Warning: Some content published on this website contains potentially offensive language.
By Milo Wolverton
I glance at the clock on the wall. forty-seven minutes left. By now, the Adderall has worn off, and the classroom discussion about the Aeneid has drifted away with it. Instead, my mind wanders back to 2012.
I am sitting on an ugly green couch in my parents’ living room as Ethan crashes down the stairs. I toss the PlayStation controller on the table, and he lands on the shag carpet by the front doorway. Italians are crazy superstitious, so I’m surprised Mom moved here. A staircase in front of the doorway is always bad luck.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Ethan says as he presses his thumb to his index finger and waves it around. Fucking goombah.
“Dude,” I say. “Why are you flipping out?”
I’m playing dumb from my place on the couch with just a hint of attitude to really sell it.
“You fucking pissed on my bed!” he says as he kicks an empty Cheerios box that lands in front of the recliner on top of Dad’s knee-high checkered socks with gaping holes in the heels.
Now to be clear, I did piss on his bed. But I had my reasons.
“What the fuck, Ethan?” I’m committed to selling my outrage, so I start to raise my voice. “You think I’d piss on your bed like an animal?”
“Yeah…because you did,” he says, reaching the end of the couch to block the fifty-inch flat screen TV in front of me.
Now that he’s a teenager, I can’t use my age to beat him up anymore, but he doesn’t realize that towering over me isn’t going to work either. He forgets that I know he can quote Star Wars by heart or that he cried when his guinea pig died a couple months ago.
“So you’re saying that with two dogs in this house, you automatically assumed that I’m the one who pissed on your bed? Wow, dude,” I sound indignant because I’m actually getting mad.
“Well…yeah…” he stops and considers it. “You were upset that I told Mom and Dad, so I thought…”
“That I would stoop to pissing on your bed?” I push past him to head for the door, but he stops me. Time to seal the deal.
“Don’t!” I snatch my arm back. “I got you beer because you’re seventeen, and I figured you were safer with me than your stupid fucking friends.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Coming back here was hard,” I’m choking back pissed-off tears.
“I know,” he says softly.
“No,” I interject. “You obviously don’t. Mom and Dad already think I’m the devil because I’m gay. Thanks for telling them I corrupted their baby, too.”
The front door is jammed, so I have to yank hard.
“I didn’t piss on your bed,” I say as it flies open. “But I wish I had thought of that because I would’ve.”
I step outside, but the word “grade” snaps me back to the present. I missed it. Something about midterms.
I glance at the clock. Forty-five minutes left.
Time passes more slowly than it used to. The place in my brain that used to be filled with quiet emptiness is now stuffed full of echoes and snapshots from my childhood. Sometimes memories climb down from dusty cabinets just to dance around me in the silence. Other times they come and swaddle me in their arms like my mother used to come to me as a child after I’d had another nightmare about snakes or tornadoes. But today, like a lot of days now, they’re only here to muddy the water that separates what was from what is.
I don’t think Ethan actually believed me, but I made him doubt himself enough to give up. I confessed to him years later. He just laughed like always and called me an asshole. He always acted like that—like nothing was wrong. So ever since he committed suicide in November, my mind wanders aimlessly through time in hopes of understanding. Eventually, I end up on memories like this one—a memory that used to be harmless and funny.
Sometimes time gives new meaning to old thoughts, and sometimes new experiences change the way we remember our memories. Right now, I wish I could go back and erase the things I said that day. Then I’d go back to the night that I gave Ethan his first Corona and erase that too. Maybe he wouldn’t have become an alcoholic. Maybe he wouldn’t have been drunk the night he died. Maybe he’d still be here.
I glance up at the wall. There are still forty-four minutes left.
Milo Wolverton is a student studying English at Winthrop University. He grew up in a blue-collar town in Western Pennsylvania, but he now lives in South Carolina with his wife, cat, and three dogs. Milo identifies as queer and trans and is interested in exploring issues of class, queerness, and trauma in his writing.