by E. Graziani
I sit still as stone, rage boiling inside me, rising up to the back of my throat again. My breathing deepens and my face flushes red as I cradle my pen in my hand. It only takes a split second for my mood to change, but everyone has a boiling point—and Ass Kisser has pushed all my buttons. My hands itch to grab his neck and snap it. My teeth clench, then I can’t keep it in anymore, so I just let it out.
“Why don’t you just shut your fucking shit-filled mouth and leave everyone alone, Jack—you ass-kissing piece of crap?” I feel light-headed after I finish the last word—crap; euphoric from letting off toxic steam that has built up over the last few months. Some of the kids gasp. I think it’s because this may be the first time they’ve heard my voice.
“Who said that?” I hear someone say. “Did she say that?” A swell of laughter spreads across the room.
“What did you say?” Jack squints at me as he furrows his brows.
“She said shut up and leave people alone.” That’s Norma.
Jack whirls around to face her.
“Ass kisser.” That is Ishaan. More laughter, after which Jack’s at a loss for words, probably for the first time in his life. He’s had the wind knocked out of his sails. I feel victorious.
I want so much to have the courage to do this every day, to shut down all the bullies who make me feel subhuman. At this moment, in this room, it is the perfect storm. A precise mix of anger, audacity, and the new desire to reciprocate an act of kindness have enabled me speak out against someone who has no idea how words can cut through someone’s very soul. I may never get the nerve to do it again, but today works in my favor, because Jack just shakes his head, whispers a profanity under his breath, and sits down hard in his chair, legs sprawled out in front to convey his contempt at having been cut down.
Then in walks Ms. Emerson, all distracted and shuffling some reports that are to be handed back today, and she very nearly trips over Jack’s feet. “Can you please sit up straight!” Ms. Emerson’s voice is shrill. “I just about fell and broke my neck.” Muted laughter rises and falls.
This was really not Jack’s day.
...
I join Norma and Ishaan at their table for lunch, and though I’m not much of a conversationalist, I try my hardest to impress them. It’s a little awkward, as Norma is staring at her phone and Ishaan is reading a book.
Finally Norma comes up for air and gazes at me as she lays her phone down. “So what are you doing this weekend?” she asks.
I shrug. “Not much.” There’s a pause in conversation, then Ishaan looks up from his book.
“Did you know that thousands of letters are sent to God every year by way of Jerusalem?” He points at the page he’s reading. “It says here that the Jerusalem post office takes the letters very seriously, and has—get this—a Letters to God department! The staff sends them to a rabbi, who slides them into the cracks of the Western Wall, whatever that is, where they join the million or so messages per year that are delivered in person. You can also fax or e-mail messages, and they’ll print them out and put them in that wall, too.”
“Isn’t God supposed to just hear you, wherever you are?” I ask.
“Or,” continues Ishaan, “you can snail mail it—the address is ‘God, Jerusalem.’” He looks flabbergasted by this fact. Norma smiles and shakes her head. Then there is an awkward silence.
“Do you believe in God?” she asks.
I shrug. “I believe in something.” I chew on the side of my mouth. “I call her the Ultimate Being.”
Norma nods. “Cool.” More awkward silence.
“Do you really cut yourself?” I blurt. Norma’s eyes widen.
“Whoa—that’s kind of private.” She pulls her sleeves even farther down over her hands.
“Norma isn’t ready to share everything with you yet, obviously,” Ishaan cautions. I mentally note that I have to practice my social skills.
Norma checks over her shoulders, then she leans across the table and speaks softly. “I got some weed from my cousin—she gave me a joint. You wanna get together this weekend? We can go behind the school and smoke it.” Ishaan and I look at each other, unsure how to respond.
“I dunno,” I say, raising a brow. I glance over my shoulder, too. “I mean, don’t they tell us not to smoke that? It’s dangerous and still illegal, isn’t it?” I look to Ishaan for confirmation.
“It is.” He closes his book with a snap.
Norma purses her lips. “Whatever. Are you in or not?” she asks impatiently. I wait for Ishaan to answer. If he says yes, I won’t say no.
“Okay, I guess I’ll try it, but I’ve never even smoked cigarettes. I’ll probably die if I inhale,” he declares.
“Well, you have to inhale, or you won’t get high,” Norma whispers. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore—too many ears around here.”
We didn’t talk about it again until Friday after school. We decided to meet at Ishaan’s house, because he was closest to Lakeview. We were going to hide behind one of the portables and try to figure out how to smoke the joint without puking.
“I’m not sure we should be doing this,” I say as we walk toward the school parking lot. I keep thinking of all the stuff they told us in school about smoking weed—how it can make you depressed and can cause psychosis. And then I think about all the adults I know who are nuts and screwed up and never smoked a joint in their life. I’m torn between images of my mother’s substance abuse and the need to prove my friendship to Norma and Ishaan.
“I’m absolutely sure we shouldn’t be doing this,” quips Ishaan.
“Oh, please,” hisses Norma. “Three-quarters of the school population has done this already.”
We find an acceptable spot at a portable, close to the stairs. At least if we faint, we’ll have somewhere to sit, instead of falling onto gravel.
Norma reaches into her satchel and pulls out the joint and a pack of matches. She puts the open end between her lips and strikes a match—it doesn’t catch, so she tries another. It works. As Ishaan and I watch, she brings the joint to her lips and inhales. I’m fairly certain that she’s never smoked before, as she expels the smoke with a deep, throaty cough. When the coughing fit subsides, she takes another drag, this time smaller, and manages to keep the smoke down.
Ishaan tries next. He inhales, coughs, chokes, and passes it to me, not even daring a second drag. I decide I should turn out the best effort and impress my friends, so I take a shallow drag and inhale. Of course I cough it out, but I try again, and this time I hold it down. I pass it on to Norma. Inhale, pass, repeat, until the joint is a tiny ember, which we let float to the ground. I feel my foot move to stomp it out. I actually didn’t will my foot to move—it kind of just did it of its own accord. That freaks me out a little. I remember thinking that time is going by a lot slower—but I can’t remember what I’m saying and can’t finish my sentences.
Looking back through my foggy islands of recollection, the next few highs were better. I felt floaty. Music sounded incredible while high, and it got hard to hold back laughter. Time slowed down or sometimes sped up. Food tasted incredible, and I usually got very hungry, plus if I was outside, I noticed that things looked different, like the treetops, the ground. I could see another side or another angle of the world. If I was inside, I might become fascinated by everyday things like posters or the patterns on wallpaper. Sometimes I could actually “hear” myself thinking much more intensely than normal.
It didn’t happen all that often at that time, but when it did, all that made us feel like we could take on anything. Thirteen-year-olds trying to act like we knew what we were doing and didn’t care how much it hurt us. The good feeling was only temporary, and the same old feeling always came back after the high was gone, sometimes even worse. After the highs came the punishing lows.
By the end of the school year, we were inseparable.
&n
bsp; Chapter 12
Like I said, my mom reached a point in her addiction where she had to either stop or run headfirst into a wall. Momma not only ran into a wall, she lunged at it—and in the end, the wall won. That summer, we got a call from Toronto General that Mom was in intensive care with acute septicemia. Gran had no idea what that was, so Destiny and I checked online, and it wasn’t good.
They told us that Mom got septicemia from dirty needles and that she was brought in too late to help her. Her organs were already shutting down. Mom and her dealer boyfriend were too wasted to realize she was sick. Barely coherent and slipping in and out of consciousness, she died from complications arising out of the infection. We stayed with her the whole time; Gran wouldn’t let Mom’s boyfriend near her.
I didn’t—and I still don’t—like to talk much about the entire ordeal. Truth is, I was angry. As much as I loved Momma, I didn’t cry at her funeral. My anger took up too much space for me to feel much of anything besides rage: rage for losing my mother to drug abuse years before she died: rage at my Gran for not keeping Momma home. I even felt rage during the wake. Our town house living room was crowded with people talking and eating, introducing themselves like it was a church social or something, and my mother was dead.
“Jesus—it sounds like a fucking party in here. I can’t stand it,” I hiss to Des and Connie.
Des nods. “Do you know that, in some cultures, they have literal parties after a funeral? Like the ancient Celts or modern Ghanaians.”
Connie rolls her eyes. “Really, Des?”
“What? It’s true.”
“You guys are just as bad.” I walk away and join Ishaan and Norma, who are huddled awkwardly in a corner. My sisters aren’t angry or horribly upset at all, it seems.
I grew up idolizing a person I barely even knew, unable to figure out why I felt that unconditional loyalty. Connie and Des were sad, of course, but afterward, they were so much more easily distracted that I felt I was the only one mourning my mother.
Of course, in addition to deep sadness and anger, what I feared most became my new reality. After the funeral, the Darkness and empty feeling came back stronger, taking me down like quicksand. So I buried it. I buried it deep inside me and never let it out, because if I did, I’d be afraid of what would happen. I buried it with attitude and recklessness, carelessness and contempt. I built a wall around me—only then did I know I’d survive.
The people that kept me from sinking to the bottom and suffocating were Destiny, Norma, and Ishaan. I stuck with the people who were there for me when I was my most apathetic. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t think I could have come out of that deep mass that was pushing me down and pressing the light out of my soul.
“You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” Bob Marley said that.
All the crap that life threw at us was a little easier to take because of Norma and Ishaan. They gave me licence to be reckless. It was a welcome distraction—one that I craved.
Fast forward to November of grade eight.
...
“Hey, wut up?” Ishaan slams his books down on the greasy cafeteria table next to Norma and me. “What we can do this weekend?” he asks.
“I’m really not down for doing anything lame again. Weed just makes me paranoid and I don’t have any money.” I scrunch up the plastic wrap from my sandwich and toss it to the bin, missing it. “Jeez, now I gotta go pick that up.” I walk by the Sacred Cows, and hear a definite “Oh my God” and giggles as I pick up the wrapping and toss it in the trash.
“Go fuck yourselves,” is my cool response. Being crude freaks them out. Can’t stand you—die and go to hell. As I turn to swagger back to our table, I see that Ishaan and Norma are deep in conversation. I catch the last bit of the discussion as I sit down.
“So if you take those two together, you get really messed up.”
“Take what?” I say.
“If you take Ambien and then drink vodka or some other shit, you get really messed up—I was doing some research and found it on a totally effed-up site last night.” Norma sounds excited.
“How did we get from ‘what are we doing this weekend’ to mixing Ambien and vodka?” I ask.
“Norma was just making a suggestion,” remarks Ishaan. “You were the one who brought up drugs.”
“The hell I did; I said I didn’t have the money to buy weed and it makes me paranoid anyway.”
“Well, this is free.” Norma’s smile is saccharine. “My mother, Ms. Huge-Ass Lawyer, needs Ambien to sleep, ’cause money flies out of her asshole continuously and that keeps her up at night.” Ishaan and I giggle at the visual.
I screw up my face. “I have trouble sleeping and I don’t have money flying out of my hinny.”
Ish rolls his eyes and looks over his shoulder. “We were saying that if you take Ambien and drink after you take it, you get high.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“They post this stuff on the Internet?”
“That’s not the point—the point is that we got our weekend.” Ish’s voice cracks with excitement. “If Norma gets the Ambien—how many can you get?”
“I don’t want her to suspect—three maybe…six at the most.”
“Are they prescription?”
“Duh. That’s why I can’t take that many. And why we need alcohol—to ‘enhance’ the effects.” She uses air quotes when she says enhance. There’s a tingling in my stomach. A mix of excitement and apprehension. I know drugs are trouble—my mother’s death is proof of that. I’m confronted with the decision to do the right thing or do something stupid. Should I heed that vision of my mother lying decimated in a hospital bed due to drug abuse, or should I listen to the voice that pulls me down into the stupidity abyss where you do dumb things to be cool, to go along with friends, and to be able to brag about it.
Naturally, the stupid voice wins out. “I’m in,” I say softly.
“As am I,” echoes Ishaan.
“So, where are we gonna do this?” I look from Ishaan to Norma.
“My house, of course,” Norma replies. “My dad has enough vodka to kill a horse. He’ll never know it’s missing. He goes through it so quickly that for him, it’s like opening a bottle of Perrier.” She smiles. “They’re going out tonight. If you guys get permission, you can sleep over.”
It was a plan.
Ishaan begged his father to let him sleep over, and with a little egging on from his sister, his dad relented. I felt sorry for him—his father couldn’t get beyond his son’s sexuality. Ishaan was the only son and he was gay. And then there was me. I don’t think Gran would have cared if I had grown a horn and spewed beer out of my mouth—all I had to do was tell Gran where I was going. She didn’t mind not having me around, so I figured I was doing her a favor.
...
That evening, I stuff some extra sweats, a toothbrush, and socks into my backpack. I walk to Ishaan’s house and wait outside. Not thirty seconds later, his door opens and there he is, backpack over his shoulders.
“Hey,” Ish says with a little wave. Gracefully, he descends his front steps to join me—I wish I had his poise and natural refinement.
As we walk, I want to ask the question, but in the same instant, I don’t want to sound like I’m sucking out. “Are you ready to do this?”
“Hell, yeah—can’t wait.” Though his words are bold, he sounds less than convinced. “You?”
“Me too,” I lie. We’re both quiet.
“Even, like, after what happened to your mom? You’re not freaking out?”
I shrug. “What do you think it’ll feel like?” I ask.
“I dunno. Probably we’re gonna feel really good. At least, I hope so. I hope we don’t, like, freak out or something, or die.” He laughs nervously and takes out his phone. “Norma just texted me
; her parents left and she’s got the pills and the vodka.” He puts his phone back in his pocket.
“I hope that we don’t end up like one of these celebrities, dead in a bathtub or something like that.” My lips are dry and my stomach is tingling again.
“Come on, you know we’re not that screwed up—even for being screwed up.” That makes me laugh.
When we get to Norma’s, we knock politely and then let ourselves in. “Hey, Norma, it’s us,” Ish says.
“Hey!” Norma comes bounding up the stairs to meet us. “Oh my God, you scared the crap out of me; I thought my parents came back.” She huffs out a big breath. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you to wait until someone answers the door?” The music from the basement resounds throughout the house.
“Sorry,” drawls Ishaan. “The door was open.”
“Yeah, we thought you were expecting us,” I remark.
“Yeah—no, I’m sorry—just kinda jumpy.” She scratches her head nervously. “So what do you guys think? They’ll be gone awhile, but they’ll be back. Do you wanna start?”
Our eyes dart from one to the other in a kind of eye dance, then finally Norma speaks. “Okay, you scaredy-shits, I’ll go first.” She turns on her heel and heads downstairs to the game room, her short hair bouncing as she skips. Ishaan and I follow her sheepishly into the laundry room. She opens a cupboard and pulls out a water bottle filled to the top, three Styrofoam cups, and a plastic bag with three little pills.
“I could only get three. She didn’t have that many left.” She uncaps the water bottle and pours the liquid evenly into the cups. She hands one to me and the other to Ish. “I researched that you should drink the alcohol first, then find a spot to lie down and take the pills, ’cause they might fuck you up.”
