Joey left his bedroom and Craig felt shaken, and he was shaking. He looked at his hands and saw the fine tremors. Joey said he could tell him things. Things. The word had become dark and ominous.
He laid back on the bed, brought his knees up. Joey had shut the door when he left and Craig was glad, he liked the door to be shut. He felt safer behind closed doors when he was alone. Of course the closed door when he was with someone wasn't so good. He closed his eyes and remembered the quiet click of his door, the darkness only interrupted by the street light outside the window. His father standing over him, and Craig remembered the odd fear just hovering over him and in him, and he remembered how he couldn't breath right. He could never catch his breath. He'd tried to stay so still, tried to will his mind to go somewhere else, and he could hear his own voice speaking inside his mind, 'this isn't happening. It's not. Not at all,'
He thought it was funny as his hands shook and he hugged his knees to his chest, he thought it was funny that he didn't feel all that better not living with his father. He'd thought that he'd feel better than this.
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His appetite seemed to have improved a little, Joey thought, although he was still too thin. He noticed his shoulder blades poking at the thin material of the T-shirt he wore. Eating breakfast, eating most of it. Joey silently applauded. Sometimes the least thing you could do was nourish the body.
He cleared dishes and washed them just to be doing something. The silence was here, sitting right between them like some physical being. When Angela was around the silence was not as noticeable through all her noise. Whining, crying, laughing, asking endless questions with the philosophical topspin, 'If God created everything who created God?' He had to laugh at those questions. One day she'd discover he had no clue. And he had no clue what to do about Craig. He could never eat the whole plate or bowl of anything, and he'd reached the point where he was just pushing the food around into little mountains and tunnels and plains, an entire geological landscape made out of oatmeal.
Something was so wrong with this kid that Joey wanted to shake him and demand to know what it was, what happened, what had scarred him so badly. Why did he cry in his sleep and curl up into the fetal position? Why did he move with such suddenness at any movement toward him? Why did he have that haunted look in his eyes?
He wanted to ask him things, wanted to sit and listen and understand but Craig wouldn't open up. Joey closed his eyes slowly and then opened them, letting in the light of the kitchen and the way it reflected off the floor.
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It hadn't seemed like such a big deal when Joey called and made the doctors' appointments for Craig and Angela both. A yearly physical, what was the big deal?
"No," Craig said, and he actually backed up. Joey looked at him with such honest puzzlement it was almost comical.
"What? Why? What is the big deal-"
"No, Joey, okay?" He was shaking his head. He'd backed up as far as the kitchen table and he stood against it now, holding onto it but staring at Joey.
"No, Craig, it is not okay. You can't, you need to have one to be sure that everything is alright, and with, you know, what you went through with your father…you might have some lasting injuries…" This was not going well, his sentence trailing off in broken fragments as he mentioned what Craig tried so hard to avoid, and he winced and looked down.
"It's just necessary. A necessary thing. No big deal. Okay?" he tried again, and Craig was looking down at his sneakers. Joey scrambled in his mind to reason out why this was such a big deal. Because his father was a doctor? Because he associated the doctor's office with broken bones and bruises and pain?
"Okay?" he said.
"Yeah," Craig said, giving in, his voice thick. But he still wouldn't look up at him.
