After my mother’s funeral, the weeks passed and my rage grew. Every word my father spoke to Drew cut through me, tearing through old scars and leaving me weaker and more alone. My emotions pulled in so many directions. One minute, I would despise everything about my father, blaming him for Mom’s death and for everything that had gone wrong in my life. The next, I would yearn for the attention he gave to my brother. I would pore over my psyche, trying to find what was so wrong with me, what part of my person caused everyone to shy away in disgust. I tore at myself as much as I hated them, silently crying in the darkness of my room and slamming my fist into the cinder-block walls of the basement when no one was home.
These feelings festered and burned. Simmering up but remaining below the surface for a time. Then one night, the most mundane act sent me over the edge. My father came home with a pizza. He called Drew and me down. I sat at the counter as my father lifted the box top so my brother could pull out a slice. Then he closed it without even a glance in my direction.
Of all the things that had happened in that house—all of the pain and the loneliness and the confusion—it was that pizza that broke my back. It was as if I slipped out of my own body as I leaned across my father, slamming my shoulder into his arm as I reached for the box. He staggered back. Maybe he just didn’t expect the contact. Maybe I caught him off-balance. But I moved him, easily. A horrible feeling of strength surged through me. He glared at me and for the first time I saw a damaged, frail old man instead of the domineering force of my past.
Our eyes met. I swore that he felt it, too. And in that moment, maybe his anger and hatred matched mine. Even as I considered this, though, I looked to Drew. The envy I felt, though I still can’t understand it, burned even darker. And maybe my father saw that, as well.
“When’s your game tomorrow, Andrew?” he asked.
Drew looked up from his pizza. “Tomorrow . . . ? Three.”
He nodded. “Great. I can cut out of work early. I’m looking forward to it. Understand it’s a big one.”
Drew looked utterly confused. His eyes shifted for just an instant, looking to me as if he was putting the pieces of a puzzle together.
“Conference rivals,” he said.
My hand hit the table harder than I meant it to as I quickly rose from my seat. The sound echoed through the kitchen. It may have rattled the window over the sink. Yet neither my brother nor my father even flinched as I stormed away.
AT THREE O’CLOCK the next morning, I rose from my bed. I had not slept for a minute. My mind had raged, plotted, and fantasized, eventually settling on something I had never truly considered before.
It started with Carter. How my father had reacted that day. Then I saw him standing outside with my mother. I remembered how he had devoured that neighbor’s attention. My mother’s funeral. The look of hunger in my father’s eyes.
Then it came back to me. I remembered the one time that my father turned on Drew. The one time he spoke to Drew the way he spoke to me. It was when I beat that stranger up. When the police brought me home. Their car parked out front. The lights flashing for everyone to see.
I told you, he screamed, to make sure he stops embarrassing this family.
More of my father’s words came back to me then. Words from the day when I was ten and I hit Carter with a stick.
This is my neighborhood. I work hard so we can live here. And I’m not going to have the mothers telling stories about my son.
I closed my eyes again and I saw my hands wrapped in athletic tape. The vision felt so real. Like it was happening in the moment, all over again.
Why would my hands be taped?
As the question formed in my head, I felt it. I felt the first slamming into the side of my head. I felt my brain shifting, compressing against my skull. I felt the cement floor, painted blood-red and as cold as ice, striking the side of my face.
My eyes opened and the darkness was gone. My bedroom was gone. I was in the basement. Instead of looking up at the ceiling fan above my bed, I was looking at Drew’s face, and that thin half smile. At his fists, taped like mine, balled up and threatening between us. The cold basement floor against the bottom of my feet. And my father’s half smile as he watched.
No!
The dream, if that is what it was, flashed back into the ether. Although disoriented, I was back in my room. I rose from my bed, an eerie calm falling over me. I made no sound as I moved out of my bedroom and into Drew’s. It was dark, but I could see him in his bed. I could make out his face through the gloom. His eyes were closed. He breathed with such a slow regularity that the envy flared again.
How can he sleep so peacefully?
I pushed it down and stepped up to the side of the bed. I hovered over him, my fists balling up at my sides, and I pictured my fingers wrapping around his throat.