Before, After, and Somebody In Between (33 page)

“Why do I have to do the steps? I’m not the drunk in the family.”

“Well, you don’t have to. But it’ll make you a stronger person, you know?” I shake my head fiercely, and he juts his chin at the crowd. “Hey, you’re no different than anyone else in this room. You just like to think you are. Boy, are you wrong.”

“And boy, are you full of it,” I inform him, stalking away.

“The serenity prayer—” he insists loudly. “ ‘Accept what you can’t change, and change what you can.’ It’s easier than you think.”

I wander home through the sticky dusk, dwelling on all that junk about prayer and acceptance and finding your Higher Power. I wish I
could
be like Emilio and blindly believe in this stuff. After what happened to Bubby, you’d think I’d be a bit more religious, knowing how easily it could’ve happened to me.

There’s a pile of mail bulging out of the rusty mailbox. Bill, collection notice, bill, collection notice. Then I notice an envelope forwarded by the Brinkmans. The return address in elegant gold letters reads
Great Lakes Academy of Music.

Omigod
!

With long, ragged breaths, I open it delicately and skim the two paragraphs. The first one says that Miss Gina Kowalski has been accepted as a student for the upcoming school year. The second paragraph congratulates her for winning the
Andrew Carnegie Award for Talented Young Musicians in the Original Music Composition category for “Variation on a Theme” by Rupert Campbell
. The prize is twenty-five-hundred dollars, and this is on top of their regular scholarship!

Momma stumbles tipsily out of the kitchen when she hears me scream, “I got in! I got in!” She has to pry the letter out of my fingers because I’m too excited to let go.

“Who’s Gina?” she slurs, blinking at the page.

“Never mind. Just read it!” I pirouette joyfully across the decayed gold carpet as Momma reads slowly, moving her lips with each word.

“Just in the nick of time, too! Lord knows we could use a little extra cash.”

I stop dancing so fast, I practically slip a disk. “That’s scholarship money. They don’t just hand it to you to spend.”

“Scholarship for what?”

“Jeez, you read the damn letter. It’s that music school, Momma!”

She rereads the lines, and I can hear those rickety wheels turning. “Well, shoot. If you won it, you won it. It’s your money, ain’t it? Maybe I’ll call these folks up and see if they can cut you a check.” Chuckling at my expression, she adds, “Oh, good Lord. I ain’t gonna spend all of it. You can take a few bucks, buy whatever you need.”

“Are you crazy? I busted my ass getting into that school!”

“School, schmool. We got bills to pay.”

A surge of ferocious energy springs through every inch of my body. I swear to God, even my hair starts crackling. I scream at her that she’s not paying any bills with my money, and how I am sick, sick, sick of her trying to destroy me. “Why can’t I go there? Why? Why? Why?”

A hand flashes out, whipping my head sideways. “ ’Cause I said so, that’s why.” And when I shriek about how unfair that is, she shrieks back that I’m more trouble than I’m worth, and why, oh why did she ever let me back in the house?

I rub my sore cheek, refusing to cry. “Well, I don’t want to be here either. I wish to God I was someplace else!”

“So go! Get outta here. Go back to your rich goddamn lawyer.” And then she hauls out both barrels. “Oh, right, I forgot. He threw your ass out.”

“He did not. I left.” Which is technically true.

“Oh, yeah? Face it, missy, that man was plain sick and tired of you.”

“Sick of me, huh? Well, what about Larry, Momma? What about Wayne? You can’t even hang on to any of your scumbag boyfriends.”

She slugs me again, and it’s like being hit with a mallet. A warm wet trickle drips down from my nose. “You watch what you say! You ain’t nobody special in this house, missy. You ain’t nothin’, you hear me?”

I glance at my red fingers, feeling a rise of sheer rage—and realize with an eerie thrill that I just struck a raw nerve. “No wonder they dumped you. You’re just a sick, pathetic drunk!” The words spew out of my mouth, bubbling up in the blood. Yes, I want to hurt her, hurt her feelings really bad. To make
her
cry, like she always makes me cry. “And if Daddy were here, he’d never let you treat me like this. He’d throw you outta here right on your big fat—”

Momma advances. “Oh, yeah? Well, let me tell you something, missy. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d woulda taken that money his folks gave me and put an end to the whole thing.”

I can’t speak for a second, then, “What whole thing?” No answer. “You mean me?”

Momma stops in her tracks. “Forget it,” she says abruptly, but it’s too late to take it back, and now I know the truth. I was never meant to be.

“You should have.” Probably the worst lie I ever told. “I don’t know why you didn’t.”

“ ’Cause I wanted him,” she says, quieter now. “Never mind that he never wanted me, or that if his folks had had their way, you’d a been—” Momma chokes.

Toast, I think darkly. A blob at the bottom of a drain.

Recovering, Momma adds with a feral sneer, “You wanna know why I burned that fiddle of his? ‘Cause that’s all he cared about. That, and the gambling, and all his lady friends, too. Not me, missy. And he never cared nothin’ about you.”

My vision blurs. I’m having trouble catching my breath.

“All I ever heard was how I tricked him into marrying me, and how his family hated me, how I wrecked his damn life. You wonder why I drink? I was just a kid when I married him! And he treated me like shit from day one.”

This is not my mother. As drunk as she is, as crazy as she can be, my real mother would never talk to me like this. My real mother would never tell me these lies.

“I hate you!” I blurt out. “You are the most fucking insane person I’ve ever known!”

A blotch of color appears at the base of Momma’s neck. Billowing up into her hair, it turns her face as scarlet as the blood on my T-shirt. When she moves forward, I’m sure it’s to clock me again, but she heaves me aside and clumps upstairs. A split second later the lightbulb goes off:
No! Not my cello!

I spring up after her and, yes, she’s in my room. But instead of my cello, she’s holding my little round fish bowl, and before I can stop her, she tosses it through the door. Three helpless orange bodies with gaping mouths skid wetly down the steps in a spray of colored gravel.

“For your information,” she says ferociously, “Wayne
didn’t
dump me. I been seeing him regular, and he already asked me to move back in. I might do it, too.”

That’s when I lose it. I smash into her so hard, she flips over my trunk and lands on her spine with a humongous crash. For one endless second she lies perfectly still, and then she says, disbelievingly, “I think you done busted my back, sugar pie.”

Sick with shame, unable to believe what I just did, I squat beside her. “Momma, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t—you—touch—me! Get the hell outta my house!”

So that’s what I do. I rush outside and across the alley to Mamma Mia’s where the flashing neon light—All U Can Eat—makes me feel woozy and sick. Holding my nose to the sky to slow the red dribble, I sink to the sidewalk under the blacked-out window.

A guy in a green apron comes out for a cigarette. “Wow. What happened to you?” When I ignore him, he adds, “You know, you shouldn’t let people smack you around.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Got any more brilliant advice?”

He disappears, and brings me back a wet towel. I mop my face, turning the cloth a bright pink. He has stringy brown hair and a sweet homely face with teeny wire glasses at the end of an extremely large nose. His shirt tag says “Josh” and when he asks me my name, I automatically say “Gina”—but how lame is that? Gina would never be sitting on a sidewalk in front of a beer joint, hemorrhaging into her lap thanks to a smack from her old lady.

“You want to come in and have a Coke? I’m still on my break.”

“A beer would be nice,” I say thickly. “But could you bring it out here?”

“Uh, are you old enough to drink?” He jumps back as I spit out a glob of bloody snot, and then goes back into the bar for a
couple of brewskies. “Man, you look awful. Why don’t you go home and go to bed?”

“I can’t. My mom’ll kill me.” I remember my cello, waiting helplessly inside, and pray, pray, pray Momma doesn’t decide to
really
teach me a lesson.

“Well, go lie down in my van.” Josh points to the parking lot and then gets mortally offended when I give him my not-so-humble opinion of this lame-ass idea. “Hey, take it easy. I’m not gonna molest you. I’ll wake you up when I get off.”

I think about this while I work my way through the beer. Oh, why not? I can’t sleep on the sidewalk.

A grimy-looking mattress covers the floor of the van. I glare suspiciously, but Josh merely shrugs. “See ya later.”

I roll up in a ball, head wobbling, nose aching. Twice I lean out the door to spit blood onto the gravel, and it dawns on me now why my vision’s so bad: Momma clobbered me so hard, she knocked out a contact. I pop the other one free and flick it outside. Who cares? Those were Gina’s, and Gina is dead.

Next thing I know, Josh is shaking my shoulder. I wipe a pool of pink slime away from my neck. “Time is it?”

“Going on three. You okay?” I nod sluggishly, watching him rummage around till he comes up with a J. “Want a toke? It’s an awesome painkiller.”

Guiltily, my mind flashes to Emilio. “What is this? Some devious plan to get me stoned?”

“I already told you, I’m not gonna bother you. But if you ever want to, you know, do it, we could just, like …do it.”

“Do it?”

“Yeah. Mess around.”

I am not about to make the same mistake twice. “I’m only
fifteen, not that it’s any of your beeswax.” When he makes a grab for my illegal beer, I add quickly, “But I like older men.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Omigod. Am I flirting?

He puffs on the doob, then passes it over and I stare at it for a moment like I’m holding a stick of dynamite. Oh, what the hell? How can this possibly make anything worse?

The bitter smoke burns as it snakes down my throat. I choke and splutter, but finally get the hang of it, and Josh is right—it does take my mind off my throbbing nose.

“So, how much older?” Josh asks nonchalantly.

I suck harder on the joint. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

The street is dark and quiet, with only an occasional passing car, as we dangle our legs out of the back of the van. I watch the lights go out in my house, so at least I know Momma made it up from the floor. My body feels like it’s floating …floating … and Josh looks cuter and cuter with every puff. “Well. I guess that’s old enough.”

He breaks into a goofy smile, and we polish off the joint in silence. Then he shuts the van door, whips off his glasses, and kisses me so passionately, our noses clank.

“Ow! Watch it,” I complain.

Apologetically, he pulls away and then gets back to business. Between the beer and the pot and the rancid blood, my breath smells funky, but Josh doesn’t care, and his is almost as bad. My shorts are off in like two seconds flat, and I feel his hands groping me, feeling me, touching me …

And now I remember, clear as crystal, why I loved being with Danny, how good it feels to be hugged and kissed, to have somebody say they love you, whether they mean it or not.

But as wasted as I am, I remember one thing. “Wait, wait. You gotta put something on.”

It’s almost too late, and he stops with a gasp. “Huh?”

“A rubber,” I snap.

“Oh, man!” he whines, still trying to get in me. “I don’t have one.”

I shove him off. “You think I want to get AIDS?” Not to mention everything else that could happen.

“Jeez, do I look like I have AIDS?”

“I don’t know what AIDS looks like,” I tell him, trying not to think about Mrs. Addams.

Josh isn’t happy, but he gets over it fast. Instead, he takes my hand and shows me what to do, and the whole time I’m doing it, I’m thinking about other things. Like how I could really go for an iced mocha about now—frosty cold, double espresso, with whipped cream and drizzled chocolate …

When it’s over, it’s over, and he falls back, panting. I yank up my shorts, jump down onto the gravel on shuddering legs, and teeter across the alley. Stoned, stoned, I am oh—so—stoned! Maybe it’s the pot that makes me feel so brave, or maybe not. Maybe it’s just me. But one thing I know that’s the absolute truth? No matter what happens, no matter how drunk she gets, I will never let Momma hit me again.

Not like that. Not ever.

She’s still awake, sitting in near-pitch darkness at the kitchen table. “Lucky for you I didn’t break my back. I can’t hardly walk now, it’s achin’ me so bad.”

Can hardly walk, Momma. It’s
can
hardly walk, not can’t hardly walk.

“You lay a hand on me again,” she continues, “you ain’t gonna live to tell about it. Got that?”

I bite my tongue because I don’t trust my voice, and anything I say will only make her madder. But I mean it this time—I have
so
had it up to here! Now if only I could figure out a way to say this out loud, to her face.

As I turn to go upstairs to make sure my cello’s in one piece, Momma, without warning, lets out a watery sob. “I didn’t mean it, sugar pie. I swear I didn’t mean it!”

Something twists deep in my stomach, and yes, I halfway give in. “Momma, come on. Don’t cry about it, okay?”

“I coulda busted your nose! I didn’t mean to hit you that hard.”

She wants me to tell her it’s okay, and that I forgive her for what, like the thousandth time? I chew my tongue, sweat dribbling down my back.

“I tried so hard to get you back,” Momma blubbers. “And first chance you get, I know you’re gonna leave me. Then what’ll I do? What’ll I do without my sugar pie?”

Okay,
okay!
I can’t stand it anymore.

“Oh, Momma.” I hug her briefly, hoping I don’t smell like somebody who smoked dope and had semisex with a perfect stranger ten minutes ago. “Come on. I’m not going anywhere.” My voice cracks, and I wonder what she’d say if she really knew how badly I don’t want to be here. How I’d do anything, anything, to get away forever.