The Death Class: A True Story About Life (23 page)

Becca was a vegetarian and creative soul who collected sound tracks to musicals and had been cast as an actress in theater shows such as
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
;
Carousel
; and
Pippin.
Her parents paid for her to attend a high school in Chester County, Pennsylvania, called Upattinas, which encouraged free thinking and “communication over rules.”
Each summer, Becca attended camps, such as the Wayfinder Experience, which offered adventure games and improvisational theater. But her sense of self-assurance and adventure had been apparent even in childhood, when, at age twelve, she had felt emboldened enough to hop on the train all by herself to get from New Jersey to her acting classes on Eighth Avenue and Forty-third Street in Manhattan.

When Becca was thirteen and her sister, Melissa, was twenty-one, Norma took both daughters to India for three weeks, where she was speaking at a women’s conference. Almost immediately, Norma recalled, Melissa yearned to head home, but Becca seemed perfectly at ease. She learned to be a good ambassador in all the out-of-the-way places her mother sought out in New Jersey.

Now, three years later, Becca had helped with the homeless shelter makeover too, and this time during their visit, she noticed a familiar face. The girl looked about Becca’s age but was at least six inches taller than she was and slender like a runner, with skin like polished obsidian.

Becca stared at the girl, who wore a barely visible silver stud in her nose. She had not met this resident during the makeover. The girl must have just moved in.

The girl looked at Becca too, as if she’d felt her eyes. She gave a curious look back, like, How do I know you?

“I’m Becca,” she said in a scratchy voice.

“Isis,” the girl replied. Her voice was low and quick, as if she were spitting out her syllables.

They were the same age. Sixteen.

Isis had just moved in, the Monday after the makeover. She’d missed the Be the Change volunteers with their paint buckets and sorority letters but had been assigned the room with pink-and-white sponge-painted walls. It looked nice and all, but the truth was, she hated it. She hated the fact that she was back living in a homeless shelter again.

“Where are you from?” Becca asked.

Isis said she’d moved around a lot. She’d gone to thirteen different schools.

But she didn’t tell Becca all of the sordid backstory, such as how she’d once lived in a motel across the street from a truck stop. The
motel had been filled with cockroaches, prostitutes, and drug addicts and smelled so rancid that her mother had made her steal air fresheners from restaurant bathrooms. Her mom had also stolen candy, makeup, and meals. They’d cooked food from cans on a hot plate in the hotel room. Isis spent as much free time as she could at a Starbucks where her aunt worked. When Starbucks threw out food, her aunt gave her the discards.

“Did you ever live in Highland Park?” Becca asked.

“Yeah, when I was young,” Isis replied. Before everything took a turn for the worse. “Do you remember the school with the purple dragon?” she asked Becca. That was the mascot. “I used to go there.”

“Me too!” said Becca.

It clicked for them both: they had not just been classmates, Isis used to come over to play at Norma’s house. Isis and Becca had been childhood friends. What Isis remembered most about being a child around Norma and Becca was how perfect their lives seemed, how happy, living in that two-story house with a big yard, and Becca having both of her parents and an older sister to look up to. To Isis, they were the kind of family she saw in the movies or on television. She remembered thinking, Why is my life not like that?

Living in the apartment down the block from Norma’s house in Highland Park had been the best time of Isis’s life, even though she sensed that something about her childhood wasn’t quite right.

As a child, Isis liked being at home in Highland Park, in their second-floor apartment, across the hall from an African lady who used to let her try on her wigs. Isis’s mom decorated the apartment with a long white couch and stemmed lights. She kept the place real nice, paid for, Isis later learned, with drug money. Isis had never met her real father, but she remembered another man, a towering truck driver of at least 250 pounds, who would come and go. On bad days, he beat up her mom, but he never laid a hand on Isis or her two siblings. Isis would remember that when she was around five she tried to fend him off her mom by hitting him with a bat.

Her mom sold drugs. She used drugs too—ecstasy, weed, crack, cocaine, heroin, and prescription pills. Isis even recalled being given a
marijuana joint. Isis was four and sitting in the bathtub, and she remembered that her mom put it in her mouth and told her to smoke. “I had asthma, and she was sitting on the toilet, laughing,” Isis said. She would get contact highs off her mother’s smoke. “The hot box,” she said, “that’s what you call it, in the car, when you breathe in marijuana.”

Isis prayed a lot back then. “Thank you, God, for waking me up today,” she would say. She recited the Lord’s Prayer daily.

But as she got older her conversations with God changed. “I used to pray for me just to either disappear off the face of the earth,” she said, “or for my mom to find another kid and replace me. Or to just take me, to not have a life anymore.”

At four, Isis was diagnosed with a rare cancer of the kidney known as Wilms’ tumor. About one in 200,000 children get the disease, usually around the same age. She remembers the CT scans and MRIs and drinking the “nasty” hospital orange juice. For her, happiness came on days when she was not hospitalized.

Surgeons removed one of her kidneys and her appendix, leaving her with a scar starting at the dip below her neck, circling all the way around her chest, down to her pelvis, and running perpendicularly up her stomach and chest—in the shape, as she described it, of a Mercedes logo. She hated it and never stopped wearing high-collared and crew-neck shirts to cover it; she would never be caught in a bathing suit or even let a boy get close enough to her to see it. Even as her high school friends fooled around with guys, Isis remained a virgin.

She’d beaten cancer. There must have been some reason her life had been spared, she thought. But she could not figure out what it was.

Isis remembered staying in the first hotel with her mom after the surgery. From there her mom disappeared for long stretches of time, depositing Isis with her aunt. She told Isis she was going on vacation, but Isis later learned that vacation actually meant jail.

She bounced around with family members from state to state, and when her mom got on her feet she would take Isis back. Her mom held jobs too, but not for long because she would lie on her application:
Have you ever been convicted of a crime? No.
She was usually charming enough to land the job through an interview, like the times she got hired at
Kentucky Fried Chicken or Taco Bell, where she worked her way up to manager real quick.

Her mom was pretty like Isis. She wore her hair in different styles of dreadlocks, short, long, blond, or black with orange streaks. She bought makeup from Sephora and Estée Lauder with her checks and lined her eyes like those of a cat. But each time she landed a job, after a few weeks or months of working, she would end up getting fired when the results of the background checks came back.

They moved in with Isis’s grandmother for a period, until her grandmother decided she didn’t want to take care of her daughter and her kids and kicked them out. Isis was in eighth grade when they moved into a homeless shelter for women and children in Edison, New Jersey. She could remember walking into the two buildings with more than thirty rooms—one per family—each just wide enough to fit a bunk bed. Everyone had to share the showers on the same floor. It was a mix of residents, clean and dirty, rude and nice. Some people were addicts. Some of the women had been abused; others had been homeless for years. For the first two weeks, Isis curled up on the bottom bunk alongside her mom and cried herself to sleep each night.

She enrolled in school, determined not to let her classmates know she was homeless. She started wearing her mother’s makeup, applying liquid eyeliner, mascara, foundation, and eye shadow.

In school, she could reinvent herself. Each time she moved to a new shelter, motel, or group home, she enrolled in another school and became the new girl. She could be mysterious. Intimidating. Bold. With slouchy necklaces, fat bracelets, big earrings, high heels. The kids at school did not have to know what she was hiding beneath her spunky exterior, all that makeup, all those high-necked Forever 21 clothes, which she paid for by working three jobs. On the bus ride home, she would feel the familiar dread weighing on her, the feeling of going home to the shelter. Sometimes she’d avoid it altogether, spending the night at a friend’s house and waking up to go to school from there the next day. But most shelters had rules. If she didn’t check in by a certain time, she could get kicked out.

The kids at school didn’t know that she sometimes did not know
where she was going to lay her head at night or what she was going to eat, often a donated bread-and-butter sandwich, or a packet of Oodles of Noodles ramen. They didn’t see the Mercedes-shaped scar hidden beneath her vintage-style blouses and blazers. By the time Isis was in tenth grade, she had followed her mom from the shelter to a transitional living home to a motel on Route 1 in North Brunswick. “One of those dingy motels you might see in a movie or drive right by and look past because you don’t want to stop there,” she said.

Her mother’s drug use didn’t stop. Once Isis came back to the room and saw a woman in their bathtub shooting up. Her mother got angry that Isis had barged in. Her eyes looked possessed. She took a baseball bat and beat Isis with it.

She survived that beating, but her mom hurt her on other days too. Isis had a habit of sucking her teeth. One day, her mother kicked her in the ribs for it. Isis fell off the bed and onto the floor, and her mother got on top of her, punched her in the eye, wrapped her hands around her neck, and began to squeeze. Isis didn’t fight back. She never fought back. Even after all of that, she loved her mother.

“I hate you!” her mom screamed at her. She told Isis she wanted her to die, and Isis believed it: her mother was going to kill her.

But when her mom’s rage had finally subsided and Isis was bleeding but still breathing, she started to apologize and cry. “I didn’t mean to do this to you. I love you, Isis, you’re my life.”

Her mom said things like “Maybe I should go away from here” and “I’m tired of my life” and swallowed a load of sleeping pills in an attempt to die of an overdose. Isis curled up in the corner of the motel room until she drifted to sleep.

The next morning her mom was awake. No school bus came to the remote motel, so Isis’s aunt usually picked her up instead. That morning, her aunt noticed her eye, swollen and bloody. Her mother had hit her so hard, it was going to leave a scar. Another one.

“Isis, I can’t do anything for you anymore,” her aunt told her. “You’re getting older. If you want to get out of this, you need to speak up.”

Later that day, when Isis came home from school, she saw her mother peeking out of a stranger’s motel room nearby. Isis pounded on the stranger’s door and a man
opened it, his eyes red and his body twitching. “My mother’s in there!” Isis shouted. He slammed the door, and Isis began to kick it, crying. Her mother never came out.

Isis called 411 and asked for the 1-800 number for the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services.

“My mother’s abusing me,” she told the social worker. Isis went to her aunt’s house, and a caseworker showed up, arranging to keep Isis at her aunt’s for a while. But her aunt soon had a baby and decided to move down south. “I was holding her back,” Isis said.

Her caseworker put her into the Isaiah House.

“Get me out of this place,” Isis said on the phone to her caseworker, days after she moved in. Isis had never been to East Orange before, and the other girls seemed to sense her foreignness. As much as Isis had invested in her wardrobe, she knew she was an easy target for getting into fights or getting robbed.

Isis used her $81-a-month check from the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services to buy a pair of UGG boots. She wore a matching Juicy Couture necklace and bracelet, which a friend had given to her. She also got a job working off the books for $5 an hour as a clerk at a beauty supply store near the shelter, which also helped fund her vintage look. She wore ankle booties and shopped at more affordable stores such as Urban Outfitters, H&M, and, of course, Forever 21. Sometimes she felt preppy, splurging on button-up shirts from J. Crew and Ralph Lauren. She bought herself a $60 bed comforter with pink, green, and white circles on it from Walmart.

Within a few weeks, her UGGs had been stolen. Her Juicy Couture jewelry had disappeared too, along with her stash of cash. Isis got into a fight with another girl during chores. She was “shaking her butt in my face; aggravating and annoying me, so I pushed her to get out of my face. And she hit me with a broom.”

She felt disgusted being at the Isaiah House. Even worse, her mother’s life had only deteriorated after Isis left. She had been arrested for robbing an elderly woman and stealing credit cards, and ended up getting locked up on two charges of robbery, an eleven-year sentence.

Isis was furious—with her mother, and with all the relatives who had
not stepped up to take her in. In Egyptian mythology, Isis was the goddess of rebirth and protector of the dead. Isis didn’t think she belonged in a homeless shelter, yet she kept on ending up in them.

It didn’t happen right away, but another resident, Nicole, took a liking to Isis, and Isis to her. They had a lot in common. Nicole’s mother had also been a drug addict. She was shorter than Isis and wore her hair in a flip. Nicole kept talking about this woman named Norma. How she and her college kids had fixed up the house. How she was going to help get the girls into college too. How she was going to help all of them get prom dresses.