liked his quotes. He kept some of them taped to the wall of his study, and sometimes when he’d pull John in to talk to him about his son’s latest fuck up, he’d just point to one of the sayings. “Stupidity is a learned behavior” was one of his favorites, but that night at the hospital, John knew that the days of his father pointing to faded pieces of paper in the hopes of giving him guidance were over.
“You are not my son,” Richard said. “If it weren’t for your mother, I would toss your useless ass onto the street so fast your head would spin.” He slapped John on the side of the head as some kind of illustration. It wasn’t a hard hit, but it was the first time since John was six or seven that his father had raised a hand to him, and he had never, ever hit him anywhere but his bottom.
“Dad—” John tried.
“Don’t ever call me that again,” Richard commanded. “I work here. I have colleagues—I have friends—here. Do you know how embarrassing it is to get a phone call in the middle of the night telling you your worthless son is in the ER?” His face was red, and he was leaning over the bed, inches from John’s face. His breath smelled of mint, and it occurred to John that his father had taken the time to brush his teeth before coming to the hospital.
“Do you know who does this shit?” his father had asked, pushing away from the bed. “Worthless junkies, that’s who.” He paced along the length of the small room, hands clenching and unclenching. He turned around and gave a single nod of his head like he had decided something and there was no going back.
John tried again. “Dad—”
“You are not my son,” Richard repeated as the door closed behind him.
“He’ll get over it,” his mother said, but John knew otherwise. He had never seen that look in his father’s eyes. Disappointment, yes. Hatred…that was something new.
John was thinking about that look as he walked around the neighborhood the day after his father’s confrontation in the emergency room.
“Just an hour,” his mother had said, but she hadn’t added, “Don’t tell your father,” because they both knew that his father didn’t care. As if the hospital scene weren’t enough, Richard had come into John’s room that morning and told him point-blank that he would feed and clothe him until he was eighteen, and then he wanted John out of his house, out of his life. He rubbed his hands together, then held them palm out to illustrate. “I wash my hands of you.”
The breeze picked up and John pulled his jacket around him. Despite nearly dying the night before, he wanted a bump of coke, something to take the edge off. He wasn’t going to do it, though. Not for his dad or his mom, but because he was scared. John didn’t want to die, and he knew the coke would kill him sooner rather than later. He’d only snorted it a handful of times anyway, right? It shouldn’t be hard to quit. Still, no matter how much pot he smoked, the craving ached inside his body like he’d swallowed a razor. God damn Woody and his stupid parties.
“Hey.”
John looked up, startled out of his thoughts. Mary Alice Finney was sitting on one of the swings in the playground.
His hatred of her sparked like a flash fire. “What are you doing here?”
She said, “I didn’t know you owned the playground.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I skipped.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, snorting a laugh that made him taste blood in the back of his throat. “Shit,” he said, putting his hand to his nose. Blood was coming out like a faucet had been turned on.
Mary Alice was beside him. She had a tissue in her hand—why did girls always have these things?—and she pressed it under his nose.
“Sit down,” she told him, leading him over to the jungle gym. He slumped on the bottom bar, his bony butt feeling the cold through his jeans. “Tilt your head forward.”
He had his eyes closed, but he could feel her hands on him: one on the back of his neck, one holding the tissue to his nose. You were supposed to lean back when your nose bled, but he didn’t care as long as she was touching him.
She sighed. “John. Why are you doing this to yourself?”
He opened his eyes, watched blood drip onto the sand between