathe in and out I wonder if I can ever be calm again, because even the surprise at my own violence only dents my rage.
The next moments flash in distinctive images and cloudy blurs. His friends look shocked, but out of focus. My little brother glares, two searing beams of both disbelief and anger. There are some shouts and a few people have begun to circle. We are a newly formed watering hole in which the whole animal kingdom must congregate. Yet, it’s over, nothing more to see than the world gawking or gaping at me. In the next moment a freshman history teacher breaks us up. I think he’s new.
****
The plastic chairs outside the Principal’s office are alarmingly uncomfortable. They strike the back right in the middle of the shoulder blades. Now I have officially discovered why everyone I have ever seen sitting in this exact spot looks hunched over and perturbed. I’m all alone too; I guess it is one of those slow days. I lift my hand and look at the irritated red marks surrounding my knuckles, then press them into the ice. The bag turned into sloshy liquid five minutes ago and now I hunt for the cold solid chunks. Even sitting here, a chair stabbing me, my hand throbbing and my punishment waiting, I regret nothing.
I expect someone to call my full name, a dramatic affair with a firm tone and maybe even a foreboding glare. When the Principal does finally come out, however, it’s with a gloomy expression. She quickly calls my first name and then gestures for me to follow her. The last name isn’t all that important anyway. Besides, I always think of James Bond when the surname is slyly interjected and I’m sorry only secret agents are cool enough to pull that off. I am assuming you are smart enough to know I am not a secret agent. I resettle the ice on my hand, yeah, not a secret agent.
The chair across the Principal’s desk is leather bound and sealed with gold studs. The silence between us is hauntingly loud, like someone is in the background screaming and we should do something. We should get up and do something, but a concentrated quiet has tied us down. I am used to this weight so she shatters it first. She really doesn’t have a chance. I’m an expert at ignoring the screaming silence.
I won’t bore you by describing what she says. It is all questions and corresponding shrugs and half answers on my part. I do get the grim and foreboding glare though, then the words. “Your mother will be here shortly.”
I think the bag of water starts leaking, or like me, spontaneously sweats when hearing those eight syllables. “You shouldn’t have bothered her.”
“You are being suspended, Meredith. Don’t you realize this is a serious matter?” Her tone has turned up two octaves on the annoyance scale.
I sigh. For all the trouble I wish I had at least aimed better.
****
My mom drives more cautiously than my 78 year old Nana, so when she blows through the yellows changing to red, first I hold on to something. Second, I glance at her, awaiting some other crashing force to hit the air. Yet, since she stepped into the Principal’s office she has hardly said anything. This new person scares me.
We pull into the driveway. It’s only long enough to be a parking space really, so I call it the parkingway. Without a glance at me, my mom slowly clicks off the engine and proceeds to just sit there blankly. I reach for the handle and it whips into the lock position.
“Well that’s creepy.”
“Don’t,”
I am brilliant enough to know I should not provoke her with a response, but I have a good one, right there tickling the back of my throat. I swallow it down.
“Why, Meredith? Why would you hit that boy?” The Principal liked that question too. “After everything with Jonathan and-” she stutters off in exasperation. She hates the sheer notion of exasperation. There is a lack of control in that particular emotion, and since Jonathan stopped living with us, she has shunned those types of feelings all together. In the moment when my family realized something was wrong with my older brother, my mother collapsed under the weight of helplessness and then fought for the little control she had left. This means to-do-lists with deep pen scratches that rip and bleed into the next sheet, a protective grip on the TV remote, and now apparently her manipulation over the door locks. It is always something.
A thread pops out near the handle and I begin to tug at it. The silence starts screaming when I don’t answer.
“Our family has suffered so much.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“Then you need to stop making it worse,” she yanks at the handle and my body starts at the echoing slam. I watch as she does not look back. Tears reach the ledge of my lower eyelid. I wipe furiously before they can jump.
****
The prospect of gathering around the table generations uneasy dread as the unsaid loiters in the air. My father is oblivious as he sets the silverware down. Heaviness surrounds him, hanging about the sad eyes and this is before he even knows. I doubt he’ll be surprised. I have been somewhat of a failure to this family for some time now. Mom comes up and tilts one of the forks to a better straightness. It is always something.
Dinner dwells in quiet chewing sounds. My Nana, who moved in only months ago, begins to shift the asparagus around precariously. I try not to smile when the dog flocks to her and I hear a different variance of furious chewing under the table.
A fork clatters to the plate. “Mother, really?”
A tiff arises as mom tries to scold the feisty old woman that raised her. Then as my mother keeps talking, my deeds of the day are divulged. I stare at my brother, Anthony, as he picks at his fish.
Nana speaks first. “Did you win? I bet you won.” She starts boxing with the air. “Mother!” My mom shouts. “Why are you encouraging this? She got suspended. This is going on her record. What kind of college will accept her now?”
“What happened, Meredith? Why did you punch him?” My dad asks pointedly.
“He was a jerk, that’s why. I only went up to him because of this one.” I gesture to Anthony. “He was being picked on.”
Anthony slides back the chair and it screeches on the hardwood, “Well who asked you to, huh? Who asked you to do anything?” He gets up from the table and tumbles upstairs. He was never the most graceful of creatures.
I excuse myself to follow the little drama queen. I pass Jonathan’s room with that hokey “keep out” sign. Right below it, a radioactive symbol still remains. Now it follows me like a vacant eye, evaluating and disapproving. Sometimes Jonathan could be like that too, a critical overseer judging my actions and trying to whip me into shape. If he were here he would be the one to tell me out straight how severely I messed up today.
My two brothers and I have hollered at each other enough in the past years that we all have come to the novel concept of knocking. Yet, I break that code by barging into Anthony’s room. “What the hell was that?” I bark in an urgent hush. His tears surprise me. I haven’t seen my younger brother cry since Jonathan had to leave.
“Why, Meredith? Why did you have to do anything?”
“Are you kidding me? Wallis was pushing you around. You think I am going to sit back like everyone else?”
“I was handling it!”
“Handling it? Handling it? I heard today this has been going on for a month.”
“Well, what do you think will happen now? Now, I am the kid that needs his older sister to fight for him.”
I sit back on my heels. You probably think this is stereotypical, but I was counting on my older brother to be the protector. Jonathan would have beaten up any boy who mistreated me or Anthony. Well, knowing Jonathan it would have been a firm talking to, but still, it would have been more socially acceptable. Does no one care that I am trying, and furthermore I didn’t pick my gender?
“I didn’t mean to punch him, but you heard what Wallis said right? You heard what he said after I came over and started yelling at him?”
Anthony stares at me with these blue eyes of his. He is the only one that managed to inherit them and something so transparent and potent lies within those irises.
“Yeah, I heard him.”
I sit down, but don’t try to touch him. He is too cool nowadays to be hugged. He normally squirms away from them anyway.
“We stick together.” I meant it to be a profound sentiment, but it comes out in question format. Deep down I don’t know if we can stick together, or if something has already ripped this family too far apart.
****
Shamefully, I do not know how to get to Jonathan without some form of map even though he has been in the place for weeks. It is an unnerving drive, one of self-doubt and condemnation. I am trying feverishly to understand the world and the people in it. The road ahead seems to have one up on me, having both direction and purpose.
I am a little new to the whole driving thing, but you’d think any old parking space would be like the parkingway at home, but it’s not. The parking lot is slanted slabs angled for me, but somehow I still manage to park off kilter.
Inside the building plain opaque white surrounds everything, with the splash of color in some two day old flowers kind of limping over the edge of a vase. Stiff blue carpet with the vacuum strokes still present lines the halls. I sign in on one of those clipboards with the pen fastened by a chain.
The longest part of my journey lies in the stretch of hallway between room 110 and 134. An elongated mirror with a brass like finish seems to travel with me, but I don’t look at the girl inside the frame. Then I am standing there, outside the visitation room. The double wide doors are nothing special so I can’t exactly tell you why it fascinates me and stalls my movement. Then I push it forward into the community living space. I need something to distract me, something to mess with. Cafeteria like tables are sturdy slabs of plaster so I find the lose threads on my sweater and start pulling.
Jonathan comes in cautiously, the lack of confidence the most troubling difference. “Meredith?”
“Yeah, hey” I bring up my hand like he doesn’t know where to go.
He sits down and small talk tumbles forth like a toddler learning to walk. We are incredibly bad at it; even our two year age difference and genetic ties cannot seem to mend this unseen fault line that zigzags in the foot of linoleum between us.
Then he gets to a point I already know might be coming. “You told mom and dad what I said to you last time you came right?”
“Jonathan, I-”
“You told them I don’t need this crap right? That I don’t need the medication? If Ronny and those guys would have just stopped talking shit about me in the first place I wouldn’t even be here.”
“Jonathan,” I breathe. I don’t want to tell him that Ronny and those other guys don’t exist. I’ve been brave enough before and now I press my lips together, knowing where that road leads.
“I just wanted to come by and tell you that I won’t ever let anyone say anything about you. You got that?” This is not going as planned. It is not as easy as talking with him about directors and film stars and the predictability of the movies. There was a time, a time before all this, with buttered popcorn, the sunken couch and just me and him talking, critiquing, and laughing. My love of movies emerged as I reclined on that couch with him beside me, watching picture after picture. I haven’t seen a movie since he was right there next to me.
“Listen, Meredith, that is nice and all but it is Ronny that started this. We just need to stop him.”
Stop him? These words jar me.
Maybe I was kidding myself when I say I understand my motive for punching Wallis. Yes, there were words and there was unharnessed anger, but something else too. A tangible threat stood in front of me and I did something about it. Stopping Ronny? I can’t punch back false sounds or monstrous hallucinations.
So I don’t confirm or reassure my brother like I do every time he brings up our parents. All I say is, “We stick together.”
“Yeah sure, so have you told Mom and Dad? You did, right? I mean you told them all about how I am better. They would never have to call the cops or anything like that again.”
I am failing my mission. The right words to explain why I punched or tried to punch Wallis are stuck in my throat. As I clamber down that long span of hallway, the silence stretches out before me and instead of screaming I think it laughs. It laughs at the fact that I hear nothing and will continuously hear nothing while my brother endlessly waits for the voices to cease.
If this were a movie it would have wrapped up nicely, a bow and everything. Maybe I don’t need to wrap it up for you. Maybe you understand I heard a bad rumor that Anthony was getting bullied and then I saw a sixteen year old push my brother down into the dirt. Then I ran and then I yelled; strong words filled with semi-intelligent, semi-clichéd threats to end the pushing. Then there was the retort, ugly enough for my fury to boil over. By the end of the hallway, I am again pulling at the ends of my sweater and the threads start to unravel.
****
Anthony and Nana are killing dozens of aliens when I walk in. It is only when I ask Nana, “When did you get the grenade launcher?” that they notice me.
“Level fifteen, dear,” she says.
Anthony and I establish eye contact. The tension between us intensifies; like we have stepped into an old western, each waiting for the other to draw. “I was wondering if you wanted to watch a movie,” I ask him.
Eyebrows arch and then furrow. “Like, like you and Jonathan?”
“Yeah, like me and Jonathan.”
He becomes unsure, evaluating to see if there is some terrible trick. Then gets up and proceeds to trip on his way to make popcorn.
“That’s why I am the one with the grenade launcher,” my Nana says as she wraps the cord around the controller.
“Yeah, sometimes he needs a little help, huh?”
A serious expression crisscrosses her face. “Sometimes we all do.”
I smile at the simplicity of her assertion, than absorb the meaning. My family may be cracked and in need of some repair. Broken? Maybe, but still defendable, always defendable.
THE END