North of Normal- A memoir of my wilderness childhood, my unusual family, and how I survived both

by Cea Sunrise Person

  His arm dropped around my shoulders. “Um, I hate to ask this, but . . . how old are you?”

  I threw my head back, hoping it made me look a little older. “Thirteen.”

  “Oh. Wow.” He pulled his arm away just as someone cranked up the music.

  “Barracuda” blasted from the cheap living room speakers, the bass thumping painfully against my eardrums. I looked up and saw Mom. She was dancing with one of her male friends, trailing a silk scarf around his neck with one hand and smoking a joint with the other. The one saving grace about Mom’s parties was that she never invited her boyfriend, who disapproved of pot smoking and other such hippyish pursuits. Mom spotted me and released her victim, floating toward us.

  “Cea! Are you having fun, darling?”

  I slouched against Chris’s shoulder. “Yeah, sure.”

  Mom looked down at us with a stoned smile. “Look at her, Chris. Isn’t she just beautiful?”

  “Sure is. A damn shame I’m almost twice her age.”

  “Yeah, I know. And she’s got the sweetest little bush now. It’s just—”

  “Mom!” I launched myself into a sitting position, my face burning. “How could you—”

  “Oh, Cea, just relax. It’s natural for these things to happen to your body. After all, you’re a teenager now.” She smiled at me again and shook her head. “Thirteen. Same age I was when I—”

  “—lost your virginity and smoked pot for the first time,” I finished for her sarcastically, and then slumped against Chris’s arm again.

  “Yep,” she said, lifting the joint to her lips.

  I flicked my eyes up to hers, and suddenly, even through my fog, I knew what was coming next. She inhaled deeply, then blew smoke from her mouth and held the joint out to me.

  I blinked at her. “Mom!”

  “What?”

  “Are you serious? Mom, you’re offering me pot!”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, well, you’re drinking alcohol, and that’s no better. I’d rather you did this, at least it’s natural. Why don’t you just try it? Maybe it’ll help you . . . I don’t know. Relax a little.”

  I jumped up from the sofa, suddenly sober. “What, you mean because I’m so uptight? Because I don’t do drugs and screw random guys like you did at my age? Like you do now?” I turned my back on her and walked angrily into the kitchen. Pushing through the wall of bodies leaning against the counter, I reached for the vodka bottle and poured myself a long drink. As I slugged it back, I saw Chris weaving his way toward me through the crowd.

  “Hey. Are you okay?” he asked when he reached me.

  I stared at his mouth. Maybe my mother was right, I thought as I swayed from side to side. Maybe I just needed to go with the flow and be more like her. Stepping toward him, I slid my hands up his arms and planted my lips on his. We stood like that for a moment, but then the nausea hit. I broke away from him and stumbled to the bathroom. The last thing I heard before I slammed the door shut was Mom, laughing in that high-pitched, stoned voice that I knew so well.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I sat in my bedroom, tapping my pencil listlessly against my science textbook. I was supposed to be doing homework, but I couldn’t focus. Mom was out with her married boyfriend, from across the hall I could hear my grandmother screwing her lover, and the house smelled like pot smoke. I lay back on my bed and gazed up at the ceiling.

  The doorbell rang, and I reluctantly rose and walked down the hall. I knew it would be Tiffany from school. She was the only person I had let get a glimpse into my crazy world, but somehow I didn’t even feel like seeing her today. I opened the door and smiled at her wanly.

  “Hey. Come in.”

  She followed me down the hall, and I closed my bedroom door behind us. “Whoa,” she said, sniffing the air. “Smells like your mom’s been at it again.”

  “Nah. It’s my grandma this time.”

  “Your grandma? Wow, I didn’t know. She does it too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. That’s so cool. I wish my parents were more like yours.”

  “What do you mean?” I said irritably. “I don’t have ‘parents,’ or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “Parents, mom. Same dif.”

  “No. It’s not.” I made a face and drew my legs under me on the bed. “And trust me, you don’t want a family that’s anything like mine.”

  Tiffany sat down and reached for my pink jewelry box. She opened the lid and tinkling music filled the air. Then she closed it, opened it, closed it—

  “Do you mind?” I snapped. “That’s kind of annoying.”

  “Hey. What’s with you today?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Fine! Sorry for asking.” We sat side by side in silence for a minute. “Hey,” she said finally. “Want to go to the mall?”

  I shook my head. Go to the mall was our code for shoplifting, which we did once or twice a week. But suddenly, the thought of it made me feel a little ill. “No. Look, I’m sorry. I just . . . I don’t know. But do you ever think, What if I never get the life I want? Like, what if this is it?”

  She shrugged again. “Dunno. I mean, what do you want?”

  “I don’t know. I just always had this weird sort of dream about having a life that was . . . normal. But sometimes . . . sometimes I wonder if this is it. Like, my mom and grandma smoke pot and screw all day, but we live in the city now at least, so this is as normal as it gets for me. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t. She stood up and hooked her thumbs in her pockets. “Well, I should probably mosey. I’m supposed to be grounded. But hey, if I can get away this weekend, ya wanna hit Rod Johnson’s keg party? His parents are away.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said distractedly. “Sounds like fun.”

  After Tiffany left, I walked back to my room and looked around. There was Suzie Doll on the shelf, right beside a stolen bottle of Fabergé perfume. My jewelry box, sitting on top of a stolen Stephen King book.

  Shoplifting. Stocking up.

  Booze. Pot.

  I shook my head, and then I went to my closet and ripped every item of shoplifted clothing from its hanger and pitched it on the floor. Then I gathered it all up, walked down the hall and dropped it on Mom’s bed.

  When I got back to my room, I stood gazing at the collage over my bed. I had found the frame in our back alley, and spent hours pasting into it pictures of models cut from magazines. I took a deep breath and stood up tall. The idea that had been in my head for so many years now suddenly seemed a lifeline. There was one way to escape my crazy family, and all I had to do was grab hold of it.

  I STEPPED INTO THE room and glanced around, then made my way to the receptionist’s desk. “I heard there’s, like, a modeling competition going on here?” I said, chewing my lip. “I, um, read about it in the newspaper?”

  “Yes. Please fill this out, and the photographer will see you shortly.” She handed me a form, and I took a seat.

  The room was already filled with at least ten other modeling hopefuls, dressed to the nines and fully made up as if they had just stepped from the pages of a magazine. I had lost the cheap-looking makeup and let my hair go natural, but now I was regretting it. I felt like a child next to them.

  I looked down at the form. Minimum age to enter is 15, it said in bold letters. I swallowed hard and wrote down my birthday, subtracting two from the year. Then I filled in my weight, eye color and hair color, passed in the form and sat back nervously to wait. A door opened, and a slight man holding a massive camera stepped into the room. His eyes moved from face to face, and then stopped on mine.

  “You,” he said, beckoning with his finger.

  I blinked back at him and glanced to either side of me. No, he was definitely talking to me. I stood up and followed him on rubbery legs. After closing the door behind him, he looked me up and down. I tried to read his expression, but my nerves were too frazzled to focus.

  “I’m Wes,” he sa
id finally. “How old are you?”

  “F-fifteen.” My voice caught in my throat.

  He nodded and waved me over to a white backdrop. “I’m going to take a few shots. Just be natural.”

  “Okay. Should I . . . put some makeup on maybe? I noticed the other girls—”

  “No, no, you look great.” He lifted the camera to his eye. “Let’s begin.”

  This is it, I thought. I turned to one side and looked into the lens over my shoulder, smiling tentatively.

  “Good,” he said. “Perfect.”

  I turned to face him and dropped my chin.

  “That’s it. Eyes here. Beautiful.”

  Beautiful. I felt exhilarated, as if I had just been taken for a ride around a racetrack. Ten minutes later, Wes lowered his lens and grinned at me. “Wow,” he said. “You’re an absolute natural.”

  My heart leapt. “Really?”

  “Really. You’ve got everything it takes. The only real question is, are you ready for this?”

  “Yes!” I said, my voice embarrassingly eager. “I mean, totally.”

  He nodded. “And your family . . . Mom? Dad? Are they supportive?”

  I almost laughed. Supportive? “Yeah,” I said. “My mom . . . she’s, like, good with whatever.”

  “All right,” Wes said, nodding at me. “Then let’s get you in to see the agency director. We have a scout coming from New York next week, and I have a feeling he’s going to just love you.”

  One hour later, I walked out of the agency feeling like I had springs under my feet. I couldn’t stop smiling as I stood at the bus stop to go home. You are no longer looking at a too-tall, skinny teenager; you’re looking at a future model, I thought whenever someone met my eye. But I also knew I would never be able to explain my elation to an outsider. I was silently celebrating not just the beginning of a glamorous career, but also what I saw as my ticket to normal. Modeling was going to give me the money and freedom to escape my family and create the life I so desperately wanted.

  Me onstage during the modeling contest I entered when I was only thirteen.

  There was just one thing standing in my way.

  “HI, GREG? IT’S CEA. Your, um, daughter?”

  There was a beat on the other end of the line, and then, “Why, Cea! How nice to hear from you! How are you, sweetie?”

  “Pretty good. How’s, um . . . the baby? Your new daughter, I mean. Not a baby anymore, I guess.” I silently cursed myself, hating the obvious edge of jealously in my voice.

  “Great,” he said. “You know, busy! Growing too fast and running us ragged.”

  “That’s good.” I swallowed hard. No matter how much I tried not to be bitter, it still cut deeply each time I heard evidence of the charmed childhood my half sister seemed to be leading.

  My dad cleared his throat. “So. It’s been a while, huh? How’s school?”

  “It’s okay. Well, I always get As in English. My teacher says I’m a good writer.” I hesitated, then decided to go for it. “I, um . . . I wrote this story about getting drunk at a friend’s party. I thought maybe she’d be mad or, like, report me to the principal or something, but she actually gave me a really good grade. Um . . .” My voice trailed off. Suddenly, I was embarrassed at my disclosure. It sounded pathetic to my ears, like I was begging him to notice that I was a teenager now.

  “Is that right,” Greg said in a measured tone. “And . . . how are you feeling about that? About getting drunk, I mean?”

  “Feeling about it? Um, I’m not sure, I . . .” I gripped the phone hard, desperate to change the subject. “Anyway, that’s not why I called. Actually, something amazing has happened. You’ll never believe this, but I’ve been invited to go to New York. To . . . to model. With Elite—that’s, like, a really big agency and stuff. This summer. Isn’t that awesome?”

  “Why yes, it certainly is. And I can’t say as I’m surprised. You’ve certainly got the height and looks for it.”

  “Um . . . thanks. It’s just . . . there’s one problem. The agency . . . they’re going to buy my plane ticket and give me a place to stay, of course I’ll have to pay them back when I start working, but that shouldn’t take long, at least Wes, that’s the name of the photographer who discovered me, he said it shouldn’t take long, he says I’ve got a classic look and that I move, like, really well in front of the camera, plus I look a lot older than thirteen so I’ll probably get booked for magazines like Seventeen and stuff, and . . .” I realized I was rambling, but I didn’t care. Anything was better than getting to the point that I needed to come to in this conversation. Maybe, if I went on long enough, he would figure out what I was getting at and just offer.

  He cleared his throat again. “I see. So will you . . . have a chaperone? Your mom, maybe? I can’t imagine you going to New York alone, sweetie.”

  I felt myself blanch. “I, uh . . . well, Mom can’t really come with me, but I’m, like, really mature for my age, so you don’t have to worry or anything.”

  “Well, of course I trust you. And I guess . . . if this is what you want, I can’t really step in now and say no, right?”

  “Yeah, not really, I guess . . .”

  “Well. This certainly sounds exciting, sweetie,” Greg said. “So, what’s the problem?”

  I took a deep breath. How badly I wanted to do this without my father’s help. In my fantasy, this conversation would never happen. Instead, I would simply send him a magazine with my face on the cover in a few years with a short note: Here’s what I’ve been up to lately. Hope you and the family are well. But it just wasn’t possible. “I . . . I need a bit of money. Not a lot, just enough to buy food and subway tickets for, like, a month. Mom, she just doesn’t have it, so I need maybe like a thousand dollars, tops, or if that’s too much—”

  “Of course, of course. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  My heart leapt. “Really?”

  “Yes. I’m far from wealthy, as you know, but this seems important to you.”

  “It is. It really is. And when I make it big, I’ll pay you back, I promise, and—”

  “No, no, that’s not necessary. Really.”

  “Wow. Well . . . thank you. I mean it.” I swallowed hard, and then said something that pained me but that was undeniably true. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

  He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice sounded softer than I’d ever heard it. “It’s the least I can do,” he said. “The very least.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The air in the subway smelled like urine and tin. I emerged from the station into the bright sunlight, pushing my way through the throng on the street. Sweat dripped down my sides as I wiped at my face, fighting to keep the humidity at bay. A construction worker hissed and clicked his tongue at me, a sound that drove me wild with annoyance but that was slowly fading to the background of my daily life here in the city. I had only been in New York for two weeks, but I already knew the subway system by heart. I was fearless on the streets, holding my head high as I blew past the panhandlers and muttering weirdos, hunting out the cheapest delis and taking the subway to the Bronx to shoot one job on location.

  My quick adaptation to the city was something even my agency commented on. “You’re our youngest girl this summer, but you’re also our bravest. It’s like you were born here!” one of my bookers commented to me, and I smiled, thinking of the shock on her face if I were to tell her the truth of where I actually came from. But what she said was true. While girls three and four years older than me cried to their parents or boyfriends on the phone, cowered over cockroaches and blew their cash on taxis because they were either too afraid or too clueless to take the subway, I calmly did my go-sees, test shoots and very first bookings, returning weary each evening to the apartment on Lexington Avenue I currently called home.

  But I was also learning that modeling was not a fairy tale. Hardly anyone got discovered and woke up six months later to find her face on the cover of Vogue and a limo wait
ing at her door to take her to the Concorde. The reality was that I lived in a cockroachridden, two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with nine other girls that first summer. We set the timer for showers, stored our clothing under our mattresses and wrote death threats on our labeled food. Every single girl in the apartment other than me smoked, filling the tiny space with toxic gray clouds as they sat chatting about coveted bookings, pimple remedies, grapefruit diets and boyfriends back home who just didn’t understand. I deflected advances from photographers during the day and offers of drugs during the evenings, when we were expected to attend industry dinners.

  A frame from one of my first modeling shoots in New York. I was just fourteen.

  But to me, it was all worth it. The fact was that I loved modeling, my actual time in front of the camera. My enjoyment was not driven by vanity—for it was actually rare to encounter a vain model, as picked on and insecure as we were about our looks—but creativity. It took no effort at all for me to morph into the photographer or client’s vision: the innocent ingenue, the smiling teen, or the confident young woman. While the camera was clicking, I often felt like the luckiest girl alive. I was only fourteen years old, I had already found my life’s calling, and with a little luck someday I would be paid generously for it.

  But still, at night, I would sometimes think about Mom and cry softly into my pillow. I called her once, but she was rushing out the door to meet her boyfriend and promised to call me back. She never did.

  “You’re so young,” one of my roommates said to me once. “Why isn’t your mother here with you?”

  “My mom? She, uh . . . just trusts me to do my own thing. I’m independent,” I added, lifting my chin.

  “But doesn’t she, like, worry about you?”

  “Actually . . .” I cleared my throat, and before I could stop them, the words were out of my mouth. “She doesn’t live with me. She’s kind of, like, an unfit parent.”

  “Oh.” My roommate looked taken aback, but she didn’t question me.