Free Nothing Real Volume 1 by Claire Needell Page B

me wonder. His hair, I noticed, seemed a bit too long, and his eyes were rimmed with red. Mom had looked like shit for days, so bad I couldn’t even look at her without a stab of accusation running through me. She didn’t know what pissed me off so much, thought herself the injured party. How could I, her only child, have done this to her? How could I have risked her happiness?
    But what surprised me during intake was Dad. We sat there in Dr. Mick’s stuffy little office, with kids walking in, interrupting, sitting for a minute or two, then wandering out again. This place is different, the kids said, neither rehab nor mental ward, but a place for smart kids like me to start over. You take classes. You mow the lawn. You talk the endless talk about being here, and when you weren’t here, and when you might someday be able to leave.
    Dr. Mick leaned back in his chair and eyed me with suspicion. “So, kid, are you finished?” he wanted to know.
    â€œWith what?” I asked.
    â€œYou tell me.”
    â€œFucking up?”
    Then Dad jumped in, his voice breaking. “Adam is not a fuckup. He’s a good student, responsible, an outstanding athlete. He just succumbed to the pressure, and needs to get his head together.” Dad had his elbows on his knees, his body a coil. He said, “His name is Adam, not kid .”
    Dr. Mick looked back at me and said, “What do you say to that, kid? What do you say to your dad?”
    I said, “Yeah, Dad, I know what I am.” And then I said something I hadn’t really even thought, except maybe during the soccer game, or maybe a few times with May, downing Perc after Perc. I knew what it was I was after, what I’d chased down all year long. I wanted to feel nothing, to be nothing. It was only that night with Sara that I’d known what that really meant, that it meant losing, and not just giving up. “All this year, Dad, I’ve really wanted to be done with it all—everything. School. Soccer. You. Mom. Everything.”
    Dr. Mick looked back at Dad. I could hear Mom quietly crying. But Dad stared at me, his mouth tight, his lower lip slightly curved. His hands trembled in his lap.
    And then he stood up, and I half expected him to walk out the door, to get away from me, his loser son, but he didn’t. Instead, he walked over to me and bent down, and he put his arms around me, which felt kind of stiff and strange. He brushed my hair off my forehead and he kissed me on the top of my head, the way I remember himdoing a few times when I was very young, and for some reason he was the one who had to put me to bed. I remembered back then on those rare occasions when he tucked me in at night, how thorough he was about it all, and how he never rushed, but carefully pressed the covers to my chest, smoothed them down, and then planted that identical kiss. I realized then how deliberate he was, how much that must have meant to him, and that maybe sometime, some infinity ago, someone had kissed him in just that way, and he had felt it strongly, as though he truly believed he had received, way back then in his own childhood, a kind of a lasting blessing.

Copyright
    N OTHING REAL VOLUME 1: A COLLECTION OF STORIES . Copyright © 2014 by Claire Needell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
    EPub Edition © May 2014 ISBN 9780062338235
    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
    FIRST EDITION

About the Publisher
    Australia
    HarperCollins