JAMEY’S SISTER

My dad hit me last night, twice, one side of the head and then the other—not very hard, but it was awful. He never hit me before, ever. For one thing I’m a girl, plus I’m already fifteen, so it’s too late. Anyway, after those two little clouts he went over and took it out on the wall, making these horrible choking sounds.

I added it to the letter I’m always writing in my head to the president:

Mr. President, I wish you could have seen my dad last night. I wish you could see what he is going through, what we are all going through because of you.

Me and Jamey wrote to each other a lot before he died, not e-mails but regular letters in envelopes with stamps and all that. It was so exciting when one would come. Sometimes he put all our names on the envelope, in his bad handwriting: MR. AND MRS. CARMICHAEL AND MELANIE. But a lot of times it was just my name. He wrote about how hot it was over there, especially with all the stuff they had to wear and carry around, and about the guys he was with, his buddies he called them, and some of the things they would do to pass the time, goofy games they made up, because it got pretty boring a lot. He never talked about battles and such. He didn’t want to worry us. All he would sometimes say was “Today was pretty bad,” but he never went into details. He asked me a lot of questions to answer in my next letter, about school and such, basketball and such, and how he hoped I was having a lot of fun, that I should try to have enough fun for us both because he wasn’t having much. Now and then, though, he’d say something about the way he felt being over there, how proud he was, serving his country, protecting it from another 9/11.

But Mr. President, Iraq wasn’t the one. Saddam Hussein wasn’t the guy. So why do you keep pretending like he was? What are you up to?

This girl at school, Miriam Holbrook, keeps telling me stuff. She’s on the basketball team, our center. She’s a senior and I’m just a sophomore but we ended up talking a lot after practice. She takes the same bus home and we got to talking about Iraq, especially after Jamey got killed. She’s been telling me stuff you don’t get from the news, the news on TV anyway. At first I didn’t want to hear. She gets everything from her parents and they’re both college professors. Those people are always against the government, always thinking they’re smarter than everyone else.

Liberals.

My dad hates liberals. He thinks they should all be put in camps until the war is over so they won’t be out there saying stuff that gives the enemy encouragement and gives our troops discouragement. After the war is over they can come out again and shoot off their mouths all they want, but not until. Which is how I felt at first about Miriam and her parents. Lock them up. Shut them up.

But let’s face it, Mr. President, you’re the one who should be locked up. You’re the one. You know you are.

At first, like I said, I told Miriam I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t call her a liberal or anything, I just told her I didn’t want to hear it. She said she understood how I felt.

I told her no she didn’t.

Jamey was the sweetest, most wonderful person I ever knew and I’m not just saying that because he was my brother but because it’s totally true. Anyone who knew him would tell you the exact same thing. But Miriam never even met him. So when she said she understood, I looked at her and told her, “No, you don’t.”

She nodded. “You’re right.”

Well, I liked Miriam. She was a liberal but she shut up when you asked her to. So for a while we went back to just talking about school and basketball and Coach Murray’s mood swings.

But I started noticing the president’s eyes.

My dad has him on TV whenever he’s on. Dad likes him a lot. He says we’re lucky he was president when we got hit on 9/11. He says somebody like Bill Clinton, some liberal like Clinton, or Al Gore if he had won, they’d go running straight to the United Nations and there’d be a lot of meetings and then they would have meetings about the meetings they had. But this president said, “Let’s go get ’em.” Dad had a picture of him on the living room wall above this little shrine he built to Jamey. He had this table against the wall with Jamey’s picture in his marine dress blues, all his medals and documents laid out, even his varsity letter for baseball, little American flags all around. And up on the wall, smiling, a framed photograph of the president.

He has these eyes, did you ever notice?

He has these shifty little eyes. Know what he looks like? When he’s up there in front of people, or talking into the camera, do you know what he looks like? A little boy, a naughty little boy telling lies, with a little trace of a smirk because he’s getting away with it.

I told Miriam about his eyes. She just nodded. She knew what I meant. But then she changed the subject. We had a major game coming up and she talked about that. But I didn’t care about the game coming up or Coach Murray or school or anything except the president and his shifty little beady eyes.

Or how cheerful he was.

I was watching him on my little TV in my room one night. He was answering questions from a roomful of reporters and I just kept praying, I actually had my hands pressed together, praying so hard for one of them to stand up and ask him how it feels when he thinks about all the people who are dead because of the lies he told. But they just asked about this and that, and he looked so cheerful up there, and used a nickname for someone he called on, calling him “Stretch,” and everyone laughed, and he laughed too, kind of bobbing around with this smirky little chuckle, and I started screaming and couldn’t stop. My mom came in and turned it off, then grabbed me and held me and I held her and we ended up crying together, just rocking and crying really hard.

But Mr. President, I don’t want to cry. That’s what everyone does, they just cry, all heartbroken but proud, so proud because their son gave his life to save his country. But as you know, Mr. President, that is bullshit, excuse my language but that is total fucking bullshit.

I told Miriam about being tired all the time.

We were on the bus. I was really bad at practice that afternoon, really sloppy. I couldn’t focus. I felt so worn out. I told Miriam how hating the president was wearing me down. She didn’t say anything. She just took my hand. No girl ever did that before, and a month ago I would have snatched it back, thinking she was a lesbian or something. But I let her hold it. We held hands all the way to my stop without talking.

They were watching a movie, Mom on the couch, Dad in his chair. I said hi and went to my room and laid on my bed on my back in the dark.

Jamey got blown up by a land mine. He stepped on a land mine and it blew his legs off. They helicoptered him to the hospital but he died on the way. That was what it said, “died en route.” The last letter I got from him he talked about how soon he was going to be home, only six more weeks.

Mr. President, I don’t know if Jamey knew about you and your lies. I hope not. I hope he still thought he was over there trying to keep us safe. I hope he died thinking he was protecting me, instead of how he got tricked by you, how we all did.

I fell asleep. I had this dream that Jamey was back. He was dead but he was allowed back, just for a visit. Then he would have to leave again, go back to being dead again. I kept asking him why he had to go back. I kept pestering him about it. I was totally ruining his visit. Then I woke up.

I was still in my clothes. It was late, after eleven. They were in bed. I got up to go pee. I was on my way to the bathroom, passing the Jamey shrine. It was lit up so you could see it no matter what time, Jamey in his uniform looking so proud, looking like a sucker, the president grinning from the wall above.

I took down the president and flung him across the room like a Frisbee. Then I swept my arm across the table, sending Jamey and his medals to the floor. Then I pulled the table down. Then Dad was there. He grabbed me and dragged me into my room and hit me with his open hand on one side of the head, then the other. Then he went over to the wall and started punching it and punching it, making these sobbing, choking sounds.

My mom came in and we went over to him. He had his forehead and his hands against the wall now, just crying, loud and horrible. We stood on either side of him, patting his shoulders and saying things.

Mr. President, do you know what you are? You are a monster. You don’t have horns or hoofs or fangs or fur, but that is what you are, a monster.

That’s how I try to think of him now. I try to think of him as some kind of monster instead of an actual human being. It’s better that way. Otherwise I can’t stand it. Otherwise I hate him so much I don’t think I can stand it.