***
The days and months WENT on, and the sweet, nerdy, pale, Dene girl with big, ill-fitted glasses, baggy clothes and bad home perm started acting out. Soon enough, I was labelled as a bully. I eventually got kicked out of middle school and was court-ordered to transfer to a different school. It was all because I thought a girl at the school was starting rumours about me. Well, that didn’t sit well with me, so I decided to have a little chat with her in the hallway after school was out. I ended up pushing the girl into a fire extinguisher that was mounted to the wall outside of the music room. The music teacher must have heard the commotion because he ran out of his classroom to see what was going on and tried to stop the fight, but I punched him and got away.
I knew I was in trouble and that it was only a matter of time until someone was going to come looking for me. I ran straight to my apartment and hid. Not long after, the police were at my door. I opened the door and slipped past them, booking it down four flights of stairs without even touching the steps. I slid down the railings until they caught me in the lobby on the first floor and held me to the ground while kneeing me in the back to keep me from squirming.
I was hauled into the back of a cop car with my hands behind my back, and it seemed that the entire apartment building stood outside on their balconies watching the drama unfold. From there, I was transferred to the police station jail cells, where I would stay confined for a couple of days in a small cell with one toilet in the middle of it and no privacy whatsoever. It isn’t a death sentence, but when you are in it, it feels like a lifetime. I didn’t leave the cell for fresh air, food, showers or visitors.
When it finally came time for my court appearance, I got the infamous one phone call. I called my mom. “Mom, can you bring me some clean clothes? I’m at the police station, in case you are wondering where I’ve been.” Out of all the clothes my mom could have brought me that day, she thought a sweater with a large picture of Mickey Mouse on the front would be appropriate attire for a court hearing.
To make matters worse, the same day I was sitting in the small court cell waiting to be called in to appear before the judge was the same day that my class was on some sort of field trip to the courthouse. One by one, my peers opened the small window of my cell door and got a perfect view of the mess that was me. I felt like a caged animal on display. I couldn’t hide from it, either. I suppose I could have crouched down under the bench and curled into a ball hoping no one would recognize me, but that would have only made things worse. Some kids I would wave at and some I would glare at depending on who it was. Some would stare at me a lot longer than they should have. I was a Mickey Mouse character all right. I moved back in with my grandma after that fiasco. But the careless, wild child within me didn’t stop there. I was just getting started.
***
I STARTED TROUBLE WHEN I WAS BORED. I would run up and down the hallways and get my grandma eviction notice after eviction notice. My grandma got numerous complaints and eventually got kicked out when the new landlords took over the apartment. Before the new landlords came along, we were somewhat safeguarded because I was best friends with the previous landlord’s granddaughter, Bree. Bree and I became best friends when I first started living with my grandma. I think we got along so well because we both came from similar circumstances — our mothers were not in the picture very much.
I was severely bored one day and I was in one of my typical emotional, dark, raven-like moods. I invited myself over to Bree’s place, dressed in black and wearing my shades even though the short, bright winter daylight streamed in through her living room window. I was in a phase where I teetered on the edge of the other side. I didn’t think my life mattered. I didn’t think about the future and who I could be. I only thought about the now. I couldn’t see past the problems in my life. I had no hope for brighter days ahead. That day, I came up with the dreadful idea of raiding Bree’s grandmother’s medicine cabinet.
Bree’s grandma had a variety of prescription pills, and I took a few from each bottle. I held the colourful assortment of pills in my hand — mostly diuretic, I’m sure — and without thinking of the consequences, I threw my head back and let the pills slide down my throat. The next thing I remember, my mom was shaking me to wake me up and bring me home. “Catherine, wake up! Get up! What’s wrong with you?” She slapped me hard in the face and managed to get me on my feet, steering me toward the door before I walked head first into a wall. Lights out.
I woke up three days later. I slept through Christmas. As it was, Christmas was a hard time for us in our house. My Christmases consisted of Salvation Army Santas delivering presents and food bank donations in black, shiny garbage bags, so it wasn’t exactly a magical time in my house. For the most part I was content to have presents and all the trimmings of a Christmas dinner, but what I loved most about Christmas was going to the midnight mass with my grandma and being allowed to open one gift before bedtime, usually a new pair of pajamas or socks. I never complained about not having a lot of presents because my experience of Christmas was never about abundance. And that Christmas in particular, it was anything but. My family was at a loss with me. I was out of control.
That was the same year I started seeing a boy named Mathew. We met at the uptown arcade. Yellowknife had two arcades back in my younger days. One arcade was located uptown where most of the rich kids hung out, and the old arcade was where most of the poor kids hung out. It was no coincidence that most kids who hung out at the downtown arcade were Indigenous.
Mandy dragged me to the new arcade one weekend, against my will, and I met Matthew. Matthew was also a troubled kid and he was sent to Yellowknife to live with his aunt and uncle. That year, we both lost our virginity while we listened to loud heavy metal music in his bedroom.
When his caregivers found out that Matthew and I were starting to get serious, they decided that Yellowknife was no better than his own home and he was forced to move back home with his parents. It was so hard to say goodbye to Matthew. I tried to sneak him into my house and hide him in my closet so that he wouldn’t have to leave, but my grandma found him hidden under the covers and kicked him out in the cold. Half-frozen, he stubbornly serenaded me under my bedroom window, calling out my name, and looking pitiful.
After he left town, we would talk on the phone for hours and hours. Since my grandma’s phone was strapped for long-distance calls, I had to use my friends’ phone to call him. I didn’t consider or care that the long-distance charges would rack up as much as they did. When my friend’s dad — who kept his immaculate, shiny, vintage motorcycle smack dab in the middle of his living room with a small, wire fence around it — found out that I racked up his phone bill, he was furious, to say the least. It’s safe to say I never went back to his house. I did, however, make up my mind that I was going to run away to be with Matthew, and when I make up my mind there’s no turning back.
I scrounged and saved enough money for a one-way ticket to see Matthew. By the time I arrived at his house, I had ten bucks to my name. I had hopped a bus that took four days to get to the far end of Vancouver Island with nothing but a false sense of hope that, when I got to Matthew, everything would be great and we would live happily ever after. Boy, was I wrong. When I finally made it to Matthew’s house, I realized just how far away from home I was. A homesick feeling sunk in the moment I met Mathew’s mother. She was not fond of me, and it was glaringly obvious. She looked me up and down in a judging manner — my belly top, purple hair, thick black eyeliner and army boots. The way she looked at me made me feel ashamed of my sense of style.
By the end of my short visit to Matthew’s parents’ house, both Matthew and I were thrown out on the streets of his hometown with no money and just a small inkling of hope that our young love would be enough to solve all our problems. We lasted a day on the streets. Darkness was setting in on us and we had nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. I called my grandma with my last quarter to ask her to
buy me a ticket home. “Grandma, I need your help, I’m on the street,” I said, but she couldn’t help me. After all, she had little money to spare, only enough to get by from day to day. She scolded me with her angry worry: “What’s wrong with you? Why did you go that far in the first place? Get home!” I had no choice but to phone social services and ask for help. I reluctantly said farewell to Mathew and headed back to my cold little corner of the Earth.
Chapter 6
When I returned TO THE North after my runaway adventure, I was right back to my unruly self. I was a regular at the arcade, playing my favourite tunes in the jukebox and beating the boys at pool. I hung out at the arcade until closing time almost every day.
No one in my family knew how to handle me. I was completely out of control. That’s when I realized that there might be one more person that could save me from myself: my dad. It took me three days to find his phone number in the large Toronto phone book. I lost a lot of quarters in the pay phone trying to find him, but I ended up finally pinpointing him through his sister. When I got up the nerve to call him, the conversation was awkward. “Hi, dad? This is … your daughter.” Silence. Loud silence. He didn’t know what to say at first. He told me he had a family. Two stepsons. He had met his new partner only a few months after my mother had left. He paid my way to come and visit him and his family, a few weeks later.
I arrived in the Toronto airport with my bright orange hair, black lipliner, short shorts and ripped tights. I did not resemble the sweet little red-headed girl with the pretty pearl hoop earrings that he knew years ago. I wonder what he must have thought seeing this presumably tough little girl with no cares in the world. He couldn’t have known that the hostility I displayed while I was visiting that summer was a replacement for my longing for a stable life, like the life he had been living that whole time. The life that I could have had. He was a good father. I was happy that he had a family but, at the same time, jealous that he had started over without me. Undoubtedly, my visit was short lived because I felt like I didn’t belong in his life anymore. The words we used to say to each other, “I love you more than the whole wide world,” were so distant, they might as well have been way out in space. I wish I could have reached out and grabbed those memories, but, if I did, I would only end up drifting alone for eternity, trying to search for something that wasn’t there anymore. So, instead, I gave up and ran in the opposite direction.
***
YELLOWKNIFE FELT LIKE AN INCREASING burden on me and I would have done anything to try to get out, but running away and hitchhiking doesn’t get you very far when there is only one road out of town. My friends and I would slowly make our way to the mall from the arcade to check things out and then turn around and walk back to the arcade. Continuously walking in a loop all day long was the only form of entertainment for teenagers with a lot of time on their hands and no money.
Sure, I could have been in school trying to bring up my grades, but that was no fun; plus I was so far behind in my studies from skipping school for so long that I would have to put in twice the effort. Combined with the fact that all my friends were out having a good time, school was low on my list of things to do.
I began a short-lived attempt at stealing, which consisted of trying to lift clothes and makeup, but I made for a horrible thief. My friend was sporting some nice clothes and told me that she got her clothes from stealing. I wanted in, so she brought me to the mall and we stuffed our backpacks with clothes while pretending to try stuff on in the change rooms. The store clerk was suspicious and called security. The mall security chased us all the way down the street until we hid in the back alley behind a crummy motel, huffing and puffing and trying to empty our bags before we got caught. Ever since then, I always feel like I’m being followed when I’m in an expensive store. I can feel the clerk’s eyes on me and I instantly start to feel like I’ve done something wrong. It’s the same feeling I get when the police are behind me and I am afraid I’m going to get pulled over, even though I’ve done nothing wrong.
Looking back, I only stole because I didn’t know the consequences, and once again, I had to learn the hard way. I have always liked having nice clothes, though, so on my fourteenth birthday my friend enticed me to spend my birthday money in Edmonton on a shopping spree. She told me that her mom lived in the city, so we would have a place to stay when we got there. All I needed to do was buy a plane ticket and save a bit of money for shopping. I only had enough to buy a one-way ticket, but I wasn’t concerned with how I was going to get back. I should have known it was too good to be true. The minute we touched down in the city, she unexpectedly brought me to a party out in the suburbs. I was turned around and lost. The people at the party were loud and rowdy. I felt so out of place, because deep down I was a shy, lost little girl who was far from home and didn’t know anyone.
I sat in a corner of the room, keeping to myself while everyone partied around me. In the middle of the night a guy with a bandana around his head came waltzing in with a rifle stowed in his baggy jeans, bragging and laughing about how he had just scared an old man underneath a car and stolen his money at gunpoint. My anxiety hit hard, and I thought that if I didn’t act like I fit in he would try to intimidate me too by pointing the gun in my direction.
The next day I told my friend that I wanted to go home. I couldn’t dare stay at that house another night, so I told her I’d rather stay in a shelter. I checked into a youth shelter in the inner city, and my anxiety spiked through the roof. I felt so small, lost and alone. I was more afraid than I had ever been before. I managed to borrow enough money for a cheap bus ticket home. It was April and the ice on the rivers and lakes was rapidly melting, but the bus driver pushed on over the ice road, and as we crossed the mighty Mackenzie, he assured us passengers that it was safe enough to drive on. The bus was half submerged in the melted water that pooled on the surface of the ice, but we made it across safely, to everyone’s surprise. Not long afterward, the bus starting slowly filling with smoke. The water had gotten into the battery, causing it to leak. Everyone on the bus had to hurry off and huddle in the cold on the side of the road waiting for someone to come and help. When darkness fell, I hitched a ride home down the old dirt road that I had gotten to know so well, and I swore to myself that I would never run away again for as long as I lived.
***
I TRIED TO BE GOOD FROM then on and get my act together, but the white devil came knocking and, when I didn’t answer, he broke in. The first time I tried cocaine, I didn’t feel any different. I was at a small get together and it was casually in front of me on the coffee table. The lines were cut and ready to go, inviting me to try it. My friends were taking turns kneeling over and snorting it with rolled up fifty-dollar bills. Everyone around me seemed to be enjoying themselves; they started acting like they were weightless and invincible, dancing around the room with their hands in the air like they were floating. To be the only one in the room not doing it would be questionable, so I joined in, and soon enough, I was no different from everyone else, dancing around the living room in a trance and reaching for the ceiling.
I got in with the wrong crowd of people and started getting offers from older men for sex. That part of my life is a blur, a hazy nightmare. I think I chose to block those days from my memory, because that wasn’t who I was. I was a lost little girl trying to numb my existence.
I don’t know how it happened or when, but I became entangled in a prostitution ring that was happening in the middle of town in a well-known bar, in broad daylight. I had to testify on the stand, still considered a child in the eyes of the court. I had to explain in front of complete strangers what I had experienced in detail, the sexual predators that I had encountered. My family was not there, and I am grateful for that. However, I had no support and walked out of the courtroom feeling even more violated. This is a part of my life that I considered not including in this book, but I feel that it needs to be shared because there are many you
ng Indigenous girls that are coerced into prostitution on the streets every day, and it goes completely unnoticed much of the time, even in a small town.
Leading up to that point, I happened to have no self-worth left and my behaviour was a cry for help. I was craving attention, but I only attracted the wrong kind and sank into a deeper mess than I was already in. My self-love was gone. It had disappeared somewhere between the unceremonious reuniting with my father and the realization that my mother was probably never going to be the mother that I needed in my life because she had her own struggles to deal with. Looking back, I don’t blame her. I know she had a difficult life and was trying to numb her own pain. She never meant to hurt me, but she didn’t see that her neglect had a direct effect on me. I needed her to be stronger for herself and for me.
My grandparents were too old to run around town looking for me. I was so out of control that I wouldn’t have listened anyway, but they never stopped trying, and most importantly, they never stopped caring. My grandma was always there to welcome me home even if she didn’t understand the extent of the lifestyle I was living. I know my grandma stayed up all night worrying about me, walking the floors and praying that I was safe.
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