Never Too Late

by Amber Portwood

  Aside from Shawn moving out, there was another drastic change in my life that came along with the divorce and the move. Suddenly, I found myself with a ton of freedom.

  My mom has worked constantly for my whole life, which meant I never really saw her as often as some kids see their parents. But after she got divorced from my dad, she got herself a new boyfriend. From that point on, when she wasn’t working, she was hanging out with him. So with my brother moved out, my dad out of the picture, and my mom barely around, I suddenly had a house (and a phone!) all to myself. That was freedom on a level I had never even imagined. There was nobody around to see what I might be getting into. And the final part of that perfect storm was that our new house was right across the street from the high school, which made it a convenient headquarters for all my friends and I when we started skipping school and getting into more trouble.

  The divorce and the new house made for a fresh start, definitely, but the direction I took off in wasn’t really ideal. It was just a lot of freedom all at once. When you go from feeling buried in all this chaos and stupid shit, never having room to breathe, and then all of a sudden there’s nobody there and you can do whatever you want . . . well, I guess I ran with it. All that quiet time alone didn’t get spent on homework, I’ll tell you that much. Instead of focusing on doing good in high school, I ended up going the other way and skipping class to hang out with friends.

  I still had the same tight circle of friends who moved from middle to high school with me, and we started getting into trouble right off the bat freshman year. I started skipping on literally the second day of high school. A group of friends and I just walked out of there without a care in the world. It was completely ridiculous, and it was the first of many, many days bailing on class just to hang out and do whatever. That day we ended up wandering down to the nearest gas station, just killing time. There was an older girl in the parking lot, standing by her car, and we all went up and started talking to her. I think she thought we were jumping her at first, this gang of high school freshmen skipping class, coming up and being like, “Nice car!” But we just asked her to take us for a ride.

  She wound up taking us to the mall, which is where I found out I was amazing at lying. This cop came up and asked why we weren’t in school, and off the top of my head I managed to spin some crazy, elaborate story explaining why we were at the mall. I can’t even remember all of what I said—something about me being in alternative school and somebody being in college, maybe—but I remember he bought it. Hook, line, and sinker.

  It’s crazy to think about how in such a short time I went from being the good girl to suddenly walking out of school and lying to a cop in the same day. Talk about a turning point, huh?

  The problem that showed up pretty fast was I was never afraid of getting caught. That’s what usually keeps normal kids somewhat in check, right? They’re afraid they’ll get caught and they’ll get grounded or whatever. But I was never afraid of that at all. As a matter of fact, it always felt like I got away with everything. That day was just the first of many examples to come. From that point on, I skipped school all the time. I’d literally go to school just to pick up some friends and walk with them back over to my house. Seriously, I barely even remember being in class half as much as I remember skipping it, although I must have shown up sometimes. The thing is, I don’t really remember ever getting in major trouble for that stuff, either. The school would call my mom with some automated message telling her I hadn’t been in school that day, but it wasn’t like she was home to hear it. I’d get the message while I was hanging out there with my friends and just delete it before she got home. They might want to rethink that system. Just a thought.

  I kept breezing by the authorities, too. I can remember being fifteen and running into a plainclothes cop who tried to ask my friends and me what we were up to. I looked him in the eye and asked, “Who the fuck are you?” He showed me his badge. I was like, “Oh.” So I had to go back to school that day, but it didn’t really stop anything. We were ridiculous. We’d take three lunch periods in a row, walk out of the building in plain sight with teachers yelling at us to come back. It was stupid, the stuff we got away with it. But we kept getting away with it. And like we were going to sit there being bored in class when we knew we could just peace out for the day anytime we wanted! That definitely went to our heads quick.

  Obviously, my grades sucked. It was all Ds and Fs. I even failed PE, which is easier to do than it sounds, at least if you put your mind to it like I did. Honestly, the secret is just to sit there and not do anything. The teacher would try and get me to participate in the class, and I’d just be like, “Nah.” It wasn’t even PEs fault. PE is fine. I just didn’t feel like dealing with it.

  I was better in history. I loved history. I took the AP class and got way into all the crazy stories and conspiracies, learning about all the wars and the Holocaust, and getting a big crush on John F. Kennedy. I still love JFK! I gave the creative stuff some attention, too. I was a model student in choir, and in art class. I’ve always drifted toward creative stuff, especially drawing. All through school, my art teachers loved the enthusiasm I put into everything in their classes. They saw a different side of me than my math and science teachers did, I can tell you for sure.

  But even considering those exceptions, let’s be real. I was doing what I wanted, and what I mostly wanted was to hang out. I definitely started to embrace the social stuff in high school. Since my brother was a senior, I knew pretty much everybody from every grade and they all knew me. Before long I was part of the scene with the skateboarders and the hardcore kids; I had my lip pierced and my nose pierced, and I was all about those skater guys. I finally wound up getting a boyfriend, a cute skateboarder who was really good at guitar. How do you say no? I stayed with that dude for eight months, and come to think of it, we actually had a really good time. It was probably one of my best relationships, if we’re allowed to count ninth grade. I think I should be allowed. He ended up breaking up with me, though, because he was wanting to hang out with friends and get high and stuff, and at the time I still wasn’t really into it all that much. I was tagging along and dipping in, taking pills here and there, but I couldn’t keep up with the people who had thrown themselves into partying. I still wasn’t totally sold on the lifestyle.

  It was lurking on the edges, though. My brother had already given me trouble about the things I was doing at that point. That’s the thing about having a cool older brother in school with you. Everything gets back to them eventually. When Shawn heard I’d been messing around with the pills, he was literally in tears about it. In my mind I was still the good kid in my group, so I didn’t automatically see what the big deal was. I wasn’t an addict then or doing anything really excessive, I was just fitting in and being a crazy kid. But Bubby was so against it. He wasn’t into that stuff at all. Even when he did start partying a little bit, he would never tell me, because he knew I’d hate him for doing it too. It was this weird thing we had where we hated the idea of each other doing drugs. We just had that kind of silent pact not to go down that road. It’s not the most typical thing for teenage siblings, I know, but that’s how much we cared about each other. When you care about somebody that much, you don’t want them doing anything bad, whether or not it’s something you’re doing yourself. I’m sure that was part of what kept that stuff from blowing up for so long, just having him there to remind me it wasn’t what I wanted. I feel bad now that he had that burden of trying to keep me on the straight path. It must have torn him up inside when he realized I was really going down the road we both swore we’d never take.

  But that wasn’t coming for a while. I hadn’t crossed the bridge yet. The fact was, whether or not I was wild at the time, I was still holding back enough to get broken up with for not wanting my boyfriend to party so hard. So I had the skipping going on, and the pills once in awhile, and the crazy friends hanging around my house all the time, but there was some moderation going on.


  That lasted for another, oh, ten minutes.

  4

  Facing the Music

  Things got more intense pretty fast. By the time I was fifteen, I was going to the kind of parties I always describe as “the kind of parties you really wouldn’t expect a high school girl to go to.” That’s a nice way of saying they were completely messed up places to be. I mean that in the sense that if any parent found out their daughter was spending time there unsupervised, they’d probably faint and then cry. They just were not your typical teen house parties.

  Again, I didn’t have one friend who was dating somebody that was our age. I can’t stress that enough, because it’s a fact that really jumps out at me when I look back and try to understand how everything was so intense for my friends and me in high school. Every girl’s boyfriend was in his twenties, and most of them were drug dealers.

  I could have kept saying no to those pills for as long as I wanted, but unfortunately I was already setting myself up for situations I shouldn’t have really been in. When you’re buying drugs, or hanging out with people who do drugs or deal drugs, you eventually get connected to the kind of people you never plan to get connected to. I probably should have tried harder to make friends in history class, or whatever. But what I ended up doing was following the friend-ofa-friend chain to some really dark places.

  We were hanging out at houses full of drug dealers and gang bangers. These guys were ten years older than us—one was thirty years old, dating my friend who was in high school with me, a girl who was half his age. He’d come over to the house with a bunch of cocaine and lay it out on the table. That was the kind of ridiculous shit that started popping up. As time went on, we came into contact with more people and more drugs, and it all started to warp our idea of what was okay and what wasn’t, assuming we ever had a clear idea to begin with. After that period, I can’t even tell you how many drug deals, fights, and guns I’ve seen. I’ve seen people get guns pulled on them, people threatening each other and beating each other up over all this awful shit. There was one night when I was out at one of these places with my friends, and they wanted to give us tattoos. I’m glad somebody talked them out of it, but it probably wasn’t me. All I remember is lying in a Walmart parking lot that night with my head turned to the side, puking my guts out.

  I think of a teenage girl in that kind of situation now and see how shocking it is, that a fifteen or sixteen year old girl would be running around with these twenty-year-old drug-gies and gang dudes, getting wasted and throwing up in parking lots. Those were dangerous situations. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain. But we were so reckless at the time, we didn’t even think about it. Maybe it’s just how adaptable we were because of our age, but this insane stuff started feeling normal to us really fast.

  Mind you, nobody knew about any of this. My mom was always working or hanging out with her boyfriend. My brother was off doing his thing. And I definitely wasn’t on good terms with my dad.

  Even after the divorce, I still hated him for the way he was in that house. I wouldn’t have even been able to call it mad. I really felt like I despised him, and talking to him or having a relationship with him was pretty much the last thing I expected to do at any point in my life. I was putting a lot of blame on him for my unhappiness as a kid, feeling like it could have been different if he hadn’t been drunk and screaming all the time, being mean, calling me names. There was no way to get over the hurt I felt over losing him to his addiction. I had all these memories of being a daddy’s girl, and no matter how much pain my family had been through, there was no way to understand how he went from that to being the monster he was when he was drinking and fighting with my mom every night for the rest of my childhood.

  So there was no mom and no dad telling me what to do. I was all on my own. And I went all out on the partying. That was all I really wanted to do. It wasn’t to the level I’d go to a few years later, not even close. I was just a crazy teenager, basically—nothing too abnormal from what I could tell at the time.

  But I was about to get a new influence in my life, somebody who’d wind up having a bigger impact on me than I could possibly imagine at the time. I was about to meet my future fiancé.

  He was my brother’s friend to start with, but the first time I laid eyes on him was in the school library. My math teacher had sent me there during lunch. I was so behind in my homework, and he strongly suggested I go there and try to get something done. There was a class in there at the time, a senior class, and all of a sudden I saw this guy sitting with his back facing me. He had a football team jersey on, and he was freaking huge. I didn’t even see his face, but I remember clearly thinking to myself, “Oh my god, this guy is huge. He’s gotta be the biggest guy in the school.” He looked like the damn gym teacher.

  About a week later, I was sick at home—had a reason to skip, for once—and my brother walked into the house with the guy from the library. He introduced us, and I was thinking, “I just saw that guy a week ago.” He was really nice. Really proper and polite. They had just gone and bought this CD, some screamo kind of hardcore metal or something. My brother and me were into that kind of music, but when my brother’s friend put it in and listened to it, it was obvious that he wasn’t into it at all. He looked at both of us like, “No.” Back then he was just this Christian boy straight out of Cicero. He went to church every Sunday—literally, every freaking Sunday. So he left that CD for us. It wasn’t his thing.

  Some time after that I called the apartment from wherever I was hanging out, and this man picked up the phone. I said, “Hello?” And this guy goes, “I’m layin’ in your bed right now.”

  “Excuse me?” I was freaked. “Who the hell is this?”

  “I went through your underwear drawer.”

  Then I could pretty much hear him grinning. It was totally the Christian guy out of Cicero! He’d gotten into a fight with somebody in his family, and he went and stayed at my mom’s house while my brother was at work. He was just playing with me. Never gave me any reason to think he actually went through my underwear drawer. But about a week later, he called the house when I was home and asked if my brother was around. I told him no, he was at work. But then we stayed on the phone. He and I ended up talking for about eight hours that night. What I didn’t know was that he had taken my brother to work that night, so he knew he wasn’t there. It was a set-up to get me on the phone and ask me on a little date, which he did.

  Our first date was amazing. We picked up a couple of friends and went to see Final Destination. On the way there I found out there was a lot more to him than meets the eye. He showed up in a nice polo shirt and khaki shorts. Of course I had my lip pierced and my long black hair. I wasn’t really sure what to make of him. I was sort of thinking he was some kind of straight-edge football player. But on the way to the movie, his friend Jordan kept saying this weird stuff, going, “Show her your nipples, Dude! Show her your nipples!” The next thing I knew, my movie date lifted up his shirt and showed me that he had his nipples pierced! Not only that, but there was a huge tattoo of a sun in the middle of his chest. I stared at him with my mouth open, like, “What in the hell?” And I remember being relieved, because I had thought he was this goody-goody dude and he definitely was not.

  After the movie we all went out and got something to eat, and then we dropped them off and it was just me and my date. We were sitting in the car outside his house and I said, “Oh my god, dude, I can’t go home now. I’ll get in so much trouble. It’s too late.” I didn’t want to risk going home after my mom had gotten there and having to explain what I was doing. I wanted to act like I’d stayed the night with a friend.

  So he said, “Listen, you can just sleep here. I’ll stay in the car with you.” It was really sweet of him. He was sitting in the driver’s seat and I kind of laid on his shoulder. Of course, after about an hour we had to face how uncomfortable it was. So he said, “Hey, maybe I can sneak you inside.” We made it into his room and he put his arm out
for me to lay on. He was so nervous he was shaking a little bit, his arm was out completely straight. I laid down on it, but I could tell he was freaking out so I started kissing his hand. I kissed all the way up to his arm and all the way to his face and then I started to kiss his lips. I had to give him a little bit of a lesson, but it was really sweet. We just made out that night, nothing else. It was just a perfect night. Then I woke up to him shoving me off the bed onto the floor when his grandpa walked into the room.

  Still, even the morning was good. After his grandpa left, he started playing the guitar for me. I love a man with a guitar, but he was very, very good. He’s probably the best guitar player I’ve heard out of any of the guys I’ve been around. The way he plays is just so gentle, and he has a beautiful singing voice. It’s just so pretty. He played a song for me and sang to me a little bit. It was the sweetest thing.