25

HE PUT A LOLLIPOP ON MY PILLOW WHILE I WAS OUT FOR THE AFTERNOON. When I came back, I asked him where it came from. I had presumed when I saw it from my doorway that it was some toy dragged up by my half-feral cat. Another slobbering thing. 

I got it for you, he told me. Casual. He sounded real casual, when he said it. There is a difference between natural and casual. I know him well enough to know that he was thinking hard about what he was saying— all of his movements stopped, and he was standing still in the middle of his room. He and I were pretty talented in the sphere of noise-gauging and holding our breaths. 

I asked him why. It was sour green apple flavored, which wasn’t really my favorite. I liked cherry, I think, maybe grape. When I was 8 or so, they sold those big, teeth-clacking ones at the park concession stand for twenty-five cents apiece. I used to come in with quarters and grab 3 or 4 at once and sit by the public pool, hands making the paper stick all fragile and flimsy, and have two and save the rest for him when I got home. He preferred the sour ones. Those are some of the only memories I have of that park and those summers. 

He told me he had grabbed it without thinking, a reflex residual from being trained to do so by his ex-girlfriend. He’d been at the hardware store; saw them by the checkout.

The lollipop. Back to it. 

Instead of taking it back to his room and declaring I wasn’t going to eat it, I just tucked it into my desk drawer. It sat there, and I thought of it every time I smoked for some reason for a few weeks after. Probably because he always joked whenever he had a lollipop that he looked like me; would pretend to tap the ash off the sour raspberry-stained-blue stick. 

He made it a recurring thing: to buy me some sort of treat whenever he went to the store, even when I was with him, and somehow slip it into my possession. Usually, I just gave it back to him or took it to someone I knew. I felt bad, of course. One day, standing in a store, he started to get near-frantic with me and offered me ten dollars if I bought and ate a sixty-nine-cent personal bread roll. Over and over and over, he kept reminding me of the time we had gone to that store a few summers prior with the intention to buy what we needed to make our own bread before we realized how complicated and costly it would turn out to be. Thus, we settled for the fifty-cent dinner rolls from the bakery and ate them on the curb. It satisfied us. When he recounted the story to me, talking about myself, a few years younger, like I was an old friend of his who moved far away, I told him to just shut up. We drove to the soda machines that still only cost a quarter afterwards and when he sourced two quarters for us, he told me he wanted to slap me for getting that “zero-sugar shit”.

‘Course I had a problem. It just took me a while to figure it out. 

That winter, I called my brother from a blow-up mattress in my friend’s living room at 3 in the morning after he and I went out for dinner and I proceeded to vomit it up in his family’s bathroom. As I laid there, I thought of  this terrible habit from my childhood of shaking so violently when I got nervous that I would rock my headboard against the wall in my room, leaving all of these paint-chips and scuffs against it. In that moment, I was bizarrely thankful that there was no headboard for me to knock against the wall; that I was this floating being in the middle of a suburban Massachusetts living room and the next morning there would be no evidence that I had shook and shook on that blow-up mattress in the middle of the night. 

The idea of always being able to talk to “anyone” may be true— theoretically, I know that if I had walked up the stairs to my friend’s room and tapped him awake and told him that I had a terrible secret I needed to purge immediately, he most likely would’ve hugged me and told me some awkward, half-soothing platitude that would’ve maybe helped slightly before I felt rawly exposed for an eternity afterwards. But there was always the problem of the opening statement: how, in the world, do you tell someone something so awful or terrible about yourself that it nearly makes you sick with grief? How can you think about being 14 years old and being nudged with a steel-toed boot and asked if you’re alive and then telling someone about yourself? About that half-dead version of yourself and all the versions that came before and after? How, in the world, do you manage to find some sort of all-encompassing beginning to a story that never really ends; something that you could always come and say more about? 

I always imagined it like this: I am making the bed and telling someone about how I used to feel when I was a kid. Over the silence of dinner, I explain the worst parts of everything and how I didn’t really think of it much when it happened. In the morning, I shatter a coffee cup on the floor and we sit on the ground and I vomit up more and more of myself while they get the shards out of my foot and maybe they tell me something about themselves, too, so I stop feeling so bad about always tossing some part of myself onto the table like I’m a cat coming to the door with a bird. 

The worst part always seems to be opening the door and seeing the dead bird. Then you remember your cat is just a cat and he doesn’t really know better and that’s the way he can talk to you and you can’t really take that part of him away. You just go bury the bird somewhere and maybe pet your cat on the head even if you think about the poor dead bird while he curls up on your feet and sleeps that night. You forgot he could do that, right? Damn strong jaw he has on him, isn’t it? 

So: the winter. I called my brother, and I kept my voice low and murmured into the phone every awful thing he didn’t already know or watch happen himself. He cracked jokes. I put him on speaker when I vomited again and he didn’t say anything about it; just asked if I thought I needed to go to the hospital because he was worried it was going to be like when I was 16 all over again. No, I don’t think so, I said while I brushed my teeth, I don’t want to go to a Boston hospital when it’s 12 degrees outside.

Inexplicably, I thought of the sour-green-apple lollipop still in my desk drawer and felt bizarrely close to tears. I couldn’t bear the secrecy or shame of it all and I blurted out that I never actually ate it and it was in my desk drawer. It felt allegorical; representative of something greater, maybe, and he just said it was fine and that he knew anyway. Even as we talked for another hour and I curled up under borrowed blankets and faded in and out of nausea, he didn’t ask many questions.

In June, he dragged a fan into the bathroom and blew it straight on me while I curled up on the floor and pressed my forehead against the cool tile. My brother had never been one for questions, really, but he did ask me a few then, probably because he was a little drunk. Despite everything, it was casual. He asked what I was coming off of. It was a combination of things that will kill you. He told me as much, though I already knew. That hadn’t been the point. But one can always hope. I liked to think I was a hopeful person. 

He adjusted the fan and I murmured some stupid thanks. 

Why do you keep doing this. (It wasn’t really phrased like a question.) I got all the good genes. 

I know, I said, because I did know. I’m like mom. 

Sorta. He filled up a cup with bathroom tap water and I cringed. Drank it anyway. But you’re nicer than she ever was high or drunk. 

I laughed a little. Yeah. My mouth tastes like vomit. 

When he got up and walked out, I tried to mask my disappointment. He came back, though, clutching something behind his back, and asked if I was still freaked out by food. I told him yeah, but I wasn’t thinking much about it at that moment, and he just thrust out the sour-green-apple lollipop towards me. 

To help, he explained. With the vomit taste. 

So I unwrapped it and ate the stupid thing, crunching on all the little pieces, sitting in the bathroom with him. Twenty-five, twenty-five. For some reason, when I thought of that number, the real thing that stuck with me was how they used to cost a quarter at Westmonte before they bulldozed the whole park.