MY GOAL IS TO MAKE YOU HAPPY

by Hallie Gayle

My brother wants to commit suicide. He is telling me how he wants to go. “There has to be blood,” he says as we circle around the Hooters on Throckmorton for the third time. “Only cowards die without blood.” He is struggling with the one-way streets, and then we are cruising by the courthouse and giant banks, men in white button-ups waiting at crossing lights. We pass the Cheesecake Factory and the big Christmas tree, the Bass Hall where the two angels blow trumpets over the street. We’re aimless, and my brother is talking about the demons in his head. “You feel it too? Like they’re building these nests? Like they’re having conversations all day without your permission? You feel that too?” I don’t answer because I know I will cry and he hates it when I cry. By the movie theater, a man in a puffy coat is preaching into a megaphone. He is all alone and we can hear him even with the windows rolled up: “THE SON IS COMING BACK, WHO IS READY?! THE TIME IS NEAR WHEN THE RIGHTEOUS WILL PREVAIL AND THE WICKED WILL PERISH !” We hear his shouting even near Lancaster, going under the interstate bridge, getting back on the highway.

At Chicken Express, my brother orders the family meal even though I’m not hungry. We find Mike sitting in a booth at the very back, shoveling mashed potatoes in his mouth while he’s looking at his phone. “Yo, man,” he says when he sees my brother, and we slide into the hard red seat across from him. Mike begins telling a story about how some man on bath salts was trying to break into everyone’s apartment last night since he couldn’t figure which building was his. He was banging on everyone’s door and throwing his body against windows and he even took off all his clothes and started jerking off. “That shit messed up my REM cycle,” Mike says, and twitches his neck three times to the right, then to the left, puts a hand in the greasy box of chicken and, staring at me for the first time, says, “Do you mind?”

“I don’t care,” I shrug. Mike peels the fried skin off the meat with his fingers and flings the scraps into his mashed potatoes. When his phone goes off, he holds the naked chicken wing in midair, and my brother and I watch him for about ten minutes hang up and call, hang up and call, what seems to be several different people.

“Come on, man,” my brother says. When Mike finally puts his phone in his pocket, we leave all the food on the table, get back in the car and follow him to an apartment behind the Spec’s on Bryant Irvin Road. A woman with bright orange hair and tired eyes is sitting at the kitchen table opening envelopes, one of her feet in a metal bowl of water. Two guys that I guess are her sons are on the couch in the living room, playing Halo. “Justin,” the woman says, closing her eyes. “Justin, help these people.”

“Nah dawg, nothing, nada,” Justin hollers to Mike, wiping his shaggy hair out of the way to show us his pale pimply face.

We’re back in the car again. Back past downtown. In a neighborhood by an elementary school. The house doesn’t have any furniture, and the windows don’t have blinds. There’s a refrigerator flipped over on its side in the dining room and it makes me think of a raft floating out in the sea all alone. A shirtless man with a ponytail down his back is lifting weights in the middle of the empty living room. My brother hits me on the shoulder, so I pull out four twenties from the wad of cash in my purse he had given me earlier that day for safekeeping. The sweaty man puts down a dumbbell and says to my brother, “Why are you bringing little girls here?” Like he didn’t want to take our money. Mike says, “Do you want the money or not?”

My brother and I snort the coke in a parking lot. He pours out the powder from a twisted-up Ziploc bag onto my World History textbook and shows me how to sweep up the neat thin lines with my nostril. Back on the highway, the sky around us is tinfoil, crackling with cold, and all I want is to reach my hand up and tear it away. Inside of me is a warm rush that I almost can’t stand. My brother keeps saying

“Are you happy?” and I have this feeling that I want to say everything, but all that comes out is “Uh-huh.” And my brother says, “Good, my goal is to make you happy before I go.”

We arrive at his girlfriend Amy’s apartment, right next to the La La Laundromat. She comes to the door wearing a Cowboys football jersey and these silver hoop earrings bent into the shape of stars. Her hand is flung out, palm up, a cigarette dangling between her fingers. “You’re late,” she says, and my brother takes the cigarette out of her hand and smacks her on the ass. She’s not wearing pants and I stare at her My Little Pony underwear. “Hey baby,” she says to me once we’re inside. “Don’t be shy. Do you want a beer? A beer might help, let me get you a beer.”

I don’t feel intense like I did before. My brother doesn’t tell her we did coke. He told me earlier, “Don’t tell Amy, she’s a greedy bitch.” I stand in the middle of the living room, my arms around me, as I take a sip of the silver can of Coors Light she gives me. It’s cold and sour. Amy lies back on the couch, and she’s letting us see her long legs that are all cut up with razor blade slashes.

My brother is sitting on the floor rolling a joint on top of a cardboard box that’s cluttered with a glass bong, shriveled up McDonald’s fries in their greasy red packet, a phone with a smashed screen plugged into a tangled-up charger. I take a seat in a fold-out chair and pretend to pay attention to the TV. Amy is massaging my brother’s head with her large foot while he licks the rolling paper. “Give me,” she says.

“Wait,” my brother says, and hands me the joint first. I take the neat packed paper, delicate like pinched butterfly wings between my fingers, and let my brother light the end for me. I inhale hard, holding the smoke in my lungs just as he taught me, as the tiny cherry flame wavers between my eyes. He backs up and sits on his knees and says, “How do you feel?” I don’t feel anything special, but I say, “Great.”

Amy gets off the couch and comes to join us on the floor. I’m still in the chair, looking down at them. We pass the joint in a circle.

“What grade are you in again?” she asks.

“Seventh grade,” I say.

“Seventh grade,” Amy repeats and goes quiet. Then she says, “Seventh grade was when they cut off a chunk of my hair in Life Skills. Also, when I gave Mr. Trellis a blowjob during algebra tutoring, my very first.”

“Oh, come on, she doesn’t need to hear that,” my brother says.

“I don’t care. I’ve already done that,” I hear myself lie.

My brother pretends to be shot in the heart, using both hands to hold the imaginary wound as he falls backwards. “Y’all sluts are depressing me,” he says, and leans over to stab the joint out in a small ashtray.

Amy sticks out her tongue and gets on her hands and knees and starts humping the air. She crawls towards the TV and pushes the button at the bottom to turn up the volume. It’s Surf’s Up, and Amy gets back on the couch and starts laughing at everything the penguins do. My brother is laying on his back, scrolling through his phone.

“I’m hungry,” Amy says after a while, breaking the quiet. “I’m hungry,” she says again and hits my brother on the arm.

“Money?” He stands up and hovers over her. She has an arm behind her head and one leg bent up.

“I’ll suck your dick later, but no way am I giving you money. Unlike you, I pay for my rent and water and electricity and groceries,” she says.

My purse has been sitting in my lap the whole time like a pet. “Oh,” I say, when my brother turns to me, so I unzip the side pocket and pull out a twenty from the wad.

“What the fuck,” Amy says. “I’m not even going to ask.” My brother stands over his girlfriend and wags his finger at her, as if he’s channeling our father or just trying it out. My brother is not our father, though.

“You’re a quiet one,” Amy says when it’s just us two. She is leaning on her arm, giving me her full attention, which makes me want to fold inward and bloom at the same time. “But I can tell,” she says, studying me, tapping ash from another cigarette into her beer can. “You’re hardcore, aren’t you. You have what’s the word substance. I’m always good at feeling people’s energy.” I shrug and take a drink of my beer but the metal clunks against my teeth because the can’s empty.

“Here, hon, follow me.” I go with her into the kitchen. She opens the fridge and it looks like our fridge: a handful of soy sauce from Panda Express, a bowl of blue Jell-O, black bananas, a shelf of beer. “I have beer, tons of beer, cuz I get it free from the bar. I also have whiskey, and tequila. Want to do tequila shots? I’m feeling like a party.” I move my shoulders up and down and nod my head, and Amy claps her hands like a woman in a commercial and swings open the freezer as a roar of cold air hits her in the face. It’s like Antarctica in there, like ice has melted and reformed and melted and reformed, and the only space left is a frozen hole where she keeps her bottles of liquor. “Don’t tell your brother,” she says when she unscrews the gold top and drinks it straight, her face not even flinching. “You know how he is with alcohol.”

We are on her balcony smoking cigarettes, passing the bottle back and forth, and I tell Amy I like being drunk better than high, and she tells me that’s because I’m naturally high. She says that creative people need alcohol because they live in their heads all day long and boring people need weed because they are blocked from all their good thoughts and need help opening them up. “What are you?” I ask, letting smoke tumble off my bottom lip like she does, making my mouth a little spout like a teapot, lifting my chin.

“Oh hell,” she says, spreading her legs out like a man, arms resting on bent knees. I can see her black pubes poking out of her panties. “I need it all.” That’s when we start laughing hysterically, laughing so hard it hurts, and I have this feeling that I want to kiss her, but not how my brother kisses her, and not even how people kiss in movies, all sexy and horny. I want to kiss her like I’m a bear. I feel like a bear. I want to bite her blistered bottom lip and scratch at her breasts and pull at her hair.

“Where’s your dumbass brother?” she says when our laughter comes to an abrupt stop and she stands up to look over the railing. There’s a car down there flashing its lights, and I can feel the low bass from the loud music. “Hey beautiful! Are you going to dance for us?” someone screams. Amy ignores this, climbs onto the second bar of the railing and searches the parking lot and beyond for my brother.

“Amy,” I say. But she doesn’t turn around. She is held by the night sky and cheap lemony light from the security lamps and I need her to look at me. I am smashing little bugs and leaves that are piled up in the corner between my fingers. It feels as if it’s been hours. Maybe my brother was hit by a semi or maybe he slit his wrists once and for all in the parking lot of a Burger King. I run inside and empty out the contents of my purse to find my small Nokia phone my brother gave me earlier that year in case of emergency. I call the only contact listed, BROTHER, and it rings and rings and rings.

Amy sits crisscrossed in front of me now like a kid in kindergarten. “Why are you crying?” she asks, and she begins to cry, too. “What’s happening?” We are both sobbing, and that’s when my brother comes in the door with his arms full of Little Caesars boxes and a plastic bag of two-liter sodas hanging from his forearm. Amy throws a stuffed frog at his knees. “Jesus Christ, help me,” he calls out. I bend over and puke.

My brother says, “I was getting us coke.” He flings the little bag he got earlier at Amy who’s wiping all her tequila tears with the backs of her palms. “You got her drunk,” my brother says, side-stepping around my vomit to put the pizza boxes on the counter. “I didn’t get her drunk,” Amy slurs. “She’s an independent woman, duh.”

Amy makes the living room dark and plugs in Christmas lights that are strung on each wall with thumbtacks. She finds a Star Wars towel from a black trash bag and lays it over my vomit as if marking where a person has died. My brother prepares the coke with the edge of his driver’s license on an empty Blink-182 CD case he finds under the couch. We take turns snorting all of it. Once high, Amy and my brother begin to argue. They are arguing about whether or not Jesus can perform miracles because God gives him power or if Jesus can perform miracles because he’s so in tune with the energy of good things and the miracles come from within him. The latter is what Amy argues. She is yelling, and my brother says, “Hush beautiful, no need to yell,” and puts his hand over her whole face like a giant paw. I’m red as a tomato and can’t unscrew my smile because I love them. I want to say it out loud, I love y’all, but the weight of it gets stuck in my mouth and I start grinding my teeth over the unspoken syllables. Amy is spitting at him and sticking out her tongue and swinging her arms at my brother’s chest. He’s laughing like he laughed when he was a boy, snorting and hiccupping in girly octaves. “We’re all capable of being Jesus,” Amy screams over that new Kid Cudi song. “And don’t you ever fucking tell me to shut up, bro.”

My brother stands and starts to dance like a male stripper, taking off his shirt and waving it between his legs, and Amy grabs me by the shoulders like a crazy person on the streets and says, “I swear, baby girl, it says in the New Testament, he says to his disciples, you too can perform miracles if you know how much you are loved. Do you know how much you are loved?” I can see green flakes in her blue eyes and the whole constellation of every single freckle on her pale face, like I’m seeing a new person, an original Amy I couldn’t see before. I grab at her wrists. I believe you, I say, or think I say, and she takes my hand.

The three of us are dancing dancing and I think, the whole world has a broken heart because they are chasing moments like this, and I think, my brother is a coward for wanting to die.

Cotton Wool Twist In The Neck Of The Season

Sandra Lim

Then the snows melted, and all of it was green enough to blind you.

I forgot all about how we lost the old world and got the new one.

The birds sang so prettily to attract a mate, shivering in their nightdresses.

I thought, but I know this stuff.

I padded into the kitchen and started to bake a cake. Ash from my cigarette kept dropping into the bowl. I was exhausted, like a leaf when it first comes out.

Already I missed being absorbed back into the cold lap of soil, where I could withstand the fret of things unresolved, my face as tranquil as a lake.