Day Nine

THE CURTAINS WERE OPEN AND THE SUNLIGHT STREAMED in through the window, onto Bobby’s pillow. He tried to turn away, but the whole room felt lit up like a film set. He frowned, peeling his eyes open as slowly as possible, as if the light would hurt any less.

“I guess you don’t want to come for a run with me, huh?” Carmen said. She was standing at the foot of the bed, already in her exercise clothes and sneakers. “Have fun last night? It was great when you came in. I’m sure you don’t remember. It was really something else. What were you drinking? The whole room still smells. That’s why I opened the window.”

Bobby did remember: he remembered his sister’s disappointment, and the British girl’s tongue on his dick, and the way the Red Bull tasted when it came back up. “Ugggh,” he said, not wanting it to happen all over again. He turned onto his stomach, burying his face in the pillow.

“Oh, I’m sure you feel like crap,” Carmen said. “So I’ll just see you later, I guess, yeah? I wanted to go on a cruise to the Bahamas, okay? So this is not about me, Bobby. This is on you.” He heard her pivot on her rubber soles and squeak out of the room, pulling the door closed behind her. The reverberations sounded like a truck running over his skull. All he wanted was more sleep—sleep could do anything. It could make him feel human again, it could make him forget. Before he drifted off again, Bobby felt a lurch in his stomach and scrambled out of bed and into the bathroom as quickly as he could, almost making it to the toilet before throwing up again, and littering the bathroom floor with tiny pieces of everything left in his stomach, which wasn’t much. He thought, for only the first time that day, that if he had to choose between living and dying, dying might be easier.

Sylvia was awake but pretending not to be. The only thing she was looking forward to was that it was Sunday, and therefore Joan would not be coming over, which of course was a bad thing, because it was the only thing making the trip even remotely enjoyable, but if he had come over, it would mean that he would have to see her hungover, which wasn’t pretty. Not that Sylvia ever felt actually, clinically pretty, but there were those odd days when her skin behaved and her clothes behaved and the mirror behaved. This was worse than normal, though. The inside of Sylvia’s mouth felt like it had been dried with paper towels all night long, her saliva blotted into nonexistence. She reached for her telephone, the poor dead soldier, and held it over her face. If it worked, she would have swiftly pressed a few buttons and started scrolling away, but all she could do was look at the icons for the apps. The Wi-Fi didn’t work upstairs, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She could imagine what she had missed: new pictures of Gabe and Katie kissing like brain-damaged guppies or pressing their cheeks together like they couldn’tstandtobeapartforasecondlonger. Everyone else would be posting pictures of the parties they were at, or vacations with their families, everyone at the beach and tan and flaunting it. There might even be new and embarrassing pictures of someone else, someone to take the spotlight away from her. She swung one leg out of the bed at a time, crab-walking out as far as she could without raising the rest of her body.

Standing up straight made her head feel wobbly, but it wasn’t so bad. She’d had worse hangovers—twice. The first time was when she was fifteen and the whole family went to a wedding of one of Franny’s friends in Northern California wine country, and every table (including the teenage table, where Sylvia was sitting, miles away from her parents and everyone else she knew) had bottles of wine that were replaced with a rapid frequency. The second time was when she and Katie Saperstein accidentally drank too many wine coolers before a school dance “as a joke” and spent the whole night in the school bathroom, the same place where they had to pee a hundred times a day, reminding them of their mistake forever and ever, or at least until graduation. This wasn’t as bad as either of those times, but it was bad enough that Sylvia knew she’d have to dig through her mother’s bag for some aspirin.

Sylvia shuffled to the door of her room, opened it, and stuck her head out as an exploratory venture. There were sounds coming from downstairs—Charles and Lawrence, she thought—but no movement on her floor. She shuffled farther into the hall and put her ear against the door to her parents’ room. They would both be awake by now—her father never slept past seven, and her mother was incapable of feeling left out, and so even she rose early when there were other people around. Sylvia knocked once and waited. There wasn’t any sound, so she opened the door. The bed was empty, as she’d suspected. “Mom? Dad?”

When there was no answer from her invisible parents, Sylvia shuffled the rest of the way into the room, and into their bathroom. Her mother traveled with a small pharmacy—sleeping pills, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, antacids, antidiarrheal tablets, Benadryl, calamine lotion, Band-Aids, Neosporin, floss, nail clippers, nail files, the works. Sylvia rooted around until she found the pills she wanted and swallowed them down with a gulp of water from the sink, which felt so good that she did it a few more times, lapping straight from the tap like a dog. She looked at herself in the mirror and began a semi-thorough investigation of her pores. Her face was blotchy, and there were little pimples on her nostrils. She smiled widely, and then bared her teeth. As long as Bobby didn’t try to speak to her, she’d be fine. The thought of seeing Carmen wasn’t appealing, but then again, it never was. Sylvia turned around and wobbled back in the direction of her bedroom.

Her parents’ bed had been hastily made, with the thin cover pulled up to the pillows, but nothing tucked in. On Franny’s side (it was the left side, with the messy stack of books and magazines and two half-full glasses of water), the pillows were dented and askew. On Jim’s side, they were perfectly straight, as if her father’s head hadn’t moved all night. Sylvia walked around to his side of the bed and sat down. She pulled back the cover and put her hand on the bottom sheet, feeling for warmth. There was no trace of her father in the room except for his empty suitcase and a pair of his shoes tucked neatly beside the dresser.

Sylvia had always known that her parents had issues—that was the word people liked to use. They fought, they belittled each other, they rolled their eyes. Everyone’s parents were like that when no one was watching. Sylvia had never actually confirmed that with any of her friends, but it had to be true. It was like discovering that Santa didn’t exist, or the Easter Bunny, or that no one actually liked their extended family. This was doubly true for parents who had been married as long as Franny and Jim. It was a normal part of life, being annoyed at the person you were always with. Healthy, even. Who wanted parents like on fifties television, with pot roasts and implacable smiles? Even so, Sylvia had never even entertained the possibility that one of her parents had cheated on the other one until she started hearing the whispered fights through the walls. Now instead of seeming normal, it all just seemed sad. Her head still throbbed, and her mouth was dry again. Sylvia pushed herself back up to standing, even more mad at Bobby for helping the whole world go to shit, instead of just their parents.