Page 20 of Bobby Green
“You think I don’t know where you hide them?” she taunted as he came up dodging backward. Oh God, she’d found the stash. One goddamned cooking knife—one—in the whole house, and he kept it in a shoebox in the top of his closet. Other boys might keep their spank material there, but not Reg. He’d learned how to use his phone, and he hid the kitchen implements in the dark.
“Well, I didn’t untilnow!” he yelped. She didn’t know how to hold a knife, he thought dimly. He’d seen enough action-adventure movies, where the heroes were jacked and the villains were stupid. She was shorter than he was and stabbing downward, and he just had to wait until the blade was pointed toward her and—
He grabbed her wristhardand squeezed until the knife clattered onto the ground with all the pill dust. While she was still keening, he pulled her hand around to the small of her back, reached around her shoulder, and pulled her other wrist back too. She thrashed, but he used the pain of the wrenched shoulders to wrestle her to the ground into a three-point restraint, thanking God for the self-defense class Dex had made him take a few years back, when incidents like this were a regular occurrence.
“Let me up!” she sobbed, and he kept one hand locked around her thin wrists and used the other to scrabble on the floor. Pink pill, pink pill, pink pill….
He found one and shoved it in her mouth dry. He kept his finger in the back of her mouth, scrubbing the pill on the sides of her molars until it disintegrated. In one smooth motion, he pulled his finger out of her mouth and used the heel of his hand to clamp her jaw shut, holding her still until he felt her swallow.
Then—because she could take two, the doctor had said that—he grabbed another one while she sobbed and swore at him, and repeated the operation. She was down to sobs, her thrashing mostly for form, as he grabbed the red-tipped capsule he knew was the strongest antipsychotic and shoved it into the back of her mouth.
“No,” she wailed. “No, no, no, no, no….” She said something else—the taste, probably—but his shoulder ached like fire, and he had blood running down the back of his arm and off his elbow. He needed to find someone to stitch that up, and he couldn’t afford to fuck around. He shoved at the pill until it exploded in her mouth and then held her chin again, trying not to let the sound of her whimpering move him inside.
Of course it moved him inside.
“Sh,” he whispered, remembering all the times she’d comforted him in the night. Mom would come home, drunk or high, with a guy or three, and V would hide him in the closet, holding him close, singing softly in his ear. “Take me on,” he hummed. “Take on me….” He didn’t know any other words than that, but the sound of it was bouncy and happy and something she’d heard on the radio when they were kids. Her whimpers faded to hiccups, and he found the other two pills on the ground before standing up and assisting her.
Her eyes had gone to half-mast—the second sedative had been a little heavy-handed—and he helped her into the nearest kitchen chair before turning to pick up the knife. He put it on the highest shelf—the one she couldn’t get to without a chair—and reminded himself harshly to remember it later. He figured it would depend on how many stitches he needed if that worked or not.
He washed the pill residue off his hands—because the doctor had warned about that—poured her some water, and turned around with the cup and the pills, his heart twisting at her crumpling face, the tears just running down, sputtering into space with her little caught breaths.
“Here,” he said gently. “Here, V. Let’s take them right now. I don’t know how many you missed, but I’m going to have to check them morning, noon, and night for a while, okay?”
She nodded numbly. “Sorry, Reggie.”
He pressed the heels of his hands against his stinging eyes and pretended the wetness was from washing up. “I know, V.” She was always sorry—and he always believed her. The doctor told him about chemicals in her brain and how they whispered things to her. Whispering chemicals seemed like a fairy tale, but he’d heard her talking to people who weren’t there, and when they started telling her the pills were poison and Reg was bad, that was usually a sign things were about to go cattywampus.
“The pills are poison. You know they’re poison.”
“No they’re not, sweetheart.” Morning, noon, and night. He was going to have to lock the pills up again and administer them like they were food in a zombie apocalypse. No girls, no Johnnies hookups unless he brought them here.
He looked around the house, depressed. Most of the guys didn’t seem to judge, but the girls did. He’d put up with the judginess, though, if only he could be not alone here, in this rotting house, wondering when his sister was going to kick him in the balls.
“Poison,” she mumbled, still crying. “Reggie, why you gotta feed me poison?”
“So you don’t try to kill me in my sleep, V.” He’d been one choked snore away from being a nighttime television story before he’d hidden the knives. Time to buy a gun safe so he could eat steak again sometime in the future. With a sigh, he grabbed two plastic bags from the cupboard and bent down again to try to salvage pills. He was good about only saving the unbroken ones—and very aware that he shouldn’t let any of the medication get on his skin. The doctor had warned about that, and he’d listened with big eyes.
Something that could seep through his skin scared him to death.
“I wouldn’t hurt you, little brother.” She gazed up at him then, and through the hair and the wrinkles time had wrought, he could see V—Veronica—with round cheeks and warm blue eyes, the same almond shape as his. She’d been beautiful in her twenties, but the last ten years—illness, anger, even the medications she took—all had exacted a price.
“Not on purpose, V.” He squatted in front of her, pulling one of the plastic bags off his hand so he could cup her cheek. “In your heart you’re still my V,” he said softly. “We still sing together, right?”
She nodded and offered a watery, dim smile. What time was it? He looked around the kitchen and realized it was still only about three o’clock in the afternoon. But she was nodding off—probably because of the two sedatives—and it was just time for her to sleep.
“Come on, V,” he said, standing up and offering his arms. She was so small compared to him—and he wasn’t big next to the guys at Johnnies. But he worked out all the time, and swinging her into his arms like a child was a lot easier than putting her into a three-point restraint when she was fighting him. He carried her up the stairs, careful not to bang her head, and took her into her room. When he got there, he looked around and groaned.
It was a filthy disaster. He should have known—plates had been disappearing left and right, and she’d been losing weight. All the food was up here, in her room, and oh God, she’d been drawing on the walls again.
He didn’t know how to edit what she saw on the internet.
The worst—the very worst—propaganda against minorities, LGBTQ people, God, even against the mentally ill—all of it was filtered through her imperfect mind and found its way onto the walls in Sharpie.
He didn’t even know where she got the Sharpie and had a sudden thought to her amazon.com account. He usually gave her money for books—apparently she’d been buying Sharpies too.
In the pile of dirty dishes and fetid clothes, though, her bed stood pristine. He wasn’t sure how clean her sheets were, but she made it, every goddamned morning.
He had no idea why.
