by J. A. Wright
Olive convinced Mom to eat three meals a day and join a walking class on the weekends and a salsa dance class on Friday nights. Mom didn’t like the walking or eating but she seemed to love the dance class. She even made me dance around the kitchen with her one night when she got home. It was nice to see her happy again. It made me feel better about everything.
I came down with glandular fever at the end of April, about five weeks after I’d started back at school. I wasn’t the only one who got sick. The four other kids from my cooking class got it too. I had to miss another three weeks of school. When I finally went back, in the middle of May, there were only a couple of weeks left in the school year and I was still so tired that it took me almost an hour to walk the one mile to my house. I missed sixty-eight days of school that year. That’s what my homeroom teacher said on the message she left on our phone a week before the end of the school year. I deleted the message before Mom got a chance to hear it. I already knew I had to go to summer school to make up for all the missed days and I didn’t want to discuss it with Mom or anyone.
The only good thing about being sick was that I lost twenty pounds and looked better than ever, but not even that seemed to make me happy. By the time I turned seventeen and finished eleventh grade I wanted to die. I didn’t know why; it just seemed like it would be easier.
Summer school ran from June 20 to July 26, and I knew I had to go, so I did—for the first week, anyway. So did Wade and Crystal (two of the other sickies). But it was boring and the teacher always showed up late and left after he gave us a bunch of assignments to do, so we all stopped going. I hung out with Wade and Crystal until they became an item and decided to start hanging out in Wade’s bedroom instead of the park.
Even though I told my mom I was going to school every day, I did nothing all summer. In August, when my summer school report card arrived in the mail, I discovered I’d passed both English and History and gotten an A minus on an algebra test I never even took. I was shocked and I didn’t know what to do, especially since Mom had seen the report card first. She was so happy.
“Boy, you’ve really made an effort this summer. I’m so proud of you,” she said as she hugged me.
I called Wade and found out he’d gotten almost the very same report card and his parents were so happy they were buying him a car. Wade made me promise not to say anything to anyone. “I won’t get a car if they find out, so promise me you won’t say anything and I’ll give you a ride anytime you want,” he said.
I agreed to not say anything to anyone about the report cards and I let mom buy me the new coat I’d been talking about for months as a reward for the good report. On our way out of the store she put her arm around me and said, “If you keep up the hard work you’ll have a great senior year, and I might even help you buy that car you want.”
“I hope so,” I replied as I pulled away from her.
A week after the summer school report cards came out, when I was walking to the store to get cat food and a new toothbrush, one of the twins (the cute one) drove by and wolf-whistled at me. I smiled and whistled back and watched him turn his car around and pull up next to me. “Ya wanna come in for a little smoke?” he asked.
We smoked two joints in his car and then went to his house to make nachos and watch Caddyshack. Before I left to go home, he showed me the room in their basement where he and his brother grew weed. It was a big darkroom with purplish lights and little wood boxes nailed to every wall with plants growing in them.
After a few weeks of getting high together, the cute twin told me I could buy some weed from them to sell if I wanted. I thought it was a great idea. My first sale was on the first day of senior year. It was easy. I sold a couple of ounces to one of the local stoners and he told me to keep it coming.
By October I was buying and selling about a pound of pot each week. The twins used their profits to buy a motorcycle, and I used mine to buy my pills from an old guy the twins introduced me to. He sold just about every type of narcotic in existence, including the type of pills I liked, the ones that made my days okay.
Mom started dating Charles at the beginning of my school year. She met him at her dance class and made me swear not to tell Robbie or anyone else about him.
“What do you think about me dating a black man?” she asked.
“Well, Dad would spin in his grave, but I don’t really care,” I replied.
One night about two months after they started dating, just before Halloween, I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and saw Mom in the living room on her knees giving Charles a blow job. He saw me before she did.
“Hey, looks like someone likes to watch,” he said loud enough for me to hear.
I was shocked and scared and turned around really quick to go back to my room. “Mind your own business!” I heard mom yell out in her drunk voice before I slammed my door shut. I put a chair up against my door, but I didn’t go to sleep until I heard the front door close and a car drive away.
Mom didn’t say anything to me the next day about Charles, and I was too embarrassed and grossed out to bring it up. Things got weird between us after that, and I stayed out of the house as much as possible. We had a couple of big fights, mostly about me staying out late on school nights. “We’ve got rules in this house, young lady. You’d better straighten up before someone makes you!” she yelled at me once when I slammed the front door hard enough to knock a few of her figurines from the shelf. But it was too late. I didn’t know how to change and I didn’t want to and I certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near Mom and Charles.
My senior year of high school wasn’t all that great. I was way behind in math and English because of my lousy junior year and I hated everyone and I knew they hated me too. Probably because I’d done such a good job at getting known around school as a slut. It seemed if I drank more than six beers (and I usually did), I’d end up having sex—usually with someone I wasn’t supposed to, like Katie’s boyfriend Matt. Wade, Crystal, and I crashed Katie’s Halloween party and I had sex with Matt after Katie passed out and Wade and Crystal took off. I don’t actually remember having sex with him because I was pretty drunk, but I must have because we were both naked in her bed the next morning and my Catwoman Halloween costume was ripped all the way down the back.
Even though I said I was sorry and gave her a nice card with ten joints in it, she was so mad about me fucking Matt she wouldn’t look at me and she told almost everyone at school what I’d done. It was a long, awful school year, made worse by Wade moving to Boston in December and Katie and her friends making fun of me, calling me a slut and spitting on my locker. I really hated Katie, so I continued to have sex with Matt, not because I liked him but because I knew one day Katie would find out and it would make her crazy. She did find out eventually, and it did make her crazy, and I didn’t feel as good as I thought I would. When I saw her walking home from school crying after she saw Matt and me making out in the backseat of his car during lunch break, I felt bad and thought about walking across the street to tell her I was sorry, but I knew she’d hit me or spit on me, so I turned and went the other way. I stopped having sex with Matt after that, though he kept calling me and showing up at my house asking for it.
Mom and I kept our distance. It wasn’t that she was mean or anything; she just ignored me, and I tried to stay away from her. She finally broke up with Charles when Robbie arrived a day early for Christmas and found Charles and Mom on the couch with their arms around each other. I went out the back door when I heard Robbie yell, “What the fuck’s going on here?”
Mom didn’t say Robbie was the reason she broke up with Charles, but I knew he was because I heard her crying on the phone to Olive a few times. “Robbie said he’d disown me if I didn’t break up with Charles,” she told her. “Sometimes he’s just like his dad. It’s scary.”
We started getting along better after Charles was out of the picture, especially after Mom started dating the good-looking guy who owned the pharmacy sh
e went to. I thought Nick was a “nice guy” but changed my mind to “perfect guy” after he arrived at our house on Valentine’s Day with a dozen red roses for Mom and a dozen pink roses for me. He brought us gifts all the time from then on, and he even helped Mom fix the gate latch and hang a few flower baskets on our front porch.
I made a few attempts to cut back on my drinking and drugging after Nick encouraged me to try harder at school. But school was too hard, and I was way behind everyone else. Plus, I just couldn’t stay away from drugs. I liked being high more than I liked anything else, and I was selling enough pot to buy all the pills I needed.
I don’t think I was any worse than a few of my friends who got high every day. The only difference between them and me was that the school principal was on my case. He hated me and never missed a chance to say something mean, and he called my mom about everything I did. One day, just before spring break, he must have called her and threatened that I wasn’t going to graduate because when she got home from work she was pretty mad.
“I hear you got five D’s on your report card. I guess you’re just gonna be a high school dropout, huh?”
“I probably will be, but I think I can get a GED, and that’s almost the same thing as a high school diploma,” I replied.
“No it’s not!” she screamed before she grabbed her coat and slammed the door on her way out to meet Nick.
Mom and Nick started seeing each other about a week before Valentine’s Day, and after that they met for drinks and dinner at a local cocktail lounge almost every weeknight. Sometimes, afterwards, they parked in our driveway and stayed in his car for hours. I knew they were having sex, and I knew Mom didn’t want me to know. I think she was embarrassed. I spied on them a few times, though I couldn’t see much since Nick’s Lincoln Town Car had tinted windows
I could tell Mom had fallen in love with Nick the night he came in to use our bathroom. I was lying on the couch watching TV when she made him take his shirt off because she’d gotten her lipstick on his collar. She promised to wash it for him, and he left his shirt on the kitchen table before he went home. She didn’t wash it until the next day, after she’d slept with it on her pillow all night.
They’d been dating for four months when she found out he was married, and that his wife was about to have a baby. She discovered this when she went to his store to surprise him with a birthday cake. It was toward the end of May during my senior year. I’d agreed to go with her—she wanted me to hold the lemon chiffon cake on my lap while she drove—but only after she agreed to buy me a long black cape so I could crash the senior prom after-party dressed as Morticia from The Addams Family. I was in the makeup aisle, waiting for her, when I heard someone walking toward me and sniffling. I looked up to see Mom holding a tissue to her nose with one hand and holding the cake in the other hand. She was very upset, so I took the cake from her and followed her out the front door into the parking lot. She grabbed the cake from me and threw it at Nick’s car. Even though I was startled, I couldn’t keep from laughing, and this made Mom laugh too. The cake made a big mess. Once we were in our car she told me what had happened.
“I opened Nick’s office door singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in my loudest voice and holding the cake,” she said. “There was a little girl sitting on his desk and Nick was kissing a very pregnant woman.” She blew her nose. “I should have known!” she screamed.
Mom took the breakup pretty hard, and I did too—I thought Mom and Nick were good together, and I liked Nick. He was cool, and he always called me “Sexy Bird,” which made my insides feel wobbly and weird, in a good way.
I tried to help Mom by listening to her talk about Nick, sometimes all day, and I didn’t complain about the two weeks of driving by his store with her sitting way down in the passenger seat so she could watch him leave work. I even called him twice to tell him what a bastard he was like she’d asked me to. He just laughed and told me to tell her to call him whenever she wanted. “And you don’t need to be a stranger either, Sexy Bird. Call me whenever you want,” he said.
It was such a relief when a new salsa teacher started at Mom’s dance class in June and used her as his dance partner the first night. She thought he was “dreamy,” and she stopped crying about Nick after that.
I was surprised to learn I was going to graduate from high school. My grades were almost as bad as my attendance, and my principal had told me at least ten times that I’d be sitting in the audience on graduation day. So when I saw my name on the list of graduating seniors, and my homeroom teacher gave me a piece of paper with instructions about renting a cap and gown, I decided not to say anything about it, just in case they’d made a mistake.
Mom clapped when I finally told her the news. “The last time I spoke to your principal he said he didn’t let kids graduate with less than a 1.8 GPA. You must have brought it up since then. Thanks,” she said.
“Yeah, I think I did,” I lied.
I’d been to the principal’s office at least once a week that year, mainly for skipping school but sometimes for falling asleep on my desk. The last time I’d visited his office I’d been so stoned I’d dozed off while I was waiting and slipped off the chair onto the floor. He’d seen it happen. “I don’t want you back here next year,” he’d said.
I couldn’t bring myself to respond, because I just didn’t care.
I graduated a few days after my eighteenth birthday, and Olive and Mom came to watch. They took me to dinner afterward, and the only thing they talked about was dancing. I drank Mom’s beer while she demonstrated how her new dance teacher did the samba. Everyone in the restaurant watched her. It was corny, and I tried to hide behind Olive. They dropped me off at home on their way to a dance contest, and I put a chair up against my bedroom door and snuck out my window. I hitchhiked to a big party on the other side of town and didn’t get home until the next afternoon.
I was planning to work all summer at Ken’s salon (and sell a little pot on the side) so I could pay off the little orange Ford Fiesta I had on layaway at a used car lot in town. The owner was a friend of my dad’s, and he’d agreed to sell it to me for eight hundred dollars on a payment plan because he liked my dad.
I gave him a two hundred–dollar deposit at Easter (from my pot sales) and told him I’d get the rest to him by the end of June. I was thrilled when Mom gave me five hundred dollars for a graduation present; I gave the car dealer three hundred and told him I’d have the rest in a couple of weeks. I spent the other two hundred dollars on drugs because my old drug dealer friend gave me a really good deal on two pounds of pot and a hundred Percocets.
My plan was to ask Ken for a three hundred–dollar loan to pay off the car, but when I arrived for work at the salon the first Saturday after school got out he stopped me before I hung up my sweater and asked me to step outside.
“Honey, I’ve told you about a million times that you can’t show up here stoned. The last time you worked you swept up the same pile of hair for twenty minutes and two customers complained. I’ve hired a student from the beauty college to replace you.”
I cried all the way home from Ken’s place. I was upset that he thought I was stoned when I was working. I wasn’t stoned the day I swept the same pile over and over—not really stoned, anyway. Not stoned enough for anyone to notice. I didn’t tell Mom about losing my job, and after a few days I began to feel okay about not working and figured I could make enough from selling pot to pay off my car.
I slept in and hung out around the house watching TV and eating nachos for a week—until Mom found out I’d lost my part time job at Ken’s. She yelled at me about it for hours, and then made me write a résumé and go out to look for a job. I didn’t want to work—I didn’t want to do anything except watch TV, get high, and sleep—so I didn’t make much of an effort to find a job. I just left my one-page résumé on the counter at a few stores and at McDonald’s and went to the park to sell a few bags of pot afterward.
On the second day of my job search, I ran into
my sister Tammy at the mall. I had seen her around, but we hadn’t talked since Dad’s funeral. I didn’t know what to say so I just smiled at her and waited for her to say something.
“Fancy running into you here,” she said and smiled really big at me.
“Yeah, I know. Mom’s making me look for a job,” I replied.
“Have you had lunch? Do you want a burger?”
She bought me a cheeseburger and Coke and we talked about why she hadn’t been in touch. She said her boyfriend John was a good Christian, and she was doing her best to be one too. “We’ve both seen you smoking and hanging out with the wrong crowd, and John thinks you’re a bit of a troublemaker. I think you’re a lost soul.”
I felt myself blush and looked away, hoping my face wouldn’t turn beet red in front of her.
I’d seen John around, but I didn’t know much about him except that he taught at the same private Catholic school that Tammy did and drove a brown Honda Accord. The school they worked at was only a block from my high school, so I often saw them driving to and from work.
When Tammy got up to go get us both a chocolate sundae I searched through my purse for a lifesaver so I could try to cover my smoke breath.
“I decided to keep a distance from you and pray that Jesus would put you on the right path, and it looks like he might be doing that now,” she said when she got back with the sundaes.
I didn’t know how to respond. I’d never thought I was lost, and I didn’t know much about Jesus putting people on a path, so I kept eating and shrugged my shoulders a few times when she asked me about going to church with her.
“I’ll have to ask my mom about church, okay?” I said after her sixth invite.
Tammy must have felt pretty bad about saying that stuff to me, because two days later she called.
“Hey, I’ve been praying and talking to John about you, and he said the recreation center is looking for someone to work at their front desk thirty hours a week and he’s willing to put in a good word for you if you want. He’s on the board and knows everyone there. Should I have him call and set up an interview for you?” she asked.