Then Dad, irrational Dad with his sudden manic anger and his conditional love, leaned right into my face and hissed, “I don’t know how we made you.” As I stared back at him, a switch flipped, and when Mom—pathetic, submissive Mom who pretended to be laid-back but actually just put up with all his shit—grabbed my shoulder, I whirled around and hit her with all my strength.
It felt…amazing. As if my emotions, normally ricocheting around my interior, had finally found an out. I marveled at how clear and lucid I felt, the way the spinning wheel had stopped.
We were at the top of the stairs, and Mom took a step back as she grabbed at her face. Her feet shuffled, her eyes like two moons, and then she was falling, her hands clawing at air, the wooden steps making awful knocking noises as they connected with her back, her side, her shoulder, and, finally, her head.
* * *
I heard a noise in the kitchen; my computer, announcing that I’d received a new email. I picked up the bottle of pills and padded back down the hallway, listening to the maraca shake of every step.
A cheerful email from Greg with a new password to try. It was somehow cute and sad, now that I knew I’d killed her: affable Greg unwittingly helping me track down this imaginary killer, someone Not Me who’d forced their way into Edie’s apartment to pick up a gun and push it against her temple. I imagined the rest of the Flip cam video playing out: It was probably Edie and this Jenna in there, in Edie’s own fucking apartment, having a drink or a smoke or a bump or whatever, and I’d hung out for a minute, biding my time, until Edie and I were alone and my anger could break out, torpedoing around the room as the music from two floors up made the ceiling shake. I imagined the moment the red drops hit my white shoes, how my drunk, panicking mind had made the most basic of scrambles: pushing the gun against her fingers, typing something simple into her big black laptop. A lash-out not that different from the hard shove I gave Josh, a sweet kid who’d had the bad fortune of meandering into my path. I wondered what switch he’d flipped, what innocent remark had awakened the orange-red rage in me. I closed my eyes, mentally replaying the video Tessa had shown me of that night. The church-organ-like blast of the semi’s horn, the chorus of screams. “I’m deleting this,” she’d said, “but…but I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
* * *
My father had put it only a little differently. “We’re going to say she slipped,” he said, gripping my arm so that it bruised brown and green, “but we aren’t going to forget this. You almost killed your mother.”
I didn’t accompany them to the hospital, instead locking myself in my room and watching out the window as the EMTs hoisted Mom into the ambulance, the side of her head soaked in blood. Dad paused to look up at me with pure hatred before clambering in after them. She had a severely sprained wrist and needed two stitches in her head, on a blob of scalp they had to first shave bare.
That Monday, I’d met Dr. Mahoney, a wiry-haired pediatric psychiatrist with a particular interest in aggression and disobedience. Every night for a week, we sat across from each other in uncomfortable armchairs, and through my braces I answered her questions in a small voice. Afterward I pressed my ear against her office door as she discussed with my mother everything wrong with me; “oppositional defiant disorder” seemed to be the problem, and the solution was both physical—weekly therapy, constant surveillance from the time I got home from school until bedtime, my door never closed, my computer time never unmonitored—as well as chemical. Three new pills appeared next to my dinner plate, and my parents eagerly watched me swallow them after we said grace.
The pills made me feel foggy and faraway, and for the first time in years, I could sleep at night. But that sleep had become a conduit for awful dreams: one where I found a long knife under my pillow and crept into the basement with it, then came upon Dad sitting on the weight bench in the dark. Another where we were at Uncle Bob’s farm with targets tacked to trees, my ungainly hands curled around a