14. NEW DAMAGE
WHAT’S HAPPENING IS a screaming, sleepy, blur of shouts, kicks, and fists. For a moment, Bronwyn and I cling to one another, shaking and screaming. Then we lunge at them. Dom still hasn’t made it to his feet. The Nova’s driver is holding a half-full bottle of something that looks like cheap bourbon. Both of them reek of alcohol. I throw my small amount of useless weight at the driver, who stumbles backward. I don’t know what to do. I’m panicked. I can’t fight. I yell and swing my fists around, hoping to hit something that won’t hit me back.
There’s the sound of glass breaking. The Nova’s passenger runs out of the bus, calling us losers again as he goes. The driver pushes me away and I land on my ass on the floor of the bus. For an instant, I see Dominic up on his feet. The driver swings at him, the bottle still in his hand and I don’t understand what’s happening.
There is a look of horror on the driver’s face as he drops the bottle. It clangs and rolls on the floor of the bus.
Dom’s hand goes to his neck, then he drops on the floor next to me.
Bronwyn screams.
The Nova’s driver runs out. I hear them shouting outside, then the sound of a car’s tires grinding on the gravel as the engine revs, then begins to fade away.
I grab Dom and shout at Bronwyn, “Go get help!” She doesn’t move. “Theresa! Go get somebody!” I’m shrieking. Hysterical. The voice coming from my body, I don’t recognize it. It belongs to a stranger. A terrified stranger.
She staggers out. I look down at Dom, try to cover his neck where the blood is coming out. He’s making thick, wet, choking sounds, his mouth opening and almost closing like a fish trying to get air.
“Dom… Dom… it’s okay.” The stranger’s voice coming out of my body is sobbing. “Dom, Dom… please, please… wait. Just wait. We’re getting help. Just wait.”
I’m holding his head in one hand and trying to hold the blood inside of his neck with the other. What I see in his eyes is fear and impossible sadness and a goodbye no one is ready for.
What I see is something inside my best friend moving further and further away from me. I sit there helpless, holding his poor, scabby Mohawk head, my hands covered in his blood as everything inside of him that ever talked with me, laughed with me and nagged me slips away off into some distant dark where I can’t follow or reach to touch him or make him hear me.
All I want is to make him hear me.
Bronwyn comes back. It only took her a few minutes to run back to the 7-Eleven and call the police. It might as well have taken several hours. She enters the bus and says nothing. She falls to her knees and helps me hold on to what had been our best friend moments before.
That’s how they find us, when the red and blue lights appear, when the sounds of voices and static coming through police radios enter this piece of shit bus and shake the silence.
15. THE DAY I TRIED TO LIVE
THE LAST OF the day begins to disappear behind the mountains. To the west, the sun setting behind the Rockies creates an illusion of a great love-colored inferno that threatens to incinerate us all if not for the great, jagged wall of rock protecting us. I take my time, moving slow through the parking lot of the Broken Arrow greeting card company. Across the highway, the lot at the IBM building is still full of cars.
My rusty orange Datsun 210 is the ugliest, saddest car here, though I know none of these other people are as proud of their vehicles as I am of mine. Aunt Stacey loaned me five hundred dollars. “You can pay me back after you start getting regular paychecks,” she’d said.
Then she made me promise never to hitchhike again.
In all the years I’d lived with my mother’s sister, I never really knew her until my best friend died. When she picked me up at the police station that night, I tried to show her the blood under my fingernails. I don’t know why. I thought I could make her understand something, though I can’t remember what it was.
Her mousy brown hair had been clipped up in one of those plastic clips but had started falling out so that plastic and hair hung crooked from her head. Her flannel shirt and sweatpants looked as though she’d just picked them up off the floor and put them on. Purplish-gray circles under her eyes, she put her hand over her mouth when she saw me and burst out crying when I showed her my fingernails.
She touched my cheek where it had started to bruise and I looked at her. I almost didn’t recognize her.
I’d never seen the human being living inside my Aunt Stacey before that moment.
That night must have been when Aunt Stacey saw me for the first time, too. From that night on, she stopped sending me to the therapist alone and started going with me. It’s strange how easy it was, once we tried, to just spend time being broken together.
When I told the therapist and Aunt Stacey that I didn’t know where to look for the future, they did that concerned adult thing. That attempt at guidance thing. It’s hard to explain to people who already know who they are and what they like that you have no fucking idea what you want to do with your time because you don’t know how to like or dislike a thing, or how to do anything.
So, Aunt Stacey said we should try a whole bunch of things, that something was bound to
