Somebody Up There Hates You Read Free

promised. Always nice to have a plan for the future.
    Jeannette also rubbed the antinausea gel that I call Puke-Away on my wrist, and I was happy as a little clam, drifting to sleep in a world where Sylvie and I went to some chick flick together—some lame romance that she’d talked me into—and that was okay because the next week we’d go to see the new Terminator for me. And then we went and got a pepperoni-sausage-double-cheese pizza, and then we fooled around on the big couch in her basement, and she let me get further than ever before, my hands all over her, everywhere. Lips and tongue, too. I mean, I’d almost reached heaven.
    And then a real devil paid me a visit. Sylvie’s father. Smelling like Marlboro smoke and bourbon, his face sweaty and purply-red. Porcupine bristles on his cheeks. I mean, the man just walked in. And that’s one of the worst things about this place and every other hospital room on earth. Anyone can just stroll on in. No one even knocks. There is not one iota of privacy in this place. I mean, sure, there are doors on our rooms and sometimes we can keep them shut for about twelve seconds at a time, but the doors have glass windows in them—as in totally transparent. So there you are, on display, day and night. Enough to make a grown kid cry. And don’t even try taping a poster or hanging a towel over those windows. Nothing attracts a legion of irate nurses and antsy therapists more than that.
    Here’s what I’d like to say about this, to everyone. Listen up: we’re teenagers. At home, we’d have KEEP OUT signs on our bedroom doors and—duh!—locks. We would slam our doors in everyone’s faces and hang out alone in our bolted, private, sanctuary rooms. Free at last, praise god almighty, free at last.
    But here? Hell, no. An example: here, Sylvie’s mother and her three little brothers hang around her room all day, every day. Hour by hour, minute by minute, all day. The little ones, twins I think, run Matchbox cars around the railings of her bed, and the biggest one—the makeup supplier—sits in a corner with a stack of comic books. Her mother clucks around her nonstop, all red-eyed and swollen-faced. Once, I heard Sylvie yelling at her mother, who’d probably just asked her something simple like, “Do you want another pillow, honey?” Sylvie just flat-out screamed, “No, I don’t. I want to be left alone. Leave me aloooooooooooooooooooooone.” Sweartogod, that last syllable went on for, like, twenty seconds until Sylvie ran out of breath. Then her mother—short little dark-haired Italian lady, all round and soft—and the three little boys scooted their asses out of there, every one of them in tears. Then I heard Sylvie groaning in her bed, saying, “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” And I didn’t go anywhere near that room that afternoon. After that, the boys never come in at night anymore and the mother leaves around seven. Now it’s Sylvie’s father who camps on the fold-out in her room every night. So it’s still the no-privacy routine: mother and bros all day, father at night. And when the father is in there, Sylvie never, ever yells at him.
    And let me be clear about this: that man scares the bejesus out of me, even when I’m not dreaming about his daughter. That man is so mad, so furious, so sad and so, I don’t even know how to say it, so, like, nuclear-blasted by his daughter’s dying that he gives off toxic fumes. No lie, the man glows orange and smells like rotten eggs. Pure sulfur, I swear, running in his veins. And he hates everybody. He’s a lawyer, Sylvie says, but I don’t know—he seems more like the fucking Godfather to me.
    And this is the guy who just stomps on into my room and leans over my bed on Cabbage Night itself. Talk about vicious tricks. I am more than a little stoned and a little horny and beyond exhausted, so all of