* * *
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After school, I stood in the hallway listening to Alyson talk to her father in the office. I couldn’t make out a whole lot, just her talking and crying softly, until I heard her yell “FUCK YOU!!!!!!” She slammed the phone down so hard I was surprised later when it wasn’t broken, and then she ran past me into our room. I thought I should go and try to comfort her but I didn’t know how to begin. I imagined a spider’s nest—something that looked manageable until you touched it too much and found yourself in a mess of swarming baby spiders.
I ignored it. I pretended that nothing had happened. I went outside to go finish my chores.
We didn’t talk until bedtime, because she punched the bathroom mirror shortly after. It shattered and busted her knuckles; blood spattered all over the sink and floor.
No one got mad at her. They took her to the clinic to get stitches. I felt guilty, so I volunteered to clean up the bathroom. I got a splinter of glass stuck in my finger.
I didn’t bother to pull it out. I hoped I got gangrene.
But later, in the darkness of our bedroom, the two of us in our separate beds, I asked her what had happened. I pretended I didn’t already know. She didn’t cry while telling me. Instead, her voice was flat and dead.
Her father wouldn’t even let her go to the funeral. He said she was still too new to the school, that he didn’t want to risk it. He refused to explain what, exactly, he thought she would be risking. “I’m never talking to him again,” Alyson said, in a tone so cold I believed her.
THE SHIT BABY
The boys had a new nighttime counselor. His name was Hank. He was cute in a TV-dad kind of way, but I thought he was mean because he didn’t say much and always looked at me slanty eyed in the hall. But all the boys seemed to love him. They said he told dirty jokes and let them go to bed late and didn’t care if they dipped as long as they didn’t walk upstairs with one in. Meanwhile, most nights we had Rosie, who was great and everything but she was such a stickler for the rules.
But then Hank started taking us to AA meetings in Yreka once a week. All the kids with “substance abuse issues” got to leave, while the nerds like Tommy and schizophrenics like Stephen had to stay. In the van, Hank let us listen to whatever music we wanted—he didn’t care if it had curse words, or was rap or punk—all the music the other counselors hated and forbid. He drove fast with the music loud, taking the turns of the mountain so fast it felt like we’d fall in, and we all told war stories from our drug days and laughed.
Hank was sober, had been for eleven years. Before that, he’d liked coke, and also weed—but it was the liquor that got him in trouble. He had stories about getting kicked out of bars, thrown in jail, various dates and jobs ruined by puking.
The best story involved too much weed and a bottle of Tums. One night, he’d had a bad case of the munchies, could have killed someone for a candy bar, but there was nothing in the house except stale bread and condiments, and going to the store seemed impossible. In the bathroom he came across a bottle of Tums. He figured they tasted like fruit—same as candy. In his stoned stupor, they tasted good. He ate the whole bottle.
In the morning, he tried to take a shit first thing, just like usual. Nothing. No shit the next day either, or the one after that. He was so constipated, it felt like he was pregnant with a shit baby.
The fourth day, though. That day his shit was gigantic, and it was also solid white. He guessed it was the calcium in the Tums. “Looked like a fucking iceberg,” he said. “All white and hard and so big it stuck out of the water. So big and white I should have named it.” We couldn’t stop laughing. Every time the van finally grew quiet, somebody would start giggling and that would set the rest of us off, and by the time we got to the meeting my stomach hurt. Hank and his massive iceberg shit baby.
SHORTLY AFTER THAT
Nathan left. He didn’t say goodbye. We didn’t know he was leaving until he was gone. He wasn’t the owner, just the person in charge. The owner was some woman named Donna, who lived in Sacramento, who I’d never met. Maybe they got into a disagreement. Either way, one Monday we woke up and he wasn’t there, and they said he wasn’t coming back. It felt like a bit of a betrayal, this man who’d listened to me in counseling and then disappeared with my secrets.
In the meantime, Bill the ranch manager would be in charge. Bill, who wasn’t even a counselor but a fucking cowboy, and, even worse, a Christian.
THE BRIGHT SIDE
But then they hired this woman Carly. Not as a headmaster, like Nathan. Her title was Wilderness Counselor. She came in a couple times a week, met with us for counseling, not the hour-long sessions we’d had with Nathan, just a quick check-in for ten or twenty minutes. If something bad happened, she might talk to us for longer, but mostly that was it. We were told that once we got to know her and vice versa, she’d take us backpacking and rock climbing, Death Valley and Mexico and Alaska. I liked her right away. We all did. She was cool, knew about good bands and had funny jokes.
BUT REALLY
Carly was no help when Bill did things like go into the classroom and decide we weren’t allowed to listen to music anymore, and since I ignored this new rule, I had to stay in my room during free time for three days.
And sometimes he’d do stuff that was really fucked up. One morning he was yelling at Tommy during breakfast because he’d made his bed all messy.
“How about you stop being a dick,” I told Bill.
He flipped out. “Until you learn some respect, you’re not going anywhere. Not down to the barn, not to watch movies, not on a walk, not to town. The only places you’ll be going are your room and the schoolroom and to do chores.”
“Um, hello,” I said. “I have an appointment with my psychiatrist tomorrow.”
“I don’t care. You’re not going anywhere. You can go next week, after you’ve learned your lesson.”
Naturally, I ran out of medication.
Rosie was dispensing, and she seemed so confused until I explained why there was nothing in my bottle.
She muttered, “Good Lord,” and then dug through other people’s medicine until she came up with my doses. “Here,” she said. “Our secret. We’ll solve this problem in the morning.”
I don’t know what happened, if Rosie yelled at him or something, but the next night my medicine had been refilled, and not only that, Bill apologized. To me. His voice was soft and you could tell he was embarrassed and I tried to not revel in it but it was hard. “It’s OK, Bill,” I said.
Later, once I was in bed, I played that moment over again in my head. Bill’s embarrassment. Bill’s apology. Rosie could get anybody to do anything. What an amazing woman.
VETERAN ADVICE
At the AA meetings, we were the only people under forty. Hank had formerly been the baby of the group. Mostly it was crusty old men, old-timers who could quote whole passages from the Big Book and loved repeating all the stupid AA catchphrases. It works if you work it. Keep coming back. Meeting makers make it. But they also had great stories, about robberies and prostitutes and prison. They loved us, gave us extra cookies and cigarettes, which Hank didn’t mind us smoking as long as we didn’t smell like it when we got back. Between that and the coffee, the handholding and the corny phrases and the God and prayer bullshit hardly mattered.
The first few times we went, Hank had instructed us to just watch and listen and take it all in. He told us we didn’t have to like or relate to everything we heard—the point was to pay attention to the parts that sounded like us. “It’s like a cafeteria. Take what you need and leave the rest behind,” he said. Another stupid fucking catchphrase. But we did what he said.
And he was right. When I listened to the old men, I found traces of myself. One night, this guy—he was wearing a hat like the ones my grandpa wore, with the name of his navy ship from WWII stitched on the front, white hairs sticking out of his nose—was saying the only time he felt whole was when he was fucked up. The generations between
us were nothing; there was something in him that also existed in me. I heard what he said like he was talking straight to me. Like I was the only person in the room.
I DECIDED TO TRY SOMETHING NEW
It was late and I couldn’t sleep. I kept watch on the clock until it read 12:03, because Rosie was on night shift, and she said I had to try to sleep for at least two hours before I could get up to read.
But this time I didn’t start reading right away. This time I asked her if we could talk.
She smiled like she’d been waiting for me to ask that question a long time. “Of course,” she said, and I sat down next to her at the table. I told her about my loneliness. I said it felt like there was something wrong with me. I felt like I was missing something.
“Loneliness, huh.” She leaned back in her chair, and looked at me for a moment like she was assessing me. Then she said, “That’s something I know a lot about, sweetheart.”
I knew Rosie was married to a truck driver named Denny, but I hadn’t really considered what that meant. Turns out it meant she was alone a lot of the time. Her kids were alone a lot, too—the oldest, her son, had to be the parent sometimes. He put the others to bed when she worked the night shift, prepared breakfast in the morning, made sure everyone got to school on time. She said she felt the loneliness in herself, but it was worse when she saw it in him because she knew it was her fault.
“But I have to look at the positives,” she said. “Denny’s gone a lot of the time, sure. But we have good health insurance, a nice home. Plus with him being away so much, we don’t have time to argue or get bored with each other the way most people do. I swear, his job is what’s kept us going for these fifteen years.”
She put her fingers on her hair-sprayed curls, twisting them in a way that was almost girlish. “You know, there’s good in everything,” she said. “It’s just sometimes you have to dig a little harder to get it out.”
She was quiet for a bit, and I was too. “Now you,” she said. She reached across the table to hold my hand. Hers were warm and plump. Mom hands. “You’re sensitive. And that means extra pain, extra loneliness, extra sadness. But it also means extra joy.” She said, “Your job is to dig for the gold. God’s given you a shovel, you just have to figure out how to use it.”
We sat there for a while after, me reading my book, her reading some women’s magazine that told you how to be a good woman. I kept looking at her over the pages, how her face was both hard and soft, tired and youthful, at the same time. I wondered what she thought about the magazine, if she was reading things she cared about or just killing time. I wondered what she thought about me. But I didn’t ask. Soon I grew tired. I said goodnight to Rosie, and she said goodnight to me. I fell asleep within minutes, like magic.
SITUATIONS THAT USED TO BAFFLE US
After we’d been going to AA for a month, Hank told us it was time for us to share. So after we finished reading from the Big Book, Hank nodded at us, which meant we should raise our hands.
Alyson went first. She talked about her mom, and getting arrested for stealing, and how much she hated her father. And then Luke went, sharing about his blackouts and how he always felt like he couldn’t stop betraying the people he loved. And then Kiran—the fights he’d gotten into, his DUI, how his mother told him she didn’t love him anymore. These were things that only came out in group, and I felt so proud of them for not being afraid to say them aloud here in that room, outside the school, to people we barely knew.
And then it was my turn.
I wanted to be honest. It was weird, standing up in that room. I didn’t know where to look or what to say, and I felt the hot spread of embarrassment crawl up my neck and face. I told myself it didn’t matter, but I couldn’t talk while looking at anyone so I just stared at the ground, at the worn industrial carpet covered in weird stains and cigarette burns. And then I was talking, saying that drugs were the only thing that seemed to fix me, the only time I could shut up my stupid brain. I told them I wasn’t suicidal anymore, but sometimes all I wanted was to die. I told them I couldn’t stop hating myself. When I finished, everyone was looking at me—the old men, Hank, my friends, everybody. But it didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. They weren’t looking at me like I was a freak. They were looking at me like they understood.
At the end of the meeting, they gave out tokens—for the people who had been sober a month, six months, years. Unfathomable amounts of time. They offered all of us, “The most important token of all. The one for a new way of life.”
We went up one by one, and everybody clapped, and they gave us a token and a hug. At other meetings when other people had gone up for that token, it had felt cheap and corny to me, celebrating something just for showing up. But when I got that hug—the old man, I think his name was Stu—he smelled like cheap cologne and tobacco and something else, maybe beef jerky. That smell and that hug actually meant something to me—starting as tingles at the back of my neck, shooting into my arms.
As I walked back to my seat, fingering that white piece of plastic, I realized I was in danger of crying. I didn’t even know why. I didn’t feel sad.
I felt something new.
I felt …
happy.
LET’S TWIST AGAIN
We were having a dance. The first ever at RTS, in all of its three years. We’d spent almost two weeks deciding on a theme, making decorations. The challenge of finding songs we liked that didn’t have curse words or talk about sex or drugs or violence. We decided on the theme Lost in Space, so we cut planets and stars out of cardboard, painted them and covered them with glitter. Rosie went into town, bought us shiny star-shaped Mylar balloons—even one that looked like an astronaut—a big pack of tissue paper, a purple strand of Christmas lights.
Of course none of us had prom dresses, prom shoes, or prom hair, but we did the best we could to get ready. Alyson put a mix CD on her Discman and turned the volume all the way up, fuzzy through her headphones but loud enough that we could hear, and I pretended it was like the olden days, when I’d go over to Nicole’s after school on Fridays and we’d spend hours listening to music while picking our outfits. I put on the long black nightgown I bought at a vintage store, and over it my fuzzy pink angora sweater, my rhinestone choker and my silver bracelet. Alyson French-braided my hair so it was like a headband, and then we put little flower clips to pin it in place. We did our makeup with the brightest shadows we had, to fit the theme, sparkly purple on my eyes and electric green on Alyson’s. We put glitter on everything, our cheekbones and brow bones and collarbones. I didn’t have any prom shoes, so I just went barefoot, painting my toenails silver. When we were finished, we didn’t look prom-ready, but it was close.
The kitchen almost looked like a normal dance too. The “decoration committee” had put purple butcher paper on the tables, sprinkled glitter on top. The tables and chairs had all been pulled back and pushed together. There was a big bowl of punch, soda cans, a tray of cookies. The tissue paper was bunched up in things you could almost imagine were extraterrestrial landscapes, lit up from behind with the purple Christmas lights, glinting off the glitter on the planets and stars.
And then Luke and the rest of the boys came up the stairs. Somebody turned on the music, oldies because we couldn’t find anything else that fit the criteria, and as “Angel Baby” swelled through the speakers Luke walked up to me, his eyes glowing in the cloudy light. He had a corsage for me, pine needles and a couple bright yellow oak leaves bundled together with white yarn, because there was no florist and any flowers outside were now dead. He tied it around my wrist and I almost felt normal, almost like I was going to prom. He placed his hands on my waist and I put mine on his shoulders, because we weren’t allowed to get any closer, and he smiled at me like I was the best thing he’d ever seen, and I felt like I was, like I truly was good, beautiful and alive and special and loved.
URSA MAJOR
The dance didn’t last all that long but it didn’t need to. There was a mete
or shower that night anyway. It was cold and clear, so first we went into our rooms, and I put long johns under my nightgown and my fake fur coat over. The staff gave us a bunch of old blankets and towels so we could lie out on the front lawn but the grass was wet and crunchy with frost, so we went down to the basketball courts. Maybe that’s why they let us go out alone—we’d be on the lawn so they could watch us—but no one came out to stop us from moving. We lit up a cigarette, one that Alyson had stolen from Rosie’s purse, menthol and skinny, passed it between us and waited.
Nothing happened at first, so we pointed out all the stars we knew, or thought we knew. Venus, the North Star, Orion. I’d never seen stars the way they looked in Redwood Trails. There were so many you might really think the sky was just a sheet of black paper with pinpricks, dully masking the glowing afterworld.
I tried to recall the stories I’d heard during that Christian camp, but all I could remember was the one about Ursa Major. Once a giant bear roamed the earth but he and a hunter got into a fight, and the hunter grabbed him by the tail and flung him into the sky. That was why the tail was so long—it had gotten stretched out in the flinging. I thought the bear might fall down. It bothered me that a little mistake like fucking with the wrong hunter could lead to an eternity of embarrassment and consequence—alone in the sky with a stretched-out tail.
Then Alyson spit on her hand and started to give Kiran a hand job under the blanket, mostly joking, and we told stories about all the funny places we’d had sex. Except by then I’d heard all the stories before—Alyson getting fingerbanged on the teacups at Disneyland, Kiran in his little brother’s bed, me in the bathroom at a Burger King, Luke in church.
Juliet the Maniac Page 14