Some Bad News about
Your Lower Companions
THERE ARE STAGES to blowing up your life, even when your life is still pretty new and doesn’t have a lot of square footage to be destroyed. I was methodical about how I obliterated my old self in the same way that a stick of dynamite is methodical. Okay, methodical is the wrong term. I was thorough. Let’s put it that way.
Along with airborne pregnancy, another thing my mother warned me about was a class of people she called “bad news.” We’d be talking about the kid down the road, the one with the limp and the motorcycle that got pushed more than ridden. “Oh, him,” she’d say. “He’s bad news.” As though the kid were a piece of correspondence dipped in something foul and contagious; the human embodiment of doom. I thought it would be the worst possible thing to be labelled bad news. Once you were bad news in my mom’s books, you weren’t worth the motorcycle you pushed over, as my older brother discovered when he began to hang out with a couple of guys my mother didn’t like. Her laments against some of his friends were prolonged, enthusiastic, and often loud. But my older brother has integrity. He hung out with whomever he wanted, no matter what kind of news they were. He remained friends with people for life. And my mother got over her concerns.
I, on the other hand, was made of weak and easily influenced stuff. Once my mother suggested someone was bad news I couldn’t forget it for even one second. As I began my revolution I was terribly bothered by the knowledge that Darcy and most of my new wild friends seemed to be the bad news my mother had warned me about. Something in me protested against the idea that I was now on the bad-news team. Sure, “out-of-control, possibly slutty teen with a drinking problem” seemed to be my new identity, but that wasn’t quite the same as being bad news, was it?
Oddly, the more I worried that my friends were bad news, the more I tried to prove to them that I was as bad as they, if not worse, the same way that I pretended to have poor grammar around people with poor grammar. I felt like if I behaved badly, then they wouldn’t feel so bad about themselves.
The truth is that I was more than a little scared of the stealing and violence that marked my friends’ progress through middle school. In fact, I was more than a little scared of them. I was too nervous to do crime and not a good fighter, so I tried to fit in by acting like an ass in school and by drinking.
Convincing my teachers at middle school that I was a rotten egg wasn’t difficult. They didn’t know about all the academic awards I got in elementary school. All they saw was my increasingly disruptive behaviour and all they heard was my foul language.
Swearing was the foundation stone of my attempt to gain middle-school street cred. “Fuck off,” I’d say when another girl asked if I had the homework from Mrs. Whatever’s class. “Eat shit,” I’d say in the pause where other people might use “No way?” or “Really?” The problem was that I had extremely bad timing. The vice-principal of the school, a man you’d think I would have noticed occasionally given that he was approximately eight feet tall, always seemed to be hovering nearby when I used my swears. I’d come out with a stream of the foulest language I could muster and would be waiting for my classmates to giggle at my hilarious potty mouth and a second later a voice would boom from just over my left shoulder.
“Ms. Juby! Do you use that foul language at home?”
Shame would swamp my shallow vessel and I’d slink off. Only kids who were bad news got caught swearing in front of the vice-principal, Mr. Dundurn. And even though I was doing my best to fit in with the bad newsers, I didn’t want to actually be one. The wild ones, though, loved my schtick unreservedly. They thought my swearing and my total inability to get away with swearing was the funniest thing ever. It even made up for my rumoured sluttiness and tendency to barf. At least for a while.
The thing was, I did use that language at home. We all did. One time, my older brother thought it would be amusing to teach my youngest brother some swear words. That was fine when it was just us kids, but then came the day my mother was pushing my youngest brother, who was three or four at the time, around the supermarket. My youngest brother was a taciturn child, and he often wore a stern look on his face that was unusual on such a small kid. His severe expression caught people’s attention and caused them to condescend to him even more than they would to a regular, smiley child. On this visit, the produce man came over and, using his best sing-song, talking-to-a-baby voice, said, “And do you like fruit, young man?” To which my youngest brother, scowl firmly in place, replied, “Fuck off, cocksucker.”
So in a way, swearing was part of a family tradition.
The day I got suspended for the first time it wasn’t for drinking or swearing, but was related to the overhaul that my standards were undergoing at the time. I’d become a serious and, I thought, seriously stylish smoker almost right away. I blew my first fully formed smoke ring in the first week. At first I hid my smoking from my mother (who remained unaware of it for a while because she was so saturated in cigarette smoke herself it was impossible for her to smell the evidence), and I spent long hours smoking with other wild ones in various wooded locations, as well as littletravelled alleys and unused parking lots.
Then I got the bright idea that it would be less work to smoke just off school property. I was always in favour of anything that saved walking. I started smoking at the far edge of the playing field and convinced some of my friends to join me. The playing field was more or less directly in view of Mr. Dundurn’s office, which, unfortunately for us, was equipped with windows.
He spotted me acting suspiciously, hauled me into his office, intimidated a confession out of me, and promptly suspended me. My memory here is a bit shaky, but I think he also suspended some other people. Word spread that I was an informer. As the Beat Up Susan Juby movement gained steam so did the impetus to change friends. But who would have me now that I was bad news, or at least so-so news?
That’s when I noticed Charmagne, Nan, and Brenda. They were three of the prettiest girls in school and they always seemed to be laughing (in a condition my mom used to describe as “spinny”) and were several orders of magnitude less scary than the wild girls. They did sports, but not too seriously, and were popular with almost everyone, including the good kids, the wild ones, and the jocks. I’d seen them at a couple of parties, and they definitely weren’t opposed to having a good time.
I can’t remember how I went about ingratiating myself with them. The lines between social groups weren’t as hard and fast in middle school as they became in high school. To fit in with them I tried to tone down the eyeliner use, wear jeans that were one size larger, and work on my jokes. Keeping them laughing was key.
We started doing things together and hanging out a bit after school. They enjoyed drinking nearly as much as I did, but weren’t as into violence as the tougher wild ones.
My partial defection from the wild ones didn’t go unnoticed. There were hostile mumblings from Darcy and her friends, but nothing too serious. I was partly shielded by my new friends. Then came the day the leader of my new friends, Charmagne, who had a full head of glossy brown hair and blue eyes with startling light grey flecks in the irises, came to school with some news.
“You want to go to the show this weekend?” I asked her. This was code for do you want to meet before a movie, get drunk, then wander around town mooning at boys until your parents come to get you.
“I can’t,” she mumbled. There was something strange in her voice.
“Why?”
“My parents said.”
“You’re not allowed to go to movies any more?”
Nan and Brenda wouldn’t look at me.
“What?” I asked again, even though I was beginning to sense that I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“The problem isn’t the movies,” she said.
“So … what is it?”
“It’s you,” she said.
It was like a burning spotlight had come to rest on me. “What about me?”
“Mr. Dundurn talked to them at the parent–teacher meeting last night.”
“About me?” I repeated, unable to stop myself.
“Yeah. He said you’re, you know, bad.” Charmagne twirled a lock of hair around her finger and wouldn’t meet my eye.
“What? Are you kidding?”
“He said you’re evil,” said Charmagne, whose parents were deeply religious.
The others nodded.
“He talked to your parents, too?” I asked Nan and Brenda.
“My mom was worried about my grades,” explained Nan.
“Your grades are my fault?”
“They did kind of get worse after you started, you know, hanging out with us,” she said.
Hot tears burned my eyes. I couldn’t breathe.
My new friends walked away.
I didn’t follow them. The worst thing was that part of me knew the vice-principal was right. I was bad news. I’d known it as soon as I had my first drink. It was like someone had just taken a big piece of my sense of self and thrown it away.
Charmagne, Nan, and Brenda and I were apart for only a few days. My mother called the school to complain when I told her what the vice-principal had said about me. But the hole that had opened up inside me remained. It was as though Mr. Dundurn had made my greatest fear real by speaking it out loud. I was not just bad news. I was bad. I was under attack from every direction. The negative external and internal messages I was getting, some intentional, some not, convinced me that I had a lot to hide. Not just the things that happened when I got drunk (most of which I didn’t remember), but also the fact there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I was the imminent asteroid, the dirty bomb headed for your hometown. As a result of this awareness, when I was sober I kept myself tightly controlled. I knew I had to work harder than anyone else to keep my mask on. It was crucially important that my clothes matched and that my makeup was just right and that I never showed any vulnerability. Any problem on the outside and the ugliness on the inside might be revealed for all to see. That, I thought, could kill me. The more match-y and controlled I got when sober, the more I started to explode when I drank and got high. And that was the worst news of all.