I don’t know what about animal dissection inspires this teacher but he’s practically two-stepping his instructions across the room. I glance around to see if anyone else finds this weird, but no one’s the least bit fazed. Of course not, Mia, you’re in fucking farmland, they all probably killed a chicken this morning to bring for lunch.
I do a quick inventory of my new class. I brought neither bible nor shotgun, so between the religious and the rednecks, the snot-nosed nerd in the back is increasingly appealing. I’m beginning to wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. Then I notice the arm-crossed, slouching girl in the back. She smiles at me, runs a ring-filled hand through short and spiky bleached blonde hair. She’s pretty, with heavy eyeliner, electric blue eyes.
When I pass her desk on the way out, she says hi.
“I’m Melanie. You’re that new chick from LA, right?”
At least I haven’t been mistaken for a local.
I’ve only been in Larkin about a month but I’m really happy, trailer parks, hunting, cornfields, and all. One kid here actually pulls up to school in a small tractor. A fucking tractor! Like I should talk. I show up in a yellow school bus.
Melanie and I hang out almost every day. I don’t know where she gets her drugs but her supply seems never ending. After school, I walk the now-familiar path to Melanie’s house and follow her singing to the bathroom, a cluttered crack of a room filled with hanging clothes and a sink dyed rainbow from years of spilled hair dye and makeup. Despite the dirt, I love the mess in her house, it feels homey, easy to squish into and disappear. Our house has hardwood floors, hard angles, and uncomfortable, yet attractive, furniture.
“Mel?”
Two surprised blue eyes peep out from the curtain. “Oh! Hi. Listen, Jeremy’s folks are gone for the weekend, he’s having a huge party. It’ll be awesome. Tell your aunt you’re staying at my house, my mom will cover.”
One thing I’m still getting used to is that no one here has parents—even if they have them. Lying for my friends certainly wasn’t part of my mother’s parenting. When I was little and didn’t get my way, I would fantasize that I had “real” parents somewhere that never said no. It suddenly feels like I’ve walked into the golden land of those imaginary parents.
I love it here. I finally feel free. I have some space from my mom, I have a cool group of friends. I have no history.
“I think she smokes pot with her new friends, but she does go to school,” my sister says to me optimistically.
If the worst thing she does is smoke pot in the cornfields, it’s an improvement. My, how my standards have changed. Hopkins is out the window, too, she’ll never go back. We look at public schools all the way into the Valley. They all look the same, the same dingy halls, same tired teachers, the same gang-banger boys and slutty girls I sent her to a private school to shield her from.
Mia steadfastly refuses to come to the phone when we call. We haven’t spoken to her once since she left. Six weeks later it still feels like a kick in the stomach.
“Are your teeth brushed?”
My little cousin Sophie nods her head vigorously.
“Okay, go pick out a bedtime story.”
Sophie loves when I read to her because I always do the voices. Cockney street urchins, evil wizards, I can be just about anyone. Of course, being high helps. I’ve learned to lower my voice halfway through the book, so that she’s asleep by the end of it.
“And the little princess lived happily ever after.”
I fold the book and watch her sleep. She’s so fragile but at the same time seems so much stronger than I am. I want to protect her, so bad things never happen to her, so she’s always clean and glowing. I touch hair lightly, afraid to disturb her, to rub off.
The doorbell rings. I run down before it wakes up Sophie. Melanie’s there with two guys I’ve never seen. She smiles and shakes a baggie of white powder in front of her face. She probably fucked them for it. A month ago I would have gotten mad at her for doing that, but I don’t even care now. It keeps stuff coming my way.
“Oooh, Mia, you’re gonna LOVE this shit!” she giggles furiously. “This heay’s the pure, uncut co-cai-een-a.”
An hour of partying later, I’m throwing up the “uncut cocaieena.” My tongue’s bloody from biting it while it was numb and the acid from the vomit stings. Shaking, I push through the medicine cabinet and find the Nyquil bottles so I can fall asleep. Thank God Sophie gets so many colds.
Melanie’s free drug supply no longer baffles me. His name is Trevor Wilkinson. Most things don’t live up to their reputation. The Wilkinsons leave theirs in the dust. Local legends, Trevor and his brother are both dropouts and are usually in trouble with the law. The most anyone’s seen of them is a glimpse from their black Impala, a flash of face, a whiff of smoke, a blaring song.
Their house looks like a ghetto crackhouse airlifted and dropped in the middle of a cornfield. Blue paint is peeling and faded, a rusting pickup truck sits dying on the front lawn, and a mangled dog is chained to the front porch. It lunges for me when I walk by.
“Shut it, Samson,” someone behind me growls.
I turn and there’s a skinny, blond guy standing behind me. His hazel eyes look gentle despite the devil lock hanging between them and a badly scarred eyebrow. He looks twenty-six, twenty-seven.
“Who’s she?” he asks, blatantly checking me up and down.
“Mia,” I say. “You gonna keep staring or invite us in?”
“Feisty,” he says, flashing a grin. “I like that. I’m Derek.”
He reaches for the front door but it flies open on its own as a guy bursts through and hurls himself over the porch, retching.
We walk down a dingy hallway into a smoky room filled with people in various stages of oblivion. Condom wrappers litter the floor, along with empty plastic baggies, tin foil, and soda bottles.
Melanie struts in like Cleopatra, laughing as she pushes a potato-faced kid with a bull ring out of the way to clear a spot on the sofa. A small pile of heroin sits on the coffee table. Suddenly, Mel goes silent. I watch, intrigued by this new side of her, precise, focused, and serious.
Just as I lean in to do a line, the door slams open and a squatty woman with hair shooting out in all directions is silhouetted in the doorway.
“Hi honey, I’m Linda.”
“Mia,” I say, waiting for her to comment on the small mountain of dope.
“Nice meetin’ you, sweetie.” Her smile vanishes. “Derek, did you take my cigarettes?”
This place is nuts, awesome, but nuts. I lean back in and cut out two lines. The high hits me totally unexpectedly. It’s not that instant rush you get from coke, it sort of melts over you slowly until it feels normal to be weightless and floating, like life has always been slow and beautiful. My body comes and goes, tingly and prickly one minute, normal the next. I sit zoned out like that for hours before I realize I have to puke.
Derek gives me a ride home, Melanie being “occupied” with Trevor. I pass Linda curled up on the sofa, dazed and drooling.
“Is she sick?” I whisper.
“No,” Derek answers. “Not sick…just weak.”
I spend time in Mia’s room each day, exploring her old books and toys, her collection of handmade boxes, her photos. It soothes the ache in a part of me I wasn’t aware of yet, the way your sternum or spleen doesn’t exist until it hurts. I have a new organ now in the shape of my daughter’s absence. I’m learning the anatomy of new life.
Late one Saturday night, I find a pretty wallet that she never used. Or so I thought. I notice a seam has been opened to make a secret place. I dig inside and find a folded white 3 × 5 card. I unfold it to see, written in blood traced with a fingertip: ROTTEN.
“Hey, Mia, I’m gonna mix you up something special, ’kay? It’s better than straight H. Speedballs are seriously like communing with God.”
“Sure,” I mumble, half stoned, half drunk.
Derek comes over with a needle and a belt.
“Here, tighten this around your arm,” he says. “Make sure it’s really tight.”
The needle comes toward me, slow and weaving, like the circles my mom used to make with a spoon when I was little to get me to eat. It finally makes contact with the vein and plunges in.
It’s the most mind blowing pleasure, the rush of coke minus the agitation. And when the coke wears off it leaves just enough of an edge to enjoy the heroin, which is ten times more potent than snorting.
There’s nothing like personal calamity to find out just how small your town is. Somehow, everyone knows what’s happened to our family, friends, colleagues, school moms. I run into them everywhere, in library stacks, at the Writers Guild Theatre, at the Farmer’s Market herb stand. I’ve become a human car wreck that people can’t help rubbernecking.
They’re all kind, concerned, but sometimes I need to not be who I am. I’ve ducked out a restaurant kitchen, slipped through an employee lounge, hidden behind display racks. I’ve escaped through the produce doors at Whole Foods twice.
I know they all care, many of them deeply, and I’m grateful. It’s the pity in their eyes I can’t stand. How careful they are. It’s such a thin line between I’m sorry it’s you and I’m glad it’s not me.
We go to the Wilkinsons so often now it’s become routine. Time’s hard to distinguish there, nights blur with days, this week with last week with last month. It’s like a continuum, you know whenever you go back you’ll pick up right where you left off, snorting, smoking, shooting. It’s its own world, that house.
Derek’s become like a big brother. Sometimes he takes me on drives and shows me stuff, the best cliff jumping spots, places where deer gather, secret caves. We talk about things, his mom, my old dad. He lived on the streets for a year before coming back home. He’s been on heroin for six, but he says he’s trying to kick it. Kick it and leave this place for good.
I know what he means about this place now. Being young and doing this shit is one thing, but here half the parents do it, too. I know one guy whose forty-five-year-old aunt gives his friends head as long as they dope her up first.
“No,” Derek says, ignoring the ten I tap against his shoulder.
“What the hell’s your problem? You mix me speedballs all the time.”
“I know, but shooting straight is different. You think I haven’t noticed your legs?” he asks, sucking the liquid into a needle. I tug down my cutoffs. I’d forgotten about my scars.
“That don’t matter, I already seen them,” he mumbles, one end of a belt in his mouth. “You got enough to figure out without fucking yourself up even more. Don’t wanna end up like me now, do ya?”
I’d normally continue to argue, but something in his tone silences me. He jerks his head sideways, pulling the belt tight while pumping his fist. Tapping his bulging blue vein, he shoots up. His blood replaces the junk in the needle and I watch the bright red mix with the fluid, like jellyfish tentacles. For some reason it reminds me of a womb, something about the blood curling up into the fluid and swaying gently. It seems warm and cozy and I want to be in there, just for a moment.
I start to say so but his eyes are already closed, his back slumped against the wall and he curls on his side. I push his devil lock to the side to see his profile. He looks young all of a sudden, small. I saw him curled up like this last week, only then it was because he was sick from withdrawal, his sheets covered in his own filth. He didn’t even make it six days.
I’ve been in Indiana visiting Mia for three days and haven’t looked into her eyes once. She won’t look at me and barely speaks to me. I know nothing of her now, what she thinks, what she does, where she goes. My daughter’s made me irrelevant. I need new skills. I need all-seeing eyes, I need the ears of a dog, I need clairvoyance, armor. I need many things to be Mia’s mother now, love least of all. Now, love is a liability.
She doesn’t know who I am, either, and I think it angers her. She doesn’t recognize this woman who is scared, who doesn’t know how to make her pain go away.
We share the same guest bed, and some nights she scoots over and puts her arm around me. The night before I leave, she says good night, Mom, I love you. I cry till long after she’s asleep.
I gotta get the hell out of here. By the time Derek picks me up, it takes two fat lines before I even begin to calm down. I’d forgotten how bad it is between my mom and me now, either awkward silences or pointless lectures.
When we get there, I’m thankful for the chaos that is the Wilkinson house. For Samson’s barking, for Linda’s hollering, for everyone high as hell and getting drunk.
I go to the corner where Melanie’s at and blow some coke while matching shots with Derek and Trevor. I lean back and the room splatters into pieces. Furniture and people’s faces and bodies all swirl together to dance a dervish and I see my mom’s face floating in the middle of it all, with her sad, defeated look. I hate that face, it’s a lie. She was never like that until I ran away. She was never weak or helpless, she’s usually a fucking banshee.
A familiar rage builds, my hands clench. I stumble to the bathroom and fumble around until I find a razor. It pours out of me in a torrent, every thought and feeling leaving a red gash on its way out. I cry red until I can breathe again.
“Whooohoooo!”
Melanie’s on the bed in her underwear and a T-shirt, rocking her hips in tempo with the music. Five guys are crowded around the bed, shouting and whooping. Every couple seconds she stumbles, then giggles and keeps dancing. I want to leave but I shot some shit and am too fucked up to move.
Melanie’s really into it now, whipping her hair around like a rock star and leaning over far enough for everyone to see down her shirt, sans bra.
“Hey, Mel!” Trevor yells, pumping his hips. “Show them what you show me!”
Melanie turns her back, then whips her shirt off, cascading giggles. How can she do that? I can’t take off my shirt in front of one guy, much less five. She’s running her hands over herself and shaking her hair and feeling so good and…
I come to and the room’s empty and dark. I’m so thirsty. I go to sit up but I’m pushed back down. I can’t…I can’t breathe. Gasping, I try to sit up again, but something’s pushing me down. There’s a weight on me and this pushing, on top of me, inside of me. In a haze, I see Derek’s face floating above my own, wincing. What…what’s his face doing there?
Sun streaks through the curtains. I pull the blanket up over my head and curl up in a ball. Shit! I feel last night’s activities coming up. I grab a bag from the floor and let it go. I’m sweaty and shaking, my teeth chatter.
“Mia?”
Melanie gets up and comes over to me, pulling my hair from my face and stroking it. Her hands are refreshing and cool.
“Come on, sweetie, let’s go eat, you’ll feel better.”
Nodding, I pull the cover off to get up and immediately throw it back on. I’m naked from the waist down.
“Did I fall asleep like that?”
Melanie grabs my jeans off the sofa. “Damn, Mia! You don’t remember anything, do you?”
Well, no shit. I pull on my jeans and suddenly Derek’s wincing face flashes. I stiffen and push his face out of my head.
Fuck it Mia, what happened, happened. Just forget about it.
When Melanie calls next I make up some excuse for not wanting to go to the Wilkinsons. I’m afraid to be around Derek, of him pretending nothing happened. Of me going along with it.
“Brian Starcher told me about a party tonight, he’ll pick us up at my house.”
I’ve seen Brian at school. He roams the hallways in his wife beater, muscles bulging, chains and cigarette dangling beneath multicolored spikes.
We go to some guy’s house and party until late. Brian and I drop acid under the stars and have one of those “deep” conversations. There’s a fair tomorrow, he says. By the time the acid wears off, it is tomorrow.
“Mia’s run again, Claire.”
The phone call we’ve been dreading. Paul knows before I say anything, by the way I drop into a chair with the phone. He slams his fist on the cabinet.
The police find her later that day outside a raunchy bar in another town. The officer tells me she was with ex-cons. Parolees at a biker bar. It’s Venice, country style. Vivian picks her up from the police station with her bags already packed. She can’t put her on a plane fast enough.
If I thought she looked bad at Vivian’s, she’s even worse now. Her eyes are always pinkish, her nose runs, her cheeks and eye sockets are sunken. She barely weighs a hundred pounds.
She’s coarse, rabbity, aggressive, secretive. Sometimes she cackles with hoarse laughter that’s so unnerving, I’m almost afraid of her, of this Indiana Mia. She’s picked up the accent and mannerisms of rural druggies so well, I think she needs an exorcism rather than therapy, which she refuses anyway. “No freakin’ way, I don’t need no therapist.”
Sometimes she’s so blue and quiet, it’s painful to see, painful that she refuses to open up to me. Other times, she’s beaming and fizzy, saying I’m so glad to be home! Of course, she’s high when she’s like this, so it poisons my joy. It’s obvious she’s completely addicted now. Her unspoken threat is that if we say anything about it, she’ll run again.
She’s become both stupid and cunning. What I’ve come to realize is that she doesn’t need to be any smarter. Just as a scholar thrives on how much she knows, a druggie thrives on how little. Their knowledge and energy constrict around finding their next high, their brilliance is measured by it. If you only need to be smart about one thing, any junkie can be a genius.
It’s frightening to have no parental authority, no power to help her. Still, we’re thankful that she’s not on the street. That she’s not a crime scene photo on a Venice police officer’s desk.
She agrees to finish tenth grade at an alternative school, “for fuckups,” she says, not bothered by the label. The director, Maddy, likes Mia, she likes them all, they’re creative, misunderstood, they march to a different drummer. They march to their dealers, I add. Then that’s their path, Maddy says, you must trust that your child will find her way.
What if that way leads to permanent addiction, to jail, to the funeral parlor? Or just to the shabby half-life of those who never fully rose up from the level they sunk to in their drug days? Like the men with graying ponytails who hand you your groceries. Or the women with cigarette laughs, funky toenails, and sagas to tell.
“I’m taking a bus back to Indiana.”
It’s early Sunday morning, her duffel’s already packed.
“I didn’t want to sneak out again. I promise I’ll call every few weeks to let you know I’m okay. But, if you guys or Aunt Vivian do anything to find me, you’ll never hear from me again.”
You said you’d finish school, I say weakly. Paul, the easy parent, the one who was always a sucker for his little girl, has had it.
“You don’t have to worry, we’re not going to look for you this time!” he yells at her. “You want to go live with scum, go! You want to throw away your future, fine, go, leave now!”
This has broken him. There is a flash of hurt on her face; it’s the first emotion she’s shown since she got home. Still, she walks to the door with her duffel.
“Mia, wait!” I rush after her. “The bus station’s in a dangerous part of town! Your dad will take you. Paul, please!”
I can’t believe it, I’m volunteering to take her to a bus station to run away. But she’ll escape no matter what we do. At least she’s offering to call. No one speaks on the ride downtown. The ticket line is full of migrant workers, drifters, a group of nuns. Mia stands outside my car door in the seedy parking lot, hoping I’ll come out to say good-bye.
“Please, Mommy, it’s not about you, it’s not, I just have to do this, I have to be on my own. Please, hug me good-bye.”
When she starts to walk away, I jump out and clutch her. We’re both crying for this good-bye, the way we cried when she arrived in the world.
“Promise you won’t look for me, I promise I’ll call from the road every day so you know I’m okay,” she says as she hugs me then pulls away.
“Please call us, Mia.” She’s already walking away from me. “Please call! I promise I won’t look for you!”
I am lying.