Tim's mother is too young to die, but she dies anyway--in a video that goes viral. Tim scrambles to hold his life together, but the person who keeps him on his feet turns out to be his half-sister, a fiesty girl who has no idea they're related, but...
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I leave the hospital with seven stitches in my head and not much else in there. The pain meds kick in hard and if I couldn't think straight before, I definitely can't now. Everything feels a little fuzzy around the edges. The prairie landscape looks more like an oil painting, hills rolling up and down, up and down.
"I don't remember getting to the hospital," I say, watching fields in layers. Farmland goes on for miles and miles. The horizon forever meets the mottled sky.
"It's probably better that way." Heather drums her rings against her steering wheel. "I had to pull over three times so you could throw up."
Awesome. That's one way to sober up. Just get rid of all the alcohol.
"I feel like I got hit by a truck."
"According to you, it was the other way around."
Goddamn. Yes. That was it, wasn't it?
The rest of the drive, we're quiet. The landmarks are few and far between on this stretch of highway. The closer we get to Murphy, the more graffitied overpasses and collapsed barns we come across.
Eventually, Heather will want to talk. She'll want to know what happened, but she lets me silently slip out of her car in her driveway and slink up to my room to marinate in my bad decisions.
All I want to do for the rest of the day, and possibly the rest of the summer, is lie on the floor and listen to my music. Except, what I'm finding is that all of them are ruined by my mother. There's hardly a piece of vinyl in my collection that doesn't connect back to her. There are all the records that were hers when she bought the record player—the Johnny Cash albums, the Joni Mitchell and Neil Young ones, especially. There are all the ones she got me for birthdays or Christmases—The White Stripes, Arcade Fire, Death from Above 1979. I abandon the records for my iPod instead, my headphones blocking out the world.
I put on rap. Mom hated rap.
Maybe because it's angry, and because there's something about it that's more raw and honest than poetry. It isn't pretty. It isn't flattering. Seven stitches in my head, I don't want to think that I'm anything but an idiot. I can't think of my mother as anything but a liar.
