Sliding Into Home (7 page)

He laughed in my face, and the whole class laughed with him.

“Do you really think you can be a marine biologist?” he asked in front of the whole class.

I wasn’t embarrassed. I was mad. I got up and threw my chair to the ground. “Fuck you, motherfucker!” I screamed before storming out of class.

I didn’t care who pissed me off—I never backed down. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit there and take this from him.

When my mom heard what happened she was on my side. She charged into the school yelling and screaming, livid that a teacher would crush a little girl’s dreams like that when he should’ve been motivating kids like me and pointing us in the right direction.

I think he eventually apologized, but the damage was done. Between the math teacher giving me good grades for being cute and the other teacher never even giving me a chance to succeed, I quickly lost interest in school again. No one there was supporting me. Sure, my mom would fight for me, but I needed more than that. I needed to
feel like I could do something with my life. I needed a reason to be in school, and I just couldn’t find one.

Around then I was introduced to a second bad group of kids. I met them through school. A few of them went to Clairemont, but some of them were older. They all hung out at “the square”—an outdoor mall/movie theater near the high school—and they were all trouble.

My old group from the apartment was into drugs and just chilling, and I still hung out with them from time to time. But this new group was into doing drugs and tagging their names on walls, breaking shit, and fighting. They were a rough crew. I liked being tough—no one is going to tell a girl anything she doesn’t want to hear if she’s in the tough crowd.

My new group wasn’t really a gang, but it was pretty close. On a typical night out with them, I’d ask my mom to drop me off at the movies, and instead of actually seeing a movie I would go around back and watch them spray-paint their tags on the wall behind the theater. I never did the tagging. I couldn’t—literally; I was terrible with the spray can. But I liked being part of the group and I thought the graffiti was cool. I also liked that with these people behind me, nobody could fuck with me.

This group did drugs, too, and along with coke they did crystal meth. Crystal was harder, dirtier, and more powerful. I went to a party with them one night and they were all smoking it. They offered me some, so I took it (I wasn’t really one to say no to anything). I inhaled the crystal meth and within seconds my heart was pounding. I felt unstoppable—like I could knock down a wall with my bare hands. I was like the Incredible Hulk trapped inside a five-foot-four, 115-pound girl. It felt good, but I also felt a little gross when I came down, sweaty and dirty, and saw the sunrise. I was talking fast, I
got paranoid, and in general I felt like a crackhead. When I ran out of people to talk to I found a piece of paper and wrote down all my thoughts.

After running into my friend Sarah that night, I ended up sleeping at her house. She was in the crew with Brittany, and she only sometimes hung out with the tagger guys, but I needed a place to crash so Sarah invited me over. I was wired, though, so while she was sleeping I wrote her an eight-page letter about our friendship. It was nuts. I literally couldn’t catch my breath all night. When the sun came up and I was still awake, I felt awful, just completely out of control.

But even with all the bad feelings that came from doing crystal that night, as soon as I was back in a position to do it again, I did. I didn’t get addicted, though. I did a lot of crystal, but in my head I knew I could stop whenever I wanted to. I just didn’t see a reason for stopping yet.

I started dating a guy in the group named Tony. He was a tall, dark, skinny half-Mexican guy with short brown hair. He wore baggy clothes, smoked cigarettes, and was one of the leaders of the tagger group. No one messed with him—he would knock someone out just for looking at him funny. He was tough and powerful, and I thought that was pretty hot. He was nineteen and I was fourteen and I thought we made a good couple.

One night I met Tony in a park where we sometimes went to drink and smoke weed, and we had sex on a park bench.

It was the first time I’d had sex since I lost my virginity with my buddy from seventh grade. Only a year and a half had passed, but I was a world away from where I was back then. I was now doing any drug I could get my hands on and having sex out in the open, and none of it seemed unnatural.

From that night on, I went everywhere with Tony. We did lots of drugs and had lots of sex. I wasn’t quite sure if I enjoyed the sex. Most of the time I would have sex just to have it; it was more of an ego boost than anything.

I changed my look drastically that year. I shaved my eyebrows and drew them in, gelled my hair down, and overall looked pretty scary. I’d walk around the hallways at school thinking I was so cool, knowing my new group had my back so I could do whatever I wanted.

This sense of freedom allowed me to experiment not only with drugs, but also with different relationships without caring what other people thought about me.

One day I was eating lunch at school with a group of people and I told them I was frustrated with Tony and how he was treating me that day. I said I was tired of dealing with him and announced to the crowd, “I’m sick of guys; I just want to be a lesbian.”

Out of nowhere, one girl in the group looked up at me and said, “Me, too.”

I didn’t think she was serious and she didn’t think I was serious, but both of us
were
serious, and once we figured that out we gave it a shot and started dating. I was into sports and got along with guys better than I did with girls, so I felt like a boy sometimes and thought maybe I could be a little bit of a lesbian. Plus, I was curious and I’m an open person, so I thought,
Why not give it a try?
I could take a few weeks off from Tony and he wouldn’t even notice.

She was cool, too. We got to know each other a little and started holding hands around school. We got so much attention for that; people would point and stare, and we loved it.

After school we would make out and fool around. She was a little
girl, but she was crazy, and a total partier. We had a lot in common. One time we had a threesome with a guy and we both had a lot of fun.

We liked each other, but our relationship lasted only a few weeks because after the threesome I realized I missed guys. After we broke up I found out that she was hooking up with her ex-boyfriend behind my back the entire time. What the fuck was that about?

One guy who stepped in whenever I didn’t like Tony for a week or I decided I wasn’t a lesbian was Mark, who I secretly dated on and off through the beginning of high school. He was a tall black guy who looked exactly like Dave Chappelle. He was my baby, but our relationship was always on the down-low. After school, on days when Tony wasn’t around, he and I would go around the corner, smoke a blunt, and go to his place and have sex. He had a good heart and the biggest penis in the whole world. The sex was great.

I took him to a couple of school dances, because Tony would never go, and people thought we were an odd couple—a short little blonde girl and a big-ass black guy—and even though we swore to everyone we were just friends, I loved him. Sadly, Mark died in a car accident in 2008. I’ll always have a place in my heart for him, and looking back I wish I had gotten into a real relationship with him because instead of taking him seriously I spent more time with Tony, which was not a good move.

Whenever I’d meet up with Tony we’d go off somewhere and cause trouble. If his crew ran into another crew a fight would almost always break out. The guys loved to throw down. I wasn’t into the drama, but at the same time, I’d rather be with the kids doing the punching than with the kids getting their faces bloodied.

Tony and I had been hanging out for a few months when one
night we were walking down a side street to meet some friends at the park and all of a sudden cops showed up out of nowhere. It was like a scene from a movie. One second everything was calm and the next three cop cars with their lights blazing and sirens blasting cornered us in a parking lot.

I freaked. I had no clue what was going on, and put my hands up as the cops instructed.

Tony was a tough guy who never showed any emotion. I knew he had feelings for me even though he never acted like it. But at that moment, for one second, he had a heart. He turned to me and said, “You need to stay away from all this. You’re better than this.”

Those words ran through my brain in slow motion. I
was
better than this. He was right. While I was still processing what he said, he turned to me again and said, “Go have a good life,” and bolted off.

The cops ran after him, leaving me in the parking lot all alone for a minute or two. Soon after, a cop came back and put me in his car. I heard on the radio that they caught Tony and that he pulled a knife on the cops before they wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him. I’m not a hundred percent sure what it was he was being picked up for, but the list of potential reasons is pretty endless. He went to jail for a while.

Inside the car, the cop and his partner were trying to get me to talk but I wouldn’t. They were asking me who all of these people were, and I knew them all, but I didn’t rat them out. We even drove by the house the group would hang out in and I wouldn’t back down. Just like when my mom dragged me into juvenille hall, I didn’t fear the
authorities. But I did duck down when the cops drove past the house where all the kids hung out. Those people I was afraid of.

The cops eventually drove me home, told me I was too young to be out on the streets at that hour—there was a teen curfew at the time—and left me with my mom, who of course was furious. I had lied to her about where I was going that night in the first place, so coming home in the back of a cop car wasn’t exactly what she was expecting.

I went back to the group’s hangout spot a few months later and everyone in the house yelled at me and threatened to kick my ass. They thought I was a rat and had something to do with Tony getting arrested. I would never do that, and I told them so, but they didn’t believe me. I didn’t care. Tony was right: I was better than that.

While I knew I was better than that, my mom wasn’t so convinced. She grounded me for what seemed like a lifetime.

I wasn’t ready for that kind of punishment. Freshman year was ending and there was no way I was going to spend my summer locked up in that house. So the night after Tony got arrested, I packed a bag and ran away. Of course, I went back to Brittany’s house; this time my mom didn’t come running for me. I still went to school enough days to finish the year with barely passing grades.

Brittany’s family let me stay into the summer and they treated me really well, though I never asked them for anything. I felt bad even taking a shower at their house.

Hygiene was the least of my worries, anyway. Even though I was done hanging out with that crew of rough kids, I was still very heavy
into crystal meth that summer. I could get it pretty easily; I was back hanging out with the guys from the apartment complex, and one of the guy’s brothers who lived a block away always had crystal, so I had easy access.

I spent my days doing coke at the apartment and occasionally going to this guy’s house to smoke meth. Sometimes I still hung out with Brittany, but plenty of times I was on my own, bouncing around from one place to another, doing as many drugs as I could get my hands on.

Despite my erratic behavior that summer I started dating my dream guy. He had just graduated and all year I had watched him hold hands with his girlfriend during school and sit in the grass eating lunch with her while I fantasized that he and I were sharing a tuna fish sandwich instead.

They broke up early that summer and we connected at a party in town.

He was a cute, blond-haired surfer who drove a little Volks-wagen Beetle and spent his days at the beach perfecting his tan. He was a really good guy and he treated me well. He’d pick me up from Brittany’s house and take me on real dates. I didn’t go with him to watch him beat people up or steal something from a quickie-mart. He was a gentleman, not a slimeball like most of the guys I’d been with, and I liked that. Plus, we looked really good together.

He smoked weed but didn’t do any other drugs. A part of me wished I could be like that, but another side of me knew that weed wouldn’t be enough.

When I wasn’t with him I was out doing crystal or coke. He would pick me up from Brittany’s or from some party and not realize I was on drugs. I didn’t lie to him; he just never really asked. That
worked out fine when I was staying at Brittany’s house, but when her family went to Texas for a two-week summer vacation and I stayed with him and his dad, my habit became harder to hide.

Mr. Perfect worked at Outback Steakhouse, and when he was there I would use that free time to do more drugs. If he was working at night, I would go to a party and come home all messed up after he’d gone to sleep. I’d just sit in bed next to him, wired out of my mind, until the sun came up.