“Which is it, Mom?” I shot back, unable to stop myself. “Am I an uppity bitch or a fucking dumb-ass? Pick a lane. You’re all over the place.”
“Fuck you,” Carla retorted, taking a long drag, wobbling on her feet. “You know what I’m saying.”
“Whatever. Get out. I need to study.”
Her slurred voice rang in my ears like the lyrics to a song you can’t stand but can’t stop singing. Now came Carla’s favorite tune, the one where she blamed me for every failing in her life as if she hadn’t been the architect of her own shitshow.
“I didn’t want you but your dad — worthless fucker — told me he was going to marry me and I believed him. Surprise, surprise, no ring on the finger, just a screaming kid that I couldn’t afford and didn’t want. My life…ruined.” She gestured uselessly at everything around her. “Is this the thanks I get for sacrificing everything? A fucking piece of trash whore who ain’t doing nothing but giving me grief every day of her damn life.”
Same story, different day but it still stung. She was a broken record. The only difference? I didn’t cry anymore. “Maybe you should’ve kept your legs shut,” I quipped, rising to shut the door in her red face. I leaned against the locked door as Carla screeched on the other side, banging with sloppy attempts to break it down but she was too drunk to do much damage, even to this flimsy excuse of a door. “Sleep it off, Carla,” I muttered, returning to my bed.
I drowned her out with loud music and grabbed my notebook. I liked to write, not that I thought I was destined to be a novelist or anything but it helped to write down the things that chewed on me.
It probably wouldn’t shock anyone to know that most of the pages were filled with rants about my mother. Guess you could say I had mommy issues. I’m sure I’ll need therapy at some point but for now, I was coping in my own way.
What would happen after the auction? Would I be irrevocably ruined in the mental department? What was the emotional cost of something like this? Would I completely devolve in middle age? Crumpling in on myself as the dam broke holding back every memory from this time in my life?
A nervous breakdown on layaway.
Maybe.
Even if I seemed chill about the whole thing, it wasn’t true. I scribbled my confession: I’m not chill.
I’m freaked out but this was my ticket out. As much as it made me cringe, if some rich guy wanted the privilege of taking my virginity…I guess he could have it for a shit-ton of money.
I wanted to tell my best friend, Lora. But I couldn’t. The burden of my secret was no heavier than the rest I carried about my life but I always shared everything with Lora.
She knew my mom was a raging bitch and we had plans to attend college together. Unlike me, she had decent parents and they were helping her make it happen. Sometimes I watched her life from behind hungry eyes as the ugliness of envy whispered terrible things in my mother’s raspy, booze-soaked voice. Why had fate dealt me such a bad hand? Babies were born innocent, right? If that’s true, what had I done to deserve a mother like Carla?
Thoughts like that were a dangerous bog I tried to avoid but sometimes I was weak.
My cell phone rang and I picked it up, grateful for the distraction. Speak of the devil.
“Hey girl,” I answered. “Shouldn’t you be pricing all those collectible Barbies you have to sell on eBay? You’re going to need beer money, you know. College ain’t cheap.”
Lora ignored my tease and said, “My mom wants to throw you a small birthday party. You think your mom would be cool with that?”
Oh yeah, my 18th birthday was coming up. I was one of the few high school seniors who hadn’t hit the magic number yet. It was one of the main reasons I hadn’t been able to bail on the home situation just yet. Carla had already threatened to report me as a runaway if I tried to leave. It wasn’t because my mom had some long-buried maternal instinct — it was because she received social security money for me when my biological dad died and if I wasn’t around, they’d cut her aid.
Bottom line…it was all about the money.
Was it any wonder I took Madame Moirai’s deal? I’ve been taught my whole life that I was nothing but a payday.
That was the other thing about the auction, the girls had to be eighteen. Otherwise, it was kiddie porn, or something like that. Like being eighteen was any different than seventeen. I knew girls who’d become raging sluts by the time they’d hit fifteen. But let’s protect the children, right? It seemed weird to be talking about cake when an hour ago I’d signed a document detailing the loss of my virginity. Still made my head spin. I returned to the conversation. “Who cares what my mom thinks. It’s not as if she’s going to go all Betty Crocker and bake me a cake, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought but my mom wanted to make sure. Chocolate?”
“Of course.”
“Great. I’ll let my mom know.” There was a beat of silence. “So where’d you go today? I thought we were going to meet at The Drip for lattes.”
No more lattes for me. No dairy. “Yeah, I had some errands to run,” I answered, being purposefully vague. Even though I really wanted to tell Lora what I was up to, I knew I couldn’t and I wasn’t about to blow my opportunity just because I was feeling lonely and scared about a deal I’d made for myself. It was my bed, time to lay in it.
And, if I were being totally honest with myself, I was teensy bit afraid that Lora would find my decision abhorrent. I could stand a lot of things but seeing the judgment in Lora’s eyes would just about kill me. I cared about her opinion because I know she loved me in the real sense.
So, yeah, I wasn’t about to burden her with the knowledge. We’d been besties since junior high and even though we came from two different worlds, it’d hadn’t mattered. Until now. The divide between us felt like the fucking Grand Canyon and it wasn’t anyone’s fault but it was there just the same.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem off today.”
“I have a lot on my mind.” My mind picked at straws, searching for something believable. “Those financial aid packets you dropped off are seriously challenging my intellectual limits. I swear I think the government is purposefully weeding out the ones they deem unworthy by putting them through the FAFSA gauntlet.”
“True story. My dad had to do mine.”
Sometimes I liked to imagine that my dad, if he hadn’t run off and left my pregnant mother and then gotten himself killed in a DUI a year later, might’ve been a decent guy once he matured. And maybe he would’ve been the kind of guy who would help me fill out financial aid packets.
But the reality was more like, he probably would’ve been a douche and just as bad as my mother because birds of a feather flocked together.
Tough game to play. But that wasn’t Lora’s reality. Her dad was Wally Cleaver. I faked a yawn. “I better get back to it. No one but me to figure this shit out,” I told her, which was true.
“Maybe I could help?” Lora thew out there as a polite gesture but I knew she was just being nice because frankly, Lora would probably only make things worse. I loved the girl but numbers weren’t her thing.
“You know I love you, right? But if you couldn’t figure out your own application, I sincerely doubt you can do much better with mine. I’ll take my chances with Youtube leading the way,” I told her.