you. I thought you was somebody else. How you doing?”
I told her I was fine, and she asked me how he got like that. I had no idea. I was deep in a REM cycle when my phone rang.
“So you wasn’t with him. Can you believe what this boy got himself into?” she asked me, shaking her head. I shook my head too though my forehead wasn’t as furrowed and my lips were not as pursed. I wish I could feel her level of indignation. I’m sure I’ve earned it.
“I can hear somebody opening a bag of chips out there! Gimme something. A half a sandwich. I’m hungry.”
“I ain’t staying here if you gonna act a fool,” his mother said. She meant it too because she turned around halfway through her last word and walked out.
As soon as his mother was out of sight, he yelled, “Nobody loves me!”
“Your mom loves you,” I said.
“She’s gone.” He pouted. “She doesn’t love me. I’m a fuck up. Nobody loves me.”
“I love you,” I said.
“You do?”
“Yeah, sure I do.”
“You’re the only one who ever loved me, Sweetheart,” he said, pulling my hand over to his mouth so he could kiss it even though it meant I was bent over the bed with the guard rail smashed into my liver.
Sweetheart? The last time we spoke, he called me something less affectionate. Not just once. It was a cascade of “I hate you, you bitch. Arrogant bitch. Ugly bitch. Stupid bitch.”
“How could you not have known!” he had screamed at me in the end. “I was drunk
drunk at your play! I was high at your birthday!”
He asked me how I let him get away with it for so long when I should have been the one to call him out. I should have known, he said, about the other women he was sleeping with. He wasn’t wrong. Someone else might have.