Free Nothing Real Volume 1 by Claire Needell Page A

when she’d lost me.
    I already knew even before Sara let her hand slide all the way down until it seemed stuck there at the waist of my jeans. Sara liked to show people she could do whatever the fuck she wanted. A few months before I might have made a point of resisting her. But now I was Perc man, zombie Adam. And it wasn’t just that I couldn’t quite get my mouth to form the right words. I knew from experience there was no better feeling than being high on Percs and getting what Sara was plainly offering. The last clear thought I had was yes —and I was grateful to the girl in the pink sweater that she had dressed the way she had, that she had offered herself to me, that I did not have to be alone for one more second, melting into the tall kitchen stool in fucking Bonnie Fine’s kitchen. I never minded Sara. In ninth-grade algebra I’d sat behind her and I remembered how she smelled like lemons.
    I stared hard at her, and she picked up my hand and led me down the hall, and then upstairs to what had to be Bonnie’s older brother’s room. Michael was away at college, but had left behind a fish tank that someone else must have had to clean.
    The bed was made up with green-and-black flannel sheets, like they sell at L.L.Bean. I sat down and pulled Sara toward me. But Sara had her own ideas, and she pressed her palm into my chest and pushed me back on the bed. I said her name once, and she told me to be quiet.
    Afterward I put on my jeans and tucked my shirt in, but then I satback down heavily on the bed. It was surprisingly hard to stand. Sara was combing her hair out with her fingers. I noticed for the first time how her nose turned up a little at the end. She was a cute girl but not a beauty. She had none of May’s alluring strangeness. She combed her hair out as if she were looking into a mirror, but it was just the fish tank she faced, with a lazy, orange-finned fish fanning its way around the fetid water.
    I felt light-headed. There was something I needed to tell Sara, but I couldn’t form the words. I felt a coldness creep up my back, a darkness, a debilitating silence. My heart started beating crazy fast, something that had never happened to me before on Percs. I thought, frantically, that I might never be able to speak again, that there might never be anything I would need or want to say to anyone. Sara and I did not exist on the same plane. She had already put what had happened between us behind her. She had fixed her hair, and was ready to join the others and have a smoke. But I still couldn’t move. I wasn’t sure how I would ever get out of Michael Fine’s childhood bedroom. It was May I needed, and now I had lost her; there was no way I could conceal any of this from her. May had always been on this path to destruction with me, and I needed her to know I had arrived.
    I couldn’t recall how much beer I drank, or the actual number of pills I’d taken. Had I even had a hit off a joint? I remembered Sara saying my name in a tone of surprise. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t explain it to her. I couldn’t tell if there was something physically wrong with me, or if I’d simply become paralyzed by the thought of needing to move. I felt my own hands on my face, but as thoughit were a stranger’s touch. Then, the darkness and silence within me broke into a million pieces, like shards of nothingness. I heard myself choking and tried to muffle the sound. I remember Sara coming over to me, and trying to pull my hands from my mouth, but I was biting them then, coming down hard on my fingers and palms. I remember her calling for Bonnie, for Jay. I remember tasting blood.
    The day they brought me here was a Saturday. Dad had on khakis and a blue polo tucked in, but no belt. It was an odd thing to notice, the lack of a belt, but Dad is the type to wear the same things in the same way, and even that small omission from his usual uniform made