I could hardly bear to be in the same room with my mother now. She ate ferociously but gained no weight, and she’d picked up smoking again, which made the house smell and Lily cough. Her breath reeked so badly, I wondered if the drugs were still sitting in her stomach, sending poisonous gases up her throat. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.
Her new plan was to homeschool Lily. A friend had told her she could apply for aid from the state if she was Lily’s full-time caregiver. “Public school isn’t serving her needs,” she recited. “Anyway, it’s only temporary. I’ll get a job in home health as soon as I get my license back.”
The moment she said the word temporary, I knew it wasn’t. Lily was her project now, and my mom never did my hair again. Neither of us could forget that I had taken her place for a week. In fact, I had been too brave.
* * *
I had longed for independence from Lily, but the reality was awful. I missed her horribly. The thick shell I’d grown protecting her was not so easy to dismantle, and school was achingly lonely and purposeless. My classmates quickly forgot why they weren’t supposed to sit next to me on the bus, but the aura of disgrace hung around me like a fog, mingling with the stink of poverty. All my clothes came from church basements and garage sales now, and I outgrew them far too quickly. My mom cast evil glances at my lengthening limbs, interpreting my lurch into puberty as an act of rebellion. She guarded my sister so jealously that I had to sneak into Lily’s room at night to sing her to sleep with the song from her favorite movie, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
One night, Lily interrupted the opening bars. “When are you going away, Mac?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said gravely. I had just turned thirteen. My options were limited.
“Dad went away. Mom went away.”
I still had nightmares about that week, though it had happened over a year ago. I answered carefully. “Mom was only gone a couple of days.”
“Dad went away. Mom went away,” she repeated matter-of-factly. “You’ll go away. And you won’t come back.”
“I won’t go away, Lily.”
I could feel her evaluating the truth of the statement, processing it the way she processed everything, by running it through her body. The napkin on the floor of the Bob Evans, the screaming at the school bus.
“Okay, then,” I amended. “If I go away, I’ll come back for you.”
This seemed to satisfy her.
After a moment, she said, “Do you know the difference between horses and ponies? Ponies are less than fourteen hands tall. Fourteen-point-two for English. A hand is four inches.”
“Oh.”
“And ponies have different conformations.”
“I promise I’ll come back, Lily.”
She sighed under the blanket. “Conformation means they have different bones. They look like horses, but they are an entirely different breed.”
“Lily—”
“They can survive on a lot less grass.”
We breathed quietly together in the darkened bedroom.
“I know,” I whispered, choosing to hear, Don’t worry about me, I can wait.
* * *
The day I turned fifteen, I walked to the nearest strip center and got a job at the Frogurt Palace. We’d never replaced the Pontiac my father drove away, and if I ever hoped to escape after high school, I had to start saving for a used car now.
I kept ten percent of my paycheck; the rest went to household expenses. This appeased my mother, who had less and less patience for my existence, and ensured we always had non-SNAP-eligible goods like toilet paper. My cash tips I rammed inside the smelliest shoe in the back of my closet—a needless precaution, since I was the only one who ever cleaned.
The Frogurt Palace was where I met Trace and the Kevins, a trio of red-eyed burnouts with sagging wallet chains who started coming in near the end of my shifts. I knew Trace vaguely from the bus, and Kevin Tran and Kevin Botti trailed behind him wherever he went. I let them have the frozen yogurt I cleaned out of the spigots every night, a grayish-pink slurry that tasted like strawberry toothpaste, and I wasn’t their only benefactor; Quimby, the owner of the Golden Crown Video next door, kept them high and supplied for the price of listening to his weird stories. After a while, they convinced me to come along.
Quimby turned out to be a pale, puffy man in a sweaty T-shirt and eccentrically patterned chef pants who lived in the basement apartment under his store. With his baby face and unwashed hair slicked back from a balding pate, Quimby’s age was impossible to determine, but I had to think the owner of a video store—even a shitty little video store that was mostly porn—had to be a lot older than us. On the rare occasion when a customer rang the bell, he’d run upstairs, exchanging his ratty bathrobe for an equally ratty blazer on the steps.
My first time smoking out at Quimby’s, Trace held the bowl for me and told me to suck in. Just when I thought my lungs would burst, he released the carb, and a giant hit of smoke hammered my chest. I coughed like crazy and my eyes streamed, first with pain and then with relief as all the girls I had been—the brave girl, the tough girl, the winner, the wanter—exited the building, and I became nothing.
* * *
“Hamlet was, on reflection, not a wise name for any pet, even a golden retriever of his particular splendor.”
On a winter afternoon my sophomore year, I sat on the floor with Trace and the Kevins, mightily stoned, sneaking a look at Quimby’s wall of DVDs and videos. I couldn’t make out the hand-scribbled labels on the spines, but they looked unsavory.
Quimby, as usual, pontificated from a beige recliner.
“However, my mother believed a young boy should never be talked out of a budding romance with Shakespeare, and so the dog’s fate was sealed.” He paused for dramatic effect. “The bullet that separated gorgeous breath from golden body was chalked up to a hunting accident, but I always suspected my father of pulling the trigger.”
Trace yawned. Kevin Tran rubbed his shaven head; Kevin Botti took a hit.
Quimby’s voice jabbed me like a finger in the back. “Want to watch one, Jennifer?” It was the first time he’d ever addressed me directly.
“Dude,” said Trace, looking up from his combat boots for the first time in an hour. “Her name’s Mackenzie. She’s been coming here for, like, months.”
“Of course, she has,” Quimby said. “Darling Jennifer, please pick out something we’ll all enjoy.”
Either because I was getting paranoid, or because the recliner gave Quimby an imperial height, it felt more like a command than an invitation. Determined not to flinch, I leaned over, tipped out a videotape at random, and handed it to Quimby. All I could make out of the title was “Madame de . . .”—the ellipsis like a dirty wink. Kevin Botti passed me the bong, an obscure gesture of respect.
But Quimby was regarding the video with an expression of mild astonishment. “The Earrings of Madame de . . .” He said solemnly, “Gentlemen, there’s more going on in Jennifer’s scraggly little noggin than anyone knows.” Then he swiveled the recliner and loaded the tape.