A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me by Jason Schmidt

probation officer told Dad that the state of Oregon had washed its hands of him; we could leave any time we wanted.
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    Dad and I left Eugene early that fall, right after my birthday. There were a couple of factors that contributed to the delay in leaving town. One of them was Dad’s strange obsession with getting the Vega fixed up. After having it towed to Eugene from Portland, he’d had it towed from Marcy’s house to the Roosevelt house. When the time came to make the move to Seattle, he insisted we were going to do it in the Vega. He never explained his reasoning, but I assumed he was just mad at himself for having totaled his first new car. Or for having screwed up the pot delivery. Or some combination thereof. It wasn’t exactly surprising. Hanging on to things that would be better let go of was kind of a cultural through-line among my people.
    We didn’t have the money to pay a regular garage to fix the car, so Dad made a deal with Sean, the shotgun-crazy drug buddy he’d wanted to give Charlie to. Sean took Dad’s $500 and the job, which he accepted as a sort of challenge against his prowess as a mechanic and a friend. The Frankenstein contraption he gave back to us a few months later was more or less Vega-shaped and capable of moving forward under its own power, if not much else.
    We packed light, just some bedding and a few changes of clothes. Everything else went into the storage locker with the stuff we’d put in there after the house fire on Hayes. Dad’s plan was to spend our first night camping out by Fall Creek, then head north and look for a house in Seattle.
    We found a good spot that night, at a bend in the creek where the water ran over giant sheets of volcanic rock and shaped the stone into natural pools and rapids. We roasted marshmallows and drank tap water out of old milk jugs. Then we crawled into the back of the Vega, cuddled up under our Pendleton blankets, and went to sleep.
    Dad woke up in the middle of the night because he was hot. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong until he noticed something was off about my breathing. He put his hand on my forehead and I was burning up with fever. He woke me up, and I was lucid enough to answer his questions so he decided to wait until morning and see how things looked.
    When the sun came up it was obvious that something was pretty far wrong. Every nick, cut, and scrape on my body was swollen red. When Dad touched an old cut on my arm, it immediately popped open and started discharging a mixture of pus and blood. That was bad, but the part that really freaked him out was that I didn’t cry. I just stared at the gunk coming out of my arm like it was happening to somebody else.
    He packed up the car and drove straight to Sacred Heart Hospital in downtown Eugene. The ER doctors said it was a staph infection. They loaded me up with antibiotics, and acetaminophen to bring my fever down. They also prescribed a special soap to use against the infection. They said Dad should check my temperature every hour, and if it got above 104, he should bring me back to the hospital.
    Dad stopped at the pay phone in the hospital lobby and called everyone he could think of, looking for a place for us to stay. But most of our friends in Eugene had kids. None of them could risk having the infection spread to their family. I sat on a green vinyl chair next to the phone and watched Dad go through a pile of change. He never raised his voice. His face just got redder and redder.
    â€œI’m thirsty,” I said.
    â€œIn a minute!” he snapped.
    I lapsed into silence until we were back out at the car.
    â€œWhat’s staph infection?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s bad,” he said.
    â€œHow bad?”
    â€œReally bad.”
    â€œOh. Okay.”
    We got into the car and he made sure my seat belt was locked in. Then he sat quietly with his hands on the steering wheel for what seemed like an hour