What is Real by Karen Rivers Read Free Book Online Page A

shit.
    The Christmas before that, I was in Vancouver and the silver tree was nearly hidden behind a mountain of presents.
    It’s like a game of Spot the Differences, made easier by the fact that everything was different.
    I haven’t talked about Feral much. Not yet. He’s my brother. My stepbrother. Feral is a heroin addict. “Recovering,” they said. We were to call him a “recovering addict.” Frank the Recovering Addict.
    Fuck that. He was Feral and always would be.
    When I moved, I didn’t tell him. He was “working through his issues” and apparently his issues included me. I wasn’t allowed to see him, speak to him or contact him. SD seemed to think that all of it was my fault. That Feral’s addiction had something to do with me.
    My mom agreed.
    My own fucking mom agreed .
    I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream. I wanted to do a lot of things that I didn’t do. Smash things. I wanted to smash glass. All the glass. Everything. I wanted Feral back. I wanted I wanted I wanted, and no one fucking cared.
    Feral was the alpha, no doubt about it. I would have followed him anywhere. I did follow him everywhere. He was FERAL. I was just Feral’s stepbrother.
    Without Feral, I was nobody.
    I tried to tell them, but no one was listening.
    Feral’s addiction erased me.
    The thinner he got and the more strung out, the less anyone cared what I was saying. Even Feral started to squint at me while I was talking, like he couldn’t quite remember who I was. We still did shit—played our crappy music, hung out—but he was mostly gone. Just gone. At school, I started to fade. Without him next to me, kids talked through me. Past me. Even Glass started to drift. She was still with me, but I could tell she was gone.
    I needed Feral.
    We did everything together. Every. Fucking. Thing.
    And he left me and I was alone and I stopped caring about everything. I know how that sounds.
    And I know that it’s true.

    And when school started again that fall, St. Joe’s without Feral was stupid. And he bounced in and out of rehab like neither place could hold on to him. I stopped talking. No one noticed. I started making movies every day, miles of movies, more and more movies. And I wasn’t talking—why didn’t anyone notice? Or care?
    I was making a documentary. “The Disappearance of Dex Pratt” it was called. Then I changed it to “The Invisible Dex.” Then I changed it back.
    Then I deleted it.
    Then I dragged it out of the trash and saved it in a file called Fuck You .
    Then it was November and my dad was out of rehab, and I was being called home. Imagine there were trumpets. There weren’t, but if you imagine them, it’s more dramatic. In real life, there were just a bunch of phone calls and “arrangements” and the strange set of my mom’s lips when she said, “You should go.”
    The gray hairs that freckled her haircut like lines of disappointment.
    The way her hand shook when she reached for the milk.
    SD said, “It’s not your fault.” He said that. SD is a big guy. When he hugged me, I could hardly breathe. But I didn’t believe him. He thought it was my fault. I know he thought that because he gave me a check. The number of zeroes on it said, “I feel guilty for blaming you for all of this shit, but I do .” I’m not stupid. I know how it works.
    I put the money in the bank. “For college.”
    Yeah, right.
    I was glad to leave that glass house. I would have been gladder to blow it up, watch all that glass fall down on the city like diamonds or snow. I don’t know if I told you about the house. The way it splayed out over the cliff and the wall of glass made it so that any room you were in allowed you to see the whole glittering city below you. Feral used to say that when we flushed the toilets, it rained on the people. “The people.” Like we were not