Free Uncle Janice by Matt Burgess

catching bad guys,” she told him. “But we’ll get her up real soon, okay?”
    “She was all cold,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Her mouth was full of upchuck.”
    Janice ran past him. Still in her underwear, she burst without knocking into Fiorella’s room, where the bedsheets were crumpled but empty. Thick curtains on the windows made it difficult to see. The room might’ve smelled like upchuck, just as he’d said, but she couldn’t tell with her nose stuffed. A humidifier puffed steam into the room. She stepped closer, hunched over, for some reason afraid to make a sound. She worried Fiorella had rolled off the bed at some point in the night and got herself trapped on the floor, wedged between the box spring and the wall. A clown jumped out from behind the door. It wheeled toward her, quickly through the darkness, with its pasty skin and green hair and bloodied lips, and it rose up into Janice’s face and said, “Boo.”
    She staggered away, screaming, until she hit the edge of the mattress and fell backward onto the bed. Hector’s cape trailed behind him as he vaulted into the room. He, too, was screaming, but with laughter, like the clown, whose face was softening into a thick rubber Joker mask.The body beneath it belonged to Fiorella. Already dressed for a day of meth clinics, she wore a white Mets jersey, number 13, yellow under the pits, and acid-washed jeans with a pair of guns—her own and Janice’s—holstered to the waist.
    “Yes!” she cried. “Oh man, Itwaru—you shoulda seen your
face
.”
    “I could’ve attacked you!”
    “Oh yeah,” Fiorella said, gesturing to Janice collapsed across the sheets. “You was all ready to bust out your jujitsu moves.”
    “Did I do good?” Hector asked.
    “Jesus Christ,” Janice said.
    “Hey, no cussing!” Fiorella told her. “I don’t want you teaching my baby boy no bad habits.” She tried poking Janice in the ribs but kept getting her hand slapped away. “Hey, but I bet you’re not hungover anymore, am I right? Huh? Huh, huh, huh? Am I right? Man oh man, Itwaru, your face is like covered in hives. You want some Benadryl?”
    One question at a time: did she still feel hungover? Yes, as a matter of fact, she did, maybe worse than before. And no, she did not want a Benadryl. Well, actually, yes, she did want a Benadryl, but with her four-buy ultimatum she couldn’t risk its drowsy-making side effects. A lint roller, though, would’ve been great. And maybe an EKG machine. A couple of Advils. Before leaving the room, Fiorella tossed the Joker mask into Janice’s lap, and Hector, who surely sensed time running short, followed his mama out into the hall. She’d have to call a cab soon, to take her and Janice to the rumpus, or rather eight blocks away from the rumpus, outside A.R.’s Tavern, where they’d both left their cars, but in the meantime Fiorella was telling him to get dressed for school. He’d be waiting for the bus downstairs at Mrs. Bakkemo’s, she said, to which he responded that he’d spent all night at Mrs. Bakkemo’s. No fair. Nothing ever was. Janice lay back down across the bed and put on the mask. The only oxygen she could breathe in there was her own. Out in the hall, but sounding much farther away, Hector was asking if he could at least keep his Superman costume on under his school clothes. The humidifier’s puffing became harder to hear. Strangely peaceful inside this mask, Janice pretended she was dead, her go-to method for falling asleep. Down at her ankles,unseen, Mister Maplewood, who hated to be ignored, tensed his jaw, ready to chomp.
    The Flushing Hospital Methadone Maintenance Outpatient Clinic opened its doors at seven thirty in the morning for the usual motley of men and women in dress shoes, tennis shoes, flats, pumps, clogs, Uggs, stilettos, galoshes, wellies, high-tops, Timberlands, and Timberland knockoffs. A skinny young white guy had a jump rope tied around his raggedy loafer, to keep the sole