Free Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen Page B

in school?”
    â€œSophomore. Next year I’ll be a junior.”
    â€œSixteen, then?” He narrowed his eyes, as if concentrating on something important, as if wrestling with a momentous decision.
    â€œThat’s too young,” his brother said. “Sixteen. Man.” He shook his head. “Too young.”
    â€œBut girls are more mature,” said the one.
    The other shook his head. “Not that much.”
    â€œSixteen isn’t so young. Not all that young, when you think about it. When you think about it we’re sending eighteen-year-olds off to war all the time.”
    â€œI never thought of it that way,” said the other, sarcastic. He gave his brother a pitying look. “I’m outta here.” He walked off, out of the room. When he was gone I turned to the one left and said, “Who are you again?”
    â€œMike,” he said. He had settled on The Three Stooges , who were working as tailors and had found a suit full of money, and its pending loss, which was certain, set off an anxiety in me so powerful the skit’s comedy was lost in it.
    When a commercial broke in Mike said, “I’m gonna get myself a drink. You want a drink?” He opened the little refrigerator and bent over to inspect its contents. “We got Coke.”
    I was expecting a can but when he handed me a drink it was in one of the hotel’s short glasses, amber-colored and dimpled. It tasted like Coke but there was something else to it, something bitter and warm. Rum, or whiskey, I didn’t know the difference. I drank it down and in a minute Mike was up mixing drinks again, and then again. It wasn’t long before I felt loose all over and started laughing at the least little thing. My laughter was loud and low and came out stuttering, without my adding any shape to it. It rang through the room and sounded to me the laugh of a retarded person.
    I was lying on my stomach on the floor. Mike was sitting beside me with his legs crossed, but went so far as to stand up when something was funny and bend over laughing. “Fuck me, that’s funny,” he said. Sometimes when he laughed he grabbed his head like people did in aspirin commercials. I rolled over and watched the television upside down. “Hey,” I said, “you should try this.” Mike stretched out beside me on his back, then started voicing over the characters. “Hey, guys,” he said in Curly’s falsetto, “everything’s all upside down!” And Mo answered, “You’re upside down, you moron.” With an almost scientific detachment I noticed I was having trouble doing more than one thing at a time, for instance watching the television and listening to Mike, for instance laughing and keeping my eyes open, for instance hearing Malinda cry out in something like pain from the next room and pretending I hadn’t. And then everything was reduced to breathing. I was breathing through my mouth as though a person who had been trapped underwater up to the brink of death.
    Sometime later Malinda and Flash, or Rod, came out of their room, and distantly I heard Malinda saying, “Shit! Oh shit!” Then she was pulling my hand, pulling me up and then onto my feet. I was still so far gone it was all as in a dream, wobbly and chimerical, the room looked like a place I’d never seen, Flash and Mike like people I’d never seen, and I was up on my feet being pulled along by Malinda out the door and down the hall—we were running, now, with a swiftness that seemed untenable—and when we got to the elevator Malinda pressed the down button but then couldn’t wait. She kept on running to the end of the hall and banged through the door to the stairwell, which was lit by a single orange bulb. We ran down the stairs and out into the back parking lot, then around the building, and up to the boardwalk, which was empty, its lights out, its stores shut away behind grates,