(God, here’s a weird little news flash for you: I was a virgin when Reactor One exploded. True story. So, maybe we should file “Emily Shepard’s First Time and Sexual Awakening” under Yet One More Grotesque Nuclear Mutation. I mean, it’s probably true I wouldn’t be a virgin by now anyway, but with any luck the first time I had sex it would have been with some boy my age whose biggest issue would be—and here is more therapist-speak—“learned behavior.” By that I mean learned porn. If I’ve figured out anything the last few years, it’s this: everything boys and young men know about sex, they got from Internet porn, which means they have seriously unrealistic expectations. And girls my age? Sometimes they do freaky shit because they’re simply afraid to say no. They want to be cool. They want to be liked. Yup, for a girl who they say has, like, zero self-esteem, I know my stuff.)
Church Street is made of bricks, and it’s an outdoor mall smack in the middle of the downtown. Pedestrians only—no cars. Burlington is so crunchy that the bricks have capitals and cities and countries carved into them, including places that were seriously communist when the mall was designed. It was a Wednesday, and it was an Indian summer kind of day. (I know “Indian summer” isn’t perfectly PC, but it works. It’s two words and they say exactly what I want.) We were both wearing these blue-and-yellow rugby shirts we’d lifted from PacSun. They weren’t as nice as the ones at Abercrombie, but it’s much more difficult to shoplift there. You’d think with the way Abercrombie blares their music it would be easy to steal from them, because the kids who work there must be deaf and stunned from the noise. Think lab rats, maybe. Also, it’s much darker inside an Abercrombie than inside a PacSun. But Abercrombie always has a lot more staff and the people at PacSun are way more “whatever.”
There were lots of leaf peepers strolling up and down the middle of the street, and most of them were somewhere between the age of seventy-five and embalmed. Everyone had said the tourists wouldn’t come that autumn because of Cape Abenaki, and I imagine a lot did stay away. But mostly they just stayed away from the Northeast Kingdom. Plenty still came to Lake Champlain and the western slopes of the Green Mountains. I mean, Burlington must have been sixty or sixty-five miles from the edge of the Exclusion Zone. And southern Vermont was nowhere near it. By the fall, Burlington’s biggest issue was dealing with the last of the walkers and the last of the refugee tent camps. But most were gone and most of the people in them had found homes somewhere. Most of us had settled in somewhere. So, by that Wednesday, I was just a regular old homeless kid who occasionally fucked truckers from Montreal.
(And to think grown-ups thought I had “a lack of impulse control” before Reactor One blew up. I guess it was always going to be a crapshoot to see who or what melted down first.)
“My mom’s getting out of jail,” Andrea said to me out of the blue.
“No shit? Where did you hear that?”
“A friend of hers sent me a text.”
“You need a new phone.”
“Yeah. Clearly.”
“What does she want?”
Andrea shrugged. “She wants to see me.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I know, right?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. The problem is, she knows Poacher.”
I knew that; it was how Andrea had found Poacher in the first place. But I didn’t yet see where this was going. “So …”
“I didn’t text back,” she said.
“No?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want my mom to find me. I mean it: I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to see her or my dad—not ever again. They’re both total sleazebags. And my dad? He’s not just a sleazebag, he’s nasty. He’s just garbage.”
“But you think she’ll find you through Poacher,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” She pulled a half-smoked cigarette from her pants pocket and lit it with a very pink Bic. “I think maybe I’ll have to leave.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Andrea was like a big sister to me. Already she had taught me so much. “And go where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Poacher gives us a roof,” I said. “And some freedom. And we have a little money.”
“We have chlamydia,” she said.
“We do not! At least I don’t.”
“You know what I mean. It’s just gross what we do. Our lives are just gross. Maybe we don’t have chlamydia today, but we will tomorrow.”
“Poacher would just find you.”
“Maybe.”
I motioned for her to give me a drag on her cigarette. “Think he’d track you down if you left? Would he hurt you?” I asked, after I’d exhaled.
“No. He’s way too mellow. That’s not Poacher.”
“Maybe he’d keep your mom away from you. You know, protect you.”
She seemed to think about this. “I guess he might.”
“Tell him your mom is getting out and you don’t want to see her. See what he does.”
“Okay,” she agreed. We watched an old couple detour away from us when they saw us. Then she said, “Want to get a tattoo?” This was not as random as it sounds. She had been talking about getting a tattoo all week—or, in her case, another tattoo. She already had a string of ivy tattooed around her left ankle.
“Nah. I don’t want to spend the money.”
“I know a guy who will do it for free for a pretty girl.”
“If she fucks him, I suppose?”
“No, it’s not like that. It’s that young guy with the dreadlocks—at the tattoo place on North Winooski. It turns out he knows my cousin. He’d do me a favor, I think.”
“So it wouldn’t cost us anything?”
“Nope.”
So I said, “Why not?” (See what I mean about me and impulse control?) And off we went. She got her second tattoo—an animal that looked like it was part lion, part snake, and part (I am not making this up) goat—and I got my first. It’s on my shoulder blade and my back. It says, “Set bleeding feet to minuets,” and the writing looks like calligraphy.
When I told the dude I wanted a line from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, he nodded and said, “Hope is the thing with feathers, right?” He wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass, but I still felt it was kind of condescending. It seems a lot of girls use that line, even if they have almost no idea who Emily Dickinson was. He even had the words on a pattern, and it was designed to wrap around a bird’s wing. After you pick the line, you pick the bird, and you can either have something as sweet as a bluebird or barn swallow, or some winged nightmare with talons that looks like it belongs in a super-violent adults-only video game.
But I surprised him with what I wanted. He didn’t know the poem. The truth is, the only line from any of her poems he knew was the one on the pattern about hope. So, I kind of threw him for a loop.
“I have some beautiful ballet slippers that could fit with those words,” he said, and Andrea thought the image was perfect. But I told him I wasn’t a So You Think You Can Dance kind of girl. I never took ballet. I don’t even know what ballet slippers feel like. So he got out this fat notebook filled with patterns and wanted me to flip through it, but after a moment I realized the guy was on to something with his birds. He really was. I didn’t want wings, but I wanted a feather: a quill. A quill pen. That was, I think, how my mind worked.
The tattoo hurt a little, but not very much. And it took Andrea’s mind off her mom for a while.
So, that was the day I got my tattoo. All the guy wanted for payment was for me to wear beaters and halter tops when the weather was right to show it off, and then tell people where I got it. But, of course, I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone I got it for free.
So, you’re the first.
Sometimes when I reread what I’ve written, I find myself creeped out by what’s between the lines. What I haven’t written.
For instance, that memory of Andrea and me chilling on Church Street, all carefree and la-di-
da the night after we’d each done a trucker in the cabs of their eighteen-wheelers is six weeks after the night I lost my virginity. You don’t need to know the details. It began with fake cool and ended with real hysteria. Me—not him. But here’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version. I owe you that.
He was a friend of Poacher’s who was also a vet and was paying Poacher to do me. I thought I could handle it. I was living on Poacher’s food and Poacher’s Oxies and sleeping under Poacher’s roof. I was smoking Poacher’s weed. And the other girls did it, right? So, why not? I agreed. I was, I guess, trying to earn my keep. To be as down with the routine as everyone else. But it all went wrong, and I was a mess. That little part of me that was still sixteen kicked in, and I had one of those out-of-body experiences: There I was looking down at me from overhead and I was beneath a guy three times my age and I was bleeding on this crappy mattress and it hurt and it was ugly and it was gross. He was gross. And I was so small. Physically. I was just so little compared to this dude. And suddenly I was out of control and beating him on his back (which at first he had thought meant—mistakenly—that I was seriously into it and seriously into him), and I was begging him to stop, to stop, to please just stop. Finally Poacher and Andrea heard me and realized the situation was tanking fast, and yanked him off of me.
And there I was, scrawny and naked, and I curled up in a ball and hid my face in my arms. This was nothing like what the first time was supposed to be. This was nothing like what a hundred rom-coms had led me to believe it would be. This was nothing like what my life was supposed to be. And the Oxies weren’t helping. I felt like the lowest, most vile, most pathetic thing on the planet. And, trust me, it’s no small trick to feel both vile and pathetic.
But, looking back, you know what’s the saddest thing? How easy it is to get used to that feeling when you’re hungry and scared and alone.
Chapter 4
I had a few serious screaming fights with my mom over the years. When I was fighting with my dad or with both my parents, the battles were a little more subtle—like I’d just sit there at the dining room table, seething. Then, of course, I’d ratchet up the stakes big-time and get up and slam a door or something. Once, I broke these two crystal wineglasses that had their wedding date on them: I just went outside and hurled them, one after the other, against this phony stone wall that was in our backyard. (The rocks were real, but no farmer had ever built it to section off a field or try and be a good neighbor. See? I’ve read Robert Frost, too. Okay, I won’t show off like that anymore. But the wall always kind of appalled me because the people who built our meadow mansion had a stonemason construct it so the house would look more like it belonged on the outskirts of Reddington. Maybe it helped a little, but not very much. It was still kind of like putting mud boots on a dairy cow.) So, why did I break the wineglasses? Because I was frustrated and angry that my parents were drunk. Again. Their marriage worked a lot better before we moved to Vermont. At least I think it did. They didn’t start fighting until they got here—or if they did, they did a much better job of hiding it from me. I guess there were a lot of reasons why Vermont was so toxic for their marriage, but I think the biggest one was that they just didn’t belong in a place so small. So rural. We moved there because my dad was excited by the job: a chief engineer at a nuclear power plant that had two reactors. And they probably convinced themselves that Reddington was close enough to Montreal or Boston when they needed a city fix. But it’s really not that close at all. We hardly went either place. And it’s not like there were a lot of other flatlanders in Reddington. (Just so you know, “flatlander” is a real word in Vermont. That’s not some teen-speak I made up. And it says it all about what it means to be an outsider, doesn’t it?) There were some, of course, like Philip Christiansen’s family, but I’m really not sure my mom had any close friends in Reddington or Newport. It’s kind of sad, when you think about it. She just never fit in. My dad grew up in Phoenix and my mom in Westchester County. My dad did a little better than my mom because he could talk sports and nuke-speak with the other engineers, but my mom pretty much worked alone in her office. And she just didn’t have that much in common with most of the other moms in Reddington. Even when I was in the third and fourth grade and my mom would help chaperone the field trips, it was agony for me to watch her. There would always be three moms, and she’d be the odd mom out. Just sitting alone on the school bus or walking alone while the other moms dished about whatever and kept one eye on the kids to prevent us from accidentally killing ourselves.
I don’t know, maybe if she had tried more. But maybe she did and she just didn’t belong in Vermont. Who knows? Maybe she just didn’t belong anywhere. There are people like that, right?
A couple of times my dad interviewed for other jobs at other plants, but one was in Nebraska and I’m not sure Nebraska would have solved the rural problem, and he didn’t get the job at the plant near Boston. And then, after he had the drinking suspension in his personnel file, he wasn’t going anywhere. No other plant was going to hire an engineer with that kind of black mark.
Looking back, I’m not sure we would have moved even if my dad had gotten that job closer to Boston, because I was about to start ninth grade and my parents were sort of under the spell of Reddington Academy: a really good prep school I could go to for free. And I don’t think they wanted to uproot me—move a kid as she starts high school. I seemed to be difficult enough as it was.
So, they were unhappy and they drank. Not, I gather, a unique story. Shit happens and the grown-ups dive headfirst into the Scotch. At least some do.
Anyway, the wineglasses. It was a Saturday night—only around seven-thirty—and my parents were both so drunk that neither of them felt sober enough to drive me to Lisa’s house, where I was supposed to be hanging out. I was thirteen. So they said I couldn’t go because they couldn’t drive. And they didn’t want me to call Lisa and have her mom come and get me, because they didn’t want people to know they were hammered. And so they started arguing over whose fault it was that I couldn’t go—in other words, who was supposed to have taken me and should have stayed sober enough to drive a car when it was spitting snow. So, young bomb thrower that I was, I told them that the world would be a better place if they just got divorced, and then I broke their wineglasses. (Once, after Emily Dickinson’s father gave her some grief for setting a chipped plate on the dinner table, she calmly carried it to their garden and smashed it. I didn’t know this story when I was thirteen, but it sure hit home when I read about it a year later.)
In all fairness, it’s kind of a gray area, right? I mean, I shouldn’t have gone postal on their crystal, but it would have been nice if one of them had been able to drive their thirteen-year-old kid to a friend’s house.
If I ever get married and have children, I promise you I won’t ever get stupid, stinking drunk in front of them. And I will never, ever fight with my husband in front of the kids. And, finally, I promise that if my marriage sucks because of where we live, we’ll move.
Of course, I also learned a lot of good things about parenting from my mom and dad. That’s a fact. I knew they loved me, even when—my opinion—they seriously screwed up.
So, I really was desperate to see them or hear from them those first hours after the meltdown, especially since I knew in my heart that they were screwed (which meant I was screwed, too, but that honestly wasn’t what I was thinking at the time). Days and weeks later, when I saw the things people were saying about my dad in the news and online, I was devastated. People said crazy mean stuff about him. People said crazy mean stuff about both my parents. It wasn’t fair. I mean, they were—and I know this word because I once wrote an English paper about the Emily Dickinson poem “It dropped so low in my regard”—reviled. They were hated. That’s why I gave up on the Internet. That’s why I gave up on Facebook and Tumblr.
I think I did a good job with Cameron—and that’s thanks to my parents. And I don’t care what anyone says about that.
So, I ran from the college cafeteria into the woods. I didn’t run on the paved roads or the sidewalks around the campus, because I thought it would be easier for them to catch me if I did. Instead I ran straight down this grassy hill toward a line of trees. I fell once because the grass was like a Slip ’N Slide, which must have been when I lost my phone. I didn’t look back for a while because I figured people were following me. Nope. Not Lisa or Ethan or Ms. Gagne. When I finally allowed myself to catch my breath, I was hidden by a wall of scrubby brush and birch trees. I looked up at the buildings, including the modern brick one that housed the cafeteria, and I saw cars and buses coming and going, and police officers and guys who I think were campus security herding kids and families and old people inside. If anyone was going to come after me, they hadn’t started yet. Honestly, my feelings were a little hurt, which in hindsight is just crazy. I mean, there was a fucking nuclear meltdown going on and it was pouring outside. We’re talking monsoon, practically. All anyone could think about was radiation and fallout and the “plume.” Who had time to worry about little old me? And, for all I know, they did come after me. It just took them a minute to rally or to decide, Hmmm, I guess she isn’t just drama-queening out there and we better go get her.
But by then I was off and running.
My plan was to try and find my parents. I actually thought I was going to go back to Newport and Reddington. Remember, I was kind of hysterical and, as I’ve told you, I’ve always had weird brain chemistry issues, and back then I wasn’t on any meds. (When I first got here, there was some talk about whether I should be taking antipsychotics. Seriously? One doctor brought up lithium. Yeah, not happening. I was on something for a few days, but I found I couldn’t write. The doctors said it was just my imagination. Wrong. When I was that medicated, I had no imagination. That was the problem. So, I try and stick to the antidepressants, and I am on a way lower dosage than I was when I was living with Poacher and downing painkillers like M&M’s.)