Star Witness

18

JESSE

"I'm gonna go return the key. Jesse, you're coming with me." Alice grabs me by the arm, dragging me away from my bag toward the motel door.

"Why is Jesse coming?" Tomás asks with an amused glimmer in his face. He's lying on the bed, arms dangling down. Mia is doing manual airway clearance on him--tapping around his chest to make him cough, basically.

"Can't go anywhere as a woman in this world," Alice replies primly.

As autistic as I am, I tend to miss these things, but I do not think she's bringing me along for safety. I turn out to be right. I hate when I'm right. It's never good for anybody.

"Idiot," she says as soon as we're out of the room.

"What?"

"I said, idiot! You left some of your stupid powder on the bathtub. Idiot."

A lightning bolt of alarm. "I did?" A couple things happened, this morning. Tom knocking on the door before I was done, asking what was taking so long. The hasty cleanup. "Shit." The edge of a motel bathtub is one of the less dignified places I've crushed pills on, but I was desperate, and it's the only part of the room with any modicum of privacy.

She stops outside the office and whips around toward me, two messy braids hitting her shoulders, flyaways in her face. "If you're going to do stupid shit, at least hide it. You are so lucky it was me who went in there."

"Please don't say anything."

Alice crosses her arms. "Not my business, I guess. But you're stupid. Real stupid, Jesse."

"Is it obvious?" I ask, paranoid about that, now. "That I'm fucked up?"

"No. Because none of us know what you act like when you're sober."

"You wouldn't like me when I'm sober."

"I don't think that's your decision to make for me."

I take the key out of her hand and open the office door. "You're right. It's not your business."

"You're a real dick sometimes," Alice tells me. "Drugs make you act like a dick."

The woman at the desk takes the key, bored by me, by Alice, by the powder in the bathroom. She doesn't even get off the phone while checking us out. This comforts me. There are still people who don't care.

-

Back in Illinois. Crossing the border feels like the word DANGER being seared into my side--feels like the last time I saw my mother alive.

I had Tomás as a distraction for awhile. We played one of our old games--trace a shape on the other person, and they have to guess what it is. But now he's driving again, and it's just me. And her.

By last summer, I was never home. Elise had found a more permanent place for each of us to crash. It was a bunch of older girls. My sister always knew older people, got into college parties as a teenager. Everybody loved her.

Elise thought I wasn't seeing our mother at all, but the truth was that I still went by. I worried. Well, I was the one who bathed her; I saw the bruises. I didn't trust Liam, or his friends, or the parties he threw. And, physically, the place was filthy. So I grocery shopped for her and I took her clothes to the laundromat. She was different, now. That morph into a ghost, woven through my whole life, was complete. Usually she would just sit and watch me. I know now it must have been because she had started doing meth. Depression is a part of it, just like Ecstasy; what goes up must come down. Stimulant comedowns can kill you, that is not even a metaphor. Hindsight is powerful. So is an autopsy. She had been doing it a while and doing it hard, even if I hadn't seen her tweaked out. Yet.