My mother.19
Tonight, I’m thinking about the Twenty-Seven Club.
I’m thinking about how ever since I got to Red Oak, I’ve reassured myself again and again that I’m not like these other girls. I’m normal bad, you see, and they’re bad bad. Crazy bad. Mentally unstable bad. But after my conversation with Vera and Soleil tonight, it occurs to me that maybe I’m not as different from these girls as I first thought.
Because I, too, have always held a secret belief that I’m fated to die suddenly, tragically, and way too young.
I think about how my life these past few years has been a kind of dance around this belief, how so many of my actions have been a dare to see if it’s really true. If I was back home right now, take any given weekend and I’d probably be squeezing myself into something tight and short, getting ready to head out for the night—school night or not. I’d have my Juul charged up, my hair curled around my shoulders in long waves, my fake ID and cash I’d stolen from Alanna’s wallet nestled into the pockets of my cropped faux-leather moto jacket.20 Do I miss those kinds of nights? Not really, to be honest. What I miss is the beginning ritual, blasting music in my bedroom—Kesha or Cardi, Nicki or Ari, Gaga or King Woman, my dad’s old Guns N’ Roses and Zeppelin albums, or my mom’s Hole and Bikini Kill CDs from when she was my age. I miss sitting on the edge of my bed as the beats pulsed around me, pulling black nylons up my freshly shaven legs, the way my stockinged feet slipped so cool and smooth into my boots. I miss the blending of the shadow, the smudging of the liner, the gentle squeeze of the lash curler, the minty tingle of plumping gloss as it slicked over my lips. I miss that first step out the door, the quiet unfurling inside of me, the giving of myself to the game of chance that was the night.
There is great power in this, the ability to telegraph to the world how much you just don’t give a shit. Boys find it sexy. Girls, too.
But here’s the truth: I did give a shit.
Those jolts of panic that would rock through me whenever I realized I could never call back the control I had relinquished told me so. The moments when excitement curdled into fear, when things no longer felt like a game. Like the night last summer when me and Eve met some boys down by the Montrose Beach boathouse. One of them had a pickup truck, and we hopped in the bed and went for a ride. Everything was so much fun until the boy who was driving—whose name I’ve since forgotten—decided to pull onto Lake Shore Drive. Soon we were speeding along the water so fast that I had to close my eyes to keep them from drying up, the lake wind slashing at my face, but he kept going faster and faster, and me and Eve couldn’t do anything but cling to the sides of the truck bed and scream, knowing that with one quick swerve or sudden brake we’d be thrown over the side to explode against the asphalt, girl-shaped missiles in the night.
Later, when I got home, I couldn’t stop shaking and I couldn’t sleep. I listened to Amy and Janis and Aaliyah,21 but I found that any romantic notion I may have had about dying young had blown away on the Lake Shore Drive wind.
It scared me—just not enough to change me.
Later that same summer I almost died again. Me and some kids from school snuck up to the roof of a carpet warehouse in Goose Island to smoke weed and watch the Navy Pier fireworks. Me and this boy Adrian were sitting together on a skylight, passing a joint back and forth, when the glass cracked beneath us. We jumped up just in time, a second before the whole thing gave way, crashing down into a million pieces to the concrete thirty or forty feet below.
Lying here now, under my thin, itchy blanket, with the mute trees swaying outside, I shiver, remembering. Why didn’t I die that night? Or so many other nights, when my luck could have—should have—swung in the other direction? It’s just another reason, as if I needed one, not to believe in God. Because if God were real, why would they cut down so many kind and decent people in the prime of their lives, so many brilliant artists, and then decide to spare a piece of shit like me?
18
FOR HALLOWEEN, I get a homemade card in the mail from Lauren and Lola. On the cover of the folded construction paper is a drawing of a ghost, the typical white-sheet-looking one, except it’s topped with curly black hair, bleached lavender at the tips, and purple eye shadow smudged around its circular black eyes—so I guess it’s supposed to be the ghost of me—or at least, the me I was before I came here and they chopped off my colored ends and stopped letting me wear most of my makeup.
MIA!!! It says in shakily printed block letters on the inside of the card.
WE MISS U!!!
WE LOVE U!!!
U ARE BOO-TIFUL!!!
I miss the twins, too. I love them, too. I, too, think they are boo-tiful.
Always have.
I remember the summer they were born, the summer I turned eleven. They arrived six weeks early, so tiny that they had to spend a week in the hospital before we could bring them home. When they got here, they mostly slept, but when they were awake they cried and cried, these little mewling wails that filled the whole house, and they’d kick their tiny wrinkled legs and ball their fists so that all I wanted to do was pick them up and rock them until they slept against me, two tiny loaves of warmth against my chest.
Not that Alanna ever let me hold them much. Or feed them, either. She’d read on some online parenting blog that if she fed the babies formula from a bottle, they would grow up to be stupid, so she breastfed them constantly, even if it meant she got, like, one hour of sleep per night. She cried even more than the twins did, and she could go days without showering or brushing her hair. That summer, whenever I came home from soccer camp, she’d be sitting in the family room, lights off, blinds pulled, air-conditioning blasting, topless and wearing the same stained pair of yoga pants, holding a baby to each boob and staring at Judge Mathis without actually watching it.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Dad one night when he took me out for ice cream so I wouldn’t feel neglected.
“Having a baby, let alone two . . . it’s a hard adjustment,” he said.
“Was Mom like this? When you guys brought me home?”
“You were a pretty easy baby,” he answered, digging into his mint chocolate chip. “And there was only one of you. But yeah, she had a hard time, too.”
“She did? Like how?”
“Just normal stuff. Sleeplessness. Hormones. You know.” But I didn’t.
“The thing with your mother,” he finally said, poking at his ice cream as he very pointedly refused to look at my face, “was that she loved being your mom. But she didn’t necessarily love being a mom, if that makes sense.”
“I mean.” I stared at him. I knew that if I stared hard enough, he’d eventually have to look at me, and soon enough, he did. “Not really.”
He sighed and put down his spoon. “Your mom, Mia. She was a complicated woman. A wonderful, complicated woman. She had a difficult history and had many different issues and she thought—we both did—that maybe having a baby could fix . . .” He made his this-conversation-is-giving-me-a-headache face and trailed off. I was about to ask him what it was that I had failed to fix for her, and whether that was the reason she left us. But he changed the subject quickly.
“Could you do me a favor, honey? When you’re around during the afternoons, after camp, could you help Alanna out with the twins?”