Page 69 of Did They Break You

I swallow hard, listening to my mom sighing on the phone. I think about the weeks after Remi filed charges. I stayed in my room. Never came out. I heard Mom yell at Tristan, berating him for his grades, his choice in friends, his clothes.

I usually got in between them; took Tristan out of the house.

But while I waited to see if I’d be sent to prison for a night that was nothing but flashes in my mind, spotty pieces sewed together with drunken thread, I didn’t have the energy.

I put in my headphones.

I tuned my brother’s pain out.

“He just needs to see a therapist or?—”

“You got into an argument. Before he did it,” I tell my mom, guilt turning to anger as I keep my eyes closed, trying to lower my voice. I don’t want Tristan to hear me.

“If you think that was my fault, Cort, you don’t understand how mental illness works.”

“As if you do,” I bite back, eyes flying open as I dip my chin, digging my nails deeper into my skin. It feels good, but sometimes, I wonder what that blade would feel like. Seeing crimson on my skin. It’s almost euphoric, imagining it.

I don’t want to die.

I just want a release.

“What did you say to him?” I press Mom. “Before you went to meet a client while your son lay bleeding out in a bathtub,what did you say to him?”

“Watch your tone, Cort,” Mom warns. I hear more people in the background, then what sounds like a door closing. Silence. Another sigh from my mother, always content to play the victim when it works in her favor. “It was a usual fight,” she confesses, her tone one of helplessness, like she couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this. “About too much time playing video games. I just want him to make something of his life?—”

“What did you call him?” I interrupt her, pacing in the hall, my nails still digging into that spot just at the crease of my elbow. “Did you hit him, Mom?” His glasses were broken, on his bedside table. But I wonder if it was that or the names. The verbal abuse.

I think of the words Chase spoke to Remi.“Fucking slut.”I don’t know why I didn’t care then. She overwhelmed me, and I lost myself in her. Everything else was noise.

I look down at the tile of the hospital floors as I walk.

“What did you say to him, Mom?” My voice is broken as I gaze out at the grounds of the hospital, teeming with people.

Another sigh. “I have to go.”

“Mom. Did you hit him?” I clench my fingers tighter around my phone, digging my nails in deeper.

“Goodbye, Cort.”

“We’re talking aboutyou,”Mom counters in the present.

I think about my brother. He’s tall, like me, but all gangly arms and limbs from… not eating enough.

He likes video games and fashion and wants to be a model andthat doesn’t go over well with Mom.

“I saw her at a party,” I concede to Mom, rolling my eyes in the night as I do, wondering what exactly she heard. Wondering if Maya found out and told her herself. “Nothing happened.”

Mom laughs, and I hate her laugh. It’s bitchy and dark and always makes you want to scream instead of laugh with her. Like she’s holding onto secrets that’ll rip you apart and she finds it amusing that you don’t know what they are. I tighten my fingers around the phone, feel a light breeze wick at the back of my neck, through my damp hair.

I pause beyond the trees of the cemetery, along the brick path.

“Funny, Cort, because Maya sent me a message. Let me know you’re blowing her off and acting distant.”

“Whatever,” I tell Mom, barely paying attention as I stare into the thick of the trees edging the cemetery. Turning my head, I glance around me. While the gas station across the street is lit up, a few cars parked at the pumps, there’s no one else out here.

“We got in a fight. That’s it.”

“Well fix it,” my mother says, her words causing me to grit my teeth and tear my eyes from the trees as I look up at the sky, imagining what it would be like to be anywhere but here. “Be man enough to admit when you make a mistake and get back with her. With your insistence on going to the same school asthat girl, you need protection against any slander she might?—”

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