If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir by Jessica Hendry Nelson Read Free Book Online

says, and snatches the television remote from her lap.
    Her boyfriend, Rick, watches her and laughs, her pretty face scrunched in concentration, tossed back toward the ceiling. Her eyes are closed. She digs the thin heels of her shoes into the floor, drawing black lines through a collection of ash.
    “All right, baby. Damn!” he scolds, pushing her into the couch cushions and stealing the joint. The gesture is neither affectionate nor aggressive. I know from experience that Angel can snap in an instant; she is prone to scream wildly when it is least expected. This is part of the fun. Jordan looks at me conspiratorially.
    “I love you, Peanut,” he mouths.
    He disappears upstairs for a while. I hear him talking with Angel’s mom about pierogis, and then I hear her offer him a plate. He has a look that makes women want to feed him. Rick and Angel have settled into the corner of the sofa, his arms around her as she dozes on his shoulder, the strap of her dress dangling, revealing the edges of a deep-crimson bra. It surprises me to see them behaving so intimately; they look so young. Last night, a blonde from a neighboring school had shown up at Angel’s door looking for Rick. Before he could get to her,Angel had spit in the girl’s face and somehow torn the front of her shirt. The night ended with Angel yelling curses at the back of Rick’s rusted, yellow Volkswagen and Angel’s mother screaming from her bedroom window, “Shut the fuck up! Just shut the fuck up, Angel!” But now, Rick kisses her neck and she wiggles her small fingers into the pocket of his jeans.
    “Crazy bitch,” Rick whispers tenderly.
    I get up to retrieve my school bag from the corner of the room where I’d dropped it hours ago. I don’t have any boyfriends and I am beginning to worry that I never will. I still scribble the names of my crushes inside school notebooks and ignore them in person as a matter of course. I know my aloofness to be a symptom of shyness, but secretly I hope that it conveys some measure of mystery and seduction. So far, it hasn’t.
    Rick carries Angel upstairs. I sit and wait for Jordan to return, sipping on bad red wine and finishing up some homework. My mother thinks that I am here to tutor Angel, and sometimes I stay overnight. She doesn’t actually believe it, but we play the game anyway. It’s a precarious arrangement that works for now. She’s spent so many years dealing with a drunk husband, she hasn’t the energy to worry over me. I’m the good egg, and that’s that. In the meantime, Eric has been diagnosed with ADHD and is getting in trouble at school. Homework is a nightly battle. He smokes pot all day, every day. She works constantly, selling real estate alongside her mother, and she does well. We get by. I keep my shit together, and that seems to be enough for now.
    When we are not at Angel’s, Jordan and I are at my house. He rarely goes home anymore. We sleep side by side in my bed,and by the time we get there we are too stoned to talk properly, preferring to tell each other fairytales involving young Robert Plant and a desert at night. Campfires blooming in the dirt. A fifth of whiskey. In our dreams, we sing like Stevie Nicks. We dance wildly like Janis Joplin. Once, in the middle of the night, I stuck my hand up the back of his T-shirt and felt the cold knobs of his spine. He wasn’t asleep like I’d thought and he rolled away slowly and sighed.
    Jordan comes downstairs with a second helping of pierogis in a glass bowl. He places three blue Ritalin in front of me on the coffee table, though I know there are more in his pocket. He is an unabashed thief. He licks the gravy from his spoon, dries it on his jeans, and begins to crush one pill into a fine powder. “Wait!” I say. “Take your time.” He ignores me now, because he knows I am as addicted to the process as to the drug itself. I am hooked on the anticipation, the crunch of the pill, the swirl of blue sand, and the careful way Jordan