Broken Compass

“Doesn’t matter. You can’t help me, West.”

“Listen.” I tug him closer. “What’s going on? You said it’s not your dad, then who is it, Nate? What is it? Is it drugs? Tell me.”

But he pulls away from me. Shutting me out again. “Go back to your family, man. I’m all right.”

Nate never lied to me before. He didn’t always tell me everything, but he never lied.

He is lying now.

Nate won’t talk to me. The days pass, and with every new day the distance between us seems to grow vaster. He’s been withdrawing more and more over the past few months, and this last bit was like a door slamming in my face.

Leaving me outside.

Leaving me alone.

I thought I had a brother who’d be beside me at all times, but I was wrong. Not that I think he’s trying to hurt me, not on purpose. But he is. I don’t know what’s going through his mind, why he thinks keeping me in the dark is the best way.

Best way to kill a friendship. I’d tell him, if he talked to me at all. But even at school he avoids me, avoids everyone. Syd says he avoids her, too.

Then I think about him huddled in his parents’ room, about the vacant look on his face, and I shiver.

All sorts of terrible scenarios go through my head. He has a mental disorder. He’s hooked on meth. He’s sick and dying and doesn’t want me to know. Cancer. Leukemia. AIDS.

I’m driving myself fucking crazy with the possibilities.

But I’m distracted by Grandpa having some nasty days with his bad heart and Della making cryptic comments about death that have me scrubbing floors and bathrooms like crazy in an effort to get my racing heartbeat back under control.

She’ll try it again. I can feel it. She got dead drunk a couple of times over the past few months, but nothing crazy. Nothing too worrisome.

It won’t last. Not when Grandpa is demanding all my attention, when I bathe him and cook for him and check his meds. When I sit by his bed.

My sis is an attention-whore. But also sick. She’s so fucking sick. Depressed. We’ve taken her to shrinks, to psychologists. She plays along, and then spirals down and out of control again. Maybe it’s drugs, maybe it’s her friends, maybe it’s a chemical imbalance in her brain.

/> I dread the day when I come home too late. The day I repeat my mistake, the one Grandpa will never let me forget about, and this time fail.

Fail the test.

Lose, like it’s a fateful game. Lose the battle.

Lose everything. Because if I do, who would want to keep me? And yet I can’t lie, like Nate can. Not even to myself. That day will come, and it will break me like nothing else could.

I walk Sydney home a few days later, and we’re both so lost in thought we make our way in silence through the city.

So she shocks me into a stumble when she turns to me and says, “Are you the one leaving me money every two weeks?”

“Money?”

“Yeah. Under the door? No?” She sighs. “It’s not you. Gotcha.”

I’m frowning, trying to figure out what she’s talking about, to read between the lines. Not my forte. “Do you need money?”

“No. I’m good.”

“Look… Nate told me about your mom.” I scowl down at my dirty sneakers as I step over a hole in the sidewalk. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay.”

“Why didn’t you say anything? You doing okay?”