Sliding Into Home

by Kendra Wilkinson

  One by one they went around and sniffed it right up, and then it was my turn.

  “Do you want to try some?” one guy asked as he passed me the rolled-up dollar bill they were using.

  “Okay.”

  I couldn’t have been more ready, but I guess my face was saying something my brain wasn’t because they all started laughing. I knew I was young and the tone of my “okay” probably tipped them off that it was my first time, but my head told me I was ready. I didn’t have a voice in my head telling me no. I didn’t picture my mother’s disappointment. I just saw an opportunity to try something new.

  So, despite their laughter, or maybe out of spite, I shoved the bill up my nose, bent over, and snorted my first line of cocaine.

  I chased the coke with a beer and my throat started feeling funny. I was told, amid more laughter, that this was a “drip,” and that it happens with coke. It felt like a big ball of shit going down my throat. I couldn’t swallow, and for a few seconds it was absolutely terrible. Once that went away, though, I started feeling really good. I did a little more that day, and after that I wanted to keep doing it over and over again. I felt like I could stop at any time, but I just wanted more.

  As one might expect, my trouble outside of school led to trouble inside school as well. It was inevitable that my afternoon activities at the apartment would cause me to make bad decisions throughout the rest of the day, too.

  I was on drugs, doing coke all the time. I started to act like the bad girl in school, skipping class and smoking cigarettes, and once I got that reputation I felt like I had to live up to it.

  I snapped and became someone I wasn’t—a real problem child.

  I would do all sorts of crazy things to fit my new persona, like take markers and color all over myself or show up at school in a bikini.

  “You can’t leave the house like that,” my mom would say.

  “It’s bikini day at school,” I would reply as I left the house, before she could realize that no school would have a bikini day.

  All the kids laughed when they saw me in the bikini. I loved it.

  The school obviously had a dress code and, as it turns out, bikinis were not acceptable. I knew the rules. I didn’t like the rules, so I made my own. This stunt earned me strike one.

  Later I was assigned a “how-to” school project. We had to teach the class one of our skills, so I brought in a baseball bat to teach the class how to play softball, because even though I was doing drugs, sports were still my strength.

  But my walking down the hallway with marker all over my body, my hair out of control, baseball bat in hand, freaked out some of the adults. Some of the other kids were scared, too. I was a total psycho and I loved when people were scared of me. As I walked to class, a teacher came up to me and nicely asked me about the bat. She could have yelled and dragged my ass to the principal’s office, but she was sweet.

  I was not.

  I yelled and screamed that the bat was for a project, and nearly threw it at her. It took three teachers to settle me down.

  Strike two.

  At the time, my best friend was a girl named Brittany. She was that girl who everyone wanted to be friends with. She was in the cool, rebellious, Skateworld crowd, but was respected by the preppies and goody-goodies, too. She asked me to eat lunch with her one day and we just clicked. Her group had their hair scrunched with mousse and their bangs flipped out to their eyebrows, and very quickly I started to look and act like her. Now she’s religious and into God, but back then we were the bad girls.

  We’d hide in bushes and jump out and scare people when they walked by, and we did a lot of experimenting together. When we heard about bulimia, we wondered what it would be like to throw up our food, so we went to the bathroom together and puked. That was just one of the many stupid things we did.

  Brittany and I also used to steal liquor from my grandmother’s house, take it to the local pool in my neighborhood, and drink it. It was dangerous and fun but we usually took only a very small amount, so the impact was minimal.

  One day toward the end of seventh grade, I felt like causing a little trouble and taking our petty theft to the next level. I wanted to bring alcohol to school.

  I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t think it was all that bad. It’s not like I’d be hurting anyone, right? Plus, I thought I was cool, a step ahead of the other kids. I thought I knew something they didn’t about life.

  I waited until my grandmother was out running errands one afternoon, then grabbed the spare key from where my mom always left it, snuck inside my grandmother’s house, and made my way to the liquor cabinet. The house was empty and quiet, but I acted like I was a professional robber, hiding behind couches and other furniture while making my way toward the cabinet. Really, though, getting the alcohol was usually very simple. I just had to go in there, pop open the liquor cabinet, and take whatever looked liked it would be missed the least. But that day I thought it would be fun to make it more of an adventure, so I acted stealthily and snagged all the little plastic airplane bottles of alcohol I could fit in my hands.

  The next morning I put the bottles in my backpack and was off to school. I drank some vodka in the bathroom and went to class drunk. People expected me to be off the wall, so none of the teachers suspected I was under the influence. Unfortunately, I gave a bottle to a kid who couldn’t handle his liquor (what kind of seventh grader was he?) and the teachers caught him. He got called to the office, and of course he ratted me out.

  I was so pissed. No matter how bad I was, I never ratted anyone out. If there was one rule in life that I actually did follow, it was You don’t rat someone out.

  A guidance counselor and a security guard came and pulled me out of class. When a security guard was there, you knew you were in trouble. When I got to the principal’s office, there was a police officer waiting for me (even worse).

  “Have you been drinking?” he asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Where did you get the alcohol?”

  “What alcohol?”

  “Listen, we can give you a lie detector and ask you these questions if you’d like.”

  They probably weren’t really going to do that, but it was enough to make me cave . . . almost.

  “I got the alcohol out of the Dumpster in the alley,” I said, coming clean about having the booze but still lying because I didn’t want to involve my family.

  They’d heard enough. Strike three.

  Summer was around the corner, but for me it started a little early. They kicked me out of school and told me to never come back.

  Those were the rules, whether I liked them or not.

  CHAPTER 5

  Summer Druggin’

  With school out of the way I had the summer to live a little. Meanwhile, my mom was begging anyone who would listen to let me back into my regular school for eighth grade. She even went to a hearing and tried her hardest to get me reinstated.

  I didn’t care. While she was fighting for my right to an education, I was at the beach, playing soccer and fighting for my right to party. I also spent more and more time at that apartment and fell further in love with cocaine.

  I didn’t have a source of money at the time and I never wanted to ask my mom for cash. Even though I was always up to no good, deep down I had a good heart. I knew my mom was struggling to make ends meet, so I wouldn’t even take lunch money if I could get along without it by eating my friends’ food or bumming money from them. I always wanted to be a person who earned money, instead of just taking it from my mom.

  In the beginning of my drug phase I would go to the apartment near my school looking cute and smile big until one of the guys gave me coke or weed for free. But as I got more and more into drugs, the smile just wasn’t cutting it. I needed to come up with money to support my habit. I began to occasionally ask my mother for lunch money or for some cash to see a movie, and then I’d use it to buy drugs. Other times I would sneak into my grandmother’s house and s
teal from her purse. I didn’t think she would catch on, and she never said anything, so I figured I was in the clear.

  With my new income and no school to pretend to worry about, I was free to enjoy summer to the fullest, and I started to really lose control. I think I would have gone off the deep end completely if not for my love of sports. That was the one thing that kept me sane. Even when drugs were taking over and causing me to make bad decisions, in my heart I still enjoyed playing sports.

  That summer I was in a youth soccer league, and when I was on the field I was a different person. I was focused. I was an athlete. I wasn’t the girl who got kicked out of school. I was like Jekyll and Hyde; on the field I was a good girl, but when I was at that apartment, I did lots of coke. I never even mentioned soccer to the people I hung out with in the apartment. They weren’t into it, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to keep those worlds separate.

  But as summer dragged on and my coke habit turned into an obsession, soccer started to take a backseat. Instead of resting up the night before a big game I would be out partying. Sometimes I’d even go right from the apartment to the game, high on cocaine. On those occasions I’d run around the field like a crazy girl, heart racing, drenched in sweat, and out of control until I started to come down. Then I’d lose all my energy and running would become hard. I was also smoking cigarettes pretty often (I stole those from my grandmother, too), so when I wasn’t tearing around like mad, I was coughing up phlegm and wheezing my way down the field.

  Despite the toll the drugs took, for the most part I was still a pretty good player. There was a traveling team that I really wanted to be on. It was expensive, and I knew my mom couldn’t afford it, but I tried out anyway and made the team. When my mom told me I couldn’t go, it was heartbreaking. When I realized I was stuck playing on the local team, my interest level dropped even further.

  It was around this time that I got into acid, which was a big drug to do at the time because you could get it for five dollars a pop. It was going around the neighborhood, and one of the guys at the apartment complex hooked me up with some.

  “It’s amazing,” the guy who sold it to me said. “You’ll see trolls in trees and rainbows and smiley faces everywhere.”

  Sounds cool.

  I took the acid and went to Skateworld. Like many roller-skating rinks, Skateworld has a lot of lights flashing all over the place, so I had a really bad trip. There were no rainbows; it just felt like the lights were attacking me and the walls were closing in on me. People were messing with me and telling me I had spiders all over my body. I bugged out.

  My mom came to get me, but luckily I held it together and she didn’t notice that anything was wrong. She took me home and I ran up to my room, where I sat on my bed and stayed awake all night.

  It was only a matter of time before I took my newest habit to the soccer field. I dropped acid before a game one time and it was not fun. (Okay, it was a little fun.) My mom drove me to the game, and during the car ride the acid kicked in. Things that usually didn’t move were moving, and things that should have been moving fast, like other cars, seemed to be moving really slowly.

  Once the game started things got even worse. At one point the ball went out of bounds and I was supposed to throw it in. To this day I’m not sure if I ever actually threw the ball onto the field. I just remember picking it up and staring at it, amazed at all its beautiful black and white dots.

  My mom was at the game, but she didn’t yell at me or punish me. It’s hard to say if she just didn’t realize I was on drugs or if she pretended she didn’t know to make herself feel better. Either way, she kept quiet. I think she knew I was in trouble but she was getting tired of yelling at me and trying to control me. There was nothing she could do, so she sat back and prayed I would learn to make better decisions in the future while denying how bad the problem was at the moment. I guess she handled things a little backwards: her anger came first, and then the denial phase started.

  I felt a little bad. I hated not playing well, and I obviously wasn’t at my best on acid. But the guilt wore off pretty quickly. I just made sure I got my hands on some coke, weed, or alcohol, and every bad thought immediately left my mind.

  Along with regular sports, I went through an extreme-sports phase that summer. I got really into skateboarding and thought I was pretty awesome because after a couple months of practice I could drop in on a half-pipe. But learning how to skateboard and do tricks only occasionally kept me from doing drugs.

  Right near the park where I went to skate was another park—the park we did drugs in. I’d walk with my skateboard through the drug park to get to the skateboarding area, and plenty of times I never made it there. I’d stop and get high, and my day would be shot. I’d have the skateboard in my hand and I would choose to do drugs instead.

  The skateboard park was also next to Horizon Christian Fellowship Church, and the preachers would come out every so often and try to talk to the other skaters and me about God. I think they thought the skating park was where the bad kids hung out—little did they know.

  My family wasn’t very religious, but I was always interested in what the preachers had to say; one time they even convinced me to come in and listen to a sermon. There was a small part of me that wanted to follow in their path and be a good kid, because deep down I was a good kid, but at that point in my life, nothing was going to save me.

  I was pretty much fucked up every day that summer, and then when school started, I wasn’t exactly motivated to turn things around. Even though my mom begged and pleaded to get me back into my regular school, I was forced to go to a “special” school for problem kids. There were kids who brought guns to school, gangbangers, and me, an innocent-looking little girl with an attitude problem and a growing love for drugs.

  It wasn’t even a school. It was just a big room in a shopping center where the other outcasts and I sat every day. We were all just dumped there, like garbage. I hated it. I wasn’t learning anything (not that I wanted to). I knew I deserved to be there, and I guess I belonged with that crowd—actually, a part of me thought it was cool to be at the bad school—but I felt caged in.

  I wasn’t comfortable there. I needed to be out in the world, exploring what life had to offer. I couldn’t be locked up with delinquents all day. Yeah, maybe I got into a little trouble, but I knew how to handle myself.

  I felt it was time for me to be out on my own. I was a free spirit who couldn’t be held back. So I stopped going to school just before spring break and ran away from home. I ran all the way around the corner to my friend Brittany’s house. My mom was worried, and she reported me missing. She called all around town looking for me. She even called Brittany’s house, but her mom, who answered the phone, didn’t know I was there. I would sneak in and out of her house, doing drugs at all hours with the guys at the apartment, coming and going as I pleased.

  My time as a runaway lasted about a month. Then my mom, with my grandmother’s help, wised up. One evening they called Brittany’s mother, and her mom insisted I wasn’t there. At two A.M. they called again and asked her to just check Brittany’s room and make sure.

  Busted. My mom and grandma came and picked me up and took me home, kicking and screaming.

  I don’t know how my mom did it, but somehow she talked to the right people and convinced them to let me pass the eighth grade. I finished up at the strip-mall school and enrolled in some summer school classes, and with barely a 2.0 grade point average I was officially admitted as a freshman at Clairemont High School in the fall of 1999.

  CHAPTER 6

  Not-so-Fresh Feeling

  Freshman year was sort of a fresh start: New school. New kids. New teachers. Most kids would have looked at it as an opportunity to turn things around, and I guess I started out seeing it that way. I was involved with activities—I joined the junior varsity soccer team, and I was obsessed with putting together the homecoming float—but it was hard for me to take school seriously, especially since
right from the beginning the teachers weren’t taking me seriously.

  I had a perverted math teacher who made inappropriate comments to me all the time. He told me that if I wore a short skirt to open house and told all the parents about the stuff we were learning in class, he would give me an A for the semester. It was like I was asked to be a fourteen-year-old spokesmodel for math class. I didn’t even know what we were learning, so he had to write it down for me. But I showed up to parents’ night, looked cute, and watched that old man get wood while I talked about isosceles triangles. I got the A.

  Then there was another teacher, who took my dyed red hair and tiny cutoff shorts as a sign that I was stupid. My grades weren’t so great—I was pretty much hanging on by a thread except for math class—but the guy didn’t even want to give me a chance, and I hated him for it. Not only was he a jerk, but he was also a narc: he would run a tape recorder during class because he wanted proof to take to the principal when the kids were acting out of line.

  One day he had us go around the room and say what we wanted to be when we were older. When it was my turn, I said that I wanted to be a marine biologist. I loved the ocean and going to the aquarium, and I had a thing for sharks and whales. So at the time, marine biologist seemed like a decent plan.

  He laughed in my face, and the whole class laughed with him.

  “Do you really think you can be a marine biologist?” he asked in front of the whole class.

  I wasn’t embarrassed. I was mad. I got up and threw my chair to the ground. “Fuck you, motherfucker!” I screamed before storming out of class.

  I didn’t care who pissed me off—I never backed down. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit there and take this from him.

  When my mom heard what happened she was on my side. She charged into the school yelling and screaming, livid that a teacher would crush a little girl’s dreams like that when he should’ve been motivating kids like me and pointing us in the right direction.