Jake laughs. “You’re probably right. How did he turn out so good with such a crap male role model?”
“Are you kidding?” I ask. “He’s got you.”
Jake picks the dirt from under his fingernails. “Yeah. Right.”
“You’re going to play college hoops. You’re every kid’s hero. ASU send your letter yet?”
“Nah, not yet.”
I can tell it’s bugging him. The county paper already ran a story about the big shot from Cedar Hills signing with Gonzaga.
“It’s coming. They’re probably just fighting over who gets to hand-deliver it.”
He tries to smile.
“And hey,” I add, “you’re a better big brother than I ever had.”
Jake looks up. “I heard Kmart got clean and he’s living in Flagstaff.”
I shrug. “Wouldn’t know. He hasn’t come home in years. But I doubt it. My parents always have an address to forward stuff to, but he made us promise not to come find him. Easiest promise I’ve ever kept.”
I turn the spotlight off, and when her eyes adjust, the doe leads the fawn deeper into the trees, somewhere safe from pain-in-the-ass teenage boys.
We lean back against the tailgate, and it’s quiet for a minute. Not summer quiet, either, with the bugs and frogs in the background. Winter quiet, when everything’s gone to sleep.
Jake and I don’t do so well with quiet. Never have. So we both blurt something out at the same time.
I say, “Do you think God can make a spotlight so bright that even He can’t look into it?”
And at that exact moment, Jake says, “I think I might have a problem.”
At least, I think that’s what he says. But my voice is louder, and my conversation is easier, so that’s the road we roll.
Later that night, after I’ve showered all the sweat and grit from my skin, I still can’t shed the memory of that moment. And I realize I’ll never know what was down that other path, because it’s way too late to talk about it now.
carbon
hydrogen
nitrogen
oxygen
96 percent of your body is made
of those four elements.
One time
Daphne explained it to me with Legos,
even though I am smart enough to understand it without them.
96 percent of a person is built
with just those four bricks.
It matters how you connect them.
N2 is most of what we breathe
with every single breath.
In and out,
like waves on a shore.
H2O is water, and you can’t live without it.
H2O2 is hydrogen peroxide, and it will kill you.
C6H12O6 is glucose—plant sugar—if you connect it one way,
but
there are about a hundred other ways
to combine those same Legos,
and some of them are poisonous.
I build another molecule in my mind sometimes:
The one I looked up after the roof.
The one I’m most afraid of.
C18H21NO4
And then I break it apart
turn it into
water
sugar
air
so it can’t hurt anybody
it’s supposed to be helping.
carbon
hydrogen
nitrogen
oxygen
Four elements. Four words.
The ingredients
to make
or wreck
your world,
even if somebody tells you:
It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault.
When I see the text,
I rush it to Mom,
who rushes it to the police,
who track the text location
to an empty hill in the middle of nowhere.
The good news: fresh tire tracks.
The bad news: tires so old and bald
they don’t tell us anything.
It’s not your fault.
I hear her talking on the phone,
but it isn’t the police.
It’s the pharmacy, with four words
I hear on speaker
that make her worry lines even deeper:
“Too soon to fill.”
“But I’m out. I took them exactly like you said,
and I’m already out.”
“But I need them, especially with all that’s going on.”
“Yes, I understand. Two weeks. I’ll call back.”
She doesn’t understand,
because she doesn’t know
what I know.
She sits on the couch and buries her head in her hands,
so I sit down beside her
gentle like snow
and ask the question gently too.
“Mom, are there pills missing?”
“They counted wrong at the pharmacy.
And it’s not the first time.
I love Ashland Drug, but I’m transferring somewhere else.
It’s just too many mistakes.”
It’s not their fault, I want to tell her.
It’s not a mistake.
Is there a way to make her see without hurting her more?
“Painkillers?” I ask,
but not because of the pain in her face.
“No,” she says, shaken awake.
“I haven’t needed painkillers since my surgery.
Just my blood-pressure pills
and my sleeping pills.”
And I breathe a little easier because
maybe it was the pharmacy’s mistake.
But pills are pills are
carbon
hydrogen
nitrogen
oxygen
and I should probably tell her
what I saw
and what I know.
It’s not your fault.
That’s what Jake’s text said.
Except he’s wrong.
It is my fault.
Because I saw
and I knew
and I said nothing.
Still, I say nothing.
A Jake joke
from The Book of Luke and Jake:
A chemist walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a glass of H2O.”
His buddy says, “I’ll have a glass of H2O too.”
Then he died.
Jake promised himself that once the last refill from his surgery ran out, that would be it. No prescriptions, so no pills.
It almost worked too. He’d been toughing it out for nearly two weeks before one of the punks on the JV team left his locker open and Jake saw an orange prescription bottle on the top shelf.
It was Darius Ruckert’s locker. Jake recognized the Lakers sticker on the door. He laid a hand on the locker and nearly shut it before he remembered that Ruckert wasn’t injured—and saw that it wasn’t even his name on the bottle. He wasn’t doping, was he? That stuff would mess you up in a hurry.
Jake’s mind flashed back to the previous basketball season, when Ruckert had almost made varsity as a sophomore and Coach had asked Jake to take him under his wing. Hadn’t Jake promised to help Ruckert any way he could?
Now it was time to make good on that promise. Jake snagged the bottle and shut the locker. Ruckert might be a punk, but if Jake could save him from going down a dangerous path, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
He was going to flush them right there in the locker room. He really was. But Kolt came in just then, so
