I’D START THIS out by how Faction 73 ruined my life, but that would be a lie. My life was already ruined by then. My childhood had been filled with seeing my mother shoot up and pass out every morning before I left for school. It was filled with her deadbeat boyfriends who never stuck around long enough to know my name.
Well, one stuck around that long, but I’ll get to that later.
It was filled with our arguments about how I was too uptight, how I needed to loosen up and live life a little. Well, Mom, look how well I’m doing in school. No thanks to you.
If you really want to know how it all started, I’d have to take you back to where it began. But I can’t go that far. I can’t bring myself to share that part of the story. Not yet.
People always say that life gets better once you’re out of school, but what a bleak way to look at it. What were we supposed to do in the meantime? How were we supposed to get through life when it felt like time crawled by at a dreadfully slow pace? It didn’t matter that in one year, my life would magically become better simply because I had graduated from high school. I needed to know how to get through it now. I needed to know how to get through all the things I hadn’t asked for.
The morning of the recruitment, I got ready for school, per my new normal. I couldn’t stop myself from staring at my arm and imagining the bruises from the finger marks that had been there weeks earlier. Or noticing the dark circles under my eyes as I applied a coat of mascara and hoped I’d finally be able to make it through a day without it running on me.
As I walked back to my bedroom to grab my school bag, I spotted Mom passed out on her bed. Her bedroom door stood wide open. Probably because she had been too out of it to swing it closed before she collapsed on top of the comforter.
With a sigh, I rolled my eyes.
It was always the same with her. Passed out from either booze or drugs. At least in the mornings. I had no idea what she accomplished during the day, if anything at all. And it was any wonder she managed to get the bills paid on time. She wouldn’t tell me what she did for work, and eventually I had stopped asking.
What did it matter? As long as I had electricity to cook my own meals, get ready for school in the mornings, and do my homework at night, I didn’t care what she did anymore. I had stopped caring years ago.
After grabbing my bag from the desk, I headed for the front door. But before I could step outside, my stomach twisted.
Covering my mouth with a hand, I hurried through the house back to the bathroom and made it just in time to throw up in the toilet. I collapsed to my knees on the linoleum floor and heaved. Fresh tears stung my eyes. Groaning, I carefully fingered away the tears in an effort to keep my mascara intact.
Slowly, I reached for the counter and pulled myself up. My legs felt weak. Actually, my whole body felt weak. And when I lifted my chin and looked at my reflection in the mirror, I gasped. My face was so pale.
As I let out a slow breath, I turned on the faucet. I rinsed out my mouth and then held my trembling hands under the cold water for a few seconds as I stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes had filled with tears and before I could stop myself, I sobbed and hung my head. Tears slipped down my face as I closed my eyes.
Sniffling, I patted my cheeks with cold water and then blotted my face dry with a hand towel. I wiped away the black mascara from under my eyes and then I headed back to the front door. If I didn’t hurry, I’d be late for my first class.
I hated being late. It drew attention, and attention was the last thing I needed, especially now. If I could skate by without being noticed, maybe I could get through the rest of the school year.
Of course when you miss a few days’ worth of classes, that tends to draw attention. After you return to school, you get weird looks from kids who probably thought you had died over the weekend and they’re shocked to see you’re back. Kids you hardly know because neither one of you has expressed an interest in the other.
You also start getting a lot of attention from the teachers. Some of them eye you carefully as you enter the room like they’re trying to figure out your life story. Or at least the part that made you miss so many days of school. Maybe they think, did she attend a party and drink so much alcohol that she had to be rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped? Did a family member die? Were her parents fighting at home? Was she sick with the flu?
Other teachers, a rare few, express genuine concern, especially when you suddenly withdraw, lose interest, and stop laughing at everyone’s jokes. And if that goes on for days, they start recommending that you see the school counselor.
Only no one could help me, and the last thing I wanted to do was talk about my messed up life with someone I’d run into in the halls afterward. I was a straight A student. I didn’t need that kind of embarrassment. I didn’t need them looking at me differently.
Sure, maybe they would have recommended that I talk to someone outside of school, but then that would mean they’d have to get my mom involved. And she wasn’t exactly the type to understand. She was bound to find some way to justify what had happened to me. Maybe I had caused it. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I was making it out to be. I could just picture her saying, “Oh, don’t worry about it, honey. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. The best thing to do is forget about it and move on.”
That would be easy for her to say because her way of dealing with difficult situations was to shoot up. Any drug she could get her hands on would do the trick. Maybe she’d even offer me something to take the edge off.
If the city officials only knew how bad their drug problem was, perhaps I’d have a mother who actually cared about me the way a mother was supposed to care about her child. Maybe I’d still have a father at home. And maybe I wouldn’t have a reason to lock my bedroom door at night.
As I got closer to the school, I heard the sounds of laughter. A guy and girl seemed to be bantering about something I couldn’t make out. And when I rounded the corner onto Second Street, I saw Gabe and Emerson running across the street in front of the school building as the bell rang.
I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy whenever I saw them together. It wasn’t that they had each other, that they were best friends; it was that their home life was better than mine. They didn’t have to worry about the things I worried about. Or maybe it was that they were close. They walked to school together. They laughed at each other’s jokes. They didn’t have to walk alone.
By the time I reached the main doors, I was exhausted. I hurried through the empty hallway. And then, avoiding everyone’s stares, I stumbled into the classroom and collapsed at my desk. The teacher glanced up and gave me a worried look.
“Everything okay, Miss Gould?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs. Jenkins. Everything is fine. I was just running late.”
She eyed me for a moment and then gave me a warm smile. “Okay,” she said as she rose to her feet and picked up a stack of exam booklets.
I groaned inwardly. I had forgotten it was exam day.
She divided up the stack and then handed them to the students in the front row. “Please take a booklet and pass them back. You may begin right away.”
As Gabe Marconne handed me the stack, he leaned close and whispered, “You’ll do fine.”
I gave him a small smile. “Thanks,” I replied.
After handing the stack to Anna behind me, I leafed through the booklet and then closed my eyes for a few seconds as I took a deep breath. As quickly as I could, I worked through the chemical formulas and equations.
Even though I had spaced the exam and fallen asleep at my desk by seven o’clock the previous night, the exam problems were relatively easy. This was stuff I knew by heart. All stuff I had learned before.
When I was three-quarters of the way through the exam, my stomach turned again. I closed the booklet, accidentally slapped my pencil on the desk, and with a hand over my mouth, I hurried out of the classroom. Mrs. Jenkins had glanced up and given me a questioning look, but I couldn’t stop. I ran to the bathroom and locked myself in one of the stalls.
After my body was done heaving, I picked myself up off the floor and braced myself against the stall as I lifted my foot and pushed the lever to flush the toilet. Slowly, I felt my way to the counter and then patted my face with cool water. With trembling fingers, I cleaned away more running mascara from my eyes and let out a ragged breath as I cursed myself for leaving the tube of mascara at home.
Somehow I had to make it through the rest of my chemistry exam and my other classes. But at the rate I was going, I wasn’t sure how that was going to happen. If I had to make a trip to the bathroom every hour, it was going to be a long day. Was it food poisoning? Was it something I had eaten the day before? Was it anxiety? I couldn’t imagine what would cause me to be sick. And then I sucked in a breath as it dawned on me what was going on.
The room quickly grew stuffy and suddenly my face was getting hot and my eyes were welling with tears again. I shook my head to clear away the thought and fanned my face to keep the tears from falling. And then I hurried back to my class. If I could keep my mind occupied, I could get through the rest of the school day.
I whispered ‘sorry’ to the teacher and then slid into my seat. Taking a deep breath, I turned back to where I had left off and tried to focus on the last three chemical formulas.
When I finished the exam with time left over, I walked up to the teacher’s desk and handed her my booklet.
Quietly, she said, “Please see me after class.”
