Chapter 2
Arianna Rose looked around the cramped mobile home she and her mom stood in and groaned.
“You can’t be serious, Mom,” she said.
“It’s fine baby. We’ll be fine here. It just needs a little sprucing up is all,” her mother replied.
“If by sprucing up you mean set on fire than yes, sprucing up is exactly what this place needs.”
“Don’t be so negative, baby. We’ll make this place a home in no time.”
She knew that making the dumpy trailer “a home” was her mother’s code for picking up a man at the nearest bar and making him a regular fixture in their living room. The thought of yet another scotch-soaked suitor setting up camp with them made her stomach turn.
“Yeah Mom, I know what you need to make this place a home. And I’m sure you’ll find Prince Charming at the dive we passed on the way here.”
Her mother raised her brows and feigned insult. “Don’t you talk to me that way, girl,” she began.
“Oh save it, Mom,” Arianna said and effectively ended her mother’s halfhearted attempt to reprimand her.
“Give me a smoke, will ya?” her mom asked.
Arianna reached a hand into her black canvas bag and dug out a pack of Camel Lights and a lighter. She took one out for herself and one for her mother. She watched as her mother lit her cigarette with impossibly long, hot-pink nails. Arianna often wondered how her mother managed to do anything with her artificial claws, much less ignite a lighter. But she did, and with surprising dexterity.
Arianna smiled and cocked her head to one side. Her mom loved to smoke, so much so she closed her eyes and tipped her head back as she puckered her lips and inhaled. Each crease around her mouth deepened as she did so, yet her expression remained one of sheer bliss. She left her eyes closed while she blew out ribbons of opaque smoke. Once the ritual had been completed and the first drag had been taken, she opened her eyes and raked her hand through her dry, dyed blonde hair. Her hair remained back where she’d pushed it, positioned in place like hay with styling product added to it. The metal bangle bracelets on her wrist clanged together softly as she dropped her hand to her side.
“Yeah, we’re gonna be just fine here, baby,” her mother crooned. “You’ll see.”
“Oh I’m sure we will,” she replied and lit her own cigarette. She did not indulge in the same dramatic routine as her mother, but the infusion of nicotine into her bloodstream did improve her mood a bit.
“You have everything you need for school tomorrow?” her mom asked.
“I guess so,” Arianna answered. “I really wish I could have finished out my senior year back in Rockdale, though. At least I knew a few people there, had a few friends.”
“Oh don’t start in on me about that now, okay? Haven’t I been through enough with the whole Carl thing? Haven’t I hurt enough without you giving me shit too? I was shamed out of Rockdale. Do you know what that was like?”
She saw her mother’s eyes begin to well with tears. She did not want to risk making the blue mascara and eyeliner that rimmed her tear-filled eyes run, so she decided to let her mother off the hook on the subject of relocating during her final year of high school for the moment. She shifted the conversation, instead, to a more pressing matter at hand. Namely, the run-down trailer that reeked of mold and a sour stench she could not quite place.
“Speaking of shit, this place is a shithole.”
“Shithole or not, we would be on the streets if it weren’t for your Uncle Eddie. No thanks to Carl, of course.”
Her mother ran her hand through her hair again and instigated the bracelets a second time. Arianna found her good mood souring along with whatever had rotted in their new home. She’d had enough of her mother’s self-pity for one day and decided to remind her that Carl’s decision to evict them had not been on a whim.
“Mom, he found you screwing his cousin on a lawn chair. What did you think he’d do?”
“Well, I don’t know what I thought he’d do. But I didn’t think he’d kick us out, that’s for sure.”
Ordinarily, she would never have let anyone else get away with saying something so ignorant, but she genuinely believed her mother lacked the ability to think any situation through. It was as if her mother has stopped developing mentally somewhere around her sixteenth birthday, that adulthood had eluded her entirely. Arianna’s mother, Cathy Rose, never considered consequences, especially where relationships were concerned. She acted on impulse, was self-indulgent, and prone to fits similar to a two year-old baby’s tantrum. She loved attention – preferably of the male variety – and drank too much, but she was the only mother Arianna would ever have. And for that reason, she let a lot of stuff go.
“We passed a Safeway on the way here with a Help Wanted sign in the window. I’m gonna drive by there and pick up some hair dye for my roots and some stuff to clean this place, and maybe see if a manager is around so I can see about the job. You can start unpacking your stuff. I’ll help you unload it first.”
Her mother disappeared out of the trailer to their car. Arianna stubbed her cigarette out on the sole of her boot and looked around. She dreaded unpacking. Time and experience had taught her that no home was permanent. Just as she’d get settled in a new town, her mother would decide that the relationship she had been in had to end. And they would have to leave. The same story played out each time. The only thing that changed was the zip code. Now, she was in a new town called Herald Falls in New York and she could almost hear a timer initiating the countdown until they left for another town, and yet another miserable trailer. Until then, though, she would have to deal with the current one. Reluctantly, she turned from the dismal display before her and walked to her mother’s car. Two boxes waited for her stacked neatly. Her mother had passed her and brought one to the trailer. Three egg boxes they’d gotten from a supermarket held every belonging Arianna owned. Her life had been condensed into three egg boxes. The thought made her chest ache, but only briefly. She never allowed herself to wallow more than a moment.
“Ya got those, baby?” her mother called out as she opened the driver’s side door of her ancient and decrepit Toyota Camry.
“I’m fine, Mom. Go get your hair dye,” she called back. But her mother couldn’t have possibly heard. She had already closed the door and waved absently as she preened in the rearview mirror. Arianna rolled her eyes and made her way through the small living room and even smaller kitchen to a narrow hallway that ended with her room. She dropped the boxes she was carrying and opened the one on top. After moving a few leather-bound albums, her hand felt a plastic scented-oil warmer. She pulled it out and searched for an electrical outlet to plug it into. When finally she found one, she shoved the prongs of the warmer into it. The vanilla oils began to heat immediately and contend with the odor of mildew. She breathed in the warm scent and began removing her possessions.
She took folded clothes and placed them in the squat dresser that had been left behind by her Uncle Eddie’s previous tenants. The dresser had water ring stains on the surface and more splintering chips in it than she could count. But the drawers slid in and out smoothly, a feature she was grateful for. Her last one would fall off its track half the time and fell out of the dresser completely the other half the time. Any dresser, or no dresser, was an improvement from the last she’d had.
Unpacking her clothes did not take long, and what little she had fit nicely in the small bureau. With that done, she turned her attention to the bed, if it could even be called that. The sleeper more closely resembled an oversized window seat, and she wondered whether it would be long enough for her to stretch out and sleep comfortably in. She sat on it and crinkled her nose as the smell of sweat and feet rose from it. Before she would attempt to lay in it, she would need to borrow one of her mother’s old comforters to cover it and stifle the stench. She stood and slid the last two boxes in the far corner of the cramped room and set about inspecting the rest of the trailer. Overall, it wasn’t dram
atically different from her last. The trailer her uncle owned and allowed them to stay in for the time being, the one she now lived in, was much smaller and smellier than the last, but the layout was nearly identical. Of course, one major selling point of their current trailer was that it lacked Carl and his many friends and family members who visited at all hours of the night in varying states of inebriation. But she was confident her mother would remedy his absence with a new string of frequenters. She was sure that in no time she would stumble home after a work shift and several cocktails at the local dive bar with someone new. All she could hope for was that the new clown was a mellow drunk as opposed to some of the angrier, more aggressive types she’d encountered along the way. Angry, aggressive drunks who sought to enjoy both her mother and her had taught her at a young age that she needed to arm herself when she slept. She remembered her knife and quickly returned to her room and took it out of the bottom box. The hilt was slender and the blade lightweight. It fit perfectly in her hand, familiar and comforting like an old friend. It, like a friend everyone should have, had saved her many times. She removed it from its sheath and stared at the silvery blade.
In it, she saw an image of herself, distorted, but her, nevertheless. She looked different from most girls her age, harder. She did not opt to bleach her hair as her mother did. And she did not have her mother’s fair skin and blue eyes either. In fact, she did not resemble her mother in the least and guessed she looked like her father, whoever he was. Her deep brown hair fell in pin-straight panels around her face to her shoulders and was all the same length. Her eyes were nearly the same color as her hair and her complexion was olive rather than peaches and cream. She lined her eyes with charcoal-colored makeup and preferred to wear black as opposed to the candy-colored rainbow her mother favored.
Arianna was nothing like her mother. She promised herself years ago that she would never allow herself to be vulnerable and at the mercy of a man. And if she ever decided to have a child, she would wait until she was older and more settled, and certain she could provide for it.
Settling down and having children were distant, obscure possibilities. School, however, was definite. In less than twenty-four hours, she would enroll at yet another school. Her eighteenth birthday had passed three days earlier and she was sure she would be one of the oldest students in her grade, and likely the newest to the school. But the months would fly by as they always had, and before long she would do something else her mother had never done: graduate from high school. After high school, she wasn’t sure what she would do. She quickly sheathed her knife again and tucked it safely in her boot. She would place it under her pillow as she had every night for the last eight years, and it would accompany her to school the next day.
The sound of tires kicking up gravel in front of the trailer distracted her from her brooding. She looked up and realized the room had darkened considerably, that the sun had set some time ago. A rumbling engine outside meant that her mother had returned. Her mother had been gone for several hours and had likely found her way to the local watering hole. Arianna paused a moment in her room and considered going out to greet her and share a smoke with her, but the sound of a male voice followed by her mother’s laughter changed her mind. She froze where she was. Her mother did not like to be alone, and Arianna never liked the people she kept company with.
“Baby, come out and meet a new friend I made in town,” her mother called in a slightly slurred voice. “We got fried chicken!”
More giggling ensued, both her mother’s and the mystery man’s, and Arianna decided to ignore her mother and forgo dinner. Hunger would be a welcome alternative to sharing a meal and part of an evening with another of her mother’s loser suitors. Instead, she shut the door to her tiny room, and the world beyond it, and prepared for her first day in a new school.
Chapter 3
The alarm clock radio beeped incessantly until Arianna reached a hand out and silenced it with a smack. She stayed in bed for several seconds and allowed her eyes to scan her room. Morning sunlight did little to brighten it by any definition of the word. The effect was quite the opposite, in fact. Water stains on the ceiling were more visible, along with the overall yellowness of the walls. But the condition of her room was the least of her concerns. She needed to get up and start a new school. And she needed to slip into the bathroom without encountering her mother’s overnight guest. She doubted either of them would be awake. They had stayed up until the early morning hours and, judging from the noise level of their partying, had imbibed plenty of liquor. To be safe, she hurried and picked an outfit from her dresser: a white tank top with a cropped black T-shirt that hung off her shoulder to layer atop the tank top and a pair of black, stretch skinny jeans. She accessorized with several hoop earrings that went up her earlobe, a thick-banded wristwatch and her favorite black motorcycle boots. Her boots were the most expensive article of clothing she owned. They were genuine leather, steel toed, and her proudest purchase, second only to her motorcycle that waited on the trailer’s porch.
Her motorcycle, a used 2009 Kawasaki KLR 650, had been purchased seven months earlier with money she’d saved working after school and summer jobs. The three-year-old bike was the closest she’d ever come to owning a new one. She loved to ride, had caught the fever for it when she was twelve. A boyfriend of hers had a dirt bike, a KX 80, and had taught her to ride. As soon as she had become comfortable with the mechanics of operating it, she had fallen in love. Everything about riding had enticed her, the feeling of freedom, of speeding on two wheels with nothing between her and the world around her, going where cars couldn’t go. Her relationship with her motorcycle-riding twelve-year-old boyfriend had ended after a short time, but her love affair with riding had just begun. When she had turned sixteen and had gotten her driver’s license two years earlier, she had bought her first bike, a used CR 250. Not surprisingly, her mother had not protested her purchase, as any decent parent would have. To the contrary, she had celebrated alongside Arianna when she’d finally saved enough money to buy it.
Arianna shook her head remembering her mother’s unorthodox reaction to her choice of transportation and took a final glance in the mirror. She supposed most girls in her position would have started a new school with a new outfit, but new clothes were a luxury she simply could not afford. The clothes she wore were neither new nor expensive. But they were clean and she had paid for them herself. Such details may have been lost on another, but were held as small victories in her mind. They gave her a degree of confidence and pride she would not have had otherwise.
Dressed and armed with her smidgen of self-confidence, she stole out of her room and crept to the bathroom to brush her teeth and hair. Once she’d finished in the bathroom, she peeked out beyond the door into the living-room area and saw a man sprawled out on the couch. She shook her head and was about to slip down the hallway and out of the house when she heard a voice whispering in her ear.
“Funny, I didn’t remember him havin’ boobs last night,” her mother whispered and Arianna jumped.
“Shit mom! Are you trying to kill me? You’re like a ninja or something sneaking up like that. Shit!” Arianna’s heart pounded. She’d assumed her mother would be in the living room or her bedroom, not right beside her. It took a moment to compose herself before she laughed at her mother’s comment.
“So, he didn’t have boobs last night, huh? Looks like he’s got a pretty generous set now,” she said and giggled.
“I know. His are bigger than mine,” her mother said and cupped her own breasts.
“Mine too. How much did you drink last night?”
“Enough to free willy in there,” her mother said and laughed. “The guy’s a whale, get it?”
“Yeah Mom, I get it,” Arianna said and took a few steps closer to get a better look. The man slept in a white undershirt with matching yellow crescents under each armpit. His belly was large and round and he did have what appeared to be breasts. The few hairs he’d had been combed and s
tretched across his scalp in a feeble attempt at concealing his bald head.
“Oh Mom, I think this one’s a keeper,” she said sarcastically. “You should marry him. I see my future father in there.”
“Oh shut up, you little wiseass. This is not my proudest moment.”
“No, no it’s not.”
“What should I do? He can’t stay here.”
“For starters, take a shower. Don’t forget to bring your cell phone in, and lock the bathroom door. And when he wakes up, tell him you have an early appointment and you’ll call him later.”
Her mom paused and seemed to mull over the advice she’d given her. The time she’d spent coaching her mother had cost her time she would have spent eating breakfast. Her stomach rumbled and reminded her she had skipped dinner the night before. If she hurried, she would have time to stop at a gas station and grab a roll.
“That could work, baby! What would I do without you?” her mother asked and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “Where are you off to so early?”
Her mother had clearly forgotten it was her first day at a new school. A night of heavy drinking often caused her memory to lapse. That and what little common sense and good judgment she had generally expired.
“School, Mom, I start school today,” she replied. “And I’m going to be late if I don’t leave now.”
“Oh, good luck, baby! I’m sorry I forgot. This has all been so hard on me. I can’t seem to keep a thought straight in my head.”
“It’s okay. I’ll see you later,” she said.
She turned and walked down the hallway, past the sleeping man. She grabbed her backpack that rested against the inside wall by the front door and headed out. Her motorcycle leaned against the trailer with her helmet affixed to the back. She slipped her arms into the straps of the backpack and put her helmet on. Then she straddled the bike and started it. The Kawasaki engine purred and she felt her pulse rate quicken. She enjoyed few things in life, and riding was one of them. She revved the engine twice, released the clutched and shifted into first gear with her foot. With a slight twist of her wrist, she felt wind in her face. She rode, enjoying the openness of the county roads, for more than ten minutes before she reached the gas station that skirted the campus of her new school. She ran in and grabbed a roll and paid. She ate most of her breakfast quickly then continued to school.
Planet Urth Boxed Set Page 16