After Nothing Read Online Free Page A

these habits. Mom barely went near him, so she never interfered with them, and I just figured he’d earned the right to do what he wanted, so I just let him be.
    He had two bathrobes that he wore in rotation. They couldn’t go in the wash at the same time or he wouldn’t get out of bed. At least one of them had to be there. If both were there he would always choose his blue and black check bathrobe over his red and black check one. He could bath himself, and he did this every morning after breakfast. He could shave himself – just not very well. He always missed patches, and sometimes cut himself, but he wouldn’t let me do it, and tutted when I suggested he grow a beard. He was great at making that tutting sound. Sometimes he wouldn’t be doing anything in his room but sitting in his chair and tutting. He could make that sound for hours and not stop until you distracted him.
    Dad could get himself breakfast. Granola and milk every day. He always had to drink his tea out of the same stained cup. It had love hearts of different shades of pink all over it.
    He didn’t eat lunch. Mom always put his dinner on the table in the early evening, but she never went into his room to tell him it was ready. If I wasn’t home he ate most of his dinners cold. In winter he had to have dinner extra early because for some reason, known only to him, he wouldn’t eat after it got dark. Those early winter dinners were the only allowance Mom ever made for him.
    I’d often stand outside the door of his room before I went to bed. Sometimes I’d hear him tutting, sometimes snoring. Sometimes I could hear the soft hum of voices on the radio through the closed door.
     
    ‘Why’d you say “rubbish” earlier?’ asked Kane one day when we were lying in his bed.
    ‘Rubbish?’
    ‘Yeah. You said how there was “rubbish” all over the street.’
    ‘I meant trash.’
    ‘I know what you meant. Why’d you call it rubbish?’
    ‘My dad’s English. Sometimes I accidently call things what he called them.’
    ‘That’s why you sometimes speak different.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Yeah, sometimes.’
    I didn’t reply. Kane moved over on top of me.
    ‘My dad’s Black,’ I said.
    He nodded, staring down at me.
    ‘You got gold in your eyes.’
    ‘Just a lighter brown near the center,’ I replied.
    ‘Looks like gold to me.’
    I traced a finger over the black letters inked on the forearm he was resting his weight on.
    ‘What does this mean?’
    ‘One of my boys.’
    ‘Shys,’ I murmured. ‘He died?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘Got shot.’
    I looked up into the deep brown of Kane’s gaze.
    ‘You miss him?’
    ‘Yeah I miss him.’
     
    I went to the doctor’s. I couldn’t keep eating the emergency contraceptive. It made me feel sick half the time, and was doing really strange things to my cycle. At one stage I thought I might have been pregnant. The doctor said the pill would take seven days before I could count on it working. Kane and I were meeting up every day by then, and he wasn’t too happy when I started putting him off, so I ended up telling him why. No one had ever looked at me the way he did. Like I was responsible for the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
    ‘It’s fine, Kane. I’ve been taking the morning-after pill.’
    ‘Bitch, you said you were on the pill.’
    ‘What does it matter? I didn’t get pregnant.’
    He clenched his fists, and then actually backed away from me. I watched him take each step, and then I watched him walk away.
    I didn’t see him for a week.
    It was weird not knowing if he was in my life or not. I couldn’t really feel it, because that was how I still was, and it didn’t seem real. There were some things though that had a coldness to them. Walking past his locker and him not being there. Waiting on the front steps in the morning, and the afternoon, and not seeing him among the mass of students pouring through the school doors. Lunchtimes sitting alone at a crowded