Her absence gave me a sense of relief and loss. The weight of responsibility had been taken off my hands. I wasn’t doing so good carrying that weight. But it hurt that she just took off. I wanted to see it through, see her recover. I wanted to know she was okay.
Wouldn’t make up for what happened, but at least I’d know.
Then I noticed the money on the dresser, six fifty-dollar bills. What the hell? Why would she leave $300? Where do girls walking down the side of the highway come up with cash like that?
No way in hell Dad would ever leave money laying around, not for me to find, definitely not on my dresser. It had to have been her. She left all that money, either by accident or on purpose.
I didn’t like the idea of her leaving money. What was she paying me for? What did she expect?
The weight of responsibility settled firmly back on my shoulders.
I picked up the money and shoved it in my drawer, and that’s when it hit me.
“Not again.”
I hate that feeling, the sense of vertigo that always accompanies one of my dreams. They weren't really dreams, not exactly, more like waking nightmares. I was loathe to admit what they actually were – visions. To me it seemed a curse. The curse I'd inherited from my mother, rearing its ugly head yet again, slamming all my senses and awareness to another time and place.
It was not exactly pleasant.
Suddenly, I stood somewhere else. I saw the Hoodie Girl standing out in the cold night, at the edge of the tree line at the trailer court, staring intently at my bedroom window. She blended into the shadows, watching, waiting. The whole scene had a super-creepy stalker vibe. I sensed a series of emotions accompanying the vision; her loneliness mixed with a desire to be included, to be inside my room, a need to be with me. There was a movement at the window of the trailer, a shadow eclipsed the lighted window. With this signal she moved forward, almost floating, gliding up into my opened window. She moved graceful, like one of those ballroom dancers whose feet never seem to move as they slide across the floor. A new pileup of her emotions swept over me; joy, she was very happy to be included in my life, accepted.
Without warning a second vision flashed, replacing the scene outside my trailer like a roller coaster switching direction, leaving me breathless, guts twisted in vertigo. I was now standing inside the Moses Lake High School gymnasium, music blaring, lights flashing and twirling off a disco ball in the center of the dance floor. There were students everywhere decked out in formal tuxedos and shiny, iridescent dresses. My attention was magnetically drawn to the center of the dance floor. Something important there, something I was meant to see. This had to be the strangest thing I’d ever witnessed, me … dancing … not just dancing … getting down. I was having a grand ‘ole time.
What the hell?
I was dancing, at a formal dance, in a tuxedo. How weird is that? I’d never gone to a single junior high or high school dance, and I’d definitely never worn a tuxedo before. Life must be throwing me some real curve balls if this was my future.
My gaze was pulled away from this bizarre sight to another person standing at the sidelines of the dance floor. Rachelle Werner, alone, dazzling in a shimmery blue strapless dress. The vicious scorn on her face ruined the effect of her stunning blonde hair, ice blue eyes and elegant dress. She stared directly at me. Not the here and now me, but the one cutting footloose on the dance floor in this future moment. I was having a blast, but Rachelle stabbed venomous daggers of hatred into my back with her eyes. It occurred to me then to take a closer look at who I danced with. Before I could focus on the blur of gyrating bodies and shimmery dresses, another vision slammed me into elsewhere.
The roller coaster vertigo rocked me again as the scene jump-flashed to the skate park. I’d never had more than one vision at a time, and it was really messing with my equilibrium. Felt like I was gonna hurl. I stood on the sidewalk just outside the waist-high fence surrounding the skatepark. My attention zoomed into the parking lot, to the tinted windows of a particular car and passengers. It was Hoodie Girl, with an older, much larger boy who was all over her.
Literally, all over her.
The guy was kissing, groping, cavorting, basically dry humping the Hoodie Girl. Instant revulsion and hatred curled my hands into fists. I went straight for the car.
I wanted to smash the sick bastard taking advantage of my Hoodie Girl. This dude who was twice her size completely smothered her.
A furious indignation rose in my craw. I reached to yank open the car door and POOF! The vision ended. Just like that. I really wanted to know who the hell that was, but I hadn’t seen shit. The dark window tint obscured my view.
“Fuck!” Back in my bedroom, I staggered and panted hard, trying to reign in my anger.
She may be gone, but I knew I’d see her again. My visions were straight up, never wrong. Even when they showed me someone’s death.
* * * *
Chapter 4
Monday, September 16th
Apart from worrying about Hoodie Girl, who had disappeared for an entire week, I now had a big fat problem with Justin. He was not happy about the video I posted to my Facebook. Though I had called him every day, left voicemails and text messages asking how he was doing, he ignored me.
And then a few days ago the text war began.
Justin: WTF? (What The Fuck) I cant believe U sent that video 2 every 1!
Mike: Sorry dude, it was pretty cool. You screamed like a girl. Did U see all the comments it got on my FB?
Justin: PBIAB! (Pay Back Is A Bitch) Im gonna stomp UR ass when I see U!
Mike: Come on! U got 2 admit that was some funny shit! ROTFLMAO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off)
Justin: U better run the next time I see U!
Mike: Sorry Jus, Im only playing around. U posted that pic of me pissing on the roadside and that video when I railed my nuts at the skatepark. What’s the big deal? I’ll take it down.
Justin: Im not playin bitch! Im gonna beat you like the white trash U R!
I tried calling Justin several more times to apologize. He ignored me, the wicked silent treatment.
Silent indifference is pure evil. It means they don’t even care enough to rise to the bait. Silence takes away all your power. I had always enjoyed getting a rise out of Justin. He handled it so poorly. Made for great entertainment.
So, I had stopped by Justin’s house on Northshore drive. I’d never seen him so mad before. I had hoped to calm the situation down. Justin answered the door in a t-shirt and boxer shorts, a scowl painted on his face. “What the hell do you want.”
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be cruel or anything. I thought it was funny. I guess it wasn’t very funny to you.”
“Ha, ha, ha. Really fuckin’ funny. See how I’m laughing? You know what else is gonna be funny? Me and Tommy and the whole friggin’ wrestling team are gonna beat the shit out of you in front of everyone. I’ll be laughing really hard then.”
“Dude, I’m sorry, I deleted the video. I was just playin’ around. Look, you can check my Facebook page. It’s gone.” I held out my cell phone to prove it.
“Gimme that.” He snatched my cell out of my hand and threw it across the yard. “You’re not sorry, but you will be.”
I chased that phone like a dog after a Frisbee. I had saved up for two months to buy that phone. Luckily it landed in the grass, nothing broken. “Asshole!” I had a mind to put a foot up his sore ass.
“Get the hell off my property!” He stood there pointing his finger out to the street, Mr. Righteous.
“You wanna be an ass? Fine! Send your gay wrestler buddies after me. See if I give a shit!” I stomped off.
“Better watch your back Mikey! Moses Lake is a small world!”
“Did they test you for drugs at the hospital? I bet they’d like to know how much of your mom’s Xanax you were on. Butt plug.”
“Go fuck yourself, Mikey. Post that on Facebook.”
He used to
be my best friend. We used to tease each other all day long, joking. Nothing was ever really serious. So why was he being so serious?
After stewing on the situation for a day, I decided I didn’t owe Justin anything. And if he was really planning to jump me, why should I be apologizing? And what made him so special that he could treat me this way? So what if he had money, and a nice house on the waterfront. So what if my Dad doesn’t have a dime, and we live in a white trash trailer park.
What gives him the right to treat me like trash when he’s climbing up the side of the damn playcenter high on drugs?
I don’t have very many friends. I can count them on one hand. I was so angry with Justin. I couldn’t leave it alone. They say you shouldn’t text when you’re angry, but I was too pissed off to care.
The text war resumed.
Mike: What up Jus? R U still walkin funny? Maybe U should stock up on the hemorrhoid cream.
Justin ignored me.
Mike: Hey ramrod, what up? A couple extra inches in the pooter? Have U been able to take a crap yet?
Justin ignored that one too.
Mike: I hope this has been an enlightening experience. Im sorry U had to fall on a fence post 2 finally realize U R gay J. R U planning on coming out of the closet now?
He couldn’t let that one slide.
Justin: Stop calling me! Im never talking 2 U again!
Mike: S2BU (Sucks To Be You)
Justin: RUFKM? (Are You Fucking Kidding Me) SFT2M! (Stop Fucking Talking To Me)
Mike: ILT? (It’s Like That)
Justin: ILT!
Mike: Whatever J Hope U get well soon. U don’t want to miss out on the video shoot next week because UR ass hurts.
The group of skate punks we hung out with had planned a skate video shoot for the following week.
Justin: mlm (digital middle finger)
Mike: BIOIYA! (Break It Off In Your Ass)
Our friendship was officially cancelled for the season. And I guess it was serious, Justin missed two weeks of school after his playcenter adventure.
As friends we had been somewhat competitive, especially when it came to filming skate videos. We had constantly tried to outdo each other, to prove who was better. As enemies, the friendly rivalry morphed into a bitter war.
Friends make the worst enemies. They have all that personal, inside knowledge to hurt you with.
* * * *
Chapter 5
Thursday, September 23rd
Justin took his vendetta against me to the extreme, and our friend Anita Gomez ended up in the middle. Anita was a permanent fixture at the skatepark. She hung out with us all summer long. Once upon a time, we three had been inseparable; hitting the skatepark daily, catching the latest movies, and swimming in the Columbia Basin irrigation canals. Well, me and Justin did most of the swimming. Anita was too self-conscious of her plump body, and refused to wear a swimsuit. She mostly laid in the sun working on her already golden tan.
The glory days of our threesome were over, and Anita paid the price for her continued association with me in spite of my feud with Justin.
Like had become the norm, I spotted Justin together with Tommy in the cafeteria. And it always set me off.
I turned to Anita sitting beside me. “I hate preps! They’re such douche bags! Posers! It’s all about how much money they have and how many toys they own! They’re nothing but consumers defined by what they own. Brad Pitt said it best in Fight Club, “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need … It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” They’re all fools chasing after the latest, greatest shit because the TV says they need stuff to validate their existence. We should all start over at zero, reprogram society, relearn what it means to be human and stop running this endless rat race!”
Anita was well acquainted with my rants. I had been going off like this for the last two weeks. I’m sure she saw through my speech. I mean look at me. Look at how very little I have. You think that might influence my perspective on consumerism a little? I would love to have some stuff, move back into a decent house. We used to have a house. Not a trailer, a house. But that was a couple years ago, in a different lifetime. When my Dad had a job, and I had a real life.
I doubt my little pedestal speech of altruisms fooled Anita. She looked sidelong at me to see if I was truly angry or just flapping my jaw to pass time.
I don’t think she wanted to make an enemy of Justin, but his actions left her no choice. As though summoned by my rant, Justin gravitated towards us, making entry with his usual flare of asininities. Justin and company – Tommy and several wrestlers – walked past flashing the loser sign, an L shape of index finger and thumb at right angles, held to their foreheads like a perverse military salute. Justin tried to pull off a tough-guy hard stare with his beady, light blue eyes glaring at us. He wasn’t very good at the bully routine. Too short. And his shaggy, greasy blond hair didn’t help. Justin couldn’t muster the bluster to scare anyone.
Justin called out, “Looosers!” to punctuate his hand-forehead gesture.
Anita lashed back, “Were you hoping to intimidate me with that? You’re not tough Justin. You look constipated. Still got a piece of that fence stuck up in there? I think you need an enema. You’re full of shit.”
Justin should know better than to go head to head with Anita. He’d been burned repeatedly by her tongue lashings. He wasn’t quite sharp enough to keep up with her, but foolish enough to try.
“Shut it, fat ass!” He paused for a moment, obviously trying to come up with something better, “There’s still some food in the kitchen. If you hurry they might feel sorry for you and give you seconds.”
Anita wasn’t daunted by talk of her plus size body. She’ll be the first to admit she’s a BBW (Big Beautiful Woman). She slipped into her ghetto rat persona like a set of comfortable boxing gloves, “You can’t handle all this!” She ran her hands up her thick body in mock seduction and licked her finger to touch her ample behind with a hiss-sizzling-hot sound effect. “Yo three inch ding-a-ling ain’t doin’ a thang for me!”
That was a more personal jab than anyone else would know. She’d seen what little Justin had to offer when he tried making out with her last summer. He’d been stupid enough to whip it out. She actually laughed at him. He’d made her swear to never tell anyone, and she didn’t, except for me. Anita tells me everything.
But that was before he decided to make her a public target for ridicule. Friends always make the worst enemies.
Justin blanched at Anita’s words, and went even paler when she wiggled her pinky finger in illustration of his shortcomings. The badass with hard eyes and sneering lips was reduced to mumbling, “bitch” under his breath as he sulked off.
Anita wasn’t about to let him off the hook. She tagged him in the back as he tried to slink away, “Das right! Unh hunh. Das right. I toot it and boot it, and I made it feel stupid!” She was always quoting lyrics from her music. By then Justin had slithered to the cafeteria exit, his buddies snickering at him instead of her. Picking a fight with Anita Gomez was considered hazardous to your health. The girl needed a surgeon general’s warning on her T-shirt.
“You’re wicked. But he deserved it.” I shook my head, smiling all the way.
“Fuck him and his grapple-grope gang. He’s not even a wrestler, just a wannabe.”
Her strong exterior shell couldn’t hide how upset he had made her. I knew her too well. Her big brown eyes glistened with unshed tears. She’d once been good friends with Justin despite his occasional stupidity. It hurt to be treated that way by someone she once thought of as a friend.
Then Rachelle Werner, the one and only, walked into the cafeteria. The rest of my world ceased to exist in Rachelle’s presence.
And who was Rachelle? Simply the most beautiful blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned cheerleader I had ever known – the only cheerleader who knew my name. We were once neighbors, way back
when, in a time when I had a real life, a real father, and a real lakefront house on Northshore drive. Rachelle represented the best of everything that had once been good in my life, back in junior high. That was before my father’s lay off from Genie Industries, before the foreclosure, before the drinking.
Like so many Americans today, my Dad had been duped by low interest rates, high appraisal values, and fast talking mortgage brokers with lax loan qualifications. Richard refinanced our lakefront home at the height of the real estate market and took out every penny of equity. By the end of the following year, with his unemployment and other issues, the house was lost in foreclosure, its value barely half what he’d borrowed.
Financial institutions in Moses Lake treated Richard like a leper. Their lending guidelines only allowed credit for those who can prove they don’t really need it.
When the bank evicted us from the only home I had ever known, my relationship with Rachelle evaporated and my father’s drinking habit ramped up to full-blown alcoholism. With the move to Garden Grove, I transferred from Frontier Junior High to Chief Moses Junior High, cutting me off from Rachelle. In a few weeks we stopped calling each other. The last time we spoke she made it clear she wanted to hang with other guys at her school, and that was that. Rachelle hung with a bunch of other guys. By the time I saw her in high school two years later, she was hangin’ with Tommy Schroeder. Our lives were now worlds apart, separated by time, circumstance, and the unbridgeable chasm of money.
None of this ever changed how I felt about her, but the fact remained, she’d been hangin’ with Tommy for over six months, and had no interest in me whatsoever. They were a perfect match – popularity, money, both bright shining stars in their field of sports. Rachelle captained the cheerleading squad, and Tommy was one of the top wrestlers on the team. I never had the time or inclination to join sports, let alone attend the events. Between work and skating, I didn’t have time for much else.