Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (23 page)

The guy at the desk called after me to stop, but I didn’t listen. I was out the door and on the sidewalk. I was running, I was running as fast as I could. I didn’t slow down until I had turned the corner onto Church Street, that outdoor pedestrian mall, and the only reason I went from sprinting to jogging was because it was too crowded to run like a crazy person on the bricks. I went past the restaurants and bars where people were eating and drinking like it was just another night at the end of June, but nothing was really registering. I had no idea what I was going to do. But then I thought of Andrea. I remembered the statue of the kids playing leapfrog and figured it would be a miracle if she was actually sitting on the bench beside it at that exact moment, but it was still light out so you never knew. And I didn’t have anyplace else to go. So I continued down Church Street and, miracle of miracles, there she was. She was sitting on the bench by the statue and sharing a cigarette with a guy who I’d learn in a couple of minutes was called PJ. Poacher Junior.

I was out of breath, but I nodded at her and said, “Hey.”

She looked at me, and for a split second I could tell she wasn’t completely sure how she knew me. I wondered if she was stoned. But then it all clicked: “Abby, right? From the shelter?”

“Right,” I said. “My name is Abby Bliss.” I was about to say something like
The shelter kicked me out
or
I think I need a little help
, but Andrea beat me to it.

“You need a place to crash,” she said. “That it?”

I started to cry. (See what I mean about what a basket case I’d become? Eleven months earlier I was keying a Beemer SUV. Now? I’m sobbing because someone is willing to share her very crappy mattress with me.)

“Whoa, now,” Andrea said, and she stood up and hugged me. Then she motioned for the dude beside her to get off his ass and wrap his arms around me, too. “Group hug, baby girl,” she said to me. “Group hug.”

For my seventeenth birthday, I bought myself my very own X-Acto knife and a squeeze bottle of Bactine at the drugstore on Cherry Street. I didn’t even lift them. Paid cash because these were supposed to be presents. No one in the posse knew it was my birthday. I didn’t tell anyone.

It was getting cold now, so people were spending more time than ever inside at Poacher’s, which meant there was, like, no privacy. PJ and Missy were gone by then, but other kids had shown up. Kids came and went all the time. So I took my birthday presents to myself and a couple of Andrea’s Band-Aids from her kit and went to the mall. I camped out in a stall in the ladies’ bathroom and pulled down my pants, and there I tried to cut the numbers 1 and 7 into my thighs. It was just a mess. I was just a mess. I mean it: I was never much of a visual artist.

Different people have tried to explain to me why I cut, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain it. I kind of hated myself. I kind of hated the way I was making so many seriously bad decisions.
Maybe if the Red Cross had still had that tent in City Hall Park, I would have gone to them and said to whoever was there, “Hi, my name’s Emily Shepard. What’s yours?” Sure, I would have wound up in a foster home somewhere, but would that really have been any worse than what I was doing? (When I wrote that sentence just now, I meant it rhetorically. But, in all fairness, it is more complicated than that. Just think of the crap that poor Cameron endured. Then add to that how much people hated my family. And, of course, there was still my fear of what the investigators would want to know about my mom and dad.) But going to the Red Cross wasn’t even an option anymore, because by then that tent was long gone.

Just so you know, the only time I actually tried to carve numbers or letters into my skin was the day I turned seventeen. Yup, happy birthday to me.

Chapter 12

Like I said
, I do not believe that my dad was drunk the morning of the meltdown.

He might have been hungover, but I honestly don’t believe even that was the case. My parents hadn’t drunk all that much the night before. And given the amount those two could put away, I have to believe they had a pretty impressive tolerance.

But there had been times in the past when my dad had had alcohol on his breath at the plant and people had noticed—at least once with serious repercussions. It happened not quite two years before the meltdown. He was sent home from work (“escorted off site” was the way they put it). As part of the you-fucked-up-in-a-dangerous-business protocol, he was suspended without pay for a month and forced to see a shrink; he had to pee in a cup whenever they asked for the next twelve months. (And I have a feeling they asked a lot.) In other words, this was way more than a write-up in his personnel file. The plant had been required to rat my dad out to the NRC.

After the meltdown, the newspeople had a field day with this—which made me feel like even more of a loser than usual. Why? Because the day my dad was walked from his office to his car and my mom had to drive him home was the day after I got caught kind of skinny-dipping with boys at the pond behind Hillary Lamb’s house. I say “kind of skinny-dipping” because I kept my bottoms on. Hillary did, too. But the other two girls, who were both a year old than us, didn’t. And the boys who were there
were all butt-naked. (Would I have taken my bottoms off eventually? Probably. But I hadn’t yet. And would it have been a big deal if I had? Probably not. It was a big pond and it was nighttime.) There were eight of us, total, and we all got in trouble when Hillary’s mom and dad got home about nine-thirty at night. The fact that there were empty beer bottles everywhere and a bonfire we weren’t keeping a super close eye on didn’t help. I think we would have gotten in even more trouble if it hadn’t been August, a month when teenagers are supposed to do stupid shit. But it’s not like we were having sex. It’s not like we were even planning on having sex. At least I wasn’t. This wasn’t an orgy or something gross. We were just naked or almost naked teenagers and it was dark out.

I was about to start tenth grade. To be honest, I have no idea what I was thinking. I have no idea what any of us were thinking.

You know that expression “You’re driving me to drink”? Who knows? Maybe I really did drive my parents to drink.

Sometimes I’m excellent with dates. Other times, not so much.

Turning seventeen—and, I guess, the way I turned seventeen—kind of sent me into a spiral. I was smoking a lot more dope and swallowing a lot more painkillers. Poacher was either awesome or satanic, depending on your perspective. The minute I got home, he would reach into the pocket of that leather vest he loved or his army jacket—which he wore a lot because we kept the heat set at something like refrigerator at his apartment—and open one of his little orange prescription vials.

Anyway, I do not know the exact date of what I’m about to tell you, but it was a few weeks after Thanksgiving. Church Street was beautiful because all the restaurants and stores were decorated with Christmas lights, and the north end of the mall, not all that far from the shelter, had a massive Christmas tree. It was gorgeous. The only tree I’d ever seen that was bigger (and, in all fairness, it
was a
lot
bigger) was the one at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Still, the one on Church Street wasn’t shabby.

Once I was properly medicated, Poacher said I should take a shower. Taking a shower usually meant money was tight and he needed Andrea and me to work the truckers out by the interstate. I nodded and threw my coat in the corner by the kitchen where we tossed pretty much everything we wore outside. Coats. Sweaters. Boots. Some days, it was a pretty nasty-smelling pile.

“Andrea around?” I asked. Once before I’d gone out to Exit 14 by my lonesome, but I was really uncomfortable and kind of scared. I felt much safer when I had Andrea with me.

“Nope,” he answered. That was it. But I had this feeling he had been about to say more and decided to stop himself.

“Will she be back soon?”

“Nope,” he said again.

Trevor and Joseph were on the couch machine-gunning zombies on Xbox, but Trevor jumped in. He didn’t take his eyes off the TV and stop shooting things, but he said, “Her mom showed up. That chick is long gone.”

Poacher glared at Trevor, but he didn’t say anything. Sometimes, when I look back, I think Poacher was a little scared of the boys. At some point we all saw right through him—I guess we all live a little transparently—but he did give us a roof and a place where we could crash.

“She went with her mom?” I asked Trevor. I was shocked and a little bewildered. “She hates her mom!”

“She did not leave with her mom,” Poacher said, and he said it like he was protective of Andrea and would never have let her leave with her mom. “I warned her that her mom was coming before her mom got here. So Andrea split. She’s just not here.”

“Never coming back,” Trevor said.

“She will,” Poacher insisted. “She’s just lying low.”

“Where is she?” I know I sounded pretty shrill. Pretty manic. But I was suddenly really freaked out that my friend was gone. I was kind of panicked, which was no small accomplishment since
I had just popped a couple of Oxies and the apartment reeked of dope. You’d think the stench alone could mellow you out. “Tell me, where is she?”

“Hey, Abby, no need for that tone,” Poacher said, and he put his hands on my upper arms in a way that he probably thought was fatherly. “She’s fine.”

“But she is gone,” Trevor chimed in, clearly relishing Poacher’s discomfort and my angst. Meanwhile, all kinds of shit was exploding on the TV screen. I couldn’t stand it. So I pulled Poacher’s fingers off the sleeves of my shirt and marched over to the couch. As if Trevor’s hands and the Xbox controller were a game of Whac-A-Mole, I used my fist to whack the plastic onto the floor. It didn’t break, which in hindsight is a good thing, but still Trevor screamed at me.

“What the fuck!” he yelled, and for some reason Joseph started laughing. (Actually, I don’t know why I just wrote
for some reason
. The reason is probably that Joseph was stoned.) Still, it was Joseph who bent over and reached down and picked up the controller. He inspected it to make sure it was still working and then handed it to Trevor.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Trevor ranted. “Why? I’m not the one who peaced out on you! I’m not the one who split!”

He didn’t get off his ass on the couch, but he was sitting forward because he’d been scorching zombies and shit. I was standing over him. I wanted to shove him into the cushions in the back of the couch. I didn’t. But I might have if Poacher hadn’t come up behind me and said, his voice this weird and pathetic attempt to sound paternal, “Abby, what’s gotten into you?”

I could feel my face reddening. Suddenly I couldn’t stand how greasy my hair was. How filthy Poacher’s beard was. How our whole world smelled like weed: vaguely skunky and pungent like field grass. I pushed past him and dug my coat from the pile. I looked back at him and asked, making no attempt at all to speak like a human being rather than the stoner banshee I was, “Did she say where she was going?”

Poacher had decided his
Father Knows Best
gig wasn’t going to play and so he just shook his head. He looked pretty disgusted with me. “Nope,” he said finally.

So I went back out onto the streets to see if I could find her. I thought it was just perfect that Trevor shouted after me, “She took her shit, Abby, she’s gone!” while Poacher was saying, “Young lady, you come back! You come back here right now! You have work to do!”

Yeah, right. Work to do.

I did find Andrea. She was at the bus station, which is actually a part of the Burlington airport. We said good-bye. I’ll tell you about it later, but I can’t right now. It just makes me too sad.