Halfway Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

my two months here, so assiduous not to intrude. I snap the light on the bedside table, bathing the room in peach through the old silk shade. This room's not so tatty, though, its green wicker furniture crisp as Maine. Brian nods approval, soberly indifferent, even when I open the balcony door at the foot of the bed, to the beckoning shine of the moonlit sea.
    "We share a bathroom," I explain, pushing through yet another door. Even as I flick the light I wish I'd had a minute to tidy up. It's pretty gritty. There're prescription bottles all over the sink and counter, like Neely O'Hara in Valley of the Dolls. Funky towels on the floor and underwear strewn haphazardly. The plumbing hasn't been scoured in ages, and green blooms around the fixtures.
    "Beautiful tile," Brian says gamely, as I snatch up shorts and toss them into my room.
    "Look, you don't have to go right to bed. Maybe you want a drink or something." I'm rattling on as I scoop the prescriptions and push them to the far end of the counter. I open the cupboard above the tub, and eureka, there's one clean towel. I present it to Brian. "I think there's vodka in the freezer. Whatever you like. It's just that I get real tired."
    "Sure, sure, you go to bed. I'll be fine." There's a crease of worry between his eyes as he studies my face. "I'll just do a little work and then turn in myself."
    "I bet you were supposed to call Susan."
    "No, that's okay. They know I'll be home tomorrow. I'll be fine."
    As he repeats this ringing assertion of life, he lifts his free hand in an awkward wave and backs out of the bathroom. Gently he closes the door. I who will not be fine turn and blink in the mirror above the sink, which I usually avoid like a nun. All I can see is the lesion on my cheek. My sickness is palpable, and indeed I'm completely exhausted. I splash my face with water, then use the hand towel to scrub at the smegma on the sink. It's hopeless.
    I stand at the toilet and pull out my dick—O useless tool, unloaded gun—and dribble a bit of piss, not a proper stream. The virus does something in the bladder to tamp the flow, or else there're lesions there as well.
    I leave the light on for Brian and close my own door. I don't even bother to turn on the lamp as I shrug out of the crew-neck and kick off my jeans. I duck into the bed and under the old down comforter that's shredding at the seams, spilling feathers like a wounded duck. Moonlight streams in, blue-gray on the furniture.
    And I lie there, I who sleep like the dormouse now, nodding off into naps two or three times a day, ten hours solid at night. I stare at the ceiling, and the rage comes back. My father with the strap, my useless mother whimpering, "Don't hit his head." Brian on the field swamped by fans at the end of a game. Laughing with his girlfriend, horsing around with his buddies. My memory is split-screen, the Dickensian squalor of my woeful youth against the shine of Brian. No slight or misery is too small for me to dredge up. I am the princess and the pea of this condition.
    I don't know how long it goes on. At one point I realize I'm clutching the other pillow as if I'm strangling someone, and my teeth are grinding like millstones. Then I hear Brian and freeze. The water goes on in the sink, right through the wall behind my head. I can hear him scrubbing his face—can see it.
    Because it's as if the sixteen years have vanished since we shared a room in Chester. I in my scrawny body have finished brushing my teeth, and Brian the god, a towel at his waist from the shower, steps up to the sink to shave. At sixteen he's got hair on his chest. His stomach is taut, the muscles cut like a washboard. I am so in awe of him that I have to force myself not to look, for fear of the dark incestuous longing that licks at my crotch like the flames of hell.
    The water goes off. There's a shuffle of feet on the tile, and then I hear him pissing. But with him it's a geyser, a long and steady stream that drums the bowl