She tells me she is disgusted with herself. We are walking in the field. She isn’t going to Wisconsin. Fuck that. I don’t, we don’t need that. I’m sticking here, where I grew up. She walks in front of me and the sun is setting and she turns to shadow and there’s just orange glowing around her. I don’t want to keep walking. I keep walking, and then she stops and takes the joint out and we smoke it. I don’t like her. I don’t like this girl. I don’t know what I’m doing here. She’s too fat. She’s too weird and she’s too fat. Where are we going, I ask her. I don’t know. I’m not going to do this. I start walking in the grass. It goes up to my knees.
I wake up in a car. She’s playing radio static again. Grey everywhere. Turn it down, I tell her. She turns it down. I fall asleep. I wake up in my bed. My head hurts like hell. I feel like I slept for a long time. I can’t get up. I wake up in my car. I’m driving down a road and all the trees look green and blue and white and orange. I look at the speedometer, I’m going five below. I look in the rearview mirror, nothing, I feel a hand on my shoulder. I miss you, Mom.
I have a hand in my pocket as I walk to the grocery store. I’m going to buy some apples. I feel around for the dollars I put in there. The automatic door opens and I feel cold, then warm, then medium, then warm, then cold. I walk. I see a display of green apples. I feel them on my fingers. I walk back to my car with the apples.
Sometime that night, I sneak down to the basement and take a screwdriver from my dad’s toolbox. I go to my room and take an apple from the bag. I sit at my desk and dig the screwdriver into the core, make another hole with a hollowed out pen, put a chunk into the center, take a lighterlight it, inhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, inhale, exhale. There really isn’t much to do.
I go to sleep at three. I have a dream about a couple of guys that break into a high school in the middle of the night and pee on everybody’s locker. Then the police come and they can see the floodlights turning everything white and suddenly I’m one of the guys and I have to say “I love you” because that’s the line in the play but it all seems too real and I can’t believe that we’re in a play, I think we’re really going to die, so I take a gun from the cabinet near the door and shoot my accomplice three times in the chest. His blood is bright blue and splashing like paint and starts looking more and more like paint then I close my eyes and open them and see blue flowers on a carousel and I close my eyes and I’m afraid to open them but I force myself to, to wake myself up, and I see my bedside table and I’m not afraid anymore. I’m awake. Then everything turns blue.
I miss you, Mona. These are the words that were in my head as I walked to class that day. It was pouring rain out, but the sun kept shimmering through the raindrops, making it bearable, somehow. I miss you, Mona… I miss you… and I hate you forever! Suddenly, I found myself smiling as the rain smashed against my face. I realized I was free at last from that fat bitch that tried to control my life. I control my own life! So I went to the grocery store and asked Mindy to the dance!
