Wyatt loses balance. He stumbles and falls. It’s not a fast fall. He tries catching himself, but he can’t. When he goes down, I go down too, falling on top of him. Wyatt is bigger than me. He’s stronger, an athlete, but I use my rage to my advantage. With him on his back, I climb on my hands and knees onto his chest, my knees digging into him as he squirms, not able to get out from under my body weight.
I see it in his eyes, fueling me at first: the fear.
Wyatt is scared.
Just beside me, on the floor, is the glass from the broken lantern. I reach out for it, snag a long, slender chunk of it in my hand, its edges digging into my own palm, the end of it razor-sharp and pointed, and I think of the relief I will feel as it perforates his skin. As it slips into his organs. As he bleeds.
I don’t think about the repercussions.
I think only of what he did to me.
I raise the piece of glass above my head. I watch as he flinches and writhes beneath me, the scar above his eye still visible from last time. When anyone asks, Emily tells people it was from a baseball injury, but that’s not true. It’s from me. I did that to him.
All of a sudden, Wyatt gets a second wind. He fights back, pushing me off him so hard that I fall away. He jumps to his feet before I can get up, calling me names, saying stuff like, “This is why you have no friends,” and, “This is why no one likes you,” as he runs his hands through his messed-up hair and fixes his dumb shirt.
I lie there on the ground, gasping for air.
“The price just went up,” he says, standing out of breath above me, looking down. “Forty dollars. Forty dollars or I tell,not just about this,” he says, reaching down to scoop his phone up from the ground, “but all of it,” meaning not just about Daniel, but that I tried to stab him too.
After he leaves, I lie there on the floor, my heart racing, wild thoughts filling my mind.
I wouldn’t really have stabbed him with that glass. At least I don’t think so.
I’m not capable of that, ofmurder, I don’t think, though Emily made me see that therapist for a while because of poor impulse control. Because ofintermittent explosive disorder, as the therapist called it in my diagnosis. Because of the angry, racing thoughts that would make me rage and slam my bedroom door and break things and say things that hurt.
That was when I was twelve. She said that, with therapy, I’d grow out of it. We talked about other ways to control my anger, like deep breathing and going to my “happy place” aka this hilltop I remember from when I was a little kid, where I picture myself lying on the soft grass at the top of the hill with nothing visible but the endless blue sky.
The therapist said the tantrums and outbursts would lessen over time and in severity.
I don’t think they have.
Courtney
Somehow I must fall asleep.
When I wake up, it’s hot in the bedroom. The windows are closed, and there is no air-conditioning in the cottage, so that it’s unventilated and close. I wake up with a slick of sweat running between my legs and breasts, my thin shirt adhering to my wet skin. I push the covers off and rise from bed.
It’s dark in the cottage. My eyes struggle to adjust, the blackness unbearable, so that I want desperately to turn on a light, but I don’t because I don’t want to wake Wyatt.
Alone, I feel my way to the kitchen. I run my hand along the knotty pine walls and then, when the wall ends, I put my hands out in front of me, casting around for the counter, touching it. I hunt for a glass in the cabinet, not bothering to run the water to let it cool before filling my glass and throwing it back.
All of a sudden, the floor behind me creaks, the sound of it like a rusty gate blowing shut on a stormy day. I jump, nearly letting go of the glass and dropping it into the sink.
I whirl around, just barely hanging on to the glass, gasping. Wyatt is there. He’s not much more than a dark figure that I know is him by his shape: as tall as Elliott but much more slender with his hair in his face, a dark mass like a mophead.
I throw a hand to my heart, breathing hard.
I didn’t hear him get out of bed, not the rustle of sheets northe keening of the mattress springs as he rolled over and pushed himself to his feet.
“I’m so sorry, Wyatt,” I whisper, turning back to set the glass on the countertop. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I just needed some water.”
Wyatt is quiet. Unresponsive. He stands there, motionless, and I ask, tilting my head, pulling my eyebrows together and searching through the darkness for his face. “Are you okay? Is there something you need?”
He’s quiet at first, his breath audible in the stillness of the cottage.
“Come on,” he says. “Hurry up or we’re gonna be late for school.”
School.
