We were very quiet and the atmosphere in the room felt a little scary as the dial slowly moved to the Y. When it spelled out Y-E-S, Chris freaked out and ran home.
A few months later we were playing kickball at school with a bunch of kids when Chris started acting really weird. We played kickball almost every day at recess, so he knew the rules as well as any other kid. But when it was his turn, he kicked the ball and ran across the field to second base instead of to first. He was on my team and a good friend, so instead of laughing at him like the other kids I corrected him and pointed him in the direction of first base for next time.
Then when he was up again he kicked the ball and ran straight to third base. More laughter from the other kids.
I didn’t get it. Why wasn’t he running to first? What was his problem?
The next day he didn’t come to school. Then a week went by and there was no sign of Chris. We started asking the teacher about him, and eventually she told us all that Chris had a brain tumor and would not be back.
Chris was in the hospital for a while and then he went to a special school where I got to visit him one time. He was in a wheelchair and didn’t look healthy at all, and I was so sad for him. His illness seemed to be happening so fast. One day we were playing with the Ouija board in my room and the next he was in the hospital.
Shortly after I visited him, he died. Even though I knew he was sick, I didn’t realize he was going to die, so I felt like I didn’t get to say good-bye. It was heartbreaking to lose him.
Maybe that day with the Ouija board he knew he was sick, and asking if he was going to die was his way of trying to tell me. Or maybe we were just two kids having fun and it was an odd coincidence. Either way, the prediction came true. I’ve never touched a Ouija board since, because it reminds me of Chris and brings back all sorts of sad feelings.
Chris will always have a special place in my heart. I think about him all the time, and if you asked a Ouija board if I’ll always remember him, I can tell you for certain that the answer would be Y-E-S.
Outside of my few friends at school, I also turned to odd people around my neighborhood for companionship.
Next door to the development where we lived was a retirement community that as kids we kindly referred to as the “old-people complex.” The other kids in the neighborhood and I loved it there, and we bugged the elderly people all the time.
One of my friends and I really bonded with an older Asian man named Yen who lived there. After school we would go and knock on Yen’s door together, or sometimes I went by myself. I never told my mom about the visits, though, because I knew she wouldn’t approve. And if she was going to say no, then why ask, right?
Yen didn’t speak a word of English and I didn’t speak Yen, yet somehow we communicated. He would always ask me to come in, but I knew better than that. Instead he would come outside and watch me as I performed all the cool things I was able to do at the time: I’d jump rope, bounce a ball off my knee, and do a few cartwheels, and the two of us would just look at each other and talk with our eyes. It seemed pretty normal. I felt closer to this old man than I did to most of the kids in my school.
This was also the case with an older woman in the neighborhood. She and I were supertight. I would go to her house and get something cold to drink and play with all her birds and cats. I would help her carry groceries, too, which made me feel like I was doing a good deed.
It’s funny that I was so into helping my elderly neighbor, because if my mom asked me to carry groceries I would get mad and try anything to get out of it. Doing it for this woman, though, was no problem. I liked helping others when no one was looking or expected anything from me, but to do the same for my mom, who expected me to help around the house, always seemed like a pain in the ass. I would want to do stuff to make her happy and surprise her with good deeds, but the second she asked me to help her I wasn’t interested.
When my grandmother, Mary, moved from New Jersey to live next door, she and I had a similar relationship. She was very loving, but she wasn’t the kind of pushover grandparent who spoils kids. She was more like a second mother to me.
My grandfather, her ex-husband, also took over some of the fatherly duties. He would take me to soccer games and occasionally pick me up from school. In the car he would sing “You Are My Sunshine” and I would tell him to shut up because I thought it was embarrassing.
He was a World War II veteran, so he would take us to air shows to watch the Blue Angels, and to the naval base in San Diego. We spent a lot of time there and attended all the special events they held at the base—Easter egg hunts, Mother’s Day brunch, and the annual barbecue where they served amazing Mexican food. Of course the Fourth of July was like his Christmas. He would say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, but on the Fourth of July he would raise a flag in the yard and, with his hand over his heart, sing the national anthem loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. All the kids would laugh at him, myself included, but he didn’t care. He loved his country and made sure we grew up appreciating the military.
My grandfather taught my brother and me to say “please” and “thank you” to others and to not put our elbows on the table, and I think he was the first person on the planet to recycle. I would accompany him on the drive to the recycling center with a million cans in tow, and more often than not he would pull over along the way to scoop up more recyclables from the side of the road. He’d swerve across six lanes of traffic and drive in reverse a hundred yards if he spotted a can on the road. It was crazy, but he was set on teaching me to treat others with respect and to care about the world.
However, all my values and manners went out the window when it came to my brother, Colin. When we were little we did not get along. We are three years apart, so in elementary school he was always following me around and copying my every move. I hated him for being a little tagalong so I was constantly yelling at him and beating him up. I was always so nice to everyone else and made a point of protecting the weaker kids in school, but my brother was my personal punching bag.
Aside from a few fights with my brother, though, I was a good kid, and a pretty normal one at that. I was always outside, building forts and tree houses, digging for dinosaur bones, and using my imagination to make my own fun. Friends or no friends, old Asian dudes or little Mexican boys, dad or no dad, I was going to enjoy life and do whatever I had to do to be a happy kid.
Everything was going smoothly until I graduated elementary school and moved on to middle school. It was then that I could have used a father, or at the very least a friend who was a good influence. Because when I turned thirteen, I was no longer my grandfather’s little sunshine.
CHAPTER 4
A Perfect Misfit
When I got to middle school I thought I was very mature. Some of my best friends were senior citizens, so it only made sense that I would think I was too grown-up for the kids in my own grade. I was a tiny blonde girl running around in soccer shorts, but inside I was wise beyond my years.
I wanted to know more about everything I was beginning to be told to avoid. Sex, drugs, alcohol—it all had my teenage brain working a mile a minute. I was ready to explore the world, but my mom had other plans for me. She was strict, man.
The first real parties I ever went to were at Skateworld, where I had birthday parties as a kid. My mom loved it then, but once I got to middle school her opinion changed. She thought it was a place where bad kids hung out, and she was right. The middle school girls always dressed skanky to go to Skateworld, and before the end of the night they’d usually find someone to hook up with. Everyone my age stayed there until it closed and then hung out at a spot in the neighborhood until all hours. But I had a curfew, so at nine o’clock my mom rolled up to Skateworld in her red Jeep Grand Cherokee to drag me away from all the fun. I was embarrassed and, in my mind, it was totally unfair. I wanted to do what my friends were doing; instead, I sat at home wondering what I was missing. Then, in school on Monday, everyone would
talk about who kissed who or who gave head to who, and I’d missed all of it!
I couldn’t live with her rules. I was ready to be a rebel and make my own choices. She pulled me out of Skateworld one too many times and I decided I would not let her ruin my night again. So when the next big party came around, I didn’t bother to tell her about it. Instead I just ran away. I left the house when she wasn’t paying attention and spent the night getting drunk on Mickey’s malt liquor in the Mervyn’s parking lot with no intention of going home again. A few hours in I was pretty hammered, and a friend thought I would sober up with some coffee. No luck. That just made me more wired and gave me a stomachache. It was a disaster.
At the end of the night when the party was over I had nowhere to go but home. My big plan to run away didn’t even last the night.
Even when I was in elementary school, I’d dreamed about running away. I would get a couple people in on my plan and we would talk about saving our money and getting on a bus to leave town. We weren’t trying to run away from anything specific; we were more interested in running toward something. We wanted to be adults. We wanted adventure. It would take us weeks to save our pennies, and when we finally had our money together we would all chicken out at the last minute.
This time was sort of the same. I was going to run away to make my own decisions and be my own boss, but when all the other kids went home, I had no choice but to do the same.
My mom was very mad when I arrived home, of course. She yelled, grounded me, and threatened to never let me see certain friends again. I just stood there and listened and showed no emotion. I didn’t care what she had to say. The bottom line was that I was back under her rules and already plotting my next escape.
One of the next parties I was invited to was down at the beach. Based on my recent behavior, my mom wasn’t so sure I should go.
“Pleeeeeeeease,” I begged, knowing full well that I was going to go no matter what she said.
“Are the girl’s parents going to be there?”
“Of course.” (Fingers crossed behind my back.)
“Okay, but I’m picking you up at ten P.M.,” she said. “No funny business.”
It was a camping party and everyone—boys and girls—had tents and was allowed to spend the night. Again, we were all drinking (it was the latest middle school fad), and for most kids it didn’t matter because they could just sleep it off. I still had my curfew, so my fun had to end early.
When my mom came to pick me up she could tell that I had been drinking. She could smell it on my breath, and she was furious.
“That’s it!” she screamed. “You are spending the night in juvenile hall.”
My younger brother, who was probably ten years old at the time, was in the car and he was freaking out. I, on the other hand, was cool as a cucumber. Maybe the alcohol blurred my ability to fear my mom’s threats, but I wasn’t scared of her. We pulled up to our local juvie and she yanked me out of the car and dragged me inside.
“Officer!” my mom yelled. “I just picked up my daughter and she’s been drinking. She’s twelve years old and I want you to keep her.”
The two cops behind the desk looked at each other in amazement. The expressions on their faces said it all: Who is this crazy lady and what are we supposed to do with this kid?
Colin saw their guns and was even more freaked out. But there was nothing they could do. The place was full of real criminals. They were never going to keep me there. The officers took me in the back and tried to scare me by threatening me, and then they let me go.
“What are you doing?” my mom said. “Aren’t you going to keep her?”
Uh, no, Mom.
She drove me home and that was the end of it. She was losing control of me and she knew it.
It was a slow but steady process. A missed curfew here, a night of drinking there. Day by day, as I made my way through the seventh grade, I was turning into the kind of kid who would become totally uncontrollable, and I could see my mother unraveling.
Things took another turn for the worse when I expanded my social network outside of school and found an older crowd of people who wanted to hang out with me. My walk home from school wasn’t long, but on the way there were a few areas where kids and even young adults gathered after school or work to chill.
One day an older guy, probably around twenty years old, was standing outside his apartment complex with a few other people, all in their late teens. I was friendly, so I stopped and said hello and we started talking. Eventually he invited me upstairs to his apartment to hang out with his friends.
It was a small apartment, with a living room and a kitchen on the left and a hallway with two bedrooms on the right. There were half a dozen guys and girls sitting on the couch, talking and drinking. It seemed like a fine place and I was excited that this older group had welcomed me. I clicked with them immediately, and I felt cool hanging out with older kids, so I really felt like I belonged with this crowd. I knew I’d found my place and quickly became a regular.
One of the girls in the apartment was a hot girl who had recently moved into my neighborhood. I remember seeing her around and thinking she was so beautiful. I wanted to be her friend but, more important, I wanted to be just like her. Listening to her that day in the apartment, to my virgin ears at least, she sounded very experienced when it came to sex.
A short while later she and I went to the beach together and she told me about all the sex she had had and how it felt and how to do it. The way she described it was way more detailed than anything my babysitter had ever mentioned.
All the guys at the house would laugh at me because I was still a virgin, and everything she was saying sounded so amazing. When she was done talking, only one thought went through my thirteen-year-old head: I need to have sex right now.
I ran home from the beach as fast as I could and immediately called Samuel, a friend of mine who was in my class at school. He was a tall, skinny white boy. I had a little crush on him, but he was always more of a friend than a boyfriend. My family loved him because he was a good kid—the perfect kind of kid to be allowed in my room without my mom questioning what was going on up there.
“Hey, Samuel, what are you up to?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You want to come over?”
“Sure, why not.”
“And have sex.”
I think he must have run out of his room before he even hung up the phone because his mom dropped him off at my house in what seemed like a split second. He slipped past my mom and grandma, who were downstairs in the kitchen, and came right up to my room.
I shut the door behind him and we hopped onto the top bunk and started kissing. He was shaking a little, and I could tell he was nervous. We were both virgins, but I wanted so bad to not be a virgin that my fear went completely out the window.
Lying on his back, Samuel took a condom out of his pocket and slipped his pants off. I don’t know where he got that condom, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had spent a year or two in his pocket.
I climbed on top of him, but we had no idea what we were doing. I just knew that once I started bleeding I was no longer a virgin, so I watched and waited and, after a minute or so, there was blood.
We stopped—two unsatisfied, sexually frustrated teenagers. But I wasn’t a virgin anymore and I was very happy about that. It was literally the best time of my life, at that moment. I was a fucking woman!
Samuel’s mom dropped him off a boy and picked him up a few hours later a man. Things were weird between us afterward and we never had sex again, but none of that mattered to me. I couldn’t wait to go back to that apartment and tell everyone.
Losing my virginity was just the beginning of me living on the edge. That apartment turned out to be a window to a very bad world for me. My first day there, they handed me a beer. It was only my second or third time drinking (after my mom caught me that one time she always smelled my breath after I’d been out). They weren’t trying to pressure
me into anything; they just assumed I would want one, and they were right. I cracked open that beer and pretended I drank all the time.
As time went on I started spending more and more of my afternoons at the apartment. I felt comfortable with these older, more experienced people—way more comfortable than I did with the kids at my school, where I sort of floated around between crowds, never really finding a group or clique to call my own. These guys, while significantly older, welcomed me with open arms. I was like the little sister who would do anything that they never had.
And when I say that I would do anything, I mean anything.
They did all sorts of drugs at the apartment—pot, coke, LSD, and various kinds of pills. Everyone there was getting fucked up all the time.
I knew a little about drugs before meeting these people. We learned about drugs in the D.A.R.E. program in school, and it was common knowledge that drugs were bad. My mom didn’t really think I would get into drugs because I was so into sports, so she pretty much stayed away from the topic, but even with the little information I had at that age I knew in the back of my mind that it was wrong and dangerous. Somehow, though, it still sounded more fun that bad.
So when I fell in love with this apartment-complex crowd, I began experimenting. Sure, in sixth grade I’d once tried to smoke nutmeg (which didn’t work), but this time it was for real.
The first time they broke out coke at the apartment, just looking at it made my eyes bulge out of my head with excitement. I knew it was bad, but I liked bad. I wanted to try anything and everything, regardless of what it would do to me. I thought it was cool, and I couldn’t wait to give it a shot.
Someone poured the coke on a tray on the table, and it looked like snow falling from the sky. One guy cut it up into lines and then everyone took turns snorting it. I watched and took notes in my head on how to do it—I didn’t want to look stupid.
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