Stumbling to my room, I grabbed a clean pair of socks from my drawer and put them over my hands as makeshift bandages. The cuts bled through the fabric, but they didn’t look nearly as bad as the dishrag on my foot, which was drenched in crimson. I desperately needed to wash these wounds, but I had to take care of my brother first.
Hobbling, I pushed open the door to the main bedroom and found Johnny there, passed out next to our mom.Thank god!
I hopped over to him and shoved his shoulder. “Johnny! Johnny! Wake up!”
He rolled over onto his back and flung an arm over his eyes dramatically, like the dim light was brighter than the sun. Mom didn’t stir at all.
“Jesus Christ, Cori.” He dragged out his words, following them with a lazy stomach scratch. “Why are you shouting?”
“Get up!” I poked him again. “You need to get out of here. And what the hell happened to the living room?”
He turned back onto his stomach, his eyelids drifting shut.
“Nuh-uh.” This time, I bent my elbow and used it to crunch down into his shoulder blades. “Don’t go back to sleep. You need to get your butt up.”
“Ow!”
“Get up!”
“Alright!” He waved his arm in the air to stop me from digging into his back again. “I’m up.”
But he wasn’t up. He barely moved. It was like he wanted to go back into the dumpster.
“Johnny. Get. The. Fuck. Up. NOW!”
He managed a glare. “I am up. I just said.”
“No. Get up! As in, out of bed. We need to move you.”
“Wait. Huh?” He sat up a little against the headboard.Finally, some progress!
That was when I realized. In all the shouting and jostling, my mom hadn’t made a peep. As concerned as I was for Johnny, that wasn’t normal.
“What’s going on with Mom?”
She hadn’t been around for a few days. But the last time I saw her, she seemed to be doing pretty well. I’d been working on schoolwork when she came home, and we sat at the table for an hour eating Chicken in a Biscuit crackers while I told her funny stories about kids at the Center. She had mentioned a plan to spend time with aspecial friendfor the next few days, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Now, as she lay on the bed with her skirt hitched up to the middle of her thighs, I registered the bruises behind her knees and on her arms. One of her ankles looked swollen too.
“Oh. She’s just strung out, I think,” Johnny said.
“You think?” Shuffling over to her side of the bed, I raised one of Mom’s arms. When I released it, it dropped to the mattress like a stone.
“Yeah. You missed it. There was kind of a bad scene, I guess. When Mom came home.” I was about to demand he elaborate when Johnny suddenly sat up straighter. He brought a hand to his throat and frowned. “Cor, can you grab me a glass of water?”
When he grimaced again, I looked around and saw a small cardboard box in the corner. Handing it to him, I said, “If you need to throw up, do it in here unless you think you can make it to the bathroom. I’ll grab your water.”
He scrunched his face at the bloody sock mittens on my hands but didn’t ask about them.
I hopped eight feet to the little bathroom at the back of the trailer. I didn’t want to risk the gauntlet of broken glass in themain room again, so I picked up a cup from the sink counter—Johnny would just have to deal with the toothpaste residue around the rim—and filled it with water.
When I brought it back into the bedroom, he asked, “Why are you limping around?”
“Glass through my shoe. You need to be careful out by the kitchen till I get it cleaned up. Now tell me about the ‘bad scene’ you were talking about earlier with Mom.”
I sat down on the edge of the mattress, applying pressure to the wound on my foot, trying to slow the bleeding while he talked.
Johnny cleared his throat. “After you helped me shower yesterday, I went right to bed.” He stopped to take a sip of water. “It’s hard to explain, but my body felt different than it ever has before… I can’t remember much about them putting me in the dumpster, but I think Chi-chi’s guys might have stabbed me with something.”
“Okay.” I exhaled. He’d been so out of it yesterday. I’d been terrified. Thank god he seemed okay now, other than looking like he might hurl up his insides.
