Page 24

Story: Did They Break You

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

CORTLAND

Wednesday night, I slow to a jog, ending my run near the cemetery that’s just off campus, surrounded by a thick grove of trees. It’s where I saw Remi earlier today disappearing with that friend of hers. I grit my teeth and try to shove the thought away.

Game day is coming up, and last weekend I played horribly.

I haven’t really been focused in practice either.

I haven’t been focused at all.

I can’t stop seeing those cuts on Remi’s wrist. That kid pushing her into the bushes. Then before that, Chase’s hand on her hip.

My phone vibrates in the pocket of my running pants and I grab it, wiping my forearm over my brow as I slow to a walk. I clench my jaw when I see my mom’s name.

Linda.

Swiping my finger over the screen, I hold the phone to my ear.

“Have you seen her?” Her first words to me.

I roll my eyes, trying to bite back my temper as I glance up at the moon overhead.

“No,” I lie to my mom, looping back around on the sidewalk across from the cemetery, pacing to cool down.

There’s a pause, and I think about Maya as I bite my lip, swallowing a groan. I blew her off after the game and I’ve done my best to avoid her. I don’t even know why.

Remi hasn’t been in my bed since Friday night and she’s obviously going to keep her mouth shut.

Maya is a shield.

“That’s not what I’ve heard, Cortland,” Mom says, her tone laced with anger.

Fuck you. I hold the phone away from my ear a second, think about throwing it in the fountain at my side.

“How’s Tristan?” I ask Mom, ignoring her bullshit, but spiting her anyway. Like she would know how he is. I went to Dad’s after the game and had dinner with him and my brother.

He’s quiet, and still seems exhausted, but away from Mom, he’s doing so much better.

I close my eyes and think about when I got out of the cab at the hospital. After I saw Tristan in that bed.

“What happened?” My words are hard, my back against the wall just outside of Tristan’s room.

Mom sighs. I hear people talking in the background on her end of the call. “I don’t have time for this, Cort ? —”

“Don’t have time for this?” I glance at a nurse who eyes me as she walks past, pushing a patient in a wheelchair. Closing my eyes, I knock my head against the wall, gritting my teeth. I’ve got one arm crossed over my chest and I dig my nails in below my sleeve on my opposite forearm.

I think about what Tristan used.

A hunting knife. Dad took a picture of it when he went back to the house to clean up. Tristan is on a seventy-two-hour hold, but I saw that picture.

It’s saved in my phone.

Blood slick over the metallic blade, bright red flecked across the white porcelain of Tristan’s bathroom.

He didn’t cut deep enough to bleed out, but he tried.

I swallow hard, listening to my mom sighing on the phone. I think about the weeks after Remi filed charges. I stayed in my room. Never came out. I heard Mom yell at Tristan, berating him for his grades, his choice in friends, his clothes.

I usually got in between them; took Tristan out of the house.

But while I waited to see if I’d be sent to prison for a night that was nothing but flashes in my mind, spotty pieces sewed together with drunken thread, I didn’t have the energy.

I put in my headphones.

I tuned my brother’s pain out.

“He just needs to see a therapist or ? —”

“You got into an argument. Before he did it,” I tell my mom, guilt turning to anger as I keep my eyes closed, trying to lower my voice. I don’t want Tristan to hear me.

“If you think that was my fault, Cort, you don’t understand how mental illness works.”

“As if you do,” I bite back, eyes flying open as I dip my chin, digging my nails deeper into my skin. It feels good, but sometimes, I wonder what that blade would feel like. Seeing crimson on my skin. It’s almost euphoric, imagining it.

I don’t want to die.

I just want a release.

“What did you say to him?” I press Mom. “Before you went to meet a client while your son lay bleeding out in a bathtub, what did you say to him?”

“Watch your tone, Cort,” Mom warns. I hear more people in the background, then what sounds like a door closing.

Silence. Another sigh from my mother, always content to play the victim when it works in her favor.

“It was a usual fight,” she confesses, her tone one of helplessness, like she couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this.

“About too much time playing video games. I just want him to make something of his life ? —”

“What did you call him?” I interrupt her, pacing in the hall, my nails still digging into that spot just at the crease of my elbow. “Did you hit him, Mom?” His glasses were broken, on his bedside table. But I wonder if it was that or the names. The verbal abuse.

I think of the words Chase spoke to Remi. “Fucking slut.” I don’t know why I didn’t care then. She overwhelmed me, and I lost myself in her. Everything else was noise.

I look down at the tile of the hospital floors as I walk.

“What did you say to him, Mom?” My voice is broken as I gaze out at the grounds of the hospital, teeming with people.

Another sigh. “I have to go.”

“Mom. Did you hit him?” I clench my fingers tighter around my phone, digging my nails in deeper.

“Goodbye, Cort.”

“We’re talking about you,” Mom counters in the present.

I think about my brother. He’s tall, like me, but all gangly arms and limbs from… not eating enough.

He likes video games and fashion and wants to be a model and that doesn’t go over well with Mom.

“I saw her at a party,” I concede to Mom, rolling my eyes in the night as I do, wondering what exactly she heard. Wondering if Maya found out and told her herself. “Nothing happened.”

Mom laughs, and I hate her laugh. It’s bitchy and dark and always makes you want to scream instead of laugh with her.

Like she’s holding onto secrets that’ll rip you apart and she finds it amusing that you don’t know what they are.

I tighten my fingers around the phone, feel a light breeze wick at the back of my neck, through my damp hair.

I pause beyond the trees of the cemetery, along the brick path.

“Funny, Cort, because Maya sent me a message. Let me know you’re blowing her off and acting distant.”

“Whatever,” I tell Mom, barely paying attention as I stare into the thick of the trees edging the cemetery. Turning my head, I glance around me. While the gas station across the street is lit up, a few cars parked at the pumps, there’s no one else out here.

“We got in a fight. That’s it.”

“Well fix it,” my mother says, her words causing me to grit my teeth and tear my eyes from the trees as I look up at the sky, imagining what it would be like to be anywhere but here.

“Be man enough to admit when you make a mistake and get back with her. With your insistence on going to the same school as that girl , you need protection against any slander she might?—”

I laugh out loud, tuning her out. “You broke your son’s glasses off his face when you hit him, let him cry in his room before he took a knife to his wrist and haven’t once gone to see him, but you want to talk about slander?

” I know she’s going to lose her goddamn mind, and I know that house I’m in is being paid for by her , but I don’t care when I say, “I don’t have time for your bullshit right now, Mom.

” I end the call, pushing my phone into the pocket of my black pants.

I stand there for a moment, breathing hard, regretting my words already.

She could take it out on Tristan. On Dad.

She’s manipulated and controlled him for so long, he doesn’t know how to stand up to her either.

I’m just learning, and it’s hard. I want to call her back, tell her I’m sorry, even though I’m not.

I feel like screaming. I dig my nails into my inner forearm, as hard as I can, hoping to draw blood, letting the pain calm my thoughts.

I started doing this after what happened with Remi. When my fingers reach the inner crease of my elbow, I pinch my skin instead, the irritated lines I dug into my arms.

It hurts.

It feels fucking good.

I wonder what Remi would think, if she could see me now. I imagine her biting my lip in the bathroom, the blood in my mouth. The accusations she hurled my way in my bedroom.

She wants to hurt me. Yeah, I wanna hurt me, too, baby.

When my arm feels like it’s on fire, I finally drop my hands, catching my breath.

I close my eyes, thinking about seeing Remi at that graveyard in Aben when I drove by in my truck, windows down, wondering what it’d be like to go sit with her.

She’s not there.

And if she is, I need to stay away from her.

But I can’t get that look out of my head. The one she gave me when I told her I recorded her in my bed.

I didn’t actually expect her to believe me, but I forgot she really does think I’m a fucking monster.

I open my eyes, biting the inside of my cheek. Then I head toward the trees anyway, rubbing my palm over my arm to soothe the sting.