Fiction

Shauna left the apartment in her flip-flops and without a sweatshirt. It was Brian’s fault.

“Come on, come on,” he said, a rolled magazine stuck in his hand like he was aiming to swat a bad cat. She cried out but he just shook his head and advanced. He never raised his voice but just walked across the room, his chin stuck to his right shoulder as he went, one eye on her and one looking behind him like a chameleon. He only stopped when they were out the door. He turned and looked back inside the apartment with his whole face once and then closed the door behind him.

The fog was in, thick but high. The sky looked like crumpled wax paper. Shauna was cold and pissed. She could feel herself losing control of her hands, a sudden petulant anger seizing them. She threw them towards his chest and pushed. “What the fuck? Why are you kicking me out of the house? Does Dad know what you’re doing?”

He brushed her arms away. “He’s sick again. It’s better if you’re not around.”

“What do you mean, sick? He was fine an hour ago. Goddamn it, I was watching TV in there.”

“He’s sick. Sorry to kick you out.” Her brother apologized too much. He would dramatically roll his eyes down to the floor and rub his hands on his thighs so it looked sincere. It was his way of getting out of things, she thought.

“What the hell am I going to do?”

“Go down to the harbor for a little while.”

“I’m freezing already. Fuck. It’ll be cold as hell down there. Are you coming with me?”

“I’m going to stay here for a minute. Go down to the harbor, to the part where the tourists are. I’ll come and get you.”

“How long is this going to be? I don’t want to be sitting and freezing and smelling fried fish for the rest of the afternoon. I’m not staying out until mom gets home.”

“I don’t know how long it’s going to be. I don’t know.”

“Oh, just fuck off.”

Shauna was not going to obey her brother. So far as she knew, when puberty had arrived a few years earlier, it hardly changed his body – his upper lip sprouted a sickly little thing he detested, and he turned leaner in spite of starting plenty skinny – but it had made him an insufferable prick. At some point after the bank ate up her dad’s boat and the old man stopped parenting, Brian volunteered for the newly open role of paterfamilias and took to it with tyrannical gusto. His comfort with telling her what to do was remarkable. They were only three years apart, but he carried himself with an authoritative air, yelling at her for spending too much time outside, yelling at her for spending too much time with a boy, yelling at her for not doing her homework. He had the balls to dress her down in line at Safeway for reading gossip magazines rather than helping him unload the cart. He was worse than a parent.

She’d be fighting it until one or the other of them moved out. In the meantime, he’d keep on ordering her around, and, on occasion, driving her off the couch into the street, because her dad was sick. Like she couldn’t be in the house when he was sick.

She didn’t know and didn’t want to know what was going on with her dad or her brother anymore. Shauna just wanted to sit on the couch and ignore everyone. In that apartment, afternoon TV was the best part of most days.

Shauna didn’t go straight down the harbor. Instead, she went out back to the dumpsters. It was pretty much the only place in the whole of the Seaside Meadows that couldn’t be seen from the road, the parking lot, or one of the windows in the apartment complex.