Confessions of an Angry Girl
Page 12
“Rose? Rosie?” a panicked Robert yells from the room. I don’t answer him.
The EMT bends down and checks Stephanie, and then radios to his partner that her breathing is irregular and they’d better take her in for alcohol poisoning. The partner says he’ll be up in a minute, and Stephanie vomits again. The smell makes me woozy, and I’m wondering if we should all be moving a little faster to get Stephanie to the hospital, but the EMT just casually turns her on her side so she won’t choke.
“You any relation to Peter Zarelli?” he asks, one hand on Stephanie’s cheek, holding her head to the floor. He looks like he’s done this at least a million times.
At this point, I’m so used to people asking me that question that it barely fazes me, despite the weird context. “Yeah. He’s my brother. He’s away at college.”
“Huh. Small world. I used to play hockey with Peter. He was a junior when I was a senior. I skated over his hand by accident once. I think he had to get stitches.”
I read his name tag, which says R. Passeo. “Bobby?”
He looks at me, startled. “Uh-oh. Am I legendary at your house or something?”
“No. It’s just funny because, um, somebody told me a while ago that he was the one who drove Peter home after that happened.” I’m tempted to ask him if he knows Jamie, but then I remember that fifty people are out there in the bedroom, listening to my conversation with this guy. Fifty people who are probably already plotting their revenge against me. I keep my mouth shut. Stephanie tries to raise her head, but Bobby tells her not to move, to just relax, that she’s going to be fine. She opens her mouth to say something, but only spit bubbles come out. I reach for a towel and start trying to get some of the puke off me.
“Little young to be drinking,” he says to me.
“It’s homecoming.” I shrug. “You remember, right?”
“Yeah. It seems like a long time ago, though, all that partying. You okay? How much have you had?” he asks.
“Me? None.”
“None?” he says, skeptically.
“Rosie?” Robert calls again, his voice closer.
Bobby looks at me, expecting me to answer, but I don’t. “Is that your boyfriend out there?” he finally asks.
I shake my head. “Just my ride home. It’s past my curfew.”
“The cops are confiscating keys and calling parents, so I don’t think he’s going to be driving you anywhere. Why don’t you go tell them what happened so they can file a report.” Bobby leans in and says quietly, “Talk to the older guy. He’s nicer. And don’t worry about your friend. We’ll take good care of her. What’s her name?”
“Stephanie Trainer,” I say, gingerly picking up her bag from the vomit-covered floor and wiping it off with the towel, which is useless because now the towel is also completely vomit-covered. I gag as I hand the bag to Bobby, but he doesn’t appear to be grossed out at all. He’s seen a lot worse, I guess.
“The cops will probably take you home without calling your parents— Uuh, your mom. Think of it as a little reward for being the good citizen tonight,” he says.
Whistle-blower is more like it.
When I walk into the room, everyone falls silent, even Robert, who I now see was being held back from coming into the bathroom by a cop with gray hair who looks like he’s about two seconds away from retirement. My classmates all stare at me as if they’d just learned that I was a serial killer who had murdered each and every member of their families.
“Are you Rose?” asks the older cop. When I nod, he lets go of Robert and gestures for me to follow him out of the room past the younger, mean-looking cop, who is holding a cardboard box that he’s filling with all the alcohol he can find. Some of the guys are watching him with tears in their eyes—they worked very hard, probably calling in a lot of favors, to score all those bottles for tonight.
I’m so dead.
“I’m Officer Webster. Grab your things,” he says, slapping his nightstick in his hand, his eyes on the grief-stricken boys. I hold up my bag, showing him that I already have my things. He steps out of the way so I can walk in front of him, and we head out of the room and across the balcony to the staircase.
It’s like walking a gauntlet. Richie Hamilton watches me as if he can’t quite grasp what’s happening. I hear somebody behind him say, “Nice work, Rose.” And when we walk past Matt and Mike, Matt snarls at me, “What the hell did you do?”
Officer Webster’s nightstick goes “thwack” against his palm, and Matt shrinks back a little, which I thoroughly enjoy. It might be the last moment of enjoyment I will ever experience in my teenage life. I ignore Matt and look at Mike.
“Stephanie’s in there, Mike. She almost died.” I have no idea if she really almost died or not, but I feel like saying it anyway. “You might want to go check on her before they take her to the hospital. In fact, maybe you should go to the hospital with her. That would be the nice thing to do. Since you’re her date,” I say, with extra emphasis on the word “date.” He looks a little ashamed as he heads toward the room, and my opinion of him improves. Slightly. As I go down the staircase, I hear Matt say, “You just screwed this whole night up for everybody, you know that?”
When we get to the bottom of the stairs, the cop leads me across the parking lot to his car. Someone on the balcony yells, “Cuff her!” and they all start clapping. I feel my face turning red, and I don’t turn around. “Where do you live?” he asks.
“Brook Road, in Union.”
He opens the back door to the cruiser and says, “Get in. I’ll drive you home.”
The thought of arriving home late for curfew in a cop car with flashing emergency lights makes me feel sick. Although I might still prefer it to riding home with Robert and his condom collection. The jury is still out on that one. But I know I don’t want my mother to look out the window and see me getting out of a police cruiser.
“Would it be possible to wait for one of my friends to drive me home?” I ask, hoping against hope.
The officer looks at me and then up at my jeering classmates. He sighs a very deep, bone-weary sigh.
“Rose, trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to stick around here. I don’t think your friends are too happy with you,” he says, shaking his head as if he can’t believe what I did any more than my classmates can. “Monday is not going to be easy for you.” He looks up at the balcony and waves his nightstick, getting them to shut up for a few seconds. “Go on, get in. Watch your head.”
I duck into the back of the car, my hands clasped in front of me as if Officer Webster had actually slapped on handcuffs. He gets in the front and picks up the radio to tell the station where he’s going. Before he starts the car, he turns around and says to me through the metal gate that’s supposed to keep me from doing anything bad to him, “Did you at least have a good time before your friend almost drank herself to death?”
I don’t know what the appropriate response is here. Maybe, No, Officer, I had an awful time because my date brought condoms, thinking that I was going to have sex with him. Or perhaps, I can’t remember anything that happened before I dialed 911 and committed social suicide, Officer. And then there’s always, Yes, Officer, I had an incredible time because somebody else’s boyfriend kissed me, and it was the best first kiss anyone could ever ask for, and even though I have no idea if we will ever kiss again, or if his girlfriend is going to try to smother me with her gold-and-black pom-poms, it was all worth it.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I don’t know how to have fun. Tracy always says I need to loosen up. But I don’t want to take my clothes off in front of half the school, and I don’t want to have a funnel full of vodka jammed down my throat. I don’t want demonic cheerleaders making me do awful things, and I don’t want a jock boyfriend who pressures me into having sex and might be cheating on me.
None of that is fun, as far as I’m concerned. It seems more like the ninth circle of hell than ninth grade. But what do I know?
quagmire (noun): a predicament; a bad situation
(see also: arriving home in a police car)
12
AS I HEAD up the front walk, light from the TV flickers through the window onto the frozen lawn. The effect would be pretty if it didn’t mean that my mother is waiting up for me. Of course she is. That’s the kind of luck I have.
She pulls the curtain to the side and looks out the window just in time to see the officer leaving in his cruiser. The front door flies opens as I reach for the handle, and I expect her to be standing there, having run from the TV room to the door at record speed. But it’s not her. My heart does a weird skip-stop thing, missing a few beats, like I’m suspended in that moment between tripping over something and falling to the ground.
Dad?
No, idiot. It’s Peter, your brother, who didn’t bother to show up for Thanksgiving, apparently putting in a rare holiday appearance in honor of Christmas.
Peter doesn’t really look like Dad at all, except for his hair. But apparently when he’s backlit in a doorway and his face is in shadow, he’s a dead ringer.
Bad choice of words. I seem to do that a lot.
“You okay?” he asks, looking really worried. I’m guessing I look like I’ve seen a ghost.
“Did you just get out of a police car?” my mother says, her voice shrill and grating, like a dentist’s drill on high speed. “It’s forty-five minutes past your curfew. What is going on? Where the hell have you been?”
“Hurry up, get in here—it’s freezing,” Peter says, ignoring Mom and helping me take off my coat.
“You sit down right now and explain,” she demands, grabbing me by the arm and shoving me onto the couch so hard that my head makes contact with the wall. Peter is so surprised by her minor act of violence that he forgets to finish closing the door.
“Did something happen? Are you hurt? Is Robert hurt? Was there an accident?” She’s standing in front of me, yelling into my face. In a strange way, I feel like she’s looking at me for the first time in months. Well, she’s looking at me like she’s never seen me before, but at least she’s seeing me.
Peter is suddenly between us, facing her, my coat still in his hands, cold December air pouring in through the partially open front door.
“Mom, you’re being crazy. Let her answer one question at a time.”
My mother puts her hands on her hips and stares at the ceiling, shaking her head. Peter slowly turns toward me without taking his eyes off her. He actually looks a little freaked out. I guess my beloved brother expected to come home to a house that was exactly like it used to be before he left—minus Dad, of course. Well, sorry to disappoint you, Peter, but life here in good old Union did not freeze in time the second you departed for college, and nothing is like it was before you left. Your mother and sister have been replaced by aliens that have no common language and no clue how to talk to each other.
“Rose? You have three seconds to start explaining yourself,” she says to the ceiling.
“I’m fine, Mom. Everyone’s fine. Stephanie just drank too much—”
“She drank? There was alcohol?” my mother says, her hands flying up into the air.
“Mom! Stop!” Peter demands. My mother goes quiet again but she’s pacing now. When did Peter start talking to Mom like that? And when can I start doing it? “What the hell happened, Rose?” he asks.
I debate whether I should tell the truth or not but realize there’s absolutely no point in lying. The whole town will know what happened by morning. “Stephanie got sick and I was worried, so I called 911. I thought she was dying. The EMTs and the cops came and broke up the party—”
“I thought you said you were going to Tracy’s after the dance!”
“We were supposed to go there, but we ended up at the Amore Hotel instead—”
“What do you mean, ‘We ended up at the Amore Hotel’? You don’t just end up at a sleazy hotel at age fourteen! Do you realize you were supposed to be home close to an hour ago?” my mother yells. I’m about to scream back at her when her furious expression melts off her face, and she bursts into tears.
Peter and I look at each other, stunned. Something weird is happening here—it’s like we’re watching our mother wake up from a six-month coma.
And then I realize: that’s exactly what we’re watching. She’s been in shock since she got the call the day after Peter’s graduation party.
The call came out of the blue, which I guess it probably always does. Even if someone you love is in a war, you don’t really think that they’re going to die. You know it’s a possibility, but you don’t believe that someday, two nicely dressed soldiers are going to show up at your door and tell you that the person you love is dead.
Not that that’s how it happens for contractors’ families.
Those nicely dressed soldiers that show up at front doors, bearing bad news in all those war movies only visit soldiers’ families. Apparently contractors’ families just get a phone call. I still have no idea what the person on the other end of the line said to my mother that day. For all I know, they said, “Your husband is dead. Sorry,” and hung up. It wouldn’t surprise me—people don’t care about contractors’ contributions to the war. Or maybe it’s not even that people don’t care—they just don’t know. They don’t know that there are all these non-soldier people over there trying to do normal jobs like build things and drive trucks and deliver supplies in the middle of a war zone, even though they don’t know the first thing about how to survive there.
Anyway, when the call came, Mom answered the phone, went into shock and has been there ever since. Until the terror of losing another one of us snapped her right out of it.
“Mom,” Peter says quietly, taking her by the shoulders. “Sit.” He pushes her gently into a chair. “Rose is fine. She’s right here. Nothing happened to her. See?” He gestures toward me. “She’s fine.”
My mother glances at me, taking me in from head to toe like she’s looking for injuries. Then she takes a few deep breaths and wipes her eyes. She’s starting to look embarrassed already, as if she shouldn’t have cried in front of us. “Where is Stephanie?”
“The EMTs took her to the hospital.”
“And Robert?”
“I don’t know, probably at home.”
“Why don’t you know where h
e is, Rose?” she asks, her tone implying that once again, I’ve mistreated Robert. This pisses me off.
“Because I wasn’t allowed to stay long enough to see what happened to him. The police officer wanted to get me out of there before everyone tried to kill me.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
“For calling the cops, who confiscated all their alcohol,” Peter answers, guessing correctly.
“Were you drinking?” she asks.
“No.”
“You weren’t drinking,” she says skeptically.
“Why even ask me if you’re not going to believe what I tell you?” I snap.
She stands up from her chair and points a finger in my face. “You are grounded,” she says, deadly calm, all trace of tears gone from her voice.
“What? Why? For calling 911?”
“For scaring me by being more than an hour late for your curfew—”
“I was only forty-five minutes late!” I say, rage starting to boil up from the pit of my stomach. As my temperature rises and my common sense takes its leave, a thought calmly pops into my head: I don’t have panic attacks—what I have are rage attacks.
“—and for lying to me about where you were going after the dance.”
“I didn’t—”
“We’ll discuss the specifics in the morning,” she says, her therapy voice back in place, the cracks in her facade firmly sealed up again.
“Mom, that’s not fair. Rose did exactly what you would have—” starts Peter. I cut him off by grabbing the first thing I see and chucking it at the wall, effectively destroying any case Peter was about to make about me behaving responsibly. Peter and my mom duck as holiday M&Ms go flying and a candy dish shatters to the left of a bare Christmas tree that is leaning against a wall in a bucketfull of water. The sound of the glass breaking and the M&Ms clattering to the floor is unbelievably satisfying.