In the Summertime

three

It's not fine.

As soon as I enter my house, I can tell something is wrong.

There are clattering sounds coming from the kitchen, meaning my mother is either awake and cooking, or awake and looking for a drink in the fridge. Neither of those are good options.

I should have expected it -- there hasn't been an incident in the past few days, which is a few days too many.

The best thing to do now is to just deal with it. To go in the kitchen and talk to her -- gauge her mood -- and then escape to my room as fast as possible. But the thing about today is that I don't want to talk to her. I don't want to have to make eye contact and worry that she'll decide I'm staring in a disrespectful way and then things end with me getting in trouble. I don't want to have to talk to her about my day or about how I'm feeling or about school or about anything else; I just want to go and lay down until dinner.

Even if I wanted to, though, I can't make it to my room without walking past the kitchen, and that's a problem. I don't want her to know I'm here. She's going to know regardless -- she probably thinks I'm already in my room because that's where I was supposed to be an hour and a half ago -- but I don't want to make my presence known, and I don't want to have to deal with something that I really do not want to deal with.

It might be inevitable, though.

I slowly, carefully, walk further into the house. The couch isn't messy -- the throw pillows are neat and where they're supposed to be -- and the blanket is folded and placed carefully over the back of it. It's a distinct change from how it looked yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that.

I reach the kitchen, but I make sure to stand a little bit before the doorway, so my mom can't see me unless she's standing in a certain spot. The clattering has died down some, and I can hear the sizzling of something as it cooks. If she's cooking, that probably means she hasn't been drinking, which is a good thing. Unless the reason she hasn't been drinking is because she knows I poured half of the cans of beer, and a good amount of the other types of alcohol we have -- had -- in the house, down the drain and then threw the cans and bottles away. If she knows that, if she doesn't think she just drank them all, then I could be in serious trouble.

Peeking my head out a little, I watch as my mom -- standing in front of the stove, with her back to me -- cooks. She doesn't look tense, her shoulders seem to be relaxed, and the line of her back isn't ramrod straight, but none of that really proves anything. She could be in that mood where she acts like nothing is wrong, and gives no indication that something is wrong, and something actually is wrong and she's expecting me to know it.

I wish I could see her face; it's always all in the face.

She turns the stove off, and I am hit by the sudden need to escape, by the need to just go. I want to get as far away from here, from this place -- from this house, from this town, from this life -- as I possibly can. The urge to pack a bag and catch a bus out of here is overwhelming in its intensity; it hits me like the truck that hit the Velaris' cat a few months ago. I can hear the crash as it slams into me, can feel my ribs threatening to collapse into my lungs and insides. And it hurts.

By the time it occurs to me that maybe that's not an entirely good thing, and by the time my mom starts to turn around, pan of something in her hand, whatever she was cooking still inside it, I'm darting across the open doorway and am in the hallway leading to the two bedrooms and bathroom, am already on my way to my room where I can safely shut myself inside. I imagine her looking up and staring at the spot I've just vacated, and I find myself wondering whether she'd know I had just been standing there or not.