Sliding Into Home (5 page)

It was a camping party and everyone—boys and girls—had tents and was allowed to spend the night. Again, we were all drinking (it was the latest middle school fad), and for most kids it didn’t matter because they could just sleep it off. I still had my curfew, so my fun had to end early.

When my mom came to pick me up she could tell that I had been drinking. She could smell it on my breath, and she was furious.

“That’s it!” she screamed. “You are spending the night in juvenile hall.”

My younger brother, who was probably ten years old at the time, was in the car and he was freaking out. I, on the other hand, was cool as a cucumber. Maybe the alcohol blurred my ability to fear my mom’s threats, but I wasn’t scared of her. We pulled up to our local juvie and she yanked me out of the car and dragged me inside.

“Officer!” my mom yelled. “I just picked up my daughter and
she’s been drinking. She’s twelve years old and I want you to keep her.”

The two cops behind the desk looked at each other in amazement. The expressions on their faces said it all:
Who is this crazy lady and what are we supposed to do with this kid?

Colin saw their guns and was even more freaked out. But there was nothing they could do. The place was full of real criminals. They were never going to keep me there. The officers took me in the back and tried to scare me by threatening me, and then they let me go.

“What are you doing?” my mom said. “Aren’t you going to keep her?”

Uh, no, Mom.

She drove me home and that was the end of it. She was losing control of me and she knew it.

It was a slow but steady process. A missed curfew here, a night of drinking there. Day by day, as I made my way through the seventh grade, I was turning into the kind of kid who would become totally uncontrollable, and I could see my mother unraveling.

Things took another turn for the worse when I expanded my social network outside of school and found an older crowd of people who wanted to hang out with me. My walk home from school wasn’t long, but on the way there were a few areas where kids and even young adults gathered after school or work to chill.

One day an older guy, probably around twenty years old, was standing outside his apartment complex with a few other people, all in their late teens. I was friendly, so I stopped and said hello and we
started talking. Eventually he invited me upstairs to his apartment to hang out with his friends.

It was a small apartment, with a living room and a kitchen on the left and a hallway with two bedrooms on the right. There were half a dozen guys and girls sitting on the couch, talking and drinking. It seemed like a fine place and I was excited that this older group had welcomed me. I clicked with them immediately, and I felt cool hanging out with older kids, so I really felt like I belonged with this crowd. I knew I’d found my place and quickly became a regular.

One of the girls in the apartment was a hot girl who had recently moved into my neighborhood. I remember seeing her around and thinking she was so beautiful. I wanted to be her friend but, more important, I wanted to be just like her. Listening to her that day in the apartment, to my virgin ears at least, she sounded very experienced when it came to sex.

A short while later she and I went to the beach together and she told me about all the sex she had had and how it felt and how to do it. The way she described it was way more detailed than anything my babysitter had ever mentioned.

All the guys at the house would laugh at me because I was still a virgin, and everything she was saying sounded so amazing. When she was done talking, only one thought went through my thirteen-year-old head:
I need to have sex right now.

I ran home from the beach as fast as I could and immediately called Samuel, a friend of mine who was in my class at school. He was a tall, skinny white boy. I had a little crush on him, but he was always more of a friend than a boyfriend. My family loved him
because he was a good kid—the perfect kind of kid to be allowed in my room without my mom questioning what was going on up there.

“Hey, Samuel, what are you up to?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“You want to come over?”

“Sure, why not.”

“And have sex.”

I think he must have run out of his room before he even hung up the phone because his mom dropped him off at my house in what seemed like a split second. He slipped past my mom and grandma, who were downstairs in the kitchen, and came right up to my room.

I shut the door behind him and we hopped onto the top bunk and started kissing. He was shaking a little, and I could tell he was nervous. We were both virgins, but I wanted so bad to not be a virgin that my fear went completely out the window.

Lying on his back, Samuel took a condom out of his pocket and slipped his pants off. I don’t know where he got that condom, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had spent a year or two in his pocket.

I climbed on top of him, but we had no idea what we were doing. I just knew that once I started bleeding I was no longer a virgin, so I watched and waited and, after a minute or so, there was blood.

We stopped—two unsatisfied, sexually frustrated teenagers. But I wasn’t a virgin anymore and I was very happy about that. It was literally the best time of my life, at that moment. I was a fucking woman!

Samuel’s mom dropped him off a boy and picked him up a few hours later a man. Things were weird between us afterward and we never had sex again, but none of that mattered to me. I couldn’t wait to go back to that apartment and tell everyone.

Losing my virginity was just the beginning of me living on the edge. That apartment turned out to be a window to a very bad world for me. My first day there, they handed me a beer. It was only my second or third time drinking (after my mom caught me that one time she always smelled my breath after I’d been out). They weren’t trying to pressure me into anything; they just assumed I would want one, and they were right. I cracked open that beer and pretended I drank all the time.

As time went on I started spending more and more of my afternoons at the apartment. I felt comfortable with these older, more experienced people—way more comfortable than I did with the kids at my school, where I sort of floated around between crowds, never really finding a group or clique to call my own. These guys, while significantly older, welcomed me with open arms. I was like the little sister who would do anything that they never had.

And when I say that I would do anything, I mean
anything
.

They did all sorts of drugs at the apartment—pot, coke, LSD, and various kinds of pills. Everyone there was getting fucked up all the time.

I knew a little about drugs before meeting these people. We learned about drugs in the D.A.R.E. program in school, and it was common knowledge that drugs were bad. My mom didn’t really think I would get into drugs because I was so into sports, so she pretty much stayed away from the topic, but even with the little information I had at that age I knew in the back of my mind that it was wrong and dangerous. Somehow, though, it still sounded more fun that bad.

So when I fell in love with this apartment-complex crowd, I began experimenting. Sure, in sixth grade I’d once tried to smoke nutmeg (which didn’t work), but this time it was for real.

The first time they broke out coke at the apartment, just looking at it made my eyes bulge out of my head with excitement. I knew it was bad, but I liked bad. I wanted to try anything and everything, regardless of what it would do to me. I thought it was cool, and I couldn’t wait to give it a shot.

Someone poured the coke on a tray on the table, and it looked like snow falling from the sky. One guy cut it up into lines and then everyone took turns snorting it. I watched and took notes in my head on how to do it—I didn’t want to look stupid.

One by one they went around and sniffed it right up, and then it was my turn.

“Do you want to try some?” one guy asked as he passed me the rolled-up dollar bill they were using.

“Okay.”

I couldn’t have been more ready, but I guess my face was saying something my brain wasn’t because they all started laughing. I knew I was young and the tone of my “okay” probably tipped them off that it was my first time, but my head told me I was ready. I didn’t have a voice in my head telling me no. I didn’t picture my mother’s disappointment. I just saw an opportunity to try something new.

So, despite their laughter, or maybe out of spite, I shoved the bill up my nose, bent over, and snorted my first line of cocaine.

I chased the coke with a beer and my throat started feeling funny. I was told, amid more laughter, that this was a “drip,” and that it happens with coke. It felt like a big ball of shit going down my throat. I couldn’t swallow, and for a few seconds it was absolutely terrible.
Once that went away, though, I started feeling really good. I did a little more that day, and after that I wanted to keep doing it over and over again. I felt like I could stop at any time, but I just wanted more.

As one might expect, my trouble outside of school led to trouble inside school as well. It was inevitable that my afternoon activities at the apartment would cause me to make bad decisions throughout the rest of the day, too.

I was on drugs, doing coke all the time. I started to act like the bad girl in school, skipping class and smoking cigarettes, and once I got that reputation I felt like I had to live up to it.

I snapped and became someone I wasn’t—a real problem child.

I would do all sorts of crazy things to fit my new persona, like take markers and color all over myself or show up at school in a bikini.

“You can’t leave the house like that,” my mom would say.

“It’s bikini day at school,” I would reply as I left the house, before she could realize that no school would have a bikini day.

All the kids laughed when they saw me in the bikini. I loved it.

The school obviously had a dress code and, as it turns out, bikinis were not acceptable. I knew the rules. I didn’t like the rules, so I made my own. This stunt earned me strike one.

Later I was assigned a “how-to” school project. We had to teach the class one of our skills, so I brought in a baseball bat to teach the class how to play softball, because even though I was doing drugs, sports were still my strength.

But my walking down the hallway with marker all over my body, my hair out of control, baseball bat in hand, freaked out some of the adults. Some of the other kids were scared, too. I was a total psycho
and I loved when people were scared of me. As I walked to class, a teacher came up to me and nicely asked me about the bat. She could have yelled and dragged my ass to the principal’s office, but she was sweet.

I was not.

I yelled and screamed that the bat was for a project, and nearly threw it at her. It took three teachers to settle me down.

Strike two.

At the time, my best friend was a girl named Brittany. She was that girl who everyone wanted to be friends with. She was in the cool, rebellious, Skateworld crowd, but was respected by the preppies and goody-goodies, too. She asked me to eat lunch with her one day and we just clicked. Her group had their hair scrunched with mousse and their bangs flipped out to their eyebrows, and very quickly I started to look and act like her. Now she’s religious and into God, but back then
we
were the bad girls.

We’d hide in bushes and jump out and scare people when they walked by, and we did a lot of experimenting together. When we heard about bulimia, we wondered what it would be like to throw up our food, so we went to the bathroom together and puked. That was just one of the many stupid things we did.

Brittany and I also used to steal liquor from my grandmother’s house, take it to the local pool in my neighborhood, and drink it. It was dangerous and fun but we usually took only a very small amount, so the impact was minimal.

One day toward the end of seventh grade, I felt like causing a little trouble and taking our petty theft to the next level. I wanted to bring alcohol to school.

I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t think it was all that bad. It’s not like I’d be hurting anyone, right? Plus, I thought I was cool, a step ahead of the other kids. I thought I knew something they didn’t about life.

I waited until my grandmother was out running errands one afternoon, then grabbed the spare key from where my mom always left it, snuck inside my grandmother’s house, and made my way to the liquor cabinet. The house was empty and quiet, but I acted like I was a professional robber, hiding behind couches and other furniture while making my way toward the cabinet. Really, though, getting the alcohol was usually very simple. I just had to go in there, pop open the liquor cabinet, and take whatever looked liked it would be missed the least. But that day I thought it would be fun to make it more of an adventure, so I acted stealthily and snagged all the little plastic airplane bottles of alcohol I could fit in my hands.

The next morning I put the bottles in my backpack and was off to school. I drank some vodka in the bathroom and went to class drunk. People expected me to be off the wall, so none of the teachers suspected I was under the influence. Unfortunately, I gave a bottle to a kid who couldn’t handle his liquor (what kind of seventh grader was he?) and the teachers caught him. He got called to the office, and of course he ratted me out.