It’s Miss Margaret who stops me. She steps out of the playroom with a crate of blocks in her arms, sees me, looks down the hall toward the window, and shrieks, “Motherfucker!” I withstand the uncharacteristic obscenity, though it makes me stumble, but the blocks she casts in my path form an obstacle I cannot pass. There are twenty of them or more. As I try to avoid them I am reading the letters, thinking they’ll spell out the name of the thing I am chasing, but I am too slow to read any of them except the farthest one, an R, and the red Q that catches under my wheel. I fall off the pole as it goes flying forward, skidding toward the window after I come to a stop on my belly outside the PICU, my central line coming out in a pull as swift and clean as a tooth pulled out with a string and a door. The end of the catheter sails in an arc through the air, scattering drops of blood against the ceiling, and I think how neat it would look if my heart had come out, still attached to the tip, and what a distinct, once-in-a-lifetime noise it would have made when it hit the floor.
WHY ANTICHRIST?
My father warned me that sadness cleaves to sadness, and that depressed people go around in hangdog packs. Common disaster is the worst reason for a friendship. In picking your friends, he said, you should consider what great things you can do together. You are assembling a team, he told me, not a teatime cozy of crybabies, and he made me promise never to become part of any orphans’ or bereaved sons’ club, because sitting around in a circle of pity getting your worst qualities praised and reinforced was no way to move ahead with a great life. That is the way down, he said, making a down-roller-coaster motion with his hand, but you shall go up.
So I knew what it was all about, when Cindy Hutchinson started paying nice attention to me after her father died. He was the richest man in town and was doubling his money at the World Trade Center when the planes hit. Cindy became a tragic celebrity, and suddenly everybody remembered that my father had died when we were all in tenth grade, and the teachers all looked at me in the silences that fell during the frequent breaks they provided for us to talk about our feelings, as if I were somehow more grown-up than everybody else because my life had sucked harder and earlier than most. Or like I must have learned something back then, and if I would only share, it would make it easier for them all to bear up in these days. But I just stared at my desk, because I didn’t know anything like that.
I caught Cindy looking at me in class or at lunch, and a couple of times she came to games and I would feel an itching on the back of my neck in the middle of a play and look up to see her there. But she didn’t actually talk to me until the middle of October, and I never tried to talk to her, though like everyone else I felt bad about her dad. She was always surrounded by friends or admirers and seemed like she was getting enough sympathy to last anybody a lifetime, so I stayed away.
One afternoon after school while I was walking down to the lacrosse field I saw her with her friends, playing around on the statues outside the library. She ran after me when she saw me, but she didn’t catch up till I was passing the gym. “Hey!” she said, and I stopped and turned around.
“Hey,” I said, and then she just stood there, pulling at her skirt and touching the pencil that was stuck in her hair and looking at the divers falling past the windows in the gym. “Yeah,” I said, because I didn’t know what to say to her. “See you later.”
“I know how you feel,” she said suddenly, spitting the words out all at once and stringing them together in a swift mumble, but I’d heard the phrase so many times before that I think I’d understand it if somebody said it to me in Chinese.
“No you don’t,” I said, and walked away. Her hand was only touching my bag and she just let it drop away.
“I’m having a party tonight!” she called out after me. “You should come!”
“I don’t really go to parties,” I said, which was true. I didn’t like to drink, and didn’t like watching people get drunk, and the people I wanted to make out with were never the people who wanted to make out with me, and if I wanted to make some drunk girl cry then I could stay home and do that with my mother.
But I did go, and maybe that was the first sign, that weird pressure I felt all through practice and at home while I made dinner and while my mom watched me eat, not touching what was on her plate except to push up the potatoes in heaps, and to take strings of chicken off the bone to dangle for the dog. I was thinking of Cindy and her party all afternoon, and in the shower after practice I stood with my eyes closed under the water like I always do and felt like I was spinning in place, my bare feet turning on the soap-slicked tile, and when I opened my eyes I found I had turned to face south, down toward the river and her house. I almost never feel like I have to do something, but when I do, it usually turns out to be the right thing — I’ll pass the ball to someone who looks like they’re covered or pick an answer on a test that I think is wrong but feel is right, and it always works out.
“I’m going to a party,” I told my mother.
“Good for you, honey,” she said. “You don’t get out enough. Did we show you this?” She turned down to the dog. He is part poodle but mostly mutt and the fancy haircut my mother gets for him every month always looks like borrowed finery to me. “Channel up!” she shouted at him, and he ran toward the television and turned it off with a bump of his nose. “Well, we’re working on it,” she said. “But go, go! You have a good time! Don’t worry about these.” She indicated the dishes with a sweep of her hand. “Puppy and I will take care of everything.” But she went to her room not very much longer after that, the dog trailing after her, and closed her door. So I cleaned up myself before I went down the hill to Cindy’s house.
We live in the same big neighborhood, one of those places on the Severn where people pay a lot of money for big woods and the feeling that they are miles away from their neighbors. On the curving roads it would be two miles to Cindy’s house, but cutting down the hill through the woods it wasn’t even one. She lived on Beach Road, right on the river, on a little house-sized peninsula. The drive down to the house was full of cars, but the woods covered the light and the noise of the party until I came around a bend in the drive and saw the place, every window bright. She was sitting alone on her front porch with a glass of wine in either hand, one red and one white, taking sips off each one while I watched her. I don’t know why I stood watching like that but it wasn’t long before she looked up at me. “I knew you’d come,” she said.
“I feel like shit,” Cindy said, “but I want everybody else to have a good time.” That was the point of the party — the next best thing to feeling happy herself was seeing other people happy. So she floated from group to group in her house, exhorting them to drink more or laugh more or sing more or join her for a game of strip poker upstairs in her big attic bedroom. “Come on,” she said to me, when I hesitated to accept a drink. “It’s for charity.”