I’m 15. My hair trails down my back, reddish-orange. I don’t wear makeup, because I don’t really need it, yet. My tshirt is a size medium, plain, Hanes, scooped up from the bargain bin of the Sears kids’ department – I have four of them in different colours. My jeans are a holy mess, size 34. I wear Airwalks – my first pair – and a hoody that zips up and down and didn’t come from a bargain bin. I’m a mixture of skater betty and grunge.
Most of these clothes were bought with the proceeds of my job as cafeteria cashier the year before, in junior high. It was a volunteer position that I was awarded based on my contributions to student council. I pocketed money from the cash box on a daily basis for most of my tenure.
I’ve been grounded for two weeks out of an unspoken month for coming home with a hickey and then daring to have what-I-considered-to-be a logical conversation with my father about my intact virginity – how I plan to wait until I’m at least 16 years old, because to be younger and lose it would make me a slut. Somehow, even though I rarely remember the words you’re grounded coming out of his mouth, I spent most of grades four through 11 confined within white walls, disallowed from the bare-bones activities: school, errands and computer club meetings.
The hickey is gone, my angst remains, but I have one thing on my side in that my father did a lot of drugs before I came to be, in addition to having at least two major cranial injuries. His memory is swiss cheese.
He doesn’t remember how long I’ve been grounded for – I know it and he knows it, and likely, he’s smart enough to know that I know it. He’s not smart enough to know that I will work his lack of date-notation to my advantage.
I’m sighing and bored. It’s a Saturday and he’s attempting to get things done, which generally means sitting around, not getting much of anything done, smoking too often, and eventually, starting on a project that isn’t really necessary that will last way into the small hours of the night. He avoided doing the things he had to by creating jobs for himself, that guy.
I do that too, today.
I’m doing my best to stay underfoot. Enough to be petulant and annoying, but not enough to merit a beat down. I want him to want me to go away and it doesn’t take long, before the talking, snacking, getting accidentally on purpose in the way while he was just trying to make a damn cup of coffee, for fuck sakes makes him boil over.
I broach a compromise. I say, “look. This is the last weekend I’m grounded for. I have nothing to do here and my friends are all busy. Can I please just go to the library to read? I don’t have any new books here and my homework is done.” This plea contains at least four lies.
It took him all of three seconds, giving me that gnarly-eyed stare while packing his homemade aluminum foil pipe with tobacco. The questions began as he inhaled his first drag.
“Who are you going to see?” Exhale.
“No one. Every one’s busy.” Cough.
Inhale. “What are you going to do?” Exhale.
Breath. Cough. “Read. Get some new books. I want to find something about fashion illustration in the 40s.” Cough. He always had a spectacular ability to blow smoke directly into my lungs and eyes so that every time he lit up, I would become a red-eyed, sputtering child, unable to complete a sentence without hacking, incapable of blinking without crying.
Inhale. “And your homework is done?” Exhale. Tap tap ping. He’s done his drag, bouncing it off of the ashtray. It’s time to empty the pipe and start again – a bic pen lid scoops out the burnt and yellowed fingers twist, tear and tamp down a new hit.
Cough. “Yes.” This is a huge lie, since I haven’t been to class in three days – I don’t know what my homework is, so I definitely haven’t completed it.
“Fine. I’ll give you a ride.”
My plans go awry at that moment – the sweet freedom I was looking forward to. The call I would place on the payphone at the corner store ten blocks away. How slowly I would walk from there to the library to meet my friend. There’s $50 in my pocket, burning into my leg and my nose is getting itchy, and my fingers won’t stop twisting each other about as if caught in a do-or-die death-match. I’m a mental mess because this is the first day in over a year that I’m going to get high and now, he’s going to drive me.
I loved sitting at the library, or really, any place quiet, after cocaine hit my system. I felt at peace, not edgy the way most of the rest of the world does. Cocaine is like Bikram’s yoga to my brain – calming, leveling, Namastéing. And I need that kind of peace today because I’ve only recently moved back in with him after staying at my grandparents’ trailer for a little break. After he kicked me in the face, you know? I need to not be in the same place with this fucker I’ve all but forgiven. I haven’t forgiven myself for living there in the first place.
He’s driving me, and I’m sitting, lotus-style on the floor of the pickup because he never put the passenger seat back in it after it came out the first time. Every bump in the gravel-topped alley behind our house makes my skinny ass ache, and without any heat in the truck, I’m considering whether I might freeze to death, never having known what one last time’d be like. I’m coughing because he’s smoking more – he always smokes more while driving.
I do that too, today.
This is the vein my brain is working at, needling what ifs into reality, until I’m positively certain that I won’t be getting high today, or every again. Before I know it, we arrive, pulled onto the shoulder of the street my high school is on.
The library’s automatic doors beckon me from across the street, shrilling louder than his words, “Be home by five.” And I tear out of the truck, nearly tripping over my shoes and a stray soda bottle. I throw my backpack on and resume my indifferent posture – the one I’ve taken up for high school that tells others that I don’t give a fuck about them.
And then I see the bus, not signalling. Maybe he’s about to turn at the juncture of the three-way stop, or maybe he’s going to go straight, right in front of me. Separating me from the library, right where I need get to.
The panic is strong now. I know that I’m 20 minutes away from the hook up. I know that in 30, I will feel something comparable to what others describe as happiness. I know that there’s a bank of payphones in that library’s building from where I can make my call, and where I’ll wait with a chai latte in hand from the café down the hallway.
And now, the bus might stop that. It’s interfering.
I take a chance and run in front of the bus. I must get there, before the bus goes past, like some frantic in-real-life frogger. And just when I was safe, when I got to the middle of the street where west and eastbound traffic are normally divided by a tarnished, broken yellow strip of paint, two things happen:
The first is that the bus stops, signals and waits to turn because I’m directly in front of it; the second is that my pants fall down.
I froze. I see the bus, the driver not distinguishable because the sky is reflecting on the windshield. I am 100% in his sights. He’s a great horned owl; I’m a nervous field mouse. Finally bending over to pick them up, my entire white, skinny ass is exposed to the front of the bus because I’ve recently started wearing thongs.
Mortified, I look back and I see my father, still parked in the same spot, pointing out of the window and laughing at me.
This post is part of a series of weekly writing challenges on {W}rite of Passage. You can sign up, too, if you like. Other kids are doin’ it:
