Ma is thrilled about the idea on the phone. She tells me about the weed plants she’s been growing on the fire escape for her new business venture as a drug dealer. Our first night there she pulls out an Altoids box with four nugs in it and tells us that growing weed was too much work, so we should smoke the remnants of her abandoned career.
She carves out enough floor space in my old bedroom to put down a futon for us. It pulls at my heart to realize that she’s washed the sheets, for probably the first time since I left three years ago, and put a candle down to make us feel welcome.
We are jet-lagged, so we pass out early, and wake up to her talking to herself in the darkness. I get up and go into the kitchen to see what’s going on.
Ma’s eyes are red and glazed over. She is smiling, but there is a wickedness to her face that wasn’t there earlier. Her words are slurring together and her pants are unbuttoned. She stumbles around the house, limping brutally, talking about shooting yuppies and fluorescent lights descending like a toxic umbrella over the whole city.
Bending from the waist, she leans over and cranks her radio up, blasting Chopin through the house. I ask her to turn it down in various tones, but it’s as if she can’t hear me. She just keeps rambling, her lips pursed forward, eyebrows arched in disdain, lurching around, shedding her clothes.
I plead with her, telling her we are exhausted, at the very least for Nikita’s sake, but Ma just lopes into the bathroom and plops down on the toilet, her run-on sentence unbroken.
Standing there in my underwear and T-shirt, ears burning with upset, I remember what it’s like to feel invisible. I remember what it’s like to feel lost, alone with a shell of your mother. I slam the door to the bedroom, crawl under the covers, and bite my fist, unsuccessfully trying not to sob.
Nikita is afraid of the way I change as the days go on. She says I am retreating into myself, that I am hardening, that she doesn’t know this person, that I can be mean and cutting. I apologize, pretending I don’t know what she’s talking about.
The third night, the buzzer rings at three A.M. Ma doesn’t get it, so it rings a second time, and a third. By the fourth ring I jump up and storm to the front door.
“What the fuck! Who is it?”
“It’s Gus! Let me in, baby!”
“Ma! It’s your fucking boyfriend. What do you want me to do?”
Like a dispatch from the grave, she grumbles, “Let him in, of course!”
I buzz him in, prop the door open, and go back to my room and try to sleep.
Five minutes later, crashing noises announce fuckhead’s arrival. I clench my jaw, trying not to feel anything and failing. He groans loudly, whimpering in pain, as if trying to get my ma up out of bed to come check on him. At full volume he yells, “Baby! I hurt myself. Come here, baby. Come help me.”
My ma doesn’t respond, but he keeps going.
“My love, come and help your man. I’m hurting here! I fell into the door. Come on, woman, come help your fucking man!”
That’s more than I can handle. I feel skeeved out just hearing him call her baby. I get up and go out into the foyer.
“Get the fuck up off the floor and keep your fucking voice down. People are sleeping in this house.”
“Oh, shit. It’s you. The bad seed returned.”
“Listen to me, motherfucker, this is my house. Don’t call me names. I’ll fucking kill you.”
“Oh, you’ll kill me, huh?”
“Get the fuck outta my house.”
“Rhonna! Baby! Your daughter is threatening me!”
“You fucking pussy.”
I grab him by the back of his jacket and drag him toward the door. I’m considerably smaller than him, and my bare feet and legs are exposed, but I feel no fear. Adrenaline surges through me, rage surfing its volatile crest. I throw open the apartment door and push him out with my foot. He’s too drunk to resist.
“You’re a fucking bitch! A fucked-up bitch!”
“Get the fuck out of my house, you pathetic piece of shit.”
“Rhonna!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
I slam the door and stomp back toward my room. My ma scares the life out of me, standing at the door to her room, stark naked, glaring at me. She hisses, “You threw my man out?”
“He was wasted and screaming, Ma. He’s an asshole.”
“This is my house!”
“He has no respect for you, Ma!”
She lopes toward the apartment door, berating me for being such a mean bitch, throwing it open and calling his name. He is gone. She starts to cry.
“And? What if he never comes back now? What now? Because of you! You’re gonna take your little girlfriend and go back to fancy-ass Europe with your fancy-ass father and leave me here again, with no boyfriend now, because you fuck everything up for me.”
My feet feel like lead. Betrayal surges through me like a snake with a razor spine. I feel crushed by her words.
Only when I hear Nikita’s voice do I snap out of this. I turn and go into our room, slamming the door as hard as I can. With every ounce of my body, I scream at the door, “FUCK YOOOOOU!”
I collapse into the bed, weeping uncontrollably. Nikita is stunned by the scene. She detests my rage so much she almost can’t console me, but the crying is too painful for her and she takes me into her arms. We make a pact to leave as soon as we can.
We go back to her parents’ house in Germany, where I stare at the boxes of all her things, her whole room, packed up on her floor, labeled and stored away, to be divvied up into her new life, wherever that will happen. She is done with our school.
We start to talk about what is to come. The directors are threatening to kick me out for having an illegal sexual relationship, and generally being mouthy and averse to authority, but after an extensive round of begging and pleading, they have decided I can come back. I am going back to Highland and Nikita is staying home for the foreseeable future. The idea of losing her makes me feel nauseous, but I’m yearning to experience other things. A part of me thinks I wouldn’t make it through the entire year without kissing anyone, and I never want to lie to her, so, in a grab at maturity we aren’t ready for, we decide to try and have an open relationship until we can be in the same place again.
The impending separation weighs heavily on me, and days are overcome with tears, big discussions in the forest. Sticky days are spent staring out from her balcony, worrying that I am fucking up the one good thing I’ve ever had. But I don’t want to lie. She says she understands, that I am gonna be sixteen and I need to experience as much as I can.
I tell her my love for her is the most significant thing I’ve ever experienced. That she taught me how to feel like I am a part of the world, which is an indescribable gift. I tell her that she is my family, no matter what.
She sits on her bed and gives me a tiny white box. Inside is a replica of the ring she wears perpetually, a naked woman’s body wrapped around her finger. The gesture makes me cry. I swear I will wear the ring every day until my finger falls off. She laughs and says she hopes that never happens, my fingers are way too precious. We kiss, and she shows me exactly why my fingers are treasures to her.
When the time comes to leave, I feel like I am leaving my soul mate, my other half, my puzzle piece. I know I will be back with her soon, but the act of leaving is awful. We hold each other on the train platform in the hazy dusk light for a long time, crying and kissing, promising each other forever.
As the train pulls away, I watch her sweet blond head shrink into the distance. I can see the embers of her cigarette long after I can see her, and I cry, burying my face in her scarf, smelling her hair. I sigh, long and hard, from a deeply tired place within myself, and turn over in my bunk, knowing I am returning to where I came from before all this magic overtook me. That place where I am alone with it all.
Chapter 39
The Second Round
Southern England, fall 2001
YEAR TWO OF BOARDING SCHOOL IS
A GRIND. I PUT MY head down, headphones on, and try to learn to navigate this place alone.
The first week back I fall into bed with a British waif named Alexandra, one of the cool fashion clique who never seemed to know I existed before. She’s striking, though shy. Olive skinned, tall, draped in bright fabrics and things she sewed herself, she has a quiet, intelligent presence. She carries pain in the hunch of her bony shoulders.
I compartmentalize my affections. I have a new sensation of being desirable to others, but my love is off limits. I belong to Nikita, and we speak every few days. She’s heartbroken and lethargic at her parents’ house in rural Bavaria, and she wants me to talk to her more. This makes me feel suffocated.
I can see beyond myself for the first time. I notice that everyone has perfectly clear skin from drinking nothing but water and tea.
If you sleep through dinner here you might starve, but that’s all I want to do. The cold makes me want to snuggle, a pillow or a girl. Maybe it’s the poor nutrition, or the damp, but people have started to piss me off. I’m better at managing my anger by now, but not perfect. Sometimes I punch walls, and that gets me a talking-to from the higher-ups.
Without real rules I have nothing to bounce back against. The foundation of my character is the dance of continually regaining my balance from slamming into rules. Here, you sign agreements, you commit to acting a certain respectful way, and you know that everyone here has done the same. When you break the agreements you’re not a rebel getting one over on the system, you’re just an asshole.
I get along well with the students, but the staff are wary of my volatility. I switch my tactic to charm, but these people seem to want to erase the impact of personality. Too bad that’s the only currency I’ve ever been taught to value.
It’s hard for me to sleep. I hate being confined to my room. Once the doors have all been closed and silence has been called, I grow despondent in my cell. The endless silences, meditations, and whispers in this place are smothering me. I can’t even hear myself. I have nightmares where everything shrinks to ungraspable size or swells beyond measure, where I lose all ability to control anything. I wake up sweating and gasping, filled with baseless terror that won’t subside for hours.
I am so very trapped here. The nearest town is a forty-five-minute walk, and it’s a pub and a gas station at a single stoplight. More people live in my building in New York than attend and staff this entire school, so sometimes I have to sneak out and go for a walk.
When the conversation turns to what I’ll be doing for the winter break I get quiet and embarrassed. That is very much not my way, but I know everyone else is traveling to exotic places with their loving families.
By this point, my poppa lives in his studio. He left Julia the summer I went to school and fell in love with a German girl less than half his age, a friend of Barbara’s named Nina. He’s made it clear that having me live there, the three of us in a single room where he actually has no right to live at all, would never do. He’s says my “odd aggression,” my “desire to blow it all up” and get him to live with me alone somewhere else, in our own apartment, has no basis in reality, even if I can’t believe that. What would we live on? he asks me. He says he is on fragile ground, that he is determined to change his life, to remake it entirely, to save himself from something terrible, but I have no idea from what. And what could take precedence over his own kid? How he could he possibly expose me again to all that I escaped from?
I’ve worn out my welcome with Barbara, and my mom’s is a disaster, so yeah, I don’t really know what to say when these kids complain about having to visit Mom in France and then fly all the way to the Maldives for the second month of break. I go home to New York and sleep on my aunt Olivia’s floor.
By spring break the staff are warning me that they’re considering not inviting me back to school again, and send me “home” to contemplate the situation.
I turn up in Karlsruhe a self-righteous mess. Barbara is out of town, so I get to stay in my old attic room. Poppa stays in bed in his studio the whole week I’m there. He says he’s sick, but I don’t understand why. He doesn’t have a cold or anything visibly wrong with him. He says it’s on the inside. I ask him if it’s got anything to do with his weed smoking.
Every inch of his studio is covered in charcoal and pastel drawings, about ten of them taller than me, all in different stages of completion, hallucinations of saints engaged in unsaintly activities, botanical or geometric shapes, trees, clouds, hands, feet, drapery, and flowers, like medieval dreams or maybe nightmares. The floor is covered with the inspirations for these drawings: pictures ripped from books, photos of friends, dancers, explosions, landscapes, and body parts.
I’m standing next to the plywood sleeping platform he has built, a kind of Elizabethan affair with a huge bed high off the ground encircled by black velvet curtains that keep what little warmth his oil heater generates inside the makeshift room.
He’s scrawny in a T-shirt, wrapped in a black duvet. He looks at me with a new clarity in his eyes. He says, “iO . . . it’s not weed.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not weed I’ve been smoking all this time . . . as a matter of fact I never smoke weed. I hate it. Makes me psycho.”
I don’t know how I know, I’ve never met this devil before, but something in me just does.
“It’s heroin.”
He looks ashamed. He asks me if I knew the whole time. Miraculously, I had no clue. I never guessed. I’ve never seen somebody on heroin before, as far as I know, and I never could have imagined that my dad was a junkie. That’s why he was so up and down, why he’d pass out so hard, why he’d never remember our plans in the morning.
“Holy shit. For how long, Pop?”
“Umm . . . since just before Elio was born.”
“Since I was four?!”
“Yup. Since you were four. The fight of my life. A lot of people I knew and who knew you are no longer with us. I, on the other hand, intend to make it. And I am going to make it.”
This leaves me reeling. My head feels light and heavy at the same time. I feel angry, I feel sad, I feel confused. I think of every junkie I’ve seen throughout my life, collapsed on stairwells, needles in their arms, mumbling bullshit gibberish, passed out standing up on my block. Poppa has never been like that, but isn’t that what junkies are?
I feel bad that he’s sick. I want to know what it means. I just feel so . . . fucking . . . alone. Fuck you, dude. Fuck. You. Way to show up for your fucking kid, man. Great job. Go fuck yourself. But are you gonna be okay?
I GO BACK TO SCHOOL like a lit flare. I climb the biggest tree on the property and pretend to fall seventeen feet out of it to the ground. I wander inside and act confused. I make my eyeballs shake back and forth, and I pretend to have amnesia.
Jacques, the school nurse, is fatigued by my shenanigans, but he can’t afford not to take me seriously, no matter how implausible. He drives me to the hospital in town and lets my New Yorker friend Anya come along to keep me company. I am burrowed into the act so deeply I almost believe it myself.
I feel pathetic and childish for regressing like this, but also dark and sad. I want someone to care. I want people to worry about me. I feel dangerous, like I might harm myself, but I care too much about how that would hurt my ma, so I’m trying to warn people by acting out.
They keep me overnight, in a hospital bed, on watch. Anya is down when she leaves, and her worry makes me feel a little bit better. Jacques is over it. He sees through me.
I spend three days in bed, shaking my eyeballs back and forth whenever someone comes into my room, pretending that my memory is returning slowly. I get offended when people suggest I’m faking it, but the whispers build.
When I “recover,” Anya and I take to smoking joints in the sheep fields. We got a brick of hash from a kid on a yellow bicycle in Southampton, the nearest big city, which is an hour away by bus, and roll joints so strong we get jelly knees. They’d kick u
s out on the spot if they caught us doing drugs, which terrifies me. I become consumed with paranoia about it, because, despite my disdain for so many things here, this has become the only home I’ve got. My room is a sanctuary, a bed I can rely on.
Somewhere during the course of this I decide that it’s time for me to lose my virginity in the technical sense. Nikita has certainly demolished whatever barrier there was between me and proverbial adulthood, but I want to know what a boy feels like.
This, of course, is completely forbidden, which means it will involve a fair bit of planning. The process of choosing which boy it will be is a bit like selecting which cow you will slaughter—which one has the most meat on it, and which one is most likely to be led away peacefully.
Rumor has it that the size of the boy’s endowment is crucial to the girl’s enjoyment of the act. I do a little snooping and find that there’s a boy from California who is supposed to be qualified; he’s also built like a rugby player and doesn’t offer much in the way of intellect. Perfect. The hurdle is that a friend of mine has a crush on him. I tell myself that because I merely want to have a strictly one-time, almost technical exchange with him, it shouldn’t cross any boundaries.
One night, a bunch of us sneak away to the tree house and play spin the bottle. The boy is there. Truthfully, I haven’t the faintest idea how to flirt with men, but I do my best to let him know that the tide of something within me has shifted in his favor. I do this by sitting close to him and selecting him to kiss during truth or dare. At one point, after what I think is a particularly successful make-out, I sit between his legs, leaning my weight back against his broad chest.
At the end of the night, when everyone is making their way back to the main house in the glistening, frosty moonlight, I pull him by the hand. We fall behind enough that by the time I pull him off through a field to the left, they’re all so far ahead that no one notices.
I practically drag the boy to a dilapidated shed in the center of a distant field. In all my romantic wisdom, I think that this abandoned hut, dubbed “the shag shed” by the older kids, would be the perfect place for him to deflower me. Surrounded by discarded boards and dead leaves, under a collapsed roof, is a broken red velvet couch.
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