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“Ervin, honey! Time to get up!”
My eyes were glued firmly shut with the crust of a terrible night’s sleep, an unbreakable bulwark between the real world and the lull of dreams, but the smell of breakfast refused to allow me to give up and give in. With an almighty groan, I pushed back against the cracked leather of the couch and pried myself free of its claws. Being upright gave me enough willpower to scrub at the gunk caking my eyes shut, and finally able to see, I was greeted by the VCR’s dim message that it was 7:15 in the morning.
“Don’ needa be so loud…” I weakly protested. It was hard to put up much of a fuss though when Mom was making bacon and eggs for the second day in a row. Ordinarily breakfast was a milk and cereal affair, so I was counting my lucky stars to get it again after having missed the previous day’s home-cooked meal.
The temptation to skip again was still a heady mistress, but even if I could have pulled off the same trick—or something like it—twice in a row, I wouldn’t. I needed more than a bit of sleep to dispel the memory of the fight from last night. I rubbed my eyes a bit more, checked to make sure Dad had stowed the foot rest of his horrendously clashing recliner, then slipped off of the couch with a yawn the size of a dinner plate.
“Mornin’, Mama,” I said, another yawn grabbing hold of me and sinking in its claws as I crossed from the living room to the kitchen, trading hardwood for linoleum. Padding up behind her, I asked, “Do I have time to shower, or should I wait?”
“I’ll only be a few minutes more, hon.” She turned from the stove top and ruffled my hair, smiling when I squirmed away with an involuntary squeal of protest at the unexpected maneuver. “Pick out something nice to wear for your first day of school, then have a seat, okay?”
I almost got suspicious right then, the texture of her phrasing catching on me for a moment instead of brushing past. But it came free, the moment passing, her words allowed to pass without further consideration. It was my first day, I reasoned. Funny, isn’t it, how whenever we encounter something that doesn’t fit our expectations, we’ll bend over backwards to find a justification.
The box I thought was in my book bag right then was full of that sort of reasoning. But we haven’t gotten there quite yet.
Fleeing from further mortification, I scurried past the table crammed into the corner and out into the garage. The air in there was heady and damp, courtesy of the leak in the far back corner of the ceiling. It had been there since the blizzard last winter that dropped a couple feet of snow on the neighborhood, regularly retaining water for days after any sort of precipitation fell. Like me, it was a constant source of arguments between Mom and Dad. He had promised to fix it once the snow melted, and August in Maryland was, notably, not known for its snow.
I slipped between Dad’s clunky, ancient station wagon and workbench, its sagging surface buried under a mound of mismatched tools. I grabbed the bulky suitcase in the corner adjacent to the leak and flopped it sideways onto the concrete floor with a heavy thunk. The zipper had a habit of getting caught when opened too quickly, so I took my time carefully undoing it to reveal my clothes. I didn’t enjoy having to make daily trips to plunder old luggage for something to wear, but it was preferable to letting Dad’s smoke slowly seep into the fabric. I had to tolerate it at home, but I drew the line at tracking it with me everywhere else. I hated my wardrobe enough as is. I settled on a polo and a pair of khaki shorts Mom had bought a couple weeks ago. She’d like that, I thought, as I sealed the suitcase and set it back upright. At least somebody would.
Mom was starting to plate everything when I reentered the kitchen, so I hurried through to the bathroom to drop off the clothes. Maybe if I ate quickly enough, I thought, I could get out of there with minimal interaction with Dad and Booker. I was fairly sure Booker didn’t need to get to the community college until 10 on Tuesdays, so he might sleep in. As for Dad, he showered in the evening after work and didn’t didn’t need to be at the nearby construction site until 8:30, so he tended to wake up as late as he could. If I had to go to school anyway, then better to cut out early to avoid the greater evil.
My luck then that they both ended up answering the siren call of a hot breakfast in the end.
I ran headlong into Booker when I rushed out of the bathroom right as he was stepping into the hall. Being a solid head shorter than him and a good bit lighter, I bounced off and would have fallen to the floor if he hadn’t grabbed the back of my shirt.
“Watch where you’re going,” he growled, preempting the ‘thank you’ I almost gave him. He then doubled down by shoving past me, pushing me back towards the bathroom in the process.
“Why don’t you?” I shot right back before I could think better of it.
He stopped and turned to look over his shoulder, but whatever he had been about to say crumbled to dust when Mom poked her head around the kitchen corner and told us, “No fighting. Breakfast is on the table. Go eat while I wake—”
The door to my room swung open, and Dad stumbled out, his eyes fluttering open as he pinched his nose and asked, “Why’re you—?”
“—your father, though it seems that’s unnecessary,” Mom concluded before answering the question Dad had been presumably asking, giving us both a Look while she did. “The boys were tussling, but they won’t be any longer.”
Except that wasn’t what Dad had been asking. “What? No, you were calling my name.”
Again, I almost figured it out, and again, I invented a reasonable and entirely wrong explanation. He had just misheard. Obviously.
It didn’t help that Mom thought the same thing. “You’re hearing things, Morgan. Now, everyone get to the kitchen, or breakfast will get cold. Scoot—scoot.”
The moment passed, my trust in reality reaffirmed. I followed in Dad’s bobbing shadow as we all moved to the kitchen and took our typical places. For me, as the smallest and youngest in the house, that meant squeezing through the narrow gap between wall and table to the back corner. Never mind that I wasn’t that small anymore.
“So!” Mom said with a hint of forced cheer as we all started in on the food. “Big day for my big boys!”
You know the drill by now, right? Justification. I had already concluded she was excited on my behalf because it was my first day attending high school. I just stretched that assumption a bit more, thinking she was also enthusiastic for Booker to start his Tuesday-Thursday classes at WCCC.
“You know it!” Booker enthused with a toothy grin, a strip of bacon impaled on his fork. “Can’t wait for classes to start!”
But see, if there’s one lesson I’ve learned—
“That’s great! You remember how to get to the campus, right?”
—it’s you can only stretch something so far.
“Mmhm. I had to go in the other week to talk with the registrar about adding that extra class, remember? It hasn’t been that long.”
The eggs on my shaking fork fell to my plate with a wet plop, splattering everywhere.
“Ervin?”
Because eventually? It’s either going to break, or it’s going to snap back.
“Ervin? Honey bunch, what’s wrong?”
My fingers were so numb it was a miracle I managed to set that fork down without fumbling it. “Oh. Sorry. I’m just… I’m not, um… really… hungry…”
“Erv?” Dad leaned forward, eyes squinted. “You are not getting out of your first day that easily.”
“Morgan…” Mom warned, face pinched in a frown.
“I’m just making sure he… feels better?”
My teeth hurt. I couldn’t stop shaking. My teeth were shaking. Vibrations stole down my throat, rocking back and forth, back and forth. A ship caught in a storm without end, black clouds marred by a jagged scar, the eye of the storm crusted shut by a terrible night’s sleep. A maw of clenched teeth, trying to hold back the rain, but—
Bile filled my mouth.
—they can’t hold it back.
The eggs and bacon I’d managed to eat already rejoined their compatriots, uniting four parts of one whole. Everyone around the table reacted immediately, evolutionary instinct demanding they flee from the sick, from plague and death. Or maybe they were just really, really grossed out. I know I was because seeing the corpse of my eggs come back to haunt me brought a second wave of bile laced with the few remnants I hadn’t yet managed to evacuate all over what had been a perfectly lovely breakfast.
I think there’s a joke to be made here about sending the meal back to the chef, but I somehow doubt Mom would have appreciated it.
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As it turns out, vomiting breakfast all over the kitchen table was a lot more convincing than shooting snot over it with regards to whether I was too sick for school. Too bad existential breakdown is a bit harder to replicate than shoving pepper up my nose. At least I was right about barfing making my case to stay home better.
So yeah. I skipped the (not just my) first day of school. Again.
Mom and Dad hauled me to the couch, and that time, there wasn’t even a hint of a peep of a complaint from Dad about truancy. As far as they were concerned, I’d managed to catch a bug or something. As far as Booker was concerned, I was, “Vile! Absolutely vile! You probably infected me with your sick!” Charming, right?
I didn’t— couldn’t—respond to anyone when spoken to. That freaked Mom out badly.
“I’ll call Kurt and get the day off. We’re taking you to the ER.”
“What? No!” A look of panic stole over Dad’s face, and while I wished he had been scared for my sake… “Absolutely not, Lynn! We can’t afford that!”
She whirled on him like the wrath of God, hair whipping everywhere. Fire was in her eyes and cheeks, her expression a promise of imminent violence. I genuinely thought she was going to backhand him right in front of me.
“Our son just emptied his stomach and can’t speak a word, and you’re worried about a bill?!” I can’t recall ever hearing her as angry as she was right then. The backhand I’d feared never came. She settled for jabbing him in the chest with a pointed finger. “You want to know why I want a divorce, Morgan? This! This is it!”
His face, normally a constant tan from working outdoors, paled so dramatically that he almost matched Booker’s typical pasty complexion. “Divorce?! You insisted this is a trial separation!”
Mom bit her lip, clearly not having meant to step on that particular land mine. “Bedroom.”
“Lynn—!”
“I am not having this conversation here, Morgan,” she intoned with fervent, inarguable finality. She turned to me, her expression softening instantly. No, not softening—breaking. “Stay right here, honey. Don’t move.”
I watched as Mom all but dragged Dad to their bedroom and laid into him the moment the door was shut, my mind racing a mile, a sensation like static welling up under my thoughts. How? How did this happen? It didn’t make any sense to me. Was it some sort of twisted heavenly retribution because I had skipped school? Surely this was too much for something so small. Some other sin then?
My breathing hitched as a thought occurred, the world suspended in time for a horrifying second: Was it because of the box?
I had been staring at the door to Mom and Dad’s room, but the moment that suspicion slithered through me, my head snapped to the front door. My heart deafened my ears as it near instantly accelerated to a rhythm that had my chest threatening to burst open, the tremors reverberating through my bones up through my jaw and into my skull.
My book bag wasn’t there.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The thunderous tempo my heart had swelled to slammed to a stop, a reversal that by all rights ought to have done me in on the spot. But no, the infernal clock of my meat suit resumed ticking. Oh God, I wanted to say, but the words didn’t come, my tongue still on impromptu holiday. I realized I was standing, my eyes still unwaveringly fixated on where my book bag should have been.
And yes, that book bag really was more important to me right than whatever mechanism had shunted me from tonight back to this morning. You think my priorities were off? I was a 14-year-old afraid of going to literal Hell, so yeah, the metaphorical, time loop version took a back seat. Sue me.
It took me much longer than I’d like to admit to piece together where the book bag and the far more important box likely were. Again, in my defense, I was in the middle of a crisis. The book bag had been in my closet yesterday, stowed away for the summer holiday. The box then was still under my bed, and Dad was preoccupied with Mom.
My feet were already in motion, Mom’s edict to stay put broken in the name of a higher authority. I hurried over to my door as quickly as I dared, the necessity of secrecy the only reason I didn’t throw myself into a full sprint. Each creak and groan my bare feet drew from the aging floor had me wincing and expecting Mom’s head to poke out of their door, her considerable ire right then redirected to me. Fortunately, I made it to the door without issue, likely because of their ongoing feud masking the noise of my approach.
I slipped in, pulling the door shut behind me and lost all self-control for the last few steps it took to cross my room. I practically threw myself to the floor, and sure enough, my box was there, shoved to the back by Dad’s junk. I squirmed underneath, pushing everything between me and my box out of the way, and in a matter of seconds, I reached my prize.
That was, of course, the precise moment that Dad put his foot down.
“Call — the — doctor!!” he bellowed, the sudden apex of what was already significant volume, the sound of a door slamming open hot on its heels. “So help me God, do not go to the ER!”
It was instinct that demanded I pull myself completely under the bed, an intuitive recognition that if Dad was storming out, he would almost certainly be storming into my room. My twin bed only had so much space under it, barely enough room for me to squeeze myself into a ball in the gap I had made in Dad’s stuff, but I managed it in the nick of time. He threw open the door to my room with equal intensity, the flimsy wood bouncing off the wall so badly that it nearly shut itself as he barged in.
With a final, guttural snarl, he threw it the rest of the way shut. In the perceived privacy of my room, he started changing into work clothes. I slammed my eyes shut, no matter that I could barely see his ankles around the rim of the knees I had pulled taut against my chest. Then he began rumbling sharp, horrifying things I won’t repeat about Mom that were never meant for my ears, ears I couldn’t cover without him hearing me.
Dad’s foul litany and the meager barrier of the thin walls almost made me miss Mom’s, “Ervin? Where did—?”
But I didn’t miss the knock on the door.
“Hey, Daaad?” Booker. I had forgotten about Booker. “You’ve got a stowaway.”
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My memories of what followed are honestly hazy, vague impressions of sight and sound for the most part. But I remember Mom’s coaxing. The bed lifting away. The couch sinking its crooked fingers into me.
It was a poor consolation, but I was reasonably certain the focus on me kept eyes off of the royal blue box I had to leave behind.
Mom joined me on the couch after changing out of her work clothes into something more casual, and Dad and Booker left soon after. I couldn’t do anything about the box without cluing her in, and her apparent fear to leave me alone meant she wouldn’t stumble upon it. A stay of execution, but enough for all my earlier panic to seep away while we whiled away the hours until the appointment our primary care physician had fit into his schedule.
I didn’t get up. Didn’t sleep. Didn’t even read. Mom turned on the TV, and I stared at it without seeing. Waves of white noise washed over me, breaking down my castles into sand. I straddled the line between being asleep and awake, the captive of something far worse than the spindly grasp of an old leather couch, and eventually, roused me to go to the bathroom and get dressed.
She’d replaced the nice school clothes with alternatives meant for comfort. A pair of functional gray basketball shorts ordinarily reserved for PE, and my favorite shirt, an over-sized, used tee Mom had gotten me from the consignment store a few years back, expecting I would grow into it. The plain, black cotton was worn enough to be super soft but not so much it was falling apart. I changed out of my sleep clothes, grateful for the small measure of comfort, then we left.
“I’m at a loss, Mrs. Scrivens,” the doctor told her after he had finished putting me through a battery of tests at her insistence. “Ervin’s heart rate and blood pressure are elevated, and he’s a bit flushed, but I can’t find a single thing wrong with him otherwise.”
There was something very wrong, of course. My earlier panic withered away, the reality of my situation had settled in hard. I wonder what the doctor would have done if had been able to tell him I was reliving August 27th for the second time. Order a psych eval? Joke’s on him, I already thought I was crazy at the time.
“But something is wrong!” Mom insisted, cheeks an angry, splotchy red with boiling over fear and anger because something was Wrong with her baby, and she didn’t know what. “Why can he read and write but not speak?!”
But I did. All day, the issue had been hammered home. When Mom had turned on the TV earlier, it had been on the news for the 27th. When she had started her car to drive us to the doctor’s office, the man on the radio had recounted the weather for the 27th. When we had checked in and were asked to wait until they called us, we passed a man in the waiting room reading the newspaper for the 27th. I hadn’t confirmed just yet that I was stuck in a loop, but I knew with absolute certainty that one of two things was true: Either I was having a genuine psychotic break, or I was somehow reliving August 27th. I didn’t know which was preferable.
“I’ve done everything I can,” the doctor told her with what might have been genuine regret, though it could have just as easily could have been that he genuinely wanted the crazy kid and his crazy mom out of his exam room. I’d never liked the man; maybe it was mutual. “Ervin… could have aphasia…”
“Aphasia?”
“It’s a communication disorder that usually comes on suddenly. I can’t diagnose that myself, but his symptoms are enough for me to refer you to speech-language pathology and neurology in Hagerstown for a workup.”
The mention of referrals sent a shiver down my spine.
“N-Neurology? Oh… Oh no. You think there’s something wrong with his brain?”
Mom and Dad had already had a fight over the mere idea of sending me to the emergency room, and now there was talk of sending me to more doctors?
“It’s a possibility, but again, you’ll need to take him to see a specialist to be sure. Aphasia is known for spontaneously occurring, but there would be an underlying reason for it. A stroke or a head injury—something. Just as an example, he may have fallen in the middle of the night and not remember. He’ll need an MRI at the very least, and the specialists may recommend more testing.”
Specialists sounded expensive. MRIs I knew were expensive.
“O-Of course. Whatever we need to do.”
I could have written on the notepad the doctor had given me for testing, but I settled on stamping my foot to draw their attention and shaking my head wildly.
“No?” the doctor supplied, clearly confused.
I could see it the moment Mom got it. The minute slump of her shoulders, the way her eyes dimmed. But she rallied, lying, “It’ll be okay, honey.”
In the end, I couldn’t do anything to stop her. I was voiceless—powerless—as Mom spoke with the care coordinator, making appointments and plans, laying out a future I wanted even less than the one I had the first time I woke up on August 27th.
Mom held my hand tight on the way out of the office. Gave it little squeezes and told me, “I love you, honey,” and, “you’re gonna be okay,” at irregular intervals the entire walk back to the car. I’m still not sure who she was trying to convince because I was not going to be okay. I was going to go to sleep that night and one of two things was going to happen: Either I’d wake up on August 28th on a collision course with ruining Mom’s life with debt or I’d wake up on August 27th—proof positive reality was broken or I was broken. And regardless of which outcome came, I might never speak again.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to roll down the window on the drive home and howl like something obscene. I wanted the world to look — at — me. To look and me and talk to me instead of about me, like I wasn’t there, like I’d become a thing instead of a person when I returned Mom’s generous breakfast to the place from whence it came.
But I didn’t do any of that. I kept my mouth shut like a good kid, my jaw screaming for me, in pain like nothing I had ever felt.
The atmosphere at home that evening was excruciating. Mom fussed over me at every turn, plying with me more water and snacks than I could stomach and bringing me all my favorite books from the small bookshelf Dad had built me for my desk. When it was time for dinner, she even made Booker sit in the corner instead of me and served my lasagna and veggies for me. Booker ought to have been frustrated at being smooshed into the tight space. He certainly should have been teasing me about causing trouble for everyone, even if only in the safety of a discreet whisper when Mom wasn’t near. But the anger never came, and neither did the teasing. He just watched me as he picked at his meal, his quiet observation giving way to pity a couple of times when he thought I wasn’t looking.
And Dad? He wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t say a word to me either, but that was mostly true for everyone else as well. He and Booker shared a single, quiet conversation I couldn’t hear after Dad showered and changed into casual clothes, but other than that, he devolved into single word answers and wordless grunts. I never thought I might miss the arguments or Dad’s veiled put downs and not so veiled disappointment.
I was suffocating. I needed to get out. I needed fresh air, a chance to be alone, and I got it, eventually, in the weirdest way: Booker fell asleep.
By some unspoken agreement (Get it? Because almost nobody was speaking?), everyone gravitated to the living room. It was more of a rarity those days, but it used to be near daily. When Booker and I were growing up, back when the couch didn’t have its fangs or Dad’s armchair its stains, we spent almost every night in the living room together. Booker and I sat with Mom on the couch with him always taking the seat closest to Dad’s chair, and we would do our homework on the coffee table with Mom’s occasional input while she and Dad watched the news. Eventually the channel would change to whatever show Booker was interested in that week, and I would curl up with Mom and read books.
It wasn’t the same. Despite poor little Ervin’s sacrificial lamb bringing the family together in the physical sense, the rift between mine and Mom’s side and Booker and Dad’s was too cavernous for even the grasping, leather fingers of our couch to bring together. I crammed myself into my corner of the couch as deep as I could then squirmed in deeper for good measure, and on the opposite side, Booker had some college textbook open on the arm of his side, leaving him perpetually turned away as he read. Mom perched in between us, caught between my I don’t want to be touched vibe and Booker’s studious focus, and settled on watching the news while making little comments and asides about the world’s goings-on that nobody really heard. Dad watched the news as well, but no one could have described the situation as him and Mom watching it together.
I didn’t give the VCR’s dim pronouncements of time any more of my attention than I did the TV’s blathering, but time marched on regardless (until it didn’t). Booker dozing off and slumping over onto Mom was what finally drew my attention to how late it had gotten, a sullen ‘11:01’ the caption to a show I didn’t recognize. Like the flag falling at the start of a race, that was apparently the signal for the uneasy, temporary truce to end.
“Going to bed,” was all Dad said before he pulled in the footrest of his chair and vanished into my room. There would be no getting my shoe box that night. I would have to retrieve it in the morning, whether that be tomorrow’s or today’s.
“Booker, dear?” Mom said so softly I almost didn’t hear her over the TV. “Let’s get you to—”
Then she stopped. She stopped and looked at me, her poor, pitiable youngest, the kid she had spent all day fussing over, and then she made one last act of service for me by carefully easing herself out from under Booker while gently laying him down on the couch. He didn’t look comfortable in the slightest with his bottom half draped off the cushions to the floor, but he slumbered on regardless.
Mom turned off the TV, the behemoth crackling with static as it settled from a night of use, and turned to me, saying, “Why don’t you take Booker’s bed for the night, hon? You’ve… you’ve had a big day.”
My mouth had no words to give, but I managed a nod. She leaned in and gave me a hug so gentle it felt like a ghost’s, then she kissed my hair and pulled back, the overhead light at her back and her face swathed in shadows as she turned to retreat to her room. It took several minutes, but silence finally fell over the room as the last of the TV’s grumbles faded away.
I stood, but not to go to bed, Booker’s or otherwise. I turned off the lights in the living room and hallway and opened and closed the door to Booker’s room, leaving just enough time between to make Mom think I’d gone inside in case she was listening.
Then came the hard part. Booker’s room sat at the end of the hall adjacent to the bathroom and opposite the storage closet with the washer and dryer. More relevant to my goal right then, it was the bedroom furthest from the front door, and the hallway back to the living room was a minefield of creaking wood that led right past the rooms containing each of my parents. Under cover of darkness, I crept back to the living room as quickly as I dared, painstakingly avoiding the floorboards I knew would moan the most while giving as little as I could of my inconsiderable weight to the sturdier ones.
After an agonizing eternity, I reached the living room. Faint moonlight illuminated the coffee table and the couch cushion closest to the window facing the front of the house, leaving the impression that Booker had been beheaded, his face cast in silvery light while his torso down was swallowed up by the dark. The length of floor between the front door and where the hallway met the living room was no less perilous than my progress so far, but it was shorter and felt safer with Booker visibly asleep. I carefully made my way to the door and though I did my best to turn it quietly, the deadbolt still clicked when unlocked.
I shot Booker a panicked look, and for a terrifying second, I swore one of his eyes half opened, but it wasn’t. A trick of the gloomy light. I opened the door, grateful Dad kept the hinges oiled better than he took care of the leak in the garage, and shut it behind me.
The air outside was warm and humid enough to be sticky, but it was kinder to me than the walkway to the street was to my bare feet. The concrete was prickly, urging me forward and off into the thin strip of grass that barely constituted a front lawn. Flush with success, I turned on my heel to go climb the trellis.
A quiet little whine escaped me when I realized a new problem. The trellis was afixed to the wall between the windows for my room and Booker’s. Dad would hear me, I thought, and being caught outside at night would be far more difficult to explain (If I even could, mute as I was that night) than wandering the house at night.
I wish I had a better justification for what I did instead, but there is no justifying stepping into the road, much less in my comfy but dark clothes. It didn’t matter that it had been a day from hell or that I’d had my victory snatched away. All I know is the urge to flee grabbed hold of me, a rolling thunder swelling up and drowning out all rational thought until all that I had left was running.
That thunder collapsed in on itself, folding away while a new sound unfolded in its place, a screech that crescendoed into an abrupt stop. No, I don’t know how I missed the headlights either; I’m just glad the headlights, and the driver behind them, didn’t miss me.
Blinded by the headlights, I heard more than saw the driver’s door get thrown open, a face I couldn’t see emerging to shout, “Get out of the road, kid!”
I spun on my heel and ran. I didn’t care about the pavement tearing up my feet. I didn’t even care anymore about waking Dad as I scrambled up the trellis. I didn’t stop until I was flat on my back, panting hard beneath the crescent moon.
I crashed along with the adrenaline from my near miss, never making it back inside.