We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas Read Free Book Online

he wiped his mouth with the hairy back of his hand after he took a sip. “He gave me a route that went into Staten Island. That means extra zone pay. My first day, an upstart kid like me, and he’s making sure I get some money in my pocket. He said, ‘You have twelve stops. You’ll be done in six hours. You should stay out ten.’ I didn’t understand. I didn’t want him to think I was a shirker. I said, ‘If it takes six hours, sir, I’ll try to get it done in five.’ He looked at me like I was a stone-cold idiot. ‘If you get back here in less than ten hours,’ he said, ‘don’t come back.’ ”
    He was so excited talking about her father that she wasn’t sure which of them it was he was supposed to be in love with. She surprised herself by how quickly she drained the tall glass, sucking the sugary drink up through the straw. It made her nervous to look at the empty glass and feel herself begin to lose control, her brain tingling slightly, her lips taking their time to come together when she spoke, her head a little heavier on her neck. She wondered if she’d taken the first step on the road away from her dreams. What scared her was how easy it had been to do it. All she had to do was get the contents of the glass into her stomach. To chase her agitated thoughts, she ordered another drink immediately. The chatter in her head quieted down as she sat drinking and trying to return Billy’s insistent gaze. All she could focus on were his strangely doughy cheeks and protrudingears. She imagined him a couple of feet shorter, in a T-shirt with horizontal stripes, and a bowl haircut. In the middle of a little story he was telling, she laughed to think that what was evidently a boy before her somehow struck the rest of the world as a full-grown man. The bartender, whose age wasn’t in question—he must have been a year or two shy of her father—gave her a look that Billy didn’t see, in which there seemed to be pity for the boy. The first drink had been too syrupy sweet, but she liked the second one so much that she ordered three more after it.
    It was after midnight when Billy carried her in, begging her father, she later learned, to spare his life, explaining that she’d been possessed, that she’d smacked his face whenever he’d tried to get her to leave, that he hadn’t wanted to give anyone the wrong idea and get escorted out and have to leave her there with those animals.
    Her father woke her early in the morning. She spent a couple of hours on the tiled floor of the bathroom, leaning her head on the rim of the bowl and sitting up straight when the urge to throw up possessed her. When she’d emptied her guts completely, her father told her to take a shower. Then he walked her to Mass at St. Sebastian’s.
    “You’re no different from the rest of us,” he said. “You don’t get a special dispensation.”
    The air conditioning in the new church cooled her sweat and set her to shivering. Once, she had to get up to go to the sacristy bathroom. When she fell asleep, her father elbowed her awake. When communion came, she had to choke down the host. For a terrible moment up by the altar, she feared she’d have a retching spell. She took deliberate steps and deep breaths all the way back to the pew, and she ended up missing a day of school.
    That Friday night, after dinner was over and the kitchen was clean and her mother had retired to her room, her father sat her down on the couch.
    “If you’re going to be fool enough to do this,” he said, “you can’t go about it half-cocked.”
    He went to the liquor cabinet and brought over a couple of tumblers and set them down on the coffee table. Then he went back and returned with a number of small bottles of different types of whiskey.
    “What’s this?”
    “You’ll be getting a lesson.”
    “I can’t,” she said.
    “You will,” he said.
    “I’ve learned my lesson already.”
    “This is a different lesson,” he said. “We’ll start with