“Please return the shirt, and tell your manager not to send you here again.” Before Oscar could reply, the woman had turned back to the counter. A moment later, she was helping a young couple with the massive bill they’d racked up.
Oscar wished he could advocate for himself, that he could somehow prove this wasn’t his fault; he wished he could play back to them everything his mother had said and how awful it was. But as he played it over in his mind and tried to come up with the words that might explain it, Oscar remembered that the woman had told him she didn’t care. And as her stony face turned into that of his mother in his mind’s eye, Oscar rumpled up the shirt into a ball and tossed it in the corner of the room, zipping up his hoodie and banging out the door and out the store without another word.
16
THE MARJORIE CORRELATION
Mathematics had always been among Oscar’s best subjects. As a teenager, he’d loved sitting at his desk, writing out a gorgeous triangle proof, neatly solving quadratic equations, mapping out probability. When he’d run into his former high school teacher just a year before, she’d asked what he was doing and whether he was alright. Oscar had always liked Miss Spencer, so he’d been glad to tell her he was studying Computer Science.
“You’ve always been a star at math. I’m not surprised. But Iamglad,” she’d said.
Oscar had been, too.
His calves ached as he labored to get as far from the shopping district as possible, as quickly as he could. His heart was punching in all the hours he’d failed to work, hammering away at the scaffold from which Oscar’s sanity was set to hang. His breaths staggered out of him as he blinked away his tears.
Of course Oscar was good at mathematics. His first lesson in life had been the concept of correlation, the direct relationship between his mother’s presence and the swift departure of his joy. Maybe Marjorie Peters had put out a restraining orderagainst Oscar’s peace, forcing it out of every single room she was in, every street—for a time, the entire town.
Oscar’s teeth slipped as he ground them, and the feeling jarred, curling his nose. Who was this woman, to make him whimper like this, like the dog she’d refused to let him and Lina have as kids?
I hate you, he thought.
And he wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to his mother or himself. They had always been two sides of the same coin, equally hard and brittle, never seeing eye to eye. His short nails dug deep into the tender flesh of his palm,aching, and Oscar relished it. Oscar wished for a moment he was back at that stall, that he could smash the side of his fist into every plastic container, crack them until there was nothing left to crack, until his skin was a map of lacerations, until his hand was throbbing so badly from the pain, there wasn’t space for thought.
Oscar turned a corner, the edges of his vision blurring as his panic spotted the world in black. Out of the pedestrian part of town, everything felt closer, larger, louder. This was no longer the rush of people walking by in groups, the soft flirtatious laughter of couples trilling on the air, the cries of small children begging for ice cream as their parents exasperatedly tried to explain that school was about to start. That had always been his mother’s argument come September, as though his throat would magically know to close up so he could avoid eighth grade English.
On this side of his world was the sound of construction, grinding a headache straight through his skull, the rumble of cars and trucks as they passed through to get from one city to the next, the beeping traffic lights that made him want to punch a hole through green.
Stop it.
Oscar wanted to tear out his hair.
Stop it.
Oscar wanted to scream.
Stop it.
Oscar wanted to walk into traffic.
Turning abruptly as the thought bouldered into him like the sixteen-wheeler he wished would flatten him, Oscar pressed himself against the wall of a bakery and pulled out his phone, fingers trembling as he pulled up his messages.
Spikey (Draft): Boo, can you come get me? Something bad has happened and I’m scared. I want to
Aaron was supposed to be recovering from the ugliness with his mother. What the fuck was Oscar doing? He closed the conversation before he could continue growing his mess and instead found Christina’s contact and started typing.
Oscar: Hi, Christina. Do you have an open slot today?
Oscar stood against the wall, counting the taps of each finger on the back of his phone like he was one of those ballet teachers his mother kept taking him to as a child. It would always end the same, with them telling her gently that Oscar didn’t seem interested in learning and perhaps she should find him a different activity, that these things couldn’t be forced.
But his mother had forced him. Over and over again.
And look at her now, still forcing him off the edge, teetering on the tips of his toes at the periphery of the sidewalk, a swan dropping to its end.
No. This is all you.
It had been more than four years since he’d last seen her. He shouldn’t have let her affect him this much, not now. He was supposed to be a brick house, built from the sweat andlabor his Papa had put into affirming him every day of his life. How did she turn him into sticks and mud every single time?
Because you’re fucking weak.
