The Kids Are All Right

by Diana Welch

  Russ said that Dad was the best running back North Quincy High had ever seen. The night before the state championships, Dad was at the movies with his girlfriend when a couple of thugs from the rival school crept up behind him and whacked him in the head with a crowbar. Dad couldn’t play and North Quincy lost the big game, which the local papers blamed on the incident. “Your pop was a local hero,” Russ said as Dan, Amanda, and I devoured yet another tidbit about this mythical man, our father.

  Montgomery wound up driving me to Washington, D.C., and we spent the night with his friends Dick and Lisa Castle. Lisa had done her master’s degree at Georgetown, and she and her husband were huge Hoya basketball fans. I liked Lisa a lot. She was this petite southern lady who wore her long blond hair curled off her face, like a country singer. She had big breasts, small ankles, and a mischievous smile. Dick was Montgomery’s best friend and had a helmet of silver hair and a permanent, cheesy grin. He reminded me of the bald eagle from the Muppets. That night, at dinner, Dick told me that he and Lisa had written me a recommendation when they heard I was applying to Georgetown. I was touched. But then he said, “So please don’t embarrass us.” My stomach cramped.

  My roommate was a skinny blond from Marblehead, Massachusetts. Her name was Susanne. She was already unpacking when we arrived, and I could tell from her first smile that we’d be friends. Her brother Freddy was there, too, helping her. He unpacked an opened box of sanitary napkins from one of Susanne’s trunks and started throwing them onto her bed, saying, “Extra pillows for you gals.” He reminded me of Dan. I said good-bye and thanks to Montgomery and spent that first day exploring the campus and surrounding neighborhood with Susanne. That night, as we both lay in our twin beds in the dark, Susanne told me that I was the first person she had ever met who had lost one parent, let alone both.

  I loved waking up in my dorm room, which Susanne and I had decorated with Indian print textiles, an enormous REM poster, and some plants. It was the most settled I had been since Mom died. I loved everything about being at the university, from my classes, to the fact that I had daily access to a hot shower, to the new friends I was making. The only thing I didn’t like was the cafeteria food, so I called Amanda to see if the trust would give me the food-plan money so I could make my own meals. “Sure,” she said without hesitation. I bought an electric wok, a small refrigerator, and a toaster oven and put the rest in a savings account for groceries. Soon I was making eggplant parmigiana, steamed sea bass with shiitake mushrooms, and spaghetti carbonara in my dorm room. It didn’t take long for Susanne to go off the meal plan, too.

  But as much as I loved school, I had this nagging feeling that I got in on a fluke, that I might fail out. And Dick’s words, “Don’t embarrass us,” fueled that fear. I’d cheated my way through junior year at Fox Lane, reading Cliffs Notes and, on occasion, even using Mom’s illness to get out of taking tests I was unprepared for. At Georgetown, I had no excuses. I had to apply myself. I signed up for extra help whenever it was offered, took fastidious notes, and read each assignment not once but twice. This was too good a deal for me to fuck up.

  Amanda and I stayed in touch weekly now that I had a permanent address and a phone. She was growing tired of city life, and of partying, too. She was thinking about moving to Virginia. I hoped so. She’d be closer to me. I called Dan every so often, but he was harder to track down. Whenever I called his dorm pay phone at Trinity Pawling, he was nowhere to be found. Both Amanda and I were worried about him. I had hardly recognized him when I returned from Europe. He had grown his red hair long and shaggy and was wearing a beaded necklace. And he was bragging about how he planned to sell drugs at school that year. I knew if he got caught he’d be kicked out of Trinity Pawling once and for all. I decided to invite him down for a weekend in Washington, D.C., and finally got him on the phone one October evening. When I told him I’d pay for his train ticket, he said he’d come the next weekend.

  His hair was even longer than I remembered it, and he was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt. We went to a party the first night, and he flirted with all my girl friends and had my guy friends in stitches with his boarding-school stories. He crashed in my twin bed that night, his feet in my face and mine in his. The next morning, we went to Houston’s, a restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue famous for its all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. We piled our plates high with eggs, sausage, chocolate chip pancakes, and grits.

  “Tell me everything,” I said before digging in. “How are things? What have you been up to?”

  Dan took a big bite of breakfast, and then he started to boast that he’d seen six Grateful Dead shows that summer, and how he had made tons of money selling pot to rich kids at TP. “I buy a dime bag in Harlem and sell it to these assholes for fifty bucks. And they pay it!” he said between bites. As I sat there, listening to this sixteen-year-old boy posing as Dan, I wondered what had happened to my brother. I was having visions of him in a juvenile delinquent home when he said, “Oh, and check this out: At the last Dead show, I dropped five and a half hits of acid.”

  He looked me right in the eye as he added, “In one sitting,” as if it would impress me. I felt like he had just punched me in the face. Then he said, “I read if you do six hits, you’re considered legally insane.” I didn’t break his gaze. As tears began to run down my face, Dan’s cool composure crumbled.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, leaning forward across the table.

  “I already lost two parents,” I said. “I can’t deal with losing a brother, too.”

  Dan leaned back into his chair and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time that weekend. He was quiet for a moment, as if he was trying to place his feelings. “I had no idea anyone cared.”

  I got out of my seat and threw my arms around my brother, in the middle of the breakfast rush at Houston’s restaurant. “Your sisters love you more than anything in the world,” I said into his ear, and he started to cry, too.

  “Moron,” I added.

  And Dan let out a chuckle in the midst of his tears.

  DAN

  LIZ TOLD ME that morning at Houston’s that I looked like the walking dead. I knew she was right. I felt that way, too. And when she said, “You’re scaring the crap out of me. You’re getting burnt,” I knew what she was seeing. I was completely alien to her; I was alien to myself. Before Mom died, I was a happy, laugh-at-everything person. Even when Mom was sick, I was still a confident, popular kid. I could talk to anybody. Then something broke inside me. I lost that confidence. I wanted a drug that would change the way I felt about myself, and the way I was perceived. But, believe me, when you’re feeling weird and introverted, acid doesn’t help.

  Right before junior year began, I booked a Combos Snacks commercial. It was a disaster. The night before, I went to buy acid with two friends. I was planning on selling it at a reggae concert that was coming up at school, so I bought one hundred hits in Central Park from three Puerto Rican guys. We were spending, like, three hundred bucks, so my friends and I each took a hit to make sure it was good before we paid the guys. It was good. Very good. We wound up cruising around the city until five in the morning, and when 6 a.m. rolled around, I realized I had ten minutes to run and catch a bus out to Coney Island for the shoot.

  It was a nightmare. I showed up, still tripping, and was put in Chuck Taylor high-tops, suspenders, and a porkpie hat. I was supposed to throw the Combo up in the air, catch it in my mouth, and then eat it, which was torture. These were pizza-flavored-dehydrated-cheese-filled pretzels. They were disgusting! My line was supposed to be “They’re great!” But all I could say was, “They’re … they’re so … dry!” Meanwhile, about twenty other actor kids were jumping and high-kicking all around me. It was like a fucking Lionel Richie video, all Technicolor and happy. And there I was, in the middle of them all, the guy on drugs with the gray face and the sunken eyes. The director finally gave up and kicked me off set. Someone with a clipboard told me to wait on the bus, where I sat alone for hours, trying
to remember how to spell “West End Avenue” so I could fill out paperwork and get paid.

  So when Liz made me promise never to do acid again, it was easy to say okay. I meant it. I just got into coke and mushrooms instead.

  DIANA

  ONCE I GOT over the initial embarrassment of being held back, repeating fourth grade at Rippowam Cisqua was really fun. I made friends easily, and there was a big jungle gym that we crawled around on, swinging like monkeys. My new name at school was Diana Welch-Chamberlain, a compromise. My new mom had asked if I wanted to sign up at a new school as Diana Chamberlain, to deflect curious questions. I understood her point: I didn’t feel like having to explain to everybody at school that my parents were dead; it was easier to just have the Chamberlains be my mom and dad and just be normal like everyone else. But dropping Welch altogether felt wrong. Like giving up. So Diana Welch-Chamberlain it was.

  My best friend’s real name was Abigail, but whenever she introduced herself, she said, “B with two quotes.” She was on my bus route, and we always sat in the backseat, like cool girls. We liked to hang out in the library and read trashy young adult novels by Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan. From the backseat of the bus, we dared kids to eat chewing gum off the floor, and we told jokes about Frog Face, our mean and ugly bus driver. It was there that “B” quietly explained to me how her mom told her that clear stuff comes out of your vagina a couple weeks before you get your period and that’s how you know you’re going to get it. She didn’t have it yet—none of the girls in my grade did—but everybody had read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret so we were all just waiting. None of us even had boobs yet.

  My new mom wouldn’t let me go over to “B’s” house, ever, and didn’t approve of our hanging out. She told me it was because “B” was a slut and her mother was a gossip. Her opinion didn’t matter much to me; “B” and I hung out all the time at school, anyway. I was allowed to go to other people’s houses and often went over to my friend Alicia’s. She was the youngest of three, but her brothers were so much older that they were already out of the house and it felt like she was an only child. Her parents spoiled her, but not in a gross way. She rolled her eyes at them a lot, and once I watched in awe as she stamped her feet because her mother wouldn’t buy her a Nintendo.

  Alicia didn’t know how good she had it. Her parents respected her opinion and told her they loved her. I liked to imagine what my life would have been like if Alicia’s parents had taken me in. It’d be better, that’s what. For one thing, Alicia’s parents believed in privacy and never barged into Alicia’s room without knocking. Meanwhile, it seemed that my new mom was always poking her head in my room, unannounced. Like the time I was cheating on my math homework by using a calculator that was hidden in my lap.

  “Who do you think you are?” I stiffened. Her voice was like a string yanking at my spine. I turned from my desk, careful not to let my calculator show, and faced the figure in the doorway. “Margaret said that you completely ignored her at school today.” She slapped her thigh to emphasize the word “completely.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, truly mystified. I didn’t remember even seeing Margaret at school; she was in first grade. We had different recesses and everything.

  “Don’t give me that,” she said. Her voice was almost a whine. “Don’t give me any more of your lies, young lady.”

  “No, I’m serious, Mom,” I said, pleading. “I don’t remember ever seeing her at school today.”

  “She said she waved to you in the hallway, and that you just walked right by her with your little friends.” Her eyes narrowed. “Do you think you’re too good to say hello to my child?”

  “I didn’t see her, Mom. I swear; I did not ignore her on purpose.”

  It was as if she hadn’t heard a word. She just nodded and smiled, as if she knew a dirty secret. Then she leaned forward and said, “You’re just an ugly little girl,” pausing between each word for emphasis.

  I looked down at the carpet, and her voice carried on, no longer yanking my spine but curving it with its heaviness. It was the first time she had called me ugly. I was ugly; it was true. And she wasn’t helping matters any, always dragging me to the hairdresser’s for another ugly haircut. The one I had now was the worst so far—a close-cropped, square helmet that made the conductor on the train to New York City mistake me for a boy. “The little fella rides for free,” he had said, winking at me and clacking his hole-punch on the ticket.

  The boys at school called me “Dino,” as in Dino the Dinosaur, as in Fred Flintstone’s prehistoric pet. And on the first day of school I got giddy as the cutest boy in the whole grade was walking toward me in the empty hallway. “Hey, ugly,” he said, with a quick smile. It was just the two of us; there was no one else to laugh and make him feel cool for being mean. Further proof that my mom was right.

  “You’ll stay up here for the rest of the night,” my new mom said, her tone final. “No one in this house wants to look at you right now.” After she slammed my door, I took a deep breath and finished my math homework, with my calculator out on my desk in plain view.

  AMANDA

  I CAME HOME from work one night to find that my apartment had been broken into. Before I even walked through the door, I could tell something bad had happened. The dogs were agitated. Bentley was whining, and Ralph was pacing back and forth. As I made my way through the place, I saw that my VCR, TV, stereo, and camera were gone. The police came and were like, “Wow, they really tore up the place,” because clothes and stuff were strewn everywhere. I didn’t mention that it actually looked pretty much the same when I’d left that morning; I was never neat.

  I think it was my upstairs neighbor’s crack-addict brother. Whenever he hung around the stoop, he gave me the creeps. Anyway, I didn’t want to live there after that, so I moved in with Karen. Then I got held up at gunpoint one night at work. I had gotten a second job working at Laser Video, a movie rental place in Greenwich Village, to help me save up for the possible move to Virginia. There were two guys, and the one with the gun was sweating and shaking. He looked terrified, which scared me even more. He kept yelling “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” even though nobody was saying anything.

  Shit like this was constant. My cars were always getting broken into. I had to replace windows on the Saab three times, and the Mercedes got to the point where the trunk wouldn’t latch from being forced open so often. They even stole my mix tapes. Virginia was looking better and better.

  I was hanging out with my friend Jim at Karen’s when Dan called to say he had been kicked out of school because they found a bong or something in his room. I wanted to kill him. Jim and I drove upstate that afternoon to get him. By the time I arrived, I was no longer mad, just thinking a mile a minute as to how I could convince the school to take him back. But Dan was gone. I was literally walking around campus for three hours yelling “Dan? Dan!” while Jim played show tunes on the piano in the main hall. So I called Karen’s apartment to see if she had heard from him, and he picked up the phone. It turns out he got a ride with someone to New York. So I was pissed all over again.

  DAN

  EVERY YEAR, THERE was a well-known “surprise inspection” of our dorm rooms. One Thursday night, they announced one at dinner. That gave kids time to go back to their rooms and get rid of any evidence that would get them in trouble. At that point, I was making bongs and really elaborate hookahs out of chemistry equipment I stole from the lab. I stored them, along with some empty vodka bottles, in a padlocked plywood cabinet in my room. Getting rid of illicit material was difficult, because there was no way to get out of that building without running into a teacher. So I made an executive decision. I decided not to worry about it.

  That night, the art teacher and assistant principal marched into my room and asked me to open up the cabinet. It was padlocked. Thinking I was clever, I said, “I lost the key.” And they said, “That’s fine.” And, on cue, the science teacher entered my ro
om with bolt cutters.

  It took them forever to bust open the lock, and as they were doing that, I slowly backed out of my room and called Amanda on the pay phone in the hallway. She answered, and I said, “Amanda, any minute now, I am going to be kicked out of school.” Just at that moment, Vice Principal Archibald Smith walked out. I said, “Mr. Smith, my sister wants to talk to you,” and handed him the phone.

  He took it and said, “We’ll call you back,” and then hung up. I couldn’t believe it. I thought Amanda was going to handle this for sure.

  AMANDA

  I DID HANDLE it, somehow. With Karen’s help, I got Dan back into Trinity Pawling that January. I think we played the orphan card. Then I packed all my furniture from my Brooklyn apartment into a U-Haul to move down to Virginia. I had accepted Abbie’s offer of a job and a place to stay on her farm and was saying good-bye to New York. The night before I left, a bunch of friends came over to Karen’s apartment for a farewell party. After we drank two cases of Karen’s chardonnay, I invited everyone to drive down to Virginia with me. I thought it would be more fun that way. So one crew drove the Saab. I don’t remember how I got the Mercedes down there. I was in the U-Haul with the dogs when it started to blizzard. It was the worst winter storm in decades; I couldn’t see the road in front of me. There were snowdrifts as tall as the U-Haul. It was horrible. And, unfortunately, so was my new apartment. It was in a barn, so dirty and crammed with boxes of Abbie’s stuff that it was like living in a stall. The water was orange and smelled so bad I couldn’t bathe in it, let alone drink it. But, I figured, at least I was only a two-hour drive from Liz.