Backwards Read online

  Bright-red tulips blooming — that’s the first thing I remember. Only they weren’t tulips. Their petals were drops of crimson, sinking into bathwater. It hit me that the drops must be coming from somewhere. Then I saw his wrists, and I realized that the red was blood. I didn’t feel any revulsion or sadness. Instead, I was struck by how bright the drops swirling in the water looked. I wanted him to move his arms so there could be more pretty blossoms — a whole tub full of tulips, flashy as springtime — but he merely let his arms fall beneath the surface, coming to rest on his legs and turning the water pink. So much for art.

  He wasn’t naked. That seemed strange to me. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, and sneakers, all of which were soaked. It didn’t look very comfortable — wearing wet jeans and shoes in a tub like that. He let his head rest on the porcelain edge, which also didn’t look comfortable, and a small, rectangular blade slipped from his hand. Then he shifted, knocking several shampoo bottles over. His brow creased. Perhaps he wondered if he should pick up the mess, but he must have realized that his hands would drip blood onto the floor, so he left the bottles where they lay and closed his eyes.

  Once he did that, I was able to get a little distance from him and hover above his body. If he was aware of my presence, he gave no sign of it. He was tall and gawky — too big for the tub, so his legs peaked like a child’s drawing of mountains and his shoulders hunched. Pink water lapped halfway up his shirt, but his hair and face were still dry, and the knees of his jeans looked dry as well. I thought it must frustrate him not to be able to submerge his whole body in the warmth of the water. He seemed young — seventeen or eighteen — so it probably hadn’t been that long ago when he’d been able to stretch out fully in the bathtub. I wondered if it surprised him when he discovered he didn’t fit anymore.

  An open bottle of aspirin lay beside the tub, and a few white pills had spilled across the floor, dissolving in a puddle near the shampoo bottles. I pictured him downing a handful of aspirin before opening the package of razor blades. His sweatshirt was draped over the toilet seat like a tablecloth with two car keys resting in the center on a yellow sticky note. FOR TEAGAN the note said in blocky letters, slightly smeared.

  He stirred and I felt a tug, as if I were a kite being jerked back to earth. He glanced through heavy lids at the pen on the edge of the sink. I didn’t have much trouble guessing his thoughts — he wanted to write more on the note or write another, longer note. That’s what he was supposed to do, right? Leave a note? But it was too late now because his shoes and jeans and shirt were already wet, and if he got out of the tub to get the pen and more paper, he’d drip pink puddles everywhere.

  With a frustrated sigh, he lay back. Maybe he was crying, although I didn’t see any tears. I had a hard time feeling sympathy for him. After all, what sort of person only leaves behind a sticky note with two smudged words and a set of keys? The whole scene really started to depress me. I tried to pull away and escape from the room, but I was yanked back again.

  “What the hell, Dan!” called a girl’s voice. The doorknob rattled. “Are you taking a bath? It’s almost noon.”

  So the guy in the tub was named Dan. He struggled to lift one arm, but it flopped back into the water. His face looked as pale as the tile walls.

  “I need to take my contacts out,” continued the girl. “They itch.”

  Dan rolled his head from side to side and muttered a faint protest.

  “Fine. Have it your way.” The girl left, only to return a minute later to rattle the doorknob again. “You better not be naked,” she warned.

  After several seconds of rattling, the lock clicked and the door swung open. The girl stood in the doorway, holding the screwdriver she must have used to jimmy the lock.

  Despite her dyed-black hair, slight frame, and pierced nose and eyebrow, the resemblance between her and Dan was striking. They both had high cheekbones and hazel eyes. Seeing his sister, I realized that Dan might be considered handsome, although right now he looked about as appealing as curdled milk.

  The girl’s expression darkened as she took in the scene. Dan’s eyes had closed. If he was still conscious, he was doing his best not to look it.

  “Very funny,” muttered the girl. She must have thought Dan was pulling a prank on her. “If Mom saw you, she’d lose her shit.” The girl shoved his shoulder, but he didn’t respond. “Dan?” she said, faintly at first. “Dan. Dan!”

  Her toughness came apart like tissue paper as it dawned on her that he wasn’t faking. Then her face creased and her mouth twitched. I hated seeing her break down, but I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t even look away while she collapsed, uttering a fragmented prayer of “God” and “Mom” and “Please.”

  My sense of things got blurry after that. I saw Dan’s mom arrive. She fought back her initial horror and attempted to pull her gawky son out of the tub, but she couldn’t lift him. She finally settled for raising his arms out of the water and wrapping his wrists in towels. Her face looked brittle. In a way, her choked reaction bothered me more than the sister’s cries.

  “Call an ambulance,” said the mom, but the girl didn’t move. “Teagan, call an ambulance!” she repeated.

  The girl still wouldn’t move, so the mom went to get a phone herself. Her voice sounded strangely detached, as if she refused to accept what she was saying.

  After stating the necessary details, the mom returned with yellow dish towels. Dan’s wrists had slipped back into the water in her absence, and the bath towels were soaking wet. She wrapped the new towels around the old ones, but it did little to keep the blood in. Still, she held the wet towels tight to Dan’s wrists until the ambulance arrived.

  The paramedics rang the doorbell several times before the mom went to let them in. Teagan stayed in the bathroom, frozen. One of the paramedics, a tall guy with a shaved head, had to physically drag her out so they’d have room to work in the cramped space.

  I watched them step into the tub and hoist up Dan’s body. The tall paramedic banged his knee on the tub spout and cursed. Pink water splashed onto the bath rug and spilled across the floor into the white-carpeted hall. The mess was tremendous now. I felt myself growing angry at Dan for causing it. It wasn’t simply the stains on the floor that upset me, but the way his actions would affect his mom and sister, staining their lives, too.

  The paramedics lay his body on the floor. Then the shorter one jogged to the truck, tracking bloody water everywhere, while the tall one put tourniquets on Dan’s arms, cut through his jeans, and attempted to insert an IV. He asked how many aspirin Dan had taken. No one knew the answer.

  By this point, I had to struggle to stay focused, but I kept watching because of the mom and the sister. I wished I could do something for them.

  The tall paramedic pushed a gurney into the hall, but he couldn’t get it through the bathroom door. They had to drag Dan’s body out to load him up. Then they strapped him on. I doubted he had much of a pulse anymore. His pale limbs jiggled as they rushed to wheel him to the ambulance.

  Once outside, I tried to drift away. I wanted to float into the overcast sky and be free of this whole mess, but the images of what I’d seen became tight and heavy, tugging me back toward Dan. No matter how much I fought, I kept getting dragged closer to his pale, limp body. His bloodless lips neared, and he drew in a last feeble breath, drawing me in as well. Darkness surrounded me. I struggled, but there was no escape. When his breathing stopped, it felt like the door to a windowless room had slammed shut.

  It was Saturday, November 15, but I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t understand the strange countdown of days that formed my existence until later. All I knew then was that I was alive, alone, and trapped in the body of a dead person.

  The first night was long — a gray, indefinite expanse
of time. I couldn’t see, hear, or feel anything. So I huddled, not moving, if a bodiless entity can be said to huddle. In my imagination at least, that’s how I saw myself, my nonexistent arms wrapped around my nonexistent legs — a genie trapped in a jar for who knows how long.

  There was no way to judge the passing of time. No change or differentiation between one moment and the next. No forwards or backwards. Just a vast gray nothingness. Until a scream broke in.

  The scream tore through the darkness, trailing a stream of sunlight. I tried following the light out, but something kept me anchored. Looking down, I saw Dan’s body in bed. He slapped the alarm clock with a meaty hand, then scratched the stubble on his cheek. Both his wrists appeared fine now — not a scratch or bandage on them. There wasn’t even a scar where the cuts had been. That surprised me. Although his skin had a pinkish hue to it and he was breathing, in my memory he remained dead as a squirrel squished on the road.

  I fought to pull away, but I was trapped inside him. Then the alarm screeched again. Dan buried his head beneath his pillow. Brilliant. You’d think that when an alarm is blaring, the sensible thing would be to turn it off and go back to sleep. Instead, he kept pulling more blankets over his head. He even grabbed a sweatshirt off the floor and bundled it across his ears. The guy was like a tortoise trying to bury himself in dirty laundry. This went on for way too long, until someone pounded the wall and a voice I recognized as his sister’s told him to “Wake the hell up!”

  Dan fumbled blindly with the alarm’s buttons for nearly a minute before dragging his head out from under his pillow and finding the switch. Then he sat up and rubbed his eyes. I hoped he would shower, because his hair reeked of stale smoke.

  I sank into him, wondering why he smelled like the wrong side of a bonfire. The deeper I got, the more I could sense what he sensed. I heard his heart thumping inside his chest and felt the weight of his body on his bones. Beneath all those physical sensations, though, whispered something else. His thoughts, maybe? There were so many whispers braided together, it sounded like a river rushing over rocks. I drifted closer until the whispers swirled around me, tugging at me, but I couldn’t discern what any one whisper said. There was just this general sense of his mood. He seemed irritated and sleepy.

  I felt better keeping my distance from the whispers. With effort, I stretched my awareness far enough away so that I could almost perceive Dan from the outside. He slouched on the edge of a bed that was set against one wall of a mostly bare room. There was a desk, a dresser, and a few shelves with books and some dusty football trophies on them. Drifts of wrinkled clothes cluttered the floor. I tried to look at the few posters decorating the walls, but most of what I saw, heard, smelled, and felt continued to be directed by him — as if I were stuck in a car, and all I could do was move around a little and watch things go by while he drove. He stared at a calendar hanging on the wall beside his bed. The top part showed a photo of a gazelle jumping over a crocodile. Below this it said COURAGE: the ability to do something stupid and run like hell.

  All the days on the calendar were blank, except for a cluster toward the end of the month that had been circled with Thanksgiving break — visit Dad scrawled across them. Dan reached for the calendar, and his whispering thoughts grew louder and more anxious. For a moment, I expected him to count the days until Thanksgiving break or turn the page to look at December, but then he seemed to come to a decision. He lowered his hand and turned away. The whispers gradually subsided as he shuffled down the hall toward the bathroom.

  I cringed when he reached for the bathroom door. I didn’t want to see the puddles of blood, dissolving pills, and sickly pink stains on the rug again. No matter how I fought to get away from there, though, it made no difference. I couldn’t leave, and I couldn’t stop him from walking. I couldn’t even close his eyes or make him look in a different direction.

  Dan pushed open the bathroom door and flicked on a light, blinking at the stark floor tiles and bright-white tub.

  The bathroom wasn’t exactly clean, yet compared to the bloody mess I expected, it appeared immaculate. No blood stained the rug or tiles, and there were no pills on the floor. Even the shampoo bottles Dan had knocked over were back in place.

  Dan slid off his boxers and stepped into the shower. The cold tub stung his feet, but the water soon warmed, pelting his back with hot drops. He moved mechanically, rubbing shampoo into his hair. A tangy-sweet scent of grapefruit and bubble gum filled his senses while warmth trickled down his spine. I focused on the physical sensations, marveling at how all the tiny hairs on his arm lined up as water streamed over his muscles and pooled around his toes. However I got here, it felt amazing to exist, but Dan seemed indifferent to it all. Dead to the world.

  He shut off the water, toweled himself dry, and got out. Then he went about his morning business, oblivious to me riding around inside him. Without access to his thoughts, he seemed like a walking corpse. A zombie.

  I watched Dan dry his hair, put gel in it, wet it again, then gel it again, until he finally gave up and doused himself with way too much cologne.

  “You done plucking your nose hairs yet?” called a familiar voice through the door.

  “Just a minute.”

  “Come on, Dan. You’re taking forever. I need to get ready.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair one last time and opened the door.

  The girl who’d discovered his bleeding body in the tub stood on the other side with her hands braced on her hips. She raised her chin and jutted out her bony elbows like a hedgehog trying to appear bigger.

  “All yours,” he said, avoiding her gaze.

  Teagan sniffed. “It smells like a country club in here.” She nodded at the bottle of cologne by the sink. “Have you been drinking that stuff again?”

  I laughed, but Dan didn’t. “Very funny,” he grumbled.

  Teagan crinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue. I was beginning to like her. In spite of her heavy black eyeliner, she appeared childish and nervous. I remembered how she’d come apart when she discovered her brother’s suicide. Beneath her insults and tough posturing, I saw the opposite — a girl who cared so much it scared her.

  Dan didn’t appear to notice any of this, though. He blew past Teagan and shuffled into the kitchen to pour himself a bowl of cereal.

  Watching him spill cereal on the counter and dribble milk down the side of the carton repulsed me. Then the crunching. Slurping. Swallowing. The zombie seemed barely conscious of what he did. He ate out of habit, shoveling soggy bites into his mouth.

  His mom bustled about the kitchen, but Dan didn’t say a word to her. She wore a starched white blouse and business slacks. Although a little on the heavy side, she was still fairly attractive, with pale-green eyes and dark hair cut in a stylish bob. She held a bagel in one hand and a sponge in the other, eating while she wiped up the mess that Dan had made on the countertop. Then she put away the cereal box and the milk he’d left out.

  “Will you go to the grocery store after school?” she asked, brushing crumbs off the table in front of Dan.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yeah,” he said, sounding like she’d interrupted him in the middle of composing a symphony. “You want me to go today?”

  “Yes, today,” said his mom. “We don’t have anything for dinner.” She tossed the sponge into the sink and dug through her purse, pulling out a credit card. “Here. Just get what’s on the list. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah,” repeated Dan. A caveman could have been more articulate.

  “You have to make sure to get angel hair pasta, not the regular kind. And don’t buy avocados if they’re not ripe.”

  He took the card and set it on the counter.

  His mom hesitated. Then she picked up the list and credit card and stuffed them into the front pocket of his backpack. “So you don’t forget them,” she said.

  Teagan strolled into the kitchen a moment later and poured h
erself a cup of coffee. Their mom watched her — a mix of concern and disapproval playing across her face. “You need to eat something for breakfast,” she said.

  “That cereal tastes like dog food,” replied Teagan.

  “I thought you liked this cereal.”

  Teagan rolled her eyes and sipped her coffee.

  “At least eat something healthy at school.”

  “Are maggots healthy?” asked Teagan. “Because that’s what they serve. Tricia found a maggot in her rice.”

  Their mom checked her watch and cursed. “I’m late,” she said, turning to Dan. “Think you can give your sister a ride today?”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not taking Teagan,” Dan said in a quiet monotone.

  “Why not?” questioned their mom, looking from Dan to Teagan. “Last time I checked, you both went to the same school.”

  “He doesn’t want me to embarrass him in front of his friends,” Teagan said.

  “That’s right,” Dan replied. “Stay away from my friends.”

  Teagan’s jaw clenched. She tried to look angry, but from the way her shoulders dropped, I could tell that Dan’s words had hurt her. I wanted to punch him for being such a jerk. “Some of your friends are nice to me, you know,” she said.

  “Like who?”

  “Like Finn.”

  Dan glared at his sister. “Don’t talk to Finn.”

  “You can’t tell me who to talk to.”

  “I mean it, Teagan.”

  “Why — jealous? Afraid he’ll like me more than you?”

  Dan scowled. “He probably only talked to you to make fun of you.”

  Teagan slammed her coffee cup onto the counter. “You’re such a prick,” she spat, and stormed out of the room.

  Their mom sighed. I sensed this wasn’t the first time fights like this had happened. “I don’t understand why you can’t be nicer to her,” she said to Dan. “She looks up to you.”

  “She shouldn’t,” he said.