As it grew dark, more people showed up and we’d figure out a place to party. Unless somebody’s parents were out of town, the parties always revolved around a vacant spot—along the beach or in the canyons, dirt lots off the road where Nicole lived, waiting to be turned into houses and a freeway. We would go there until it got “burned,” aka the cops started rolling by as part of their regular patrol.
Our group even had a nickname: PT, Palms Trash. Sometimes the football boys from Carmel Heights drove by the circle and yelled at us from their trucks, throwing soda cans and once a burrito. They meant it as an insult, but I was happy to be called PT, happy to be trashy and not care. Happy to be part of a group.
PILLS, PILLS, PILLS
At New Hope, I joined the literary and art magazine, which some goth girls ran out of my advisor’s room. We sorted through the submissions or worked on our own stuff sometimes, but mostly we just sat around and talked. Quietly. Mrs. Hunter freaked out if you made too much noise. A lot of times that meant we passed shared notes. There was Anna, who had tattoos all down her arms and said she was schizophrenic. Tricia, who had big beautiful boobs and a two-year-old daughter. And Lily, who was extra goth, always in a ton of makeup and long lacy dresses, and had the prettiest face I’d ever seen. She lived down the street from me but we never did anything outside school because she claimed she was agoraphobic, had tinfoil taped over her bedroom window, and supposedly shot up speedballs. At school she’d give me pills, Percocet and Vicodin, which I traded for my mother’s Somas. After the suicide attempt, my mom kept the medicine in a black lockbox in a cabinet in the dining room, requiring her permission every time I needed an Advil. My mom didn’t know I knew where the box was. She also thought the lock on it was secure. It took a while, but it was possible to pop it open with a bobby pin.
At New Hope, there were pills everywhere. Sometimes I skipped lunch and used the money to buy them. Other times I’d trade for what I could find at home. Every now and then people were dumb enough to trade for my psych meds. I hid everything I got in the little silver case my mom made me keep in my purse, just in case I ever decided to spend the night somewhere last minute. I’d nestle them next to a night’s supply of Tegretol and Wellbutrin and take the pills right in class. I liked the power that came from getting high in plain sight simply by swallowing a little capsule. Once they’d kick in, I’d sit on one of the beanbag chairs in Mrs. Hunter’s room and read, or go into the art room and take out the watercolors. We were allowed to listen to our headphones whenever we wanted as long as we kept the volume down, and every classroom had big windows and warm light, and I’d sit there high and comfortable, a feeling of indulgence, like somebody’s favorite cat.
WE ARE THE WEIRDOS, MISTER
I found out the reason why no one besides the four of us ever stayed long in Mrs. Hunter’s room. I was reading one day when all of a sudden she started freaking out. She stood up real quick from her desk, slammed the chair under her desk and stormed over to the tables.
“All right! That’s enough!” she yelled. “Everybody out.”
I couldn’t figure out why she was mad. Some people had been whispering but we were allowed to whisper in class. That was it. That was the only noise.
Everyone got up to go, collecting their things and looking at each other and rolling their eyes. I picked up my books too, but then she started yelling again.
“You! You’re fine. You stay.” Mrs. Hunter was small and blond, but with her finger quivering at me she seemed like a witch. I did what she said. I didn’t argue. I put my book back down, sat in my chair, eyes straight ahead.
“You. You stay also. All you girls. You’re fine.”
I felt Tricia and Anna and Lily sit back down noiselessly. We opened our books. The classroom emptied. It was silent for the rest of the day. We got a lot of work done.
I got an explanation for Mrs. Hunter’s behavior after school let out. Two actually.
She had a coffeemaker in the room, which she drank from constantly, so the room always smelled like burnt coffee. That was the part I already knew. What I didn’t know was that she drank two pots a day. Not only that, but once she finished brewing a pot, she used it in place of water and brewed it again—double-brewed, so strong it might as well have been speed.
I also didn’t know about an incident that happened a few months before. People used to go into Mrs. Hunter’s classroom all the time because she was kind of oblivious, always on the computer doing whatever it was she did, scribbling in notebooks, sometimes just staring off into space. One day, these guys Matt and Robbie—the big ugly—and a few others came up with a plan to smoke weed in class. It was elaborate, involving aquarium tubing from the science room and a student pretending to faint so Mrs. Hunter would have to take her to the office, while Robbie and Matt cut a square in the window screen with an X-ACTO knife. Then they got one of the kids in the gardening club to affix the tube to the wall with the little staples they used to guide vines or whatever. Even the window was chosen strategically—next to the bookshelf, partially obstructed, near the beanbag chairs so it didn’t look strange if you were sitting on the floor.
The plan worked. Somebody dropped a book or “accidentally” knocked over a chair or coughed while they flicked the lighter. When they exhaled, the smoke was blown through the aquarium tubing, which pointed away from the open window. It was flawless.
Until, of course, it wasn’t. A few of the seniors were former drug addicts, now sober, and they worked as informal narcs for the school. One walked by at the wrong moment, saw the smoke, and ratted them out. Everyone in the room got lectured until Robbie and Matt confessed, figuring as few people as possible should take the fall. They were almost expelled (I didn’t even know where the hell you went once you’re expelled from New Hope), but in the end got “community service,” which involved janitorial chores around the school. Mrs. Hunter got in trouble too, almost fired, so her behavior was close to understandable. Still, she was a freak. Just like the rest of us.
OTHER PEOPLE’S PROBLEMS
We all had group therapy for an hour every Friday. The groups were mostly divided by gender, except for the queer kids who were all together. I tried to figure out why I was placed in my group but I couldn’t. Holly wasn’t in mine, or Anna, but Lily and Tricia were. I thought maybe ours was the pretty girls because they spent a lot of time talking to us about sex and self-esteem. But there were some hot girls in a different group and some ugly ones in ours so it was hard to say.
Other people had been to the mental hospital, attempted suicide, or cut themselves. I wasn’t the only one on psych meds. But most of the other girls’ problems stemmed from things you could easily define, things that happened outside of them and made it easy to see them as victims. This girl Jessica, her mom was a drunk and had an endless stream of equally drunk boyfriends. Abby’s grandpa molested her. Lily’s mom worked long hours and was never home. Cheyenne’s family sometimes didn’t have enough money for food.
Not once did anyone ever talk about what it was like when your only trauma was yourself. It was all real problems, concrete things that had gone wrong. It made me want to carve out the part of myself that was defective, like a gangrenous limb. My problems didn’t seem bad enough to justify all that I’d done to myself. Midway through the semester, I started being sick on Fridays, as often as my mother would let me get away with, so I didn’t have to go to group.
MY OLD LIFE
A couple months into the semester, I called Nicole’s house after not hearing from her for a while. Her mother said she was gone. She’d been arrested for stealing a car with her new boyfriend, and so her parents sent her away to a reform school in Montana. That wasn’t surprising. Nicole’s parents had been fed up with her for years.
Sometimes I thought about Nicole, mostly when I was putting on makeup before we went out at night—Holly just wore mascara and lipstick—but really, I only thought about Holly now. It was strange how someone could disappear from your life li
ke that. In a few short months, Nicole had gone from the center of my orbit to a dot so far away it didn’t matter anymore.
But Holly was nicer than Nicole. With Holly, I wasn’t the weird one. We were the same. We were equal. We were best friends.
QUARANTINE
I hadn’t told Holly about my diagnosis, though. She knew about the suicide attempt, and that this was the reason I’d come to New Hope, but I’d never mentioned the details and she never asked.
One day, Holly and I ditched school. We didn’t have a good reason, we just didn’t feel like going. Neither of us had skipped out at New Hope before. I wasn’t sure if they’d notice or care, or what would happen if they did. The uncertainty was a little bit thrilling, and as we walked the mile or so it took to get from Carmel Heights to Holly’s house, I felt excited, like I was doing something illegal. I kept thinking maybe a police officer would drive by, immediately know what type of girls we were and what we were doing, and arrest us.
Of course this didn’t happen. We got back to Holly’s, turned on her stereo, got sodas from her fridge and went on her patio to smoke cigarettes. We stayed out there for hours.
“The scariest thing was the hallucinations,” I found myself saying. “I honestly thought I was completely batshit. I thought I was going to be fucked up forever. But they’re gone now, thank God.”
I was quiet, feeling both overly exposed for my confession and relieved. I wasn’t sure how Holly would take it, the fact that her new best friend was nuts. I wasn’t sure what she would say. I looked her in the eye and in my stomach I felt a new dread. But she surprised me.
“I’m bipolar too,” she said. She’d never hallucinated, but right before she started at New Hope, there was a time when she couldn’t sleep. “I’d be so tired but as soon as I lay down it felt like my heart was going to beat straight out of my chest. Like I’d done crank or something. My mom was so freaked out, she skipped work and took me to the doctor. That was when I switched to New Hope. I’m on lithium now, but I hate it.”
I was shocked. I knew Holly wasn’t exactly normal. But hearing her say the thing about her heartbeat. My experiences coming out of someone else’s mouth.
As it grew later, our pagers started going off, friends from New Hope and the Palms. We didn’t answer them. Instead, we continued listening to music, smoking, talking. I felt safe, like we were on an island, a safe island of two where nothing could get us, just Holly and me, bipolar best friends.
HATE-CRIME SATURDAY
It was a Saturday night, right after Valentine’s Day. I’d called my parents from Holly’s house and told them the usual lie: we were going to the movies and then I was sleeping at her house. For some reason they always believed me.
Instead, we were going to a party. Danny Smackball was meeting us in front of his work at nine. That wasn’t his real name. I don’t know why anyone called him that. It was a stupid nickname. He worked at the Italian restaurant in the shopping center down the street from Holly’s house. I think he washed dishes.
The party was at an abandoned Vietnamese church. Some of the boys found it when they went off-roading. It seemed like it had been vacant a long time.
Danny Smackball’s truck was black and shitty. We got in, me in the middle because I was the smallest. It was a stick so he had to bang his hand against my thigh each time he switched gears. I didn’t know what to do in response. Leaning into his hand felt wrong. Scooting away felt wrong. Just sitting there and not moving made me feel like a corpse, but that, in the end, was what I settled on.
The drive took a while, over winding dirt roads I didn’t know existed. The moon was almost full and we were far enough from the city that the stars shined sharp and bright, the way they did in the desert. There weren’t any streetlights, and it seemed like we’d been transported far away, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. By the time we got there, my leg had fallen asleep from sitting so stiff.
The party hadn’t really started yet. There were just a handful of cars out front. We walked inside and it was empty and dark, with only a couple people sitting on a pew in the corner. They didn’t acknowledge us. A few candles were in front of them, the glass kind with the Mexican saints, their faces distorted by shadows. They were smoking something, it was hard to tell what.
I felt a surge of panic because Danny never had a lot to say and I hated awkward silences. But then I heard Junk Dog, whose real name was Matt, his voice muffled like it was coming from the ceiling. Holly heard it too. “Junk Dog!” she said. “Where are you?”
“Up the ladder,” he yelled.
It took a few minutes of flicking our lighters around in the dark to find the ladder in the back corner. It was wooden and old and I was afraid of heights, so I didn’t look down. It led into an attic, one with a bunch of windows, completely empty except for another candle and Junk Dog and Ramon. They were sitting cross-legged, smoking weed.
Holly wanted to go out on the roof because of the stars. We climbed through one of the windows and it led to a flat section, just big enough for all of us. It was cold that night, the air thin, so the shadows were sharper. Junk Dog had a big bubbler but no more weed. Holly and I had most of a gram. Ramon had a handle of shit vodka. We smoked and we drank, until everything became dry and muffled, until my eyes and throat burned.
At some point, the noise of their talk blurred out. I was alone on that roof, no people, just me, everything empty and black. I wanted to jump into it, to become it, forget my name. Not die. A desire to be a void, not a person.
I stared at the trees, the branches long spikes pointing up at the sky, and I thought about falling into them, puncturing my chest and heart. Then Holly’s voice broke through. She told me to get away from the edge. I looked down. It was hard to say if I’d die from that height or merely fuck myself up.
From the roof, we couldn’t see or hear what was going on inside. When we finally went downstairs, I was surprised to see the church was packed. It was dark, people towering over the few candles on the ground, a bunch of stretching demonic shadows. There was no music but the conversations followed the same beat, throttling like a bass drum, sounds but not words.
My breath quickened like I might have an anxiety attack, so I headed back up the ladder. I tried to tell Holly to follow me but it was too loud. I stopped before I got all the way up, because something ran across the attic floor. It moved like a cat but it was too big to be a cat and then it seemed to disappear.
“Are you gonna go up there or what?” It was Junk Dog, behind me on the ladder. I didn’t know he’d followed me.
“One second,” I told him. “There’s something up there. Some sort of animal.”
“Let me see,” he said. I went up, alone in the dark with whatever it was, waiting for it to latch onto me.
Except when Junk Dog flicked his lighter, there was nothing there. He told me I was crazy and for a second I was worried he knew about what had happened last semester, but the only person I’d told was Holly and I knew she wouldn’t tell anyone.
I’d always liked Junk Dog because he was the kind of person who never said no. If you couldn’t sleep and wanted to go down to the beach but didn’t want to be alone, you could call him up, 4:00 a.m., and he’d be sleepy and grumpy but he’d pick up the phone and then he’d come get you. He did drugs and drank in the right way, until they were gone, and then he did his best to get more. There was something solid about him, something that made me feel protected and calm. But recently we spent a lot of time alone. It didn’t mean anything but I couldn’t get him to see it that way. He kept trying to kiss me, and I kept saying no, and each time it made me feel so bad that all I could hope was he wouldn’t do it again. So I tried to avoid situations that could be taken as romantic. The attic above an abandoned church seemed easy to interpret as a good place to make out. Part of me wanted to like-like him, because he was fun and nice, but I couldn’t do it. I think it was because he was too short.
I was relieved when Ramon came up the ladder a mo
ment later. He was sloppy drunk, clumsy and too loud but at least there were three of us now. His girlfriend had broken up with him. They were always breaking up but this time she’d gone and fucked someone else, this guy Larry who sold us weed sometimes.
“I’m so fucking pissed,” he yelled. “I want to punch something.”
“So punch something,” I said.
I didn’t think he would but then he took off his shirt and wrapped it around his fist, and then he punched it through one of the windows. The glass exploded over the noise of the party. The shards glinted off the candlelight and it was beautiful and I wanted more of it, so I went over to one of the other windows and kicked it. I was wearing boots and jeans, except a shard of it tore through my pants. I felt wetness on my leg and then I looked down and saw the blood. I liked it there. I didn’t stop to see how deep the cut was. Ramon’s wrist was bleeding too.
He punched another window and Junk Dog punched the fourth, his jacket protecting his fist, and then all the windows were broken and we were bleeding and breathing heavy, hot and destructive and alive. The floor was sparkling with glass, crunching under our shoes. There was nothing left to break. We stood there, still for a moment, looking at each other, saying nothing, but something crackled through us anyway. I let it hit my blood, and then I went down the ladder.
I walked around for a bit, the two boys following me, bumping into people but it was too crowded for anyone to notice, a mob. Holly and Danny seemed to have disappeared, which was exactly why I loved parties like this. You could show up with some people and they could disappear, and it didn’t matter because they’d soon be exchanged with new ones. It made everyone seem interchangeable, in a comforting way that meant I’d never have to be alone.
Juliet the Maniac Page 7