AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You said to make sure you got up,” he explains.
“Shane.” My voice has gone from annoyed to concerned.
He usually looks impish when he wakes me creatively. He doesn’t look that way at all right now.
Shane’s eyes are bloodshot, his long dirty-blonde hair is everywhere, and the hand he’d just been knocking with has scabs on each knuckle. And beyond that, he just looks – bad.
“What happened?” I ask.
My eyes dart to my digital alarm clock. It’s earlier than I need to get up and I didn’t ask him to wake me.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
I shake my head. “To your hand?”
“Oh.” He flexes his fingers while he examines it. “Dunno.”
Lies.
Or worse, blackouts. Not more blackouts, please.
“Did you miss taking your meds yesterday, Shane?” I do my best to ask this gently.
“Ran out.”
He looks away when he says this.
“When? Yesterday?”
“While ago.” He waves his hand dismissively as my heart plummets. “Got thirty bucks, Jayjay?”
And now I’m ticked.
I glare at him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were out of your medication?”
“C’mon, Jayjay,” he drawls, looking exasperated. “Thirty. I’ll get you back soon.”
“You need thirty to get your pills?”
“No… need two hundred and three for my pills. I need thirty for something to take the edge off not having a hundred and eighty-three. You got it?” He reaches for my leather backpack purse on the hook on the back of my bedroom door as I absorb the fact that those numbers weren’t even the same.
“No!” I snap, rising and pointing at him. “Stay out of my bag. I don’t even have an extra dime right now.”
“No?” His face falls. “Damn. You sure you don’t have twenty-seven or something?”
“I told you, rent is due the day after tomorrow and my entire pay plus the tips I’ve saved up for two weeks will only just cover us. Just. We’re gonna be living on Ramen, rusty tap water, and air for the foreseeable. I take it you didn’t go to that job expo yesterday?”
His eyes go blank for a second and then a wrinkle forms over the bridge of his nose. “It was a fuck-about. Stood in line for three hours and they said it was already full.” He starts biting on his nails, which are already bitten to the quick – this is another sign he’s off the rails and lying to me.
This feels like a typical Shane excuse, but there’s no point in saying so.
There’s no point in asking just how long he’s been off his meds. It’s obvious to me that it’s long enough that he can’t sleep and looks like he’s either been on a bender or is about to step off the ledge to go on one.
I don’t even want to ask what his magical ‘take the edge off’ thirty-dollar cure is. Illicit drugs, no doubt, though he won’t outright admit it to me, knowing I’ll lose my mind if I think he’s back on drugs again, so no point in asking about that either.
There’s also no use pushing about why his knuckles are all scabby – I know he won’t tell me the truth, if he even remembers. Injuries he can’t explain are one of the things that often happens when he’s off his medication. Fibbing is another, though I think he’s trying to protect me from the truth more than trying to be deceptive.
The only thing I can do right now is go take my shower and get ready for my shift at the coffee cart. Shane woke me thirty minutes early, something he tends to do when he’s spiraling like this, anxious to talk to me, pretending to be my human alarm clock, but I’m up. And I know that when I leave, he’ll try to find another way to get some money, and then he’ll crash for the day. Another day will go by where he does nothing to help himself. Or me, who is trying desperately to help us both.
“What about the clinic? When do you go again?”
“I missed two appointments so now I’m on the wait list,” he says. “That’s why I need the thirty-six bucks. There’s something holistic that’ll help.” He looks at me with eyebrows quirked.
“I don’t have thirty-six dollars.”
Holistic. I don’t even ask. It’s probably magic mushrooms, or that dream DMT stuff, or something like that.
My big brother’s life has been an ongoing rollercoaster of a battle with mental illness, self-harm, and substance abuse. He lives with me because after losing a job and getting evicted with his last downhill spiral, he moved back in with Dad. Dad had strict rules for him staying, but Shane screwed up, resulting in Dad coming home to a party in his house after a hunting trip ended early. Shane was getting Narcan administered to him in the bathroom by his then-girlfriend when Dad walked in and Dad lost it and tossed him out as well as the twenty-or-so people hanging out in Dad’s living room smoking dope, doing lines, and the biggest sin of all – sitting in Dad’s recliner.
