Crazy Enough by Storm Large Read Free Book Online

above the ground, blurring the edges of everything. A great day to be slathered in Bain De Soleil and flirt with the tattooed carnies at my dad’s water park, or just run into some cold water, like kids were doing everywhere else that day.
    Instead, we walked up the cement steps into the main office to sign in and wait for Nursezilla to come grunt us up to our mom’s floor. When we said Large to the sign-in nurse she looked on a clipboard and quickly sat up very straight, smiled phonily and awfully, and said, “Um . . . yes. Could you please wait over there for a moment? Someone will be here soon, to talk with you.”
    To talk with us?
    John went stone quiet. His face was stiff under his long rock ’n’ roll hair.
    We sat on the sofa across from the front desk, the sign-in nurse smiling nervously if she caught us looking her way. She busied herself with some papers and kept her head down.
    John and I stared blankly forward.
    â€œShe’s dead. She fucking did it. She’s dead,” I said out loud, not looking at him. I knew full well my big brother had already come to that conclusion. What I wondered was, did we make this happen? Does John think we made it happen?
    I was immediately ashamed of myself. All the joking . . . I felt like a bully who had terrorized a little dog and then watched it sprintinto oncoming traffic. A tiny living being, so twisted and miserable from God knows what, but all she wanted in the whole world was to be loved. And one by one, all the loved ones in her life gave up on her and pulled away. Including her children. My faced burned. I wanted her to die, and now . . .
    â€œHi there,” someone was singing at us. “You must be Stor-meee!”
    I looked up to see a middle-aged woman in a pink pantsuit standing in an office doorway. John and I were pulled from our reverie and beckoned into a bright office, blasted with air conditioning. I instantly had gooseflesh all over my arms and legs. We sat on one side of a massive desk, she on the other. A plaque on the desk read Dr. Candy Something-ski.
    â€œSo, how are you kids doing?”
    Next to her name plaque was a menagerie of ceramic Siamese kittens, frozen and shiny. They were posed to look like they were suspended in midplay. All around the room were the trappings of someone who had to bullshit families as their primary source of income. On the walls were framed posters of soft-focus vistas, those typical shots of seascapes and rainbows with birds stretching across them. Some had motivational phrases about footsteps and paths and shit. There were other glass critters here and there, all peeking their heads around, giving the impression that they were all paying attention. Like they cared.
    I wanted to smash everything I saw.
    Dr. Candy opened her mouth to sing again, this time to my brother who just stared at his thumbs.
    â€œIs she dead?” My voice did not sound as tough as I’d hoped.
    An expression twitched over her before the cough-syrup smile of gigantic fake empathy returned. The look that lit for a nanosecond on her face was a cold, sharky indifference with a barb of “I’ve heardabout you, you mouthy little fucker, don’t interrupt me again or you’ll be frozen in glass faster that you can read the motivational messages on my wall.”
    I could feel the bitch, and she hated me. Fuck her.
    â€œIs. She. Dead?” I refused to look at her, staring at the tiny ball of yarn in the grip of the tiny ceramic cat whose tiny butt pointed up. Someone thought it a good idea to paint a tiny butthole under its upturned tail.
    â€œSuzi’s had a bad day.” She turned her lollipop charm back on me, talking at me as if I weren’t real. I looked at John, then at his thumbs as he didn’t lift his eyes, then back to the ceramic kitty butthole. “And it seems she’s been trying to hurt herself, and,
and . . .”
    â€œWe know she wants to fucking die already,