Nothing Real Volume 1 by Claire Needell

back. She wants him to know this is how he’s made her feel, this nothingness. He could keep playing her this noise, this whinnying. She could always pretend to like what he likes, to know what he knows, but now he will have to suffer the consequences.

My Name Is Adam
    I used to imagine what my life would be like if my father were gone. Dead, actually. I’d think about it for hours. That’s what I told Dr. Mick when I wound up here, and he began asking a lot of crap: about my relationship with my dad; about when I started to unravel, to feel like shit all the time, and not only half the time, like a normal kid. He wanted the whole timetable laid out, as if knowing how the thing began would be the key to its ending. But it wasn’t a time line at all, not a direct route or even a winding path in a forest of weed and Percocet. Mine was a fall. And you don’t get back up out of a hole by staring at where you came from. You have to claw your way out. You have to hang on tight every fucking second, and not ever slip.
    I told Dr. Mick this, and he said it was a good analogy. Psych points.
    That’s how you make it out of here.
    I don’t think Dr. Mick got the extent of my dwelling on the death of my dad. How this was an everyday, fairly time-consuming obsessionof mine. I put details into this story—heart attack with feet on desk, car crash on 684 in the far left lane, a pileup of mangled Porches and BMWs.
    I imagined Mom silent at first, then a choked sob, almost a bellow emitting from her contorted mouth. And me. Sometimes I’d imagine myself cool-eyed and observant, standing around, watching other people freak. But other times, I’d be on my knees, thinking how permanent it all was. How now that he was dead, we’d both have to be assholes for all eternity.
    It got so bad, this morbid fantasizing, that when my dad actually did get home from work I’d feel a slight twinge of surprise, as if he’d actually been resurrected, and had not just pulled his silver Porsche into the driveway, wheels on the gravel audible from the kitchen where I sat with my feet up on the table. But that was only until I’d hear his step on the wooden stair. Then I’d snap to and sit up straight, like I was about to do something important—study precalculus, or take out the trash.
    When I thought about him dead, I’d do the funeral routine in my head first, and then the emptiness of the days that would follow, Mom’s grief an echo filling the house.
    I’d think about the work I’d do around the house, the people I’d have to deal with.
    I would be doing actual stuff, chores and whatnot, but in my head I’d be thinking how it was all just up to me now. I’d stomp around in my heavy boots, walk around the back of the house, knocking down the thick icicles that hung glistening from the roof. They were heavyas hell, and believe me, it’d be all over if one of those ice daggers nailed me, but I’d make the danger of it worse, smacking a few of them at a time, ice crashing in a shower, the sound like glass breaking. I’d whack tree branches with an ax handle, and the ice and snow would fall, some of it going straight down my back, a sheet of blinding white, and I’d pretend all of this was work, that it served some sort of purpose, and that I wasn’t bored out of my mind, wasn’t outside smoking a fat blunt.
    I pretended to myself that these things needed to be done and I was the one to do them.
    Sometimes I’d catch Mom watching me out of the upstairs window, her face pale against the green curtains, her brown hair streaked gray. She was still pretty, but in a way that made you think about what she looked like when she was young.
    I cut entire weeks of school. Other times, I’d show up without any books or even anything to write with. I didn’t go to some blow-off school either. Hamilton High is the kind of place where even sophomores