Chapter 3: 9 Months, 27 Days Earlier
“Jenny, don’t drink it all!” Katelyn yelled from the cramped living room into her sister’s even smaller kitchen. Yelling wasn’t really necessary in Jenny’s small two-bedroom apartment. Katelyn, Jenny, and two of Jenny’s friends were quite close amid the highchair, dollhouse, toy kitchen, and an array of other toddler furniture that filled up the space. Katelyn didn’t really want another drink. She just didn’t want Jenny to have another drink.
Jenny, Katelyn’s 19-year-old sister, was pouring the rest of a bottle of neon blue Vodka into a plastic toddler’s cup; some spilled out and down the sides of a fading Elmo decal. The last drops fell from the bottle as Jenny shook it. Jenny let it clatter to the countertop where she grabbed an open lemonade carton. Jenny filled the rest of the cup. She turned to Katelyn with a wicked smile before she tipped the cup to her lips and took a mighty drink. “Ahh,” she exaggerated, “you’ll just have to buy another.”
“Jennieee,” Katelyn whined. “I don’t have any more money.”
“You like coming over here? Want to go home. Should I call mom?” Jenny turned to her two friends who were watching a reality show on the screen; they had turned to watch the sisterly spat. “Katelyn is mom’s fav’rite,” she slurred.
Katelyn looked down at her own drink to avoid the obvious threat; her sister was drunk and she was a mean drunk. Jenny, even though she was four years older, was the only sister Katelyn considered a friend. Even a mean Jenny was better than going home.
Katelyn forked over her allowance or whatever she could skim from her mom’s wallet so Jenny could buy booze. And, Jen let her hide out and drink with her. It was a give and take deal, but she’d take it. Her mom and dad were fighting in full force again. Her mom thought he was back on drugs. So, whenever her dad made it home, all they did was fight until he left again. Listening to it all was painful, but even more painful was the truth. Her dad wasn’t acting right. Katelyn didn’t want to believe he was back on drugs. Katelyn couldn’t deal with that again. Her sister, on the other hand, she could handle.
“Sure, Jen, let’s call mom and let her know I’m with you. Let’s call her so she can really know that you’re still a drunk instead of just suspecting you are.” Katelyn got up from the worn sofa while she talked. “Let’s call her so you can wish your kids goodnight.” She knew she’d hit a nerve with the last jab and strode quickly to the bedroom.
“You can leave now!” Jenny yelled at her.
Katelyn ignored her as she stepped into the dark bedroom and slammed the door behind her. Through the thin door, the TV show was only slightly muffled and her sister’s words were only masked by the room’s darkness. “She may have them, but they’re my kids. They’re my kids!” A commercial filled her short silence.
Katelyn couldn’t help but picture the plump cheeks of her niece and the baby blue wide eyes of her youngest nephew. Kayla was almost three and Jacob was at that cute, smiley six month stage. Katelyn’s mom took custody of the kids after Jenny went missing for a week the previous month. When Jenny came back, without the dirtbag she left with, their mom wouldn’t give Kayla and Jacob back until Jenny went through an alcohol treatment program. Jenny still hadn’t signed up. This month, Jenny was going to lose her welfare payments, but even that didn’t seem to worry her.
“Let her take care of them; it’s more she ever did for me.” Sadness mixed in with the bitterness in Jenny’s voice, but Katelyn knew better than to play into her pity party.
Katelyn moved away from the door after she was sure her sister had moved on. She heard Jenny complain to her friends and, shortly thereafter, wicked laughter from her friends. Katelyn threw herself on the unmade bed; her eyes had adjusted to the dark and she kept the lights off. She checked the time on her cell phone: 12:36 a.m. It was too late to walk anywhere; the stupid city curfew was at 11:00 p.m. on weekends and the cops loved to stop her. Her last name might as well be stamped on her in reflector neon. Thanks, Dad, for the legacy, she thought. Katelyn had already been stopped and escorted home twice by the police. Luckily for her, after the cops left, her parents ended up cussing about the crooked cops rather than punishing her.
She leaned back on the bed, knocking over a laundry basket full of clothes onto the floor in the process. She didn’t bother picking the clothes up. They were probably dirty anyways. Jenny hadn’t asked her to borrow money for laundry lately.
On the ceiling she could see the outlines of stick-on, glow-in-the-dark stars and planets. They didn’t glow. The lights had been off for too long. Some previous tenant had put them there to amuse their children, probably someone like Jenny, a single mom on assistance. The apartment complex was for single moms; the rent was super cheap because the Iowa Department of Human Services paid most of it while moms found jobs or went to school. The State must not have found out about Jenny’s custody issue yet. If Katelyn needed to, that was something else she could use as leverage against Jenny. Katelyn hated fighting dirty, but kind just wasn’t how her family played anymore.
She checked her phone again. The screen’s light momentarily blinded her in the dark. No calls, no messages. She ran through recent texts and sent a few “wussup” probes to a few people from school. Emily, a sophomore Katelyn met in Foods class last trimester, said she was going to a party tonight on a junior’s farm outside of town; Katelyn wasn’t invited. No freshmen were ever formally invited to the upperclassman parties. But, Emily didn’t even ask Katelyn if she wanted to go. Suspicion crept into Katelyn’s mind.
She started a new text to Emily: “where r u?”
She watched the message send, and the screen went to black. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark again. The room had a stale, dirty smell to it. It’s good the lights are out, she thought. She didn’t want to look at stains in the warped carpet or on her sister’s clothes. Now that she centered on the smell, she couldn’t shake it. She pushed the window up with her foot, but it only rose a few inches. The early May evening was considerably warm already and the air wasn’t stirring.
Katelyn pulled her t-shirt collar up over her nose. The familiar laundry soap fragrance was traceable under the smell of secondhand smoke. Her mom had started smoking again when her dad came home. He already burned through more than a pack a day on his own. She hated smoking. She had grown up her whole life breathing cigarette smoke; the thought of putting a cigarette on her lips on purpose grossed her out. Still, the smell was familiar, almost comforting. There was another scent today; she closed her eyes to concentrate on it. The baby smell of Jacob still lingered from where she had patted him to sleep earlier.
Vibration and light announced the new message on her phone: “Leaving lame party. Going to RD. Wtf r u?”
Yes, a way out, thought Katelyn. RD: Emily was headed to Rollins’ Dam, not so much a dam, but a pile of logs and rocks in a creek that dwindled to a trickle after the spring rains finished. It was on the edge of the Rollins Acreage, off a gravel road accessed through a rarely-used county road. Emily’s friends had turned it into a hangout complete with cheap plastic lawn chairs and a homemade fire pit. It was outside of town limits and therefore out of the jurisdiction of Northrup’s PD. The County’s Sheriff Department didn’t have it on their radar, either. Emily had her driver’s license and must have been able to borrow her dad’s car tonight.
She sat up and typed. “Fun. Can u pick me up a@ Jenny’s?” Before she could push send, the screen flashed a red warning “Battery Exhausted” and then switched to the fatal “Turning Phone Off” message. Katelyn moaned and slumped back on the bed. “Great,” she muttered, and she felt her eyes start to brim with tears.
Katelyn didn’t cry in the open, not where anyone could see. She didn’t dare let her family see that they could hurt her. Crying never brought words of comfort. Even now, with her nieces and nephews running around the house, their tears and cries only
brought angry shouting from her sisters and her parents. Tears didn’t earn sympathy in the Wells household.
In the dark, though, sometimes. When she couldn’t sleep, long after her mother stopped coughing in the living room, tears just slid out of her. And now, tears trailed slowly out of the corner of her eyes to run into her hair.
Minutes passed, maybe a half hour. Katelyn seemed to come out of a trance when she heard the deeper bass of a male voice in the next room. Then, a second male voice said hello. She heard her sister’s friendly-flirt tone, an over-compensating pitch that girls instantly recognize as fake but that boys seem to believe.
“Now the party can begin!” Jenny screamed, “Ladies, we’re back in business.” The new arrivals must have come bearing gifts, the 40% proof kind. More greeting sounds and friendly insults were thrown around and now music accompanied the rising noise. She heard Jen say, “Sure, right back there.” The bathroom, right next to this bedroom. She looked to see shadowed forms under the door as they stopped in front of the bathroom. She heard the door open, saw new light—the bathroom—and then the light fade as the door clicked shut. Katelyn pulled herself upright to focus on the problem. The shape of the visitor’s shadow still cast against the carpet through the space under the door. No one had gone into the bathroom. The person was still standing outside the door.
Next, the door handle to the bedroom turned. Katelyn jumped back into the corner of the bed, crouched and still. The door swung open briefly and the shadow quickly sneaked into the room and closed the door behind.
Katelyn didn’t mean to, but she sucked in air. The intruder instantly turned her way. There was just enough moonlight outside to make everything in the room have enough its form. The moisture of this boy’s eyes reflected a small enough amount of light to reveal that he was looking straight at her. His body didn’t move, but his head tilted to the left.
“What do you want?” Katelyn finally managed.
His body relaxed; he didn’t move away from the door. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
Katelyn was still on guard. “Are you lost? This isn’t the bathroom,” she snapped.
The mystery guest leaned back against the door, his hands casually found his pockets in jeans that hung low on his narrow hips. “Well, we’re all lost,” he paused. “Aren’t we?” His voice was playful, tempting her to relax and play along. He clearly wasn’t leaving. “That is,” he said deeply, “until we find what we’re lookin’ for.”
Katelyn didn’t know whether to be bothered by this boy’s evasive talk or to play along with her own. She didn’t recognize him as anyone she’d met at her sister’s before. Most of the boys that came to Jenny’s were somehow linked to a familiar troublemaker group—friends of one of the kids’ fathers or some seniors from Jenny’s former grade, some still in school, some not. Jenny’s friends were rough; some had been in trouble with drugs and others busted for some misdemeanor theft crime like Jenny. Katelyn didn’t mind this crowd, though. They were more real than most of the people in this town. She felt a bond with them because with every strike against them, it only made them have more in common with her family. Still, it didn’t mean Katelyn should let her guard down. She decided to play along.
“What are you looking for, then? And why do you think you’ll find it in my sister’s bedroom?” she added, swinging her feet off the bed and sitting upright to add more of a challenge in her posture.
“Your sister, huh?” He took his time in reply. Katelyn instantly wondered if she’d given away some bit of knowledge she shouldn’t have. “Well, sister, what are you lookin’ for? And why are you lookin’ for it in the dark?” He followed up his words with a quick reach out to the light switch. Halogen light instantly flooded the room from the overhead bulb. The light shade had been taken down at some point and the bulb burned directly into her eyes. She quickly shut her eyes and turned her head, but she had caught a quick glimpse of the boy.
“Don’t! Turn them off!” she yelled at him. Self consciously, she wondered if she looked like she had been crying and if he could have seen it within those brief seconds.
The room went dark again.
“Sorry. Thought I’d shed some light on the matter,” he joked. She could now picture a face to go with the words. His face had been friendly, amused and slightly smiling. His face looked like a man’s face, not like those of the boyish features of her fellow freshmen classmates. He couldn’t be that old, though. He still looked playful, despite a scruffy head full of dark hair. Combined with his lanky, lean frame, he was attractive—not cute, but decidedly masculine attractive.
Suddenly she became timid. Katelyn wasn’t as carefree in talking to boys as her sisters or her friends. Katelyn envied her girlfriends at school who knew how to come up with funny lines or comments that would get the boys’ attention. The only boy Katelyn felt at ease talking to was her cousin or J.R., her first and only boyfriend back in sixth grade when the term “boyfriend” meant nothing more than giggles at the mention of his name.
“What gives, sister?” the dark shape asked from his position by the door with a voice free of mockery now. In fact, he seemed genuinely curious, concerned even.
“I duhhno,” Katelyn quickly mumbled, instantly regretting the grunting sound. “I guess I don’t want to be around anyone right now.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” he said. “Do you mind if I hang out here with you? Or, is this a one-person hideout?”
“No,” Katelyn started, already at a loss for the right words, “I didn’t mean no to you. I mean, I don’t know you, so it’s not you,” she began to ramble nervously. She gave up and sighed, slumping back against the wall, “Just, I don’t want to be out there.”
The stranger moved away from his lean on the door. “Look,” he said, “why don’t I start out again. I’m Tim.”
Katelyn struggled momentarily with a remaining doubt of caution. “Hi, Tim,” she surrendered. “I’m Katelyn.”
Pick-me-up Page 3