You Know I'm No Good
Page 19
I move very carefully through this new life, not taking any chances. I go to school, and then practice, and then home. And yeah, it’s boring a lot of the time, and yeah, sometimes I feel the old wildness coiling up inside of me, but I’m trying my best not to let it win. And so far (and with the understanding that everything could have already gone to shit by the time you read this letter), it’s working.
Remember that guy Xander I used to hook up with, the one with the rich German dad? Well, he once taught me this word. “Terroir.” It’s when something tastes like the place it’s from. A wine from the Loire Valley of France, for example, tastes flinty, like smoke, because of the soil in that particular place on the earth. It’s like how, when someone starts talking and you know where they’re from by their accent, terroir is like food or drink with an accent that alerts you to its origins.
You have a very complicated terroir. I would need to taste it many times to find all the notes. The first and only time you ever kissed me, in the woods with wolves sleeping in the darkness just beyond where we could see, I tasted rain hissing against hot sidewalks. I tasted wood polish, clean carpets, and steel skylines. I tasted almonds and money, sugared dates and nail polish, the bubbling hiss of sparkling water, and the chalky numbing pop of cocaine. I tasted the candle wax and sweat of a crowded party in a run-down apartment in the East Village. I tasted something sweet just out of reach, and the insistent note beneath it all, a salt and mineral tang—the taste of buried pain.
I bet you tasted it in me, too.
I guess every one of us troubled girls has her own landscape, her own growing conditions. Some of us came up in the rainy season and had our best flavors washed away by our careless caretakers; others shriveled, unprotected, under relentless heat. Still others were fussed over too much, resulting in overcultivation. And then there were the ones who were ignored completely, left to grow small and bitter and wild.
It’s so easy for the world to stomp on girls like us, to burst open our thin, sun-warmed skin. I get why you’re afraid to step back out here. But please promise me, one day, that you’ll try. And when you do, come find me. There’s so much we need to talk about. There’s so much I still need to say. Even now, I don’t know whether I belonged at Red Oak or not, whether I was, to use your criteria, truly bad or just not good. All I know is that if it weren’t for Vivian and you—and you most of all—I’d be a Missing Girl forever.
I see a life up ahead for us, Vera. A proper life, with all the sorrows and the joys, all the bullshit and all the transcendence. I see that no matter the weather or the climate, the erosive properties of the place in which we came up, we troubled girls have to keep at it, twisting and pushing our way out of the earth, our vines green and reaching. If we can just keep going, we can survive. We can prove them wrong, all of them: all of those experts who said we were undrinkable.
Love,
Mia
Mia’s Red Oak Poetry List
“The Applicant”—Sylvia Plath
“Crossing Half of China to Sleep With You”—Yu Xiuhua
“Diving into the Wreck”—Adrienne Rich
“Fever 103”—Sylvia Plath
“Get Up 10”—Cardi B
“I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense”—Danez Smith
“In Memory of my Mother”—Patrick Kavanagh
“Mariner’s Apartment Complex”—Lana Del Rey
“my bitch!”—Danez Smith
“My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work”—Tiana Clark
“Obligations 2”—Layli Long Soldier
“Relay”—Fiona Apple
“Praying” (opening monologue)—Kesha
“So I Send This Three-Word Burst, Poor Ink, Repeating”—Steve Davenport
“She Had Some Horses”—Joy Harjo
“Water”—Anne Sexton
“Where are the dolls who loved me so . . .”—Elizabeth Bishop
“The Whiteness of the Whale,” Moby-Dick—Herman Melville
Acknowledgments
A massive thank-you to the young women who shared their stories with me over the course of researching and writing this book. There are too many to name (and I know some prefer to remain nameless), but I do want to extend a special thank-you to Morgan Feinstein, and also to the faculty and students at Oklahoma Teen Challenge.
Several other incredible women helped this book make the journey from messy manuscript to published artifact. Thank you to my fantastic agent, Sara Crowe, and everyone at Pippin Properties. Special gratitude to Alexandra Cooper, who has now edited three of my four novels and who always pushes me to think harder and go deeper. Thank you to the kind and wise Rosemary Brosnan, Allison Weintraub, Alexandra Rakaczki, and the rest of the wonderful team at Quill Tree Books. This book is a beautiful physical object, and for that I must thank Dana Ledl for her wonderful cover art, Cat San Juan for her book design, and Erin Fitzsimmons for her art direction.
Thank you to Will McGrath and Ellen Block for welcoming me into your Minneapolis home while I was in town for research, and to Neelu Molloy for sharing further expertise on your hometown. I hope to share a hotdish with you all soon. Thank you Luis Calzada Zubiria and Marty McGivern for your careful, thoughtful readings of an early draft. Thank you Kelly Dunn Rynes for giving me a crash course (see what I did there?) on the physics of ice-skating. Bridget Quinlan, thank you for arguing with me, as only you could, about the true definition of “basic.”
I wrote the first scene of this book ten years ago, in Don DeGrazia’s Advanced Fiction class at Columbia College. My friends and mentors in the Chicago literary community, many of whom I met on that legendary corner of Michigan and Balbo, have been essential to my growth as a writer. Thanks to all of you, with shout-outs to Randy Albers, Patricia Ann McNair, Eric May, Christine Maul Rice, Alexis Pride, Chris Terry, Matt Martin, Joe Meno, Jarrett Dapier, David Schaafsma, Ann Hemenway, and the staff at Women & Children First and the Book Cellar for always supporting the work of local authors.
My husband, Denis; my three daughters; my family; my close circle of friends—phew. Diving into the wreck of my imagination would be impossible without the knowledge that you were standing at the ready to pull me back up. I love you all!
And finally, a thought about Amy Winehouse, whose brilliant lyrics provided the title of this novel: however unfair it was, Amy was as famous for her troubles as she was for her musical genius. But it’s worth remembering that she was sober when she wrote most of the songs on Back to Black. The cliché of the tortured artist is a dangerous one, because pain can’t be repurposed into art until the artist is well enough to put some distance between herself and the thing that tortures her. There is nothing noble or romantic about suffering in silence or dying young. If you’re hurting, tell someone. No one should ever have to battle blind. And nothing ever has to be a fate resigned.
About the Author
Photo by Joe Mazza—Brave Lux
JESSIE ANN FOLEY’s debut novel, The Carnival at Bray, was a Printz Honor Book, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book, a YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults title, and a William C. Morris Award finalist. Her second novel, Neighborhood Girls, was an ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice and a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults title. Sorry for Your Loss, her third novel, was an Illinois Reads selection and a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults book. You Know I’m No Good is her fourth novel. Jessie lives with her husband and three daughters in Chicago, where she was born and raised. To learn more about Jessie, visit her online at www.jessieannfoley.com.
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Quill Tree Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
YOU KNOW I’M NO GOOD. Copyright © 2020 by Jessie Ann Foley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2020 by DANA LEDL
Cover design by CATHERINE SAN JUAN
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937806
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-295710-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-295708-5
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2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
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1 For the record, I didn’t punch her, exactly. I hit her with my closed fist slightly harder than I meant to. I’d intended to, I don’t know, cuff her on the shoulder, but she happens to be pretty short—five foot one to my five foot six—so I missed her shoulder and got her in the face instead. Yes, it probably hurt, and yes, her nose bled, kind of a lot, but it’s not like bones were broken or anything.
2 Not that I ever would, of course, even if she did ask.
3 But they better not be out of money. Guess how much this place costs? Six thousand dollars. A month. If Dad and Alanna want to blow their retirement savings and the twins’ college funds to send me on a trip to teen prison, I guess that’s their own dumb business.
4 Which Xander figured out how to crack long ago. Say what you want about us troubled teens, but you can never say we’re not resourceful. Especially when illicit substances are involved.
5 BARFFFFFFF
6 The soft-bound composition kind and not the spiral kind; spiral notebook wire could be repurposed as a weapon or self-harm tool.
7 Red Oak Academy student handbook section 8.3: personal grooming—hair: hair must be kept no more than two shades lighter or darker than student’s natural color.
8 Red Oak Academy student handbook section 8.4: personal grooming—nails: finger and toenails must be kept short and neatly trimmed. Synthetic tips, decals, and other nail design products are not permitted. Nail polish is permitted at the discretion of staff and must be certified organic and “3-free” (nontoxic and containing no toluene, DBP, or formaldehyde). Nail polish may only be applied under staff supervision.
9 Red Oak Academy student handbook section 9.4: dress code—jewelry: clasped metal items designed to be worn around the neck and wrist are not permitted. Soft items (scapulars, woven friendship bracelets, scrunchies, etc.) are permitted at the discretion of staff. A maximum of two earrings per ear are permitted. Piercings are restricted to the earlobe and only the earlobe.
10 Red Oak Academy student handbook section 4.9: on-campus rules—personal conduct: Many of our girls come to us with boundary issues. While at Red Oak, students will learn to increase their understanding and respect for the personal space of themselves and others. To that end, students must maintain a six-inch separation between themselves and their peers at all times. No cuddling, hugging, hand-holding, high-fiving, lap sitting, tickling, or other forms of intentional physical contact are permitted.
11 Red Oak Academy student handbook section 9.1: dress code—footwear: students must wear shoes at all times when they are on school grounds outside of their dormitories. Shoes must be closed-toed, with a heel no higher than one and a half inches, and must be worn with socks and/or unripped tights.
12 LOS = length of stay
13 This, apparently, is what constitutes a wild Friday night in this place.
14 “Ah, Ah,” by Joy Harjo, from How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975–2001.
15 Red Oak Academy student handbook section 8.5: personal grooming—cosmetics: banned personal grooming items include but are not limited to: perfume, aerosol hair sprays and deodorants, liquid eyeliner, depilatories, baby oil, straight and disposable razors, nail scissors, tweezers, Q-tips, whitening toothpaste, hydrogen peroxide, mirrored makeup compacts, and mouthwash.
16 Also known as prison wine, pruno is a homemade alcoholic beverage made with ketchup packets and fermented rotten fruit. Apparently girls used to make it here by smuggling the ingredients out of the cafeteria and brewing it under their beds. This is why our pockets have to be sewn shut, and also why, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys condiments, so long as you’re living in Red Oak you better learn to like your fries dipped in mayo.
17 Maturation is the final step in a Red Oak girl’s journey. Staying true to the metaphorical growth cycles of the red oak tree, it is the term the school uses in place of “graduation.”
18 Slogan across chest: WHERE IT’S HIP TO B2.
19 I didn’t say this last one out loud, though, of course. First, because my mother was a real estate agent and not a rock star, and second, I wanted to win because I was the best, not because the committee felt sorry for me.
20 Also stolen.
21 Not, technically, a member of the Twenty-Seven Club, since she was only twenty-two when she died in a plane crash.
22 Or “death marches,” as Vera, who is not big on physical fitness, calls them.
23 Manned by Dee, who stands by stoically holding a whipped cream can, doling out a squirt to those who want it, lest any of us try to make off with the whole can for a quick huff in the dorm bathrooms.
24 From “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
25 Complete with pictures, for added fun!
26 Other contents: a tiny pair of Barbie ski boots, a used purple Band-Aid Lola got after her flu shot, a smudged self-portrait of Lauren drawn with oil pastels, five red maple leaves collected from the tree in our backyard, and a broken Frozen 2 Happy Meal toy that still smelled, tantalizingly, of McDonald’s.
27 In 1964, the Mattel Toy Company introduced a younger sister for its beloved Barbie doll: Skipper Roberts. A few decades later, in 1988, the company gave the doll a makeover and redubbed her Teen Fun Skipper. An updated body mold made this new, improved Skipper taller—almost as tall as her big sister!—with a nipped waist and enlarged breasts and eyes, imbuing her with a sort of sexy ingenue vibe, even though she was only meant to be about thirteen years old.
28 Red Oak Academy handbook section 4.1: supply
list
29 “I’d never hang myself, anyway,” she’d once scoffed during group chat. “It makes you shit yourself. It’s undignified. If I ever decide I’m going to try it again, I’m going like Virginia Woolf, straight into the water with pockets full of rocks.”
30 Red Oak Academy student handbook section 4.9: on-campus rules—personal conduct: students are discouraged from engaging in private one-on-one conversations with each other during the course of the school day. These conversations, if necessary, should occur within earshot of a Red Oak staff member.