This Is Where I Leave You

you had muscles. Your body is tensed too hard to breathe right so your lungs are constricted, and you’re drooling because your head is hanging, and your heart can’t pump your rushing blood fast enough, and you can feel yourself teetering, but you have no muscles left to correct with, so you end up collapsing onto your side, your nerves fusing together into knotted coils of anguish, your eyeballs turned up into your skull like you’ve grabbed hold of a live wire in the rain. There’s really nothing else like it.
    Rusco didn’t belong at this party. He had graduated two years ago, a small miracle considering the record of suspensions he’d racked up for fighting, drugs, and vandalism. Now he operated a forklift in the warehouse at one of the furniture outlets gathered in a cluster at the top of Route 9 and lifted free weights with his buddies in his front yard. He was rumored to have pulled a switchblade on Mr. Portis, our aging phys-ed teacher, who had subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown; to have punched out the bouncer at the Dark Horse when they wouldn’t serve him a beer; to have beat the shit out of his own father in the eighth grade.
    So even if I could have gotten to my feet at that point to fight him, he’d have only knocked me down again, so I just curled up into the fetal position while the room spun around me and psychedelic colors swam across the insides of my eyelids, and Rusco put his boot on my head and said, “You want to watch where you’re going, shithead.”
    And then he was gone, and Alice was hovering over me, helping me up, she and Jeremy taking me upstairs to Jeremy’s parents’ bedroom where they lay me down on a paisley bedspread. “Are you okay?” she kept saying, while I tried my best not to cry. I was enjoying her concern and her proximity, her hair intimately brushing my face as she leaned over me, but I hadn’t exactly kicked ass out there, and I would be damned if I was going to compound that by crying in front of her.
    “He’s such an asshole,” Alice said.
    I rolled away from her and closed my eyes. I think I might have dozed off because when I woke up she was gone, and a couple of seniors were making out in Jeremy’s parents’ bathroom, their quiet moans reverberating off the tiles.
    I was limping home when Paul pulled up beside me in Dad’s Cadillac. He’d been granted unlimited use of the car from the moment he was awarded his baseball scholarship, which was why, instead of being at the party, he’d been off somewhere getting laid in the backseat. “Hey!” he said. “What happened?”
    “Nothing.”
    “I heard you got your ass kicked.”
    “It wasn’t my ass.”
    I looked over at Paul and, to my surprise, saw that he was simmering with rage. “Get in,” he said.
    “It’s past my curfew.”
    “Fuck curfew. Come with me.”
    “Where?”
    Paul hit the wheel and looked straight ahead. “Just get in the car, will you?”
    The Cadillac smelled of perfume and sex, and my balls throbbed with every bump and curve. “Fucking asshole,” Paul muttered as he steered across Centre Street. “Let’s see how he likes it when I stand on his head.”
    I was scared and still in considerable pain, but I felt safe next to Paul and touched that he was so angry that someone had hurt me. We had 180drifted apart in high school, but we were still brothers, and here he was, interrupting his own evening, which surely had involved some degree of female nudity, to stand up for his little brother.
    “Quit crying,” he said softly. “You can’t let him see you like that.”
    It was a cloudless night and the neighborhood was bathed in the blue light of a low moon. Paul sped through the empty streets, and I fantasized that we were headed to the diner by the interstate, two brothers out for a late dinner to tell each other about their respective nights. We weren’t those kinds of brothers anymore, but I often wished we were. A few minutes later, we pulled up in front of a dilapidated Victorian with a sagging porch. Rusco was out on the front lawn, perched on his weight bench, drinking a beer. The two guys he’d been with at the party were sitting on his front steps, each with a beer in hand. I watched as Rusco registered my presence in the passenger seat, watched him take in Paul’s tall athletic frame as he strode angrily through the glow of the Cadillac’s headlights and up the driveway, and, for one delicious moment, saw the fear that spread across his face as