She mewled some kind of denial.
“You were trying to pimp me out to him,” I said. Flinty, brittle steel. “Do you have any idea how disgusting you are?”
She had the nerve to raise her face with indignation. “Gary has money. Lots of money. He could take care of us. Of you.”
“I don’t need taking care of.”
“That why you’re running around with older men?”
“Don’t even,” I said. I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I seen that man you’re with. Drives an old beater. You can do better.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “I cannot believe how f**king clueless you are.”
“You ain’t so smart yourself, babe. You’re giving it away for free like a stupid milk cow.”
I slammed my hand on the table, the ring pinging like crystal. Ashes puffed out of the terracotta pot.
“Shut your mouth,” I said.
She stood, making me back up. “Or what? What you gonna do?”
There was fire in me, and for the moment, that fire was stronger than the fear.
“I’ll walk out that door and you’ll never see me again. I’m eighteen. I don’t have to put up with your shit.”
Mom laughed, a throaty, ugly sound. “Yeah, you’re eighteen. That means I don’t got to put up with your shit, either.”
“So don’t,” I yelled. My hands were tingling. My accent slipped out, and I didn’t care. “Throw me on the street. Then you can finally have your empty house, and your gross men, and your f**king drugs. And when the police come, no one’s gonna bail you out. No one’s gonna sit at home waiting for you, because no one else cares about you, you stupid bitch.”
The windows seemed to rattle from my voice. The kitchen light dimmed, a flux in the current, but it felt like it was in response to me. I’d never stood up to her like this.
“You know the worst thing?” I said, stepping closer. “It’s not that you put my life in danger. You did that the day I was born. No, the worst thing was stealing my money. The money Nan gave me for college, so I could make a future for myself instead of turning out like you.”
I saw the precise moment her pride cracked. The moment she stopped being my forty-year-old mother and became a teenage girl, screaming I don’t want to turn out like you at her own mother. Her bloodshot eyes widened, lucid green finally showing. The leathery folds of her face smoothed out with shock. For a moment we probably looked more like each other than we had in years.
My body trembled. I scrubbed a hand across my eyes, smearing hot tears. So much for cold steel.
“Oh, babe,” she said. Her head was nodding slightly, repeatedly, the way you’d rock yourself for comfort. “It’s been real hard for me, too.”
“I don’t care,” I said, crying. “You were supposed to take care of me. Be the adult. For once, be the f**king adult, Mom.”
“You don’t know what it was like,” she said. Her breath stuttered. Jesus, if we both start crying, I am really going to lose it, I thought. “I put myself through shit I never want to think about again, all to make sure you had food to eat and a place to sleep and clothes to wear.”
“It wasn’t all for me. Half your money goes to buy the drugs you’re supposed to be selling.”
“You think it’s easy, living like this? You think I want to live this kind of life sober?”
I thought of the men she’d installed on our living room couch. The kind of men who’d touch a twelve-year-old. If they were that brazen with me, what kind of shit had they done to her? I’d seen some of her scars. There was a long sharktooth ripple just below her collarbone. Car door caught me, she’d said. And a puckered dimple on one thigh. Dropped a cigarette lighter. Sometimes she came home with shiners. Got mixed up in a bar brawl.
Key to making your mother the villain: believing the lies she told to spare you.
“You could’ve been normal,” I said. “Plenty of single moms work at McDonald’s and don’t smoke crystal.”
“It ain’t that simple. You don’t know what being addicted is like.”
Instinctively, unthinkingly, I said, “Yes I do.”
And I stared at her, my mouth hanging open, thinking, Yes, I do.
“Well, then, I pray you don’t turn out like me,” she said, sniffling. “I pray you get away from here and start a new life and do something good.”
My tears had stopped, but my face was still wet. “You can’t get the money you owe, can you?”
“I’m trying, babe. But it don’t look good.”
“So it’s up to me to bail us both out. Again.”
We stared at each other in our dismal little kitchen where no one cooked, and no friends came to visit, and meth was cut on the table late at night.
“You must really hate me, huh?” she said.
“No.” I took a deep breath, wiped my cheeks with my hand. “If I thought you could change, I’d hate you for not trying.” I looked her dead in the eye. “But this is who you are. You’re a liar, and a thief, and a junkie. I don’t hate you, Mom. I’m disappointed in you.”
I unpacked my bags and stayed up until 2 A.M. responding to job ads on Craigslist. In the back of my mind, I knew I could stay with Evan, or maybe Wesley and Siobhan. But Mom’s shamelessness and weakness of will had led me to become the opposite: stubborn and proud. Too proud to ask for help, even when I needed it most. Especially when I needed it most.
I’ll do this on my own, I told myself. I’ll stay here till she throws me out, and make back every penny she stole, and work something out with Mr. Rivero. I’m smart, I’m resilient—I had to be, to raise myself without functional parents. I’ll figure it out.
And when I do, I’ll leave and never look back.
Of course, in my eighteen-year-old brain, leaving implicitly entailed bringing Evan and Wesley and even Siobhan, as if I could transplant everything I still loved about this place to a new one, where only the bad things would be erased. I didn’t think, How will I hold on to them? I only thought, I have to get away from her.
A few days before Halloween, I skipped lunch with Wesley to see Evan. The minute I locked his door, he pushed me against the wall and put his mouth to my neck. It wasn’t so much a kiss as a display of hunger, his stubble scraping my skin, his teeth nipping, not gently. I leaned my head back and looked out the windows at the world deconstructing, leaves coming off the trees in flurries, everything baring itself to be ravished by winter.
Hello, visual metaphor.
Later, I would understand what drove us to screw up that day. That the more complicated and f**ked-up my life became, the more I wanted to shut out reality and lose myself in him. That he was doing the same with me, for reasons I didn’t yet know.
But in the moment, I just wanted to be ravished.
Evan took my jaw in one hand and made me look at him. His body was close, the scent of suede and faint smoke, like a snuffed candlewick, flooding over me. The mere smell of him made something in me unlace, opening itself.
“Come over tonight,” he said.
I laid my palm on his chest as if to push him away, but let it slide down instead, over his tensed abdomen, to his fly.
“That’s so far away,” I said languorously, drawing the words out.
His eyes focused on my mouth.
I unbuttoned his jeans and froze. We were both breathing fast. We’d never done anything more than make out in school. Being discovered here was death.
But there he stood, rock hard, not stopping me.
“Shouldn’t you tell me this is a bad idea?” I whispered, cupping my hand over the erection in his jeans. “I thought you were a responsible adult.”
“I thought you were.”
I felt a little out-of-body right then. Like things weren’t entirely in my control, including my own skin. When I smiled, it felt like someone else smiling with my face. My voice seemed to come from somewhere outside of me, like ventriloquism.
I brushed my lips ever so lightly over his ear, and said, “I’m a girl who wants to be f**ked by her teacher.”
His dick strained against his fly.
“Is the door locked?” he said.
“Yes.”
He slipped his hand between my legs. I wore jeans, too, and his heat radiated through the tight denim and seeped into my blood. We’d done this so many times now it shouldn’t have felt so new. It shouldn’t have made my heart go haywire, fluttering wildly, erratically, as if he’d never touched me before. But he hadn’t. Not as Mr. Wilke, not here. This was what we kept dancing around. That no matter who we were outside, in here we were teacher and student.
His other hand slid inside the waist of my jeans. Where our skin met felt like nerves short-circuiting, fuses popping. It filled my belly with static and made me lift up onto my toes, my back arching against the whiteboard. The class was dark, but all someone had to do was peer through the pane in the door and see Mr. Wilke pressing a student to the board. He unbuttoned my fly at the same time his thumb rubbed firmly against the crotch of my jeans and I clutched his collar, gasping. No wrapping myself around him. Avoid anything identifiable from this angle. He pulled my zipper down slowly and it felt like he was opening my skin.
Then he stopped. His palm rested atop my belly.
“We do this every day and no one notices,” I whispered. “No one will notice if we go a little farther.”
I started to unzip him and he grabbed my hand. Moved it to my side, held it there, and put his other hand inside my underwear. My pulse trilled. I looked up at him and his face was blurry with shadow.
“Let me touch you,” I said.
“Shut your mouth.”
My eyes widened. My breath was coming so, so fast. Hot fingers glided over the smooth coolness of my skin, slipping lower until they reached the part of me that burned, too. He put his mouth near my ear.
“Spread your legs.”
I did, my heart wild. He was telling me what to do, like a teacher. My teacher.
He traced me, light and soft, sending ribbons of electricity up into my belly. My jeans were so tight that his palm rubbed against my cl*t every time he moved. God, f**king sweet agony. When his finger finally parted my lips I was so wet it slid along the inner edge effortlessly, and I sighed, half miserable, half blissful. Adrenaline sizzled in my veins. I was waiting for footsteps in the hall, a knock at the door, a gasping face. It felt so f**king wrong to be doing this, so gloriously f**king wrong. I tried to move my arm and his grip tightened, pinning me to the board. He was so slow, so meticulous it drove me crazy, tracing, teasing, until I realized I’d bared my teeth and was grimacing at him, and when he slid his finger inside of me it felt like a pain being soothed, a raw place being pressed closed. I almost told him to stop. Anxiety and tension and want were mixing in an unpleasant way. But as his finger f**ked me the anxiety sweetened, and I wrapped a fist in his shirt and raised my h*ps toward his hand, and he lowered his face to my mouth and said, “You feel so f**king good,” but didn’t kiss me, just shared my breath. He went in to the knuckle, and then he slid another finger inside, and I put my palms against the whiteboard and tried not to cry out. I thought of the class that had been here twenty minutes ago, Wesley and Hiyam and the rest of them sitting ten feet from where we stood now, not knowing Mr. Wilke and I f**ked the shit out of each other almost every day, not knowing he was going to f**k me right here while their chairs were still warm, that I was going to come in the same place he’d stood and lectured, that I was going to come all over that big, gentle hand inside of me.