20Brother Down || Sam Roberts Band
JP
Matt pokeshis head out of his room at the sound of breaking glass and me swearing.
“Tabarnak. Ben, voyons, là!” I shout, staring down at the mess by my feet.
“That didn’t sound good,” Matt observes.
I gesture at the floor. “I broke the fucking dragon bong, man!”
He comes to inspect the damage. “So you did. The mighty beast has fallen.”
He’s trying to look serious, but I see him biting his lip to hold back the smile that wants to explode across his face.
“It’s not funny!” I insist. “This fucking sucks, man.”
He pokes a shard of dragon tail with his foot. “I mean, you’ve gotta admit, it’s a little funny...”
I watch him bend over for a second to pick up the piece with the dragon’s head on it. He waves it in the air like it’s a puppet and speaks in a squeaky voice.
“I’m so stoned it feels like my head just fell off. Oh wait, it did!”
I roll my eyes, but now I’m fighting to hold my own smile back.
“Come on, let’s clean this up before someone impales themselves,” Matt urges.
I sweep and he vacuums. We leave the dragon’s head on the windowsill where the bong used to sit. I flop down on the couch and expect Matt to go back to his room, but he joins me.
“Should I be concerned that you were looking to fire up a bong at ten in the morning?”
I shake my head as I pullmon trucout of my pocket and start tossing it up and down. “I wasn’t going touseit. I was just...How do you sayremuer? You know when you—” I make a few jittery motions with my arms.
“Fidgeting,” Matt supplies. “You were fidgeting.”
I nod. It’s been two days since the hotel room. I left Trois-Rivières not long after Molly did. I don’t know where I found the balls to bail on the gala, but somehow I managed to ignore the threat of my dad’s disappointment long enough to get on a bus.
I haven’t been able to focus on anything since. I pick things up just to put them back down. I start to make a sandwich and I give up halfway through. I can’t even finish a whole song on the piano before I switch to a new one. It’s almost as bad as when I was a kid: the little spaz at the back of the classroom who was always getting put in time out for jumping around.
“Yeah, I noticed,” Matt tells me. “You’ve been fidgeting a lot since you got back from Trois-Rivières. Is everything okay?”
I shrug, eyes onmon trucin my palm.
“How did it go with Molly meeting your family?” he prompts.
This time I just snort in answer.
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse,” I admit.
“That sucks,” Matt sympathizes, “but I suppose families often do.”
I give him a look. “Ben là, you have a perfect family. Every photo of you and your brother looks like the ones that come inside picture frames when you buy them. When is that little fucker coming back to Montreal, anyway? I like him.”
“When he is of legal drinking age,” Matt says firmly, “and for the record, no family is perfect. We’re not talking about my family, though. We’re talking about what’s going on with you.”
This is what Matt does. He sits you down, maybe offers you a beer, pretends like you’re just having a casual conversation, andbam! Suddenly he’s pulling some psychoanalysis shit on you before you even realize it.
