Unlocked by Ryan G. Van Cleave Read Free Book Online Page A

shut
and think about it
all night, its dark shine,
its potent, peculiar bulk?
    What would Dr. Zigler say?
I wondered that night,
then decided I didn’t
give a damn.

NOTHING
----
    Becky Ann didn’t believe me,
even when I vowed
I could bring it
to her after school.
Blake offered to loan
it to me. She
Yeah, righted

and sped off, her heels
clicking all the way
down the hall.
    The “something” she’d promised
apparently meant “nothing,”
which, to someone
who desired her so fiercely,
was worse than nothing,
which was what I was
content with prior
to her revving up my heart
with her short skirts
and oh-so-sexy smile.
    But at least I had Blake,
meaning a friend,
meaning something
loads better than nothing.
    And I had the gun too.
    Who knows why
contemplating it
impressed me so.
    Maybe “excited”
is closer to what I felt.

FATHER ISSUES
----
    I knew what Dr. Phil
would’ve said.
    You loaf through enough
daytime TV with your mom
    when you’re skipping school
a few days for a fake migraine,
    and you watch
Oprah

just because it’s on.
    Maybe Blake and I bonded
because of our shared “daddy issues.”
    Blake’s daddy? Dead.
My daddy? “Emotionally absent.”
    But here’s where Dr. Phil’s
homespun smarts had it wrong.
    Even Dr. Zigler’s psychobabble
missed the mark on this.
    What Blake and I had
was a 9mm Beretta.
    Its secret. Its high-impact ammo.
Its dark, smooth weight.
    You share a secret like that,
you belong to something
    greater than yourself,
a sky full of lightning
    that could split the world
in half at any moment.
    Most go their whole life
without knowing that kind
    of power, that kind
of wild potential energy.

MOM
----
    After a few weeks of normalcy,
Mom started crying again. A lot.
Words started streaming over into tears,
just like she did when she pleaded
with God over Grandma’s health.
    I swore I was sorry, am sorry,
and tomorrow will still be sorry
I stole the keys and forced my own
parents to stop trusting me,
and I more or less meant it too,
but even as the words slid out, I knew
I’d meet with Blake later
to touch the gun again and
feel it buck in my hands
like it had a spirit of its own
as we emptied a box or two
into cans, bottles, telephone poles.
    To think she believed me enough
to feel bad about canceling
my Warcraft account
and giving the iPod
to Cousin Ricky in Chicago,
who she felt sorry for,
her sister being so poor.
    I almost told her then,
knowing that if anyone
would get it, it’d be the person
who splintered ice with a meat hammer
and fed me slivers all day
when I had that fever, or who
struggled with me all summer
to make sure I wasn’t held back
thanks to my brain’s insistence
that A 2 + B 2 did NOT equal C 2 .
    I almost told her.

MARCH 5
----
    Blake had the day
blacked out—
not circled
or starred,
blacked out—
on a calendar
in his locker.
No, I didn’t break
in again. I just
saw it obliterated
with a Sharpie
when he went
to the bathroom
and I wanted
to see if my birthday
would fall on
a weekend
for once.
It didn’t.
The bell rang,
and Blake
slammed
the locker
shut as he
shuffled off
to social studies.
I never asked him
    what it meant.
Friends don’t
interrogate
each other.

HOME
----
    I had never visited Blake’s home before
and quite suddenly wanted to see it,
all the more because he told me never
    to come by there.
    I wasn’t all that hot on having people over either.
If my parents weren’t pissed off or just being themselves—
as embarrassing as letting a fart slip in church—
our place was too small, too dingy, too pathetic.
    Sure, I knew his neighborhood, though.
The lawns were golf-course green,
and an ex-cop manned the thick iron entry gate.
    His father had been some type of defense contractor
prior to that car bomb that made all the headlines.
From the look of this area, he made great money.
    I stood shivering outside the well-manicured