Fool’s Gold

“I hate you,” I say with a vitriol that I don’t really feel and never will. My dad’s face is turning red from choking back his chortles. The neon green paper full of words has now fallen to the floor, and I pray that the parakeet hopping along the carpet finds his way to it and tears it to pieces like he has the edges of my books.

“Performance,” Dad barely repeats through his guffaws.

I cry out in agony, burying my face in a pillow and kicking my legs. An entirely new barrage of giggles escapes my dad in response. I stomp my heel against my mattress again. The whole picture is reminiscent of third grade. Dad waiting for me to finish kicking and screaming through each homework assignment.

As my dad’s gleeful redness begins to calm down. He picks up the paper just in time to save it from my parakeet’s tiny, beaked chompers. He readjusts the reading glasses that slipped down his nose and lifts the terrible green paper back up to his face.

“I’m in sixth grade!” I moan, trying to interrupt his repetition of the word. “What sixth grader is spelling performance?”

“You committed to doing this spelling bee.” Dad reclined further into the chair across the room, staring at me expectantly. “Now you have to work for it.”

*

The tequila burns your throat more than any guilt or betrayal ever could as you take your third shot of the past two minutes. The man across the table takes his fourth shot and you groan, reaching for the glass that’s lined up as your fourth. You committed to this idea, and backing out now would just be wasting the past month spent on procuring a fake ID. The man, who is at least twenty-five if not thirty, is clearly an experienced drinker. He doesn’t hesitate between his fourth and fifth shot. He smiles at you cockily; he’s handsome.

And you’re very easy.

You’ve never had sex before, but you came to the bar with a very specific purpose in mind, and it would be pretty humiliating if you couldn’t get laid after all the effort you put into it. You take your fifth shot and try to ignore the screams of your nerve endings as it goes down. The man across hides his still smiling mouth behind a fist. You can’t really tell, but you’re pretty sure he’s impressed with you. Maybe, hopefully, attracted to you. You perk your chin up slightly more, hoping he’ll notice the choker on your neck and get ideas.

As the man grabs his sixth shot, he looks over to you for confirmation that you’d like to continue. His smile drops slightly, perhaps showing concern? His jawline is emphasized by the low lighting of the bar. He looks very much like a man, and you hope that the lighting isn’t revealing the small amount of baby fat that remains on your fifteen-year-old cheeks.

Tucking away the pain running through your temple and down your throat, you grab the sixth shot. You smile, and he smiles again in return. You both knock back the same tequila, knowing that you’re on the same page about where you’ll end up tonight.

My dad, despite his old back and bad ankle, is sitting on the floor next to me as I sob and whine. The neon green paper full of words lies next to us, taunting me with its confusing ideas of what letters go next to other letters. My dad runs his hand up and down my back in slow, comforting movements. He talks about a movie we watched the week before. His baritone timbers into my temple as my head lays on his chest. I can feel the barest hint of his heartbeat behind it.

“Are you ready to study the words again?” Dad asks quietly.

I attempt to bury myself further into him.

He chuckles. “You’ve been doing just fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

I take deep breaths in and out, trying to distract myself from the letters whirling between my ears. I’d misspelled the last three words, and each one felt like a bat to the face.

Dad lifts his hand from my back to reach around me and grab the neon green paper. “How do you spell relief?”

The word hits like an ice pick to my brain, freezing me to the snowy mountain climb of this spelling bee. Tears gather back into my eyes, but I hold my tongue from crying. Dad shakes me lightly.

“Come on,” he growls playfully and shakes a little harder. The tears surrender their ground as I laugh at the rapid movement I’m forced into.

“Spell it,” he says as he stops shaking me.

My laughter collapses. I look up at my dad. His gray hair has fallen slightly onto his forehead due to his own shaking while moving me. I can see his chipped front tooth shining through his encouraging smile. Years from this day, that safety-blanket of a smile will be torn away from both of us. But in that moment of spelling, knowing that he believes in me is the only thing I need.

I take a deep breath, “R-e-l-i-e-f.”

*

You lift your head up sharply, releasing the strong breath you took that was half air and half powder. A giggling woman leans on you harshly, gently wiping the remnants of the cocaine off your nose. She licks the bits of white off her thumb, not caring about the potential snot contamination. You kind of want to kiss her. But with nothing left of the zip on your face, she pushes you away. Off to find the next coke rat with extra stuff to take.

You look over at the boy who just combed your lines, and he’s already preparing the next set for the guy behind you. You offer to blow him for another two, and he stops.

He looks at you, more annoyed than turned on. “If I took up every cheap whore that offered me favors, I wouldn’t sell half my shit.”

His words are nasally and weird. Or maybe you’re just mixing up the techno track playing above for his voice. You shrug, figuring you’ll just snag something off a more desperate guy lingering around, and stumble into the bumbling crowd.

Despite the darkness that surrounds the place, you’re still blinded by every light that approaches your vision. The world goes from blue to green to pink to orange, and round and round and round again. You bump against people and feel every single hair on both your bodies.

Despite making you miss out on your hot high school English teacher tomorrow, it’s clear that the hangover will be totally worth it.

A weird feeling appears near your back pocket, and for half a second you think someone’s grabbing your ass. You turn to meet them, smiling, hoping for touches in higher places, but there’s no one grabbing you. And the weird feeling is still behind you.

You reach into your back pocket and realize it’s your phone buzzing. A miracle you haven’t lost it like your glasses, inhaler, and many pieces of clothing over the months. Pulling it out in front of you, you’re confronted with how hard it is to see the screen with the constantly changing lights.

It’s from your Dad, one hour ago.

I’m in the hospital again. I may not see you for a while.

I love you.

You stand there for a moment, rocking in the changing movement of the partygoers around you. The bass of the song above is shaking the floor and the words of the text blur. Your phone returns to your back pocket.

You stumble your way back through the drunks and druggies, holding back tears or vomit or anything else wanting to rise. You find yourself back at the line of people waiting for two measly lines of coke, the weasley dealer at the front seems satisfied, looking at the cleavage bent out in front of him as a girl snorts his stuff. Disregarding the drug addict fueled pitches and fits that get thrown at you, you make your way to the front of the line.

“I’ll let you fuck me for four.” You pull the words out from your throat, ragged and tired. Like your voice was tossed down a well and dragged back up again.

The man pulls his gaze away from the boobs on his table and looks much more intrigued by this second proposition.

*

“C-o-n-f-e-c-t-i-o-n…” the girl at the microphone stops. The word is confectionery, and it's very likely that she’s questioning if the next letter is an E or an A. The same mistake that I would make nearly every time I spelled the word while studying.

“A-r-y?” She finishes, looking to the judges at the side for confirmation.

The principal shakes her head. “That’s incorrect.”

The girl sits back down, only slightly showing her disappointment in the way she hangs her head. She takes it much better than I would have.

The judges turn their focus to me as I step up to the microphone for my turn. I return the gazes of the adults, awaiting the fate that they’ll gift me.

“Hunger,” my teacher says, smiling encouragingly.

I take a breath and pause. I’ve realized that I’m the only one who hasn’t spelled something incorrectly yet. If I spell this word correctly then I win. And it now feels hilariously anti-climactic to end on a word so simple. I laugh into the microphone and out to the crowd of two hundred other children in front of me.

“H-u-n-g-e-r,” I say and laugh again.

“Correct,” the principal smiles. “Congratulations, you’ve won the annual Payson elementary spelling bee.”

Cheers and claps erupt from the crowd. Some of the kindergarteners are standing up from the floor to jump and clap. My fellow competitors are rising from their chairs to hug me and tell me how good I did. The principal walks up to me, breaking through the crowd of sixth and fifth graders surrounding the edge of the stage and hands me a green trophy, larger than my head. It’s heavy. A real bonafide trophy. At the top of it is a bee-man with glasses and a graduation cap.

Dad’s celebratory whistle clears through the room's noise with practiced ease. I see him standing at the back of the crowd, holding up his phone to immortalize the event. The smile on his face matches my own.

*

You can feel the frown lines in your face. In that terrible, itching way that makes you want to tear your skin away. The joint in your hand is halfway finished, but you feel nowhere near high enough. You’ve opened all the windows in your room, so the smoke doesn’t sink into the ceiling, and you’re pretty sure the lack of hotboxing is the cause of your partial sobriety.

Restless, as the weed hasn’t slowed your muscles yet, you stand to pace and scan the room that you’ve spent so much and yet so little of your sixteen years in. It’s filled with junk—papers, books, toys, and clothes cover every inch of space available besides the skinny trail that leads from door to bed to closet. The lingering remnants of six daughters filtering in and out of this room has taken a significant toll.

The floating shelves above your bed in particular are warping under the weight of the many trophies, medals, and ribbons that each child has earned over the years, including yours. At the very end of the shelf is a green trophy with a bee-man on the top, holding his finger up in a “Eureka!” type gesture. The symbol of your sixth-grade academic victory.

You lift the trophy off the shelf. A plume of dust follows the disturbance and mixes in with the smoke around the room until it's unnoticeable in the air. As you hold it in your hand, you realize it's much lighter than your sixth-grade memory recalls. The bits of gold and black across the piece are neutral in their temperature, not the heavy biting cold that you expected. You realize that the trophy is made of plastic. Not the metal that you once thought. It becomes clear that the thing which forged your academic backbone is made of the same stuff as disposable cafeteria forks.

You grip the bee-man in your hand, and without much effort at all, snap him off his tiny fools-gold throne. You hold him in your hand, much lighter than he was while chained to the green pillar of the trophy. Slowly, you begin to snap off each of his limbs as well. Tomorrow, when you’re sober and capable of feeling guilt again, you’ll glue it all back together. But for now, the thing is broken and worthless.

*

You’ve missed the early deadline for college applications. And the regular deadline. And you are now two days away from missing the late application deadline for a college that the school counselor showed you just last week. You stare at the college’s admissions page on your laptop. Glaring into the darkness of your bedroom, there’s a big red button at the center of the screen that screams APPLY.

For what? is the question that rings through your head as your fingers twitch against the keyboard. They itch for the hit, the swig, the small death of each one-night stand.

You’re certain that if you click off this page, your life is over. Still, you can’t find the piece of you that should care.

The phone starts to ring and is quickly answered.

“Hello?” It sounds tired but clear. Not the screechy, incomprehensible mess that it was just a year ago while high or drunk or both.

“Sweetheart?” The vocals are shaky. They belong to someone old, tired too, possibly nervous. “It’s your dad here.”

I jolt up from my position, almost standing up from the force of my head rearing back. His voice is almost unrecognizable with its weakness. He certainly doesn’t sound like the impassioned man that spoke for hours every night during my childhood.

“Hey, Dad.” I try not to sound nervous, but I cannot stop the waver of my words.

“I don’t want to take up too much of your time. But I missed you, and I wanted to call to see if you were alright.”

The blurry memories of a thousand events over the past few years go through me all at once. I think of the open laptop and the application button that beckons.

“I’m doing okay,” I say, knowing that any details would only break him further.

“Good,” he says in response. “That’s good.”

Silence descends on the call, the only thing indicating Dad is still there is the slight noise of people talking in the background. He hitches his breath once or twice, as if to almost say something and then forget it. I do the same.

“I’m really proud of you, you know.” His bravery exceeds mine. His voice quakes further, the way it does when his chin is curling and he’s about to cry. He won’t let the call go on long enough for me to hear his sobs.

“You’ve been through a lot, and you’ve been so strong. I haven’t been there in a long time, but you’ve been so good and I’m sorry.”

The quiet comes again, his breaths are deep and slow, with occasional hiccups. And I know he’s pulling together his last bits of strength before he has to go.

“I’ll try to call more. I love you so much, sweetheart.”

The call ends. I’m not allowed to respond.

I drop my hand from my ear; the phone follows into my lap. Across from me, on the edge of the floating shelf above my bed is a glued together bee-man on the top of a green trophy. The cracks and breaks along his arms and body don’t hinder the wide smile on his face.

I turn to the laptop, still glowing with the strength of the big red button that demands a reply to its proclamation: APPLY. Demands a choice. Demands that I be. Somewhere in my phone is a record of Dad calling, insisting that I am something. To be proud of; to miss; to lose. Something worth trying for.

I click apply.

-Rebekah Story

Rebekah Story is an emerging non-fiction writer based in Utah. Her work has been published in the Kolob Canyon Review. Much of her writing focuses on religion, drug abuse, bisexuality, and complicated family dynamics. When not writing, Rebekah enjoys embroidery and painting with oils.