Tell Me It's Real(118)

With a grunt, he lifted it out of the way and set it against the wall. I glared at the four of them, especially when I saw that Nana did not have Ding Dongs and a burrito from Los Betos. One should not promise Los Betos if one cannot deliver, for it might make another person extraordinarily pissy.

“You done pouting?” Mom asked.

I crossed my arms and stuck out my bottom lip. “I’m not pouting.”

“He’s not done pouting,” Dad told Mom.

“Okay, well, let’s get this intervention started,” Nana said gleefully.

They all started forward into the room, forcing me to take steps back until my legs hit the bed and I had to sit. Nana pulled out my desk chair and sat in it with a grunt, scooching closer to me until our knees bumped together. Mom sat to one side of me and put her hand on mine, and Dad sat on my other side, pressing his leg against mine. Sandy sat on the floor near my feet, and I suddenly understood what it meant to have your family smothering you.

“Who would like to begin?” Mom asked.

“We’re not really doing this,” I snapped. “This is ridiculous!”

“I will,” Nana said as she pulled a massive pile of paper from her purse. She began to read in a flat monotone. “Paul, when you do stupid things, it makes me sad. I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d—”

“When in the hell did you have time to write this?” I asked, dropping my jaw. “These things just happened! Sandy just called you!”

“I already had something written,” Nana said, affronted. “I modified it on the way over here. Can I finish, please?”

“Of course you can,” Mom said, patting her hand.

“No, she can’t—”

“Paul,” she shouted over me, starting to read again, “when you do stupid things, it makes me sad! I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d gone behind your partner’s back to see his mom! And then, to make it worse, you locked yourself in your room and started to cry!”

“I didn’t cry—”

“It hurts me to see you like this! I want you to be happy, but you keep sabotaging yourself! You need to allow yourself to be happy and to stay off meth and—Wait… I don’t think I got this far to change it. Hold on a second.” She pulled a pen from her purse and squinted down at the paper, starting to scratch off words and muttering to herself.

“You know,” I told her, “I don’t know what’s more unreal: the fact that you already had an intervention speech written out in case I got strung out on meth, or the fact that this is actually happening right now.”

“I like to prepare for every eventuality,” Nana said.

“I told you to open the door,” Sandy said mildly. “Since you didn’t, this is what had to happen.”

“We’re here because we love you,” Mom said.

“And because Vince is pretty great,” Dad said. “You’d have to be pretty stupid to let him go.”

“He made me go,” I reminded them.

“You probably just surprised him,” Mom pointed out. “He wasn’t expecting you to be there and it freaked him out.”

“Okay,” Nana murmured to herself in concentration. “I should also probably take out the part where I ask if I could have your stuff if you ever overdosed. That doesn’t seem applicable here.” She crossed out even more. I wanted to ask her how many pages her intervention speech ran, but didn’t think I wanted to know the answer.

“You probably would have done the same thing,” my dad said. “Scratch that; I know you would have done the same thing. But it’s not about you. This is about him. This is about how he’s going to lose his mother very shortly. This is about how he’s going to need someone to lean on and that someone should be you.”

I tried to stand, but they wouldn’t let me. I was starting to get pissed, but at who, I didn’t know. “You know,” I growled at them all, “everyone keeps saying that to me, that he’s going to need me, that he’s going to depend on me, but that’s bullshit. If he needed me, he wouldn’t have sent me away. If he needed me, he would have told me what was going on. If he wanted me as much as he claimed, he would have fucking let me in instead of allowing me to act all stupid and do what I did. So you’re right. This isn’t about me. This is all on him.”

“That’s not fair,” Mom said firmly. “It’s not fair and you know it. Everything around him right now is heightened to an extreme.”

“Exactly,” I snapped at her, trying to ignore the hurt look on her face. “Everything is heightened. There’s no way he would have fallen for me that quickly. There’s no way I could love him this fast. Everything is just moving at light speed, and it’s because of what he is going through. That’s all it is. It’s just that and nothing more.”