One Good Hustle Read Free Page B

distance. No voices in the halls.
    I thought I heard muttering and I glanced at the wall that separated our bedrooms. It almost sounded as though she was crying. Then nothing.
    I went back to my signatures.
    A screech ripped the air.
    Jolting up from the page, I knocked my head against the wall.
    Marlene .
    I stared at the wall between our rooms again. Her scream became a crying wail and I ripped the signature pages out of my binder and crumpled them up. I switched off my lamp and stared into the dark, my heart banging away like a monkey in a cage.
    The wailing turned into loud gasping sobs and I jumped out of bed just as my mother’s door flung open. I heard her stagger against the wall as she rushed toward the kitchen. I chased after her.
    As I came round the corner, she pulled a butcher knife out of the sink. In just her bra and panties, she turned the point of the blade toward her stomach. Then she let it drop.
    “It’s too dirty,” she said. She sank to the floor, choking on her tears. “And I’m too fat. It’ll never go in. How did I get so fat?”
    I tried to help her up, but she pushed me away.
    I went back into my room, took the crumpled pages out of the wastebasket and ripped them into pieces and more pieces. Miserable confetti.
    The next morning while she was sleeping, I got up the guts to phone my dad in Toronto. We hadn’t heard from him in months. I thought maybe if Sam knew how shitty things were, he would come and get us.
    Sitting in the living room I filled him in as quietly as I could. “She threatened to stab herself in the stomach last night. Last week she swallowed a bottle of pills and then called the ambulance. Another time she said she was going to drown herself.” I had decided before I picked up the phone that there was not going to be any crying, but that went out the window as soon as I heard Sam’s voice. “I can’t stay here,” I said.
    It was silent on his end. I waited for him to say something. Something about a plane ticket for me.
    “I’m goin’ out of town,” he blurted. “You got friends you could stay with?”
    Not much to talk about after that.
    When I came home from school to pack my bag before going to stay with Jill, Marlene came into my bedroom and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, tears rolling.
    “I just can’t—” She wiped her nose with a Kleenex. “I don’t know how to fill another day. It’s such a relief to go to sleep and so horrible when I wake up and know I have to drag through another one, like a thousand pounds of dead … until I can sleep again.”
    I sat on the edge of my bed and watched her. Mascara had streaked down her cheeks into the corners of her mouth. She dug her fingers into my bedroom rug.
    “I wanted you to know because—” She swallowed. “I always thought it was cruel when I heard a woman killed herself and let her kids find her like that. I didn’t want that.”
    I said, “If you want help trying to get pills together, I’ll try. But, um, I have to go. I’m not going to watch.”
    I couldn’t look at her. I kept tweetzing the sheet on my bed. Tweetzing is this thing I do where I rub a fold of the cotton between my fingers. Marlene says I’ve been doing it since I was a baby.
    I nodded to myself. “I can’t be here for—” I lost the words then, as if I had already begun to seep away, long before I stood up to leave.

THREE
    JILL’S LAST EXAM was earlier in the day so she was long gone by the time I got out.
    Except for Jill, I don’t have a crowd at school. Part of the problem is, like my dad, I don’t drink or smoke. Sam says addicts are weak. People in this school don’t hold that opinion, though. The halls are full of alkies and heads who think the fact that I don’t drink or smoke weed means I’m a spineless little suck. A chick named Crystal Norris actually shoulder-checked me in the hall once and called me a suckhole. I didn’t do anything about it so maybe she had a point.
    When I come