Incidentally, I did not learn any of this in biology in ninth grade. I learned it in middle school in sixth grade. Foliage season is a big money maker in Vermont, and so we learn about leaves young here. We use a thesaurus to find words to describe it: words like the one I just used, “phantasmagoric.” Or—another favorite word of mine—“luminescent.”
In any case, the adults seemed to be talking a lot that autumn about the effect of nuclear fallout on the fall foliage season. Supposedly, the leaves inside the Exclusion Zone were as colorful as the tropical fish that nose around the world’s most exotic coral reefs. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It wouldn’t be until the following year, long after Poacher and the posse and Andrea and Cameron, that I’d go back—that I’d go home.
And, by then, the prettiest color was rust.
Chapter 6
Libby Dunbar had way more important things to do than to watch over me. And so when she decided—kind of mistakenly, in hindsight—that I was cool, she concluded that she had to do two things: She had to find someone else to look out for me. And she had to get me moved far away from the meltdown zone. She sure as hell had to get me out of the staging area. So she told me to wait where I was and she’d be right back. Honestly, I have no idea what she thought she was going to do, but she left me alone while she tried to solve the little problem that was … me. Here is basically our conversation just before she left. (As you can see, I didn’t help matters by lying.)
LIBBY: And you have no idea where the rest of the students from Reddington Academy have been taken?
ME: No.
LIBBY: You just didn’t get on any of the buses when they came to your school.
ME: I wanted to find my mom and dad.
LIBBY: I understand. And you said your grandmother has Alzheimer’s and your grandfather lives in Phoenix.
ME: Yup.
LIBBY: And you have no aunts or uncles.
ME: Nope.
LIBBY: Which I guess means you have no cousins.
ME: I guess.
LIBBY: Your friend—this Lisa Current—
ME: Curran.
LIBBY: Right. Curran. You’re friends with the whole family?
ME: Uh-huh.
LIBBY: Okay. Let me see if I can find Lisa’s mom and dad.
Given that she was pretty sure my parents were dead (God, that’s an awful thing to write), it was pretty clear that she had no plans to have me sent wherever the rest of Reddington Academy was holed up. It really made no sense to just drop me into a sea of high school students who were already wigging out. But I wasn’t wild about the idea of spending the rest of the day alone in an assistant principal’s office while she tried to find Lisa Curran’s mom. I felt that I had to do something. Anything. I couldn’t just sit there.
So I left. According to one of my therapists, this was “a manifestation of a kindling PTSD.” (I thought that was kind of poetic when I read it.) It “presented” with “an exaggerated fight/flight mentality.” Apparently, I chose “flight.”
Still, I remember when I stood up to leave, I told myself that I was only going to see if she had any tampons in her purse (which she did) and go to the bathroom. Then I might walk from the office to the end of the hallway and peek back into the gym. That’s all. Watch the madness there for a moment or two. I actually thought to myself, You need to be back here when Libby returns. But when I got to the gym and saw all that chaos, I gave myself permission to go to those double doors that opened out onto the parking lot and the athletic fields. And then, when I saw it had stopped raining, I had to walk out there. When was the last time any of us had stood outside and not gotten wet? It had been days. Seriously, it had been raining practically nonstop for days! So I did, fallout be damned. I went outside. I mean, it wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. There were other people out there. Granted, they were trying to cover themselves with anything they could find, using newspapers and trash bags if necessary. But still: they were out there.
I have absolutely no sense of direction, and so I had no idea which way was north: the direction of the power plant and my home. My house. My dog. Maybe if it had been sunny I could have figured it out, but, really, even that wouldn’t have helped all that much. As you might have guessed, I was a pretty lousy Brownie and never spent even a second of my life as a Girl Scout. Besides, it wasn’t sunny. And so I just started walking across the parking lot, past the cruisers and fire engines and camo-colored National Guard trucks. I was midway to the entrance to the school when I overheard a group of the guardsmen talking under a tent. I stopped and listened, which looking back was a big mistake. There were four of them and they were wearing hazmat suits, but they had pulled off the hoods and were drinking bottled water. They were covered in sweat and looked pretty beaten.
“It’s like pilot error,” one of the guys was saying. “Operator error is the term. Whatever his name—Shepard—fucked up.”
“His wife is the spokesperson for the plant, you know,” someone else said. “Pretty despicable, right? Whole family: fucking despicable.”
“There’ll be a cover-up.”
“You can’t cover up a fucking meltdown.”
“Melt-through.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Besides, the energy company will want this to be human error. If it’s human error, then nuclear power doesn’t look so bad. The industry doesn’t look so bad. And they’re both dead by now. There’s not a lot of collateral damage when you have dead people you can blame.”
“Even his wife? She’s dead, too?”
“The side of the container was gone! Just gone! The surrounding building was, like, rubble. You saw the size of the blast.”
“Someone was saying he was drunk. That true?”
“Yup. I hear they had a daughter. You watch, they’ll make her testify or something. Talk about what an alcoholic her dad was. Make it clear this was all the fault of one idiot drunk.”
“Wow. Where did you hear that?”
I knew I didn’t want to hear any more. I’d heard enough. I started to run, and it was at the edge of the parking lot that I saw a bike leaning up against the side of a fire truck from the village of Barton. So I took it. I just took it—and I was off.
I’m not going to pretend I understand even half of the poems that Emily Dickinson wrote. But when I get them, I get them. I get the rhythms and I get the point:
Life, and Death, and Giants
There’s a lot more, but let’s start with that first line. How can you not love it? How could anyone not love it? Read it aloud:
Life (slight pause) and Death (slight pause) and Giants. I love that capital G.
Or this:
REMEMBRANCE has a rear and front,—
It really does, doesn’t it? Again, that’s just the first line. She goes on to compare remembrance to a house with a garret, and God knows I could use a garret to squirrel away a lot of my crazy mental shit—my crazy mental demons. Actually, I need way more than a garret. I need a self-store garage bay. You know, the ones that always seem to end up having a dead body in them? I practically need a warehouse.
And while I have pretty shamelessly thrown my brain under the bus and blamed it for some of the seriously bad choices I’ve made, I understand that it has its assets, too. It has its moments.
The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.
I love it when therapists talk about boundaries. I really could have used some, right? But how can you fence in a brain? How can you ask a person to rein in something that really is wider than the sky?
Andrea often looked like she’d been sleeping in eyeliner—which sometimes was the case, especially when we crashed after bingeing on OxyContin. But the look kind of worked on her. Even when goth was kind of passé, she could pull it off—I think because it always seemed like she was secretly so vulnerable.
When I look back on m
y days with the posse, I see in my head all of us who crashed at one time or another at Poacher’s. It was not really a wild crowd—it’s not like we were having raucous parties. Mostly we were just trying to survive, and the sex and the drugs and the robberies were not the product of some rager or keg party gone crazy. It was just how we kept a roof over our heads and tried to stay warm until, finally, we just hated ourselves so much—which was a very high bar, trust me—that either we left or we OD’d. The regulars, in addition to Andrea and me, included Missy, who was nineteen and was from Concord, Massachusetts, and came from unbelievable buckets of money. She had a pink sports car when I first moved in—not kidding—a Miata convertible. But one day her dad and mom appeared out of the blue to bring her home, and when she refused, one of them drove home in her car, so we lost that set of wheels. They couldn’t believe what a rat hole their daughter was living in. We couldn’t believe that they found her. She once told me that her house in Concord had six bedrooms and four fireplaces. She did cocaine for a while, which most of us didn’t, because she had the wallet to make cocaine happen. Poacher loved her for that. But it also wasn’t going to last. She claimed her older brothers used to abuse her, which was why she was so fucked up. I never quite believed her. I think, like a lot of us, she was just a head case and made stuff up.
On the other hand, I do believe that Lida, another girl, really had been abused by her stepfather. I don’t think she could have made up the crap she told me. She was my age. After her mom and dad divorced, her mom remarried, and her stepfather turned out to be a total pig. He used to make her suck him off for her allowance, usually in the car after he’d picked her up after softball or field hockey. He got her to do it the first time partly by scaring the shit out of her and partly by seducing her. Of course, the “how” doesn’t really matter. As a kid, once you do something like that, you’re kind of stuck. You feel ashamed and you feel violated and you feel like the worst daughter on the planet. She was eleven years old that first time. She would do it for four more years before she would finally hit the wall and go to her mom. And her mom—who was spineless and pathetic and clearly freaking terrified of her second husband—accused her of lying. Yup, took her husband’s side over her daughter’s. Claimed that Lida was making the whole thing up. As they say, the River Denial is wide. Anyway, once you put something like that out there, you’ve pretty much torched any chance of a relationship with your mom, at least if your mom claims she doesn’t believe you. So Lida ran away.
Poacher’s boys tended to come and go a lot more. Trevor. Joseph. PJ (for Poacher Junior). Trevor and Joseph were older than I was, but PJ was younger. Maybe fourteen. We called him Poacher Junior because his eyes became the same slits as Poacher’s when he was stoned, and his arms got as wobbly as those Styrofoam tubes little kids play with in swimming pools. It was like he had a garden hose for bones. The boys—and they really were like boys; sometimes it was like us girls were their babysitters—could sit around playing Poacher’s Xbox for days. They really could. I think they were as beyond help as the girls, but they didn’t show it. Not really. Teen boys are often more chill than teen girls, but inside they can be just as fucked up.
The big difference is that most of the time the boys could only bring in money by stealing, especially once the teen shelter wouldn’t let them back into the life skills classes. But we girls could actually earn cash. We could earn our keep and our drugs because we had something we could sell. (I know now that boys can do what we did, but back then I didn’t realize there was a market for underage male hookers. In some ways, I guess I was weirdly naïve.)
But once in a while we did break-ins with the boys, which brings me back to Andrea and sleeping in eyeliner and the robbery. The robbery, the one where we all almost got ourselves killed. We’re talking a Bonnie and Clyde kind of cataclysm, minus the guns, because only the police had guns. But it was pretty bad. You get my point.
As I said, Andrea didn’t sleep in eyeliner because she wanted that zombie smudge look. Usually she did it because she just crashed. Boom. Wilted. Out. And the downside to sleeping in eyeliner, aside from the fact that you look like you just got dumped at the prom by your boyfriend and have been sobbing for hours in the bathroom—See? Sometimes I can come up with analogies that are “age appropriate” and not batshit crazy—is that you can get eye infections. And eye infections just suck.
The plan was to break into Missy’s aunt and uncle’s house in Shelburne. Shelburne is a very swanky suburb just south of Burlington. When Missy first left Concord, she was supposed to live with them. That’s how she wound up in Vermont in the first place. The family thought that a change of place might straighten Missy out. (There was another girl like that at the shelter. Like Missy, she needed a lot more than a change of place and a different roof over her head.) The house where her aunt and uncle lived was kind of like mine back in Reddington: unapologetic meadow mansion. It was on a hill that looked out at Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, and it had these awesome ports for iPods on a wall in almost every single room. It was two years old, but it still smelled brand-new. The floors were a beige wood and still shiny as glass. There were white throw rugs and blue throw rugs and huge black-and-white photographs of leaves over the couches and beside the fireplace.
And there was an alarm system, but Missy knew the code to turn it off.
At least she did once.
Or at least she did when she wasn’t high as a kite on Percocet and beer.
You can probably see where this is going.
There were five of us squeezed into Missy’s convertible: Missy and Andrea and Trevor and PJ and me. Ridiculous, I know. I honestly don’t know why Andrea and I were there. I don’t know why PJ was there. It really just should have been Missy and Trevor—or even just Missy, if she was willing to take a few trips.
Even though Missy hadn’t really lived there for two months, the plan was to steal some of her shit, too, so that she could throw a hissy fit and insist that she had had nothing to do with the robbery. We were going to steal a lot of silver and her aunt’s jewelry that we could pawn at a few places in Montreal, and whatever electronics we could fit in the Miata—which, given our brain-dead decision to cram five of us into a car meant for four people, two of whom were clearly supposed to be dwarfs, wasn’t very much.
We went there on a Friday night in October when her aunt and uncle would be at some gala in Burlington for the hospital, where her uncle was a heart surgeon. Her cousins were both away at college, so the house would be empty. We would just drive in, open the front door with Missy’s key, turn off the alarm, and start piling shit into the car. We didn’t even bother to park with the front of the car facing away from the house—you know, in the “getaway” position. We figured the worst that would happen would be Missy’s aunt and uncle not believing her when she said she had nothing to do with the robbery, but we figured they weren’t the type to tell the police they thought their niece was involved.
The alarm system was idiotproof, but we were less than idiots. It was the kind of system that has little boxes on the windows and doors to tell you if one has been opened, and a couple of motion detectors on the ceilings on the first and second floors. When you unlock the door when the system is on, you simply go to a keypad and punch in some numbers, and it turns itself off. You have, like, a minute to punch in the numbers.
The night of the robbery, that minute seemed both like a second and an hour. The keypad was in the front hallway, right beside the switch for the porch and the hall lights, and the minute we open the door and kind of tumble inside, we hear this robotic female voice telling us to deactivate the alarm. At first we’re all laughing because we really are pretty stoned. The voice is straight out of a bad sci-fi drama on Spike. But then it dawns on us that Missy is trying to press the buttons with her gloves on, and she keeps hitting two buttons at once. (Incidentally, we were all wearing gloves. We’d all watched enough TV dramas with cops to know that we didn’t want to have sex on
the beds, use the toilets, or leave fingerprints anywhere. We didn’t want to drop a bottle of pills or a cigarette pack anywhere. In hindsight, Missy didn’t need to wear gloves because her fingerprints were supposed to be all over the house because she’d lived there for a while. But, again, nothing about this robbery was very well thought out.) And so she keeps screwing up the code to disarm the system. Then, maybe because she is wearing gloves so her muscle memory is off, she realizes she has forgotten the code. I’m not making that up. She can’t remember the numbers or the order or even the word the numbers would spell if she were to use the letters beside the numbers on the keypad.
And that’s when the madness really began.
In most ways, I didn’t look or act like a rebellious teenager. Slacker? I guess. Underachiever? Could have been my middle name. But, for instance, I didn’t do a lot of insane shit with my hair. Actually, I didn’t do any, unless you count not washing it for days because you’re homeless or stoned. But a lot of girls like me really make a statement with their hair (and often that statement is somewhere between “I just saw a Tim Burton movie and want to look like Corpse Bride” and “I need serious amounts of help and have no idea how to ask for it”). They shave their heads or they dye their hair or they spike it. They get dreadlocks. They get Mohawks. But that wasn’t my way of trying to get people’s attention. I mean, I’m not even sure I wanted to get people’s attention. I wanted to get my parents to stop drinking. I wanted my parents to be happy. I wanted to figure out why, it seemed to me, my brain didn’t work like everyone else’s.