--Wish It Was You

ALICE

I’d never thought of my hand as a ladle, but Mikky was strewn across the bathroom floor, and I had to get the vomit from his mouth, so. I must’ve wiped my hands on my jeans at some point because when I looked down, my left thigh was darker than the other, with an orange-y crust. Probably Spaghetti-Os.

The last thing he ever did in his life was puke canned pasta.

An hour earlier, I had tried calling him, and he still hadn’t called me back. It was late Christmas morning and I was hungover from drinking too much at some overpriced shit hole near Government Center.

Mikky had been sober for two years, but every missed call, unanswered text, a day or so without hearing his voice, and my stomach twisted like the time my mother accidentally gave me salmonella poisoning. Had it happened? Had it finally happened?

You really did it this time, Mik.

After the fifteenth time I heard Mikky's voicemail—“hello…hello? Heeelllloooo?! Ahh, gotcha idiot! Don’t leave a message”—I got in my old Subaru and called Mikky’s best friend, Miguel.

“He’s not answering me, Mig. I just have this feeling…”

Don’t talk like that, he told me. You know how he is. Maybe his phone died. Maybe his charger broke. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I tried the front door, but it was locked. I used to have a set of keys, but Mikky changed the locks after my mother got ahold of them and made a copy for herself. There was a ground-level window around back, so I walked through the gate and across the split pavement of the yard.

“Mikky?” I said, when I saw him through the crack in his broken blinds.

Mikky, I screamed, as I kicked at the glass. Mikky, Mikky, Mikky.

Miguel must’ve heard me because he came running into the yard as my body was halfway through the now broken window. He wouldn’t be able to fit through it.

“Call 9-1-1,” I choked when I cut my side on the single stubborn piece of glass that remained in the frame. I had stars in my eyes, but not the kind people talk about when they have big dreams. My stars were Fourth of July sparklers being stabbed into my eyeballs.

My foot slipped into the toilet bowl, and I lost my balance, falling onto the glass and my brother. The puke seeped from the side of his mouth.

I scooped out the thick bile, tilting his head to the side so that gravity could help me, and fumbled in the pocket of my puffer jacket for my Narcan. It lived there with the old tissues.

“Are they coming, Miguel? Are they fucking coming?”

“I called them! Come open the door!”

But I couldn’t leave him there. I was frozen in time, banging my fists on his giant chest and pressing up and down like I used to when we played the clear BOOM! game and he’d pretend that my baby fists were electrocuting him back to life.

I ignored the nasty smell coming from his mouth as I tried to give him my breath, all of it, every bit of it if I goddamn had to. I sprayed the Narcan up his nose again and again and again.

Either the EMTs or Miguel must’ve broken through the front door. The flashing blue and red lights came in through the side windows, and I thought, man, this is it. This is the moment where it’s not anxiety and it’s not a panic attack and I do have that seizure. I do stop breathing. Which maybe under the circumstances wouldn’t be so bad.

Miguel wrapped his arms around my arms to keep me tearing at the EMTs arm-sleeves. To keep me from getting on my knees and praying to them to play God for a minute. To, please, give me a miracle because I never asked for a damn thing.

But Miguel said to let the professionals work, so I did.

I knew, though. Even if I didn’t want to. I knew before I’d gotten in my shitty Subaru.

An uncapped needle on the floor next to his body.

The blue rubber tourniquet still wrapped lazily around his bicep.

The smell of pee from the unflushed toilet, dark yellow from a night of drinking Miller High Lifes and shots of Fernet.

And Mikky. My Mikky.

This is how the world would remember him.

The boy with brown hair that was so dark it looked black unless he was in direct sunlight, who would drag you outside just to prove it.

The guy who laughed too loud and had some of the worst tattoos I’d ever seen—who actually gets the words “hard” and “core” tattooed on their hands?

The man who rapped to Vanilla Ice in his work van and showed up to my apartment to fix a lightbulb but left me with muddy boot prints to scrub.

The brother, my brother, who pulled my hair into a shitty ponytail and rubbed my back while I puked after drinking away the news that my internship at the Planetarium didn’t turn into a job offer. “They can shove it up their Uranuses,” he said, the last thing I remembered before falling asleep with my face on the toilet seat.

And now…now I had to go deal with my mother.

TAWNI

The nurse at the front desk said do you wanna see your son, and I was like, yeah, I wanna see him. I wanna see him moving around my apartment, opening kitchen cabinets and smiling and asking me to make him some of my meatballs on Scali because it’s his favorite food. Can you do that? Can you get him breathing? Because that thing in there…that’s not my son. That’s a goddamn corpse, and I’m not gonna sit in some room and look at that disaster.

So I parked my ass on the blue rubber seats in the waiting room and picked at a heart carved into the armrest of the chair while I waited for Alice to come back out and tell me it wasn’t true. That it wasn’t him she had found, and actually it was some junkie friend he was trying to help who spent the night at his apartment. Miguel sat next to me, but I was ignoring him because he was on their side. He believed what they said.

The waiting room had peeling white walls, splattered here and there around the baseboards with what looked like dried mud and puke. It smelled like piss masked in Clorox, and all of the hand sanitizer dispensers I had tried were empty.

Behind the glass divider of the section I was sitting in, a young girl with greasy hair and dirty Ed Hardy sneakers was screaming, trying to break away from the two boy nurses, or orderlies, or whatever they were, attempting to restrain her and put her in a wheelchair.

“THE PURPLE MAN ATE THE RED MAN AND IS GONNA EAT ME. THE PURPLE MAN ATE THE RED MAN AND IS GONNA EAT ME GONNA EAT ME GONNA EAT ME GONNA EAT ME…”

The lady was a looney, but I kinda felt bad for her, too. I mean, nobody start out that way, right? Must’ve had a man or something that drove her crazy. Took too much Special K or smoked a lot of crack and came out the other end like a toilet flush into the harbor.

A third nurse in pink scrubs joined the two, looking a little bit like one of those fairy boys. He floated over with his feet pointing out, popping his little ass up and trying to seem important. The syringe in his hand found the cellulitey part of the lady’s arm, and she lost her legs. Her chin went into her chest, and then another chin joined that one. When they wheeled her past me, she looked me in the eyes and said “eat me?”

Was my son dead?

I kept trying not to think about it because then I’d be putting that thought out there in the universe, and God forbid. God forbid.

One of the nurses swiped his ID badge, and the doors were flung open like I was sitting at some magic show. Alice was on the other side. “Eat me, eat me?” the crazy lady asked her, half-assed reaching toward her, already one foot on the other side of a nice sedative high. Alice didn’t even look at her, like she couldn’t hear her. She was always halfway on the other side of something too, but I didn’t know where.

Alice was a beautiful girl, but she didn’t know it and good luck trying to tell her. Great skin, unlike Mikky. Same eyes as him though—they both got them from their piece of shit father. Neither of my kids looked like me, and it still pissed me off. They did get my dark hair, but I’d been bleaching mine since I was eleven, so I started telling people it was natural.

But something about her in that doorway didn’t look so pretty. She looked scary, like a ghost in one of those paranormal shows Mikky got me hooked on last time he dried out at my house. Every time I blinked, I thought she might disappear.

She walked over to me without looking up. I wasn’t sure if she even knew I was there until she sat down in the chair next to me, her jeans farting on the cheap upholstery. I laughed a little. She folded and unfolded her hands in her lap, watching them like they were gonna turn into something else. Maybe she thought they were gonna eat her, like the lady.

“Ma?” she said, whispering with that deep raspy voice. You always had to lean in when Alice spoke.

“Well?” I said. “Can we all get out of here now?” I tilted my head back and rolled my eyes up at the ceiling. One of the square pieces was missing.

What a ridiculous situation these kids put me in. I’d been in the middle of wrapping the new work boots I got for Mikky, and now when we sprung him out of here, he was gonna walk in my apartment and see them.

I felt Miguel’s hand on my shoulder. He rubbed it a little and I brushed it off. What was he doing?

“Mom.” Her eyes. It was like Mikky was looking at me. “Please.”

But it wasn’t Mikky. Where was Mikky?

She put her hand on my hand, and I pulled it away and slapped her. Miguel jumped up and grabbed my hands and then pushed them down into my lap, but Alice didn’t move.

“He’s gone, Ma.”

“You shut up. You shut the fuck up, kid.”

“Mikky overdosed. He’s gone.”

“Shut up, Alice. Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP.”

“Ma,” said Miguel, and I swear to God, if I heard someone say “ma” one more time…

She tried to put her arms around me, but I didn’t need her, I needed Mikky. I needed to go see my son, to watch him pull weeds in the yard with his butt crack hanging out and sing off key to that terrible rap business he was into. I needed to give him his new work boots. It was too cold for the ones he was wearing with the hole in the toe.

“Get off of me,” I said to her and Miguel. “What is wrong with you? Don’t you know what you’re saying?”

I knew I was starting to make a scene, could tell by the nurses that were standing by, waiting for me to really lose it. I didn’t give a shit about those fags. I didn’t give a shit about any of the losers in that place, fucking junkies and wet brains. A lady with a dead son…

I was a lady with a dead son.

I turned around and started punching Miguel’s stupid chest. He could take it. His bones were solid, and the sound made me feel like I had it together. He didn’t stop me as I punched and punched and punched until my knees gave out and fell hard to the tiles. I could already feel them swelling.

“My son…” I said.

Alice knelt down next to me, staring at my face. Looking through me.

“Where’s Mikky, Al? I don’t want you. Go get me my Mikky.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why can’t you? Why? Why…”

“Mikky is dead.”

No. I screamed as loud as I could, my throat feeling like it was getting blood blisters, but I didn’t stop. I knew Mikky would come if he heard it. If he heard how much he was hurting his mother.

I pushed my face against the dirty floor as the boys came over to help me up. I swung at their stupid noses. I screamed harder.

Then the perky-assed nurse came over with another needle, this one all for me. That’s when I stopped screaming.

They put me in a wheel chair, calling for the doctor to come.

I looked over at Alice, who just stood there, unflinching, like the world was happening to her and there was nothing she could do about it.

I spat on one of the nurse’s too-white Keds. I said, “eat me.”

Title: --WISH IT WAS YOU

Genre: Literary/contemporary fiction

Age range: This book is suitable for late teens through adulthood but will appeal most to 18-35 year olds.

Target audience: Addicts, recovering addicts, those impacted by addiction, and those curious about the impact of addiction.

Word count: These are the first 2,227 of 70,000+ words.

Author name: Amanda Todisco

Bio: Amanda Todisco is a Game Design Writer at Hasbro and an Adjunct Professor of Writing at Urban College of Boston. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She’s currently working on her first novel.

Writing style: I don't write for writers; what's most important to me is that my work is accessible to everyone. As the famous Hemingway diss goes: "poor Faulkner. He thinks with big words comes big emotions."

The hook: It was Christmas Day when Mikky shot up in his apartment and overdosed on Fentanyl. His sister and best friend, Alice and Miguel, found him dead on the bathroom floor with a tourniquet still wrapped around his bicep. In the weeks that followed, the already rocky relationship between Alice and her pill-popping, wine-chugging, undiagnosed bipolar mother, Tawni, was pushed to its limits. While the women are polar opposites who set off on their own grief journeys—Alice sought out her estranged father and investigated who sold Mikky the dirty dope, and Tawni found another young addict like Mikky to turn into her newest savior project—their love for Mikky and the binds of motherhood and daughterhood kept pulling the two women back together.

Synopsis: —Wish It Was You is a literary dramedy based in Boston and the North Shore. It’s about a mother, TAWNI, and her daughter, ALICE, in the wake of the accidental over dose of MIKKY, their son and brother, respectively. It is told as a dual first-person past tense narrative, alternating chapters between the two women. ALICE is street smart and smart smart, which is conveyed through her edgy voice and her love for astronomy. TAWNI is a middle-aged on-and-off again alcoholic with a casual affinity for popping pills.

The story opens with ALICE on the day of her brother’s death; she is the one who finds his body, along with MIGUEL, MIKKY’s lifelong best friend and a strong supporting character. With his death comes something else ALICE is dreading: “now I had to deal with my mother.” There’s no doubt that the death of MIKKY is going to have a detrimental effect on TAWNI, and ALICE is not only concerned with her own devastation, but also the task of looking after her selfish, alcoholic, and undiagnosed bipolar mother.

To find themselves, however, the women must set off on separate journeys. ALICE and MIGUEL dig up an old time capsule that the two boys buried in a historical cemetery, and ALICE finds a note with a phone number, which she traces to her estranged father. She also takes it upon herself to figure out who sold MIKKY the fentanyl-laced heroin that led to his death.

Meanwhile, TAWNI takes in a stray. In the early morning hours the day after MIKKY’s death, she’s chugging beers under a bridge where her ex-husband used to go to shoot up. Here, she meets a young man named BOBBY, who reminds her of her recently deceased son. She soon makes it her mission to save him. But when BOBBY can’t be saved either, TAWNI hits her bottomest bottom, leading to the climax and turning point of the story.

Ultimately, TAWNI is sectioned and placed in mandatory treatment. ALICE, after a grief-inspired romance with MIGUEL, has an epiphany: her entire identity has been wrapped up in her mother and brother and their addictions. She chooses herself and forgoes a relationship with a man who may very well be her soul mate. The story ends with the two women coming back together, TAWNI now in recovery and ALICE teaching young recovering addicts about the planets. There is hope for healing. The novel navigates the themes of grief and loss and the complications of a strained relationship between mother and daughter. There is also humor, love, and the belief that recovery is possible.

Why my project is a good fit: After submitting to countless literary journals, I honestly don't know why any project is a good fit for anyone. Can you share the secret?

Likes/hobbies: Writing, reading, ice skating, running, dogs.

Hometown: MA

Age: 32