Chapter 2:

My mom has a robe so chalky pink it may have very well been dyed in Pepto-Bismal. She wears it now, the tattered edges brushing noisily along the Parquet flooring as she walks into the kitchen. It hangs loose off her bone-thin figure and is open in the front displaying a semi-sheer nightgown.

A lot about her can be summed up by the word 'dangle'. Stringy, unwashed hair dangles in her face. An unlit cigarette dangles from her bottom lip. And her unbound breast dangle like apples in a pair of tube socks.

"Did you take your pills?" she asks. She holds a lighter, a gold Zippo, to her cigarette tip and flicks the wheel flint several times before it lights. Her fingernails are covered in chipped red polish. It looks like blood. I think about her clawing into another person's skin, the flesh peeling away beneath her digging nails. I shudder.

"Yes," I say. I didn't. But telling her I did will make her stop asking me.

I'm sitting at the bar. A piece of paper is in front of me. A text book is open. I have a pen in my hand. Obviously, I'm doing homework but I don't know what class it's for and I'm not entirely certain of the assignment.

My mom opens the refrigerator door. She looks inside, moves a few things around to see behind them, then closes the door again without removing anything.

"You'd better of taken your pills. Remember what happened last time you didn't."

"Yes."

Not really. Just bits and pieces, like chunks of food in vomit. I spoke to someone. I did some things. I may have laughed a lot. I may have cried a lot. I may not have done either.

I only really remember the table. I climbed underneath it, lay on my back and glued – super glued – pictures to it. I plastered the bottom with glossy still frames of people I knew and places I had been. Some were pictures of friends – when we were bears, some were pictures of family, and most were pictures of strangers that I had sneaked shots of as they walked past or were sitting not paying attention to me.

I had built myself a sky of good memories.

I don't really recall why I did it. Even now, the motives seem so far away and unexplainable. Like watching someone else's dreams.

My mom found me underneath the table hours later. I had fallen asleep. She made me take my pills then I spent the next day scraping the pictures off. It made me sad. Some of them were my only copies. I thought about the memories, I was peeling them away like scabs over skin not quite yet healed, so blood bubbled up to the surface and spilt to the ground.

And I cried.

"Where is my bottle of Jack?" my mom asks. I stare at my paper. There are lines across it. Swirls, stars, hearts, just random shapes, nothing substantial. Pencil markings can be erased so they don't have to be important.

"You drank it all."

She makes a face. "What about my Smirnoff?"

I don't miss a beat. My pencil point drags across the top corner of my paper. "You drank it."

"My vermouth?"

I look up at her blankly. She throws her hands up in disgust and storms back to her bedroom. I can hear things being dug through, being tossed aside, slammed around. She isn't searching for anything, there's nothing to be found.

I return to my paper. I hope this homework is not important. The phone rings, so I put my pencil down, slide clumsily from the stool I'm sitting on, and answer it. There's a man on the other end. He wants to talk to Jeremy Tanker. My uncle.

I tell the man he isn't home.

The man asks when will he be back.

I say I don't know.

Will you have him call me.

I can tell him to, but I don't think he will.

I'll just call back later.

Click.

Good bye.

I put the phone back in its cradle and lay down on the couch. My uncle owns everything. The house. The phone. This couch. The floor under my feet and the roof over my head, he always says. Or roars. My uncle likes to roar. Like a lion, only I imagine a lion would be afraid of my uncle's roar.

I saw a lion once. At the San Diego Zoo. We all went together, back when we were bears. Our coach – it wasn't Murdoch...Buttermaker, his name was Buttermaker – rented a bus. We loaded on and I didn't have to sit alone like I do now because the others wanted to sit next to me, to talk to me, to include me. It was a good time. We sang songs on the ride and played games; Tanner – Tanner sat behind me – punched my arm a few times shouting something about bugs.

When we got there, to the zoo, we saw monkeys and elephants and even a giraffe. And the lion, of course.

At the koala tanks, Engleberg – he was very fat then but he isn't so much anymore; he and Tanner spend a lot of time at the school weight room because he's on the baseball team and can go whenever he wants, Tanner isn't on the team but he just goes anyway...well...anyhow, Engleberg told us the leaves they have to eat also make them high so that they're always stoned.

Then Tanner said, kind of like you, Loop, and patted my back hard enough to chatter my teeth. I wasn't sure what he meant but he grinned at me and I never can help but smile when he looks at me like that.

Later, I got tired and found a bench to sit on while everyone else wandered off. When I couldn't find them again, I went back to the bus and lay down in the backseat, thinking about koalas and wondering what kind of animal everyone else was.

I mean, besides bears.

The team was very angry when they got back to the bus. They yelled at me, but I don't remember why. It was really late and dark outside, the zoo had already been closed for an hour. I remember thinking that I was the one that should have been angry but I didn't say so.

The only one that didn't yell at me was Tanner. He sat in the front seat of the bus, staring forward so I couldn't see his face. Even when I said sorry – though I'm still not entirely sure what for – and the driver started for our hotel, he never turned around.

I always wonder what his face looked like then.

I only ever had one picture of Tanner, of just Tanner. I glued it to my sky of good memories when I forgot to take my pills. Later, when I was scraping the sky away, I noticed I had put it in the center. It may have been the first picture I hung, the rest spiraling out away from it. Like the sun in my sky of good memories. Now, I don't have any pictures with him, they all got scraped away. I don't have anymore pictures of any of them.

Tanner is a wolverine. I had to look up different animals to figure it out. There were a lot of animals I thought about him being; rhinoceros, alligator, anole lizard, but none of them were right.

I read about the wolverine in a National Geographic at the library. The magazine had been disassembled, its pages laminated with plastic, then spiral bound. I could imagine somebody, somewhere, taking care to neatly slice each glossy sheet from its binding, carefully pressing it between two slivers of plastic, then melting that plastic together, filled with the hope that they would perfectly preserve those glossy sheets with their serif type face paragraphs and blue-footed booby photos for all eternity.

I remember thinking at the time that it wasn't a magazine anymore, not really. It was more like Frankenstein's monster, a poor facsimile of something it once in actuality was but despite all the pieces being put back were they belong it no longer can be that thing anymore.

Inside this magazine-that-really-wasn't, it said that wolverine are small and fierce. That despite they're size they are very strong. And that they will attack animals larger than themselves, or even numerous animals all at once.

Tanner is definitely a wolverine.

And I am a koala.

Which means, we're not even from the same continent.

I hear the front door click and rattle in its frame as it opens and closes. My uncle is home. His footsteps smack heavily against the floor, even across the carpet his every step is a thunderous boom.

I wonder where he was today. I already know he won't tell me. He won't tell me anything. Where he works, who his friends are, why they call and what they want. I don't really ask, but I wonder.

I think he might be a spy.

Or a bank robber.

Or a martian.

I can't really decide which.

We had a conversation once, a long time ago. Or maybe it seems like it was a long time ago. It was when we first came to live with him; my mom and I, after my dad left and before she lost her job. We were sitting on the coach, this couch I now lay on, watching the television.

Well, he was watching the television.

I was counting bits of dust floating through the air from the chandelier overhead to the spray of light on the floor. It felt like an important task at the time. No one ever keeps track of those kinds of things, you know. Bits of dust are always unaccounted for and people go about their business as though it's no big deal. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of dust particles slip through the cracks. It's a tragedy, really.

This was late at night. My mom was at work, because she still had her job then. Actually, I never really knew what her job was either. I guess it doesn't matter now since she lost it.

It happened when the television show my uncle was watching went on commercial. The laugh track stopped its endless loop and a young, attractive man with a phony smile filled the screen to talk about life insurance and how important it is for your loved ones that you take out a policy on your life now in case anything tragic were to happen to you tomorrow and – by the way – Blue Shield Insurance Group happens to have the best policies available for the most affordable prices.

My uncle turned to look at me, his eyes half-lidded because he'd had a couple beers since getting home and I've come to learn through a lot of uncomfortable experiences that they had that effect on people, and said, "So...Timmy-boy, how old are you now?"

I told him my age or near enough and he nodded then burped loudly. It smelled of franks and beans and vaguely like my Grandmother Deloris, who smells like cabbage, menthol, and mothballs which is how I guess all old people smell.

I don't think Grandmother Deloris is actually related to me because she doesn't belong to my dad, his mom died when he was really little. And she doesn't belong to my mom because Grandmother Tippy belongs to her.

Grandmother Tippy lives in Florida and has a pink flamingo in the little 2x2 square lot of grass outside her trailer at the retirement community where she lives. She always gives me peppermints and pinches my cheek every time she sees me and says, 'he sure is getting big', though, when she says 'sure' it sounds like 'shore'.

It isn't true. I'm not very big now and I know I'm not getting any bigger.

My uncle then asked me what grade I was in. But he did it by guessing the grade then asking me if it was right. It was wrong and I told him so. He started to nod but after the first time his chin went down it stayed and didn't come up again.

"You should probably go to bed," he told me, "It's late."

I said that I was fine, and that he looked really tired so maybe he should be going to bed. But he didn't hear me because he was already asleep.

And that was our conversation. We haven't really had any more since then.

I don't think he really likes talking to me.

Most people don't like talking to me.

My uncle stands over me now. He leans his face into my line of vision so that it's all I can see. My mom says he's her younger brother but to me he looks much older than her. His face is all wrinkled in the corners of his eyes and around his mouth and he doesn't have much hair on his head. The wrinkles crinkle with his expressions, and deepen depending on his mood. Right now they're very severe because he looks disapproving.

It doesn't surprise me. Like I said, everyone looks at me like that, disapproving, disappointed, disparate.

He has his hand on his hip, the other rubbing the back of his neck. He looks like he wants to say something to me but he doesn't, he just fidgets his mouth and glares. Sometimes when he does that, it reminds me of Tanner. The Tanner before we were bears.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Yes, I think my uncle is very much like Tanner. His face is red, his nostrils flaring. He is ready to do something explosive and I realize I probably shouldn't be so close. I wonder why he is so angry.

I look at my hands. At the coach. At the floor.

It seems to not make sense. The longer I stare, the less sense it makes. Unraveling thread twines round my fingers, across my chest, and slithers to the floor. The cushion beneath me is spilling its guts, white fluff with tiny black and gray fibers mixed in.

I look to my uncle. Attempt an explanation.

My mouth opens, at least, I think it does, and nothing comes out. I realize, almost frighteningly, I have forgotten how to speak. I think about my tongue, it feels now intrusive in my mouth, a large chunk of flesh pressing against my oral cavity. And my teeth, jagged obstructions, I can't remember their purpose.

"Shit," my uncle says. His face twitches with the word and I feel my body involuntarily mimic the movement. He disappears from my view and I watch the ceiling. Sometimes, I think, if I sit really still and stare for a very long time then I can see shapes swirl across it.

My uncle is shouting. He's calling for my mom. He's slamming things around. He's saying words he slaps me on the mouth for saying. I can't be bothered to see what he is doing or ask if he needs help finding something. I'm looking for a star in the stalactite drywall.

He returns to stand over me, grabs my collar, tries to pull me to my feet. A loud and strangled noise claws out my throat but I don't think it was me, it didn't sound like me. He's got something in his hand, he's shouting commands in my face, prying at my mouth. I fight because it seems the appropriate thing to do.

My mom is shuffling down the hall. My uncle slips something in my mouth. Its small, oblong, almost like a pebble, it tastes bitter on my tongue.

"Swallow damn you!" His hand is on my throat, he's shaking me. My body feels numb.

"Let him go, God damn you, Jeremy! Get the hell off my son!"

Tears are streaming down my cheeks. Another pebble is shoved into my mouth. They both dig into my throat, tunneling a path into my digestive system like mechanical drills.

"How the fuck many of these is he supposed to take?" My uncle demands. My mom is slapping him, her bare hands snap against his meaty bicep, jiggling the flesh like gelatinous dessert.

"Let him go, I said let him go!"

He lets me go. I fall back onto the coach, coughing uncontrollably. My mom is shrieking. My uncle is shrieking also.

"I told you to keep your hands off my son, goddammit, Jeremy, I told you!"

I stare at the ceiling again. I fold my hands on my belly. For a moment, only a moment, my world was splotched. Yellow and white. It was so much prettier yellow and white.

"And I told you to make sure your goddamn son takes his pills, Evelyn. Or I swear – I swear – I will toss him out on the streets where he belongs with the rest of the nutjobs. He tore up my coach, for Chrissake, look at it. Tore up his goddamn fingers too..."

The pills sit in my stomach, heavy for their size. I let the tears stream down freely, silently. I'm not sad or upset. I just like the warm feel of them trailing down my cheeks.

"Fuck you, Jeremy. Fuck you! He told me he took his pills, what the hell else do you want me to do?"

There are no stars or any other shapes in the ceiling anymore. I'm starting to realize there never were. It's impossible, after all. It's just a ceiling.

"Shove 'em down his fucking throat if you have to. You're his mother, for crying out..."

Everything is just as it is. There are no stars in the ceiling. There is no sky of good memories under the table. Tanner is not a wolverine. I am not a koala.

"You gotta throw that in my face every goddamn time, Jeremy? Every goddamn, fucking time. Like I wanted a psychotic kid in the first fucking place?"

And we are no longer bears.