Something Wicked (7 page)

Eleven

Because I’m grounded, my mom and I split a bottle of white wine during dinner on Friday night. Though she has called and set up appointments for the new school, I still haven’t agreed to go. I haven’t talked to her all week and so I’m definitely not happy about staying home for the weekend. “If we’re cooped up together, we may as well have a little fun,” she says cheerily while pouring herself a full cup and giving me just half. She’s trying to be nice and make things good between us, but I just can’t help but be a bitch to her. I don’t know why. There’s no real reason. It’s like it’s instinctual with me.

“Hey …” I object, eyeing the half-empty glass. I am slouched back in the chair, arms crossed, making it clear that I’m not okay with the grounding, despite her attempt to make it fun.

She gives me a look. “That’s enough for you, Hon,” she says, but then she picks up the bottle and adds a little more. Which is pretty much how she is, always saying the right thing, like “You’re grounded” or “No allowance,” but in the end letting me get my own way. It’s like she’s a kid who is only acting the role of a parent. She can’t possibly enforce a rule because she feels bad for me. It’s as if she still feels all the
pain of being young. Like instead of being thirty-five, she’s only twenty.

She’s decided to stay in tonight, which I know is a big deal to her. Usually she’s out with one of her boyfriends, so I try to be good about it. I try to be happy, but my mind keeps wandering off.

We pop popcorn and make ice cream floats with Baileys. We get into our pyjamas and watch my mom’s favourite movie:
Ice Castles
. It’s this sappy movie from the ’70s about a figure skater who goes blind and still wins the competition.

I look over to her near the end, already knowing how I’ll find her. She’s curled up in a ball, red-eyed and sniffling, using her sleeve to wipe her nose. If anyone walked in the room, they’d think she was my little sister. Already I’ve outgrown her. She’s petite. And skinny. And beautiful, with darker olive skin and really nice blue eyes. Beside her I’m this clunky, beefy, pale girl with dark roots and the occasional pimple. Lucky me. I got all my father’s genes—except for my boobs. My mom and I have great boobs.

I throw a cushion at her. “Jesus, Mom, stop crying, you’ve seen this a thousand times.”

“I know. I know. I can’t help it.” She laughs at herself and then sniffles some more. I think the problem is that my mom has too much emotion, which makes us polar opposites. Sometimes I think that when she was pregnant with me, she sucked all the feelings out of me and kept them for herself.

I don’t cry at movies, but I do sometimes lose it when I watch nature shows. Like the episode I saw last week about a leopard in a South African zoo. The leopard had just had a baby and the doctors were holding it because the baby was screaming in pain. And then one doctor discovered that the baby was missing a hind leg, and he put him back down because now he would not survive. He explained that the mother, in her
excitement at delivering it, had severed the leg while chewing off the umbilical cord. The cub was so cute and so tiny, and his life was never even given a chance. Oh, I cried and cried and cried watching it alone on this cold metal surgery table. And I thought, how sad, because the mom would never understand the damage she caused.

Around eleven, I say I’m going to bed. In my room, I smoke a popper and stare at my cellphone. My mind is stuck on the thought of Michael.

Where did he go? Where did he go?

People don’t just disappear like that. Leave without saying goodbye. Things so unfinished. It’s like leaving in the middle of a sentence. I wish I didn’t walk out that last night before he got to tell me why he wanted to break up. Then I’d at least know the reason instead of being left wondering what I did so wrong. Was it because of our age? Was it because of my suspension and that I don’t do good in school? And to not say goodbye? Why? He loves me too much to say goodbye? Not enough? He’s a coward? He had a breakdown? He had given hints about feeling low and there were signs I recognized from my mother’s experiences with depression. Sweating. Staring vacantly at the television. Slow to respond to questions. Not being able to make simple decisions like what toppings to order on a pizza.

Or maybe he met another woman. I think of him in the arms of some lady, maybe someone his age, kissing her, holding her body when they sleep. This is what bothers me most—not so much the sex, but the sleeping. That warmth. That closeness. I think we have it all backward. Kids sleep alone and adults sleep together. It seems to me that kids are the ones who need
the companionship, they are the ones who are haunted by the bogeyman. When I slept at Michael’s, it was the first time I had been all night with someone while I was sober. And it was as if his sleeping body was a witness when the suffocating darkness violently woke me. And because of Michael, the night’s grip on my throat was looser.

I just can’t believe he left me.

If I stuffed my clothes in a garbage bag, if I just walked the fuck out of here, would I find him?

The phone rings, sending a wave of excitement through me, like it does every time since he left. “Hello?”

“Yo, Mel.” The sound of a girl’s voice sends my heart crashing back down. It’s just Jessica. “We’re in the ravine.”

“Get yer ass over here, bee-yotch!” I hear Ally shouting into the phone.

“I’m grounded.”

“So?” Jess questions, and then explains to Ally, “She’s grounded.”

“So?” Ally shouts.

“Okay. See you in twenty,” I say, not needing any more persuasion than that.

“Later.”

I hang up the phone and glare at it in my hand. “Fuck you.” If Michael thinks I’m a child, I may as well act like one. I change into my jeans and a thick hoodie. I switch the phone onto vibrate and put it in my back pocket. Then I roll a blunt and slip out the window, hanging off the balcony, and drop from the second floor onto the first-floor balcony, then down.

The ravine party is totally sick by the time I’m there. It has to be past one o’clock. Everyone is scattered around the non-
existent bonfire, sitting on the bench logs or on the grass. David has the tunes blasting, and there’s so much ganja smoke in the air, you’d swear we’re in the clouds. If people weren’t so drunk, they might feel cold. But we party here all year, even in winter, so it seems our bodies just adapt to the temperature.

I find Jessica right away, sitting on her boyfriend Devon’s lap. She passes me a mickey of vodka. “Here’s to your grounding.”

“Cheers,” I say, taking the bottle and finishing what little was left.

“What the hell?” she contests.

“It’s okay,” Travis interjects before I can answer. “I’ve got some more.” He takes a bottle out of a plastic bag by his feet and holds it up. Not caring what it is, I reach out and grab it, tearing off the cap and chugging down as much as I can before the burn in my throat becomes unbearable. The surrounding laughter overtakes Jessica’s protest. I shut myself off from all of it, everyone, replace the cap on the bottle, throw it back to Travis and plop down onto the ground, staring up at the shadow of trees. There are many ways to run away, I think as my head spins. You can pack your bags and physically leave a place or you can stay and just pack up your soul.

At some point, Jessica, Travis, Devon, Ally, Craig, and I end up at Travis’s house, in the basement, where we watch
Requiem for a Dream
again, for the fiftieth time.

A few hours later, I find myself lying half naked on Travis’s parents’ bed, trying to lose myself in the thought of Michael. All I’m thinking about is him. I’m imagining his mouth. I’m imagining his tongue. Craig is down between my legs, fully clothed. I won’t touch him back. There’s no way. He knows he could never go out with someone like me. I’m not the most
beautiful, but guys like me. So he’ll take what he can get—and all he can get is me off. I’m actually impressed at how good he is, and it takes only a few minutes. And when I’m done, I quickly push him away, pull up my underwear, and tell him I have to go.

“That’s it?” he questions.

I turn my head, flipping my hair at the same time, and look him directly in the eyes. “What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” I ask, quoting my favourite Claire Danes
Romeo and Juliet
line.

“Huh?”

Moron
. I dismiss his ignorance. Of course he doesn’t know Shakespeare. He’s a little fifteen-year-old boy. “I’m grounded,” I explain, zipping up my jeans. “It’s like five in the morning. I have to get home.”

He sits on the edge of the bed looking like some pathetic child, probably afraid to get up because of his hard-on. I don’t feel sorry for him. He can go jerk off to some internet porn later. He’ll get props for having been with me anyway. In the end, it will probably get him more action.

“Aren’t you going to thank me?” I ask from the doorway, smirking. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, shakes his head, and then pulls his gaze away. Usually I would finish with something even more obnoxious just to make him feel even shittier than he does right now. But instead, I’m the one who feels bad because I recognize in me the unfeeling and empty person I used to be, before meeting Michael. And I don’t want her back.

“Good night,” I say nicely, knowing it’s too late to make a difference, and shut the door behind me.

Twelve

So I make a choice.

It’s my first day at the Delcare Day Program. I stand outside the side entrance to the church, staring at the school door like it’s an opponent I’m about to get in the ring with. I smoke a cigarette, pacing back and forth between the parking lot and the church, wondering what the fuck I’m doing. It’s the hardest thing I’ve had to do. Go to a special school? It’s like admitting you’re a total failure. I feel sick to my stomach.

I suck in the last bit of cigarette wishing it would never end. It’s the last in the pack. Finally, I butt it out.

Breathe.

I put my hand on the door.

Breathe.

Push.

The day program is in a church basement. There’s something blasphemous about having a school for screwed-up teenagers in a church. It taints the holiness of the building or something. The sacred should be untouchable. It’s like Metallica playing a concert in the Roman Coliseum, or relocating our crappy school band practice to the library due to flooding. I feel like
me being here puts an embarrassing brown streak on God’s clean white underwear.

I head down the stairs to the classroom. I saw it yesterday at my intake meeting. There are a bunch of little elementary school desks scattered in uneven rows, a few larger round tables, and a teacher’s desk in the corner. Along one wall are painted blue and yellow “cubbyholes” where we can leave our jackets and stuff. On the other walls are old laminated posters of Michael Jordan, Martin Luther King, and people climbing mountains. Across the hall is “the couch room,” which is a windowless room full of mismatched, worn couches and a big square table in the centre full of pamphlets on STDs, drugs, Kids Help Line.

The teacher, Miss Something, a middle-aged woman with the kind of hippie beaded necklace my mom’s friend Crystal would wear, meets me outside the classroom and reviews our conversation from yesterday’s meeting. “Now remember, Melissa, you’re here to work on what’s keeping you from being successful in the regular school system. It’s a transition program.We are committed to help you work on your personal challenges. Okay?”