Finding Mr. Brightside

I’m staring into the freezer when she walks in wearing her pajamas and fuzzy white slippers. She immediately locates the bag of pizza rolls I’ve been looking for and takes over the preparations.

“How is she doing?” Mom says quietly, staring at the microwave.

“She’s … okay.”

“Did she eat anything while she was here?” Mom nods back toward her bedroom. “She must’ve worked up quite an appetite.”

“We had Taco Bell,” I say, although I don’t remember Juliette having any.

“Well, that’s something, I guess.” Mom places the plate of pizza rolls down at the bar and starts talking about stressful topics like eating better, cooking more often, and maybe doing some sort of cleanse together. Dad was always detoxifying something from his system, testing out the latest superfood, concocting the perfect te

“Hey, did you end up hitting any more jackpots?” I ask, changing the subject. I hold out my hand for an early inheritance.

Mom covers my palm with a napkin. “Aunt Jane convinced me to play the five-dollar slots and … it didn’t end well. But we had fun.”

“The most important thing,” I say, because she needs to hear it’s okay to have fun again, and because maybe I do, too.

“Exactly,” she says. “And I did get you a sweatshirt from the gift shop with my comp points.”

I smile and act like the hoodie is a thousand-dollar bill when she brings it over and asks me to try it on. The sleeves are a little short for my overgrown arms, but otherwise it’ll serve my purposelessness nicely.

“We’re not done chatting about this Juliette situation, Abram.”

I nod like a serious individual who faces tough topics head-on, hiding my nervous energy over the thought of Juliette and me evolving into a situation.

After Mom goes to bed, I wait about twenty minutes for her to give up sleeping and turn on her TV, then I ease my way through the basement door into the night. I cut across the neighbor’s yard and follow the jogging path behind our row of houses straight up the hill to Juliette’s. I’m trying not to make noise, but I’ve made a loud choice in footwear and my flip-flops are smacking. I take them off when I reach the edge of the Fly

There’s something sitting on the top of the dresser that supplants my feeling of being creepy with one of hope. Her Doritos Locos Supreme. Just the wrapper remains, she’s obliterated the rest, including the goopy i

Then I see her—Juliette in the window, practically flying out of her parents’ closet with a garbage bag over her shoulder. She flings it down onto the hardwood floor, swipes at the tears in her eyes, and turns back for more.

I want to help.

As if reading my mind, Juliette freezes, balls up her fists, and whirls around toward the window. She spots me right away, again doesn’t allow herself the luxury of being surprised. I hold up my hand like I’ve come in peace, not to stalk her. She calmly lifts two of the bags, her twiggy arms refusing to give in to their weight, and then tilts her head down and to the right, where the hill the house sits on slopes toward the doors of the walk-out basement.

I meet her there. Neither of us speaks as I take the bags from her hands and haul them back to my house, my car, so I can deliver them to the Salvation Army whenever I wake up tomorrow afternoon. I lose official count of how many trips we make between houses. I’m too busy trying to grow on her, get to know her while not asking any questions, convince her there are no consequences to seeing me outside of school on a regular basis.

No idea if it’s working.

7

Juliette

JOGGING.

A six-hour period of insomnia has passed since the premiere of my fake movie, Prescription for Love, starring me, in a role I was born to play, as “the crazy girl at CVS,” and that other guy, whom I’m no longer allowed to think about starting now. One last thought: it was sweet how Anonymous took those heavy trash bags from my hands and didn’t act like he was my knight-in-drooping-sweatpants for doing it.

Sprinting.

I’m home and stretching in record time. Brewing my father’s morning coffee in what he refers to as “that fancy-schmancy machine your mom bought.” (Doesn’t help if I tell him, in an edgy tone, that it’s just a Keurig.) I grab his mug and walk into his office. He’s still asleep on the couch.

Looking down at his handsome face, the three distinct stress lines on his forehead, I make a wish to the fickle Writing Gods that he wrote a few paragraphs last night, even if they were horrid. I’ll help him smooth over the clichés; I’m great with the delete key. He stirs, opens his eyes, and almost catches wind of my affectionate expression. Embarrassed, I quickly show him a picture of his mostly empty closet on my iPhone. Then another, as he sits up to process what I’ve accomplished on his behalf. He looks relieved. And also suspicious.

“You really hauled all those clothes out of here last night without any help?” he asks, eyebrows raised.

“I had pharmaceutical assistance,” I say, handing him his coffee.

“I wish you wouldn’t take that crap, Juliette. It makes you jittery, you can’t sleep, and if anyone has ADHD around here, it’s me.”

“What? Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.” I walk over and try to open the window, but it won’t budge. “Why don’t you join me today, Dad? There’s this new thing everyone’s breathing called ‘fresh air.’”

I can’t even see his mouth anymore, he’s so against the idea. I’d have more luck reasoning with the three-hole punch on his desk. Then I see the wheels turning, his mind working like mine does when it’s trying to escape the topic at hand.

“I’m serious about your Adderall,” he says.

“I’m serious about your air quality,” I say, from halfway down the hall.

I go back into the kitchen and make my coffee, staring at the picture of Mom’s empty hangers. I’m not getting the hollow sense of closure that I guess I was going for. In fact, I feel more anxious than anything else, like I’ve made a mistake. No, that can’t be it—maybe I just need a pill.

I unscrew the decoy Centrum bottle on the window ledge, taking out the CVS bottle I hid inside it last night. I pluck out an Adderall, break it in half, then decide to place both halves into my mouth, oops. I wash them down with a swig of my extra-bold, extra-black coffee. Once you go black, it’s harder to go back to getting cracked-out on anything else.

I learned that from my mother, no stranger to CVS herself.

ABRAM

MOM INSISTED ON accompanying me to the Salvation Army this morning to drop off the clothes. She used the Just want to spend time with my son guilt trip on me, and it was hard to be, like, No thanks, Mom—I’m all set.

The problem with her being in my car as I pull into the parking lot is that I have about a million extra bags in the trunk from Juliette’s house, and only a bad joke about those bags having babies overnight by way of explanation. I find a spot near the entrance and quickly get out of the car, Mom following suit. Reluctantly, I pop the trunk, and then box her out from trying to grab a bag and hoist her way to the chiropractor’s office for the next six months.

“Abram?”

“You’re not lifting any of these, Mom.”

“Thanks, honey, but why are twenty more bags here than what we had last night?”

I start poking through some of them as if searching for the answer. “They’re all the same type of bag,” I throw out there. Mom nods like that’s really saying something, but I can tell she’s still skeptical. She agrees to go inside and let them know we’re here with a sizable donation.