I consider for a moment. I try to find something appealing about each of their scenarios, but I can’t. I search to come up with one of my own, but come up with nothing. All I can think about is my lost shoes and the lost hamster scratching from inside the bathroom wall.
“I dunno. I never really thought much about it. Is that kind of fucked up?”
Dom turns his head and looks me in the eye. “Never? Not even once?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s fucked up, but you’re gonna have to start thinking about it sooner or later. The future catches up with you. You don’t want to be standing there like a chump with nothing to do when it shows up. Not saying you have to plan out college and every little detail, but you know… maybe think about stuff you want. Stuff you dream about that you can’t have now.”
“I guess I’ve been busy dreaming about stuff that already happened instead of stuff that might happen, or that I want to happen.”
“That’s the cool thing about the past,” Bronwyn says, “It’s temporary. If you don’t like the one you have, you can just keep making new ones until you find one that’s a good fit.”
I don’t know how to find the future, or where to start looking for it. I close my eyes and wish I could be as strong as Bronwyn; strong enough to look at the prototype of me and shove her down in a hole where no one can see her anymore.
13. MIND RIOT
FINDING COMFORT ON the floor of a strange, abandoned bus is easier than I thought it might be, but the three of us had slept crammed together in stranger, darker places. When Bronwyn was still a Theresa who had no big city plans for Bronwyn, we used to sit in a big drainage pipe that we believed was a mysterious tunnel that led to other worlds. Every time, we’d come out of our magical tunnel stinking and smeared with ditch slime. Until Theresa’s dad found us in there one day and grounded her for two weeks. He told Aunt Stacey, who completely flipped, crying and shouting at me about how we could have drowned in there.
Then Dom and the Zombies moved in next door, Theresa’s dad split for good and Dominic took us on an expedition past the field at the end of our street. Underneath a big cottonwood tree, there was a hole in the ground and a ladder. We climbed down there and found nothing but a big, empty concrete room.
“Some old fallout shelter,” he’d told us. “But now there’s no house or anything around here, so it’s just an underground room without a door.”
It was dirty, damp and full of spiders, but it was our place. When Indra and Aunt Stacey screamed at one another, when Theresa ran out of the house during another one of her mom’s drunken tirades, and when Dom could no longer tolerate the hospital smell of his home, we went underground.
We protected ourselves and each other from the fallout.
The bus is uncomfortable. Unfamiliar. A part of me wants us to be back in our hole in the ground, but somehow, being squished together on the floor, combined with my fatigue and gravel-bruised face makes me tired enough to feel like I’m floating. I know Aunt Stacey will make me feel terrible when I get back home in the morning, but for now, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter, so I close my eyes because thinking about it too much, it’s a mindfuck.
“It isn’t fair,” a younger version of me said.
“What’s fair?” Indra narrowed her eyes, leaned down and put her hands on my shoulders. She squeezed. Hard. “Nothing is fair. Nothing will ever be fair. There is no fair. Take that word out of your vocabulary. It's useless.”
“Why do you have to go? Why can’t you just stay here? Or take me with you?”
“Because you’re a kid.”
It didn’t matter how much I cried at her, how much she cried with me. I threw myself at her, put my arms around her, pulling her tighter, closer, as though I could make myself disappear into her and make her the safe place she used to be.
She tried to explain it to me as best she could, as much as she could. As many times as she said, “Me and Aunt Stacey are driving each other crazy,” or “There’s no way in hell we can get along,” I couldn’t hear anything except that she was leaving me.
I couldn’t see anything except for a piece of myself being removed. A piece that I would still be able to feel, but wouldn’t be able to touch.
Like a phantom limb. A real mindfuck.
A month later, when Aunt Stacey came to the school and pulled me out of class, her face blotchy and red, her eyes watery and puffed up, she refused to explain to me what Indra had done to herself. She used phrases that everyone uses, but none of them were really the truth.
“She’s passed away.”
“Accidental overdose.”
None of those things were what happened. I knew that. I tried to tell Aunt Stacey, who responded to my sister’s overdose by taking me to a therapist. I tried to tell the therapist how there was no accidental anything, that the images in Indra’s mind got worse and worse every time they flashed through her mind until they killed her.
That the way memory shows you things, it just isn’t fair.
It’s a real mindfuck.
Bronwyn’s screaming brings me out of sleep. Before I can process anything, something hard hits the top of my skull. I open my eyes to a confusing flurry of arms, feet, and hands. I start to pull myself up when someone grabs me by the armpit and I hear Bronwyn scream again. It’s her who’s grabbed me and pulled me up. Now on my feet, eyes open, I
