Ferocity Summer

by Alissa Grosso

  “You knew her?” I asked. “You must have been close to her.” I felt almost jealous. It was a very weird feeling.

  “Not like that,” he said. His eyes twitched. I knew he was lying.

  “I don’t really care,” I said.

  “Fuck,” he mumbled. He opened his door and got out of the car. He went to the edge of the woods to pee. I looked back out my window, but the chipmunk was gone. Maybe Randy had scared him away. When he climbed back into the car, he reached for the keys but suddenly stopped. He laid his head back against his seat and began to run his hands through his hair.

  “I just keep thinking that if I could get my hands on enough money, I could buy myself a new life and just make all the bad shit go away.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I said. “You were born rich.”

  “Not rich enough. Oh, fuck you, Scilla. Upper middle class is something short of wealthy.”

  “Is Tigue rich enough?” I was still facing the window and my voice had grown very quiet. Randy didn’t say anything at first. I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me.

  “Maybe,” Randy said. “Maybe. So, what do you guys think about August?”

  I turned back toward Randy. “Willow and I have an unspoken agreement not to talk about the matter.”

  “Well, that’s very fucking mature.”

  “Fuck you, Randy.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  As we sped toward home in silence, it occurred to me that I should ask Randy more about that girl at his school, the one who died, but I never did. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had. Maybe life just plays itself out however it wants to. I’ve kind of got this obsession with analyzing my past mistakes to see what I could have done

  differently to change things, but sometimes I feel like fate is just too powerful a force, that it would make everything the way it wanted it anyway, no matter what I did. Then again, maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better so that I don’t have to take any responsibility.

  Later in May

  Willow and I lived on Cherry Blossom Lake, in a town filled with lakes in a part of New Jersey filled with lakes and trees and cows and not much else. There’d been a time when Cherry Blossom Lake was a swank resort area, but that time was long gone. On one end of the lake were folks like me, poor slobs who lived in tiny, castoff vacation homes. On the other end of the lake lived the Jenkinses and their ilk, in their newer mini-mansions with their wall-to-wall carpeting and garage-door openers.

  “You’re not even dressed,” I said. I walked through the back door of Willow’s house only to find my ride looking like she’d just stumbled out of bed.

  “This is high school,” she said. “What the hell do you need to get dressed for? I think a dirty T-shirt and old cut-offs are perfect attire.”

  “When was the last time you washed your hair?”

  “Weeks ago. Months. Who cares?”

  That, perhaps in a nutshell, was Willow. Or not a

  nutshell, because who could imagine Willow cooped up in a little nutshell? She would never last a second in a nutshell. She would break out immediately.

  “You have breakfast?” she asked.

  “We’ll be late.”

  “Like I said, it’s high school.”

  Willow began to rummage through the refrigerator, a fancy stainless steel model with the side-by-side doors. She grabbed a carton of Tropicana Pure Premium. I thought of my own fridge, seventies harvest-gold. The few items on its bare shelves were all of the caca-brand persuasion. “It all tastes the same,” my mother insisted.

  Willow opened several different cabinets before coming up with a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. “Screwdrivers?”

  “Why not? Like you said, it’s high school.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  She took out two tall glasses and filled them nearly half full with vodka.

  “We’ll be drunk before we even get there,” I said.

  “That’s the point.”

  Willow dumped in some orange juice for good measure. She handed one glass to me and picked up one herself.

  “To summer,” Willow proposed. “Which is less than a month away.”

  “To summer,” I agreed.

  We drank. I coughed, momentarily stunned by the high percentage of alcohol, then drank down the rest of the drink much too quickly. I remembered reading somewhere that screwdrivers got their name because it was mechanics or

  oil-rig workers or something who had invented it, stirring their drinks not with traditional stirrers but with screwdrivers. That’s history for you, and how much of that is bullshit I don’t know, and besides, what the hell does that have to do with two high school girls drinking the legendary concoction at seven thirty on a Wednesday morning in the middle of May?

  “Let me piss first, then we’ll go,” Willow said.

  It was a long piss, and I understood that that’s not what it was at all. There were some regular bathroom sounds thrown in for good measure—toilet flushing, sink running—but I knew that Willow’s true mission was the imbibing of some narcotic substance slightly more potent than the orange juice and vodka concoction. Well, whatever it takes, I thought, but didn’t quite feel. It wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning, for chrissakes.

  Willow came out of the bathroom with a flushed face and damp skin. She looked like shit, but who was I to say? This was, after all, high school, and who was there to impress?

  Willow didn’t so much drive to school as slightly guide the car on a route more or less destined to get us to school, or at least, school’s general vicinity. She swerved back and forth on the road, and came close to hitting too many stationary objects to count. I felt a little woozy myself and was in no shape to complain.

  I was thinking about the subject of our toast, of summer. As a kid I had always looked forward to summer—and the temporary escape from the hell that was the education system—with unmitigated joy. Times had changed. Now, the very thought of summer made my stomach knot. Okay, maybe the liquid breakfast was partly responsible for that. But there were plenty of other reasons for my stomach and my entire body to be completely uncomfortable that morning. My best friend was having a love affair with mind-altering substances, my future looked bleaker than bleak, and, oh yeah, there was August—when the fates of the universe disguised as a jury of my peers (a completely misinterpreted law, by the way) was set to decide my future in the world. Amen. Hallelujah.

  Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

  The principal of my school was not a witch but she played one on TV. At least she looked the part, with her pale, pockmarked skin and her jet black hair with its white streak down the middle. In heels, she was over six feet tall. She could glare down at you with eyes that seemed to have been borrowed from the devil himself.

  We showed up fifteen minutes into first period and had to go to the office for our late pass. It was just our luck that Dr. Smarelli was talking with the secretary when we walked in.

  “Willow Jenkins, Priscilla Davis,” she said. “Let me guess, you’re here for another late pass. I believe you’ve hit your limit this month. You can join your old pals in detention tomorrow afternoon. You know, girls, it’s way too early in your academic careers to be so apathetic.”

  “It’s way too early to be awake,” Willow said. “And at school.”

  When she talked, I flinched. Maybe witch Smarelli noticed this, or maybe she just noticed Willow’s somewhat slurred speech. She came up to the desk to write out our passes herself. Willow, never one for inhibitions, was even further loosened up by her morning indulgences. She leaned across the desk and whispered loudly in Smarelli’s ear.

  “Let’s the three of us go into your office right now. We’ll munch your rug for the courtesy of a suspended sentence.”

  The secretary turned ghostly pale and knocked over a mug of coffee. I watched the brown stain engulf a stack of attendance sheets while the knot in my stomach got tighter. Smarelli sni
ffed at the air like the world’s ugliest bloodhound.

  “You’ve been drinking! It’s not even nine in the morning, and you’ve been drinking!”

  I watched the secretary mop up the brown puddle with a wad of tissues. It was a hopeless task. Most of the coffee had already been absorbed by the paper. For some reason, this made me think of Randy and his goal to make enough money to buy a new life. I think that’s why I started laughing.

  It’s a weakness of mine, laughing when I shouldn’t. Normally I can stop it. I was, however, mildly drunk, and my laughter got away from me. I couldn’t even stop laughing when Smarelli told us to get into her office, not even when she threatened to suspend us. That actually made me laugh harder.

  Approximately

  One Hour Later

  Okay, so we weren’t Girl Scouts. We had our share of shortcomings and vices. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely our fault—we had circumstances working against us. I was one of those single-parent statistics, a fatherless, futureless fuck-up living on the edge of poverty. I was slightly better off than Civil War badass General Sherman, in that my mother hadn’t given me up to some random family at the age of nine for financial reasons. But that might only be because such an opportunity never presented itself to my mother.

  Willow had the benefit of money and two complete parental units, but they were both nut-jobs. Her father took a totalitarian sort of approach to child-rearing. He was strict to the point of alienation. With repression that bad, it was physically impossible to be good. Then there was Midge, who insisted on spoiling her daughter without restraint. That, and, well, Midge’s grasp on reality was somewhat tenuous. Between these two poles, Willow was pulled completely out of shape.

  I’m not trying to blame anyone for our problems, but sometimes when I really think about things, I wonder if we ever stood a chance in this world.

  Is this an appropriate time to bring up the fact that Sherman, himself, was something of a hellraiser during his West Point days? There are legends that persist to this day about his midnight potato-smashing raids on the cafeteria.

  “What I’m saying,” Smarelli said, “is that this is a very serious offense. Suspension would be going lightly. I could expel both girls if I wanted to.”

  Willow and I sat in the office, flanked by our mothers. My mother was still dressed in her supermarket smock. She kept playing with the Always for Less button she was wearing. Midge had been pulled away from the tanning salon. She had on a lavender warm-up outfit.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little harsh?” Midge said. “I mean, all they did was have a little drink. They’re teenagers; of course they are going to drink. All teenagers drink.”

  “I didn’t,” Smarelli said. If Midge was a little closer, I think Smarelli might have bitten off one of her pretty little manicured fingernails. “There is absolutely no excuse for showing up at school in an inebriated state.”

  “But at least they went to school,” Midge said. “I mean, I think we should be proud of them for that.”

  Next to me, my mother sighed through her teeth. Smarelli’s face changed colors.

  Midge would take Willow’s side in any argument, but this time she had a very good reason to try to extricate her daughter from any disciplinary measure. Mr. Jenkins would come down much harder than the school on Willow, if he found out about this, and if Willow did get suspended, then he would most certainly find out.

  “Drugs and alcohol are some of the biggest demons plaguing our youngsters,” Smarelli said. “It’s our job as educators and parents to take a firm stance against the use of such substances. Especially in light of the events of last year, I cannot stress enough how important it is that Willow and Priscilla be made aware that this behavior cannot be tolerated.”

  “Punish them,” my mom said, “but for this incident and nothing else.” She locked eyes with Smarelli. The temperature in the room went up a few degrees, but I felt chilled to the bone. My mom made a far better bitch than Midge. I could almost see Smarelli shrink. Although she didn’t move, she appeared to be cowering.

  “I wouldn’t think of punishing them for anything but what happened today,” Smarelli said, in a tone so weak and quavering there could be no doubt she was full of shit. “I think a week-long suspension is appropriate.”

  “Two days should do it,” my mom said.

  “Right,” Smarelli said. “Two days will be fine, uh, starting tomorrow. Today the girls go home sick.”

  The sentence was fairly light. I think I might have felt something akin to relief. It could have been a lot worse. The problem, I guess, was that I hadn’t really cared what the outcome was. It didn’t make a difference to me. Detention, suspension, expulsion—it was all the same to me somehow. I think my mom and Midge cared more about what happened to us than we did.

  First Day of

  Our Suspension

  I chased a few last soggy pieces of cereal around the bowl with my spoon. Mom reached for the remote and turned up the volume on the kitchen TV.

  “ … Easily one of the most dangerous illegal drugs, so-called Ferocity is quickly spreading across the nation, with over one hundred known cases of overdoses reported so far … ” recounted a too-perky, bleached-blonde newscaster.

  “Listen to this shit,” my mother said. She slammed cabinets as she looked for something that could not be found. “You know who’s using this sort of crap. It’s rich kids with more money than they know what to do with.”

  “Mom,” I said, trying to head her off because I could tell exactly where she was going.

  “Oh, what? Does Little Miss Alcoholic have something profound to contribute? It’s people like Willow Jenkins who have got the money to blow on this Ferocity shit just because their rich little lives are so dreadful they need to escape—”

  “Mom,” I said again. I’d heard so many versions of this speech over the past year that I could almost predict exactly what she would say.

  “Don’t defend her, Scilla. She’s trash. Just because she’s got a little money doesn’t mean she isn’t trash. You want to wind up another overdose patient, just keep hanging around with her. You could be the next vegetable to wind up in a state hospital. Look at where she’s gotten you so far.”

  “You can’t blame Willow for everything.”

  “I don’t. I blame my daughter for being such a moron. What the hell were you thinking, showing up for school drunk? What if they’d kicked you out, huh?”

  I shrugged. I got up to dump the leftover milk down the drain.

  “Don’t walk away from me,” Mom said even though I was only a couple feet away in our cramped kitchen. “Why can’t you find some less scummy friends, Scilla? What about that girl down the block, what’s her name, lives in the brown and white house?”

  “Sarah Perillo.”

  “Yeah, why can’t you hang out with her?”

  “Probably because she wouldn’t want anything to do with me. She’s some goody two-shoes. Gets straight A’s, can recite pi to the thirtieth digit.”

  “Maybe some of her intelligence would rub off on you. You don’t have enough brain cells to afford killing them off.”

  I tried to escape to the security of my bedroom, but Mom blocked my path. “Leigh at work has a daughter that goes to school with you. Carrie. She seems like a good kid. Why don’t you guys hang out some time?”

  “She’s a jock.”

  “A little exercise would do you some good, and I’m not talking about that stuff you do in the back seat of Randy Jenkins’ car.”

  “Mom!”

  “Just calling ’em as I see ’em. You want to wind up in the gutter with the rest of the trash, just keep this shit up, okay?”

  Here’s the whole problem with my mother giving me this lecture. She was saying it like she knew something about not winding up in the gutter, but I knew she didn’t have a clue. She’s a grocery store checkout manager. She lives in somebody’s discarded vacation home in some piece-of-crap town, and she had the nerve to tell me
what I should and should not do, who I should and should not associate with, to avoid taking up residence in the gutter of life?

  “Okay, fine. Whatever,” I said. “Can I leave the kitchen now? I’d like to go take a shower.”

  “First let me give you the list of everything you need to get done today.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t act so surprised. Or were you and your rich bitch little friend planning on living it up for two days?” She pulled a piece of paper off the top of the refrigerator and handed it to me. There were about twenty different tasks on there, stuff like clean the bathroom and wash all the windows. “That’s for today. I’ll give you another list for tomorrow.”

  “I don’t see what there could possibly be left to do.”

  “I’m serious,” she said waving a finger at me. “I want this all done. No goofing off.”

  I want to tell you something about my childhood, what things were like when I was growing up, but so many of my memories are hazy and indistinct. It’s as if everything sucked so bad that I’ve completely blocked it out. What I have are glimpses of things. I remember my grandparents dying within a month of each other, both from lung cancer as a result of their lifelong two-pack-a-day habit. I think I was about seven. I went to the hospital, but not the funeral. I don’t really remember being that upset. Maybe I was too young to understand.

  I remember getting in trouble a lot. That’s never really changed. Mom always had some reason to be unhappy with me. It wasn’t really that I was a complete screw-up, but she hasn’t had the best of lives. She was unhappy a lot, and I was always around so it was just easier to be angry at me than to be mad at her bad decisions or her failures or whatever.

  She dated this one guy for a while. His name was Earl, and I was so excited because I thought I was finally going to have a father. That was something I’d wanted for a long time. He wouldn’t be a real father, of course, but I didn’t care. Any kind of father was better than nothing. I remember the three of us going out a few times like a real family. We went out for ice cream. We went out to the movies. Once, we even went out to play miniature golf. It was like being in heaven, and Mom was really happy too. Then something happened. I don’t know what. They stopped dating, and there went my dreams of having a real live dad.