Page 134 of What Boys Learn

I bring my left forearm higher and harder against his neck. I envision what will come soon—eyes rolling back, more blood dripping down my arm. And then I feel a bolt of queasiness, like I’m a kid again at a birthday party and I just ate too much cake. That dripping blood is something else. Maybe I’d settle for temporary silence.

If only he’d just pass out, I wouldn’t have to make him bleed more. Then we could tie him up. That thought eases the queasiness. I’m up on my knees, trying to find a better position for cutting off Dr. C’s oxygen when a hard kick to the back sends me sprawling. I’m on the cockpit floor, gasping. Lenora is standing over me. The knife has flown across the cockpit.

“I’m okay,” Dr. C calls out in a thin, shaky voice. “Well done, Lenora.”

I look up at her face, full of fear and disgust. She doesn’t think I’m just some shy kid on the spectrum. She thinks I want to rape her. Kill her. Dump her. Even if I somehow got her safely to land now, she wouldn’t understand. She’d tell everyone.

50

ABBY

“Need to talk about it?” Robert asked when we were thirty minutes south of Fond du Lac.

It was the first thing either of us had said in an hour. I’d been thinking about what Ewan had said, thinking about why I let myself get so bothered by the fake transcript and all it alleged—and why, in comparison, my own hand in Martha’s death bothered me hardly at all.

“Abby?” Robert asked.

“Can we put on music? Just for a while. I need to think.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding hurt.

He had no idea where my thoughts were going. How could he? But I couldn’t have a normal conversation, just like I couldn’t have a normal relationship.

Martha kept talking about getting Ewan out of the house, sending him away, even before the night of the accident. She kept saying it to our father, all those nights as they sat on their grubby matching recliners and I stood in the kitchen, listening.

She wouldn’t stop. Ewan couldn’t make her stop. She would have liked that—a threat, or an actual physical act she could report. She deserved it.

It wasn’t that I did what I did, knowing it would end in death. I just pictured her falling. One big, funny slip-on-abanana-peel whoopsie, and her coral lips pulling back into a sloppy round circle of surprise before one leg swung up and her wide rear crashed down, followed by the sound of something cracking—a shinbone, a broken arm, maybe a hip.

She’d be silenced, chastened, reminded that she drank too much at night, reminded that she slammed around the kitchen and left food out to spoil, reminded that we were part of this family, too. We weren’t the leeches she made us out to be. If she was in a cast, maybe I’d have to grocery shop. Ewan could drive me. Maybe she’d decide to go to her sister’s place in Florida for a month, to heal up somewhere prettier and more comfortable.

Those were the images that swam through my head as I poured the green dishwashing detergent into the pine-scented floor cleaner and then added a few glops of vegetable oil to be sure, the way I’d done at a sleepover once, when we made Brittany’s kitchen floor into a super slide, so slippery that we fell again and again, laughing until Brittany wet her pants.

Brittany got in trouble for that. But I wouldn’t, because I’d never tell anyone.

Robert was still fussing with the radio dial when I picked up Benjamin’s phone, which I couldn’t unlock. I shoved it aside in order to stare at the long line of motor homes ahead of us and tried to get my head back in the game, figuring out where Curtis might be hiding.

This was vacation country. Motorcycles, lots of them. People going camping. Maybe Curtis would tolerate an RV, one of those enormous ones.

“I always wondered if we’d end up with a weekend place up here,” Robert said. “Would have been nice.”

I sighed. The last thing I could think about now was our relationship.

“I’m sorry. Someday, you’ll buy a nice cabin with someone else. It’ll happen.”

Under his breath he said, “I never understood why.”

“Why’d I break up with you?”

“That’s the question.”

“Boundaries.”

“But what does that mean?”

“You don’t know whatboundariesare?”

“Like when you don’t want me to come over, unless I call or text first.”