There There: A Novel

The drome first came to me in the mirror when I was six. Earlier that day
my friend Mario, while hanging from the monkey bars in the sand park, said,
“Why’s your face look like that?”
I don’t remember what I did. I still don’t know. I remember smears of
blood on the metal and the taste of metal in my mouth. I remember my
grandma Maxine shaking my shoulders in the hall outside the principal’s
office, my eyes closed, her making this psshh sound she always makes when I
try to explain myself and shouldn’t. I remember her pulling my arm harder
than she’d ever pulled it, then the quiet drive home.
Back home, in front of the TV, before I turned it on, I saw my face in the
dark reflection there. It was the first time I saw it. My own face, the way
everyone else saw it. When I asked Maxine, she told me my mom drank when
I was in her, she told me real slow that I have fetal alcohol syndrome. All I
heard her say was Drome, and then I was back in front of the turned-off TV,
staring at it. My face stretched across the screen. The Drome. I tried but
couldn’t make the face that I found there my own again.
Most people don’t have to think about what their faces mean the way I do.
Your face in the mirror, reflected back at you, most people don’t even know
what it looks like anymore. That thing on the front of your head, you’ll never
see it, like you’ll never see your own eyeball with your own eyeball, like you’ll
never smell what you smell like, but me, I know what my face looks like. I
know what it means. My eyes droop like I’m fucked up, like I’m high, and my mouth hangs open all the time. There’s too much space between each of the
parts of my face—eyes, nose, mouth, spread out like a drunk slapped it on
reaching for another drink. People look at me then look away when they see I
see them see me. That’s the Drome too. My power and curse. The Drome is
my mom and why she drank, it’s the way history lands on a face, and all the
ways I made it so far despite how it has fucked with me since the day I found
it there on the TV, staring back at me like a fucking villain.
I’m twenty-one now, which means I can drink if I want. I don’t though. The
way I see it, I got enough when I was a baby in my mom’s stomach. Getting
drunk in there, a drunk fucking baby, not even a baby, a little fucking tadpole
thing, hooked up to a cord, floating in a stomach.