Aftercare Instructions Read online

  “Genesis. Good. I’m here first.”

  “First?”

  I notice her cheeks are splotchy and there’s a thin sweat mustache she hasn’t wiped off yet. She doesn’t answer my question or sit down; instead she says, “Are you still mad, Gen?”

  Her voice cuts through the guitar player’s soft melodies. I motion to lower her voice a notch or two. Perhaps an octave while she’s at it. “I don’t like it, Rose. It was really embarrassing today.”

  “I know. I fucked up. I really am sorry, but please know I truly thought I was protecting you. Or maybe I was in denial.”

  A crossroads: stay mad at my greatest ally over a matter of principle, or move on and accept that she wanted to do the right thing.

  But I already forgave her before she even said sorry. I need my full army right now. One soldier is already MIA (Peter, was he a soldier?), and the ranks can’t break because of that. “It’s okay, Rose. Just don’t do that to me. I’m smarter than—and can handle a lot more than—”

  “The average bear,” she finishes my sentence, and we laugh.

  This is what the first social worker said to me. After the medication incident with my mom, I had to see him at the hospital. Peter didn’t know that’s what took me so long on our “first date.” This guy talked to me like I was a little kid. Told me I was smarter than the average bear. That always bugged me, but Rose helped me laugh about it.

  The front door chimes, and Rose jerks her head toward the sound—focusing, searching. The sky has deepened to a dark blue, almost black. She has the same distance in her eyes as when we were in the cafeteria earlier today.

  “What is going on with you, Rose?”

  She pretends like she doesn’t hear my question as she takes off her layers.

  “Did you eat? I’m starving. I’m going to get some soup or something. Delilah here yet?”

  “No. Just me and Mr. Sad Songs McGee. And no, I’m not hungry.”

  Her face shifts into something less scattered and more serious. “Are you depressed, Genesis?”

  Ms. Karen asks me weekly if I’m depressed.

  “Rose. Go get some food.”

  She smiles and pinches my elbow. Then hums a little too loudly as she moseys to the counter.

  Delilah walks into the café next, and flops into a chair on the other side of the table.

  “I want to hear everything. Seriously. Everything. But I haven’t figured out what I’m reading yet, so can you just ignore me for, like, ten minutes? Please?”

  I must be onstage in an absurdist play. All these characters enter and exit with quick lines and questions and I’m stuck in this booth. I think I’ve had too much caffeine. Rose is back at the table, and she splits a grilled cheese sandwich in half. “Here, share this with me.”

  I look at it, but don’t think actors are supposed to share their food with the audience. I put a quarter of it back on her plate.

  “Hey, D to the L-I-LAH,” Rose sings, stretching a long strand of cheese from the sandwich with her mouth. “You ready to rock this joint?”

  “Born ready, Rose. Doesn’t it look like it?”

  I can’t help but feel further and further away. I don’t know my lines. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Delilah doesn’t look up from her notebooks, and her black bangs stick to her forehead. The heat is up way too high in here.

  Rose dunks the sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup and licks it off the bread before sinking her teeth into another luxuriously cheesy bite. “God! I love grilled cheese sandwiches. Why are they so delicious? Can you even answer that question?”

  “Rose, can you shut up for a minute?” says Delilah. “I have to figure this out before Curtis says it’s showtime.”

  Then as if on cue, the manager or manager-type with brown corduroy pants and a paisley sweater walks up behind Delilah. She looks down, then lifts her face up with a bright, glowing smile.

  “Hey, Curtis!”

  “You ready, darlin’?”

  “She was born ready, Curtis,” says Rose, enjoying herself a little too much.

  “Yeah, totally,” Delilah says, with a quick side-glare in Rose’s direction. “Just putting my notes together. It’s not seven, right?”

  “Nope, a quarter till. We can push that time if you want. This guy never stops till I take out the big golden hook and drag him off.”

  “I’ll be good with seven.”

  Curtis bounces away, and I see him take a deep inhale off the top of the coffee that a barista girl with rainbow-colored hair has poured for him. He makes ridiculous wafting motions with his hands, and looks like he is about to break into some glorious song or something, it smells so good to him.

  “Seriously. Genesis. Spill it,” Rose says. “What happened in the bathroom today? Vanessa looked like someone tried to murder her.”

  “Please,” Delilah says, holding up her hand. “I want to hear this too. I just need a few more minutes.”

  Rose punches the air and taps at my face every few swings, breathing heavily and bobbing around. I nibble on the quarter of sandwich. Her face jerks toward the open door again, and in walks Will Fontaine, looking thoughtfully through the crowd. Great, I have to deal with this too.

  Rose whispers quickly, “This is my date.”

  Holy blindside, Batman! Will Fontaine. Will Fontaine, who Rose gave me endless shit for, and talked for hours about how sexually repulsive he is, and how in the hell does he get so many girls, and why in the hell do I always want to kiss him, and how in the hell is it possible that WILL FONTAINE and ROSE MEYER are here for their public debut at my cousin’s reading?

  Now I’m catapulted up to the nosebleed section of the audience. I can kind of see the picture forming in front of me, way off in the distance. Excuse me while I focus my binoculars, because did he just kiss her on the cheek while she closed her eyes and smiled?

  “I can see you’re in shock.”

  “That covers the tip of the iceberg of what I’m feeling right now.” I think I yell this down to them.

  “Hey, Gen, this is cool, right?” This is Will. This is Will hollering up to me in row ZZZZZ, seat 1,000,009.

  “Um. Yes?”

  Rose’s smile takes over her face.

  So this is what was happening while I was obsessing over being pregnant and keeping secrets and having my stable ground fracture under me for the millionth time? Rose was running around with one of my oldest friends? Whom she ostensibly can’t stand?

  Delilah speaks now. “Shit, Will, I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  They hug. And I’m spinning into the ground below me like a screw slipping into an already drilled hole. Quickly and easily.

  Delilah looks at me with her eyebrows crinkling together behind her glasses.

  “Genesis, we like each other. I’m sorry to spring it like this,” says Rose.

  I nod and want to laugh my head off. Just laugh it right off. Because actually, in the weirdest way, it makes sense. Perfect sense. Because nothing that makes sense is actually sensible, right? Peter and I weren’t supposed to make sense, but we did. We fit. For a little while, anyway.

  A group of Delilah’s friends walks in next, and Curtis Manager-Man whispers into Sad Guitar Player’s ear. I watch Delilah give her friends quick kisses on their cheeks, and they nod in my direction to say hello. Somehow their acknowledgment puts me back in this moment. Out of the absurdist play. I’m here to watch my cousin. My super-awesome amazing cousin, Delilah. She’s wearing a plaid skirt with torn-up black tights and a faded Sex Pistols T-shirt that’s not one of those stupid teenybopper department-store knockoffs. It’s really from the seventies. She’s very pale, with dyed black hair and black-rimmed retro glasses.

  Looking at her, I realize how much I’ve missed her since she left for school. I never see Aunt Kayla anymore either.

  “So, Gen, heard you really gave it to Vanessa today,” Will says, grinning at me.

  “I guess.”

  “She deserve it?”


  “I think so.”

  “Good, don’t take any shit from the army, kid.”

  Rose hands him the quarter of the sandwich I returned to her plate. He eats it in one bite.

  Then I shift to Delilah. It’s funny to see her back here. All she ever wanted to do was get out and get to the city. She sits on a stool with a scattering of notebooks and scraps of paper on another stool next to her. She jokes with the audience about how disorganized she is, then adjusts the microphone. The first poem is called “Murmurs.” When she reads, it’s like someone tightens a hand around my heart. Squeezing so hard I’m sure it will burst. Squeezing so hard the beats sputter out like they’re fighting for survival. But the beats don’t stop. Not even when they want to. Not even when they are so broken you think they can’t continue. Her words pierce me. Words about longing and broken promises. Words about feeling absolutely trapped and then biting off your own hand to escape, but holding up the middle finger of your remaining hand to everything you left behind.

  “I forgot how good she is,” Will whispers.

  Rose and Will are holding hands, and she rests her head on his shoulder.

  Delilah reads, and I let my mind drift. I think about the worlds we land in and the worlds we move into. Delilah is building a new world. One she moved into by choice. Away from Point Shelley, New Jersey. And there was the world my parents tried to make for us here. But that one was more like a crash landing.

  The story goes that my mom and dad met in the East Village in the nineties. My dad was writing plays and from time to time getting them produced. My mom was a Juilliard classical voice student by day, and by night, a frontwoman in a band, singing songs to broken hearts in the darkest bars. When they met, they became one explosion of art and music. My grandparents stopped supporting her, told her she was wasting her life away with my dad, and she dropped out of Juilliard and into the scene full time. The drugs were a part of the picture, but Dad got in deeper than she did. Then she got pregnant, and panicked. She went to her parents for help, and they told her they would help if she left my dad. They compromised and moved to New Jersey instead. Closer to my dad’s sister, Kayla.

  Dad tried to get clean in New Jersey, but he would slip. He’d leave us for weeks at a time, back to get a taste of what he’d left behind. A heart can only take so much of that back-and-forth. He tried. Tried to build a new world for us here in New Jersey. But he didn’t belong. They didn’t belong. My dad left his dreams in the city and would chase back after them sometimes, but he didn’t have roots anymore. He was a dandelion wisp of himself.

  I realize that my mom faced the same choice I did. What if my mom hadn’t kept her baby either? What would have become of them? Maybe it wasn’t so easy back then to make the same choice I did—with my mom’s parents being so religious, and it just being a different time. My eyes sting. And I push push push it all back, trying to shift into Delilah’s words instead.

  She’s reading a story now. I catch pieces of it, but let her voice be cool air that fills up the room. I don’t need to make sense of the words right now. I listen with my eyes closed. When she stops, there is applause.

  The room winds around itself into words and sighs.

  She’s done.

  I look at my phone.

  There is a missed call.

  From Peter.

  AVOID ASPIRIN, ALCOHOL, MARIJUANA

  I suddenly want to get very drunk. Like, puke-my-guts-up-in-a-gutter and make-someone-else-carry-me-home-for-once drunk. Hook-myself-up-to-a-tap-of-vodka-and-drown-myself-in-it drunk. I push my way through the people, through their heat, through their congratulations. Rose calls out “Wait!” but I just push. I push myself outside into the cold night that sucks my breath from me. One voice-mail message flashes at my fingertips like a bomb. What did he say to me? I decide not to listen. I decide to call him. I’m calling him and we’re getting back together. And if not, I’m getting drunk. I either want to be drunk or be with Peter.

  I’ll try Peter first.

  No time to think. No time to overanalyze if I should or should not call. I didn’t have to think about calling him before, and I refuse to think about it now. I am a time traveler. It is one stinking week ago, when it was okay to call, okay to want him.

  The phone rings, and my ear burns, hotter and hotter. I must be shooting steam into the part of the receiver I’m supposed to listen from. Peter Andrew Sage, you better answer the phone if you know what’s good for you.

  And then?

  “Hey.”

  He answers.

  The steam in my head disappears and my face deflates and I know that voice on the other end of the line, but it sounds so far away. Part of me must have believed he wouldn’t answer. Whatever I say in this moment will go into his ear, but I don’t have a clue what it is I want to say.

  I forget everything.

  “Genesis?”

  That’s me. Genesis. Okay, that’s one thing I remember. And then I’m screaming. But it’s one of those dream screams where nothing comes out. I forget how to make the vocal cords connect with my tongue and my lips, so instead I choke. Which pushes a gurgling sound out of my mouth.

  “Gen.”

  Don’t do that. Don’t shorten my name and lower your voice to sound so sweet.

  I still don’t know what to say. I want to sink into him and hold him and smell him. But I don’t think I’m allowed to sink anymore. Now I have to talk. Talk, not sink.

  So talk, damn it.

  “Aa-uhhhh.” A sound crackles out of my mouth.

  This conversation could almost be funny. Like two animals on a nature show, meeting on the tundra, grunting and snorting at each other until they know if they should fight or mate or pass on by.

  I sort of want to do all three.

  I grunt a hello.

  “I can’t actually talk right now,” he says.

  And then I know I want to fight. I want to rip into him. With claws.

  “Peter, you owe me an explanation at the very least.”

  “Gen.”

  “How could you leave me there?”

  “You know.”

  “But you showed up. Drove me. How the fuck could you just leave me there?”

  Okay, this might not get me anywhere. Mrs. Sage doesn’t like language.

  “You need to calm down.”

  And then I am a volcano. Erupting fire and ash and rock. I’m not sure if I’m making words, but I know I’m screaming and screaming all the stuff I tried to say before—about what if I kept the baby. Would he still have left? And has he forgotten we made this decision together? And why did he do it and how irresponsible and how his mother can go to hell, until I realize the line is dead.

  Dead.

  I’m screaming at nothing.

  What am I supposed to do? I meant what I said. How could any decent person abandon another human being, especially someone they care for? It doesn’t take much to stay. It takes far more effort to leave. Leaving breaks inertia. Leaving means a whole new direction. A whole new energy source is needed to change course like that. You have to make a decision, then stand up, then leave. Peter did all of that. Made a decision, stood up, and left. In the dingy waiting room where Security makes non-patients sit. With its gray-lavender walls and daytime television and fluorescent lights. Trashy magazines and dead eyes. What did he read in the magazines this time? Nothing about first dates and how to win over your object of affection. He probably read how to make a clean break. Or six signs your relationship isn’t working. Were there signs?

  1. You don’t see eye to eye anymore.

  Did I see them too?

  2. You want different things from the future.

  If there were signs, why do I want him so bad it hurts?

  3. You’ve become codependent.

  I call back.

  4. You’ve started fantasizing about other people.

  And it rings and rings.

  5. The quirks that used to be cute are now annoying.

  I ca
ll back again.

  6. You aren’t happy.

  I throw my phone down onto the icy sidewalk and kick my boot into a dirty bank of snow. Over and over I kick and curse until Rose and Delilah stand on either side of me and I capsize into them.

  They don’t say anything. They pull me toward Delilah’s car. Then they both squeeze into the backseat with me. They don’t ask me what that was about. I see Rose has picked up my phone and it rests on her knee. We sit there, and we can see our breath. When Will taps on the window, Rose puts up one finger and sends him back into the café.

  “He must be losing his shit in there,” Rose says, and I laugh.

  Then they laugh too. They. These two most important girls in my life.

  “Poor William,” I say. “Surrounded by poets. Not a skateboard in sight.”

  Rose giggles.

  “Can we go out?” Rose asks.

  “Of the car?” answers Delilah.

  “No, like, out-out. Like, to the city.”

  “Where in the city?”

  “I don’t know. Anywhere we can get totally shitface-hammered.”

  “It’s a Wednesday night, Rose,” I say.

  “So? Don’t people in New York go out every night?”

  “That’s true,” Delilah says. “And I do have some friends throwing a party tonight in Brooklyn. I was going to stay at my mom’s tonight.…”

  Rose shoots lasers in Delilah’s direction.

  “Chill, Rose, I’m down to go if that’s what Genesis wants.”

  I don’t care what we do right now. All I know is, I don’t want to go home. So going wherever we can get shitface-hammered, as Rose puts it, will be fine with me. It’s not like I have to wake up in the morning. Suspension bonus. And it’s not like I’m grounded or anything. Zombie mom bonus.

  Oblivion beckons. I’m more and more like my father, it seems.

  “Does that sound good to you, Genny?” Rose asks. I nod. Oblivion and anonymity. Maybe I’ll even kiss someone. Prove to myself Peter isn’t the only human being on the planet that I can like. That’s what Rose would tell me to do.