A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Read Free

had a blue plastic plunger with a rubber tip, which was used to push liquid through the needle. I didn’t know what Dad had been doing with it, but I knew the pointy metal needle meant I shouldn’t touch it. I closed the box and left the room.
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    I was in the living room. I wasn’t doing anything, just sitting quietly and watching. Marianne was standing across from me. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a black vest. The curtains on the front window were open, and there was afternoon light coming in behind her, framing her in two giant golden rectangles. The living room was cluttered, and she was making her way carefully toward the back of the house. She had one hand on the wall, like she needed help staying upright. In her other hand, she had a glass jug full of red wine. She lifted the jug to her lips and took a swig, then shivered and shook her head like the flavor had hit her wrong.
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    It was nighttime. I was in the living room. My dad and some of his friends were sitting around the coffee table in front of the couch. A lamp hanging down from the ceiling cast a circle of glaring white light on the glass surface of the table and made the rest of the room disappear. The adults were laughing and playing a game where they tore pages out of a magazine. The page I could see had a glossy picture of a bright blue ocean and a wide blue sky. The sky was full of hot air balloons, and the balloons were all the colors of the rainbow. The adults tore the page into strips, rolled the strips up into tubes, and used them to inhale lines of white powder off the tabletop, into their noses. Sometimes after they snorted some of the powder, one of them would rub his nose with the heel of his hand and squint his eyes. I thought it must hurt to snort that stuff.
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    I woke up when someone knocked on our door. Maybe it was that same night, maybe some other night. Everything was dark until someone opened the door and the porch light shone into the living room. I could see that whoever had opened the door was silhouetted against the light, peeking cautiously out to talk to someone on our porch. They spoke in quiet tones, like they didn’t want to wake up the neighbors. Not that we had neighbors. After a few minutes, someone else went to the door to see what was going on. At some point another person turned on the overhead light in the living room and stepped back to open the front door wider.
    There were men on the porch, and then they were coming into our house. They weren’t like us. They weren’t our people. The one I could see best, the one in front, wore big square glasses with brown plastic frames. He had shaggy medium-length brown hair. He was wearing denim pants and an ugly white button-down shirt with black stripes that were broken up by symbols from playing cards: diamonds, spades, hearts, and clubs. He was holding a big silver gun in his right hand, like the kind in cowboy movies, but shinier. There were a few other men behind him, similarly dressed.
    One of them had a chrome-plated shotgun that he was holding in both hands—one hand on the stock, one hand on the pump—but he didn’t look like he expected to do anything with it. I noticed that the wood on the grip of the pump slide was a light blond color and seemed dirty in the place where his hand rested on it. The shotguns our friends owned were all made out of dark blue metal and had dark wood grips on the pumps, or just had two short barrels side by side and big pistol grips instead of rifle stocks. I thought this man’s shotgun was supposed to look cool because it was so shiny, but it really just looked like a toy. It was tacky.
    There were four or five of these men. Two came into the house. The one with the tacky shotgun stood by the door. One or two more stood on the porch.
    There were five or six of our people in the house; me, my dad, Marianne, and two or