my room, and when she came to check on me she seemed surprised to find me lying on my bed, fl ipping through one of her art books.
19
I suppose given everything she and Dad were forced to realize once they had to face up to the fact that, “hey, we have a kid and she’s really messed up,” she expected to find me squatting on my bed cutting my hair with nail scissors or something.
I sort of wished I’d obliged her. Their whole trying-to-care thing is too strange.
Anyway, she did the “I care” thing, sat down next to me, and said, “I have a better book about that period.
Would you like to see it?”
“No,” I said. I was looking at the book because it was Julia’s favorite, the one she always flipped through after she came over and smoked a joint out the attic window and then bitched at me for never doing it with her. Pot never made me mellow like it did her. It just made me hungry and tired.
“Well, would you like to go somewhere?”
“No,” I said again, and she frowned and asked me if I wanted a cigarette.
I said, “What?”
“Well,” she said. “Every time your father and I visited you at—at Pinewood, you always smelled like smoke. And I know that . . . I know giving up drinking has been hard, and I don’t want you to think that your 20
father and I don’t understand that. So if you want, we could set up a little area outside, maybe near the edge of my flower garden, and you could—”
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, and then sat there looking at me.
I stared at the book. What did Julia see in the pictures?
I wish I’d asked her. I thought about what she’d say if I had until Mom left.
I wanted Mom to say, “Why don’t you smoke?”
I wanted to tell her I used to, that Julia and I started the summer her mom threatened to send Julia to stay with her aunt because she was being more paranoid than usual.
(Just thinking about J’s imitation of her mother’s “Are you on DRUGS?” speech makes me smile.)
I wanted to tell Mom I stopped because the night I looked into Julia’s unseeing eyes I had a cigarette in my hand, that despite everything it was still between my fi ngers, the red tip sparking faintly, just waiting for me to breathe it back to life. All around us, the air smelled like burned rubber and cracked metal, and my cigarette still glowed as the world ended.
I haven’t smoked since. I learned to live with the sight and smell of them at Pinewood even though I went out of my way to avoid it, always making sure I 21
washed my clothes if they started to smell, and lather-ing my hair until my fingers were numb and smelled of nothing but cheap shampoo. And the thought of having one, of breathing in and out and watching it burn—I could never do that again. Not now. Not ever.
22
82 days
J,
I’m sitting in the bathroom. The teachers’ bathroom, even. You remember the signs, and how they’d glare if it looked like we might walk near it. It’s not much nicer than our bathrooms though, which surprised me. You’d think all the glaring would at least protect something interesting.
I’m pretty sure as long as I don’t move, as long as I stay right here, invisible—well, if I do that, I think my fi rst day at school will be just fi ne.
Mrs. Griggles was the guidance counselor me and Mom had to see. She actually tried to look happy when we showed up. She ended up looking like someone had shoved a lemon in her mouth. Good old Giggles. (I wish 23
you’d been there to call her that. I could never work up the nerve.) I thought she was going to explode when she saw the suggested class schedule Pinewood had put together for me. I kind of thought I might explode.
One of the things I had to do at Pinewood was take a bunch of tests. You know, in case I was “developmentally damaged” from drinking. I refused to see the results—
what did they matter? The only thing I like is words, and English in Lawrenceville County schools is all about stomping the enjoyment of them out of you. School is a waste of time, and school without you wasn’t something I wanted to think about, but apparently I’m not developmentally damaged at all. In fact, I may have started drinking because I “wasn’t challenged enough in class.” I bet you anything Laurie wrote that. Pen clicking idiot.
So anyway, instead of my normal schedule of study halls and low expectations, I’m taking honors English, honors U.S. history, honors physics, French, math analy-sis, and psychology. (I smell Laurie in that one too.) When Giggles was reading the list I tried to say, “No, I don’t want this,” but my throat had dried up, and when I glanced at my mother she looked like a stranger.
For a second, I forgot and looked around for you, because when I’m in Giggles’s office it’s always with you.
It was always with you. God, J.
been there, but you weren’t. You never will be again.
