This Broken Road

by A. M. Henry

  I have no idea what to expect when I walk into the main waiting area of the Guidance Department. I’ve always hated it here. They haven’t updated the dark wood paneling on the walls or the orange shag carpet since the 1970’s, and the small row of windows faces a wall of pine trees, so the whole place looks dark and depressing.

  When I walk in, Vice Principal Van Holst stands waiting with Ms. Brown, my guidance counselor.

  “Come in and sit down, Angela,” says Ms. Brown, leading the way into her little office in the corner. It’s just as dark and gloomy in there, so dark I almost don’t notice the little plastic bag of tiny white pills on Ms. Brown’s desk.

  Van Holst ushers me into one of the chairs opposite Ms. Brown and then takes the chair next to me. Ms. Brown picks up the bag of pills and gives me a sad, disappointed frown.

  “These were found in your locker,” she says. “Well, specifically, the bag was stuck halfway out of your locker, like it had fallen out before you closed the door.”

  Damn. Lauren works fast.

  I pick up the bag and Van Holst flinches like she wants to stop me, but then changes her mind. I open the plastic baggie and take out a single round, white pill. It has no markings on it.

  “I don’t know what this is,” I say, returning the pill to the bag and placing the bag back on the desk, “but it’s probably not a narcotic. I’m guessing it’s a vitamin or something. They’re usually the only pills that come unmarked like that.”

  Van Holst and Brown stare at me for a long moment.

  “Oh, and they’re not mine,” I add, for old time’s sake.

  Brown sighs and shakes her head. Van Holst sits back in her chair with her arms folded.

  “Seriously, have me tested,” I say. I point to the bag. “Have those tested, too. They look like the pills my mother takes to make her hair grow faster.”

  Van Holst raises an eyebrow. After a second she says, “You know, Angela, I actually believe you.”

  This time Brown raises an eyebrow, looking at Van Holst like she’s the one on drugs.

  “You’re saying someone planted them in her locker?” says Brown.

  Van Holst turns to me for a response.

  “That would be my guess,” I reply.

  “And why would someone do that?” asks Brown.

  I shrug. “Girls are mean?”

  “So you’re saying you know who put them there?” asks Van Holst.

  “Yeah.”

  They both wait for me to elaborate.

  “I’m not naming names,” I tell them. “If they want to act like we’re back in middle school, that’s their problem.”

  Van Holst says, “That’s very mature of you.”

  I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic or not.

  She sighs and stands up. “All right, Angela. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I better not be disappointed.”

  34.

  “What were things like before Jason?” Dr. Allen asks after I tell her about Lauren Hart and Harper’s hair and the pills in my locker. “You’ve never talked about what high school was like before you started dating him.”

  I don’t think about freshman and sophomore year much. After Jason, it was like nothing before him mattered.

  First day of high school—it might have been more exciting anywhere else. Most of the surrounding towns share high schools, so your first day means you have the opportunity to ditch everyone you knew in middle school in exchange for a new set of friends. But not in Harrowmill. Ninth grade was the same as eighth. New building and new teachers, but the same 60-odd classmates I’d known since Pre-K. We felt sort of grown up because now we had lockers and Homeroom and got to choose electives.

  By the end of eighth grade, I only had a couple friends left after Lauren Hart’s ascension to It Girl. That summer, I took to wandering town on my own or sometimes with Derek, eventually expanding to the woods behind our street and the vast stretches of farmland just beyond the town center.

  “Normal, I guess?” I tell Dr. Allen. She wears that piercing stare she gets when she tries to see past my vaguer responses. “I was still one of the weird kids freshman year, but not weird enough to get any crap for it since I was on the soccer team.”

  I read a lot of V. C. Andrews and Anne Rice that year. I think that’s when I started wearing lots of black and those dark, flowing skirts. As Harrowmill’s only goth kid in a decade, I was more of a novelty than a freak. I sat with Derek and a bunch of sophomores at lunch—one of Derek’s football friends and his buddies, all of them trying to revive the 80’s punk look.

  “Did you have a lot of friends?” Dr. Allen asks.

  “Not really,” I reply. “Just a lot of acquaintances.”

  I spent most weekends shut in my room. My grades slipped from mostly B’s to C’s and D’s. Every report card earned me a lecture from Dad and the riot act from Mom.

  “What the hell happened, Angela?”

  Spring of freshman year, I came home to find Mom standing in the hallway, my report card and its torn envelope clenched in her fist.

  “A C in biology? A D in geometry?!” She got louder with each sentence. “Were you going to tell us about this, or just sneak it out of the mailbox before we got home?”

  That thought had never crossed my mind, but around that time, Mom started her phase of just assuming that I constantly plotted to do horrible and dishonest things.

  “You can forget about going out until you pull your grades up.”

  A stupid punishment, since I rarely went out anyway.

  Mom started her other Anti-Angela Phase around that time—convinced that every time I spoke to her, it was with a nasty attitude.

  The first day of winter break, freshman year, Mom came home from work early. I sat in the kitchen reading V. C. Andrews.

  “Is there a reason this is just sitting on the counter?”

  Mom always hated things on countertops or on tables. I had left a glass of milk and Oreos next to the toaster because you have to wait twenty minutes until the Oreos disintegrate.

  “It’s mine. I’m going to drink it in a minute.”

  I don’t think I said it angrily or with any kind of attitude, but Mom exploded.

  “I JUST ASKED A FUCKING QUESTION, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BITE MY HEAD OFF!”

  I sat there stunned for like a solid two minutes. Mom banged around the kitchen for a while before stomping upstairs and slamming her bedroom door.

  Variations of that scene repeated over and over again for the next few weeks until I realized it was safer to just not speak to Mom at all. That evolved into hiding either in my room or outside when she was home. I felt like I was six years old again.

  “Has your mother ever seen a therapist?” Dr. Allen asks me.

  I almost laugh. “Are you kidding? She thinks only weak people need doctors or medication. She’d die of Ebola before going to a doctor.”

  Dr. Allen makes her concerned face and chews on the end of her pen. I think about the time after I stopped speaking to Mom. Freshman year rolled into summer, the soccer coach sent me to soccer camp for three weeks in July, which was how I ended up on the Varsity team sophomore year.

  “Did you like soccer?” Dr. Allen asks.

  I shrug. “Sort of. I guess. I liked running. Playing cleared my head. Like made everything blank. That’s why I kept up running even after I quit.”

  I quit the day the season ended sophomore year and never told my parents. Mom approved of school sports, so I was allowed out for soccer-related things. Practices, games, after-game parties—I made all of them up. Mom and Dad didn’t even know the season had ended pretty early in the school year.

  Derek’s punk friends were all juniors and some of them got cars that year. We started drinking on weekends. The drunker you got, the less you cared about your stupid curfew. The drunker you were when you got home, the less you cared what your mother screamed at you.

  I don’t remember when she stopped yelling. I just remember that by the
time I was dating Jason, neither of my parents bothered to say anything when I came home past 2:00 AM, or never came home at all.

  35.

  I never had a boyfriend before Jason. Not a real one, anyway. In second grade, I “married” the new kid, Vince Venezia during recess (all the kids were getting married that year). We sat together at lunch for the next month or so with all the other “married” couples, until the marriage fad died out and everyone went back to sitting with their normal friends.

  In seventh grade, I went to the winter dance with an eighth grader, Paul Something. We sat together at lunch a few times and went on a couple “dates” wandering around the mall.

  Freshman and sophomore year are a blur of soccer and weekend parties. Vodka and Xanax, and random hook-ups with boys from other schools whose last names I never knew. I started hanging out with Jason at one of those parties. We’d only dated for maybe two or three weeks before we started doing serious opiates.

  Ryan shows up at my house around noon on the first day of winter break. He helps himself to raspberry-flavored fizzy water and Oreos and then settles down next to me on the living room couch like he lives here. I try not to choke while inhaling a large bag of microwave popcorn.

  “What the hell are you watching?” He grimaces at the TV.

  “Wife Swap. This is the best show of all time.” I know it’s total trash, but seriously this is quality entertainment.

  “There’s something wrong with you,” says Ryan.

  Two episodes later, Ryan can’t look away.

  “Where do they even find these people?” he says as yet another religious fanatic trades places with a woman whose family tries to live like every day is a Renaissance Faire.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” I say.

  Casey comes home from school around three o’clock (the Academy has two more days until their break) and collapses into the loveseat, spilling books and soccer gear all over the cushion next to her.

  “Are you seriously watching this show again?” she whines.

  “I have six seasons saved on the DVR,” I reply.

  “This is quality entertainment,” says Ryan.

  Part of me wonders how we managed to hate each other for so long.

  “That is weird,” Ryan says a while later, when I show him the photos I brought back from Grandma’s. “You look almost identical.” He has the photos spread out on the coffee table. “Bummer, though.”

  “What is?”

  “Means you’re definitely not adopted.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  He examines each photo with more interest than I thought he would have.

  “They look so happy,” he says. “And they have literally nothing. A little shack and maybe one shirt each. But they’re still so happy.”

  “And here we are in our nice houses with our flat screen TV’s and our iPhones and most of us are miserable.” I think about Harmon’s assignment and how to work these photos into it. “Whatever the American Dream is,” I say, “I think they found it.”

  36.

  In a moment of temporary insanity, I agree when Dad asks if I want to go with him to pick up Rachel. She should have come home two weeks ago, but because she’s Rachel, she decided to take not one but two winter session classes.

  Dad and I sit in an awkward silence for the first ten minutes of the drive down to Princeton. Then Dad starts on the radio—changing the station whenever a commercial comes on or ten seconds into a song if he doesn’t like it. ADDDJ wouldn’t dare do this with Mom in the car. It starts getting to me after a few minutes and I’m annoyed that I get annoyed by something that also annoys Mom. I try not to feel annoyed, but then ten seconds into some pop country, Dad’s hand leaves the steering wheel, finger heading for the “seek” button.

  “Can I put some music on?” That comes out much more loud and shrill than I intended.

  Dad’s hand hovers in front of the radio buttons. “Uh… Yeah, sure.”

  I take my old iPod and the car cable out of my purse. Ryan’s been putting music on it whenever he finds something new that he likes. If I hit play and let it go through all the music on there, the iPod would play for eight days without repeating a song. I choose one of the newest additions because it has no swearing, no shredding guitar solos, or anything else my parents hate.

  “This is pretty good,” Dad says after the first song ends. “Who is it?”

  “Palodine.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “No one has. They’ve only got like 500 likes on their Facebook page.”

  “That’s not a lot?”

  “By internet standards, that’s pretty much zero. I don’t get it; they’re amazing.”

  Another song plays and I watch the landscape go by—nothing but farmland and woods and forested hills.

  “You used to sing a lot when you were little,” Dad says when we leave 17 for the New York Thruway. “Do you remember after your grandmother took you and Rachel to see Phantom of the Opera? You sang the soundtrack for weeks.” He laughs. “You used to make us all sit and watch you while you stood on the fireplace and sang it, like that was your stage. You were pretty good, too. Especially considering you were only, what… five?”

  I don’t remember that. If I really wrack my brain, I don’t really remember anything before Irae left. Maybe a hazy memory of a red and wrinkled Casey coming home from the hospital. Dad taking turns spinning me and Rachel around so fast our feet left the ground. Me and Rachel splashing in freezing cold water in a kiddie pool, Dad spraying us with the hose.

  “What’s the matter?” Dad asks. He sounds concerned, frowning sideways at me without taking his eyes off the road.

  “I don’t remember that.” I can’t think of anything else to say. I feel like if I stop clenching my teeth, I’ll cry. I turn my head to look out the window so I can’t see him. “But that was a long time ago,” I add with a shrug.

  I can’t see his face, but I feel a heavy silence settling into the car. I wonder if he remembers, if he thinks about it. Or if he and Mom and Rachel choose not to remember. Like it was an accident. Something forgivable and forgettable.

  “Weren’t you playing the guitar or something a couple years ago?” Dad asks. His calm tone sounds forced.

  “I tried. Guitar and bass.”

  “You think you’d like to go for lessons? Since you don’t do soccer anymore, I thought… Maybe you’d like to pick up something else.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Especially with your senior year coming up,” he continues. “Extra-curricular activities look good on college applications.”

  “I’m not going back to school next year.” I blurt it out before I have the chance to reconsider.

  Silence. Then, “…What?”

  Oh well. No taking it back now.

  “I’m not going back to school in September. I’ve been studying for the GED. I get good scores on the practice tests. I’m going to take it at the end of the school year. Then I’m going to get a job until I can pay for some classes at Orange Community.”

  Dad sits in stunned silence for almost a minute. More than a minute. I can’t take the silence anymore, so I say, “I’ll be eighteen. Technically you guys can’t stop me.”

  I wait for outrage. Threats of kicking me out of the house if I don’t do what I’m told.

  Dad sighs and says, “You know, we have money set aside for you to go to college.”

  “I know. I just figured that…”

  “If you dropped out of high school, we won’t give you a penny?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  More silence. Then, “Your mother won’t like this.”

  “Mom doesn’t like lots of things. Actually, I’m pretty sure the list of things she doesn’t like is miles longer than the list of things she does like.”

  Dad tries to cover his laugh by turning it into a cough.

  “To be honest,” he says, “I’m not crazy about this idea. But it sounds lik
e you’ve put a lot of thought into it. It’s not a bad plan, it’s just…”

  “Not the conventional one.”

  “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “Do you recall a time in which I was ever conventional?” I ask.

  This time he doesn’t cover his laugh. “No, now that you mention it.”

  We settle into silence again, music still playing as we cross into New Jersey, but it’s a comfortable silence this time.

  “I still think you should try guitar lessons,” Dad says after a while. “Or something else. You could use a hobby.”

  “Well, as long as you’re paying…”

  Dad laughs again. I don’t remember the last time I heard him laugh this much. Actually, I don’t remember the last time he laughed and meant it, period.

  “Were you always this sharp?” he asks.

  “I don’t know about sharp. I think I’m just an ass.”

  He laughs harder at that and I can’t help it, I laugh with him.

  “You’re not an ass,” Dad says.

  “You can’t even say that with a straight face.”

  He smiles at me—this weird smile like he just discovered something new that he likes, and I sort of remember being like this with Dad once, before Mom’s real estate training forced him to work two jobs, before I quit soccer because I figured my parents didn’t care anyway, before I decided that I hated both Mom and Dad and instead turned a boy and a drug into my entire universe. It was easy not to care when I believed I hated my family, but now I think those extra wrinkles around Dad’s mouth and the shadows under his eyes and the growing bald spot on the back of his head are all because of me—years of his life sucked away worrying about a daughter hell-bent on self-destruction.

  Too many emotions fight for supremacy in my head. I pick up my iPod and shuffle through the new music as the Palodine playlist ends, and put on something else.

  “Who’s this?” Dad asks halfway through the first song.

  “Wovenhand.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “It’s really just one guy. He’s huge in Europe.”