Chapter Four

On my first day of school, I had dry toast, Advil, and the hair of the dog for breakfast. I felt like a zero. Nothing good could come from someone like me. Rie had said she believed in me, and, for a short blip in time, I’d believed in me too. Until the rum blew in my ear and said, Follow me. Forget about the cowboy, the blood, and the glass.

The first drink had warmed me like hot chocolate on a snowy day. The second drink stoked the heat; the third one fired up my soul. I almost didn’t drink the fourth until Blue whispered, “Don’t worry, babe. I’ll get you a big coffee when I drive you to school in the morning.”

My pop-up boyfriend had flopped. No coffee. No ride. Just a drink-stained bus ticket on the countertop. I brushed my teeth three times, but the taste of sugar, shame, and stupidity lingered on my palate. I picked clothes out of the laundry basket: a mango-coloured T-shirt, yoga pants so thin they might as well have been nylons, and a pair of dark-brown ankle boots. I pulled my hair back, moisturized my face, and spritzed myself with apple-scented body spray.

I got to school, which was not really a school but rather an old five-storey brick warehouse named the Hope for Tomorrow Centre, abbreviated HFTC. On one side stood McCaughey’s Funeral Home & Crematorium and on the other side Joanna’s Psychic Arts/Hair Salon. The black smoke billowing from the stacks of the funeral home was from dead people. That’s what one of my clients had told me when I’d blown him in the parking lot. He’d said, “One day, you’ll be nothing but a puff of smoke — cremains — probably sooner than later given your big mouth and chosen profession.” He’d nicknamed me Cremains and had come to see me weekly until, one day, like a puff of smoke, he’d disappeared.

According to Rie, the city had created the HFTC to help people like me. Two hundred and ninety grand worth of renovations had salvaged the old teardown and transformed it into a learning centre and emergency refuge for the homeless. The faded words City Furniture Co. 1941 still fought to be seen against the stone-washed bricks stripped almost white from a hundred years of sun. Pigeons soldiered on despite the huge plastic owls and pigeon spikes on the edges of the roof. Two gigantic, castle-like doors dwarfed the stragglers seated on the steps, huddled together, clinging to steaming white Styrofoam cups.

I heaved one of the castle doors open. Rie was standing at the top of the steps as though she’d been waiting for me. “Good morning, Chanie!” She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m so pleased to see you here today.”

I nodded and looked away.

“Follow me, and we’ll get your intake papers taken care of.”

We walked down a wide hallway. The smells of soup, sweat, and salt-and-vinegar chips permeated the air, as though taunting my hungover stomach to heave. Locker doors slammed, running shoes squeaked, laughter, chatter, and a million variations of text alerts and ringtones beeped and chimed. The noise droned like a distorted radio in my head, making me feel squirrelly, making me want to run back out the castle-like doors. The walls were plastered from floor to ceiling with electric murals and positive words drawn in fat neon letters: Love, Hope, Faith, Believe, Jesus Loves You.

The intake went relatively well considering I had to put my hand on a Bible to make my pledge. Thankfully, swearing on a Bible had no greater meaning to me than swearing on a copy of Hustler. I stood there, slightly drunk, repeating after Rie: I will not drink. I will not do drugs. I will not engage in any illegal activities. We smiled at each other and nodded as if we’d just agreed to meet at Tim Hortons for lunch.

I stayed close to Rie while we walked down the hall. All eyes were on me. Girls with overbleached translucent hair chewed their gum and glared through their dramatic fake eyelashes, puckering their frosty lips like anime dolls. They wore dangly earrings, and their wrists were heavily adorned with bracelets and bangles. I wore no makeup, and my wrists were wrapped with white bandages. The boys were awkward, gangly, and pimply, and stared at me too. I didn’t know the likes of these young kids in the hall. They vaguely resembled the kids I’d left behind when I’d run away. Since that time, my immediate circle had consisted of Brenda, Milos, the men who paid me, and working girls like me.

I’d had only a couple of friends during my school years. I’d been a fairly normal kid, other than I liked to study and read. My fellow students were more into romance, sports, and normal teenage things like make-out parties and drinking. But I’d stayed away from parties and the “cool crowd” because the girls were mean and gossipy. There was a particularly nasty trio of bitches named Josie, Joanne, and Jackie. When they weren’t busy obsessively rolling frosted-pink lip gloss on their bitchy mouths, they were spitting insults at any girl they perceived as a threat to their self-made Barbie kingdom. They only attacked when they were in a pack, which seemed to be always.

My indifference must have annoyed them because they started calling me a “fuckin’ little whore.” Then, when Marilyn Monroe–shaped Shanna came along, they added her to the “fuckin’ little whore” list and pelted her with the same insults. So, Shanna and I bonded and became friends. Neither Shanna nor I felt like whores, or even knew what a whore actually was. I’d never have thought that the trio of bitches had foreshadowed my future, as though anyone could have known the trajectory my life would soon take. But sometimes I feel like their negative energy helped spiral me into the streets.

It was bad enough dealing with the trio at school, and though I hated my home, it was still a place of refuge from the mean girls — except for the main mean girl, my mother. I came in late one afternoon and went upstairs to change my clothes. I pulled open my top drawer, and it was empty. I yanked the other drawers open, and the same thing. Not a stitch of my clothing to be seen. I ran down to the basement, where my mother was doing laundry.

“Where are all my clothes?” I snapped at my mom, who’d been folding laundry in the basement.

“Chanie, I’m going to take you shopping for something decent and not the spandex and tank tops you like to run around in. For God’s sake, you look like a hooker!”

“You’re the one who bought me those clothes!” I said, panic slowly starting to take over.

“Well,” she said, pausing in mid-fold of Clayton’s hoodie. “I hate to have to tell you this, but one of your classmates called to tell me that she and her friends are worried about you.”

“Why?” Maybe someone had finally seen my pain, my languishing. Maybe I had an ally?

She took on her condescending bitch tone. “They’re embarrassed for you. The girls at school think you dress like a slut and you’re getting the wrong kind of attention.”

I took a moment to absorb her comments. “Are you fucking kidding?”

“No! I’m not kidding! Not only are you failing your classes, you’re acting like a floozy. Clayton’s even noticed your budding sexual behaviour. Imagine how embarrassed I feel to have such a loser for a daughter!”

“Oh! Clayton. I see!” My ankles weakened. “I want my clothes back!”

“Too bad, you spoiled little bitch! You’ll wear what I tell you.”

“How can you do this?” I started crying.

“Poor little Chanie. So hard done by,” she said, drooping her mouth and rubbing her eyes exaggeratedly. “If you don’t fucking like it here, there’s the door!”

That’s when I’d realized that I had no home and I had no friends, so I’d stopped getting attached to people and places. Everything was temporary. That made it easier to ignore the looks and whispers of the other students. They’d be temporary too.

I turned my attention to Rie. “Why are there so many Jesus slogans everywhere?”

“The local churches provide a lot of support to the program. Some students find that a commitment to faith helps them make good decisions and stay straight. Pastor Josh will guide you. He teaches classes and counsels students. You’ll love him!”

“Seems like unicorns and rainbows to me,” I whispered, as though trying to announce to someone unseen that I was way too cool and worldly to believe that some being up in the sky was judging my every move. Even the amazing Jesus, who, according to Brenda, forgives all sins, would shake his head at some of the things I’d done for money.

“Let’s get you to orientation for your assessment exam,” Rie said.

Assessment exam! What kind of Hitler-style school would give a student an exam the first day? Ambush! I’d dropped out in grade eight and certainly hadn’t taken up independent study as a hobby. My math skills were on the level of street math only. The only classic literature I’d read was George Orwell’s 1984, but it had freaked me out, so I hadn’t bothered finishing it. Plenty of trashy romance and crime novels, though. Lots of Internet articles, blogs, and some poetry, like Danielle Steel’s Love: Poems. If I failed, did that mean jail?

I followed Rie into an empty classroom. Two huge whiteboards stood at the front of the room. Orange and green numbers covered their surfaces; lines and arrows pointed up and down and circled around other numbers, with the final arrow twirling into a heart. Books of all shapes, colours, and sizes dominated most of the shelves. Old desks resembled cars jammed into a parking lot on Dollar Days. The walls, and parts of the small windows, were plastered with tacky murals and huge Jesus slogans. The room felt like the hobby room of a hoarder. Every corner from floor to ceiling had been used for storage, decoration, or desk space.

I sat on a wooden chair and tried to eavesdrop on Rie’s conversation with a boyish-looking man dressed in an emerald golf shirt and khaki pants. His teeth were way too white, like if they sold a toothpaste called Crazy White, he would be the guy on the box. His skin screamed green-juice vegan: clean, smooth, not a toxin in his body, his cells alive with purity. Infomercial healthy! I’d have to be rebirthed by Buddhist naturopaths to ever look that fresh.

“Hello, Chanie.” The boyish man walked toward me and extended his hand. “I’m Pastor Josh.”

Great! Pure Pastor Josh is here to save me.

He handed me a fat booklet and an orange pencil. “This is the assessment exam. It’ll help us determine your education level. Then we can build you a proper learning plan.”

Once the exam results were in, my “proper learning plan” would start at a grade-five level. Everyone would know I was a big zero. They’d have my criminal record and my assessment exam to prove it. I’d need ten years of tutoring to get up to a high school level and another ten years of counselling. I wondered if they’d give me bonus points for every rape I’d survived? Every assault? Every attempt I’d made on my own life? Surely those events deserved life experience points. Why couldn’t they just give me crayons and finger paints so I could whip up another Jesus pic for the wall?

Rie seemed to sense my anxiety. “Can we get you some water or anything?”

“A muffin and a coffee would be great. I didn’t get a chance to have breakfast.” Other than dry toast and rum.

“Would you like to pray together before the exam?” Pastor Josh said, beaming his vegan light. Happy tonic seemed to fizz out of him, through his eyes, his smile, and his voice. Even his movements were light and floaty, like a mystical being. I figured that when nobody was looking, he broke into random dance moves and skipped instead of walked.

“I’d really rather eat,” I said.

“Okay, Chanie. Get started, and I’ll find you a snack.” Rie patted my shoulder and left the room.

The exam pissed me off. It made me feel exceptionally stupid and hopeless. I couldn’t remember much from my social studies classes, or any of my classes for that matter. I’d been a great student, up until grade seven. Straight As and special credit for writing a fantasy novella about a kid named Angus and his powerful unicorn. But then my dad died and Clayton moved in. I didn’t mean to start failing. At first, I’d just stopped eating. Everyone said that was normal given “what I was going through.” But then I stopped sleeping too. And started shaking a lot. And then my grades tanked, and the doctor gave me Ativan. My mom told me to get over myself. She and Clayton made it a game to mimic me in whiny baby voices, manipulate my words, and make up stories about my bad behaviour for their drinking buddies. I didn’t bother to defend myself because they’d always revert to their canned response, “If you don’t like it here, there’s the door.”

I chose “the door” at the end of grade eight, a week before summer break. The same weekend my mother had left town to relax on a yoga retreat. I’m not sure what my mother needed a retreat from. Maybe her big fake tits and horse-teeth smile had exhausted her. Always having to act like her life was so hard “bein’ so beautiful ’n all.”

The retreat had been my stepdad’s idea. He’d even paid for it and offered to keep an eye on me. He said he’d make sure I didn’t have any boys over, as though that were a regular thing. I’d had one boy over one time. I’d asked my friend’s brother Cory to come over so I could show him my floral solar lights. I had closed the door of my bedroom and snapped the lights off so he could see the flowers glow in the dark. Within seconds, Clayton exploded through the bedroom door screaming about us “gettin’ up to no good in the dark.” Cory took off for the front door and almost ran right into my mom, who, coming home from a hard day of shopping, flew into a rage and grounded me for six weeks for “bein’ a floozy.”

While my mother packed her translucent Lululemon yoga pants and neon sport bras, I begged her to let me stay at my friend Shanna’s house.

“I’m nervous here alone with him!” I pleaded.

“You are ridiculous! And ungrateful. You can stay right here with Clayton and take this opportunity to get to know him better. He’s been like a father to you, Chanie.”

“My father didn’t talk about blow jobs and Halle Berry ‘gettin’ nailed by Billy Bob’!”

“Chanie, that never happened. You are delusional.”

“You were right there!” I snapped.

“Chanie, you just don’t want to see me happy. You are such a selfish little ingrate.”

“He always walks in when I’m changing. Or comes into the bathroom to pee when I’m in the shower!”

“You are a liar. That only happened once!”

More like once a week! I’d started showering at the school gym, if I could. I’d even asked Shanna if I could shower at her place while Clayton was laid off because he was always home. She never asked why. She just told me to bring my own towel and make sure I was gone before her parents got home.

The next night, I lay hypervigilant in bed. My ears rang, my eyes stung, and little blue floaters peppered the darkness. Every sound sent electric shocks through me. My intuition pecked at me like a poisoned bird as he came up the stairs. I held my breath as though total silence could keep him away. Clayton punched the light switch on my wall and slurred, “Ya little tart! Get yer ass downstairs right now!”

His beer breath infused my bedroom like evil incense, the scent of depravity. I imagined myself bolting out the front door, but I knew if I tried, he’d knock me senseless. He’d slapped me a few times for “bein’ disrespectful.” One time he’d cracked me so hard I fell into the door frame and bruised my face. My mom kept me home from school because, she said, “We don’t need no teachers pokin’ around in our family business.”

I clutched my grandma’s rosary and marched in quick, jerky steps toward the Man Cave in the basement. Don, Clayton’s welder buddy, fat, bald, and covered in body hair, smiled widely, his brown teeth replicas of rotten corn. He lifted his beer off his big gut to salute me.

“Come and watch a movie with us,” he said, waving the remote control in his non-beer hand.

I tried to say, “I don’t want to watch a movie,” but when I opened my mouth, my voice came out like a raspy meow.

“Sit your skinny ass down.” Clayton shoved me down on the floor next to Don. His feet reeked and made me gag. I pulled my knees up to my chest and dug my nails into my legs. “Look at the TV,” he said, nodding at Don to press play. “Here’s how ya make your skinny ass useful.”

I squinted at the screen, my neck rigid, shoulders shrugged up to my ears. A scrawny teenage girl sat naked on a couch with two old men, scruffy, like game hunters, one on each side of her. She resembled me, but maybe even younger. Her shiny brown hair, streaked copper from the sun, was braided into pigtails with big yellow bows. Her dull grey eyes, large and shaped like oversized almonds, brimmed with tears. She had small fuchsia lips, skin almost airbrushed, cheeks dark red. Her breasts were small, her hips and ribs prominent, and her chest heaved. They pulled her legs apart. She had no pubic hair, nothing to cover her, nothing to save her. She closed her eyes.

“Yum!” Don belched and shoved me onto my side, slapping my ass.

“Drag ’er up here,” Clayton growled and patted the couch.

I curled into a ball as Don dragged me off the floor, but I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t move. My nightgown came up over my head, and the fabric of my panties cut my skin as Clayton tore them off. The girl on TV stood up. One man thrust behind her and bent her over the seated man, who grabbed her by the back of her hair. I looked at her face. My nostrils flared in rhythm to hers, our eyes glazed over like the freshly dead, and our faces shone with tears. In that moment, we became sisters. Allies. She was all I had to hold onto. If I could connect to her, I could survive, so I held her tight. I closed my eyes and pretended we were crouched down, hiding in a closet, hands tightly clasped, waiting for a hero. When I opened my eyes, the on-screen men were done with her. She was gagging, crying, and vomiting. Soon after, so was I.

My mom came home early when the yoga weekend turned out to be a dry retreat. “Who the fuck holds a retreat without any wine?” Classic drunk bitch. She must have found wine on the way home because she staggered in sometime during the night while I was lying on the floor of the Man Cave, too terrified to get up. Don and Clayton told her they’d come home from the pub and found me tag-teaming two teenage boys. My mother stood me up and slapped both sides of my face.

“Get the fuck out of my house, you nasty whore.”

Those were the last words she said to me. She threw me out the door with nothing but a jacket and a bus pass in my pocket.

I was too scared to talk to anybody, but I couldn’t be alone, so I rode the bus until Edmonton Transit shut down for the night. I walked thirty blocks to a twenty-four-hour truck stop where I curled up outside the restaurant doors, exhausted and hysterical. That’s where Brenda found me.

After I finished my exam, Pastor Josh said, “Things may get hard, but just know that’s normal. When you get closer to your goals, the enemy gets stronger.” I shook my head and went to the cafeteria for my free lunch — the best part of the day. After lunch, I attended a group lecture with twelve other new Begin Again students. Rie told us to think about how we would like to introduce ourselves and what our personal goals for the program were. I pictured myself standing up and saying, My goals are to not get caught drinking and working as a prostitute while I’m in this program.

Later on, Pastor Josh came to give us a sermon of sorts and told us we could be anything we wanted to be. Something about how our dreams may not look like they can come to pass in the natural world, but we serve a supernatural God. More fat letters for the walls, if you could find a space that wasn’t already plastered with some stupid saying. I could never be a virgin again, supernatural God or not. I would never have parents who loved me, a safe home, a mind clear of the violence and immorality I’d seen. God was not the answer. You can praise Jesus all day long, but street whores are perpetually haunted.

At the end of the day, grateful to be free again, I burst through the gigantic wooden doors onto the pigeon-shit steps with a new energy. It almost felt like Pastor Josh had rubbed off on me. It was 3:50 p.m. Blue’s shift ended at 4:30. The thought of riding the bus with the musty people made me queasy. Their crinkly chip bags, noisy zippers, and shoddy headphones made me want to blow out of my skin. But I’d endure them if it meant seeing Blue.

Like kismet, Blue walked out the front door of my building just as I walked up the driveway. How convenient. Not the least bit staged. A reward after my shitty day. A little smirk tickled his mouth, and his eyes were alert and playful like he’d slept a solid eight hours and hadn’t stayed up half the night drinking with two burnt-out hookers.

“How’s our future lawyer?” Blue laughed.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Where was that big coffee you promised me?” I giggled and gave him a playful shove.

“I get paid next week. Until then, you’ll have to suffer.” He slow-motion-punched my shoulder.

“Well, I gotta run,” I said, as though I were busy.

“I’ll stop by later.”

I smiled.