by Susan Juby
We started doing things together and hanging out a bit after school. They enjoyed drinking nearly as much as I did, but weren’t as into violence as the tougher wild ones.
My partial defection from the wild ones didn’t go unnoticed. There were hostile mumblings from Darcy and her friends, but nothing too serious. I was partly shielded by my new friends. Then came the day the leader of my new friends, Charmagne, who had a full head of glossy brown hair and blue eyes with startling light grey flecks in the irises, came to school with some news.
“You want to go to the show this weekend?” I asked her. This was code for do you want to meet before a movie, get drunk, then wander around town mooning at boys until your parents come to get you.
“I can’t,” she mumbled. There was something strange in her voice.
“Why?”
“My parents said.”
“You’re not allowed to go to movies any more?”
Nan and Brenda wouldn’t look at me.
“What?” I asked again, even though I was beginning to sense that I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“The problem isn’t the movies,” she said.
“So … what is it?”
“It’s you,” she said.
It was like a burning spotlight had come to rest on me. “What about me?”
“Mr. Dundurn talked to them at the parent–teacher meeting last night.”
“About me?” I repeated, unable to stop myself.
“Yeah. He said you’re, you know, bad.” Charmagne twirled a lock of hair around her finger and wouldn’t meet my eye.
“What? Are you kidding?”
“He said you’re evil,” said Charmagne, whose parents were deeply religious.
The others nodded.
“He talked to your parents, too?” I asked Nan and Brenda.
“My mom was worried about my grades,” explained Nan.
“Your grades are my fault?”
“They did kind of get worse after you started, you know, hanging out with us,” she said.
Hot tears burned my eyes. I couldn’t breathe.
My new friends walked away.
I didn’t follow them. The worst thing was that part of me knew the vice-principal was right. I was bad news. I’d known it as soon as I had my first drink. It was like someone had just taken a big piece of my sense of self and thrown it away.
Charmagne, Nan, and Brenda and I were apart for only a few days. My mother called the school to complain when I told her what the vice-principal had said about me. But the hole that had opened up inside me remained. It was as though Mr. Dundurn had made my greatest fear real by speaking it out loud. I was not just bad news. I was bad. I was under attack from every direction. The negative external and internal messages I was getting, some intentional, some not, convinced me that I had a lot to hide. Not just the things that happened when I got drunk (most of which I didn’t remember), but also the fact there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I was the imminent asteroid, the dirty bomb headed for your hometown. As a result of this awareness, when I was sober I kept myself tightly controlled. I knew I had to work harder than anyone else to keep my mask on. It was crucially important that my clothes matched and that my makeup was just right and that I never showed any vulnerability. Any problem on the outside and the ugliness on the inside might be revealed for all to see. That, I thought, could kill me. The more match-y and controlled I got when sober, the more I started to explode when I drank and got high. And that was the worst news of all.
5
Second Prize
THERE WERE A FEW THINGS that kept me from falling apart as soon as I started drinking. One was my mother’s rules. She had many and as much as I protested them, they gave structure to my life. Also, every time I missed curfew or lied about where I was and who I was with, I spent anywhere from two weeks to a month grounded. My mother never confronted me about why I was getting into trouble. Nor did the parents of anyone I knew, even if the kid was found covered in vomit on the front porch every Friday and Saturday night. We were just assumed to be going through our teen phase. And some of us were. Others, however, had jumped the rails and were headed down a whole other path, one that wasn’t age specific.
I resented being grounded with every molecule of my being, but the enforced time out allowed me to recuperate, at least physically. Mentally, I was tortured by the thought of all the fun I was missing. I spent hour after hour listening to Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” while lying on the couch in the living room with the drapes pulled. My groundings were nearly as painful for my family as they were for me.
The other thing that kept me from hitting the skids and dropping out of school as soon as I started drinking was my hobbies. They were legion. My mother instigated many of my activities, perhaps because she intuited I was going to need distractions in my life. I took piano lessons (briefly), went to Brownies (briefly), bowled, figure-skated, and sucked the big one at ballet. I attended 4-H and Saddle Club (our town’s precursor to Pony Club) and in addition to reading, I loved to write. That’s not to say that I was a prodigy or particularly talented. I wrote because I thought being a writer was glamorous and important and because it got me attention from teachers.
My first novel was completed sometime near the end of grade two. It was a timeless narrative about a girl who takes her dog to Mars via homemade spaceship. The most memorable thing about that story, which I wrote after school and during recess and lunch, was how much it impressed everyone.
As the stack of pages covered with misshapen capital letters grew, teachers dropped by my desk to marvel at the young Dostoyevsky in their midst.
“My goodness,” they’d say. “Aren’t you impressive!”
That was my cue to pretend to be so caught up in the creative process that I didn’t even hear them.
“Looks like we’ve got a real writer on our hands!” they’d say.
At that I might allow myself a humble shrug of the kind Hemingway probably used when being complimented by his early mentors.
As far as I was concerned in the academic glory days of grade three, my teachers were right on all counts. I too was quite impressed with myself and my potential for greatness.
I was still writing and for pretty much the same reasons when I got to grade seven. My new specialty was stories about being misunderstood. Many of my works ended with the suicide of the main character, a figure of some genius who bore an uncanny resemblance to, well, me.
On the strength of this body of work, when I got to middle school, I was asked to compete in a local story contest by an English teacher, who was, like all good English teachers, extra nice to kids who read, even ones who were constantly in trouble, like me. He knew I was a writer, even though I hid it from some of my new friends, who didn’t approve. He’d read some of my works and been encouraging.
“Very strongly felt,” he wrote at the back of the piece about the girl whose parents were so cruel and insensitive about her social life that they, in the tradition of South American dictators, imposed a curfew, which left the girl no option but to throw herself off a bridge.
The story was made up of at least forty percent adjectives. On the back the teacher wrote, “Wow! Powerful stuff!”
My writing began to taper off almost as soon as I started drinking. I don’t know why. It was like every time I drank, my mind got a little smaller. I could almost feel it happening. The channels that fed my imaginative landscape were pinched off, and I was left with a bonsai-ed set of real world concerns that included never missing a party, getting my hair right, and finding a steady bootlegger in the form of an of-age boyfriend with his own wheels. None of it seemed like anything anyone else would want to read about.
I don’t know if my English teacher had picked up on the constricting trend going on in my brain, but he asked me to stay behind one day after school.
I did so, reluctantly.
“So, Susan,” he said. “Are you going to enter the writing competition?”
As usual, I hadn’t been paying attention in class, so I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Competition?”
“The one I’ve been announcing for the past three weeks? Sponsored by the local bookstore? Please tell me some of this rings a bell.”
He saw from my blank expression that it didn’t.
“Let me repeat myself while I’ve got your undivided attention. The competition is for promising young writers. To enter, you need to write a three-thousand-word story about the future.”
“The future?” I said.
“You know, that thing that will happen later.”
“Oh. That.”
Other than standard homework assignments and tests, this was the first time a teacher had asked me to contribute anything since I’d turned my new, rotten leaf. I couldn’t blow the request off. Obviously, I didn’t have shit-all to say about the future, other than I hoped it involved getting very, very wasted. But some small part of me was hanging on to the child-writer gig.
The night before the piece was due, I sat down to write it. It had been a while since I’d written a story, and it felt awkward even to hold the pen. I tried to summon some deep, dark feelings. They ended up being a little too dark and possibly a little too real. They included the new sense that I was caught up in something I couldn’t see through or over. The feeling had grown stronger after I tried to go a whole week without drinking and couldn’t. I was beginning to feel like I had to drink or stay home in bed for the rest of my life. I was also assailed by the creeping awareness that the only thing I cared about without reservation was getting obliterated. I spent my sober hours filled with a vicious self-loathing that only getting loaded on alcohol could quiet. None of that seemed quite right for my story about the future.
So I picked a topic that scared me considerably less. I wrote an overwrought, vaguely imagined story about a nuclear holocaust survivor who walks along contemplating the destruction of the world. It seemed safer, plus I figured I’d get points for being political.
The story was a piece of shit and I knew it. That’s why I was so surprised when my teacher announced the winners of the competition the following Friday.
First place went to a local lawyer’s daughter, who belonged to a class of girls I thought of as “bubble gummers” because they were (to my mind) bright, shiny, sweet, and slightly sticky. What I knew about the winner from walking past her in the hall was that she enjoyed reading The Economist and not bothering much about her hair. (This was anathema to me, as I spent at least one hour every morning on my hair. Along with drinking to excess, my hair was my avocation.)
The winner’s triumphant performance in the short story competition made perfect sense. She and the other bubble gummers were born to win. I, on the other hand … not so much.
“And second prize goes to Susan Juby!” said the teacher, with a sad little note of hope in his voice, like that of a prison chaplain signing up a born-to-lose prisoner for choir duty.
Heads jerked up all over the classroom, including mine.
A couple of people elbowed each other. I felt an immediate surge of guilt. The story had taken about half an hour to compose. It was terrible. Either I got second place out of pity or only two people entered.
And still …
“You girls can go by the store to pick up your prizes,” said our teacher. The first-place winner carefully avoided looking at me. Having me in second place probably tainted the experience a bit.
I rolled my eyes at a couple of people to show I didn’t care about any of it. Charmagne and Brenda and Nan had recently taken me back, partly because I made them laugh and partly because my behaviour while drinking was so extreme that they could get away with just about anything if I was around. I was once again hovering between them and the wild ones.
After school, Charmagne and Nan and I were walking downtown when a boxy green Volvo pulled up alongside us.
My breath caught in my throat. I knew the car. It belonged to a friend of the boy from the party. The one I’d thrown up on. I stared over the hood of the car at the dark blue mountain that loomed over the town so I wouldn’t have to look inside.
“You girls need a ride?” asked a boy in the passenger seat.
Charmagne and Nan giggled and said sure. I followed my friends into the car. Jack the Ripper could have been in that car and I’d have followed them in. Once I was seated, I forced myself to look around. The boy wasn’t there and I let out a huge sigh of relief.
The driver, a guy named Charles, famous for his commitment to getting baked, and his friend Aldous drove us halfway up the ski hill. They showed us how to “hotbox” a car. We smoked two joints without cracking a window until death via smoke inhalation seemed like a real possibility. Somehow, in the heavy white smoke, coughs, and muffled giggles, the seating arrangements changed and I found myself sitting next to Aldous, who’d been in the passenger seat. Charmagne and Nan moved into the front. They giggled every time Charles opened his mouth and some Spicoliism spilled out.
“Hey,” whispered Aldous. He was solid and quiet and had thick brown hair that reminded me of a carpet.
I was panic stricken. Pot didn’t relieve me of the burden of consciousness the way booze did. It just made me paranoid. More paranoid.
“That wasn’t cool,” said Aldous.
I turned to look at him. I could practically feel the blood vessels exploding in my eyes.
“What wasn’t?”
“What he did to you,” he said.
We both knew what he meant.
“Oh,” I said. “I guess not.”
At that moment a sludgy awareness came over me that the story of what had happened in that bedroom had been told and retold so it was now quite a bit worse for me.
I also realized that Aldous, by expressing solidarity, was being chivalrous, and I was bound by the rules of duty to be grateful to him.
“You want to sit on my knee?” he asked.
We had plenty of room in the back seat by ourselves.
“That’s okay. But, uh, thanks anyway.”
We sat in silence for a while. Then he grabbed my hand. I let him.
“We’re going to go to the liquor store later. We found a guy to buy for us.”
I felt the familiar flood of anticipation. Relief was on the way. “I need to get something first,” I said.
“From where?”
“The bookstore. I have to pick something up.”
Aldous leaned forward and shoved Charles in the shoulder.
“Hey, we need to stop at the bookstore.”
“Dude, I didn’t know you could even fucking read,” said Charles. Everyone, including me, laughed like this was the sharpest line of comedy ever spoken.
Several minutes later the driver pulled the car over in front of the bookstore on Main Street. I opened my door and emerged in a cloud of billowing smoke, like an extra in a Poison video. This earned me surprised and disapproving looks from everyone within sight and smelling distance.
“Back in a second,” I said to no one.
I spent a long and painfully self-conscious moment standing outside on the sidewalk, in the hopes that my dope-saturated clothing would miraculously air out so I wouldn’t be so conspicuous. Finally, I took a deep gulp of air and went inside. The store was filled with that quiet sense of purpose that a lot of books bring to a room. This made me feel even worse. Much as I loved books, had always loved books, I felt horribly out of place. Everyone here was so … not high.
The thought of going up to the counter and asking for my second-place prize was excruciating. I could already see the look I’d get from the guy behind the counter. Sure, he had a pleasant face. But the minute he saw my red eyes and smelled my eau de inside-of-a-bong perfume, he’d know I didn’t deserve second prize in any writing contest, not even one that only two people had entered.
I was just on the verge of turning and leaving, when he called to me. “Can I help you?”
“I, uh
,” I said, with my usual pot-induced loquaciousness. Marijuana had precisely the opposite effect on me that alcohol did. When I drank I couldn’t shut up. When I got high I was lucky to put together two words.
“Oh, hey! I bet you’re one of our contest winners.”
I flinched. Winner. It was not a word I associated with myself.
“Second prize,” I muttered.
“Right on,” said the man. He seemed unfazed by my inferior status. “You wrote a good story. Your prize is right here.”
He reached under the counter and pulled out the Pocket Oxford Dictionary.
“You better put your name in that,” he said, handing it over.
I nodded and began to retreat with the small red dictionary clutched in my hand.
“Congratulations!” he called after me.
I didn’t look at my prize until I was back in the Volvo and we were headed to the liquor store to meet our bootlegger. Ignoring the questions from Aldous, I dug around in my shapeless purse, which contained gum wrappers, packages of Player’s Light, eyeliner and lip gloss, and a complete absence of school books, until I found a ballpoint pen.
I scribbled my name on the blank page at the front.
Susan Juby
I stared at the signature for a good long while. It looked wrong. I should have waited until the car had stopped. My name looked like it had been scribbled by a five-year-old who’d recently suffered a devastating stroke.
But still.
Fourteen hours later, I woke up in a completely different car. A Trans Am that an older guy had driven into a ditch and left there with me and another girl still inside. My friend and I had decided to spend the night in the car because we’d told our parents that we were staying at each other’s houses and the boy who’d been driving said his parents would “have a shit” if they caught two girls in his house.
It was April and the night had been cold and miserable. We were half-frozen and I was still drunk. I looked around to discover that I couldn’t find my purse and had lost one of my shoes. There was blood all over my pink jean jacket.
