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 coupl
e 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.
Someday I should rewrite this whole mess. Try to put it in some kind of order.
Someday I should probably do lots of things.
Sometimes it was the strangest things that would bring Cape Abenaki back into the news my last weeks at Poacher’s. In one case, it was nosebleeds. There were six little kids from the elementary school in Newport who all wound up in the same elementary school in Hanover, New Hampshire. They were in four different grades, but they all traipsed into the nurse’s office over the course of three or four school days in the middle of December for the same thing: nosebleeds that just didn’t want to stop. When the nurse realized they were all from Newport, she did a little research and figured out in about a nanosecond that a nosebleed was sometimes a sign of radiation sickness. The kids—all the kids from that school up in Newport—had been stuck outside in the rain after the explosion longer than a lot of the evacuees because all the emergency vehicles had created a gigundous traffic jam, and it took forever for their school buses to arrive. Before you knew it, someone had figured out that a whole lot of kids from the Kingdom had “compromised” immune systems. They were always sick, and they were always getting colds. Out of the blue, a lot of New Agers wanted everyone drinking tea made from echinacea, and a lot of doctors wanted everyone on vitamin C and orange juice.
A few days after the nosebleed story broke, I got a nosebleed. I wondered if I had radiation sickness and got a little worried. But I didn’t have any other symptoms—which, trust me, are unbelievably gross—and so I decided it was just because the night before Poacher had had me sniff a little white for the first time.
“Hoarding and territorial issues. Predictable schism between haves and have-nots. Emily exudes education. Speaks like a have, aura’s a have. It probably made her a target in the shelter. Probably why she was bullied onto the street.”
I saw that written in one of the notebooks about me the other day. It made me feel bad about myself—like I had been putting on airs back at the shelter and deserved to be kicked out. I wanted to tell my therapist here, “If I’m that kind of a snot, how come everyone in the posse liked me?”
But I took a deep breath and chilled and kept that thought to myself. I was tired of confronting people. I guess I figured I had already caused everyone enough trouble. I guess I figured I had already done enough damage.
I left the posse for good on Christmas Day. The juxtaposition of my life that morning and my life on Christmas mornings past was just too fucking awful. A year earlier, I had given my mom and dad a poster I’d had made at the photo store in Newport. I gave the store all these pictures of the three of us on Christmas mornings going all the way back to when I was a little kid in Briarcliff and a couple of stanzas from an Emily Dickinson poem:
Before the ice is in the pools,
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow,
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!
A girl who worked at the store created a collage around the poem, and it really looked pretty good. There was one picture of my Maggie as a puppy, and her paw pads were massive, way too big for the rest of her, and the girl had positioned the photo so it looked like Maggie was pointing at the words. Then she edged the collage with gold Christmas foil and put it inside a red frame. There is no way I could have done something like that myself. My mom and dad loved it. I think it was by far their favorite thing I ever gave them.
But when I thought about that present—and, yeah, all the stuff they had given me over the years—I couldn’t help but compare it with the sinkhole my life had become. I’m not trying to get your sympathy: I knew that the meltdown had made lots of people’s lives suck. Exhibit A? I may have been the only kid to wind up an orphan because of Cape Abenaki, but seventeen grown-ups died in addition to my mom and dad, and twelve of them had children who were still living at home. Altogether, twenty-seven other kids lost a parent in the explosion. And then there were the thousands of people who were suddenly homeless: over thirteen thousand, according to one report.
But how could I not think of where I had been a year earlier and the collage I had given my parents? How could I not think of all the images on the poster from all those other Christmases? Maybe I would have stayed with the posse if Andrea had stuck around. But she was gone. Who knows? Maybe I would have hung around another couple of months if Missy’s parents hadn’t brought her home to Concord. But they had.
So I left. I was terrified by what I saw in the mirror. I was disgusted by what I’d become.
Looking back, I was waffling between suicide and survival. One minute I was leaving with every intention of giving up somewhere on the streets. Seriously: just giving up. I’d simply freeze to death like that poor guy in all the snow in the Jack London short story. It wasn’t the worst way to die—at least it wasn’t for that dude. It was better than radiation sickness or cancer, right? But then the next minute I would be thinking how I was going to fuck the world by surviving. Take that, Fate, I’m still here. You thought you could kill me? No way. I am unkillable. It takes more than a nuclear meltdown to plant me six feet under.
I was the first member of the posse to wake up that Christmas morning, and I remember sitting up on my mattress and looking around at the room and thinking how squ
alid it was. Everything looked way worse simply because it was Christmas. Things are supposed to be special on Christmas, right? But the room was dingy and skanky and smelled kind of like a locker room and kind of like a head shop because we’d been burning incense the night before. After all, the night before was Christmas Eve. We didn’t have a tree or lights, but Joseph had lifted a pack of incense from the place in the North End where we always lifted our papers and pipes. (Incidentally, there’s no symbolism in the fact that I just used Joseph’s name and I’m telling you my Christmas story. Trust me, there’s no symbolism in any of this. It’s all just what happened.)
My room back in Reddington had always been a colossal mess, too, but it was a different kind of mess. First of all, there’s a difference between unclean and messy. My room was messy, but it wasn’t gross. There was stuff everywhere, but it was always clean. And—and this is important—it was all my stuff. When I would sit up in bed (which was, of course, a real bed and not just a mattress) and look at the floor, the carpet was covered by my high heels and my hoodies and my coat hangers and my earrings and my blue jeans and my blouses and my dresses and my DVDs and the snakelike cords for my broken iPods and my old cell phones. Those were my old Cosmopolitan and Elle magazines. Those were my posters I had tacked to the yellow rose wallpaper. That was my Disney glass unicorn. That was my glass pen with a gold-plated nib. (I didn’t really write with it because this isn’t, like, the sixteenth century. But it was very beautiful.) Those were my leather journals where I wrote my poems and my observations that—to be honest—always seemed a lot more profound at nighttime than they did in the morning. Sometimes there was some dog hair on my things in the spring when Maggie would shed, but, seriously, a little dog hair was about as dirty as my room ever got.