1st 5 Pages January Workshop - Lee

Name: Betty Lee
Genre: Young Adult Speculative Fiction
Title: THE BOY WHO EATS SADNESS

I’m leaning against my hand-me-down Chevy Malibu station wagon’s back bumper, arms crossed, knees braced together. The smell of gasoline in my nose is some screwed up comfort, but it’s still comfort. And I need it today.

The scratched-all-to-crap, painted with a fully nostalgic image of a grizzly bear on its back paws U-Haul trailer looks like a threat. All these stickers that say the damage has been reported, plastered all over the bear and every corner of this thing, and it still looks dangerous.

My dad clears his throat, and I try hard to remember all the reasons this moment should feel so good.

Escape.

Anonymity.

Finally.

It’s a fact. High school goes down easy for some girls. Like my best friend Eli’s dying-special; rum and Coke, heavy on the rum mixed with (lukewarm) RC cola. You know that kind, the girls who are basically sex on legs? For them it’s four years of tests, and boyfriends, and the occasional poorly timed blemish getting in the way of a truly prime selfie.

Yeah, I had one year where I flew sort of under the radar like the other semi-outcasts. And summers with Eli next to the ocean.
 
The other three years, and I’m not exaggerating, were a bit like how I’d picture hell, if I believed in that crap.

Sure, I turned into one of those girls with the right body: boobs big enough that I buy bras at specialty stores in the city, and legs that make most skirts look like minis even when they’re not supposed to. I turned into that girl the first week of sophomore year, almost overnight. Just in time for this guy who’s lived down the street from me since forever’s asshole mom to get freaked out by the boob and legs combo. Thomas’s mom must think she’s the queen of the street. No wait, her ego’s grown. She’s queen of the town, now.

Which wouldn’t bother me at all. But she went and leaked my status, and it doesn’t matter how many bad Sex Ed classes the people at my high school were forced to sleep through, Hannibal Hamlin High has pretty much been avoiding me like I have the plague ever since.

And in a way, I do.

HIV, it’s viral. Get it?

Okay, that’s not funny. But Eli would laugh. Even now, he’d laugh.

My stomach rumbles, and I’m half-thirsty, half-irritated I have to wait until tomorrow to jet when I remember how even the school’s do-good, friend-to-all, volunteer-nut Kate G. stopped making eye contact with me in the halls after she found out my big, bad secret. She actually transferred to the Catholic school after that.

Dad clears his throat again and I’m drawn out of my mind and back to the problem at hand.

“Looks pretty low to the ground. Don’t you think?” I ask my dad, shifting my weight from the wagon so I can throw a sneakered foot on top of the hitch.

He grabs hold of my arm and pushes me up so I’m balanced on it. He says, “Jump,” and I do. But I’m not sure why.

I guess this is growing up.

The station wagon’s orange, and old as dirt, but it’s the only car at our house that doesn’t break down. Even dad’s new-to-him truck has been in the shop twice since January. But really, the best thing about the station wagon isn’t that is still has a cassette player, it’s that it’s all mine. It used to be mom’s. The first thing she bought for herself after she left her parent’s house. The only thing, she says, she held onto from back then, other than me and dad.
 
Mom’s had this car since she was fifteen, strung out on what they were calling horse, and visibly pregnant. I’m thinking that was a piece of luck, staring at the house, feeling dad’s hand holding onto my arm like he’s not quite ready to let go, imagining what this place would look like if dad ever gets around to re-painting the clapboard.

Dad lets go of my arm, backs up onto our decidedly not-green lawn. “Looks okay to me.”

“You sure?”

He’s about to respond, his head tilted a little off to the left like he does when he’s thinking, when my mom, who is inside the house, in the kitchen probably, starts screaming.

My dad stops.

The world stops.

I choke mid-inhale, waiting, not sure what kind of scream this is. When the noise becomes clear, she’s screaming my name.

Dad is about to offer to go inside on my behalf. I know he’ll offer. But he knows I’ll shrug it off.

I jut my chin at Ori, who is playing on the lawn with an underinflated football. “Stay here,” I order her.

And dad says, “If it’s bad…”

I know what he means so I don’t waste my breath on a response. I run up the three concrete steps leading to the kitchen door, swing the screen open, and catch sight of my mom. She’s covered in blood.
 
Well, not covered. But there’s enough of the red stuff to turn my stomach.

Blood and me don’t get along. For reasons.

But mom needs my help. Not dad’s. Certainly not Ori’s. My help.

The kitchen is really where my mom’s at her best. Even now—screaming, bloody—this is better than the other options.

I step further into the kitchen. “What did you do to yourself?”

Sometimes her vision blurs. Sometimes her hand jerks, her muscles get weak. Sometimes she’s just tired out.

“The knife, um, it slipped."

When I pull her hand close to take a look, I can see her index finger is cut open along the secondary fold line. And it looks deep. Maybe to the bone. I grab a dishtowel from the drawer, but mom says, “Not that one.” So I choose another. They’re all ragged and over-washed so I don’t get why she cares. But there’s no point in upsetting mom. She doesn’t handle stress well.

I take her hand in mine and put pressure on the wound. Her blood is mine, after all.

The first aid cabinet is well stocked with supplies.

I’m trying to get the Band-Aid to hold the edges of the wound closed, when Ori, who’s only four, who doesn’t listen, who doesn’t get it at all, comes running into the kitchen, the football tucked under one arm. She has dirt smeared under her eyes like the Friday night footballers do. I haven’t had the heart to tell her they use this grease stuff, not dirt.

Both mom and I yell at the same time: “Stop.”

Ori freezes on the spot, like it’s some kind of weird game. But then her face slips, and she starts to cry, tracks running through the dirt until she looks like we don’t bathe her.
 
I guess it sounds as if we’re mad at her. But we’re not.

Mom’s upset about all the blood. I’m only angry—and a bit nauseated—and taking it out on my kid sister.

It’s a damn stupid good thing I’m leaving. I used to think the anger would, I don’t know, fade. Instead, something inside me simmers. Last summer I convinced myself it was a little devil, or The Devil himself, brewing inside of me. And I can’t tell you how much I liked thinking the anger didn’t really belong to me.

Blaming it on someone—something—else felt damn good.