Make Yourself Useful

I was asked to go home and take care of my sister. She had been ranting about a man following her all over the island, and I was supposed to come home and assure her that no such man existed. She was refusing to leave the house, and even though she worked for our uncle, he had confided in our father that if she didn’t return to her bartending job at his restaurant, he’d have to let her go. He couldn’t show any favoritism or his other employees might complain. All of this was explained to me over the phone a few days before Easter. The plan was for me to take one of my two exams for the whole semester and then come home for Easter when we weren’t a family that ever celebrated Easter. My mother had Googled what to include in an Easter dinner, and my father had told Kate some lie about how he wanted to get back in touch with his Christian roots. My sister was far too savvy to believe him, but he promised me that her mind was so cloudy she’d believe anything. As soon as my exam was dropped on my professor’s desk, I was to head straight to Penn Station and catch a train back to the remote depot near the University my parents wanted me to go to so that my mother could pick me up and drive the half hour over two bridges back to our house on Gibbs Avenue.

The night before my exam, I went to a bar just off campus and while I was there, a man walked up to me and confessed that he was an alien. I told him that I would never call another human being an alien. He laughed and told me that he wasn’t an immigrant. “I’m an alien. An alien.” He touched my drink, and it lit up. A nice trick, but nobody else was paying attention. He told me that when I was eleven I had set the ends of my hair on fire just to see what would happen. Touching my wrist, he started to hum a song I felt as though I’d heard once or twice. He asked if he could come home with me, and when we got inside my apartment, he told me I would get a passing grade on my exam tomorrow, but only if I filled out nothing and handed my professor a blank answer sheet. As he lifted my shirt over my head and began to unclasp my bra, I told him that I wanted to be a patent lawyer, and that I wanted to make lots of money, and that I wanted a handsome husband, and no children, and he kissed the scar next to my belly button and I begged him to abduct me if it was true. If it was true, take me away. If it was true, make yourself useful.

I woke up in an empty hotel bed. I had no recollection of going to a hotel. When I looked at my phone, it was almost seven. My exam was at eight. I rushed back to the apartment in student housing that I shared with two other girls. One of them was on the couch with crusted vomit on one of the pillows and the other was in the shower. I grabbed my backpack and sprayed the nearest perfume on my vanity on as much of myself as I could before I started to gag. Then, I ran.

Two weeks earlier, my sister was running past a bar on Thames Street and she compelled herself into a kind of orbit so that she could resist the force that felt as though it were pulling her backwards and, instead, move her into the crowded bar for protection. Once she was inside, she went straight to the bar and asked the man working to call the police. When they showed up, she described the man chasing her to them, but as she spoke, she found she was losing detail. She had looked behind herself four or five times as she trailed her and made it a point to memorize as much as she could about him, but now most of it was gone. The police placated her and put on a show of taking a report, but she could hear them laughing as they got into their cruiser. She went back to Gibbs Avenue and locked herself in her room. My mother woke up and thought she heard somebody crying, but she told herself it was just her imagination.

When my sister was eight and I was ten, we talked our parents into letting us sleep outside one night in a tent. Our backyard was fenced in, and the island was safe. There was no crime other than driving under the influence and the occasional domestic violence. My father yelled at our mother once, and she had threatened to call the police, but that was the only household fear we’d consumed until the day my sister asked a stranger at a bar to drive her home, because she was even more scared of another stranger who laughed while he chased a woman down empty roads and crowded streets alike with seemingly no bias so long as the woman knew he was there. He had no fear. I had no fear either. I slept soundly in the tent, but my sister woke up around 2am and tried to shake me from my rest, because she was sure she’d heard something in our yard. With no choice but to try and stifle her terror by smothering her curiosity first, she unzipped the arch that made up our only entryway to the yard and looked out onto nothing more than a stone garden and some filtered moonlight. The evening had turned cloudy despite the weatherman’s prophecy, and everything looked like a specter had laid a fine white sheet over it. My sister felt her body relax, and that was when I opened my eyes.

Handing over the blank test, my professor barely glanced at me while looking down at her phone. She wished me a, and I sucked my teeth at her before exiting the classroom. I always resented professors who made a lack of testing seem like a plus rather than what it really was; a chance for them to do less grading. Simply ace the two exams and you’ve essentially passed the class. Fail one, and you may as well drop out early. The alien had told me not to answer anything so I hadn’t. Was the hotel room his? Hadn’t we gone back to my place? Did we make love while my roommate vomited right on the other side of my door? Had I gone back out afterwards? Had I met another man and gone back to his room with him and made love again and been reckless? Did I remember how to be reckless?

At home, my sister had crawled under her bed. My mother knocked on her door and told her she was going to pick me up at the station. Did my sister want to join her? Under the bed, all the dust raised itself up by about a quarter inch, and then fell back down. My sister shook her head. My mother couldn’t see her, of course, but she moved away from her door anyway. It was time to pick me up, and she didn’t want to be late.