AND A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE
My parents felt guilty. I got so many Christmas presents—a new winter jacket, new boots, new jeans, all the makeup and CDs and books on my wish list. I spent a lot of time reading the books, headphones over my ears as I listened to my new CDs. My parents didn’t bother me. Nobody bothered me. Everything I needed took up only the tiny space between my eyes, my ears, the page of my book, and it made me feel powerful, like a tiny god, ruling over a predictable world.
And on Christmas they let me call Luke, even though they didn’t approve of me having a boyfriend because they said I was supposed to be focused on getting better. But that night they said we could talk as long as we wanted. I took the cordless out to the patio. It was cold, colder than I remembered Santa Bonita being in December. I was wearing my new jacket and my breath made dusky puffs.
His mother answered. I’d met her once, when she’d visited the school before taking Luke to Ashland, the hippie town a couple hours from RTS, for the weekend. She had a severe haircut and didn’t wear makeup, the kind of woman who favored long flowy skirts and leather sandals. She didn’t seem to like me, her face pinched and priggish as I shook her hand.
But over the phone her voice got all chirpy. “Oh hiiiiii,” she said. She asked me how I was doing and I told her I was fine and asked the same question. Then she went to get Luke.
I heard shuffling, Luke’s mom talking to what sounded like Luke. I couldn’t hear what they said, but the conversation took longer than, “Oh hey, honey, your girlfriend is on the phone.” After a while, I no longer heard voices. A minute after that, Luke finally picked up the phone.
“Hello,” he said, his voice completely monotone.
I’d expected him to sound happier, but maybe he was feeling depressed or something. I asked him how his Christmas was. He said it was fine. I asked him how it was being back home. He said it was fine. I waited for him to ask the same of me, or to say anything, but he didn’t. He just sat there, the silence between us growing and gathering edges. Finally he broke it. “I left some presents for you, for Christmas. They’re on your bed.”
I wondered what they were. I hadn’t gotten him anything. I hadn’t thought to.
“That’s so sweet,” I said. “I really miss you.”
There was more silence, until eventually he said, “I miss you too.” His voice was cracking, like maybe he was crying.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, clearing his throat. “Everything is fine.”
“OK,” I said.
“I have to go,” he said. “We’re going to some party. Family shit.”
“OK,” I said.
“I love you,” he said. “I really do love you.”
“I love you too,” I said.
I heard a click. He’d hung up.
I didn’t know what to think about that.
I pushed the feeling away, stared out from the patio. During the day, you could see the lagoon and the 101 and beyond that, the shining ocean. The 101 wound up the hill, past the giant reserve full of Torrey pines. On the other side was UCSD—the spaceship library and eucalyptus trees. I conjured up the picture: hand in hand, walking under the trees, reading in the library. In the dark, all of it was just a blob. But still, I knew it was out there. That future.
JAILBREAK
Towards the end, Holly and Kate picked me up and took me to the Palms to see everyone. It was after dark but still early, and there weren’t a lot of people around. We had lied to my parents, saying we were going to a movie at the theater downtown. They thought the Palms was the source of my problems, a den of “bad influence,” as though they hadn’t once thought the same thing about Nicole.
Danny Smackball was there, and so was Junk Dog, but a lot of the others were nowhere to be found. Everybody seemed happy to see me, but a lot of the people were strangers. I hadn’t even been gone that long. And finally I realized how transitory everything was: people in, people out, a revolving door for teen problems. My absence hadn’t created a hole. Things kept on turning without me—parties, smoking, drinking, fighting, making out. And again I felt like something in a space bubble, a film of plastic that separated me from the world. An astronaut. A stranger, just visiting.
* * *
—
The last night I couldn’t stand it anymore—this ghostlike, passive version of me—so I pretended to go to bed early. It seemed believable because my flight was at 7:00 a.m. I left through my sliding glass doors, just like the old days, figuring if I got caught it didn’t matter. What else could my parents do to me anyway.
Holly and Kate picked me up. They had three stamps of acid, the only thing that wouldn’t show up on my piss test. There went my sobriety. I imagined it, an object, something tiny and small like the stamp of acid, dropping it off a cliff just to watch it flutter. I waited to feel regret but instead I felt good, like settling back into my true self.
We ate the acid in the parking lot of the park at the very back of Carmel Heights, the side that always got crowded after football games, our windows rolled down as we smoked and waited for the drugs to kick in, and Kate and Holly showed me their favorite techno songs. I imagined the me who hadn’t attempted suicide or gone off to Redwood Trails School. I fell into the version of that girl, the one who didn’t know Luke or Alyson. The one who knew drugs were fun.
I could tell the acid was starting to work when I had a sudden urge to get out of the car, to inspect the eucalyptus trees. Kate and Holly followed me. We peeled off the papery strips of bark, found sticks on the ground that seemed like magic wands.
Then Holly got a page, so we went to the Palms to listen to the message, bringing our new wands with us. The page was from Ramon, who we didn’t have to call because he was sitting in front of the pay phone. He picked me up when he saw me, swung me around like I was a bride and he’d been away at war, and the lights from the light posts shifted and glowed like suns. There was a party, he told us. We followed him over the hill in Kate’s car to an unfamiliar house.
It was almost all dudes, and everyone was doing coke, sweating and stinking. There was the creepiest vibe, and Holly and Kate felt it too. I wanted to get out of there but I had an idea. I still had twenty dollars in my wallet, from the money my parents had given me for food and movies. Coke started at forty dollars a gram, but I figured I could get someone to sell me a few lines. I couldn’t do it until after I got back to RTS, but I figured I could hide the drugs in my bra, the little pocket for the removable padding.
So I sat next to and smiled a lot at this disgusting troll Larry. He smelled like rotting meat and had the blackness of pure evil pouring out of his eyes. He finally agreed to sell me some, wrapping the coke up in a little piece of paper folded like an envelope. As soon as I had it in my hands I got out of there like I was escaping death, the contagion of a plague.
We got back in the car without saying goodbye to anyone, even Ramon, which I felt bad about, but I was too creeped out. There wasn’t anywhere to go, so we drove around for a while, Kate laughing because the lines in the road were twisting like snakes, before we decided on the beach.
We took off our shoes and rolled up our jeans and it was cold and windy, but it didn’t bother me. We ran around in the sand, splashing in the shallow parts of the waves, the crescent moon glinting off the water like money. Shooting each other with our wands, because now they were magical guns. Laughing. It felt good and it felt pure, three girls on the beach playing like puppies, and for the first time since I’d been back in Santa Bonita I felt at home, really in the world, occupying it, not just ghosting, and it seemed absurd that if my parents knew I was there on that beach they’d be furious.
Kate and Holly had meant to go home early because the next night was New Year’s Eve. They had party plans, a big one with an open bar at what was supposedly Master P’s old house, right near my elementary school. I kept pushing the thought out of my head that I wouldn’t be with them. Every time they talked a
bout calling it a night, I’d remember “one more place I wanted to see”: the hills of Laguna, the elephant slides, the parking lot at New Hope. It wasn’t too hard to convince them.
Towards 4:00 a.m., right before they finally dropped me off, I had them take me to the Walgreens. Getting on a plane coming off acid seemed horrible, terrible, especially since my final destination was the school and sobriety. But then I remembered something Gavin had said back at the school: if you take Coricidin, this cold medicine for people with high blood pressure who apparently can’t take the regular stuff, the high was way better and more intense than Robofrying. I knew the school didn’t include that kind of thing on their drug test, so I bought a box. Then they finally dropped me off, hugging me, Holly tearful, and by then the acid almost gone, just a feeling of giddiness now. The only thing left from the hallucinations were pale trails, which I saw a lot of the time anyway.
I crept back in the window, lay in bed for a bit and was nearly asleep when my dad came to tell me it was time to get ready to go. Right before we left, I swallowed half the box of Coricidin with a glass of orange juice. My mom cried some when they dropped me off, and I wanted to feel sad and I wanted to miss them, but leaving didn’t bother me too much.
When I boarded the plane I felt dizzy but that was it. Maybe the half-box wasn’t enough. I swallowed the rest in the tiny bathroom with water from the sink even though there was a big sign telling me not to drink from it.
Once we arrived in San Francisco, I stood to leave the plane but it was like there were astronaut boots on my feet. I walked through the tunnel from the plane into the airport in what I hoped was a straight line, and all I wanted was to be away from those people and the stale air pressing against my mouth like plastic film. I wanted a cigarette and fresh air.
I rushed past the security checkpoint, and I hit someone with my backpack. The guy glared at me. He said something, or maybe he yelled it, but whatever it was that came out of his mouth sounded like only noise. I got outside and lit my last cigarette. The winter air felt violent, punishing and cold. I focused everything I had onto that red tip and for the five minutes it lasted I felt OK.
I made it back through security and to my gate without too much trouble, but the plane was delayed. I sat listening to my headphones, telling myself everything was fine, I would get on the plane soon, but suddenly my head went thick and heavy, my chest tight, and I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was ODing but I didn’t know how to fix it, so I just sat there until my fingers went numb, and then I made myself get up and go to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face, not bothering to dry it off even though it smudged my mascara. I locked myself in the handicapped stall, sitting on the toilet, head between my knees, trying to catch my breath. When everything stopped, I noticed the ends of my hair were wet from something, wet from something on the floor of the bathroom. Probably piss.
I got up, my pulse still jumpy. The plane had boarded by then. I made it on just before they closed the doors. When Vinnie picked me up in the white van he didn’t seem to notice anything, but for the rest of the day I felt dizzy and doomed. Coricidin is a terrible high. Don’t try it.
BOOK FOUR
NEW YEAR, NEW YOU
The school was almost empty when I got back—just Christina, and this new kid, Alex. It was his very first day. Christina had only gone home for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and Alex’s first day was December 31 because his parents followed the same logic as mine: New Year’s Eve would be too much of a temptation.
Vinnie left right after he’d dropped me off, so it was just the three of us and Rosie. The Coricidin left things blurry, but still I could tell Alex was kind of hot for a hick. A big nose, construction boots, and a Carhartt jacket—but full lips and long lashes. His hometown was some Podunk place in Montana, and he already chewed tobacco.
Rosie had the whole evening planned out. Her ideas were so depressing that I would have preferred we go to bed at 10:00 p.m., same as always, but I could tell she’d tried and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. We ate frozen pizza. When it got dark, she showed us how to blow out eggs and then we set them on the oven to dry. Right before midnight, she handed us shitty paper hats and shitty plastic noisemakers, sparkling cider in plastic flutes, and tubes of glitter, which we poured into the eggs. The four of us went on the porch, bundled in our coats, paper hats on our heads. We opened the windows to the great room, despite the cold, to hear the TV. When the bell hit midnight, we crushed the eggs, smashing them on each other’s heads, throwing them in the air so they crunched on the sidewalk. The glitter glinted and swirled under the porch light like fireflies, and the TV blared “Auld Lang Syne.” It started snowing, fat puffy flakes light as the glitter, which seemed a good omen for the year to come. But by then I knew better than to believe in signs.
The phone rang, so Rosie went to answer it. She was gone for a while. Her husband.
I put two hats on my boobs like Madonna, and then Christina did the same. We rubbed our paper boobs together, looking at Alex to make sure he was watching. I stepped over and kissed Alex on the cheek, and Christina did the same on the other side. We could still hear Rosie’s voice from the office. I leaned over Alex to kiss Christina. She opened her mouth and I stuck my tongue in. I pushed her paper cone bra to the side, grabbed her boob. Without opening my eyes I slid my hand down Alex’s thin chest until it was on his crotch, and Christina’s hand met mine and we rubbed him and kissed, until we heard Rosie hang up. When she came back outside, Alex’s face was bright red and he kept pulling his jacket down to make sure his boner was covered, but Christina and I just looked at each other. Her sad eyes were flickering and she smiled at me, and I could tell she felt it too, this odd palpitation of power. I liked the idea that we had been Alex’s strange introduction into this strange new world. I liked that we had made it a decent New Year’s after all. We had done our best to party like it was a whole new millennium, because it was.
* * *
—
I didn’t notice the presents Luke had left me until bedtime because he had hidden them under my pillow—a copy of Youth in Revolt, a set of colored pencils, the nice kind you could turn into watercolors, and a Marilyn Manson CD I didn’t have yet. There was also a folded-up piece of notebook paper, covered in his neat block-letter handwriting, listing all the reasons he loved me … my mismatched snake eyes, my pouty lips, the way I sounded when I laughed, the brilliance of my poems. I didn’t want to but I started crying, the emptiness that was him no longer near me rising up in a wave. I smelled the paper, wanting it to smell like him, but of course it smelled like paper. I cried and missed him until I fell asleep, and in the morning my eyes were puffy and red.
Y2K
On Monday, we found that the whole school had changed again. We finally had a new headmaster, a real one. Bill was relegated to where he belonged: the ranch. The new headmaster was a woman. Her name was Stacy, and I liked her right away. I liked the way she dressed—black Western wear with flowy skirts and lots of jewelry, like Stevie Nicks if she’d found herself on a ranch. That day, she met with each of us in her office, to see where we were and where we had been, and I could tell she liked me right away too, smiling big and telling me I seemed so smart and that she liked my ring, a silver snake curled around a nugget of amber. Her office decorations were still in boxes, pictures stacked in frames against the wall. A diploma faced out, a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. I wondered how she’d found herself here.
The other big change was that Hank was gone.
He had quit. Completely left us, without even a warning or goodbye.
PAINS
Over the next few days, I kept waiting for Luke to call me, to write. I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t. I wondered if he missed me too much, or if it was too painful. I wondered if he had, but maybe the letters and phone calls had been intercepted.
I sent him letters at first, one every day, just to let him know what I was thinking and what I’d been up to, the changes that
had happened at the school. But when I heard nothing back, I suddenly felt desperate. I decided no more letters until I heard from him. There was no way I wouldn’t hear from him soon.
But I didn’t.
His silence remained a mystery.
PATIENT LOG
PATIENT NAME: Juliet Escoria
AGE: 16 yrs 4 mo
SEX: F
DOB: 8/23/83
DATE: 01/11/00
HISTORY: Patient’s behavior log good. Cont. involvement romantically with former patient LUCAS WEBER. No reported hallucinations. Cont. anxiety (panic attacks), sleeplessness.
Drug test negative.
Reported side effects of somnolence, lethargy, muscle pain, upset stomach, hair loss (mild) (cont.).
PREVIOUS MEDICATIONS:
Zyprexa—discontinued 01/99 once stabilized
Wellbutrin—discontinued 03/99 (ineffective)
Tegretol—discontinued 07/99 (risk of overdose/replace w Depakote)
Paxil—discontinued 07/99 (replace w Remeron)
Remeron—discontinued 8/99 (weight gain/replace w Zoloft)
Buspar—discontinued 01/00 (somnolence)
TREATMENT:
Cont. Depakote at 1500mg/nightly
Cont. Trazodone 25mg/nightly (for insomnia)
Increase Zoloft from 50mg/nightly to 100mg/nightly over 1 wk (for anxiety/depression)
Cont. group therapy, indiv. therapy
CLEANLINESS AND GODLINESS
I did the cocaine the next weekend, after my piss test came back clean. My plan had been to do it with Alyson during deep clean, which was how Stacy made us spend our Saturdays now. That day, my chore was dusting and then polishing all the furniture in the great room.
Juliet the Maniac Page 17