Ballads of Suburbia

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  “Shh.” She put her fingers against my lips. Even though the air around us smelled like the ocean, her usual scent, all I could smell was whiskey. The stench of it made my stomach churn. I pushed Maya out of the way and dropped to my knees, retching.

  I was still puking in the sand when the cops came. It was just like a Johnny Cash song: prison-bound after abandoning my sister, losing my woman, and being betrayed by my best friend. Christian had destroyed the closest thing I’d had to a real family in years.

  Of course, I only spent one night in jail before they sent me home. I didn’t sleep, because every time I closed my eyes, I saw Christian pinning a girl to a wall, sometimes Maya, sometimes Kara. When I got home, I tried to blot it out the way my sister did, with heroin, but that just made me throw up like I did on the beach. I like the drugs that keep me awake instead, so I don’t have to dream about Florida or Christian or anything he did.

  Even though I don’t want to remember Christian, I also know I shouldn’t forget what his betrayal taught me. So I ripped down the Gleaming the Cube movie poster that hung over the head of my bed; Christian had given it to me because we both loved that eighties skater flick.

  Scrawled in its place next to my poster of the Man in Black sneering and flipping off the world is a list I wrote in red Sharpie: “Addiction. Selfishness. Violence. No heroes.” My reminders that I’m through believing in anyone besides myself.

  4.

  MAYA AND LIAM WERE BOTH GROUNDED for three months. By the time they could leave the house for anything other than school, May approached and it was warm enough to hang out in Scoville Park again.

  The group dynamics at Scoville had changed completely since I’d started going there a year ago. The original group of nine kids who Liam, Maya, and I befriended had splintered. Of course, things were in flux when we met them. Jessica and Mary had been spreading rumors about Cass. Everyone missed Wes. It seemed like he’d been the glue holding them together, and once they realized he wasn’t returning from California, everyone went their separate ways.

  Our circle at the center of the park shrunk. I expected Craig to join Adrian, Quentin, Cass, Maya, and me, but instead, he, Jessica, and Mary sat with his new bandmates. At least Craig still came to Shelly’s parties and was friendly with everyone.

  Christian, on the other hand, stayed away from us and we acted like he didn’t exist. Though Maya and Liam still weren’t talking about what happened in Florida, everyone seemed to know that Christian was the one to shun. He and my brother had both returned with bruised faces, but Christian looked a lot worse. His lip was split, his nose was broken, and a blood vessel in his eye had burst, leaving a red spot that didn’t disappear for over a month. Everyone thought of Liam as a peaceful pothead, so if he’d flipped out on Christian, Christian must have done something unforgivable.

  Even though Christian still came to the park to skate, he left whenever Liam approached the statue. Christian no longer had any male friends; he hung out, creepily, with the freshman girls who came to the park to flirt with guys. They were like little alternative cheerleaders with belly button and nose piercings, black or blue fingernail polish, bleached or Manic Panic-ed hair, baby-doll T-shirts, and plaid minibackpacks that they carried their cigarettes and flasks in.

  These girls were all in love with my brother, too, but even though Liam still skated sometimes, he snubbed Christian and all his girlfriends. He’d shifted groups, too, having bonded with Harlan, Shelly, and a couple other ravers in gym class. I teased him that his pants were getting bigger every day. He’d also dyed his hair blue like Harlan’s, and instead of keeping the punky spikes he’d once had, he was letting it grow into minidreadlocks. I barged into his room the day I heard techno blaring.

  He just smiled. “Do some ecstasy. You’ll get it.”

  “I have and I still don’t get it.” Quietly, I was pleased that he’d stayed away from heroin as promised. E and acid were harder than pot, but definitely preferable to heroin when my little brother was concerned.

  Whatever had happened in Florida had messed up Liam and Maya’s relationship as well. They were cordial to each other, but the two of them never hung out together anymore. At first I thought it was because they were both grounded, but it continued when their paths crossed at parties or the park.

  I didn’t ask about it. Part of me was still angry at both of them for not taking my side over Christian’s in the first place. I found it easier to forgive my brother because I hadn’t forced my side of the story on him, but Maya had ignored the truth. That ate away at me.

  A couple days after she returned from Florida, Maya had called and apologized to me in the same vague way Liam had. “I was wrong about Christian and you. Dead wrong and I’m sorry,” she told me, but she wouldn’t reveal how she’d come to that conclusion. When I asked, she said, “My dad’s yelling at me to get off the phone. I’m supposed to be grounded.”

  She and I had an uneasy truce, but our friendship wasn’t the same. When we spent time together outside of the park, we watched movies or listened to music-activities that disguised the lack of conversation. I even stopped having her put colors in my bangs, just leaving them blond, because it was too awkward to sit in silence while she did it.

  My unspoken anger prevented me from opening up to her. And Maya had come back from Florida a completely different person. Mousiness replaced her flamboyance. She stopped wearing makeup and let the red in her hair fade. Instead of bouncing around, singing, and sharing her latest social experiment with everyone, she quietly doodled in her sketchbook, often wearing headphones so no one would approach her. But I didn’t question it or worry about her; I figured it was her penance for not believing me from the beginning.

  Well, that and I didn’t really worry about anyone because I was on heroin.

  The afternoons that we spent at Scoville were painfully sober because Cass was around. She hadn’t lectured me about heroin, but she’d laid into Quentin and Adrian often enough that they avoided using in front of her. Because of this, I enjoyed the days when Cass went home to study, and Quentin, Adrian, and I could go to Adrian’s, get high, and work on the “Stories of Suburbia” project.

  The five-subject, spiral-bound notebook had gotten huge as a pregnant woman at the end of her eighth month. We visited libraries and newsstands and collected stacks of newspapers. One afternoon, Quentin found an article about a beautiful island off the coast of Florida plagued by drug addiction. Several teenagers from a seemingly perfect community had overdosed within weeks of one another.

  “That’ll never be us,” Adrian said as he taped it into the book. “Gotta be a junkie to OD.”

  Even though the three of us snorted smack at least once a day on weekdays and binged like crazy on weekends, we didn’t believe we were addicts. After all, we were functional. We had a goal that had nothing to do with drugs: writing a screenplay.

  But as the original “Stories of Suburbia” notebook grew, our separate screenplay notebook languished. We were having trouble developing a central story. Finally, Adrian had a revelation on a dreary Friday while we went through newspapers in his bedroom.

  He found an article in our town’s paper and tapped the page frantically, exclaiming, “Hey, this is about us!”

  Quentin and I looked up, shocked, thinking we’d been unknowingly caught for some petty crime. But Adrian pointed to the headline, “Local Teens Seek Their Fix Across the Border.”

  The picture below the headline was from the inside of an SUV where shadowy figures in the front seat stared out at a brick apartment complex. The “border” the article referred to was that magical line down the middle of Austin Boulevard that separated Oak Park from the West Side of Chicago. The “fix” was heroin. And Adrian said it was “about us” because he and Quentin did go to some undisclosed location just inside the city limits to buy.

  Adrian eagerly tore the article out of the paper and plastered it down with scotch tape in his original notebook. Then he declared, “I know what
the problem with our screenplay is.” He snatched the screenplay notebook from my lap and began ripping out all the pages we’d-mostly I’dwritten.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I panicked, reaching for my precious work. He tossed the empty notebook back at me and started flipping through the original “Stories of Suburbia” notebook, tearing out most of its pages. He was more careful with those, I noticed, stacking them on the floor beside him.

  Adrian left the handwritten pages and some small police blotter clippings alone. “Our story is too big,” he explained. “We have the beheading at the football game. The birth at prom. The mom setting her husband on fire. The party scene, but they’re all different characters and they don’t connect because they aren’t really connected. Each one could be a crappy TV movie and I don’t want to write a crappy TV movie, I want to write something real.” Adrian indicated one of the handwritten pages. “I’m keeping our stories and our crimes in here ’cause those are real. We’ll use those.” He turned to the last page of the notebook and slapped the heroin article. “And this will be our opening scene. Us buying drugs in the city.”

  Catching on to his idea and enthusiasm, I wrote in the screenplay notebook:

  EXT. CITY APARTMENT BUILDING-NIGHT

  I stopped. “I don’t know how to write this. You guys never take me.”

  Adrian shrugged and glanced at the digital alarm clock that sat on its side on the floor. “I guess we’ll have to, then. We’re about to meet our guy to get stuff before Shelly’s party anyway.”

  Quentin’s face fell at that suggestion. “No, Adrian,” he said, soft but firm, “she can’t go.”

  “Why?” I objected, sick of being ditched whenever they went to buy.

  Quentin’s ice blue eyes seared into mine. “Because it’s not a movie, it’s real and it’s not safe.”

  His warning instilled more curiosity than fear, so I was pleased when Adrian overruled him, saying, “Writers need experience. She can come.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was in the backseat of Adrian’s car, cruising across the invisible border to Chicago. Up front, Quentin mumbled to Adrian, “What are we getting tonight, anyway?”

  “I think he’s got China white, man.”

  “Seriously? We’re actually gonna get to try that shit?” Quentin grinned and sung along a bit louder with the Screeching Weasel song, “Hey Suburbia,” that played on the car stereo.

  I knew exactly what they were talking about. A year ago, I’d never paid for drugs, smoking pot only when someone had it to share, and I never thought about where it came from. Now I spent all the money I had on drugs, and thanks to Adrian, I had encyclopedic knowledge about the origin of heroin. The West Coast got their heroin from Mexico, made up of mostly black tar, which wreaks havoc on your veins, and some brown powder. The East Coast and the South generally got their heroin from South America and it was white, but not China white, a very particular, very powerful kind of heroin from Asia. Due to its central location in the country and because it served as a distribution hub for the rest of the Midwest, Chicago had a unique heroin market. Most of it came from South America, but you could get heroin from Mexico and Asia, too. If our guy had China white, we’d hit the jackpot.

  I stared out the window, taking in my surroundings. Even though we were barely a mile from my house and the streets had the same names, everything was different. Instead of seeing women in their thirties pushing strollers and stopping in front of an art gallery to gaze at the pictures, I spotted girls younger than me pushing strollers, stopped by a group of older guys who were gathered in front of a liquor store.

  As we slowed in front of a seemingly abandoned building, Adrian snapped, “Kara, don’t fucking look around!”

  “What?” I asked, oblivious.

  Quentin reached around from the passenger’s seat to shove my head between my knees. My stomach leapt into my throat as I waited to hear bullets striking the car or something. Quentin chastised me, “You don’t want to see anybody do anything and you don’t want anybody to think you saw them doing anything.” It was the only time he’d ever spoken to me sharply and he immediately apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “but keep your head down.”

  I did as told, my thoughts returning to the division between this part of the city and us. Here we were: three white spoiled-brat suburban kids in a Honda, there to buy drugs. How fucking cliché. I guess gawking out the window did make me look like an idiot tourist or something, though I felt just as stupid with my head in my lap. Not to mention there was really no point in me going along because I didn’t observe anything to write about.

  Adrian left the car running and went inside somewhere. Quentin kept singing along to the stereo, which was how I knew how long it took: two and a half punk songs, or five minutes. Adrian got back in the car and started driving again, mumbling at Quentin to keep an eye out for cops. Eventually, he told me I could sit up, but I looked straight ahead until we crossed Austin and were a few blocks into Oak Park.

  Instead of being excited by our drug pickup like I’d thought I’d be, I felt nauseous and disgusted by my own ignorance. I was glad we had heroin and were going to a party in a few hours, so I could forget about it.

  When we got to Shelly’s, I opted to chill on the couch in her living room alone instead of braving the basement. I’d snorted a few lines of China white and it definitely felt stronger. I wanted to zone quietly and enjoy the buzz. But right as I achieved a blissful, half-passed-out state, warm hands clapped over my closed eyes and the shriek of “Kara-leeena, guess who!” jarred me awake.

  Stacey leapt over the back of the couch as my thick tongue struggled to sound out her name. “Stahhh…Stay…Stacey?”

  She threw her arms around me and smothered me in her dark hair, which still smelled mostly the same, like that apple conditioner she always used, but with a hint of patchouli underneath. She pushed me away, her hands still gripping my shoulders, so we could study each other. She was the same old Stacey, but she’d ditched the trashy outfits she’d taken to wearing when she’d started chasing boys freshman year and replaced them with a Grateful Dead T-shirt and hemp necklaces.

  Despite her latest makeover, her personality remained intact. “Where the hell have you been, bitch?”

  “Um, right here?” I blinked, still very dazed. “Where have you been?”

  “With Jason.” She pointed behind us at a guy with a long, sun-bleached ponytail, stoned green eyes, and an obscene number of hemp necklaces. He waved.

  “Hi, Jason. Didn’t we smoke pot together once?” I asked, vaguely remembering him from the park the previous summer.

  “Probably.” He shrugged, smiling. “Adrian used to sell to me.”

  “We need to catch up!” Stacey insisted, shaking both of my hands. “Have you lost weight? Your face seems skinnier. Jason, can you get us some beers? And a Coke for Kara ’cause she looks like she’s falling asleep. Have you been partying hard, girl?”

  As Jason strutted off to the keg, I admitted, “Yeah, I’m here, like, every weekend. What about you? I haven’t seen you in months.”

  “I’ve been dating Jason the whole time,” Stacey said proudly. “We haven’t been around because this is a high school party. Jason’s not in high school. He’s got an apartment. I’m over there a lot.”

  She launched into the story of her life since we’d last spoken in the fall. She elaborated on Jason, telling me how nice and laid-back he was. She went on forever, playing up how cool his apartment was and playing down that he paid for it by selling pot. She also told me the names of all of his fish before she asked, “So, what have you been up to?”

  I didn’t want to talk about Christian so I told her about Adrian, referring to him as my boyfriend for the first time and acting like I’d been seeing him all along even though the night she’d met him was the night I’d walked away from him. I also neglected to mention the heroin, enthusing about the screenplay instead.

  “Awesome! You’re writing a movie
? My best friend’s gonna be famous!”

  I grinned, more at her still calling me her best friend than her saying I was going to be famous.

  “Can I see the notebook? Can I write my story in it?” she asked, blue eyes wide.

  I took it out of my backpack, warning, “You have to write yours before you can read anything.”

  She snatched it from my hands and gestured at Jason, who’d shown up with our beers midway through my explanation of the script/scrapbook project. “That’s fine, get to know him.”

  Jason and I made small talk, mostly about his fish, while Stacey wrote. I sipped from my beer, but didn’t really drink it. I wanted another line pretty badly and was about to excuse myself to the bathroom when Cass appeared.

  “Can I talk to you, Kara?” Both her voice and her expression were flat. Not good.

  “Uhh…”

  I looked to Stacey, hoping to be rescued, but she was so into her writing that she didn’t even raise her head. She waved me away, saying, “I’ll find you when I’m done.”

  So I trudged upstairs to Shelly’s bedroom with Cass. She half closed the door and then glared at me with her arms crossed over her chest. “What the hell is going on with you?”

  Damn, I wanted a line. I shook my head. “What are you talking about?”

  Cass set her jaw hard. “Heroin. You do a little bit, fine, it’s your deal. I had my acid phase, I can’t judge. But you and Quentin are doing way too much. And now you’re going with them to buy?”

  “Where’d you hear that?” I tried to look shocked, hoping it was from Jessica or Mary so I could easily deny it.

  “Straight from the horse’s mouth. Quentin doesn’t know what he’s saying sometimes when he’s high.”

  “Well, if he doesn’t know what he’s saying—”

  “Don’t fucking lie to me!” Cass thundered like an angry drill sergeant.

  “Don’t fucking yell at me. You aren’t my mom.”

  Cass seemed near tears as she twisted her dreads around her fingers. “Since Wes left I’ve tried to look out for everyone, but I can’t handle it anymore! You and Quentin have a serious drug problem. Maya’s been weird since she ran away and I need you to help me with her, but instead you’re high all the time.”