For my mom. “Sing for us, Janet!”
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text and illustrations copyright © 2013 by Olivia Samms
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to:
Amazon Publishing
Attn: Amazon Children’s Publishing
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
www.amazon.com/amazonchildrenspublishing
ISBN-13: 9781477816509 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 147781650X (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781477866504 (eBook)
ISBN-10: 1477866507 (eBook)
Book design by Sammy Yuen
Editor: Marilyn Brigham
First edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
It was the…
I am fifteen…
3 months 1 day 12 hours
The first time…
I gaze down…
3 months 1 day 19.5 hours
3 months 3 days 12 hours
3 months 5 days 19 hours
3 months 7 days 12 hours
3 months 8 days 7 hours
3 months 8 days 16 hours
3 months 9 days 8 hours
3 months 9 days 15.5 hours
3 months 10 days 7 hours
3 months 10 days 16 hours
3 months 12 days 17 hour
3 months 15 days 9 hours
3 months 16 days 13 hours
3 months 17 days 5.5 hours
3 months 20 days 16 hours
4 months 16 hours
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It was the pom-pom the boys spotted first. The metallic strands were tangled around a batch of tall cattails. The rain-soaked cheerleading skirt, hung to dry, was draped over a wild lilac bush. A size 7-1/2 white tennis shoe lay wedged in mud at their feet, at the edge of the creek.
The boys, sophomores at Packard High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, were cutting class. Mason got a hold of what he thought was some weed. Joey was pissed at his mom and dad for grounding him that weekend over a bad grade on a chemistry test. So they cut PE, lunch, and study hall—not really classes, they justified—hiked down to the creek a mile west of the school, and lit up some oregano-laced pencil shavings.
Believing he indeed felt a buzz, Mason untangled the lone, soaked pom-pom from the cattails. “Stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!”
Joey snorted with laughter and held the cheerleading skirt up to his body, kicking his legs high into the air until he tripped on the muddy tennis shoe. He fell, his knees hitting the wet ground first. His upper body followed—his head slapping against the cold, pale flesh of her right thigh.
She was on her back at the edge of the creek, lying beneath an old, wooden, waterlogged canoe. Only her bruised legs were exposed—splayed, one bent over the other, posed in a twisted triangle.
Joey jumped up and vomited. “Oh my god, what the fuck is that? Who is that?”
Mason inched his way over to the body. He snapped off a branch from the thicket, poked at the rotted canoe, and pushed it toward the water. The wood broke apart, splintering, floating away downstream like a group of innocent bystanders.
Her torso was wrapped in a moldy blanket. Her head was tilted to the side, her neck swollen with red welts and bruises. Her normally sleek blond hair was now brown, caked with mud and strewn across her face like a dirty mop. Her eyes were blindfolded with a black scarf.
“Is that who I think it is? Is she… is she fucking dead?” Joey asked.
Mason bent down, pulled her hair off her face, and lifted the scarf from her eyes. He placed his fingers on her neck, below her ear, feeling for a pulse.
Willa blinked a swollen, bloodshot eye at him and grabbed his ankle.
I am fifteen minutes late, and I feel like everyone is staring at me. Please, please don’t look at me—I don’t want to be here. I don’t belong here, I silently scream to them. I’m seventeen and should be out with friends, having a good time, doing stupid shit that only seventeen-year-olds do.
Oh yeah, that’s what got me in trouble in the first place—the stupid shit.
I find an empty metal folding chair in the back row and sit, hoping the meeting will continue on, but the chair squeaks on the linoleum floor as I scoot it forward. One of the fine-tipped pens holding up my piled, black kinky nest of hair falls to the ground. I pick it up, and the dozen silver bangles on my wrist jangle. My sketchbook falls out of my vintage-sixties fringed handbag with a thud. So much for sneaking in the back.
They continue to stare, and the mediator—the man in the front of the room, wearing a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt—says, “Welcome! Aloha!” He smiles and nods at me like an idiot bobblehead, and he waits. They all wait for the words I don’t want to say.
Fuck it—whatever. “My name is Bea, and I’m an addict and alcoholic.”
I hate those words and only say them because I’m ordered to—an order enforced by this ridiculous “club” that I’ve found myself thrown into because of my parents.
“Hello, Bea. I understand you get your three-month chip today.” Hawaiian-shirt man smiles. Everyone in the room claps as he walks over and hands me a cheap-looking plastic chip. I roll my eyes and drop it into my purse.
They’re all phonies—plastic, like the chip—a bunch of losers. A housewife in khakis two sizes too small; a grandma in a muumuu that no doubt smells of mothballs; a trucker guy wearing a wifebeater—all sitting under the flickering, fluorescent lights of St. Anne’s recreational hall. Strong coffee percolates in the back kitchen; it stinks of despair.
They continue on with their own dramas and leave me alone, so I settle in as best I can, crack open my Moleskine sketchbook, a new one from my dad, look at the time on my phone, and write:
3 months
19 hours
21 minutes… sober
Hello new sketchbook :)
Welcome to my life… Beatrice Washington’s
horrible, crappy, sucky life!
Thankfully I am out of rehab—finally—
but my first night of freedom? A stupid AA meeting!
aka… ASSHOLES ANONYMOUS
I spot a couple of smokers at an open side door, polluting the crisp, clean, autumn Michigan air, unable to tear themselves away from their nicotine fix for even an hour. One of the guys is cute—in his twenties or late teens, like me. Regardless, he’s more my type than the lowlifes who fill the hall. And I haven’t seen a member of the opposite sex my age, especially a cute one, for more than three months.
I try to get his attention. I concentrate on his shaggy brown hair, his wide-set eyes that squint when he inhales his cigarette. I will him to look at me. LOOK AT ME, GOD DAMMIT. I blow it out to him like a paranormal cloud of smoke. Look at me now! Look! At! Me!
But he doesn’t.
I think about joining him for a smoke (having picked up the habit at rehab). But I’d probably trip or something, attracting more attention, more stares, and more judgment. And that is so not what I want. What I want is to wake up from this nightmare and have the last three months of my life back.
But since I don’t possess the supernatural power of time travel, I will try and make the best of the hour, make myself more comfortable by placing my leather bomber jacket that I bought at the flea market for thirty-five bucks under my butt for extra padding.
I’m sitting between a granny knitting baby booties and a trucker with major
BO. He’s sound asleep… drooling and snoring, gross!
A redheaded woman walks up to the front. She’s one of the younger ones in this morgue—in her late twenties—and she thinks she’s hot, you can tell. You know, big boobs, big hair, and tons of tats. But her look obviously works for the trucker next to me, as he suddenly wakes with a start and sits on the edge of his folding chair, lapping up every word coming out of her crooked, pencil-lined lips.
Her name is Karin, she says, “with an i instead of an e.” She giggles, like she’s just made a joke. “And I’ve been clean for four years now.”
Applause from the losers. The trucker goes nuts and slaps his dirty paws together, almost hitting me.
Fearing for my safety, I move my chair away from him and a bit closer to granny (I was right about the mothballs), and I begin to doodle in my sketchbook. Karin “with an i instead of an e” continues on with her story. She chokes up a little. I look at her and think, Is that really necessary?
In an instant, the image of a sleeping kid barrels through my head. It starts at the back of my eyeballs and fills my brain, shoots down my right arm, and possesses my hand, and I draw the sleeping child as Karin continues, sharing with us the reason she is here at St. Anne’s church on this shitty October night in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“My rock bottom? When one of my tricks beat my face in—yeah, smashed my nose, broke a cheekbone. It was horrible getting beat up. But the worst part was when I got home. I forgot to call the babysitter and found my three-year-old asleep in my bed—alone. I left him by himself that night,” she cries. “That was it. Everything became crystal clear in that moment—looking at his innocent, perfect little face, knowing that he wanted, needed his mama to clean up her act. I did. And I have never looked back.”
I slam my sketchbook shut.
Holy crap. I drew her sleeping kid.
It’s happening again.
My mom stands over me, over the toilet, watching me pee into a little plastic cup, making sure I don’t dip into the toilet water and dilute whatever she suspects I have taken.
“Christ, Mom, I just got out of rehab this afternoon!”
She doesn’t say anything.
I notice the dark circles around her eyes. The worry wrinkle between her eyebrows seems to be sinking deeper and deeper into her Italian olive skin, embedding itself into her forehead, cracking her face in two, and I feel compelled to say, to lie, “The meeting was good tonight, Mom. I may look for one with a younger crowd, though—they were all pretty old—but it was good.”
“Finish up, Bea, I’m tired.”
It doesn’t matter what I say, the truth or a lie. She doesn’t believe a word out of my mouth—nothing—ever since that night three months ago. Her eyes are set, staring at the prism-shaped cardboard stick that she has placed in the urine-filled cup. And she waits, sitting on the edge of the tub, picking at her paint-stained fingernails. One minute. Two. Three.
And as she waits, I see her relax bit by bit. The minutes tick by. She’s noticing that none of the horizontal lines light up underneath the nefarious drug headings, and gradually the crevice between her eyes starts to fill in and her face solders back together again.
My urine is poured in the toilet and flushed, the cardboard stick and plastic cup tossed into the trash.
She sighs and hugs me, smelling of garlic and olive oil. “I’m glad you’re home, Bea. Now get a good night’s sleep. You have a big day tomorrow.”
Shit. I’m trying not to think about that—starting my senior year, three and a half weeks late at a new school, the massive local public school, Packard High. Great. Just great.
3 months
1 day
12 hours
“Um, excuse me?” I ask the woman behind the cafeteria food counter with the purple hairnet and googly eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything vegetarian or anything, you know, healthy?” She looks at me as if I’ve asked for caviar, grunts, and points at something fluorescent green.
“Oh. Never mind. I guess I’ll have that.” I motion toward a pile of something red and beige. I think it’s lasagna.
After paying for the plate of mystery food, I take in the vast and seemingly endless high school cafeteria. Packard High is a school with two thousand and something students. Damn, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people in the same place all at once. Where the hell do I sit?
I pass table after table and see people’s mouths moving up and down, chewing, probably whispering, “That’s the rehab rat. She was kicked out of that fancy private school. What’s with her hair?” Table after table—jocks, bros, stoners, pretty girls, nerds, loners—I can tell they all shun me like the herpes virus, like I have a red circle around me with a line drawn diagonally through it.
Ah… an empty table by the trash cans—just fine with me, and rather befitting, I’m sure, in the eyes of the teenaged masses.
I pile my wild, thick, Afro-slash-Italian-American, out-of-control dark hair on top of my head to prevent it from dipping into the sludge on the plate and fasten it with a couple of pens. It promptly falls out and into the faux lasagna. I sigh, lose my appetite, and write in my sketchbook:
I blame everything on my hair…
I do.
The pretty girl posse (they’re at every school) pose at the table across from me. They, of course, have thick, luxurious, blow-dried hair and wear ridiculous cheerleading uniforms. I mean, everyone must know that they’re cheerleaders—do they really have to advertise it? They giggle to themselves, dart their long-lashed eyes at me, and whisper.
And, as if on cue, I’m thrust back to Athena Day School for Girls—the school I was kicked out of—and hear the taunting, cruel words from elementary school. Look at the Chia Pet! Beaver-head!
I was born an artistic accident—sort of like one of Jackson Pollock’s chaotic drip paintings—and was cursed with a combination of nappy Afro hair (from my dad) and thick, coarse Italian hair (from my mom). I’ve tried cutting it short—that’s when I first heard the name “Chia Pet.” Grew it shoulder length—hence Beaver-head. I tried everything. It consumed me, playing with my hair. After a while, I gave up and let it grow long, wild, and free.
And here I sit, alone at a table near the trash in a public high school cafeteria. I’m already behind in classes, already anticipating the attached label of “Druggie Chia Pet Beaver-head.” Nightmare material, right?
What the hell. I can handle it.
I sit up a little straighter and “pen” my hair back up. After going through a rehab detox, this is nothing. They can’t hurt me. Nothing, no one can.
Speaking of hair, some odd-looking dude with an Andy Warhol ’do and a camera around his neck is sashaying toward me, holding a paper-bagged lunch. Oh great. He’s smiling and waving like he knows me, and now, oh shit, he’s sitting down next to me.
“Bea? Beatrice Washington?”
“What? What did I do wrong?” I can’t help the knee-jerk reaction.
“It’s Chris. Chris Mayes.” He purses his lips. “You don’t remember me?”
I so want to be left alone. “I don’t know. Should I?”
“Art camp, last winter break? I for sure remember you. You were like the best artist in the class. I sort of bleached my hair since then.”
I squint my eyes and make a triangle with my hands, blocking out his hair. “Oh, right! Chris, of course. You were into photography.”
He holds up his camera, points, and shoots. “Still am.”
“Damn, you look nothing like yourself! You didn’t bleach it, Chris—you fried it.”
“Ha ha. Very funny.”
“Yeah… I remember you—those skinny-ass jeans and the skinny, sexy ass inside them.”
Chris plops his foot up on a chair, pointing at his colorful high-top Converse sneakers. “And these?”
“I can’t believe it! You still have those?”
“Give me a break, Bea. Of course I do. They were hand-painted by a talented young artist—namely, you.�
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I finger the design—a red dragon, a few obscenities in purple, surrounded by gold and green swirls—painted when I was definitely high on something. “If I do say so myself, they are pretty damn cool. A little gay, but cool.”
“Well, that would be me. Gay and cool.” Chris puts his foot back on the ground. “You wouldn’t believe the compliments. You still painting?”
“Ah, no. Been a little busy… rehabbing.”
“Oh, of course… of course you have. I’m sorry, that was rude of me.”
“No, no, Chris. No worries. I’m thrilled I actually know someone in this penitentiary. I had no idea you went to school here.”
“It’s unfortunate, but I do.”
He looks down at my plate of food. “Holy Christ, Bea, what are you doing, eating that crap? Are you trying to poison yourself? Die young?” He tosses my tray into the garbage. “I’m going to have to lay down some rules for you. Rule number one: never, ever eat the food here. The woman who doles it out?”—he looks over at the googly-eyed lady—“The rumor is that she never graduated from high school, resents us all, carries a spray bottle of antifreeze in her pocket, and spritzes it on the food. Here, have half of my sandwich.”
“Shit, that’s gruesome. Okay, thanks, Chris.” I happily take half of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “How did you find me, anyway? There’s like a gazillion people here.”
“Are you kidding? Your hair kind of stands out!”
“Um, look who’s talking!”
Chris suddenly goes serious on me and plants his elbows on the table, resting his chin on his hands. “To tell you the truth, I was looking for you—heard through the gossip chain that you were coming sometime this week. They kicked you out, huh? Athena Day?”
I choke on a clump of peanut butter, and Chris hands me his water bottle. “Yeah. Athena Day School for Bitches—just got out of rehab yesterday.”
“Wow, that’s pretty heavy.”
“Tell me about it. But I’ve been sober for three months—exactly three months, one day, and twelve hours.” I look at the time on my phone. “And now fifteen minutes.” I sigh.
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