I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly Page B

Rock and fucked her rapist.
    â€œI just went in and took what I wanted. I raped him ,” she told me, lying there in the dark.
    I suspected that he didn’t see it that way, but I was quickly learning not to give voice to every thought I had around Riley.

    I awoke one morning a couple of months into our relationship, dying for a piss. I heaved myself out of my bed and lurched to the bathroom in my boxer shorts. I stumbled to a stall, pulled my shorts down, put a hand up to steady myself over the toilet, then closed my eyes and let go.
    I tried to reconstruct the events of the day before. I had started drinking at noon when I got out of class, then dropped two hits of acid, then drank a bottle of cough syrup, then smoked pot. I recalled not seeing double but seeing the world refracted many times over, as if I had the eyes of a dragonfly.
    I felt that gratifying sense of relief you get when you pee, and I sensed warmth but I didn’t hear any sound. I opened my eyes. I was wearing a condom that had already ballooned to the size of a small cantaloupe with hot urine. I gasped and grabbed for it, and at that precious moment, it slipped off and hit the edge of the toilet with a splash.
    Why had I been wearing a condom? I racked my brain while I tried lamely to clean myself up, then walked back into my room. Asleep in my bed was Anne, a girl from my acting class.
    I lived my life in opposition to my father’s. Yet here I was, a weak, shitty man, cheating on my girlfriend as my dad had cheated on my mother. I had inherited all of his flaws and none of his strengths.
    Riley took me back without forgiving me. After my infidelity, she seemed to love me more, or at least to want me more. But after a couple of drinks, she took great pleasure in twisting the blade. I took it: I had betrayed her.
    Riley’s “come closer/stay back” froze me between what I felt was real love for her and my refusal to play the game. During the bickering before the divorce was finalized, my father had told my mother that he had never loved her. He had only said that he did because it was “appropriate.” For how many years and how many millions of times had he told that lie? Love had been tainted and abused, definitively ruined by my father, so the word was no good to me. I never said the words to Riley: I love you.

    Finally, Gabe had enough. He caught a bus south to visit friends. We had failed. I hitched down to California to drop in unannouncedon my father at his new home in Pleasanton, an idyllic inland city even the name of which I found despicable. I’d visited him a couple of times in different apartments over the last eighteen months, usually at my mother’s urging. Sometimes it was okay. I had apparently inherited his genetic aptitude for not talking about shit. He let me drink, and we ate a hell of a lot better than we did when I visited my mom.
    But his new place was in a gated community. I knew the security guard wasn’t about to let me walk in with my pack, so I called and called from a payphone across the street: no answer. Hours after the sun went down, Dad still wasn’t home. I bought a bottle of generic NyQuil, slipped over the wall into his wealthy colony, chugged the cough syrup, and blacked out in the cedar chips between two carefully manicured hedges.
    The sprinklers woke me the next morning. I started throwing up before I could even get out of my sleeping bag. Still, I took comfort in the thought that while all these pathetic drones around me were eating their breakfasts, I was losing mine.
    I packed up my bedroll, shouldered my pack, and located my dad’s condo. The look of alarm on his sleepy face when he answered the door was priceless. Hey, Dad, it’s the prodigal son! Ya miss me?
    When I landed in Colorado ten days later, I moved into the unheated, unfinished basement of the rundown duplex my mother was renting next to Tashina’s high school in Lafayette, a small town an