Leonard laughed. His straight, shoulder-length blond hair was nearly white. They were best friends, yin and yang. He packed the pipe and passed it to Girl.
“No, I told you, I’m not getting high today.”
They laughed and pushed her back, so she fell against a tree behind her.
“Oh yes you are,” Frank said. He held her nose shut, and Leonard held the pipe to her lips. She had no choice but breathe through the pipe. The boys were harmless, really. No one tried to kiss her or anything like that, and it’s not like Girl had kicked them or fought back or anything.
When she woke up with a cough and fever the next day, she knew it was from getting high. “I should have fought harder,” she thought to herself. She felt so sick—she couldn’t remember ever feeling so awful. A few days later, Suzy got sick as well, but with her asthma she got it worse. She lay in her mother’s bed, struggling to breathe. When she had an asthma attack, her inhaler didn’t help, so her mother bundled her up and drove her to the hospital. They couldn’t stop her asthma attack, so the doctors induced a coma and put her on a ventilator. Girl stood in the doorway, watching the blue machine beep and chuff as her best friend’s chest rose and lowered. Her eyelids were taped shut. Girl knew it was all her fault.
Mother flew up from New York to be with Girl, because the doctors said Suzy had only a one in a thousand chance of recovering. Suzy survived, but it was decided that Girl would move back to New York, so Suzy could go to a residential hospital program in Colorado. That May, when school ended, Girl boarded a plane for New York. George traveled in baggage in a plastic crate. She wouldn’t leave him behind.
notes from the fourth wall
cicadas
to survive my father, i created an exoskeleton, like a cicada
I had not seen my father in several years, and I had no aching desire to change that. When I thought about my father, I felt nothing. He wanted to visit last summer, and I didn’t know how to say no, for my children’s sake, if nothing else. Dementia was overtaking him, and the minute hand of the clock was stealing the person I used to know—every day he was a little less the man I remembered. But I still did not want him to come. Whatever he had or had not been to me, it no longer mattered—I was a parent now, no longer in need of parenting.
When I was a child in my mother’s house, my brother and I spent our summers in the backyard. The grass was thick and dense beneath my bare feet, and the dark brown dirt always stained the pads of my toes. We carved fingernail x’s in our mosquito bites, in an effort to remove the itch. The cicada buzz reverberated in my ears, the tinny radio-static soundtrack of summer. I would find their discarded robot-alien shells as clinging detritus on the tire-tread bark of the maple tree. The exoskeletons were the color of toast, slightly translucent. It took me a long time to realize the shells were empty and could not bite, and when I mustered the courage to touch them, they crackled into broken shards beneath my fingers.
I had spent a year plotting my father’s death when I was fourteen—I was going to push him down the brown carpeted stairs of his condo, and then inject alcohol into his veins and make it look like an accident. He was a doctor—syringes weren’t hard to come by, and I was overly confident in my ability to push a needle through someone else’s skin. But in the end, I didn’t have hands that would push my father down the stairs, no matter how much my rage instructed them to. My hands were useless wounded birds controlled by my heart, which still yearned for a Daddy who loved me.
The years of unrequited love drained me of all emotion toward my father. I haven’t even been able to muster up anger in longer than I can remember. I have been full-grown for quite some time now. It was too late for him to return my golden-retriever-like love, to fulfill all those hastily made promises, or to take me to the father-daughter dinner dance. Whatever I hadn’t gotten from him I no longer wanted. But his impending visit made me think I should try one more time, at least to appease everyone else. The night before he came into town, I thought about his recent attachment disorder diagnosis. Was it fair to shut him off if he was inherently incapable of feeling emotion? Hadn’t he tried the best he was able, small though those attempts had been? He sent me stuffed animals each Christmas—weird ones, granted, like a three-foot-long snake made out of neckties or a weasel instead of the husky I had asked for—but he made time to go to a toy store and bought me something each year. He wrapped them up and wrote out a name tag with his favorite black pen. His handwriting was more familiar than his face. My father was always excited to see me, scooping me up in a tight bear hug and crushing my child-soft cheek against his black-and-red plaid Woolrich jacket.
He didn’t think it mattered that I only saw him twice a year as a child, and I have learned how quickly time passes when you are an adult compared to the never-ending feel of a child’s summer and the eternity of fifteen minutes when I rubbed the toes of my shoes in the brown-gray dirt and tried to guess how much time had passed.
I decided to attempt to loosen my
