Very LeFreak (18 page)

“Well, the two parts are one and the same.”

“How so?”

“Because Cat found me with Carter. She had been looking for me, so she went to Carter’s room, where she knew we were studying. She walked in on him and me, in his bed, right after. A sheet was over us. But it was obvious what had just happened.”

Somehow, having made the decision to at least try to spin negative thoughts into positive ones, Very was finding that what she had admitted to Keisha felt less horrible than she’d anticipated. Very had always thought she could never tell another person about what happened, that the shame was too great, but actually it wasn’t. It was just a fact of her life that needed to be aired. The past didn’t deserve to be locked up in the attic of her mind. It deserved to fly out the window along with all the other ghosts, to be free, and in turn to free Very from living with it.

“Are you okay?” Keisha asked.

“What? You mean now, or then?”

“This is a tremendous amount you’re working through today. Do you want to tell me the rest of the story, or do you need a breather?”

“May I e-mail you the rest of the story?” Very joked.

Keisha smiled. “No, you may not. Miles Davis is the most you’re getting out of me.”

Very felt a small laugh escape from her throat. “You’re making me laugh when I’m spilling my guts to you?” But the smile Very felt returning to her lips was a welcome one.

Keisha didn’t respond. She, and Miles Davis and his lulling trumpet-playing, waited for Very to come forth with the next move.

Very considered bolting the room; certainly the instinct was there. But her legs felt glued to her chair. Or maybe it was her heart that was keeping her there, not letting her go until she finished what she’d started.

Finally, Very said, “Cat freaked out when she saw us. But not in the crazy, screaming kind of way. She very calmly—like, too calmly—told me to get up and go upstairs to our room. Which I did. And then I heard shouting between her and Carter, but with all the rain, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Or maybe I didn’t want to. In any case, Carter was gone by that night. No note, no goodbye, just gone. It was the next day that my mom really freaked out. When I woke up in the morning, our bags were packed, and she said, ‘We’re moving,’ and just like that, we were on a bus to another beach town a couple hours away. Completely uprooted.”

“Did you and your mother talk about what had happened between you and Carter?”

“Not really. She wouldn’t look at me the whole bus ride. She had a scarf on her head, and her face was pressed against the window, but I could tell she was crying. When we got settled in the next town, she took me to see a British nurse to make sure I wasn’t pregnant. The nurse told me Cat had asked her to tell me to please wait and talk to my mother first before I considered having sex again. And that was it.”

“Did you feel changed after this experience?”

“It was Cat who changed. Not me. I was just this dumb kid who’d made a mistake. Even
I
knew that. I just wanted to go back to being a kid. But I also knew Cat wasn’t going to help me figure out why I’d let it happen. It’s like, I was very aware that as this traveling family, we were a ship with no captain.”

“How did your mother change?”

“She sort of shut down. She got really quiet, and serious, and wasn’t her usual flirty self with men. She’d gotten another hotel job, and she wanted to work all the time, any extra job she could find. Before, when she wasn’t working, we’d go exploring together, looking at old churches, and biking through nearby villages when there were festivals and stuff. But after, she just wanted to work, all the time work.”

“Why do you think she did that?”

“She said it was because she needed to earn enough money so we could go back home. To the U.S. She said I needed to go to a proper school, and have a proper home, and she said she was getting too old to wander the world. For the first time that I ever saw, she seemed like she wanted to be settled. She said once we got back home, she would figure out a new plan. Find a place where we’d stay for a long while. But it felt like she was working so much to avoid me.”

Keisha said, “It sounds like, in her own way, your mother was trying to do the right thing by you. Learn from the mistake, and try to make a better life for you afterward.”

“I know that was the reason. But it didn’t feel that way at the time. The saddest part is, she achieved her hope for me to have a proper home, and go to a proper school, in the worst possible way. I got those things at my aunt’s house in New Haven. But I got those because the U.S. State Department sent me there. After my mother died.”

“How did she die?”

“She loved a good fire, my mom. Late one night, when I was asleep, I guess she saw a group of people partying on the beach, with a fire and dancing and food and all that. She went down to join them. It was a group of backpackers traveling across Asia. Those kids passed a
lot
of drugs around. Cat wasn’t a drug user; I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I mean, I definitely saw her smoke a joint now and then, and she was open about the fact that she experimented a lot when she was young, before she had me. But she wasn’t irresponsible that way. She just knew a good party, like me. So she joined in that night on the beach, and one tainted tab of X was all it took. Five other people died from that batch, backpackers at that same party. But Cat was the only one of the bunch who had, you know, a life outside of backpacking.”

“She had a child. She was responsible for you.”

“And then she wasn’t.”

CHAPTER 29

Suddenly Very wanted her machines back, but not for the old reasons. She didn’t want to update or comment on a needless blog, or dot-com shop for things she didn’t want or need, or participate in an online romance that was as meaningless as it was fake. She wanted to reconnect with her old life. She wanted to hear the songs her mother had taught her to love. She wanted to look at pictures of Goa, and use the Global Spider to revisit the other places she’d lived with Cat. She wanted to connect to a possible future. She wanted to find a service in New Haven that drove elderly people around where they wanted to go. She wanted to see her biological father’s name, and put her Google skills to work to see what she could find out about him.

Very wanted a laptop she could use to make a list, but not the simple paper kind of list. She wanted a Very-style list, with too many (parenthetical) asides,
¹
photos added, graphic images blended into the text, and a sound track to complement the list,

1. And footnotes. too, most obviously. It didn’t seem unreasonable to want to use machines again for this purpose. Even Keisha, who’d set Very on the task of making the list, acknowledged that the list could be made better through technology. But Keisha said that although the No Techno sentence was admittedly harsh, it seemed to be serving its purpose for Very, allowing her to take the time-out she needed to unload the nonelectronic baggage that was cluttering the hard drive of her soul. (Keisha acknowledged borrowing Dr. Killjoy’s lame-ass terminology with that last metaphor and apologized for it, thereby endearing herself to Very for eternity, and allowing Very to see that Keisha was right on this point, even if she was quoting Dr. Killjoy.)

In therapy, Very had made the connection that perhaps her overdependence on technology had been her way of not dealing with other, deeper pains. It wasn’t about the technology so much as it was about something to do, to stay busy all the time, and to not connect to what was really in her heart. Keisha said that Very, when she left ESCAPE, would have all the time in the world to reconnect and learn how to live with technology again, hopefully with better boundaries. But since Very was here and starting to make such personal progress anyway, why not really use her remaining time to process what she was feeling, in order to make the best steps moving forward once she was released?

It wasn’t like Very didn’t have some major shit to figure out once she was sprung into the world. She was more or less kicked out of Columbia, at least until she could defend her case at the disciplinary committee hearing that would be scheduled upon her release from rehab. But what case was there to defend? What could she say?
Um, guilty as charged, on this count, and so many
more. Like, sorry, and can I just pick back up with my schooling like this never happened, even though I’m pretty vague about whether I’d want to go back to Columbia at all?
Lavinia was the only reason worth being there.

More scarily, Columbia was only the beginning of the list of life issues Very needed to sort out. She still had to make her amends to people once she went back out. She had a mountain of credit card debt she had to pay off. She had to figure out where she would live.

Problems? Oh,
hell yes
, Very had problems waiting for her on the outside.

Now was the make-or-break time for rehab patients, according to Keisha. Once they figured out how and why they got to this position in life, then they had to decide: Who am I going to be now? Would they resume old habits, or pick up the pieces, grow from the experience, and move on, stronger and better?

Very had no.fucking.clue how she was going to sort out the problems awaiting her on the outside. One thing Very did know was that she didn’t want to be guilty anymore of falling into relationships for the wrong reasons. In that spirit, Keisha had suggested that since Very liked lists, she should make a list of her past relationships, to take inventory and see what there was to learn from them.

Very chose to make her list on Day Twenty, during group therapy time with Dr. Joy, who didn’t mind Very sitting in a corner of the room with pen and paper in hand, as that’s how Very typically spent group therapy time. Most of the people in group were both Olds and Acolytes, and their technical skills didn’t extend beyond using the Internet (which a baby could figure out).

Very preferred to sit in a corner and doodle during group time with them, which Dr. Joy actually allowed, saying everyone had the choice about how they wanted to participate, and if Very wasn’t breaking any rules otherwise, and if that’s how her artistic expression called to her within nontechnological bounds, it was fine for Very to write and draw in a paper composition book while the oldsters bemoaned their unforgiving/unreasonable spouses/employers and discussed with one another why it was embarrassing to their kids that they still used AOL to go online. Snoozers.

5 Guys and 1½ Girls
(with some others in between):        
A List, by Very LeFreak

1. Carter. The first. Hello, Very LeFreak
.
I, Veronica, forgive you. Goodbye
.

2. Hideo. He was my second first. We competed at high school. We both wanted to be valedictorian. He won; I pulled a major senior slump and didn‘t break the top ten, but I did come in ranked eighteenth overall, which wasn’t too shabby now that I think back on it, so yay for me. Not so yay for me was that by graduation, Hideo wasn’t talking to me anymore. Hideo and I were in a lot of the same Honors/ AP classes, and we were also together in Computer Science Club (I was the president) and the Japanese Art Appreciation Club (he was the founder), both extracurricular activities that were basically résumé padders for college applications. We were competitors, but also friends. I loved that his name looked like “Hideous” but was pronounced “Hee-day-oh.” He was Japanese, and a really nice and handsome boy, nothing hideous about him. His mom made great teriyaki. Hideo and I finally got together in our junior year (it was the sake tucked away in his parents’ liquor cabinet—and his folks were away for the weekend). By that time I was pretty acclimated to living in a regular house in New Haven, and going to a regular school, and I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t cry through the night alone up in the attic, grieving for my mom; and I also had stopped expecting that I was going to be completely uprooted at a moment’s notice, so I guess I was, like, relaxed enough to finally form attachments. I was Hideo’s first. I guess he was sort of my first, too? Like, my better first? He was so sweet, and happy, and nervous, and awkward when we finally did it. It was really nice. Nothing AH-MAY-ZING, but good. Comfortable. The problem was, he wanted us to be a proper boyfriend-girlfriend couple. And I liked it better when no one knew we were doing it.

3. Skinemax girl. After he and I started doing it, Hideo became jealous. Every guy who looked at me, he’d be like, “Do you like him?” I guess, in retrospect, he was mad at me for not giving him back what he was giving me. He was always doing sweet things for me and making me little presents and I didn’t really do that back for him and now I wish I had because he was a good guy and deserved a kinder girl and I hope he’s found someone like that now. Because I wouldn’t commit to being “outed” as his girlfriend (just as Kristy later wouldn’t with me), he started assuming I was cheating on him with other guys. He accused me of it enough that finally I did cheat on him, only not with a guy, but with the girl at that party. I was drunk, and she was drunk, but that’s just an excuse. The truth is, I probably used the alcohol to let loose that side of me, that I’d always known was there, but hadn’t done anything about yet. But since I can’t even remember her name, she probably counts as the half girl. The whole girl, even if physically we didn’t go as far as me and the half girl, would be:

4. Kristy. It hurts just to write her name. Still. I think I really did love her. Straight up, sober love. I had all these fantasies that I would go to Columbia (which was my first and only choice—I thought I couldn’t wait to move back to NYC and live on my own—hah, what did I know then?!?!), and Kristy would go to a college somewhere not too far away. She’d come into Manhattan on weekends, and we would be a real couple there, free and happy and out—at least, to each other. I’d have waited into eternity for her to tell her family even if that meant her being mine only privately; though now, I have to say I would never accept that. After Kristy freaked out on me and stopped seeing or talking to me, I, too, freaked out. Got together with several different guys (guys seemed safe—they couldn’t devastate me like a girl could). Nothing all the way. But several Everything But situations. I became a real party girl—I’d do anything to get attention and not think about the hurt
.

5. Brendan. He was the boy I used to get back at Kristy. He was her cousin, a bronze California surfer god who went to Yale. I’d met him when he was using her family’s car and came to pick Kristy up at my house one time when she and I were studying together. (Our study sessions really were Kristy and me kissing and talking and holding each other for hours up in my room, and I swear, those “study times” with her felt like the happiest moments of my life to that point, truly AH-MAY-ZING; no schoolbook ever got opened.) Soon after Kristy dumped me, I found Brendan online and posted a comment on his page. He invited me to a college party, and we hooked up. We went out a couple more times, and I posted pictures of us together on his page—nothing really dirty, but it was obvious we’d gotten together—because I knew Kristy would see the sexy pix. She worshipped Brendan like a brother. I know it was mean and manipulative of me to do that, but I have no regrets on that one. All is fair in love and war—isn’t that the saying? Also, every girl should get to be with a beautiful surfer god at least once in her life, I think. Especially if doing so will hurt the girl she really loves. Although Brendan was rather vapid and vain and way too into working out, but holy shit, he was so nice to look at, and touch. Really, no regrets. Not really, really. OK, so maybe it was sort of sleazy of me. But satisfying, in the moment
.

6. Bryan. Oh, regrets. Big-time regrets. I regret hurting him. I really, really regret losing a good friend. But … after what he did to me, and said about me … fuck him. He got his payback on me. The score is settled. Even if I *might* try to make amends to him when I get out. But it’s entirely possible that I am not that big a person and won’t. I don’t know. File him under: “Dilemma Dude, to Be Figured Out, and Possibly Amended, Later.” (I might also swing out a “sorry” e-mail to Hideo while I’m at it. We’ll see.)

7. Ghana. I think I was having some sort of manic peak when I went after him. That night of the Astronomy Club party, I was as high as I’d ever been, on what my technological prowess could accomplish. I needed to burn off some of that energy. I wish I hadn’t done it with someone who had a girlfriend, though. Note to future self: Don’t do that fucked-up shit that hurts people. Be honorable in your relationships.

Hmmm … that seems like a good goal. Strive to be honorable. It’s not all about sex. The heart matters, too. Mine does, at least. Or should.
WANTS TO.

Well, lookee here
, Very thought as she finished writing her list and flipped to a fresh page in her composition book. The beginning part of the book was filled with her handwritten thoughts and feelings and lists, but this new, empty page presented possibility. Space was available on the page, and in her heart. Not that Very was planning to go on a romantic hunt, especially not at ESCAPE now that she had barely a week left, but the possibility loomed. She was a free woman. She could act accordingly. When the time was right. And, more important, when and if the right person came along.

Maybe she could be not such a disaster, in the future?