yale adroxis /9

Everyone is born with two faces. There’s the one that they take outside with them and the one that they wear when they’re alone. I was only born with one.

The thing about me is that I smile a lot, too much according to Nowles but she’s dead anyway so I guess her opinion doesn’t really matter. It happens when I’m nervous, or when I’m angry or sad or anything, I can’t help it, I just smile.

Everyone at school hates it. They think I’m looking down on them or something but it’s not even my fault, it’s just my stupid face.

It hasn’t known what to do since mom died.

Kade says I was too little anyway to even remember her but that’s not true. Mom and I used to spend a lot of time together after Kade and Nowles got dropped off at school.

She’d sit me on the counter and we’d meal prep for the week. There were all these things that she used to make that I’m still always trying to figure out. I’m good at dumplings, I've got those, she always had me fold them and press the edges together.

I make them for Sal but I forget what gets put in them so I sort of just fill them with whatever we have in the fridge. One time it was hot sauce and diced up mushrooms with peanut butter, it was pretty good. Sal didn’t like it that time but beggars can’t be choosers.

I think I was almost five when mom never came home. Sal appeared for a moment after that and then we didn’t see him for three months so it’s sort of like he died for a bit too.

Kade got nerdier and Nowles got wilder and I just figured out how to make gimbap on my own. It’s like sushi but you put egg in there and then I forget what else so basically whatever I feel like.

Mom really believed in supporting my creativity and I don’t let that flame die.

Anyway, mom died, Sal lost the plot, Kade shut down emotionally and then Nowles got reaped. She didn’t come back so now it’s just the three of us except it’s actually kind of just me.

Sal’s never around and Kade’s got teenager stuff and I’m selling flour mixed with icing sugar to other kids on the playground and calling it cocaine. Someone’s gotta keep the lights on, right?

Sal says that we don’t have to worry about that but I worry about a lot of things. Got a track record of the people I love never making it home, y’see?

And also I don’t want Sal to notice I’ve got a turtle in Nowles old bathroom. I found it near the river with a bullet embedded in its shell, must have skid across the top and got wedged in and then the shell grew around it. I had to take it, that basically marked it as Adroxis property.

Its name is Joanne and she lives in the bathroom that Nowles’ always said was her’s only. No one goes in there still out of respect but I do because I know Nowles would have wanted me to give Joanne a home. Found a heat lamp at the junkyard and I rigged it to stay on all the time for her. I buy worms at the pet store and everyone’s happy.

Except the worms I guess.

Sometimes I don’t go to school because the other kids don’t like the way I smile. Someone’s yelling at me and I’m smirking at them, I’d wanna punch me too. Then I punch back and I forget how to stop. It's like my brain switches off but my arm's still moving and I'm laughing.

So instead of school I just do whatever. Teachers stopped sending letters home for Sal ages ago because he never even reads them. If he ever steps foot near the school he’s probably going to get dogpiled by every single one of my teachers that’s been asking for a parent interview over the last eight years.

Should have seen their faces when I turned up with a fresh tattoo after my eighth birthday. A bullet beneath my ear, for mom.

I wasn’t ever supposed to know what happened to her but Sal sometimes breaks into pieces on the living room floor for a few days and he says things that he shouldn’t.

For some reason it’s always me there for those times.

Nowles says used to say that I look the most like mom, that when I smile it’s like she’s right there.

And maybe Sal looks at me and it’s like being haunted and for a minute I thought maybe I should move out because then he wouldn’t have to look at me and see her.

Kind of unnecessary though, he doesn’t look at me much anyway.

And I worry about the guy, you know? I think he’d probably starve without me. I meal prep like how mom and I used to, every sunday night I put five containers in the fridge marked ’Sal’ so he knows which ones are for him.

I do the cleaning and check the mail because Kade doesn’t care about anything except bed rotting and plants and great grandpa and then Nowles can’t help because she’s literally rotting. I clean the guns, I make dinner and keep the graves moss free.

I pull the weeds from around the headstones and bring Nowles gummy worms on her birthday. I lick the sides clean of sugar and then stick them all over her headstone and then I make sure Sal comes home before I sleep because I can't set the booby traps until after he’s back.

I wait and wait some nights. I play video games and listen to music and once I even sipped on a beer I found in the fridge. It kind of tasted like burnt water, I don’t know how to describe it, it was bad. I knew I wasn’t supposed to have it though so I wanted it.

It made me feel sick and I couldn’t keep my eyes open and so when Sal got home he got caught in my pie trap. He wasn’t even that mad about it though. We had a midnight pie picnic on the hallway floor, backs on opposite walls, feet flat against the other. Half the pie was on Sal’s face already so I got what was in the pie tin for myself. That was pretty good.

Every now and again I pretend I forgot about not setting that one but Sal’s more careful now and knows how to look for the trigger. Guess I should stop trying to make perfect moments like that happen again, it’s never the same twice.

Sometimes Uncle Mourn picks me up from school and we go get ice cream and I don't tell him that I don't really like ice cream because he's just trying to be nice. It's like when grandma fishes you out candy from the bottom of her bag and you gotta pretend that your favourite flavour is lint. He asks me how things are at home and I tell him that there's always food in the fridge because it's not a lie.

And last time he handed me a stack of bills and told me to put it in my savings but then on the way home I bought worms and a tank for Joanne. She deserves something better than a bathtub and I kind of want to turn that bathroom into a dark room anyway.

I found mom's film camera at the bottom of a drawer when I was rummaging through Nowles' things. It's not like I'm in there all the time or anything. Sometimes I just miss her so I sit in her room and lay out the outfits she used to wear on her bed. It's kind of like a memory game.

But I found mom's camera beneath her t-shirts, the roll half-used in there. I brought it to the corner store, the one where I buy the worms and they developed it for me. Got ten good photos out of it and I wonder if Nowles even knew the photos were in there all this time. I stick them up on my ceiling so that when I go to sleep at night I can see them.

Mom smiling down at me, Nowles and Kade on her lap, no me in sight. A shot of the river with a picnic blanket laid out. There's one of Kade and Sal running away down the riverbank. A shot of me as a baby on the blanket and Nowles playing peek-a-boo with me. Then one of Sal tossing Nowles into the air and one of mom holding me with a daisy chain in her hair.

The seventh one is blurry and it's from when I turned four, I'm blowing out candles on a cake. The eighth is me midway up the stairs, holding onto the railing, until then I was too scared to go up and down by myself. The ninth photo is Kade on the living room chair with Nowles and I dogpiled on top of him.

The tenth photo is mom and Sal, dressed up to go out. Mom's in a black dress, I remember that the fabric was soft when she hugged me that night. I started crying after Sal and her left because they didn't take us with them. Nowles said it was because I was stinky to try and get me to laugh instead.

First shot on the new roll of film is the photos on my ceiling taken from my bedroom door. That way, if I die, then someone will know that they're there. Maybe one day they'll come find them, take them down and look at them a little closer. They'll see pictures of us from before, from when mom and Nowles were here.

And they'll know that I was once here too.