Calamity Read Free

you give a shit?”
    He turned out of the bathroom, threw the bottle of pills at her head--she caught them with an exasperated ooofff sound, and left the bedroom. He slammed the door for good measure.
    What the hell was he going to do? He had to keep his family together. He had to find a way to bring back the old days, the happy days, the days before the baby died.
    He went back to the kitchen but his coffee had turned cold.
     
    3
    Brendan’s teacher wanted to speak with him. While the playground monitor escorted the rest of the class outside in a single-file line, Brendan approached Miss Tuyol.
    She was a young teacher, the youngest in the building, and some of the boys thought she was hot but Brendan didn’t think of her as being hot or not. Actually, he never really thought about any of his teachers.
    She was sitting behind her desk, which was organized with colored folders and boxes and decorated with fake apples and little plaques that said things like “World’s Greatest Teacher” and “Teachers Light the Way to Tomorrow.” She was wearing a bright purple sweater with a picture of the Easter Bunny on it.
    “Hello Brendan,” she said.
    “Hi.”
    “How do you feel today?”
    “Good.”
    “Any trouble focusing today?”
    “No.”
    “You seemed a little lost when we were reviewing the states.”
    “Sorry.”
    He had been more than simply lost. He’d been off in another world completely. The pills were supposed to help with that. The pills did help him focus but not always on what he was supposed to be doing.
    Dr. Carroll had put Brendan on the pill, what Brendan called his Pillie Billy, in October after a horrible progress report and a teacher-parent conference in which Miss Tuyol made it sound like Brendan had some really serious problems, aside from poor factoring in math and weak memorization skills in history. Next year he’d seyear hebe in seventh grade, so if he didn’t get his act together (whatever that meant), he’d end up in a far worse situation than he was in now. On the up side, Miss Tuyol complimented Brendan’s creativity and language skills. She said he was a very creative boy. The only reason he had done well in English was because he enjoyed reading and writing stories. He wrote his stories, mostly short things with lots of violence, in a black and white composition book. He wrote the stories during recess or at home in his room. He had left the book at home today but that was okay because he had a different one with him, a really special one.
    “No headaches?” Miss Toyul asked.
    He shook his head.
    He hadn’t told anyone that even before the end of the summer, his head had started to hurt every time he spent longer than a few minutes reading and he’d find himself inexplicably pulled away from the page by an annoying fly or the tree blowing outside his window or even random thoughts in his own mind. Pillie Billy had cured that, sort of. Every once in a while his head hurt but it wasn’t always unpleasant.
    “Your story,” she said and picked up the two-page short story he had typed on Dad’s computer. “Do you have a goldfish?”
    “No,” he said. The story was entitled “The Dead Goldfish.” It was a bout this kid who thought his goldfish was possessed by a demon and he kills the fish by crushing it beneath his bare feet. Brendan described, as best he could, the jelly insides of the fish filling the gaps between the boy’s toes. He compared it to snot.
    “You didn’t kill your pet fish, did you?” Miss Tuyol asked.
    “We had a dog once but it got old and couldn’t walk so we had to put it down.”
    Miss Tuyol looked like she had something really serious to say. “You’ve never hurt any animals before, have you?”
    He thought of how much fun it was to pull Lizzy’s tail. Lizzy was Delaney’s cat. The cat didn’t like it but pulling its tail didn’t really hurt it, not much anyway. Besides, he liked Lizzy and didn’t want to see her suffer.
    “Your story is