And Then Things Fall Apart Read online

  AND THEN THINGS FALL APART

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  First Simon Pulse paperback edition July 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Arlaina Tibensky

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole

  or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Karina Granda

  The text of this book was set in Caslon.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Control Number 2010044631

  ISBN 978-1-4424-1323-8

  ISBN 978-1-4424-1324-5 (eBook)

  For my parents

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Date: July 12 Mood: Fractured Body Temp: 103.5

  Chapter 2: Date: July 13 Mood: Dickensian Body Temp: 101.6

  Chapter 3: Date: July 14 Mood: Hallucinatory Body Temp: 102.5

  Chapter 4: Date: July 15 Mood: All by Myself I Am a Huge Camellia Body Temp: 103.5

  Chapter 5: Date: July 16 Mood: Limp As a Wet Leaf Body Temp: 103.5

  Chapter 6: Date: July 17 Mood: The Opposite of Hopeful Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 7: Date: July 18 Mood: Incarcerated Rock Star Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 8: Date: July 19 Mood: Dorian Grayian Body Temp: 102

  Chapter 9: Date: July 20 Mood: Twice Shy Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 10: Date: July 21 Mood: Off-Kilter Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 11: Date: July 22 Mood: Red as Sylvia’s Bedside Tulips Body Temp: 101.5

  Chapter 12: Date: July 23 Mood: Retrospective Body Temp: 101.5

  Chapter 13: Date: July 24 Mood: Appalachian Body Temp: 101.5

  Chapter 14: Date: July 25 Mood: Totally Betrayed. Yet Again. Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 15: Date: July 26 Mood: Dismayed Body Temp: 100

  Chapter 16: Date: July 27 Mood: Dressed, At Least Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 17: Date: July 28 Mood: Condemned to Misery Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 18: Date: July 29 Mood: Indebted Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 19: Date: July 30 Mood: Epicurious Body Temp: 100

  Chapter 20: Date: July 31 Mood: Ravenous Body Temp: 101.1 (which is also a great radio station!)

  Chapter 21: Date: August 1 Mood: Truth? You Can’t Handle the Truth! Body Temp: 101

  Chapter 22: Date: August 2 Mood: Esther Greenwoodian Body Temp: 100

  Chapter 23: Date: August 3 Mood: Low Priority Body Temp: 99

  Chapter 24: Date: August 4 Mood: A Gaper’s Delay on My Mom’s Trajectory Body Temp: 99

  Chapter 25: Date: August 5 Mood: Shocked Body Temp: 99

  Chapter 26: Date: August 6 Mood: Weary and Lava-boned Body Temp: 98.6 *stadium cheering*

  Chapter 27: Date: August 7 Mood: There Are No Words

  Chapter 28: Date: August 8 Mood: As Nude as a Chicken Neck

  Chapter 29: Date: August 9 Mood: Infinite as Space and Wise Beyond My Freaking Years

  Chapter 30: Date: August 10 Mood: Juvenile Delinquent

  Chapter 31: Date: August 12 Mood: Sunkissed and Glowy

  Chapter 32: Date: August 13 Mood: There’s No Place Like Om

  Chapter 33: Date: September 22 Mood: Centered

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  DATE: July 12

  MOOD: Fractured

  BODY TEMP: 103.5

  I once watched a collector kill a monarch butterfly on a nature show by putting it under a glass dome with a piece of cotton soaked in gasoline. The insect’s wings flapped less and less until they were perfectly still.

  Suffocation is a cruel way to go.

  I can’t breathe under my bell jar either.

  I’m hot.

  I have the chills.

  I’m drenched with sweat, smothered beneath a hundred-pound coverlet.

  My head hurts. My eyes hurt. My tongue feels heavy so it’s hard to talk. If I stop typing, a vein in my forehead twitches with my pulse.

  I close my eyes, leaning my head back on my pillow to rest. For a second it’s as dark as a midnight sky. Then I imagine the shattered pieces of my heart sparkling like mirror shards.

  But when I open my eyes, I am still here: in the spare bedroom in my grandma’s house with her ancient green bottle of Muguet des Bois from her own high school years on the dresser. My deceitful and depraved father is still staying in the basement. My mother is still in California visiting her sister’s premature newborn, and my boyfriend, Matt, is still avoiding me.

  The best years of my life.

  And then the itching resumes with renewed fury.

  Because I have the chicken pox. It’s a virus that, contrary to popular belief, you can still catch well into your teens.

  I think I am losing my mind a tiny bit at a time. When the chatter in my head gets too loud, I start to type. The noise from the typewriter keys drowns out the noise in my head. Getting what I’m thinking onto paper in smudgy black letters feels good, like stretching or punching a wall. Or crying. Which I’m not doing much of anymore because it doesn’t seem to help.

  I’m not the first person to ever be sick, enraged, depressed, delirious, betrayed, and confused all at the same time, or to use a typewriter to examine life in all of its jagged-edge glory. Sylvia Plath did it too, and she is the most inspired, beautiful, and subversive writer of her generation. She’d be almost one hundred years old if she were alive. So even if she didn’t kill herself when she was thirty, she’d be dead by now. At least she left us her poems and The Bell Jar.

  The Bell Jar is about a young writer named Esther Greenwood and how she goes a little crazy and then gets better. But the book is really all about how life is unfair. And right now, whose life is more unfair than mine?

  It’s also about losing your virginity, and babies being alive and beautiful, or dead and grotesque, and either way ruining your life. But mostly it is about how hard it is to be yourself in a world that wants you to be someone who is easier to deal with. And it’s about writing. Which I also love. And trying to kill yourself, which I’m so not into, even though being alive is sofa king hard for me lately.

  For the past four months I’ve been reading my tattered dog-eared copy of the novel over and over again because it seems like the sanest thing to do. The book is challenging and comforting and often hilarious, unlike my own day-to-day, which is none of those things. Sylvia Plath is there for me when actual living people upon whom I have depended my whole life, are not. What I mean to say is, without her words, I’d be exponentially more messed up than I am already.

  Do I have a computer? A link to the outside world? No. My cell is even out of commission since the last fight I had with Matt when I flung it against the wall of the walk-in freezer at my parents’ restaurant. The screen’s not cracked or anything, but the # key chipped off and is somewhere in a vat of shredded mozzarella. I didn’t tell my parents, because then they would have asked what th
e fight was about. (My virginity! Huzzah!) And for all I know, some poor customer is going to swallow a # key and die of a ruptured intestine and sue my parents, and it will all be my fault.

  Without real entertainment, I will try anything to amuse myself. Not unlike the polar bears at the Brookfield Zoo, I need complex toys to keep me from going insane in my ten-by-ten cage. When Gram lugged this electric typewriter up from the basement this morning so I could practice my “typing skills,” I was actually excited. She gave me a lesson on shifting and carriage return before she left to drop off shirts for my dad at the dry cleaner’s.

  It’s a gray-green IBM, and weighs about a thousand pounds, but actually it is pretty amazing. Fast. When I hit the keys, they clickity-clack. As the ink presses onto the paper, it’s like I’m actually making something. Like art.

  Maybe it’s the pox, or my frying brain, but all I really want to do is type. I’m sick of being a hunt-and-pecker, typing like an intelligent duck. I was halfheartedly taking an online keyboarding class, and would have still been at it if I hadn’t gotten stricken in my prime. But I am trapped in this little bedroom, which used to be my great-grandma’s before she died. I’m alone with this antique typing device. My brain. And a fever. How much more Plathian can I be?

  Computers are quiet and clean and totally distracting because the Internet is there, lying in wait for a moment of weakness to pounce on your creativity and progress. Sylvia didn’t have to deal with Facebook. Blogs. Etsy. Twitter, for Christ’s sake.

  Gram just has basic cable, so TV is rather limited, but doable. The woman makes perfect boiled eggs, though, and buys the really good orange juice, the Sabor Latino with guava kind that my mom says smells like feet. Weird, the things that are making me miss my mom. She’s in Los Angeles, but she might as well be in Siberia.

  My head is throbbing and I am scratching so much that the sheets are leopard printed with spots of light pink blood. Not that my father would even notice. Dad is either working alone at the restaurant or driving the Dine & Dash delivery van around the streets of his youth, wondering where the hell it all went wrong and thinking not at all about his abandoned, ailing, and itchy only child—me.

  FLEABITES

  High on the exam table,

  You watch me from the doorway.

  While the doctor twists my arm

  This way

  And that.

  A specimen.

  My heart plays dress-up.

  Disguised as a little girl,

  I am asleep on a merry-go-round.

  Itching and aching,

  Mouth dry as toast.

  What to do?

  Daddy, Daddy, you traitor, I’m through. 6

  DATE: July 13

  MOOD: Dickensian

  BODY TEMP: 101.6

  If you get the chicken pox the summer before your sophomore year of high school, it is your parents’ fault. They—i.e., your parents—are supposed to get you booster shots. Tetanus. Whooping cough. Chicken pox. MMR (measles, mumps, rubella—whatever that last one is). This is totally routine parenting, people. In fifth grade the school secretary even sent home notes. Notes. To the home! An eight-year-old would have taken better care of a doll than my parents did of me, then—now. Whatev.

  Pox. Sounds like a Japanese candy, but alas, they are tiny, little blisters that the first doctor my father begrudgingly dragged me to diagnosed as—are you sitting down?—fleabites. FLEA. BITES. Because there was no way this doctor could believe that the alluring, practically adult young woman standing before him in a paper exam smock could have the most anecdotal of childhood diseases.

  “Do you have a dog?” The doctor asked my father.

  Neither of us knew where he was going with this. I mean we do/did have a dog, Coffee, who is staying at my grandma’s house—Mom’s mom’s, not Dad’s mom’s, which is where we are staying now. So!?

  We nodded slowly like we were negotiating with a mugger.

  “Does it have fleas?” he asked. Have I mentioned that I had a 130-degree temperature? That I was running around town without eyeliner? That I was wearing whatever had been on top of my pile of dirty laundry, and until I had looked down at my body on the way into the doctor’s office, I hadn’t even known what I put on?

  “You see”—the doctor used a pen as a pointer to indicate a pox on my forearm—“there is a center depression where the proboscis entered. And this tiny cluster of blisters surrounding it? A severe allergic reaction.” He actually used the word “proboscis” like he was an SAT tutor.

  As I was trying to get my (dirty) hoodie zipped back up so me and my fleabites could just get home—I mean, to Gram’s—my dad did something I have not seen him do, not once in the past three months since Mom kicked him out of the house. He acted like—a man. Not just a biological man, but like Indiana Jones or Kiefer Sutherland. At first I thought he was going to punch Dr. Proboscis’s lights out. Instead Dad poked the quack in the chest and said, “My daughter doesn’t have fleas, idiot. Go to hell.” Then he dragged me out the door and into the delivery van.

  Swearing is another thing I’ve never heard him do, really. “Go to hell!” is about as R-rated as my dad gets. He was worried about me, I guess. Probably worried about everything. And by everything I mean every possible thing that he could be worried about in every aspect of his life—marriage, business, self-esteem, STDs, fathering skills, etc.

  My parents own this restaurant together called the Dine & Dash. The ampersand (&)—yes, I learned this in keyboarding class—is included in the name. They serve all the typical Chicago crap that tourists can’t get enough of—Italian beef sandwiches, “Chicago-style” hot dogs (is there any other style?), fries, fruit punch from a fountain, deep-dish pizza. As I sat in the delivery van, with my face on fire with pox fever, my dad drove like such a maniac that boxes of cups and lids from Sam’s Club slid back and forth on the floor behind our seats; I thought I was going to hurl.

  “Wait until we get to the clinic before you get sick, Keek, okay? Crack the window. Try not to think about the giant bags of pepperoni in the back of the van.” This made Dad laugh—not a cruel ha-ha but a little we’re-in-this-together chuckle. I was so sick that I didn’t think how cool it was to hear him laugh until later that night under the hundred-pound coverlet my grandma insisted on using to smother me with—even though it’s July.

  At the clinic, of course, my chicken pox was correctly identified. I didn’t even have to take my clothes off and put on the paper dress. The receptionist basically diagnosed me on the spot. About three weeks of fluids and bed rest, the doctor said. It’s like the flu, but with infectious and hideous wounds that itch like fire-breathing ants all over your body and could scar you for life if treated improperly.

  My dad wrote the clinic a check.

  The doctor told me that everything was going to be fine and patted me on the head. But he didn’t know the half of it. I wasn’t about to fill him in on all the gory details. That my mom had kicked my dad out of the house for sleeping with a waitress who was, for lack of a better term, my best friend. That instead of moving into his own apartment or at least the YMCA like divorcing men do on sitcoms, my dad had moved into the basement apartment of his mother’s house. We also didn’t mention that my aunt had just given birth to a baby almost three months early that weighed three pounds and ten ounces, and that Mom went to stay with her for a few weeks, or until the baby died, whichever came first. I didn’t tell them that two weeks of bed rest would totally derail my summer learning program—that is, basic keyboarding and rereading The Bell Jar for the ninth time—or that staying in my grandmother’s house miles away from my boyfriend, friends, and dog, with my dad crying himself to sleep in the basement every night, might just possibly make me want to shove my head into an oven.

  DATE: July 14

  MOOD: Hallucinatory

  BODY TEMP: 102.5

  Matt.

  When I am into him, I love his name because it is short and strong, like he is. A perfect name
for a varsity wrestler, which he is. When I hate him, I also hate his name. Matt, like a doormat or a sweaty wrestling mat or a ball of matted hair in the shower drain. Matt, short for Matthew. But who calls him Matthew? No one but his mother when she’s mad at him.

  My hair was brown and long when we started going out. My parents lived in the same house and slept in the same bedroom, down the hall from my own. Back then Matt and I would walk to the Dine & Dash, and Amanda would serve us free Cokes and fries, and then we’d walk to his house and make out insanely until his/my hormones started to freak me out and/or my mouth got all raw.

  We also went on dates, lots of them, sometimes in groups and sometimes just us. And we laughed. All the time, at anything we wanted to, because everything seemed hilarious to us. We were a textbook example of the happiest high school couple on earth.

  And then my parents started to fight by not talking to each other. I dyed my hair black. And bleached parts of it, dyeing those parts pink. And then Free-Fry Amanda became That-Stupid-Slut-That-Ruined-Everything Amanda. And I started to write poetry on my tights with black Sharpie marker and wear them to school beneath vintage thrift store pencil skirts.

  Then the wrestling team went to nationals, and Matt started hanging out more with the other wrestlers, and one of them had a blond sister, a freshman with an A name. Amy? Anne? Jennifer? Whatever the hell her name was, she wore Keds with no retro irony whatsoever, and I know she was crushing on Matt because she would look right past me—his girlfriend—whenever we passed each other in the hall. Maybe she was scared. Afraid to look the crazy girl in the eye. And I’m sure she was totally—what is the word?—incredulous that Matt in all his mainstream hotness would have anything to do with a mess in scribble tights and hair from hell.

  Matt still came over, but we talked a lot less and kissed a lot more, and I started to think that maybe we were in love. I mean, I was. Like mature and sophisticated love where you share feelings and really communicate and grow, and whatever else people are supposed to do in a “relationship.” And that’s when all the sex pressure began. Lately, especially, it’s been like, “Hi, Keek. Did you get the algebra notes? Oh, and can I put my penis inside you, just a little bit?”