Crazy Eyes

California Dream

2010-10-13T21:25:00.000-07:00

After Explorers disbanned, I went back to wandering. But this time, I was largely on my own. My old neighborhood friends weren’t around anymore… Charlie had moved away, and so had Shawn and his sisters, and it seemed like other people didn’t come out of their houses the way they used to. Lyndsie had moved with her family to Rockford, I barely saw Jennie and Rose at school any more, and my younger brother wasn’t at all interested in my company anymore. I was on my own now.
For some reason I liked walking to the train depot. When we were younger Jay and I had sometimes walked to the train station and taken short train trips to other towns, without our parents knowing. We would go to Arlington Heights, Des Plaines, or Mount Prospect, usually, and just walk around the downtown area, pretending we lived there. (We never dared go any closer to the city than Des Plaines, and for some reason it never occurred to us to take a train ride in the opposite direction from the city.) I loved the grimy smell of the train depot, contrasted with the sanitized, air-conditioned feeling of the commuter trains. Getting on a train always gave me an excited, jumpy feeling, like I was about to go somewhere. Even if it was just the next town over.
So after school I would walk to the train depot and just hang out there. Back then, it was just a big room that smelled of beer, cigarettes and dirt. Orange, yellow and green plastic chairs lined the room, all connected to one another, I guess so nobody would steal them. Those chairs, all decorated with graffiti and mysterious staines, had probably been there since the seventies, when the depot was built. I’d heard the train depot had been an exciting place in the seventies. It was built with an attached strip mall, and a flat roof. The flat roof was because the building planners speculated that someday helicopters would be another popular source of transportation, and that they could land on the roof of the train depot! That would have been cool, but it never happened.
By the time I started hanging around, the strip mall contained only a handful of stores and restaurants that most people had never heard of. The depot itself had been taken over by the homeless people. They even used one of the payphones in the corner as their personal phone number. As for me, I’d just sit on the stairs in the back of the room, where I could see and hear everything while staying mostly unnoticed.
Then one day, when I got there, three teenagers were hanging around. There were two boys and a girl, all a little bit older than me.
I observed them from my spot on the stairs. The kids didn’t seem to be getting on any trains. They were hanging out, just like the homeless people, and like me.
In fact, the homeless people had given the kids food to eat, and the girl and one of the boys had washed their hair in the bathroom sinks. (The second boy’s head was shaved, so I guess he didn’t need to wash his hair at all.)
The biggest boy, with the bald head, was wild and talkative. He paced around the train depot, smoking cigarettes and talking to the homeless people. I learned, from eavesdropping, that he and his friends were from Michican. They were trying to hitchhike to California.
The girl was talking in Spanish to some Mexican guys outside. The second boy was quieter, just sitting on one of the chairs and smoking a cigarette in peace. So I was shocked when he came and plunked himself down on the stairs next to me.
“Whatcha doing?” he asked me.
I shrugged. I wasn’t used to anyone talking to me at the train depot, so I didn’t even have an answer for that simple question.
“Waiting for a train?” the boy prodded.
I shook my head. “Just… waiting,” I stammered.
He laughed. “I know the feeling,” he said. “I don’t even know where I’m sleeping tonight! I’m from Michigan!” He whipped out his state ID and held it in front of my eyes, so that I could see for myself that he was from Michigan. I could also see that his name was Joel, and that he was seventeen. “These two just showed up at my house at one in the morning, and asked me if I wanted to go to California. I was like, sure, what the hell!”
At the sound of Joel’s voice, the other boy and the girl came and joined us on the steps.
I felt a little surrounded… but I was thrilled that these kids, who were obviously way cooler than me, having hitchhiked from another state and all, had decided to talk to me! “Whats your name?” the biggest boy demanded.
“Nicki,” I told him.
“I’m Jerome, and this is Sally, and I guess you already got to know Joel,” said the boy. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” I told him, adding that I’d be fifteen in a few months.
Joel raised his eyebrows. “We’d be kidnapping a minor,” he scoffed.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“We were thinking before that you might like to come with us to California,” Jerome explained. “But Joel is scared that we’ll get in trouble because you’re so young.”
“You guys are minors too,” I pointed out.
“Nope. In Michigan, seventeen is the age of majority,” said Joel. “If you’re seventeen and you’re from Michigan, you can go anywhere you want!”
I’d never heard of anything like that. I’d always assumed kids were minors until they were eighteen, everywhere in the USA and possibly the world. “Can you drink?”
Jerome winked at me. “Not legally, but sure!”
“It should be okay, though,” Joel decided. “I mean, Sally’s really only fifteen, so…”
“Joel, shut up!” Sally punched him in the arm. She looked at me. She was a chubby girl with dyed black hair and large brown eyes. “You won’t tell, will you? I’m a runaway. But if anyone asks, I’m seventeen.”
“I won’t tell,” I promised.
Her eyes grew wide. “They’re gonna ditch me, and take you instead!”
“They wouldn’t.”
Joel and Jerome burst out laughing, saying I was wrong, they would definitely consider ditching Sally.
“But, seriously.” Jerome’s smile faded, and he looked somberly into my eyes. “This girl here is like a little sister to me. I will protect her with my life, no matter what.”
We were all silent, for a moment, mulling this over.
“Do you smoke?” Sally asked me.
I shook my head. “I can’t. I got asthma.”
“You party?” she asked. When I looked confused, she added, “You know… you drink, smoke weed, anything?”
“Naw.” I felt somehow guilty, like I wasn’t as cool as they thought, after all. I tried to explain. “See, my dad is an alcoholic, and…”
The kids laughed again. “Join the club, kid,” said Joel, patting me on the back.
“So are you gonna come with us?” asked Sally.
“Yeah, she is,” Jerome answered for me.
Before long, I was starting to think it might be a good idea. The kids and I talked for hours. We got up and paced around the train depot, went outside and balanced on the tracks, sat on the plastic chairs and ate stale sandwiches with the homeless people, and just talked and talked. I’ll never remember what we talked about, except for the underlying theme that none of us felt like we fit into the world as a whole. Jerome was sure that California would be a whole new world, where we could all start a new life. He said he had hitchhiked across the country before. He was full of adventurous stories of getting rides with truck drivers and hippies, sleeping on the streets and in forests, making new friends and having fun.
Sally and I talked the most of all. While the boys were outside smoking, we vowed to stick together because we were both girls. We would help each other out and keep each other safe.
For a regular person, it would have been hard to understand how I got so attached to three complete strangers, in just a few hours. But in those days, I didn’t get to have real conversations with many people. All my anxiety disappeared around those kids. For once in my life, I felt like I belonged.
After a while, a cop walked into the train station. “Let me see your ID’s,” he demanded.
All of us, except for Sally, pulled them out. Joel and Jerome had state ID’s from Michigan, but all I had was my school ID.
“What are you doing in Palatine, if you’re all the way from Michigan?” the cop wanted to know.
“My mom lives in this town,” said Jerome. “We’re just waiting for her to get off of work, so we can get some money from her. We’re trying to get to California.”
The cop looked at Sally. “Where’s your ID?”
“I lost it, somewhere in Michigan.” Sally told him that her name was Kelly. She told him a made up birthday, and an address in Michigan that could have been real, or not.
The cop checked my ID next. “You waiting for a train?”
“I’m waiting for my big brother,” I said. I’d always sort of wished for a big brother.
“Why are you waiting for him at the train depot?” the cop wanted to know.
“He’s coming on the train,” I said. I was already making up a story in my head, involving Charlie, my headbanger friend from my neighborhood. I was going to say that Charlie worked at the McDonalds in Des Plaines, and that he was on his way home from work on the train. It could have been true. When Charlie had first moved out of the neighborhood, he’d lived in Des Plaines, worked at the McDonalds there, and sometimes had taken the train back to Palatine to visit. And, I did used to pretend he was my big brother. So, I reasoned, I wasn’t really lying if I told the cop all of that. But he never asked.
“That’s fine. You can stay,” the cop told me. “But you three need to get out of here. You have no reason to be here, unless you’re waiting for a train.”
Joel, Jerome and Sally gathered up their stuff. “When do you get off of school tomorrow?” Jerome asked.
“Two-forty-five.”
“Then, I’ll see you.” He winked at me again, before he left with Joel and Sally.
“Bye!” I called after them, waving wildly.
I waited for the cop to leave, before I went out the back door of the train station, darting across the train tracks and heading for the safety of my neighborhood. I went home through the back streets, so the cop wouldn’t drive past and see me walking, brotherless.

I barely made it through school the next day. I was nervous, but I’d pretty much made up my mind that I was going to go to California with my new friends.
There was nothing, I’d concluded, to keep me in Palatine. I hated school. I had no friends, and it seemed impossible for me to get anything more than C’s, D’s and F’s in my classes. For whatever reason, I could hardly ever catch onto the things being taught.
My horrid grades caused the teachers and other kids to decide that I just wasn’t trying, and that I didn’t study, didn’t care. It was easier to pretend like they were right. Every time I got in trouble for not turning in my homework, or got a test back with an angry red D or F on the top, I used to make my face go blank. I’d shrug it off, and stuff the paper into my backpack without a second glance. And whenever the teacher told us to find partners or get into groups to do an assignment, I would stay at my desk, glaring down at my desk, avoiding eye contact with the world. I would try to pretend like it was my choice not to participate. Even if the teacher threatened to give me a “zero” if I didn’t find a partner or get with a group, I would shrug and say, “I don’t care.” It was better han letting a teacher force me into a group of kids who didn’t want me in their group. I didn’t belong in school. Getting out a few years early seemed like my idea of Heaven.
I doubted they’d miss me at home, either, if I left. I figured nobody, at home or at school, would be bothered by my running away. I imagined writing a short goodbye note, explaining that I would be okay and to not look for me or worry about me. I would be a loss they could easily get over.
That day after school, I hightailed it to the train depot, excited to see my new friends. But when I got there, Joel and Jerome were no where in sight. Only Sally was there. She was crying her eyes out. One of the homeless people, a woman with gray hair, was comforting her.
I went over to her. “Sally, what’s the matter? Where are Joel and Jerome?”:
“I’m going home,” sobbed Sally. “I Called one of my friends in Michigan, and she said my mom is really sick. I gotta go home. I called the cops and turned myself in. Jerome and Joel took off so they won’t get in trouble,”
My heart sank. Not only had our venture to California been cancelled, but so had my only chances at having three real live friends.
“You want me to stay with you until the cops get here?” I asked Sally.
She nodded. “I’m sorry I’m ruining everything,” she whispered.
“Its okay,” I said. “You could write to me when you get back to Michigan. Will you?”
“Sure!” Sally brightened. “Maybe I can come back and visit you, one day. We stayed up all night talking about you, you know. Especially Jerome. I think he likes you.”
“Me?” This was the second time I’d been told that a boy liked me! But I was pretty sure nobody had ever stayed up all night talking about me before.
As soon as we exchanged addresses and phone numbers, the same cop from the day before came in. He walked right over to us, but he looked at me first.
“You waiting n your brother again?”
I nodded.
“Do you two know each other?” the cop asked, pointing to Sally.
“I met her yesterday,” I reminded him.
“Didn’t you meet those other kids here yesterday too?”
It took me a minute to realize that the cop didn’t know Sally was one of the same people he’d kicked out of the train depot yesterday. Her fake name and birthday had, apparently, really fooled him. I opened my mouth to explain, but stopped short, and just nodded warily. “Uh… yeah,” I said.
“Okay, young lady. I’m supposed to give you a ride to the police station. Your mom is on her way here,” the cop said.
I hugged Sally goodbye, before the cop led her outside. I went to the window and watched the cop hold the back door of the squad car open for Sally. Tears started to run down my face.
It had felt good to have friends, for a while. I couldn’t believe they were gone.
The homeless woman who’d been comforting Sally came up behind me, and put her hand on my back. “Its better this way, honey,” she said. “That little girl would have never made it on the streets.”

The police ended up picking Joel and Jerome up that night, as well. They let Joel go, and he got a ride back to Michigan with Sally and her mom. The cops kept Jerome, though. He had a warrant for some crime he’d committed years earlier, when he’d lived with his mother in Palatine. Jerome was sent to the Audy Home to wait for his trial.
I wrote to Sally the very next day. I got Joel’s address from Sally, and I wrote a letter to Jerome in care of the Audy Home. For a while, I wrote loyally to all three of them. I told myself that I was keeping everyone together, in a way, keeping Jerome and Joel and Sally updated on each other, trying to keep alive the feeling I’d had during those long hours in the train depot. Jerome, rotting away in the Audy Home, was the only one who wrote back to me regularly, even after he was transferred to a residential treatment center in Virginia. Jerome and I dreamed that someday, we were gonna get the others back together, and we were going to hitchhike to California, for real.

Exploring With The Explorers

2010-10-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! I've been MIA from this blog forever, but I'm going to get back on track and keep on cranking it out! I think I'm going to try NaNoWriMo next month, too, so that I can really get some work done!
Anyway, the saga continues...

Shortly after I started my freshman year of high school (which was, by the way, not starting off as well as eighth grade had ended) I heard my mom talking on the phone one day, making an appointment. Whatever she was saying sounded a little suspicious to me. When she hung up, I asked her, “Who were you just talking to?”
“Well, I was making an appointment for us to go to a family counselor,” Mom replied solemnly.
“What for?” I scowled. I had a feeling I knew where this conversation was going.
“Because you fight with me and Dad a lot, and we want to find out why,” said Mom.
I shook my head. “I’m not going.” I certainly didn’t want to go sit in a room with all of my family members and talk about what a bad kid I had turned out to be!
“We’re all going,” said Mom.
“That’s stupid, Mom! Its stupid!” I shouted.
I ran up the stairs and sought out Jay, who was in his room listening to music. I thought for sure he’d be my ally in this, since he was the one who wanted to believe there was absolutely nothing wrong with our family. “Jay, guess what? Mom made an appointment for us to go to family counseling!”
Instead of joining forces with me, Jay retorted, “So?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do you want to go to family counseling?”
He glared at me. “Well, I don’t think its stoo-pid!” he retorted, mocking the words I had yelled on my way up the stairs.
“Shut up! I hate you!” I shouted back at him. I retreated to my room, slamming the door behind me.
I felt lonely and sick and scared. I didn’t want to go to counseling. I didn’t want everyone looking at me and telling me how bad I was.

Inevitably, the day came… our first day of counseling at the township’s Youth Services department. I had resigned myself to the idea, although it still made me feel uncomfortable. As we started driving down our street, my dad stopped the car to speak with our across-the-street neighbors Sharon and Mark, a couple who had moved in recently and became good friends with my parents. Sharon asked where we were off to, and my dad replied, “Just running a few errands!” It seemed sort of scary to me that my parents didn’t want to tell Sharon and Mark, two of their closest friends, where we were really going. Counseling was apparently something very shameful. Since we were going to counseling because of me, I must be shameful!
It was definitely uncomfortable, if nothing else. My parents, my brother and I were no longer very used to going anyplace together… let alone someplace where we would sit and talk to a stranger about how screwed up we were. And we didn’t really talk about our feelings, in general.
So when the counselor, a lady named Wendy, brought us into her little office, none of us were quite sure what to do with ourselves. Mostly, I think, we told jokes and made Wendy laugh.
We went to a few sessions of family counseling, each pretty much the same as the next. Wendy would meet with my brother and I together, and then with our parents, and finally with all of us together. We generally kept the mood light and avoided talking about anything serious.
There was one session when my brother Jay brought up some incident that had happened at home, between him and our mom. I do not remember, at all, what it was about. I only remember that, on the ride home, our mom yelled at my brother for bringing it up. She accused him of badmouthing her in front of the counselor.
“Well, the point of going to counseling is for the kids to be able to bring things like that up, things that are bothering, and for the counselor to help us with it,” my dad reminded her.
That made my mom even more angry. She was driving, and when we got to our house she didn’t get out of the car. My brother and I ran up to my bedroom. We could hear our parents shouting at each other outside. We looked out the window and watched our mom drive away, as my stereo played “Hey Jude” in the background. “It’s just like a movie, isn’t it?” my brother remarked.
At the next counseling session, Wendy announced that she only needed to see me from then on. I was the screwed up one, the one who needed all the help. My parents and brother were free to go, to keep on doing as they had been doing.
I went to counseling every week, alone, from then on. Except for periods of time when my mom refused to take me to see Wendy because I wasn’t getting any “better”. My grades still sucked, and I still argued a lot with my parents. Mostly with my mom. The arguments centered, of course, around my grades and my messy room. Plus I was as hypersensitive and anxious as always, and I was probably hard to get along with in my family because I could never, for the life of me, just “go with the flow.”
I guess my parents expected Wendy to be more of an ally to them… to somehow get to the bottom of me, convince me to just bring up my grades, get along with my family, and for God’s sake just act normal! Instead, Wendy let me use the counseling sessions however I wanted, and I mainly used them to just blow off steam. I’d sit on Wendy’s couch, fidget like crazy, and report to her anything that had happened at home or in school in the past week. Wendy would nod, ask questions, and take notes. Sometimes she’d try to teach me some sort of relaxation technique, or have me read a book about anxiety or social skills or something. Once, she told me that I had Oppositional Defiancy Disorder. But mostly, she just seemed baffled by me.
The year I was fourteen, Youth Services started an Explorers program for teenagers.
Explorers was a national organization, actually a branch of the Boy Scouts. Most Explorers groups had a specific theme, such as police work, fire fighting, or community service, and give kids a chance to do field work at the job they want to do when they get older. It was supposed to whip your self-esteem and discipline into shape so you could become a fine, upstanding citizen!
The group the Youth Services started was more of a haphazard, experimental group for kids who were already getting services there. The Explorers would raise money and decide what they wanted to use it for… ball games, amusement parks, bowling, miniature golf, etc. They would also get involved in community service projects. Basically, the Youth Services Explorers program woul give troubled kidss a chance to have some clean, positive experiences.
Sandy found out about the program, and thought it would help me learn some social skills and make friends. I was terrified of spending an additional hour each week with kids who could potentially make fun of me… although eighth grade had gone smoothly, in high school I had gone right back to being an outcast… but Sandy convinced me to give it a try!
At first there were only four other kids in the program. Kandice and Rick had gone to my school in junior high but now went to an alternative branch of our high school, for kids with behavior problems. Tim went to my high school but I didn’t know him. He was a somewhat “nerdy” boy who loved math and electronics and was as socially awkward as I was. He may have had some sort of autism himself. Then there was Daniel, who went to a different high school. He was the only black kid in the program. He came with his Big Brother, James, who had signed up as a volunteer with the program so that he and Daniel would have something to do together.
At first, none of us talked much. The adult leaders, a mix of Youth Services staff and volunteers, were in charge of breaking the ice for us. They’d already arranged our first outing to a team building park.
I signed up to go, but I was terrified! It would mean spending a whole day with people I barely knew. The other kids had not made fun of me so far, but that was because they hadn’t gotten to know me yet!
I was desperate to belong, though. I had to take a chance!

The morning we went to the team building park, there were two staff members, plus Daniel’s big brother, chaperoning four of us kids. (Tim didn’t go that day.) Rick and Candice jumped into the staff members’ car right away. There was no room left in that car, and I was afraid of being left behind, so I hopped into James’s car with Daniel. James and Daniel looked a little surprised when I appeared in the back seat, but they didn’t say anything. I sat silently, staring out the window, waiting for the trip to start.
At first I assumed James and Daniel didn’t like me, and resented me being in their car, because they were both very quiet on the drive. But it was only because they were both sort of shy, and I think they were just getting to know each other as well
It was actually James, and not the staff members, who made it a point to befriend me and make me feel more comfortable. At the team building park, he sensed my uncertainness, and stuck by me, helping me understand what to do. It was one of those obstacle courses where people are supposed to communicate with each other to get through the challenges. Communication and talking were not my strong points! When I was very comfortable around people I tended to be hyperactive, and when I was uncomfortable I tended to be silent, but I was never good at actually communicating! But James took me under one wing and Daniel under the other, and helped us both get through the obstacles.
After that, going to Explorers was easier for me. James had helped me make connections with Kandice and Rick, so I was not so nervous around them, but it was James and Daniel who I looked forward to seeing each week.

One of our first planned outings was to an ice skating rink. I had never learned to ice skate, I could barely rollerblade! But I’d found a pair of very old ice hockey skates in my basement, which I’d cleaned up so I could go on the outing. I was awkward on the bulky skates, and I was afraid of falling, so I inched my way around the rink, clinging to the wall.
Daniel skated up to me and demanded, “What are you doing, girl?”
“I can’t ice skate,” I admitted.
“Yeah you can! Its easy! I’ll help you!” Daniel grabbed my hand, and suddenly the two of us were whizzing around and around the rink at what seemed like ninety miles an hour! Daniel held onto me and I never fell once. I forgot to be afraid! I had a grin plastered across my face! I was exuberant! For the first time in a long time, I felt like a normal kid.

At the next Explorers meeting, Daniel and James weren’t there. They were absent from the next two meetings as well. I finally gathered the courage to ask one of the staff members where they had gone.
“Daniel won’t be coming back any more. He moved to Chicago,” said a leader named Cathy.
I couldn’t accept the idea of never seeing Daniel and James again! “Maybe we can find out where he is, and send him a letter,” I suggested.
“I don’t think that would be appropriate,” Cathy retorted.
From then on, “appropriate” was a word I hated. It was a word that would mean, don’t get close to people, don’t get attached, because they can disappear at any moment and you won’t even be allowed to look for them.

A new volunteer joined Explorers. His name was Jeff, and he couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Us kids were excited at the idea of a volunteer who was much younger and more laid back than the ones we were used to! Jeff admitted to us that he drank and smoked weed, and that he’d been a wild kid in high school. He talked to us like we were real people, not like he was the Staff and we were the Troubled Kids.
Right when Jeff started volunteering, there was a dance, held at the community college, for all Explorers groups in the area. We went… a little reluctantly. Kandice told Rick, Tim and I that the dance was going to be lame.
Kandice was the most worldly one in our group. She hung out with eighteen and nineteen year olds, drank alcohol, went to parties, and had run away from home a few times. If she told us something was going to be lame, we took her word for it.
Sure enough, there was hardly anyone at the dance. When we tried to hang out in the section where snacks were being served, several cops who were leaders of other groups told us that we must go dance.
Instead, we ended up playing hide and seek, boys against girls! We used the entire first floor of the building to play in. When it was our turn to hide, Kandice and I stumbled upon the back stage part of the college’s auditorium.
Our game forgotten, we snuck around back stage, exploring with the excitement of kids who were somewhere they knew they probably shouldn’t be.
Eventually the staff must have wondered where we were, and they sent Jeff to find us. He came into the auditorium. Kandice and I tried to hide, but our giggles gave us away.
Instead of dragging us back to the dance floor, Jeff helped us explore the auditorium! We discovered a way to climb up into the rafters. I was enchanted by this secret world inside the college! Up there was where the magic behind the scenes of a play was created. We found where the lighting and music was controlled, where old costumes were kept, and a piece of rope which we thought could be used to make a person fly across the auditorium like Tinker Bell! Later on, I would daydream that someday I would run away from home and live in the rafters of the community college auditorium. In another daydream, I plotted to enroll in the community college when I got older, and join a drama class just so I could spend time in the rafters. I had a habit of becoming obsessed with odd things, and for the next few months my obsession was with the rafters in auditoriums.
Anyway, the dance ended, and Kandice and I pleaded to ride back to Youth Services with Jeff. Flattered by our admiration, Jeff treated us to a crazy ride, speeding and blowing traffic lights the whole way! The dude was my newest hero.
Back at youth Services, the other kid were quickly picked up by their parents, and most of the volunteers and staff members headed home. My parents were not there yet. They’d started regularly being late to pick me up from places, giving me the sinking feeling that they wanted to put off seeing me for as long as possible. That night, Cathy, the… the same staff member who had told me that it would not be appropriate to try to write to Daniel after he moved… waited with me. She made chit-chat with me, asking me how I’d liked the dance.
“It was awesome!” I told her. “Me and Kandice were sneaking around in the auditorium, and then Jeff came and showed us how to get up into the rafters! We were up there for hours! It was so cool, just like a secret room!”
Cathy raised her eyebrows . “Jeff took you up there?”
I nodded, taking her tone as a sign of her approval. “Then on the way home, he drove, like, ninety miles an hour, and he went through all the red lights!” I laughed at the memory.
“He did, huh?” Cathy smiled stiffly.
“Yeah! Jeff is so cool, isn’t he?”
It never occurred to me that I was basically ratting Jeff out. A kid like Kandice or Rick or even Tim would have known better than to cheerfully spout all of that information. But in my innocence and excitement, I never dreamed that Jeff could get into trouble.

At the next Explorers meeting, Jeff wasn’t there.
This time I remembered the disappearance of Daniel and James, so I didn’t even wait to see if Jeff showed up at another meeting. I marched right up to Cathy and demanded, “Where’s Jeff?”
“Jeff and I had a talk, and he decided that he wasn’t ready to make a commitment to volunteering,” said Cathy. “He’s very busy with work right now.”
Even I didn’t fall for that. My heart sank. “He left because of us,” I said. “He got into trouble from the dance, didn’t he.”
Cathy shook her head quickly. “Oh, no, no, no! It had nothing to do with that!”
But I knew.

One of the last Explorers activities I can remember is when there was a state-wide conference for all Explorer groups in Illinois. It was held at the Clock Tower Hotel in Rockford. The conference was two days long. We were supposed to choose and attend seminars about things like law enforcement, self-defense, and leadership skills. My little group raised money selling magazine subscriptions so we could go.
The conference happened at a time when the Youth Services department was trying to attract more kids to the Explorers group, instead of limiting it to troubled kids who already got services there. They visited different schools and put up flyers. The result was that two girls named Megan joined us. The two Megans had been best friends since kindergarten. They were fine, upstanding, straight-A, college bound, take-charge girls with straight, shiny hair and bright eyes, and they came full of ideas on how they could change and improve our group. Instead of welcoming their ideas and attitudes, we troubled kids started off resenting them. We called them “the Megans” as if they were a separate entity from us. Even after we warmed up to the Megans, we never really felt like Explorers was the same with them there.
Anyway. We would be staying overnight at the Clock Tower Hotel, and since staff members weren’t allowed to share rooms with kids because of paranoia reasons, we had to pair up.. The Megans would share one room, Rick and Tim another, and Kandice and I the third.
When we arrived that morning after a ride that seemed to last about six hours (even though I know it didn’t because Rockford is really only an hour and a half away from Palatine) we were supposed to report to the seminars we’d chosen. The Megans dutifully went off to together to the seminar they’d chosen. The rest of us, of course, completely ditched our seminars and explored the hotel. (We did a lot of exploring. We were probably the only Explorers group that really earned the title of Explorers!)
We found the game room right away. I was excited to see that they had a Pinball machine! I loved Pinball, and I was pretty good at it, as long as nobody was watching me.
Then this boy about my own age came and started watching me play. So of course I got nervous, screwed up, and lost my balls right away!
“You’re pretty good,” said the boy.
“Naw,” I replied, edging away.
The boy followed me. “You have, like, the coolest eyes I’ve ever seen! You have crazy eyes! They’re all different colors!
“Uh, thanks,” I said.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked.
I told him, “Nicki.”
“My name is Ron,” he said. “Nice to meet you. I saw you from across the room, and I told my friend, ‘I gotta meet that girl!`”
I was confused. Why would the boy want to meet me? I was wary of him, but I stood with him and made awkward conversation for a while. He told me he lived in Galesburg, and was in a Police Explorers club, because he wanted to be a cop when he grew up. His dad, grandpa, and uncles were all cops, and so was his older brother.
After a while, Ron had to leave and go to his seminar, and I made a beeline for Kandice. I wanted to tell her about this weird boy who kept following me and trying to talk to me!
Kandice rolled her eyes. “He likes you!”
“What for?” I wondered.
“You know! He think you’re pretty or something,” Kandice explained.
“You mean he, like, boyfriend-girlfriend likes me?”
“Was he acting like it?”
“I dunno.” I thought about it. “He said I have crazy eyes.”
“Well, there you go!” said Kandice. “He likes you!”
I forgot about Ronny, while Kandice and I explored the hotel some more. There was nothing more exciting than being two kids left to their own devices in a large, fancy hotel! This was even cooler than the rafters in the college theater had been!
We wandered into a meeting room that was empty, except for a piano in the back corner, where a large, African American man was playing a song. The man was bald headed, and was wearing a red suit and tie. We lingered in the room until the man stopped playing. We clapped.
“Thank you, thank you!” the man said.
“Do you work here?” I asked. “Is this your job, playing the piano here?”
“Not exactly,” he replied. “I’m just messing around right now. Tonight I’ll be playing in the bar downstairs. I’m Willie. Who are you?”
“I’m Kandice, and that’s Nicki,” Kandice told him.
We stayed with Willie a while longer, and he played more songs for us and told us funny stories. As always, I was thrilled to meet a kind person. All anyone ever had to do was smile at me, talk to me for a while, and I would think of them as my new best friend. So of course, I didn’t want to leave ever, and Kandice had to practically drag me away when she started to get bored.

And now this story gets a little weirder.
The Explorers organization had put on a dance for all of the Explorers. I had a bad track record with dances! But apparently, when you’re fourteen, going to dances is what you’re supposed to do, because the Explorers were always having them.
Ronny and his friend Charles came to find me and Kandice, and they decided with Kandice that the four of us were going to the dance together. Then, as soon as we walked into the dance, Kandice and Charlie vanished, leaving me alone at the table with Ronny.
The music was so loud, it hurt my ears. I couldn’t even really hear the music when it was that loud… I just heard a massive, loud rushing sound. There were strobe lights bouncing around everywhere. I felt dizzy. I could see Ronny trying to talk to me, his lips moving, but I couldn’t hear the words coming out of his mouth. For some reason he kept trying to grab my foot between his feet under the table. Things were spiraling out of control!
I got up and darted out of the room.
I felt like I was escaping something, like I was in a bad dream where someone was chasing me. Was Ronny chasing me? I didn’t look back. I just kept on running.
I needed to find a place to hide! I knew Kandice was still at the dance, and I didn’t want to go back to my room alone. But I hadn’t seen Rick or Tim there, so I decided to go to their room. Only, I couldn’t remember exactly what room it was! It was in a different hallway from our room, and Iwasn’t sure how to get there.
When I thought I had found their room, I knocked fiercely at the door. Nobody answered, so I pounded even harder.
A lady came out of a room across the hall. She was wearing a cop uniform! “They’re not in there,” she told me. “Can I help you?”
I backed away from her. “I’m just looking for Rick and Tim,” I stammered.
“That’s not their room,” said the cop. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, But the cop kept staring me. I chewed on my lip and scratched at a scab on my arm, waiting for her to go away.
“Are you on any medication?” the cop demanded. “Or drugs?”
“Nope!” I replied. “Okay, I’m gonna go look for Rick and Tim now. Bye!” I turned and shot down the hallway, leaping down the stairs three at a time.
I got to a downstairs hallway with a huge picture window overlooking the pool. I stopped to catch my breath. I stood up on a bench below the window, and looked out at the pool. It was a cool view, with window above my head and below my feet. I could imagine I was flying!
“Excuse me,” someone said.
I turned around. The cop had followed me! I turned back to look at the pool. Now my heart was pounding! I couldn’t even really remember why I had been so panicked at the dance. The noise and lights and Ronny had freaked me out. Now I had cops after me! How did I get myself into these situations?
“What are you doing up there?” the cop asked me.
“Just looking,” I said.
“Why don’t you come down from there? People might think we’re crazy.”
It felt like she was talking me down from a suicide jump or something. But how could she think I was going to jump? The window was as thick as the wall! I got down anyway. And then, who did I see, but my new friend Willie?
I ran towards him, shouting, “Willie! Help me!” I hid behind him, peeking out from behind his red suit coat.
Willie chuckled. “Whats the matter?”
“I don’t want to go back to the dance! Its dark and noisy, and that weird boy is there! And now I got this cop following me everywhere!”
“Did that boy make a bad move on you?” Willie asked.
The cop had followed me down the hall, of course, and was now eyeing both of us suspiciously. “Do you know this child?” she asked Willie.
Willie nodded casually. “Well, she’s supposed to be at the dance,” said the cop. “All of the other kids are at the dance.”
“I don’t want to go to the dance!” I protested.
“Sure you do!” said the cop. “Come on, I’ll walk down there with you.”
“Yeah, I’ll walk down there with you, too,” said Willie. He winked at me, trying to convince me.
“Alright,” I gave in.
Willie and the cop started towards the room where the dance was. I followed.
Then I had an evil idea.
I slowed my pace until I was a couple of yards behind Willie and the cop. When they passed a stairway, I bolted up the stairs! I glanced over my shoulder and saw Willie looking back at me. He rolled his eyes and shook his head.
This time, I ran directly to mine and Kandice’s room. I used my key, and burst inside. Kandice and Charles were lying on the bed in there. Rick was sitting at the end of the bed, watching TV. As I slammed the door behind me, they all looked up.
“Got the cops after me!” I panted.
“What? The cops? Why would they be after you?” Kandice stared at me.
“Because… its like…” I stammered.
“Calm down. Take some deep breaths,” Rick counseled me. He handed me an open can of warm pop. “Drink this!”
I took a long chug, even though it was diet and I hated diet pop.
Before I could try to explain again, there was a knock at the door. I ran to peep through the peep hole. There were about ten uniformed cops standing out there, in a triangle formation, with grim expressions on their faces. I wondered if they were about to bust down the door, like I’d seen on “COPS.”
I turned to the other kids. “They’re here! The cops!” I cried. “What should I do?”
“Open the door,” Kandice advised.
Rick opened it for me. The cops marched right in. I stood there, drinking my hand-me-down pop and smiling sheepishly.
“Are you Nicki?” the cop in the front of the triangle demanded.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“Why were you running from Officer Parks?” he asked.
“Who’s Officer Parks?”
“That nice lady officer who was trying to walk with you to the dance.”
“Oh. Yeah. Because I don’t want to go to the dance!” I said for the millionth time.
“Why not?” asked the exasperated cop.
“Someone made a bad move on me,” I replied.
The cop narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, a bad move?”
I looked back at him, bewildered. I was just repeating what Willie had said. I had no clue what a “bad move” was, or why it caused the cop to look so alarmed. I decided to just explain, “He was kicking me under the table!”
The cops looked at each other and raised their eyebrows, their mouths twitching.
When they were finally satisfied that I wasn’t going to slit my wrists or burn the building down, the cops left, warning us to keep the door open when we had boys in the room.
As soon as they were gone, I was ready to take off again. “I’m gonna go find Willie!” I declared.
“Who’s Willie?” asked Rick.
“Some black dude we met downstairs,” said Kandice. “Nicki’s in love with him.”
“I am not!” I protested. But I was already out in the hallway by then, so they probably didn’t hear me.

I walked down to the very end of the hotel, where there was a bar and a large lounge area. I found Willie sitting at the bar. “Guess what! The cops were after me but now they let me go. And I didn’t have to go to the dance. Its over. So I came here.”
“That’s good, huh,” said Willie.
He seemed amused by my company. He didn’t have anything better to do than talk to me, so we sat in the lounge outside the bar, and talked to random people coming in and out. I laughed at the drunk people who stopped and joked with us, and Willie told me more funny stories about the people he’d met. He said he lived in Freeport, which was near Rockford, but he traveled around the country playing the piano and singing. I didn’t always understand what he was talking about. But I was having the time of my life, just sitting there!
It was one in the morning when another flock of cops appeared in the lounge. These cops looked much younger than the ones who had come up to my room. I wasn’t even sure they were cops. Maybe they were just cops in training, or even older Explorers?
“Are you Nicki?” one of the alleged cops asked me. When I nodded he said, “You need to come with us. You’re supposed to be up in your room. Everyone has been looking for you!”
“I was down here. I don’t want to up to my room. I want to stay here,” I said.
“Its one in the morning. You’ve broken curfew,” said the cop.
I hadn’t even known there was a curfew. I still balked, though, even as the parade of cops led me upstairs. “I’m having fun down here! I’m not even tired!” I said, and then changed the subject. “I’m not crazy, you know.”
The cop rumpled my hair with his hand. “Oh, shut up and take your Ritalin,” he said.
When we got upstairs to the room I was staying in, I saw Kandice, Tim, Rick and the Megans all lined up outside the door with the staff. “Hi, guys!” I greeted them cheerfully. “Here I am with my police escort!” They all laughed, even the cops.
I saw Willie one more time after that, the next morning as everyone was getting ready to leave. Of course I skipped breakfast to go down to the lobby and pester him. The weird thing was, Willie was actually sleeping on the couch in the lobby. I woke him up when I got down there, to say goodbye to him. At the time, I thought it was funny, and adventurous, for someone to be sleeping in the lobby of a hotel without having a room. I never thought to ask him why. I asked him if I could write to him, and he gave me his sister’s address, which he said he used as a mailing address. The address was in a town very close to Rockford. Willie said he traveled a lot, and that was why he didn’t have his own local mailing address.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I guess maybe Willie was one of my first homeless people. That was one of our last Explorers adventures. A few months later, the Department Of Youth Services decided to do away with the Explorers program. Apparently, we “troubled kids” couldn’t be helped after all.

Shout Out To Lake In The Hills!

2010-02-20T18:12:00.001-08:00

Hey, who keeps reading this from Lake In The Hills? Thanks for being such a loyal reader, but... won't you say hi???

School Is Cool

2010-02-20T18:10:00.001-08:00

I got lucky in eighth grade because my two friends, Jennie and Rose, had ended up in the same homeroom as me. In that school it was pretty coincidental that two girls I had met by chance, who I had only been in elective classes with during seventh grade, had both ended up in my homeroom. At my junior high we were sectioned off, so that even though we switched classes all day long, we would be in the same classes with all the kids in our homeroom, except for electives. Three of my classes were even taught by the same teacher, in a portable classroom outside the school. Maybe someone in the school had placed me in this group on purpose, or maybe it was just a happy coincidence, but the arrangement was perfect for me. Being in the same classroom three times a day, plus being with the same kids in every class, provided a lot more stability. Jennie and Rose were still my only real friends, but my homeroom group became like a sort of extended family. I now at least had people to talk to, and didn’t get nervous when I had to be in a group. The homeroom kids rarely teased me, and sometimes even could be counted on to stick up for me against other kids in the school. And Jennie, Rose and I grew even closer, now that we were together all day every day. Jennie and I even began telling people we were cousins, devising a story about how we had just recently discovered that our fathers were stepbrothers. When we discovered something we both had in common, we would look at each other and chorus, “Cousins!”
Although I was pretty happy in school, my grades and school work were still a mess. I liked to go to school to see Jennie and Rose and even to see the other kids, but meanwhile, I was failing every class! As for tests, I tried to study when I remembered to, and when I managed to bring the right books and material home. But I really had no idea how to study. Apparently, blankly staring at my books and notes was not the way to go. I failed tests miserably.
At one point, I decided I was so unscholarly that I was better off depending on my psychic abilities to pass tests! The next time I was given a test, I simply closed my eyes and randomly chose answers. I was genuinely shocked when I failed even that test!
Ms. Evans, the teacher who taught me English, Literature and Social Studies, started out being my least favorite teacher. She seemed to ignore me in class, but during Parent-Teacher Conferences she was quick to report all of my shortcomings to my mother. Ms. Evans told my mom that all I did in class was take up a seat. She claimed that I never turned in assignments (basically true), that I talked out of turn (guilty as charged… I was so happy with the little bit of acceptance I’d gained that I often couldn’t keep quiet!), and that I passed notes (not guilty… although I did a lot of doodling and scribbling in my notebooks when I was supposed to be taking notes!) After that conference my parents screamed at me more than ever, and I blamed it on Ms. Evans. I was especially happy when she had to have surgery and took an extended amount of time off to recover, leaving us with a substitute who I got along very well with.
Slowly, my grades seemed to improve. I still did horribly at tests. I failed the Constitution test that all eighth graders were required to pass in order to graduate. I had to take the failed test home and correct the answers, and then I was supposed to take the test a second time. Being the evil genius that I was, I looked up all the correct answers in my history book, copied them down before I turned in my first test, and memorized them by rote. When the time came to take the second test, I easily got an A+, shocking everyone.
I also did well at special, long term projects, which was good because these projects often carried more points than the smaller assignments and tests I flunked all the time. I remember writing a fictional diary of a girl traveling with the Wagon Train, for history class. For Science, I aced one project by doing a study on birth order, surveying the students in my little brother’s sixth grade class and cataloging their results in order to prove my hypothesis that birth order effected personality. Jennie and I aced another project together by researching and doing an oral report on alcoholism. (I felt I had an insider’s advantage on this one because of my family!) When I was flunking math, I brought my grade up by doing a special extra credit project, where basically I made a geometrical design on a piece of poster board. I excelled at this type of learning!
The year got better and better. Ms. Evans, once my arch nemesis, became my favorite teacher after a while! Social Studies was my last class of the day, and every day Jennie and Rose and I would stay after school to help put all the chairs on top of the desks and pick trash up off the floor, before rushing to our busses. I liked having this few minutes of extra attention and conversation with a teacher, and it seemed to improve her view of me too! She started singling Jennie and Rose, and especially me, out for other classroom jobs, such as bringing the recycling bin and garbage outside, delivering notes to the office, organizing shelves, etc. Sometimes she would even buy us sodas as rewards! I was still young enough, at least emotionally, to think of these things as privileges.
I also joined Dynamic Discussions, an after school club where we discussed a different topic or issue each Wednesday. This group helped me make more friends, and I really liked the teacher who led it, Mrs. Britton. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I belonged!
Around this time, I seemed to develop some sort of sleeping disorder. Even though I woke up at 6:00 every morning, when nighttime rolled around, I could not fall asleep. My brother and I still had a required “bed time” mandated by my mom. I would go to bed at nine-thirty like I was supposed to, but I would usually be unable to sleep. I would read in my bed for hours, and when my eyes got too tired, I would just lie awake in misery, often until two or three in the morning. I complained bitterly about this to everyone who would listen, but nobody seemed to have any advice to give me. (My brother did tell me that I could come into his room if I was bored, because apparently he also suffered from insomnia!)
When I did manage to drift to sleep, I was plagued by horrible nightmares. I would wake up with my heart pounding in my ears. It got so bad that all I had to do was close my eyes, and horrid visions would appear before me! One time, I woke up in the night screaming bloody-murder. My parents bolted out of bed and ran upstairs, thinking I was being attacked or something! When I woke up I was sitting straight up in bed, terrified and bawling. I had absolutely no memory of what I had been dreaming about, what had frightened me so badly. Not remembering scared me even worse. I cried hysterically, begging my parents not to leave me alone! They told me I could sleep on the couch for the night, but even the couch, right outside my parents’ bedroom, was too scary for me. I couldn’t stop crying.
“I want to go to school!” I bawled.
“What? You don’t want to go to school?” asked my mom, guessing that something at school had happened that was tormenting me and had caused my nightmare.
But, “No, I do want to go to school!” I sobbed. “Please take me to school!” School, with its brightly lit classrooms and hallways, where the kids were now tolerant ofand even friendly to me, where the teachers took time to talk to me, where even the janitor smiled at me and ruffled my hair when he saw me, now seemed like a safe haven.
“School is closed right now. It’s three in the morning,” my dad told me.
“I want to go anyway,” I wept.
In the end, my dad slept on the couch, and I slept in my parents’ bed next to my mom. It was the only way I could get any sleep. And in the morning, I happily went off to the comfort and safety of school.

As the weather started to get warmer and the sun started to shine more often, my mood lifted even more. I spent as much time outside as I could… either wandering the streets aimlessly with Jennie, Rose or Lyndsie after school, or occasionally hanging out with my brother and his friends, who had become quite the group of wanna-be juvenile delinquents! One particular time, Jay and I walked into the downtown area of our neighborhood, where we ran into a few of Jay’s friends… the twins, Jerry and Jack, who had been notoriously bratty since before kindergarten, and another boy named Brett… hanging out in front of the drug store. At the drug store you could get a warm, generic can of soda for only ten cents, and Jay’s friends were begging passer-byers for spare change so they could get some pops. Jay and I were sort of lingering around, enjoying the act, when one older man got very angry at the boys. He scowled and told them, “You children are very gull.”
“So what? We don’t even know what that means!” the boys retorted.
“It means, rude beyond belief,” the man said. “And I’m calling the police!”
Jerry and Jack shouted some nasty words after the man. But they soon lost interest and started to walk away, along with their sidekick Brett. Jay and I trailed after them.
We walked around in town for a while. I didn’t like Jack and Jerry very much. They were loud-mouthy and show-offy. But this was the first time I had met Brett, who seemed like a much nicer kid, the kind of kid I would have wanted to be friends with. I was enjoying being part of a group along with my brother, even temporarily. It sort of reminded me of the days when I used to hang out with Jay and Pete and Ben!
We came around the block, on the same street as the drug store but about a block away. I glanced over in that direction, and saw that there were two cop cars parked right in front of the drug store. “Oh no,” I gasped, “he really did call the cops!”
We all ran off. The twins ran in one direction, and Jay and Brett and I went in another. We crept stealthily around town for a while, making our way home through the back streets and neighborhoods, trying to avoid the busy streets where we assumed the cops would be.
My heart was pounding like crazy! I was sure that we were on our way to jail! Jay tried to reassure me. “It’s no big deal. Jerry and Jack get the cops called on them all the time. Besides, we didn’t do anything wrong!”
Still, even Jay was a little nervous… if not about the cops themselves finding us, then about my mom finding out that we had been somehow involved. Our mom was the kind of person who everyone seemed to know. She had friends everywhere. The most horrible thing my brother and I could have done would be to do something to displease some adult… anyone else… a teacher, a storekeeper, or anyone… that could possibly embarrass my mom.
We went home and ran up to my room, where we talked and laughed about our “adventure”. All the while, we kept looking out my window, expecting the police to drive down our street any minute now to report us to our mother.
I couldn’t wait to tell my friends and classmates about the episode! I wanted them to think that I had an exciting life, even when they weren’t around.

I was really enjoying the feeling of belonging. I felt like school was my home. On yearbook day I wanted to pick up the yearbook I had ordered months and months earlier… but to my chagrin, the PTA moms handing out the yearbooks said they didn’t have my order!
“But I know I ordered one!” I said in dismay. I had probably meant to order one, but had lost the order form, or forgotten to turn it in, or something! It was possible to buy one on the spot with cash, but I didn’t have that kind of money on me! All I had was my three dollar allowance, and my school lunch card!
While all the kids in my homeroom were signing each other’s yearbooks, I complained to Ms. Evans. I was nearly in tears! “I really wanted a yearbook!” I sighed.
“Tell you what, kiddo,” said Ms. Evans. “I’ll get you a yearbook if you promise me one thing… when you grow up an become a writer, you have to dedicate one of your books to me!”
“Sure! I can do that!” I grinned.
So I got a yearbook, and filled it with signatures, and I was happy as a clam.

I even went to the eighth grade graduation dance, at the end of the school year. I went with Jennie and Rose, not with a boy, but still, I went. A few days later Rose and I attended a graduation party at Jennie’s house. Just like a regular kid! I was sad, so sad, to see eighth grade end. To make matters worse, Jay was going to be starting seventh grade there in the fall, while I would move onto the uncharted territory of high school. On the last day of school, I actually cried from homesickness. It was the first, and last, time I would ever be sad about summer vacation starting.

Some People Aren't So Trustworthy

2010-02-20T18:09:00.000-08:00

Whenever there was an occasion for my mom to get gifts (Christmas, Mother’s Day, her birthday, etc) my dad would take Jay and I to the store and help us pick out some gifts for her from us. Jay and I were pretty good at picking out gifts based on what we knew Mom liked. She always wore the colors red and black, and she loved cows, so many times we would pick out red and black clothing, red and black jewelry, or clothing or jewelry that had cows on them! Other times my dad would sort of guide us to pick out something that he already knew she wanted.
No matter what we got her, when Mom unwrapped her gift, she would thank us profusely, tell us how wonderful we were… and then tell us that she was going to return it and get something else. “I already have earrings just like this,” she would say, or, “I really don’t like this kind of material.” Every time!
We grew to expect it, but it still hurt our feelings. My mom would tell us she was going to return something, and Jay and I would groan, “Oh my God, Mom!”
The year I was in eighth grade, as Mother’s Day grew near, I decided I’d found the perfect solution. I’d get her a gift certificate! That way, she couldn’t return it. Cappuccinos were just starting to get really popular, and a small cappuccino shop called Mr. Cappuccino’s had just opened up a few blocks away from my house. I decided to get her a gift certificate from there.
The week before Mother’s Day, my brother and I walked up to Mr. Cappuccino’s and asked them if they had gift certificates available. The young man behind the counter told me that he didn’t have any yet, but he would the next week. Seeing my face fall, he asked, “When do you need one by?”
“I wanted to give it to her for Mother’s Day,” I said.
The man thought about it. “You know what? Come back in a few hours, and I’ll have some,” he said.
I went home with my brother, and after a few hours I walked back up to Mr. Cappuccino’s. The same man was behind the counter. “You came back!” he said. As he filled out the gift certificate I had requested, he asked me some questions… the usual questions adults ask kids, like whether I lived near by (obviously I did, since I had walked there twice in one day!), what school I went to, etc.
But his questions were enough to set my mind spinning. I was delighted that the guy behind the counter had recognized me (even though only a few hours had passed), had gone through all the trouble of somehow acquiring gift certificates for me, and had been kind and talked to me. These days, I didn’t encounter a whole lot of adults who showed any sort of interest in me, other than to yell at me! The fact that someone in a store had singled me out for attention just amazed me.
I began going to Mr. Cappuccino’s on a regular basis. At first I would just stop there once or twice a week, and stay just long enough to drink a hot chocolate. The owner, Cort, was a guy in his late twenties who lived in an apartment above the shop. He worked at the shop almost constantly, and when he wasn’t working, his mother was there tending the shop. The shop was very popular, and at certain times it would be jam-packed with customers… but at other times only the “regular” customers, mainly Cort’s friends, gathered at the counter. I quickly became one of the regulars… in fact, I got into the habit of going there every day right after school, and staying until evening. On weekends, I might be there from open to close! I would sit up on the stool, nursing my hot chocolate for all it was worth, swinging my legs and cheerfully talking with Cort and his friends. I was thirteen and still very young for my age, and the people at the coffee shop generally treated me like someone’s goofy little sister. They’d ask me about school and crack jokes with me and buy me more hot chocolates.
Sometimes they’d talk about serious matters like politics, or tell stories from their childhoods, and I learned a lot about the world from listening in on these conversations. From Mr. Cappuccino’s I learned that every person in the world had something to say, some story to tell, and some lesson to teach. In a way, I was lucky, because I informally had a whole roomful of adult mentors.
Other times, everyone seemed to forget I was there, and they’d talk about more adult topics like sex, or make dirty jokes. I absorbed everything they said, like a sponge. I would go to school in the morning and repeat dirty jokes and stories to my friends, laughing hysterically even though I didn’t really understand what I was saying. Then I’d go to school and repeat the jokes to Jennie and Rose, who just shook their heads and rolled their eyes at me!
As the shop grew more popular, Cort opened up a second location, in a different town. He then had to split his time between the two shops, and more and more often it was easier for him to stay at the second, larger shop and hire other people to work at the tiny shop that I frequented. His friends no longer came around the small shop as much, and were replaced by different “regulars” who weren’t quite sure what a really weird 14-year-old was doing sitting in a coffee shop sucking down hot chocolates seven days a week. I did make friends with some of the new employees. I grew very attached to one in particular, a college student who came to work there full time during his winter vacation the year I was a freshman in high school. I was used to being around the adults at the shop, but I thought it was awesome that this college dude, young enough to still sort of be a kid but old enough for me to look up to, would pay attention to me. During that winter vacation, I spent even more time at the shop. But when January came, the guy went back to his college in Florida. I was brokenhearted! And the other young employees were never quite as nice as that guy had been.
Eventually, the little cappuccino shop lost its luster for me. It didn’t help that my little brother, and my friends at school, repeatedly pointed out that perhaps Cort and the others at the shop were only nice to me because I “gave them money.” That idea made me feel somehow dirty, and lonely. I frequented the shop less and less, until I barely showed up there at all anymore.
I was always getting attached to people and places, though… especially adults. Any time an adult showed me any sort of friendliness or kindness, they would become a hero in my eyes. There was an older lady who lived on one corner, who was often outside raking her leaves, and the middle-aged lady on another corner who was often outside with her little maltese puppy. The Hispanic family down the street always tolerated my presence in good spirits… which was a little ironic because one of the daughters in that family was a grade younger than me, and rode on the same school bus as me, but showed no interest in being my friend. She thought it was sort of annoying that I was hanging around with her mother, uncles, and little brother, but there was not much she could do about it!
I even had my own tag-along, a six-year-old girl named Tammy. Like the Hispanic family I was friends with, Tammy’s family also included a kid who rode on my school bus, a boy named Ben who was a year younger than me. I was on more friendly terms with Ben than I was on with the girl from the family down the street, though. His mother, stepfather, and siblings had moved to our neighborhood a year earlier, but Ben had been living with his real father in another state and hadn’t joined them until a few months later. Ben and I had become friends at the bus stop, before he’d gotten the chance to find out that I was an unpopular kid at school. We never did become great friends, but Ben never teased me, and at the bus stop or at his house we often hung out and talked as if we were friends. He thought it was a little weird that I spent so much time with his little sister, but since it mostly meant that he got a break from babysitting her, he didn’t mind it at all.
Ben told me that his real father was a severe alcoholic, and that Ben had often survived only by raiding his father’s pockets for money after he passed out drunk. His stepfather wasn’t an alcoholic, at least not very obviously, but he physically disciplined his own sons and Ben pretty harshly. Ben told me that his stepfather had once given his younger stepbrother a bloody nose. And as for Ben’s mom, she didn’t seem to like him at all. When I was there, she would make fun of Ben, calling him names, and encouraging Tammy to join in. Ben was yet another stray kid.
Another one of my neighborhood idols was Charlie, a twenty-two-year-old headbanger who lived a block away from me. I first met him when his semi-feral cat had kittens. Tammy and I would go to his house every single day after school, asking to play with them. Charlie obliged, bringing the kittens out for us every single day and sitting with us on the tiny porch of his house.
When I was thirteen, twenty-two seemed so worldly. I just about worshipped Charlie. A lot of the other adults in my world, including my mom and my guidance counselors, worried when they found out about my friendship with Charlie. They were sure that he was some sort of child molester. Plus, with his long, wild black hair and rock band clothing, he was pretty well recognized in our neighborhood… and not in a good way! My mom couldn’t believe that I had gotten to know that weirdo!
But looking back now, I think that Charlie really was just another stray kid, albeit a little bit older than most of my stray kid friends. His mother had died when he was a kid, and his father was an alcoholic. Like a lot of the kids I knew, Charlie had been left to figure things out for himself in life. I think maybe his headbanger personality was something he created on purpose, in junior high or high school, to help himself survive.
At any rate, Charlie was my biggest hero, and the adult I spent the most time with! He took his role seriously enough and helped me through life in his own way. When I talked about running away from home, he would talk me out of it. “I know you’re smart enough to take care of yourself, but it would be really hard, because you’re too young to get a job or drive or anything,” he would point out. “Just stay with your parents for now. At least it’s a free place to sleep, and free food.” When I complained about the teachers and mean kids in school, he would tell me, “They’re just stupid. You just have to ignore them.” He taught me not to take life so seriously and to be thankful for smaller things in life.
Not all of the adults I automatically trusted were so worthy of it, though!
There was one man, an Indian guy called Rabu who worked as a bagger at the Jewel grocery store on the corner. The kids in my neighborhood were constantly running in and out of the Jewel, buying (or stealing) candy and pop or looking for free samples or just enjoying the air conditioning. I was no different. I found a reason to go into the Jewel at least once a day. When Rabu was working he would smile and say hello to me. Always looking for someone to become attached to, I made sure to look for him whenever I went into the store.
One day Tammy and some other kids and I were playing soccer in the empty lot next to the Jewel. Rabu was collecting shopping carts from the parking lot, and when he saw us he walked over to where we were. I stopped playing soccer and went to say hi to him. English was his second language and he wasn’t all that great at speaking it, so our conversations were always awkward.
Behind us, the other kids stopped playing soccer and wandered off, probably to play in Tammy’s backyard. Rabu took my hand and held it. “Do you like that?” he asked.
I thought he was looking at the ring on my hand, which was made out of a sea shell. “Yeah! Its made out of a sea shell! I got it in Wisconsin,” I told him.
Rabu nodded. “Can I give you a kiss?” he asked.
I knew that people from other countries were always kissing each other to say hello or goodbye. My Italian family members were always kissing me at weddings and stuff. I thought Rabu wanted to give me a friendly peck on the cheek, so I nodded cheerfully.
But it turned out he actually wanted to kiss me!
I pulled away from him, startled. “I gotta go home now,” I said, and darted away. I ran home and scrubbed the heck out of my face with a wash rag and steaming hot water!
I was a dumb kid because I trusted everyone, especially in my neighborhood. In a neighborhood where most of the parents worked and the kids ran amok, I had believed that the adults I encountered would always be like substitute parents and look out for me. Usually I was right. But Rabu was the first person who taught me that some adults were not trustworthy.
From that day on, I had a pukey feeling in my stomach whenever I went into the Jewel, and I rarely went in there anymore. When I had to, because the other kids wanted to go in or because I was with my parents or something, I avoided looking at Rabu. Sometimes I would be standing in line, carefully managing not to look in Rabu’s direction, and I could feel his eyes burning holes in me. This lasted a few years, until suddenly Rabu didn’t work there anymore, and I could go into the Jewel whenever I wanted to again.

Stray Kids

2010-02-20T18:08:00.000-08:00

“You know what we are?” I told my best friend, Lyndsie. We sat against the brick wall in the alley between the bar and Joe’s Barbershop, licking ice cream cones we had just bought at Baskin Robbins with half of my lunch money for the week. We were fourteen and liked to believe we had complete freedom in the world. “We’re stray kids,” I said. I liked the sound of that. I thought it described me and Lyndsie completely. And it was better than lost kids. “We’re two stray kids who nobody really wants around.”
Lyndsie rolled her eyes. “Maybe you are. I don’t want to be a stray kid. I’m just a regular person, like everyone else.”
That was the thing about Lyndsie. She was always trying too hard to be like everyone else. You know how adults are always saying, “If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff too?” Well, if everyone else jumped off a cliff, Lyndsie would definitely be right there with them.
In Kindergarten and first grade Lyndsie and I had both lived in Wheeling, where we’d met each other at school and become best friends. Her family had moved to Palatine at about the same time as my family had. We lived only about five minutes away from each other, but we lived in different school zones so our paths never crossed. Even though our mothers had remained good friends, we had never seen each other again.
Then in seventh grade our mothers had decided to reintroduce us to each other. They’d taken us out for lunch together. In a lot of ways Lyndsie and I were opposites. She wore makeup, liked fashion, listened to pop music, and tried to be popular in school. I had little or no interest in fashion and makeup, liked listening to the Oldies Station, and had given up on being popular. But in a lot of ways we were similar. We both had strange family lives. My parents fought constantly, my mother was borderline abusive, and my dad had recently been arrested for drunk driving. Her parents also fought constantly, her father was borderline abusive to her and her younger sister, and her mentally unstable mother often threatened suicide. Lyndsie and I led lonely lives, and by the end of the long school day we were always bursting with pent-up energy and dying for someone to talk to. At age twelve we’d had to be content with going to each other’s houses after school, or having one of our mothers drop us off at the library or the mini-mall. Despite their various shortcomings as parents, our collective parents had had a ton of rules for us. But by the time we were fourteen we were more independent, riding our bikes to each others houses whenever we wanted to and roaming around the town when the weather was nice.
Lyndsie was teaching me how to be a normal kid. I mean, she didn’t actually set out to do that, but she was like a bridge between my world and the rest of the world. At school, she hung out with the older, rebellious kids. She listened to “in” music, wore makeup, went to parties, and experimented with smoking and drinking.
I couldn’t bring myself to do any of those things. But I did cut off my hair! I just took a pair of scissors, stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and lopped it off. Instead of being wild and uncontrollable, now it hung in swirls and banana curls around my face.
I also adopted the uniform of jeans, T-shirts and unbuttoned flannels, the look of musicians like Kurt Kobain. Before I had always looked sort of raggedy, but now I looked like I was following the popular style. By my second year of high school, I actually sort of blended in… as long as I didn’t talk much!

“What do you wanna do now?” I asked her.
“I dunno. We could go to your house.”
“Naw.” I hated going to my house.
“Then lets go to my house.”
“There’s nothing to do there.”
“There’s nothing to do here either,” Lyndsie pointed out.
“Fine,” I sighed.
We walked all the way back to her house, taking a shortcut through Community Park. But when we got there, her parents weren’t home and the doors were locked. Lyndsie’s mother was a stay-at-home mom who earned extra money babysitting for a two-year-old boy we called Charlie Brown, so Lyndsie didn’t have a house key like I did. We went through the gate into the back yard and sat around, waiting.
I lay back in the grass and looked up at the clouds, searching for something to amuse myself. “Hey, look, I see a giraffe!” I declared.
I thought Lyndsie would make fun of the childish game, but instead she giggled and lay down next to me. “I see a tyrannosaurus rex,” she said.
“That one looks like a bulldozer!”
“Hey, that one looks like Charlie Brown’s head!”
“Dude, if you stare up at the sky long enough, it feels like you’re floating!”
We stared up at the sky in silence.
“Wow,” breathed Lyndsie.
“This is why I’ll never do drugs,” I mused. “Because people like us, we can get high off life.”
“Yeah,” Lyndsie agreed, “you’re right.”
We stayed that way until after dusk, when Lyndsie’s mom and her little sister and Charlie Brown came home and let us into the house.

By that time, I had actually managed to make a few friends as school as well. My friendship with Lyndsie had helped me polish up my social skills a little. But the kids I became friends with at school were other “stray” kids, kids who got teased at school and were unwanted at home.
First there was Mallory, who I met towards the end of seventh grade. She had just transferred to our school from a private school. Mallory was tall for her age, very overweight, and also very unkempt. She was plagued by horrid acne on her face, and she didn’t wear deodorant, although she did wear very heavy perfume. We were in gym class together, and that was where we met, bonded by the fact that both of us sucked at sports and got picked last for teams. Our gym teacher in seventh grade often let us spend the class period in “Open gym”, which basically meant we could do whatever we wanted, as long as we were in motion. We would walk around the gym and talk, or play catch. We rode the school bus together too, and soon our friendship had expanded to getting off the bus at each other’s stops and visiting each other’ houses.
Mallory lived with her mother, stepfather, older sister, and three younger half siblings. Her stepfather’s brother also stayed with the family. She adored her younger siblings, especially eleven-year-old Sari, who had cerebral palsy. But the adults in her family were often cruel to Mallory. Her stepfather and step-uncle were constantly yelling at her, and instead of sticking up for her, her mother would warn her to “lay low” around them. The stepfather wasn’t even Mallory’s first stepfather! He was her mother’s third husband. And he wasn’t the father of Mallory’s younger siblings.
The one bright spot in her life was the volunteer work she did, every Saturday, at a local nursing home. She would roam around and talk to the residents, and would often stay all day long. She loved it there so much, she invited me to come with her. It quickly became one of my favorite places, too! We didn’t have any rules or supervision there, but just roamed around the facility, talking to people and helping out where we could.
Mallory got teased all the time at school, and although I stuck up for her, my word didn’t carry much weight with the other kids since I was a “nerd” myself. Little by little, Mallory started to shut down. She stopped wanting to hang out with me, and even though we still sat together on the bus, she would usually pop on her headphones and ignore me.
Then one day, she just wasn’t at school anymore. Her absence stretched out longer than a regular illness would have. I called her house several times but couldn’t get a hold of her.
“Maybe she committed suicide because we teased her,” joked one of the girls in the locker room.
“You’d be proud of that, huh?” I snapped at them.
They didn’t know how close they were to the truth. Mallory’s mother eventually called me and let me know that Mallory was in a mental hospital. She was there for over a month.
As if Mallory’s heart wasn’t broken enough, the nursing home we volunteered at called her mom while she was in the hospital, and told her mom that Mallory and I were not going to be invited back to volunteer anymore. The head of volunteer services, who I’d never met or seen, said we showed up when we weren’t scheduled to work, and didn’t do anything but roam around.
When I heard that, I felt like I’d been punched in the heart. I’d loved volunteering at the nursing home… and now I was being told that I wasn’t wanted there? But as hard as it was for me to hear, I could only imagine how much it hurt Mallory.
She eventually came back to school, and seemed to be doing much better… but shortly thereafter, her family moved to Schaumburg, and Mallory transferred to another school. We talked on the phone a lot, but now that we didn’t ride the same bus or even go to school together, it was hard to visit each other.
One day Mallory ran away from home. She didn’t run very far… she just went to the mall that was a few blocks from her house. Her parents called the police on her, and when they came to get her, they took her to another mental hospital. This time, when Mallory got out, she was sent to live with her dad, in Wauconda. Wauconda was in northern Illinois, in a different area code and everything, and at that time, it may as well have been Alaska. I never saw or heard from Mallory again.
A mutual friend Mallory and I had had was Rose, yet another kid who was always getting made fun of at school. Rose was a tormented soul, and I never did find out everything about her. She came from a very secretive family, where she and her two brothers were mostly raising themselves while their parents co-existed unpeacefully in the same household. I learned eventually that Rose’s father regularly abused her mother. “The sound of her crying is like my alarm clock,” Rose once told me. That was only one of the secrets in her troubled life.
Then there was Jennie, one more girl who was teased a lot at school, although at least her home life was a little more simple than mine or Rose’s. I was at her house more often than not, whenever I could persuade someone to give me a ride there. Jennie and I used to pretend we were cousins. In fact, we convinced our teachers that we really were cousins! We made up an elaborate story about how our fathers were stepbrothers but since their parents had not married each other until our fathers were adults, they didn’t really know each other that well, and that Jennie and I had just recently discovered that we were related by marriage. We invented a game we called “The Game,” where we would go out in public places and talk loudly about the fake life we supposedly had as cousins, and about our fake collective family and everything. Sometimes the Game involved pretending we were deaf, and speaking to each other using the ASL alphabet. It was a silly game, but we liked being silly! Whenever we realized we had something in common, we would chorus, “Cousins!” and make the ASL sign for cousins in the air. How weird we were!
Rose was usually silly with us too. Together the three of us would roam the streets, making up silly songs and inventing our own crazy world. But once in a while, Rose would snap, declaring that she really hated us. “I just pretended to be friends with you guys because I needed someone to hang out with!” she once shouted at us, for no apparent reason. “I pretend to like those stupid games, and those stupid songs, but I really hate them! I never liked either of you and I never will!” Then she would quite calmly ask us how we felt about that. “Do you have anything to say? Anything at all?” she would prod.
Jennie and I were never quite sure what to say about that! We weren’t the kind of kids who liked to argue. One thing our families really did have in common was that we’d been trained to be quiet and polite “good” little girls. We would just exchange nervous glances and say, “I guess… I dunno…”
For a brief while in the beginning of high school, we were also friends with Dennis, a boy who the other kids made fun of because they claimed he was gay. He did seem to have a little “sugar in his step”… literally, the way he walked and talked and acted seemed rather feminine. He claimed it was because he had grown up with four older sisters. Dennis loved to cook and he loved drama… he was in the drama club at school and was passionate about it. We liked him because he was funny, and because… well, he was a boy! It was just sort of interesting to be friends with a boy! Even a boy who acted like a girl!
But Dennis wasn’t all that nice as a person. Although he should have known what it was like to be picked on, he made fun of other people relentlessly. There was one girl who was overweight, who he constantly called “Heiffer”. He would make mooing sounds whenever he saw her. I didn’t like that girl very much, myself, for different reasons. We were in an English class together once during our freshman year of high school, and since we sat near each other in our assigned seats, we had started out at least as friendly acquaintances. But after a while, the girl had started ignoring me at class, and rolling her eyes at me when I tried to talk to her. When I asked another acquaintance why this girl suddenly seemed to hate my guts, he explained, “She said you never keep your feet quiet in class.”
That was probably true! I was always antsy in class and had trouble sitting still. I was constantly moving, swinging my legs and tapping my feet. I usually wasn’t even aware I was doing it! Since the classroom floors were carpeted, it didn’t cause a disruption… unlike in elementary school, when the floors had been tile, and my teachers had often interrupted their lessons to scold me, “Nicki, sit still!” But for some reason, my swinging legs had disturbed this girl enough to make her hate me. So, truthfully, I wasn’t all that upset about Dennis making fun of her. It still made me a little uncomfortable, though, and I never joined in.
The one thing my friends and I all had in common was that none of us quite fit in. We were strays, stray kids, whether Lyndsie thought so or not.

The Lost Child

2010-02-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

With all the chaos around the house, Jay and I were left largely on our own. We came home from school each day and called Mom at whatever job she was at at the time, to let her know we’d gotten safely home. Then we were free until evening. Sometimes I would go over to my friend Lyndsie’s house, if her mother could pick me up or if the weather was nice enough for me to ride my bike. Mostly, though, I stayed at home. I’d sit at the kitchen table and read, or write stories, or draw.
Jay, on the other hand, was living the good life! He was popular in school and always had at least two or three friends with him. Only in fifth grade, he was already figuring out how much he could get away with. He and his friends had already tried smoking and drinking. They ditched school and stole stuff and got into fights. Jay was always having fun, and he never seemed lonely. I wished I could be like him! When he’d let me, I would hang out with him and his friends. It was sort of embarrassing being a tag-along to my younger brother… but it was better than nothing!
As lonely as I was when nobody was home, it was worse in the evenings and weekends when the house was full. Besides the fact that my parents were always fighting, my mom seemed disgusted with me lately. I mean, I’d always made her angry a lot. I was too hyper, too spacey, too annoying, too messy. “It’s like you make yourself ugly on purpose,” she’d said, when my pre-adolescent face had started to sprout acne. “No wonder you don’t have any friends!” she’d say, when I came downstairs in the morning with my shirt buttoned wrong. “How old are you, two?” was one of her favorite refrains.
But lately I could do nothing right. She seemed to be looking for things to get angry with me for. I guess I made it easy for her, with my bad grades and social awkwardness! It also didn’t help that I looked a lot like my dad, and acted a lot like him too. The things that angered her about him were the things that she hated about me. She hated the unfashionable clothes I wore, hated my scraggly hair, hated that I got bad grades in school and didn’t understand the homework and got bad reports from my teachers, hated that I had no friends and didn’t seem to be trying to make any. Sometimes all I had to do was be in the same room with my dad to be included in one of my mom’s attacks. “Both of you are so lazy!” she’d snap. “The two of you only think of yourselves!”
One evening we were planning to go out for fast food, and trying to decide where to go. My mom suggested Mexican food.
“How about chicken?” Dad said. “Nicki was just saying she wanted to go to KFC!”
“Yeah! KFC!” I cheered.
“I don’t want KFC. I want Mexican food,” Mom protested.
“I can’t eat Mexican food, it’s too spicy,” I interjected.
“How about we swing by Taco Bell on our way to KFC?” Dad said.
Mom frowned. “I don’t want Taco Bell,” she snapped. “Of course! It has to be anything she wants! She’s the little princess!” She stormed out of my room.
Injured, I ran to my own room. I threw myself onto my bed and sobbed. What had started out as the possibility of a fun family night had turned into a brawl… and I had caused it!
Dad came into my room. “Come on, Nicki, lets go. We’re going to KFC.”
“Is Mom going?” I asked tearfully.
“No,” he said, “just Jay and me and you.”
“I’m not going then.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “What do you mean? A minute ago you were all excited about having chicken!”
“Yeah, but Mom will hate me even more if I go! She’ll call me a little princess!” I sobbed.
Dad sat down on my bed. “Look. She says those things to hurt you. So if you don’t let it bother you, she won’t say them. Just get up, wash your face, and go out to dinner with me and Jay.”
If she’s doing it to hurt me, why do you let her? I wanted to scream.
He eventually persuaded me to go with him and Jay to KFC, but I couldn’t enjoy the fried chicken I had been craving earlier. It settled to the bottom of my stomach like pebbles.

One of my favorite things to do was write. I had started writing stories about as soon as I had learned the alphabet, which had been at age two. I was always scribbling away in a spiral notebook, or a bunch of sheets of paper stapled together or tied together with thread. Most of my stories were novels-in-progress that never got finished. But I had written a short story called “Grandma’s Garden” that I was very proud of. It was a dramatic story about a girl who was supposed to water her grandmother’s beloved flower garden while the grandmother was in the hospital, but she neglected her chore so she could spend time with friends. Her grandmother ended up dying in the hospital, and the girl, wracked with guilt, visited the garden every day from then on to take care of it. Most of my stories were crazy, tales of orphans and kidnappings and wars and murders. But this was a somewhat normal story, and I was thinking about sending it into Merlyn’s Pen, a magazine that published children’s writing.
My mom nagged me to hurry up and send it in already. “Did you send your story in to that magazine?” she asked me, one Saturday afternoon while she and my dad were eating lunch.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Are you going to?”
“I will,” I sighed. I was nervous about sending the story in. I wasn’t sure it was perfected yet. If I was going to send it in, I wanted to be sure I had a chance of getting it published!
“You keep putting it off and putting it off. I know you’re not going to do it,” said Mom. “Why don’t you do it right now?”
“No-o-o,” I protested.
“Then when?” Mom demanded.
“I dunno.”
“Yeah. Uh-huh. Exactly.”
“What’s the big deal?” Dad asked. “She’ll send it in when she’s ready to send it in! It’s not like it’s a school assignment or something.”
“Fine,” said Mom. “Then don’t blame me when she turns out to be a loser like you!”
Of course, another fight broke out. I evacuated the room, wishing I could disappear.

Another time, my parents were fighting about me. That happened frequently, and when it did, it was the worst feeling in the world. I would hide in my bedroom with my door shut, trying to block everything out. That time, my mom came upstairs and threw my door open and started to yell at me.
I barely heard her words. I knew they were mean ones and I didn’t want to listen. “Where’s Dad?” I demanded.
“He’s gone. He ran away because he couldn’t stand being around you anymore,” snapped Mom. “You better start doing better, because you’re tearing this family apart!”

I felt sick all the time. I was plagued by headaches and stomachaches, and I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d lie awake, tossing and turning, unable to sleep until the wee hours of the morning. I’d wake up each morning with horrid headaches, nausea, and a sense of impending doom. Sometimes I’d beg my mom to let me stay home, but mostly I’d just stagger to the school bus half asleep, and go back to sleep in my first period class, laying my head on my desk.
“Stop acting like this!” my mom would tell me, some mornings when I sat in the kitchen, bleary-eyed and miserable, my hair disheveled and my clothes wrinkled. “You come from a fine home! A fine home!”
I was so used to being yelled at, I stayed in constant defensive mode. If someone said something to me, I assumed they were mad at me, and I snapped back at them. At school, though, I was a mouse, afraid of authority figures. My math teacher reported to my guidance counselor that whenever she yelled at the kids in the class (which was pretty often, since I was in a math class with a bunch of loudmouth boys who kept a steady dialogue of sarcasm and insults going in the classroom) I would start shaking. “She wants you to know its not you she’s yelling at, it’s the other kids,” my guidance counselor told me.
Everyone hated me, and I wished I could disappear. Like in my dreams where, when something bad happened, I just flew away up into the clouds, where nobody could reach me.

“I wish they would just get a divorce,” I confided to my brother one day, when I was sick to death of hearing the yelling.
“Shut up, Nicki.” Jay’s face twisted in anger. “That’s selfish.”
“Why is it selfish? I’m tired of them fighting!”
“So you want them to break a vow because you’re not happy?” he retorted.
He still had a picture in his mind of us being the perfect, happy family, and he wanted to keep it that way. I frequently vented to my best friend, Lyndsie, about the problems in my house, but Jay had not told a single one of his friends. Once when he caught me writing about my dad’s DUI in a letter to a pen pal in Brazil, he snatched the letter from me and tore it up. “Never tell anyone about that!” he shouted. “It’s not anyone’s business but ours!”

“What you are is a lost child,” my dad told me. He had been going to AA, and was learning all sorts of things.
“I am not lost. I’m here,” I replied sarcastically.
“It doesn’t mean literally lost. See, whenever a parent is an alcoholic, the kids take on certain personalities to deal with the problems,” my dad explained. “The lost child is the one who just sort of withdraws and tries to escape from everything. Like the way you always hide up in your room, reading and writing.”
“I read and write because I like to!” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but its also a way for you to escape,” he reasoned.
I mulled this over. “Then what about Jay? What is he?”
“Jay? Probably the clown, who tries to distract everyone with humor.”
I could see that in Jay. He was always clowning around. His antics often annoyed me, but they made my mom laugh. She would collapse on the couch, hooting with laughter, at my brother’s stupid jokes and voices and faces.
“I still don’t think I’m a lost child,” I said. I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of it. Lost child. It sounded lonely and helpless. I didn’t want to be lost I wanted to be wanted!

The Sounds Of Anger Ringing In My Ears

2010-02-20T18:06:00.001-08:00

Every kid hates it when their parents fight. And I grew up with the sound of anger ringing in my ears.
In fact, my first conscious memory is of my parents fighting. As a kid, whenever I thought about this particular memory, I assumed it happened when I was about four years old, because of how clearly I remembered it. In my memory, we are all in the car… me in the back seat, with my little brother next to me strapped into his car seat, my mom driving, and my dad in shotgun. They are yelling, but I pay no attention, looking out the window and daydreaming little kid daydreams. Suddenly thee car jerks to a halt. My dad gets out, slamming the door behind him. As the car lurches away from the curb, I lean forward and ask, “Mommy, where’s Daddy going?”
“Who knows?” she replies.
I twist around to watch him as he walks down the sidewalk, heading in the opposite direction from us. I watch until I can no longer see his brown leather jacket in the distance.
When I was about nineteen, I asked my mom about this, expecting her to tell me that it had never happened, that I must have dreamed it. For as long as I had been alive, my parents had had an irritating habit of claiming that I remembered many things that had never actually happened.
But this time, my mom told me, yes, that memory had certainly happened, although I had it a little mixed up. I had only been two years old, not four, because we were still living in the city at the time. In fact, my baby brother had not even been born yet. The car seat I remembered had been in the car, but it had been me sitting in it, not my brother. Same exact car seat, though! When my brother did get born, I had graduated to a regular seatbelt so that he could have the car seat. That was a long time before people started messing around and making kids sit in car seats until they were ten!
Anyways, I had been two, my mom said, and they had been arguing. My dad was drunk. She’d kicked him out of the car, and he’d had to walk home. “And it was a bad neighborhood, too,” my mom added proudly.
Later, when I asked my dad about it, he said my mom was telling it all wrong. He had not been drunk, he said, and he had been the one who had demanded that my mom stop the car so he could get out. And the neighborhood, he said, was fine. I guess everyone remembers things differently, with themselves starring in the role of the good guy. I have no way of knowing what really happened that day. I was only two, and all I understood was the anger.
My life was chockfull of memories like that. I have a strange one of my mom waking me up in the middle of the night when I was about four, sitting me down on the living room chair and quickly putting my shoes on over my footy pajamas. My dad and his friends were outside. One of my dad’s friends came in to talk to her, and she argued with him, and then she herded my brother and I out into the car, and we drove off into the darkness. “Where are we going, Mommy? Where are we going?” I asked, about four billion times.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” was all she would say.
As I got older, I grew used to hearing them fight. The sound of shouting had been in the background for as long as I could remember. I still got a cloudy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I heard voices rise and doors slam, but it was my little brother Jay who was bothered more. When their voices started to rise, he would burst into tears. If it was daytime, I would take his hand and lead him into my room, away from the fighting. If it was night, Jay would usually run into my room, and I would scootch over in my bed and let him lay next to me, where I would tell him stories until he fell asleep.
We were adept at listening for the tension in voices, the slamming of doors and objects, the stomping of feet. We never knew what made them so angry. We only knew when it was time to evacuate.
Still, most of the time it never occurred to me that any of this was abnormal. I thought we were a perfect, happy family. For the most part, we were happy. Our parents took us to the zoo, museums and kiddie theme parks on a regular basis. Our summer trips to the “north woods” of Wisconsin were my personal version of Heaven. Our mom took care of us during the day, shepherding us along on daily adventures to the grocery store or the bank or the park. Our dad read us stories every night before bed. We had a happy life. The bad times were just… interruptions.
I think I did have a vague feeling that my family was “weird,” and I wanted us to be “normal.” I tried to do things I thought “normal” people did. Unfortunately, I had no real idea about “normal” people, except for things I’d seen on TV and read about in books. I would do things like, leave marbles and jacks out in the yard, because for some reason I thought “normal” kids play with those things.
By the time I was in fifth grade, things had gone downhill. I was having trouble at school, of course, but home wasn’t so great either. It seemed like the whole world hated me. My parents still fought constantly, but my brother was older now and didn’t need me to take care of him, so he hated me too. Once, he asked me, “When are you going to start acting like a big sister?” We’d both noticed that, as we’d gotten older, he’d seemed to pass me up. He understood things that I didn’t. The world didn’t bewilder him, the way it did me. He was popular at school, and he was embarrassed to be seen by me.
My mom’s hate for me, though, was the worst. She glared at me and shouted at me, about my failing grades, about my messy room, about the fact that I had no friends. “You don’t try,” she’d say, or “No wonder nobody likes you,” or “You’re killing this family!”
I thought it was possible that my dad didn’t hate me. He barely ever yelled at me. My dad was cool. He had two jobs, and sometimes he’d my brother and I to work with him. At one job, he delivered pet supplies to grocery stores, and I loved to go to the warehouse and help him “call orders.” Jay and I loved to ride in the back of the delivery van, and go into the secret Employees Only sections of the grocery stores. My dad’s other job was at a gas station, and we spent a lot of Saturday nights there. My dad would buy us sodas or chocolate milks, and candy bars, and we’d pester the high school guys who worked there, or jump on the hose out front to make the bell ring.
My dad didn’t yell at us much. Not even at me. My mom said I was just like him. Usually she’d say it when she was telling me something she hated about me. As in, “You’re a slob just like your father!”
I made plans to run away from home, probably to northern Wisconsin, where we usually spend a happy week each summer. My mind connected Wisconsin with happiness, with feeling like I belonged somewhere. I thought that Wisconsin was a magical state, and if I could only stay there forever, I’d feel happy. Someday, I told myself, I would ride my bike up to Wisconsin. I poured over the State Farm US Almanac I stole from my parents’ room, tracing the roads and plotting my route. I daydreamed about how I would survive. I’d collect tin cans and recycle them for. I’d eat candy bars from vending machines, because they were cheap. I’d live in the woods, and swim in the lake to keep clean. The only thing that worried me was the idea of winter, where everything froze over. Wisconsin winters were even colder than the Chicago winters I was used to! The threat of winter ahead was the only thing that kept me from running away from home in the spring, summer or fall.
One night when I was twelve, I awoke in the middle of the night to my mom leaning over me, calling my name. As my eyes flew open, my mom was already talking. “Dad got arrested and I have to go bail him out,” she was saying. “I need you to stay awake until I get back, in case Jay wakes up.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around it all. “What did he get arrested for?”
“Drunk driving,” she sighed.
After she left, I lay awake and tried to make sense of it. It was common knowledge in my house that my dad had gotten arrested for drunk driving once, along time ago, before I was born. When I was little, I used to sometimes brag about this. “My dad was in jail,” I would boast.
When I blurted this out to my Nona once, a silence had fallen over the room, and my dad had scolded me, “We don’t talk about that.” And after that, I didn’t talk about it anymore, at least not in front of my parents.
But that was ancient history, little more than a fairytale in my mind. My dad had gotten arrested tonight? He was in jail now? Was this really happening?
I wanted to go wake Jay up and tell him what I had just heard. I wanted so badly to talk to someone! But I was afraid he’d get upset, so I didn’t. I just lay awake, my heart fluttering nervously, until I heard them come home, slamming doors in their wake.
After that, things spiraled downward. My dad’s driver’s license was temporarily suspended, and since he drove a delivery van for a living, he lost his job. My mom got two different jobs to pick up the slack. The fighting was constant!
One day my mom came into my room, and called Jay in too. “I might be leaving your dad,” she announced.
“I wanna stay with Dad,” I blurted out. The news of an impending divorce didn’t shock me much. I had seen it coming, and had already thought it through. It would mean and end to the screaming and yelling, an end to having to walk on eggshells all the time. Plus, if I lived with my dad, I would have even more peace and quiet. He yelled at me way less than my mom did. I couldn’t go an hour without pissing Mom off somehow!
“No, you’ll both come with me,” said Mom quickly.
“Then, where will we go?” I wondered. “To Nona’s?” That wouldn’t have been half bad. When I was little Nona and Bopop’s house had been my favorite place in the world. They had a huge backyard with a fire pit in it and a field behind it, they always spent time with us, and my aunt and uncle… who were only nine and seven years older than me… still lived there. And Nona always made great food!
But Mom shook her head and firmly said, “No.”
“Then where?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s why I really have to think about this.”
“Where will Zip go?” I asked. I was worried about the logistics of this whole thing.
“With us! She’s your dog,” Mom assured me.
Jay looked glum. “So you’re getting a divorce?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Mom.
“I don’t want you to get a divorce,” he told her.
“Well, your dad really screwed up this time,” Mom replied.
I found myself hoping for a divorce. I suspected I was one of the only kids in the world who actually wanted their parents to split up. I was sure I would go straight to hell for that. But, even if I had to live with my mom, a divorce might mean moving to a new house. Maybe I could switch schools, and have a fresh start at a place where the kids and teachers didn’t know to hate me yet. I swore to myself that, if I got to go to a new school, I’d do better. I’d try harder. I’d make friends. And maybe on the weekend my dad would pick my brother and I up and do fun things with us. Life would be just about perfect.
Maybe my parents would even get remarried, and I’d have two more chances at having a family that liked me! I especially hoped for an older stepbrother or stepsister who would look out for me and teach me things, and a much younger brother or sister who I could take care of.
I knew I was weird for wishing for these things. But I just wanted, so badly, to belong somewhere!

Maybe If You'd Known Me Then...

2010-02-20T18:04:00.001-08:00

Maybe if you had known me then, you would have made fun of me too.
Here’s me in the seventh grade. I was young for my age, and had never gotten particularly interested in things like popular music, makeup, clothing, and boyfriends. I had long, tangly, frizzy hair, and no skill or motivation to do anything with it. I didn’t even know how to make a ponytail, although sometimes I would use a ribbon or a piece of yarn to tie my hair back. My mom tried to help me out by putting gel in my hair and then blowdrying it, but that just caused it to stick out about six inches on either side of my head. I looked like a giant puffball with eyes.
I had no fashion sense, either. I had a neighbor, a woman in her late twenties, who often passed her used clothes down to me, and I treasured them because this woman was always very nice to me and I looked up to her. As a result, I could most often be seen in ill-fitting jeans and tired looking sweaters.
To top it off, I didn’t really have much in the way of social skills. I read a lot, and I related more easily to characters in books than I did to the real-life kids around me. I said awkward things. I used outdated slang that I had learned from the outdated books I found in my Nona’s spare bedroom. (That was probably where I had gotten “I’ll rearrange your face” from!) I alternated between being too hyper and noisy and blurting out whatever came to my mind, and retreating into myself and avoiding the other kids completely. Sometimes I would want to be friends with certain kids, and I’d think they were my friends, and when they teased me I’d laugh along with them, thinking, “I’m finally starting to fit in!”
The weird thing was, I hadn’t always been the Friendless Wonder! When I was little I had made friends easily, and had wanted to be friends with everyone. For the first seven years of my life we lived in apartment buildings and neighborhoods where there weren’t many kids, so outside of school and school-related playdates, my little brother Jay had been my only friend. But when I was seven, we had moved to a house on a street with tons of kids. My parents had bought a dilapidated old house, the only house they could afford in that area. While they had worked on fixing it up, Jay and I had stayed with our Nona and Bopop. The first time Nona and Bopop brought us to visit the house, a group of kids came up to introduce themselves. When I saw them, I started jumping up and down, flapping my arms, screaming, “Kids! Kids! Kids!” I grabbed my Nona’s arm and excitedly pulled her towards the sidewalk, where the kids were clumped together staring at me. Years later, one of the older ones admitted that when she’d seen me she’d thought I was “retarded.” But I quickly became part of the group, and was even sort of a leader among them. I was always the one with the grand ideas… to start a club, to build a fort, to spy on the neighbors, to put on a play, to go door to door taking a survey of what people’s favorite foods were. I was always busy, always on the move, always working on something.
I got along well in school, too, early on. I was a happy nineteen=eighties kid… I wore pigtails and loved bright colors, and my favorite show was “Punky Brewster” (although I also loved “My Little Pony,” “Rainbow Bright,” “Care Bears,” “Thunder Cats” and “He-Man”, and for a while I had a crush on Arnold from “Dif’rent Strokes”.) I had best friends, and birthday parties, and sleepovers, like all the other kids.
As early as second grade it was becoming obvious that I was a little different than the rest. While the other girls my age were already starting to imitate the older girls, at least pretending to be fascinated by boys and clothes, I still preferred the sandbox and the monkey bars. I also did odd things sometimes. I loved to read, and when I was bored in class I would sneak into the bathroom with a book, never suspecting that the teacher would notice me missing. I would spread glue all over my desk, for the pleasure of later scraping it off with my scissors. I once killed time during a science lesson by methodically licking every page of my science textbook. I had trouble sitting still a lot. I irritated the teachers and the other kids by constantly swinging my feet under my desk, or drumming my fingers. I also had an odd habit of flapping my arms at my sides when I walked, slapping my hands against my legs. I knew the American Sign Language alphabet, and when I was bored or nervous my hands wiggled and fluttered at my sides, spelling out my thoughts. When we were out in public, my mom would often yank me aside to hiss, “Stop it! You look like you have problems! What are people going to think?”
And, besides that, I was a very messy kid. The inside of my desk was like a disaster area, a Bermuda triangle of loose worksheets, drawings, melted crayons, leaking bottles of glue, dirty tissues, battered notebooks and folders, and long lost homework assignments. My backpack had the same problems. In the primary grades there hadn’t really been homework, and the teachers had usually collected assignments immediately after having us do them in class. But by third and fourth grade, when kids were expected to take more responsibility for themselves, things started to go downhill.
Still, in the fourth grade, I was a happy kid. The other kids were starting to notice the differences about me, but they shrugged these things off. In fourth grade, I had absolutely no idea what a nerd was. I had never heard the phrase. (Although my brother and I often called each other “eggnerd”, a botched version of an insult we’d heard on a TV show once… I think it was supposed to be “ignorant!”) It had never occurred to me that there were kids in existence whom everyone teased and nobody liked. Even the meanest and ugliest boy in the class was friends with everyone. We fought with him sometimes, tattled on him to the teacher, and called him names occasionally, but we didn’t hate him. We still played with him. In my world, that was how life was supposed to be.
The summer before I started fifth grade, the school district built a new school in Hoffman Estates, and many of my friends had to switch to that school. I, who still lived within the boundaries of the neighborhood school, was left behind. Added to that, the school became the host of a special classroom for “gifted” fifth and sixth graders. Because of my high reading level, I was recruited for the program. Other kids were brought in from different schools, as well.
I started fifth grade excited about all the new friends I would have and the exciting new classroom program I was going to be part of.
So when, by the end of the first week, I had been ostracized by every single kid in my new classroom, I was confused and broken hearted.
People kept on telling me that school would get better soon. But it got worse instead. Besides not having any friends, I had trouble with the school work. The teacher was always irritated with me because I couldn’t seem to finish my work on time. And I barely ever managed to turn in my homework!
The worst was when I actually did my homework, but forgot to turn it in. Then, of course, I’d forget that I forgot to turn it in. The teacher would make us correct each other’s homework, by passing papers out randomly and then calling out the answers so we could mark them right or wrong. If she passed out the papers, and she was one short, she knew that someone didn’t turn in their homework. She’d collects the papers again, have us all stand up, and read off the names on the homework sheets. As your name was called, you were supposed to sit down. I was usually the one left standing, red-faced, my fingers spelling out “Oh shit” at my sides.
My school had a self-contained special education class. Somehow that year, I was befriended by three younger girls with developmental delays. I don’t remember how this came about, but I still remember their names: Abbie, Liz and Jenny. Every day at lunch recess, they would run up to me, shouting my name, and all hug me at once! Kids made fun of them, too, but they didn’t seem to care. They knew who their friends were, and they just left everyone else alone.
I played with Abbie, Liz and Jenny just about every day. I entertained them and kept them out of trouble, and stuck up for them against other kids. One day I had to deliver some sort of note to their teacher. When I walked into their classroom, their teacher exclaimed, “Oh, look, everyone! Its one of our favorite people!” that was just about the proudest moment of my life!
I spent a lot of time with Abbie, Liz and Jenny throughout the rest of fifth grade and then into sixth grade. For a while I got to be a safety patrol, which meant I spent a lot of time on the playground monitoring younger children, and I was known among all the other patrols as the person to go to when they had a problem with one of the kids from the special education class. Those kids gave me a reason for showing up in school! They were the one bright spot in my life. I’ll never forget them!
My parents disapproved of that whole friendship, though. I gave the girls my phone number, but when they left messages at my house, I wasn’t allowed to call them back. My parents said if I hung out with “those kids”, people would start to think that I was one of them.
But maybe “those kids” saw something in me that nobody else saw.
It would be years before I even heard the terms “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” and “Asperger’s Syndrome.” Back then, the only explanation for how I was waa that… I just… didn’t… get it.

Running Is In My Blood

2010-02-20T18:03:00.001-08:00

I was twelve years old, sitting against the padded wall of the gym, wearing the blue gym shorts and the gray shirt with my last name scrawled across the back in permanent marker, the uniform I had to wear for forty minutes every day. Forty minutes of torture.
I hated gym class for two reasons. For one, I sucked at sports. I always had. When I was seven and we’d first moved to Palatine, my parents had signed me up for soccer, hoping that it would help me build confidence and make friends and whatever else putting your kid in a sport was supposed to do. During every practice and every game I would stand in the field and stare into space, blow on my hands, twirl around, play with the grass, pick dandelions… anything but concentrate on the black and white ball. My teammates ignored me, my coaches were frustrated by me, and my parents implored me to pay attention. I lasted about a month. I just wasn’t good at sports.
The other reason that I hated gym class was because the other kids teased me. They teased me everywhere, but gym class was where they teased me the most. In my other classes, the teachers had to at least create the illusion of having control over the class, and the class had to at least create the illusion of working. But gym class was anarchy, thirty sweaty kids on a field with some sort of ball, running and screaming. Gym class was where they could kick your ankles and say it was an accident. They could call you names and the teacher wouldn’t notice. When it was time to pick teams, they could blatantly reject you, and it would be your own fault for not being a better athlete. Even the teachers didn’t like non-athletic kids. If a kid sucked at reading or math, they could maybe get special help, or take an easier class, or something. If a kid sucked at sports, well, that was just pathetic.
I hated gym class.
The person who tortured me the most was a girl named Darlene. She didn’t even wait until we got outside onto the freedom of the field, but made it a point to sit next to me during roll call, just so she could start in on me. While the teacher, Miss Nelson, called out the names she should have known by heart by now, Darlene hissed in my ear, “Don’t you ever comb your hair? I hope you don’t give me lice. Do you have a boyfriend? Do you have a penis? I bet you do…”
“Leave me alone or I’ll rearrange your face!” I shouted.
All eyes turned towards me. Darlene laughed. My cheeks burned.
Miss Nelson calmly went on calling the roll. “Desmond? Janice? Bob? Kelly? Okay. Lets go outside and get into our teams.”
We lined up to go outside and play soccer, but I wasn’t about to get kicked in the ankles today. Not today. As we walked out, I heard Darlene giggling, “I’ll rearrange her face! I’ll make it prettier for her!”
I didn’t head to the soccer field with the rest of the class. I wandered off away from everyone. I heard people calling after me, but I kept going.
Not far, of course! I was too scared of getting into trouble. I wasn’t exactly a rebellious adolescent.
The school had those portable classrooms that overcrowded schools sometimes use, like little shacks outside the actual school building. I ended up hiding behind one of them, for the rest of gym lass.
I was an angry kid… angry at Darlene and Gina for being such bitches to me, angry at the other kids for actually liking people who could be that mean, angry at the teachers for ignoring it, angry at my parents for sending me back to the same school day after day no matter how much I pleaded, angry at my little brother Jay for being one of the popular kids at his own school… and angry at myself for being such a weirdo so that people would hate me. If only I were a regular kid…
Eventually, Miss Nelson sent two of the more mild mannered girls to find me. PE was over, and Miss Nelson wanted to talk to me.
The girls, who I barely knew, and who had taunted me themselves quite a few times, sat next to me in the dirt outside the portable. “It’s no big deal,” they told me. “Just don’t pay any attention to Darlene.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to have people teasing you all the time,” I told them tearfully. “You have friends. You don’t know how it feels.”
They looked at each other and then looked at me, and didn’t say anything. I guess they didn’t know what to say to that.
But life had to go on. I had other classes to go to, and if I stayed outside I would get locked out of the school in my gym clothes. So I obediently got up and went off to find Miss Nelson. She was out in the field, gathering up the soccer balls into a mesh bag. Everyone else had gone in already.
“So, now, what happened?” asked Miss Nelson. “What did she say? She said she would rain on your face?”
“No, I said I was going to rearrange her face,” I corrected. How did someone rain on someone else’s face, anyway? Pee on them?
“Oh,” said Miss Nelson. She looked perplexed.
“Because she was teasing me,” I explained. “I just blew up.”
“I understand. And I know you ran off because you just didn’t know what else to do,” said Miss Nelson. “But if you do that again, you’ll get a truancy. If someone’s bothering you, you need to talk to me or another teacher, not run away.”
“Running is in my blood,” I told her solemnly.
I don’t know what made me say that. I was physically uncoordinated and I ran out of breath so quickly, I could barely run at all. It had taken me half an hour to do the Mile Run for the state fitness test. Whatever was in my blood was more like hide and seek.

Backtracking A Little...

2010-02-20T17:59:00.000-08:00

Now that I have told the story of Mandy and Josie, and I have it out of my system, I'd like to start at the beginning.
I actually found some notebooks where I started writing my memoir earlier, so much of the following chapters are copied and edited from those.
Enjoy!

Epilogue for Mandy and Josie Chapter

2010-02-13T20:54:00.000-08:00

Well, this chapter is over with! One of the saddest chapters of my life. I wanted to share some pics with you. I have censored them a little for privacy, but you can still clearly see the children who touched my life so much! Its been a year and a half since the day when I last saw them. They are now thirteen and ten years old, which blows my mind! I hope that someday I will get a chance to see them again. I will never forget them.

Alexander and Mandy at the Children's Museum where I used to work. On weekends I could bring them there for free!

Alexander and Josie outside the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. We got to spend a night inside the museum for a special event!

Me with Mandy and Josie at a rinky-dink motel we stayed in on our way to Missouri.

Mandy and Alexander relax on our friend's hippie bus in Missouri.

Josie "drives" our friend's hippie bus.

Josie on one of our babysitting jobs. She and Mandy would often come with me to "help" me babysit other children!

Josie with Lia, at Jesse's town house. Josie loved babies, but thought toddlers and preschoolers were boring!

Codie, Mandy and Josie pose for a picture, at a pumpkin farm where we went on Mandy's twelfth birthday. Alexander didn't want to come with us that day.

Mandy with Caroline's sister Christina, at Mandy's twelfth birthday party. Christina was only a year older than Mandy, but Mandy looked up to her a lot.

The End (for now...)

The End

2010-02-13T20:53:00.000-08:00

I tried to call David, after that, to work things out. But he never returned my messages. A few times I called Mandy’s cell phone, after school when I knew David wouldn’t be there. Our conversations were stilted, though. Kids aren’t the best phone conversationalists. If they can’t see you, its hard for them to imagine that you still exist.
I made more last ditch effort to do something for Mandy and Josie. I wrote a letter to the Doles, asking for help. I described some of the things that we’d experience in the last few years with David and the girls. I told the Doles that if they, or even Rene, had any power at all to try and get the girls back, now was a good time to do it.
I included my email address in the letter. Leslie emailed me back. She said that there was nothing she could do for Mandy and Josie because DCFS had already made a decision about that. Leslie told me that she had David’s phone number, and from time to time she would call him and ask to see th girls or even talk to them on the phone. But David was hung up on the idea that Mandy and Josie had an inheritance coming to them from their grandparents. He would use the girls as a pawn, telling Leslie that if she got Rene to meet with him or gave him Rene’s contact information, she could see the girls. But Leslie and her family rarely heard from Rene, and had no control over what she did.
Leslie also cleared up some of the stories that David had told me. She swore she and her husband had never been drug addicts, watched child pornography, or abused children in any way. Either David had made these things up, or he had come to his own paranoid conclusions.
As for David’s brother, the one who had foster parented the girls for a while, he had never abused the children. The brother had been the one to request that the kids be moved from his home, because while they were there, David was constantly showing up and hanging out at his house. It was as if David had found the perfect solution to his custody dilemma. His brother and sister-in-law could handle all legal, logical and financial responsibility for the girls, David could see them whenever he wanted, and he even had the fringe benefit of a place to hang out, with free food and everything.
I forwarded Leslie a few pictures of the girls, from Mandy’s twelfth birthday party. She commented on how big they were getting, and wished me luck in getting to see them. I never heard from her again, after that.

If I was writing a fictional story, I would put a happy ending here. Maybe David would have changed his ways and we could have all been a big, happy family. Or maybe rene would have reappeared as a changed woman, and become a good mother for her girls. Maybe one of their aunts and uncles would have found a way to save them. Or maybe David would have gone to jail and bequeathed the girls to me for good. Somehow Mandy and Josie would have ended up with a safe, secure home.
But in real life, there are no happy endings. Even if something good happens, that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be happy forever. Life just keeps on going, for everyone.

The Beginning Of The End

2010-02-13T20:52:00.001-08:00

Three years, almost to the day, after Johnny and Codie and I first went to the zoo to meet David and the girls, Jesse and Caroline and I made plans to go to Boo At The Zoo again. Alexander called Mandy and asked if she and Josie could come with us. When Mandy got permission, we all rode in Jesse’s van to pick them up.
We got to the apartment building, and I got out of the van and started up the stairs to the apartment. Before I was all the way up, Mandy burst out of the door. She barreled past me down the stairs, ran to the van, and jumped in.
David and Josie came out of the apartment next. Josie, all dressed up in her witch costume, was crying and trying to block David from coming out.
“What’s wrong, Josie?” I asked.
“Josie knows that I won’t let her get into a car with anyone I’m not comfortable with,” David snapped.
My stomach sank. I had thought David had gotten past his feelings about Caroline being with Jesse. “Its okay, Josie,” I muttered nervously.
David walked up to the van. “Mandy, get out of the car!’ he barked.
I stared at him. “What? Why?”
He ignored me. “Mandy, get out of the car!” He kept shouting it, over and over, but Mandy wouldn’t get out. Inside the car, Caroline, Jesse, and the kids, were watching out the window with horrified expressions.
David walked up to the front passenger window where Jesse was sitting. “Ese!”
Normally Caroline and I would have laughed about Jesse being mistaken for Hispanic. But now I could hardly breathe, as Jesse retorted, “Who the fuck are you talking to?” He started to open the car door.
“No, Jesse!” screamed Josie.
I ran around to the back passenger door and yanked it open. “Mandy, you better go with your dad,” I said, my voice breaking.
Dejectedly, Mandy got out. She went and stood beside David, taking Josie’s hand. I got into the car, and Caroline drove away before Jesse and David could get into a physical fight. I twisted around to see Mandy and Josie staring after us. The saddest thing in the world was seeing them standing there in their Halloween costumes, Josie crying her eyes out as we drove away.
When they were little, I had promised them that I wouldn’t leave them.But in the end, I did. And it felt horrible.

A Call To DCFS

2010-02-13T20:48:00.000-08:00

I didn’t really know where to go. I felt like we had worn out our welcome at Jesse’s for the weekend. The town home was too small to really contain five kids, including two as hyperactive as Mandy and Josie. Jesse had been a really good sport while we were there, not complaining at all when the kids spilled drinks on his leather couch or slid down the stairs on their bottoms. He’d even laughed it off when Josie knocked down a fancy Korean ornament that his mother had given him. “It landed on the carpet!” he’d said. But I was still just getting to know David, and I didn’t feel right imposing on him again.
So I decided to get us a room at the Holidome. At least the girls could swim, play in the arcade, and sleep in a comfy bed, for the night. I wanted them to have some fun, instead of just sitting around worrying about what would happen next.
While the girls were busy swimming, I called Caroline. I told her about how we had arrived at David’s and found him passed out drunk.
“Well, what are you going to do now?” Caroline asked. “Are you going to bring them home tomorrow?”
“I’ll have to, won’t I? I can’t just kidnap them and live at the Holiday Inn forever,” I replied. Although it would have been nice if I could have done that. Just like years ago, when the Holidome had been a magical place for Rene and the girls and I to escape from reality, it was still a place where we could pretend like we were on vacation and everything was great.
“Maybe you should think about calling someone,” said Caroline.
“Like DCFS? But I just don’t know if going back into foster care is the best thing for them,” I sighed. We had been over all of this before.
“But if you really think being with their dad is not the best thing for them, then maybe you owe it to them to at least call, and see what happens,” said Caroline. “I mean, I dunno. I can’t tell you what to do. Ugh, I hate David.”
“Me too.”
In the end, I did call DCFS. I waited until the girls were asleep, and then I went out into the lobby to call, because I wanted to be sure that they didn’t hear me talking. I wanted to be as sure as possible that David would never find out that I was the one who called.
A DCFS call in Illinois is a huge pain in the neck, because you don’t just get to call and talk to someone about your situation. You first have to speak to an operator, and tell them the basics of the situation, such as your name and the children’s names and where you are and why you are calling. Then the operator passes the information along to someone else, and you have to wait for that person to call you back. I made the first call at about eleven that night, and so it was a sleepless night for me. I tossed and turned, my stomach flip-flopping, as I waited for my phone to ring.
When my phone did ring, at about three in the morning, the person who called me back could not have been nicer. She thanked me for caring enough to call, and listened as I told our entire story. She asked questions and took notes. When I told her that I was worried about David finding out that I had called, she said she’d list me in the report as a “person with information,” so that there would be no official evidence that I had called. If David did smooth talk his way into finding out that I had spoken to someone from DCFS about him, it would look as if the DCFS people had been the ones to approach me, and not the other way around. She said that it sometimes took weeks for an investigator to check out a hotline call but, since it sounded like the girls were in immediate danger, someone would meet with me and the girls within twenty-four hours. The lady was so kind and empathetic, I started to have hope that things would go well this time.
But my good luck with DCFS ended there. I had to go to work at the senior living home the next morning. My haphazard plan was to bring Mandy and Josie there with me. My work was in Cook County, and the girls lived in Cook County, so we were doomed to be working with Cook County officials throughout the rest of our ordeal.
I still wonder if I would have been smarter to have taken the girls back to Jesse’s or Caroline’s after all. They both lived in DuPage, so at least that way we would have started out with an investigator from DuPage! (On the other hand, I thought of all the times that people had called DCFS about Johnny’s sister’s kids, in DuPage. It had taken four years before anyone from DCFS had paid any attention to Mary and her children!)
In Cook County, DCFS investigators have to go to some crazy, dangerous place, where they run the risk of being shot or stabbed by disgruntled relatives of the children they are investigating. So the investigators wear cop-like uniforms, with badges and bullet proof vests and everything. This is meant to make them more official and intimidating to the adults they have to deal with. But it also makes them seem pretty official and intimidating to little kids!
The investigator who showed up at my work was a burly, gruff guy who talked like he was reading from a script. He started off by telling the girls, “I’m an investigator with the Department of Child and Family Services. My job is to investigate cases where children are in unsafe situations. For instance, children who are being physically or sexually abused, their parents are failing to provide adequate shelter, nutrition and supervision for them, or their parents abuse substances. Do you feel that you fall into any of these categories?”
I swear to you, this is how the man spoke to an eleven-year-old and an eight-year-old! I couldn’t believe it! The girls were pale, wide-eyed, and confused. I doubted they had even understood half of what the guy had just said!
I tried to paraphrase for him. “Do you feel like sometimes you’re not safe at home?” I asked them.
I wish so much that he had taken a little more time with them. He could have been a little more friendly to them, maybe sat down and colored with them, or done anything at all to gain their trust before he started firing questions at them.
Instead, he sat there and interrogated the girls as if they were the ones being investigated. Most of his questions were barely in English. He’d say things like, When your father consumes alcohol, do you feel that he becomes inebriated?” And I’d translate, “Does he get drunk?”
And the girls lied to him. Well, Mandy lied to him, and Josie followed her lead. They denied everything… that their dad drank, and that they had ever been afraid to be left with him, and anything else. I knew I couldn’t say anything, because that might be considered coaching them or “leading the witnesses” or something. But it was so frustrating to watch them deny everything! I wanted to shake them and shout, “What are you doing? This is your chance!”
To his credit, the investigator took me aside and told me, “I can tell that they’re lying. They’re covering for their dad. We’ll definitely be continuing this investigation.” He gave me the phone number of a DCFS caseworker who I was supposed to call to follow up with, within the next few days.
“But what should I do with them tonight?” I asked.
“You’ll have to take them back to their father,” said the investigator. “Someone should be by to see them within the next forty-eight hours.”

The mood when I drove the girls home that night was morose. I had gotten very little sleep in the past few days, and I was feeling sick, weak and shakey. The girls were quiet. They didn’t know that I was the one who had called DCFS, although if they had been a little bit older they might have come to the logical conclusion. Still, they said they were not going to mention anything that had happened, to their dad. They were afraid of getting him upset. And they wanted to protect me for even being involved.
“What if my dad finds out that you let us talk to that guy, and he hurts you?” Mandy asked tearfully, when we were almost there.
“You don’t need to worry about me, sweetheart. He won’t hurt me. If he does, I will just leave,” I assured her. “And you can do that too, okay? If you ever feel scared, you can leave and call the police. They will be able to get there faster than I could, and they will help you. Your job is not to keep your dad from getting in trouble. Your job is to keep yourselves safe.” It was the same thing I had told Alexander, back when Johnny had started doing drugs and being violent. I hoped the girls would remember this.

I was afraid David might already know that DCFS had been called on him. I had given them his phone number, and they could have already called him to make an appointment to meet with him. But when I dropped the girls off, David was actually in good spirits! He didn’t even seem to realize that I had kept the girls an extra night and day!

I waited for a few days, and then I called the phone number that the DCFS investigator had given me. At first, the flustered caseworker I spoke to didn’t even recognize the names I gave her. She insisted that the town the girls lived in wasn’t even part of her particular office’s domain. When I persisted, spelling out the information the investigator had written down for me, the caseworker admitted, “I’ve been very busy in the past few days. I just got a case in which a child died, so its been taking up most of my time.”
I swallowed hard. It was scary to live in a world where children apparently died from suspicious causes on such an everyday basis that I hadn’t even heard about this in the news or anything.
“What I will probably do is set up a meeting with the father and the social worker at the children’s school,” the lady went on,

This time, I waited two weeks, giving the caseworker plenty of time, before I called back to see what happened.
“Well, I met with the family at the school,” the caseworker told me. “I determined that the children are not in any danger. The father is complying with his alcohol treatment program. We’re going to set the family up with some community resources, such as counseling, and maybe mentors for the girls.’
“Oh.” I was dismayed. “Well… thanks, then.”
So the girls continued to live with David, he continued to drink and be his usual self in every other way, and the “community resources” never materialized. And that’s all I really know about that.

Sudden Changes

2010-02-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

While all this was going on, all hell was also breaking loose back at Caroline and Johnny’s. Their marriage of nearly ten years came to a turbulent end.
Right after Johnny moved out, Caroline called David to see about picking Mandy and Josie up for the weekend. I had just taken a job where I had to work weekends, doing respite care for children with special needs, so I had not been able to get the girls for a while. Alexander and Codie were all out of sorts from the things going on in the house, and Caroline thought that seeing the girls would cheer them up.
Talking to David, Caroline mentioned that she and Johnny were splitting up for good. David jumped at the opportunity! He told Caroline that he’d always thought she was too good for Johnny and that she’d be better off without him. He offered to drive the girls over there himself. The strange thing was, even when he had had his driver’s license, he had never offered to do any of the back-and-forth driving with the girls, aside from that first night when they’d come over for pizza. Caroline and I had practically worn our tires down to the rims, making that drive twice a week. But now, he was willing to pile the girls into his unregistered van and illegally drive forty minutes to Caroline’s house!
So, David ended up bringing the girls over. And then he got fresh with Caroline! He tried to convince her to be his girlfriend, now that Johnny was out of the picture. As the evening wore on, he became more and more persuasive, until Caroline felt very uncomfortable and unsafe. She asked David to leave.

Although she definitely didn’t want to date David, Caroline did start dating other people. One guy she dated was Jesse, a forty-year-old divorced man with no kids of his own. In one more odd twist of events, that winter, Caroline got pregnant.
When David found out about that, he became enraged! He told me that Caroline was a whore, and that she had cheated on Johnny, which was disrespectful not only to Johnny but also to him. (I tried to point out that there was no way Caroline’s pregnancy had anything at all to do with David, but he argued me into the ground.)
Mandy and Josie were still allowed to spend weekends at our house, but David said I had to personally be with them at all times. I was especially never to leave mandy alone with Caroline, or with Alexander. David said he was one hundred percent sure that Caroline secretly planned for Alexander to get Mandy pregnant. (They were ten!) He believed that, if Caroline were alone with Alexander and Mandy, she would coach the two children on how to have sex. “I don’t want a pregnant daughter!” he shouted.
I had never heard anything this absurd before! It put all of David’s other conspiracy theories to shame. It was disgusting to think that anyone would encourage two ten-year-olds to have sex… let alone Caroline, my very best friend, someone I considered my sister, who I knew would have never done anything to hurt any child!
“David, this is my family you’re talking about,” I said.
“I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel,” he replied.

After that, the only solution seemed to be to avoid direct contact with David, as much as possible. When I picked them up and dropped them off, I’d wait in the parking lot below their apartment instead of walking them up. David had gotten Mandy her own cell phone, so I’d call her phone when I wanted to make plans with the girls. Or I’d text message him, which was a simpler way of communicating without having to get into an in-depth conversations about my family. If I did have to talk to him face to face, I dodged any questions and comments about Caroline, Johnny, or Jesse.
Ever since my attempts at getting help for the girls had been fruitless, I’d decided to just try to keep the girls out of David’s way as much as I could. Mandy and Josie still spent many weekends with us. I had recently got a new job as an activity aide at a senior living community, and I was also making extra money by babysitting for families in a wealthy suburb north of where my mom lived. I often brought Mandy and Josie along with me. They would tag along as I did activities with residents at the senior living place, and they would play with the other children who I babysat. When they had school holidays, they often came with me to my school, where they would hang out in the computer lab while I attended classes. (I was taking a painting class at the time, and they loved going to that class with me! I bought them large poster boards to use as canvasses, and the other art students showered them with attention!) They even spent an entire week with me on a road trip to a family camping festival in Missouri.
It was hard to gage how strongly David actually felt about his issues with Caroline, because he was still happy to have me take the girls as much as possible. He knew we spent time at Caroline’s house. He knew about it when baby Lia was born that summer. He might not have understood that Jesse was frequently with us during visits. But I actually thought he was softening towards the idea of Jesse, when one day he came down to the car to meet me when I dropped Mandy and Josie off with him. Lia, who was then about seven months old, was with me. David smiled and talked baby talk to her, commenting on how beautiful she was. (This was true. Jesse was half Korean, and baby Lia had inherited his Asian features. Whenever we were out, people literally stopped us in our tracks to tell us how gorgeous the baby was! Lia could melt anyone’s heart.) I told him that Lia was Jesse’s first child, and that he’d wanted children for a very long time. ‘He says Lia is the best thing that ever happened to him,” I said.
“Then maybe some good came out of this after all,” David replied.

One weekend I took Alexander, Codie and the girls out somewhere, and then we all spent Saturday night at Jesse’s town home. Jesse spent most of his time with us at Caroline’s, but he still maintained his town home, and going there was like a mini-vacation because of his fancy furniture and large screen TV. The girls and I spent most of Sunday there as well, because Mandy and Josie didn’t want to go home and we just kept putting it off. When it started to get late, I told Mandy to call David and let him know that we were on our way.
Mandy called him. When she hung up, she looked uncomfortable. “He’s drunk,” she said. “I don’t want to go home.”
“How do you know he’s drunk?” I asked her.
“I don’t know, he just sounds weird,” she replied.
“Then, who knows, maybe he’s just tired,” I suggested.
Mandy was silent.
“Are you afraid to be there when he’s drunk?” I prodded.
Mandy shrugged.
“Does he hurt you, or anything like that?”
She shook her head. “He just acts weird, and stupid. He says a bunch of stupid things.”
“What do you usually do, when you’re home and he’s drunk?”
“We lock ourselves in our room,” Mandy told me.
I wasn’t sure what to do. It was a Sunday night, so I had to take the girls home. But I felt like I shouldn’t be just dropping them off if David wasn’t in a mental state where he could take care of them, especially when they were worried about being left there. I just didn’t have many choices in the situation!
Caroline and I talked it over. Caroline thought that maybe the girls just didn’t want to go home, as usual. Mandy could have even been exaggerating about David to avoid going home. Transitions were always tricky. She thought maybe, once they actually got home, everything would be fine. I decided I’d take them home, go upstairs to the apartment with them, and assess things from there.

I drove Mandy and Josie home, and walked them up to their apartment. The first strange thing was that the door was locked, and David didn’t answer when we knocked. Mandy had apparently been through this before. She removed a piece of the window, and put Josie through the window so she could unlock the door for us.
David was sitting in a rocking chair in the living room, his eyes drooping and his mouth hanging open. He reminded me of the way Casper used to look when he drank himself nearly into a coma! I couldn’t believe that he had actually slept through us banging on the door and eventually breaking and entering.
“Dad?” said Mandy.
His eyelids fluttered, and he glanced up, staring vacantly at us.
“Yep, he’s drunk,” said Mandy. She grabbed my arm. “Can we just go back to Jesse’s?”
I looked at her, and saw that same little five-year-old kid from the crack house, begging me not to leave.
“Yeah,” I said. “Lets go.”

Things Are Piling Up!

2010-02-09T08:48:00.000-08:00

Mandy spent nearly every weekend at our house, after that, and often Josie would be there too. I would usually take them, Alexander and Codie on some sort of outing. I scoured Chicago Parent Magazine for ideas of where to go. We went to children’s museums, zoos, community festivals, parks, amusement parks, or wherever the mood took us. During the week the girls would call me up, begging, “When are you gonna get us?” They seemed to live for the weekends.
If I didn’t have money to take them out anywhere, we would stay at Caroline’s and Johnny’s. But those weekends were hard. The kids would bounce off the walls, screaming and arguing. They were like brothers and sisters by now, getting along wonderfully one minute and wanting to kill each other the next. Josie and Codie were the two cute little blondies (they looked so much alike, it was eerie) vying for attention from the adults because they were both used to being the youngest and cutest. Josie always wanted to play with the older kids, but they didn’t want her tagging along. Codie, who was now three, would try to play with Josie, but Josie thought Codie was just a baby and was bored with her. Mandy and Josie would get into the usual sisterly fights, and even Mandy and Alexander irritated each other when they’d spent too much time together! It could be a nightmare, especially on cold or rainy days when we couldn’t even send the whole lot of them outside.
But Mandy and Josie hated being at home, and I felt guilty any time I had to miss a weekend with them. They told us that, at home, they did nothing but sleep and watch TV. David sometimes worked on the weekends, leaving Mandy and Josie home alone all day, and if he was home on the weekends he just wanted to sleep, so the girls spent most of their time holed up in the apartment with nothing to do. So I got them as much as possible. Holidays, school vacations, and birthdays, the girls spent with us.

More and more things worried Caroline and I about the girls.
For one thing, there was the amount of time that David spent drinking. It seemed that any time he wasn’t working, he was drinking… and not just drinking casually, but drinking so much that he could barely function. One weekend he took the girls to the zoo, where he bought beer and got so drunk that a zoo employee called the police because she was worried about the girls. (The police ended up just giving them all a ride home.) Eventually, he got a DUI, and actually lost his license because of it. He was supposed to enter alcohol treatment, and if he continued to drink he would go to prison. He had to submit to random urine tests. A few times David actually tested positive for cocaine, but he managed to convince the judge in charge of his case that the dirty tests were the result of being around chemicals at his new job. (He’d lost his truck driving job when he’d lost his license.)
I also worried because the girls were home alone so much. After school, and on any weekends that David worked, they were home by themselves. Mandy was only nine then, and Josie was five, and it seemed like they were too young to be staying home for long amounts of time. After all, Alexander had only just started being allowed to stay home for short amounts of time, usually after school and never for very long. The girls didn’t really seem to understand how to keep themselves safe while they were home alone, either. They routinely opened the door for anyone who knocked. One time, some teenagers from the apartment building knocked on the door, and when Mandy opened it, the teens muscled their way in and took some DVDs and video games. Another time, an acquaintance of David’s came over and picked the girls up, taking them out for hours, without David knowing. David often worked until after dark, and the girls said they were nervous
Then, there was still the fact that David seemed obsessed sex, including with Mandy’s sexuality. He would frequently mention that he had looked at her while she was taking a bath and thought that she was growing breasts, and that he wondered when she would get her period. He seemed to actually delight in thinking about it! He would constantly refer to her and Alexander as boyfriend and girlfriend, and talk about whether they were sneaking off together to “play doctor.”
And then, Josie started masturbating, out in the open and in public. The first time I saw this, we were at a restaurant eating lunch. Josie was sitting across from me. I said something to her, and she didn’t answer, so I looked over and noticed that she was staring straight ahead, and sort of shaking, with a wild look in her eyes. She didn’t even look up at me when I called her name. At first I thought she was having some sort of a seizure! But then I noticed where her hands were.
Any one of these things on its’ own… the girls being home alone, David’s obsession with his daughter’s sexuality, his way of harassing me, the stories about kid having sex, the drinking, the hared bed of David and Mandy, Josie’s masturbating, their reluctance to be at home… might have been okay. But they were all starting to pile up.
Caroline and I talked this over often, along with Caroline’s mom, who also knew the girls well. Christina and Danielle (Caroline’s younger sisters) were only a little older than Mandy, so Caroline’s mom was particularly sensitive about the idea of Mandy and Josie being in danger. We felt like we needed to do something, to find out for sure if the girls were in danger, and to save them if they were. But there didn’t seem to be many options.
Calling DCFS would have been one option. It was a move I was reluctant to make. In my mind, one of three things could happen if I called DCFS.
DCFS could investigate, find that the girls weren’t safe with David, and put them in foster care. This may or may not have turned out to be the best thing for them. They had been very lucky before, with their foster care experiences. But they were no longer tiny little kids who could easily be placed in foster homes. And the girls lived in Cook County, where the foster care system already had a poor reputation.
Or, DCFS could investigate, and decide that there was nothing to worry about. Then, if someone from DCFS told David who had made the report (we had heard of this happening before) or David figured it out on his own, we would never see the girls again.
Even worse, DCFS might not even bother to investigate at all.

I came up with an idea. I would call the girls’ school social worker and give her all of the information I knew. Then she could be the one to decide if DCFS should get involved. From working in a school myself, I knew that this could work. The school social worker was a mandated reporter, and if she thought something was wrong at home with Mandy and Josie, she would be required by law to report it to DCFS. I also knew that a hotline call from a school employee was a top priority for DCFS. If there was already a list of calls waiting to be dealt with by DCFS workers, a call from a school employee would be bumped to the top of the list.
So I did it. I called the school social worker, spoke to her for half an hour, and spewed out everything I was worried about in regards to Mandy and Josie. The one thing that really caught the social worker’s attention was the fact that Mandy and David shared a bed. She didn’t really seem alarmed by anything else I told her. But she promised to speak to the girls, and to see what she could do to help them.

A few days later, David called me, and I found out what had happened on his end.
The social worker had called David and told him that several people from the community had been calling her with concerns about Mandy and Josie. She had requested a meeting with him. At the meeting, she, the principal, and the school nurse, had warned David that they were very close to calling DCFS on him, and that, if they did call, the girls would probably be taken away. They told him that his best option was to put the girls in a local children’s home. The home was different from most children’s homes, because it provided a service where kids could be cared for there without DCFS being involved and without their parents losing custody of them.
To me, it sounded like a great idea! But David was sure this was just another conspiracy. He was sure that, as soon as he put the girls in the children’s home, DCFS would charge him with abandonment and put the girls up for one of those thousand dollar adoptions.
David was a smooth talker. He told the group of school staff, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could take every child and give him a little bit better of a home? Doesn’t every child deserve something just a little bit better than what he has? I’m not perfect, but what parent is?” He said his little speech really got through to them.
So, nothing ever came of that.

The Assgrabber

2010-02-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

The next evening Caroline and I had to drive Mandy home.
Mandy’s whole personality changed as soon as we got into the car to leave. She seemed to shut down. She stopped talking, and stared blankly out the window.
To try to cheer her up, we stopped at Walgreens and let Mandy pick out some toys… a dinosaur for her, and a doll for Josie. “It will give her something to look forward to,” Caroline explained to me. Mandy did seem happy about the new toys, but the closer to her home we got, the more sullen she became.
We had never been to David’s apartment before this. I definitely hadn’t pictured it the way it turned out to be. The living room was packed with reptiles in aquariums and rodents in cages, so much that there was barely room for any other furniture. The whole place reeked like the reptile house at the zoo. There were two tangled, matted cats running around in the mix. And the cat hair! I could usually tolerate being around cats. After all, I had lived with Sammy-Joe for years with no problem, and in Colorado I had lived with four cats! But here, my allergies started driving me crazy the minute I walked through the door.
And David was drunk. His eyes were drooping and his words were slurred. Right away he started hitting on me. “I’ve got a preset or you!” he announced. He gave me one of the shirts from his work uniform. (He drove a truck, delivering beer to liquor stores and restaurants, at the time!) “You an wear it with your special panties!” he said. “If you go on a date with me, I’ll buy you even more panties!”
I smiled weakly. “Thanks.”
“You wanna see our room?” asked Josie, who was bouncing up and down, excited that Mandy was home and that we were visiting.
“Sure!” we said.
Josie took our hands and led us to a room with one set of bunk beds and one mattress on the floor. “This is where I sleep,” she said, pointing to the bottom bunk. “And this,” she added, pointing to the mattress on the floor, “is where Daddy and Mandy sleep!”
Maybe if David had been a completely different person, I would have thought nothing of that. What was wrong with a little kid lying by her daddy? But David was David, and something seemed wrong about this sleeping arrangement. Why wouldn’t Mandy sleep on the top bunk, or even in the same bunk with her sister? I felt the familiar, vomity feeling rise up in my throat.

David walked Caroline and I down to the car. He pressed close to me, making more jokes and comments about us dating. Then, when I moved to get into the car, David grabbed my butt! I felt his finger poke me in the crotch!
Horrified, I jumped into the car and slammed the door. “Oh my God, Caroline, lets get out of here!” I shouted, not sure whether to laugh or panic. “He totally grabbed my ass and stuck his finger in my crotch!”
“Are you serious?” Caroline was incredulous.
“I’m gonna burn this shirt,” I declared, holding up the work uniform shirt he had given to me.
“Give it to me. I’ll wear it. Its kind of cool.”
“Take it, then. I’ll never wear it.” I threw the shirt at her, pretending to gag at the site of it. “There is something wrong with him!”
Caroline and I always laughed in the face of chaos. Whenever things were going wrong, we would find pieces of the situation that were so crazy, they were funny. This time was no different. We didn’t speak about Mandy and Josie, but we laughed hysterically at the memory of David’s grossness. We hooted and hollered about it all the way home! But I knew I was never going to feel comfortable around David, in any way, again.

Tot School

2010-02-08T08:29:00.000-08:00

If you're looking for a Tot School post, go here: http://littlebearsworld.typepad.com/1/2010/02/tot-school-learns-the-alphabet.html.html Thanks!

A Reunion With Mandy And Josie

2010-02-07T15:45:00.001-08:00

David and I spoke on the phone a few more times, but I still felt a little unnerved by him. I didn’t really want to see him alone, and I knew Alexander would love to see Mandy again. So David and I made plans for Johnny, Caroline, Alexander, Codie and I to meet him and the girls at the zoo, on the weekend before Halloween.
But that Friday, Alexander had a serious accident. He and a friend were in the backyard doing bike tricks using a homemade ramp that Johnny had built for them. One of Alexander’s tricks went wrong, and he landed on top of his bike. The handle bar impaled him in the groin, so deeply that he had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance for surgery! The handlebar had hit him an inch away from a major artery. The doctors told Caroline and Johnny that, an inch to the right, and Alexander probably would have bled to death.
By that Sunday he was feeling a little better, but he was still having trouble standing and walking around. The only painkiller he was allowed to have was Children’s Tylenol. Any adult would have demanded a stronger painkiller, like Vicadin… but the doctors who had worked with Alexander had a policy of not prescribing major painkillers to children. So all poor Alexander could do was lounge around on the couch.
Johnny and I decided to take Codie to the zoo anyway, to meet David and the girls.

Whenever I don’t see little kids for a long time (it had been two and a half years since I’d seen the girls) I always expect them to look completely different. But I recognized Mandy and Josie instantly! They were both a lot taller, of course. Mandy’s face was longer, and Josie’s hair had grown a lot. But other than that, they looked exactly the same!
“Mandy!” I called out.
She turned around, and said, “What?”
“It’s me, Angel!”
It was a reunion I’d been waiting years for. But now that it was happening, it was awkward. Josie didn’t really remember me at all, and Mandy’s memories were shadoy, entangled with memories of her mother. If we’d seen each other two years ago, the girls would have run to me and jumped on me, shouting, “Angel! Angel!” But now they hung back, smiling shyly, the way they had done that first day, years ago, when they’d been dumped in the bedroom with me at Tiny’s apartment.
We managed to have fun at the zoo, though! We rented a wagon to pull Josie and Codie around in, and we even stayed for lunch. The girls held my hands and told me about their pets. (Apparently David kept a ton of rodents and reptiles in his apartment, as well as two cats!)
“Did you know me when I was a baby?” asked Josie.
“Yes, I did,” I told her. “Well, maybe not exactly a baby. You were two… about the same age that Codie is now.”
“What was I like, then?”
“You loved to wear pretty dresses, even to play outside. And you loved baby dolls.”
“Was I into boy stuff?” Mandy asked.
I nodded. “You liked Pokemon, especially! You were Pikachu for Halloween.”
Mandy grinned. “I still love Pokemon!”
Neither one of them asked about Rene. Eventually, I would find out why.

The next weekend, we incited David and the girls over to Caroline and Johnny’s house for a pizza party. It went wonderfully! As soon as Mandy and Alexander were together again, it was like they had never been apart! And now Josie was big enough to tag along.
David spent most of the time retelling his story of trying to get Mandy and Josie out of foster care. He added stories of what a terrible person Rene had been. Most of the stories were not about how she had done drugs and abandoned her children, but about how she had cheated on him while they were together, and how she had stolen money from him. He did add several times that she had never loved the children. He told us she had smoked crack while she was pregnant with Mandy. She had stopped smoking rock when she got pregnant with Josie, but she had disappeared a few days after giving birth to Josie, leaving David to raise the newborn alone for the first two and a half years of her life. (The weird part of this story was that I had met Rene and the girls when Josie was two and a half, and David had not been around!) He was also hung up on the idea that the girls had inherited a lot of money from their grandparents, and that he was sure Rene had stolen the money.
He told these stories right in front of Mandy and Josie. I could see them stopping to listen, especially Mandy. I knew it probably sucked for them to hear these things about their mom. Anyway, that was probably how they’d been trained not to ask about, or even mention, Rene!

Over the next few weeks, I talked to David a lot on the phone. I would try to ask about the girls, but he could turn every conversation into stories about how Rene, the Doles, DCFS, and others had screwed him over.
When he wasn’t telling tales of conspiracy, he’d hit on me! His flirting bordered on sexual harassment, with him turning every sentence I said into something sexual. I would tell him, “I gotta put Codie to bed now,” and he’d say, “Can you put me to bed next? We could snuggle really close together. I’ll even buy you some lingerie… unless you’d rather sleep naked!” I would tell him I was going to school, and he’d say, “Why don’t you come here instead? I could be your teacher! We could study the human body! I could give you hands-on experience!”
He would even put the girls on the phone, and have them repeat sexual things to me. I was stuck trying to balance rejecting him without blatantly pissing him off.

The next time I Saw the girls was over Alexander’s birthday weekend. Alexander was turning nine, and he had a party at Safari Land. Mandy got to spend the weekend with us. David called a lot over that weekend, supposedly to check on Mandy, but mostly to talk to me. He was hung up on the fact that Mandy had slept over with Alexander. He said that he had told her she should “date” Alexander. He’d bought her a pair of slinky, “sexy” pajamas for the occasion, and he thought it was funny that she’d taken them out of her backpack and packed a pair of regular winter jammies instead. He wondered if Mandy and Alexander were going to “play doctor” together.
“Well, they’re only nine,” I pointed out, trying to keep the mood light. “I think they’re just best friends. Alexander and Mandy still think that kissing and stuff is yucky.”
“Actually, I know a six-year-old who had sex,” David replied. “He told me that he’d once been visiting a friend, and the friend’s six-year-old son had run into the house, excitedly announcing that a nine-year-old neighbor girl was in his tree house and that she wanted to “do it.”
“So can I?” the son had asked.
“Go for it!” the father had replied.
I couldn’t hide my disgust at that story. “You gotta admit, that’s a little weird. Six and nine years olds?”
“It all depends on your views of sex,” said David. “In our society, children having sex is very taboo. In other societies, it is normal for children to have sex, and for adults to have sex with children. And if you think about it, having sex with a child has it’s advantages. For one thing, a nine-year-old can’t get pregnant!”
I wanted to vomit! I quickly found an excuse to hang up.
Shaken up, I repeated the whole conversation to Caroline. “I think we gotta have a “don’t let anyone touch your private parts: talk with Mandy,” I said.
Caroline called all of the older kids into the room. Alexander’s friend Tyrone, who lived across the street, was also over. “I was watching TV, and I saw a commercial that said today is, um, National Talk To Your Kids About Strangers Day,” said Caroline. “So I just wanted to remind you guys about good touches and bad touches. Your private areas are anywhere where your bathing suit covers you. While you’re a kid, nobody should be touching you in those places, except for maybe a doctor. If someone tries to touch you in any way that makes you feel uncomfortable, you can tell an adult who you trust.” She added, “It wouldn’t even necessarily be a stranger. It could be an older kid you know, or a friend’s parents, or it could even be your own parent!”
I watched Mandy carefully. She seemed to be listening. I hoped she would remember this.
“If that ever happens, you could tell any of us. You could tell Grandma, or a teacher at school. You could call the police, if you’re afraid,” Caroline continued. “But remember, you can always talk to any of us. Okay?”
“Okay,” they said.
I wished we could do more.

The Girls' Dad

2010-02-07T14:56:00.000-08:00

Now, fast forward through the next year.
I never did hear back from Mandy and Josie. Maria Tyson, after one or two more email exchanges, also stopped writing to me. But now I had a name and address for the girls, and that was enough. I continued to send them letters every month, often accompanied by small gifts centered around whatever holiday was coming up.
Then one afternoon I got a phone message from a man who said, “My name is David Sanders, and someone named Angel has been sending gifts to my children. I’m interested in finding out who she is.”
I was terrified to call him back! I remembered the way Rene had talked about him, and how she hadn’t really wanted him seeing the kids. She had mentioned before that, if she ever couldn’t take care of her kids, she would want her siblings to take care of them, and not their father.
And the way he sounded on the phone… his deep voice pronouncing, “…has been sending gifts to my children…,” sounded foreboding.
On the other hand, this was Mandy and Josie’s dad!
I called him.
I had to explain, for the millionth time, who I was and why I had a connection to the girls. I always hated this part. Some people thought it was nice that I wanted to keep in touch with the girls, but others wondered what kind of person would go through so much trouble for two kids who weren’t even relatives. The fact that I had promised Mandy that I’d be her big sister didn’t hold much water in the real world.
Luckily, David seemed to be the first type of person. After I managed to convince him that I no longer had contact with Rene, and that she hadn’t put me up to contacting the girls, he told me, “The girls do remember you, and they’ve told me that they’d like to see you again. I think it would be nice if we could arrange for you to come to one of their soccer games or something.”
He then proceeded to freak me out!
This is the story he told me.
According to David, Rene’s sister Leslie had gone to check on their elderly parents, and found that Rene had been grossly neglecting them. Rene’s dad had been bedridden, and he’d been laying in bed so long that black mold had started to grow on him! Rene had been swallowed up by her crack addiction, and the children, the parents, the house, and everything, had gone to pot. Leslie and her husband had called the police on Rene, and had then whisked Mandy and Josie away.
The Doles (Leslie and her husband) had gone about trying to illegally adopt Mandy and Josie, without David’s consent. They had been able to enroll the girls in the local school only because they were good friends with the principal, despite not having any sort of custody of them.
According to David, the Doles were not good people at all. They did as many drugs as Rene, watched child pornography, and even molested their own children. The only reason they wanted to adopt Mandy and Josie was because Rene’s parents, who had passed away shortly after the police discovered them at the house, had left a lot of money to the girls. Whoever was the final guardian of the children would get the money.
When David had found out about what had happened, he’d demanded that DCFS take the girls away from the Doles.
The Doles, in turn, had told DCFS that David wasn’t a fit parent either, and that he wasn’t even their biological father. So DCFS had put Mandy and Josie in foster care, where they would have to wait while David went to court to try to win custody of them
At first, Mandy and Josie were placed in the home of David’s own brother and sister-in-law, but David had demanded that they be removed from there. He said that his brother was physically abusing the children. After that, the girls had moved to a new foster home about every six months. David thought this was because, if the girls stayed with any one set of foster parents for more than six months, the foster parents would be able to claim them on their taxes that year.
David said that DCFS had worked hard to prove that he was an unfit parent. They wanted his parental rights to be terminated so that Mandy and Josie could be adopted. The state would make thousands of dollars off of each adoption, especially off of the adoption of a little blond-haired, blue-eyed cherub like Josie. Returning children to their parents was, according to David, simply a poor business move. The DCFS people had even tried to strike a deal with David… if he would give up his rights to Josie, they would let him keep Mandy.
The girls’ final foster parents had been told that they would get to adopt the girls. When, in the end, David was granted custody, the enraged foster parents had dumped them, along with garbage bags full of their things, in the parking lot of David’s apartment building.
At the end of his story, David asked me, “So, do you ever go on dates?”
My head was still reeling from the story I had just listened to. I had to backtrack to answer his question. “Uh… not really,” I said.
“Well, are you interested in men?”
“I’m not gay or anything, if that’s what you’re asking,” I replied. “I’m just not interested in dating anyone right now.” (And if I had been interested in dating, Rene’s ex would not have been high on my list of potential dates!)
“The thing is, I’m a single dad trying to raise two girls, and they really need a mother,” said David. “And you seem like you’d make a great mother. So, maybe, for the sake of the girls, you could give me a chance.”
“Uh, well, I dunno. Maybe sometime…” I stammered. “I gotta go to, um, school now, but for sure, I’d like to see Mandy and Josie one of these days!”
“You’ll see them,” David assured me. “Give me a call later this week, and we can make plans.”

Something about David gave me a creepy feeling. I tried emailing Maria Tyson one more time. “David Sanders called me, and he wants me to get together with him and the girls,” I wrote. “I’m not sure about him though. He seems sort of weird. Is there anything I should know about him?”

She never wrote back.

A Little Help From CASA

2010-02-07T14:31:00.000-08:00

I did some more Internet searching, and turned up public court records involving Mandy and Josie. But all they showed was that there had been a court case to establish paternity for them. Their dad’s name, according to the court records, was David Sanders. I tried to find an address or a phone number where I could reach him, but found nothing.
I knew that all of this probably made me seem like some sort of stalker. But I couldn’t help remembering the little girls who had once clung to me and begged me not to leave them. I had been through a lot with Mandy and Josie. I anted them to know that I wasn’t just another person who would disappear from their lives without a second thought!

Meanwhile, three more children I knew were dealing with the DCFS system. Johnny’s younger sister Mary’s three little boys had been taken from her and put in foster care. Caroline had been especially close to her oldest nephew, Tommy, who was four years old. She had been there when Tommy was born, and had frequently cared for him since then, sometimes for weeks at a time. Caroline and Johnny would have taken Tommy into their home in a heart beat, although they didn’t have enough space or money to take in all three of the little boys. But when DCFS had taken the boys, Mary had specified that she didn’t want anyone in her family taking them. And even if Mary would have allowed Caroline and Johnny to take Tommy, DCFS wanted all three of the boys to stay together. The caseworker working with Mary was actually rude to Caroline, hinting that maybe if Caroline and Johnny had done more to help Mary in the first place, the little boys wouldn’t be in foster care at all. She didn’t bother to learn about how many times Caroline and Johnny had driven the streets looking for Mary to make sure that the little boys had food and diapers and stuff, or how many times they had cared for Tommy and sometimes the others at their house. Caroline was heartbroken over this!
I had just finished reading an article about Court Appointed Special Advocates, and I was impressed by everything they did for individual kids in foster care. I figured, if Tommy and his brothers had a CASA worker, maybe he or she would be more willing to help Caroline at least get to see Tommy. I emailed CASA of DuPage, and asked if Tommy had a CASA.
Someone from CASA responded to my email right away. They said that, while they couldn’t specifically tell me whether Tommy had a CASA, because of confidentiality rules, ninety-nine percent of foster children in our county did have CASAs.
That made me wonder… maybe Mandy and Josie had a CASA, too!

I wrote a letter to Cook County CASA, introducing myself and explaining the situation. I even gave them my full name, and social security number, telling them that they could do a background check on me if they wanted to. I wrote that I would love to be able to have some sort of contact with Mandy and Josie.
A few weeks later, I got a great surprise… an email from a case worker at a private foster care agency in Chicago! The case worker told me that Mandy and Josie didn’t have a CASA, but someone from Cook County CASA had gone through the trouble of finding out who the girls’ case worker was anyway, and they had forwarded my letter to her! This made me even more appreciative of the CASA organization as a whole. If I had mailed a letter directly to the Cook County branch of DCFS, I would have had no hope of anyone ever reading it or replying to it. But the people from CASA had taken the time to help me find Mandy and Josie, against all odds!
The weirdest part was that the girls’ case worker turned out to be Maria Tyson, who had gone to elementary school and high school with me! Maria and I had actually been friends when we were in the fifth and sixth grades. We had even attempted to start a babysitting club together. In junior high, though, we didn’t have any classes together and so we had drifted apart. It was a twist of fate that Maria had grown up to be a foster care case worker, and I had grown up to be a drifter who would eventually meet two of Maria’s young charges in a crack house.
Maria ( who had not yet realized that I was the same Nicki Mann she had gone to school with) said it would be fine for me to send letters or gifts to her office, and she would pass them along to the girls.
She assured me that Mandy and Josie were doing well. Mandy was in Brownies, and was getting special education services at school because of her ADHD. There were other children living in their foster home, and Mandy and Josie got along well with them.
I was overjoyed to hear that! I imagined that Mandy had had no trouble attaching to her foster parents, especially if they were attentive to her. And she probably loved having foster “siblings!” I was willing to bet she had started calling them her brothers and sisters right away. And Josie, adorable in a classic way, had most likely won everyone’s hearts!
I sent the girls a cheerful letter and a small gift, in care of Maria Tyson. Maybe Maria would even let the girls write back to me!

I Do Some Detective Work

2010-01-24T20:16:00.000-08:00

Life was moving on for the rest of us. Johnny’s drug addiction progressed. In the meantime, Caroline found out she was pregnant! That summer they moved from their apartment, and into a three bedroom house. I helped them paint the bedrooms. Alexander picked bright blue for his room, and we made the bedroom a neutral yellow for the baby whose gender we didn’t know yet.
Johnny was strange, because although he was still smoking rock on a regular basis, he could be a great father at other times. It was like there were two Johnnies. One was a loving dad to Alexander, who made life fun and who did work around the house and who worked hard to support his family. The other was a crazy man who hit his wife, stole money from his child, spent his paycheck on crack, and disappeared for days at a time. It was hard to know what to expect, at any given time!
Baby Codie was born that July. She was six weeks premature, and weighed five pounds, which was exactly the same as how Alexander had been born.
For a while, we suspected that there might be something developmentally or physically wrong with Codie. She wasn’t making her first milestones, and she didn’t smile or interact much with anyone. She just stared into space.
Then, almost overnight, Codie turned into a smiling, animated baby! Caroline’s mom, Lydia, said it was as if Codie’s soul hadn’t entered her body for the first few months of her life.
Codie reminded me a lot of Josie, as she got bigger. She had a round face, with big, rosy cheeks, wavy blond hair, and bright blue eyes… just like Josie. As a toddler she even developed a habit of brushing her bangs out of her eyes, a gesture that seemed unusual for such a little kid, but was also something Josie had done.
I still hadn’t heard anything at all from the girls’ aunt Leslie. I started to wonder if maybe Rene had gotten them back after all. I decided to try looking for Rene.
I did an Internet search for Rene’s name, and found a listing that claimed that her most recent address was one town over from Rand Grove. So, one weekend, I drove to that address, and knocked on the door.
The lady who answered it was definitely not Rene.
“Hi, I’m looking for Rene Jenkins,” I told the lady.
She looked alarmed. “Rene doesn’t live here!”
“Did she used to? Because I found an address listing for her, and it said she lived here.”
The lady shook her head. “No. Rene gets mail here sometimes, but she has never lived here.”
“But you do know her, right?”
“She’s my sister-in-law,” the lady replied. “But who are you?”
I explained how I knew Rene, and how I used to take care of Mandy and Josie. “I know the girls were living with Leslie. She had told me that I could see them sometime, but then I never heard from again.”
“They haven’t been with Leslie for a while,” said the lady.
“Did Rene get them back?”
“No. DCFS came and took the girls from Leslie. We don’t know why. They just said she couldn’t keep the girls there.”
“So, they’re in foster care?” I asked incredulously.
“I think so,” said the lady.
“Then, do you ever see them? Is anyone in your family going to get them back?”
The lady shook her head slowly. “We were told that Rene is the only one who can do anything for them. There is nothing the rest of us can do.”
A little girl, about Alexander’s age, appeared behind the lady. “Mommy, who is that?” she asked.
“She’s a friend of Mandy and Josie’s. She’s looking for aunt Denise,” said the lady.
The girl looked at me. “Where is Aunt Denise?”
“I’m trying to find out,” I told her.
I promised the lady and her daughter that, if I found out anything, I’d let them know.

An Informative Phone Call

2010-01-24T19:44:00.000-08:00

A few days later, I got a phone message from someone who said she was Rene’s sister. She had found my note at the house, and she wanted to let me know that Mandy and Josie were with her.
I called her back right away. I hated talking on the phone to people I didn’t know. But I swallowed my anxiety, to find out about the girls.
Rene’s sister, Leslie, asked me, “So who are you exactly? How do you know Rene?”
“I met her when she came to visit people in the apartment building where I used to live,” I replied, leaving out the part about my actually living in the crackhouse where she would buy rock. “I help her with the kids a lot. They spend weekends at my house.”
“I just want to make sure you’re not one of her drug-addict friends trying to find her,” said Leslie.
“No, I don’t do any drugs,” I assured her.
“Well, the girls are living with me now,” she told me. “Rene was supposed to go to rehab, but she went AWOL and nobody has heard from her.”
“So are they going to stay with you… for a while?” I asked hopefully.
“That’s the plan,” she replied.
Nothing could have made me happier! Finally Mandy and Josie were in a safe place. “Do you think I could visit them sometime? My nephew Alexander would love to see them too.”
“I wouldn’t have a problem with it,” said Leslie. “Give me a week or so for things to get settled down, and then give me a call.”

I waited two weeks, to give Leslie extra time, and then I called her again. But this time, she didn’t answer her phone. When I called again, her daughter answered and said Leslie wasn’t home. And the next few times that I called, nobody answered. Nobody returned any of the messages I left, either.
I gave up. Maybe Leslie had had second thoughts about letting me see the girls. Maybe someone had pointed out to her that it wasn’t wise to trust someone she only knew through Rene, even someone who claimed to have taken care of the girls. And for that matter, why did a babysitter need to keep in touch with them, anyway?
So, I looked up Leslie’s address on the Internet. I knew from Rene that Leslie lived in Fox Lake, so it wasn’t hard to find the address. I packaged up some small gifts for the girls… My Little Ponies, Pokemon cards, and some Easter trinkets… and wrote a short, cheery letter to the girls. I mailed it to them in care of Leslie. If I couldn’t see the girls anymore, I could at least let them know that I still thought about them! I didn’t want to be just another person who disappeared from their lives.

Where'd Everyone Go?

2010-01-24T18:37:00.001-08:00

Rene, Mandy and Josie stayed at Young Jerry’s for several weeks. Then, suddenly, Rene stopped returning my phone calls, and nobody answered the phone at her parents’ house!
Meanwhile, things were crazy at Johnny’s and Caroline’s. Johnny had struggled with drug addictions since he was a teenager, and he had started smoking crack again. He’d never been completely clean for longer than a few months at a time. He was no where near how people I knew from Rand Grove were… but it was bad enough that he smoked crack at all! If he got in a fight with Caroline, he would go off in search of rock. On those nights, Caroline would lock him out, and block the door of the apartment with furniture. Then we’d stay up late drinking Coke and rum and talking the night away, until we finally passed out like little kids at a slumber party!
I hated the taste of alcohol. I could never even take a sip of beer without wanting to spit it across the room. But I could tolerate Coke and rum well enough to drink quite a lot of it, and I actually liked fruit flavored wine coolers a lot. Getting drunk made me feel closer to my brothers. Casper had been drunk so much of the time that, when I got even a little buzzed, I felt like I was seeing the world through his eyes. And getting drunk with my brother Jay, when I visited him in Utah, had been one of the more memorable experiences of my life!
One night I got so drunk that I started to call people! I called Casper’s parents’ phone number, a number Casper had made me memorize years ago. They didn’t answer the phone. I wanted to leave a message, but for some reason I had trouble maneuvering the voicemail, and I called back several times trying to leave messages. “I love Casper! He’ll always be my big brother! But he’s a crackhead now. And he’s engaged to another crackhead. And he tried to strangle me,” I slurred.
I also called Della’s house phone. “Della, I miss you! I’m sorry I left! You’re a great cook!” I told her.
“Angel! Are you drunk?” exclaimed Della.
“Kinda!” I giggled.
Della laughed her ass off, and then passed the phone around to everyone who was at her apartment at the time, saying, “Listen to this, everyone! Angel is drunk!” They couldn’t fathom it!
When Della got back on the phone with me, I told her, “Della, I wish I was black!”
“Angel, you’re crazy!” she replied.
“Naw! Black people have always been nicer to me than white people!” I started listing all of the ways that white people had wronged me. “Casper is white, and he tried to strangle me! Tiny is white, and she… she’s just a crackhead! Jonah and Cassie are white, and they ditched me! Boss is white, and she ditched me at Burger King! Valerie and Craig are white, and they kicked me out! Dewey is white, and he molested me! JP is white, and he screwed me over in every way he could! But no black people have ever hurt me.”
“Angel, God made me white for a reason,” Della said.
I hung up then because I was getting sleepy and I had drank up all of the rum. By the next morning, when I looked back on the conversation, I couldn’t believe I had talked so much to Della! Even when I had lived in Rand Grove, I had kept quiet most of the time, preferring to watch and listen to people than to talk to them.

One day, while I was at work, I realized how long it had been since I’d heard from Rene and the girls. Rene still didn’t answer her cell phone when I called, though. So I decided I would go to Mandy’s school and meet up with her, Rene and Josie, the way I used to. I remembered that, when they’d been staying with Young Jerry, Mandy hadn’t gone to school very much. So I figured I’d call the school and make sure Mandy was there, before I went there.
I had done this before, and the secretary had always told me whether Mandy was in school. But this time, she passed the phone to the principal, who demanded, “Who is this?”
“I’m Mandy’s sister, Angel,” I said. “I can’t get ahold of my mom, and I was supposed to take my sisters overnight tonight, so I just wanted to see if Mandy is in school today. I was gonna try and meet up with my mom when she comes to pick Mandy up.”
The principal was silent. I thought maybe she didn’t believe my lengthy explanation, thought I was a kidnapper, and was pushing a button to trace my call and send the cops after me.
Finally, she said, “Mandy no longer goes to this school.”
“What? She doesn’t?”
“No, she does not,” replied the principal. “Goodbye.”
I hung up, stunned.

After work, I went straight to Rene’s parents’ house, and pounded on the door. Nobody answered. I peered through the windows, trying to see through the cracks between the curtains, but I couldn’t spot any movement. I even tried the door to make sure it was locked.
Rene’s car was gone from the driveway, and so was her parents’ car, the one that Rene usually drove. In case they came back, I went to my car and scrounged up a pen and paper to write a note. “Rene, where are you? I’m worried about you and the kids! Please call me!” I left my phone number, in case Rene had somehow forgotten it. I tucked the paper between the front door and the screen door, so someone would be sure to find it.

I Need a Title here!

2010-01-24T17:56:00.000-08:00

Now that I was officially living with Caroline an Johnny, Mandy and Josie came over just about every weekend. They were like part of the family. Mandy, especially, fit in perfectly. She and Alexander played together all the time. They loved all the same things… Pokemon and video games and stuffed animals. When Mandy spent the weekends, she and Alexander would play together from morning until night, and then fall asleep together in a pile of blankets on the floor, still talking about the things they’d done that day. When they wouldn’t go to sleep at night, all I had to do was threaten to separate them!
It was great for both of them. Alexander didn’t have many friends. There were no other kids in our building. He played with kids from Caroline’s mom’s neighborhood when he visited her, and he was used to playing with Caroline’s sisters, but that was about it. So it was great for him to have another kid his age to come over. And Mandy wasn’t really making friends at school. They both were in kindergarten, and they both hated it, and they both were having trouble learning. Both of them loved art, and complained that they didn’t have enough free time at kindergarten to color or draw. It was like they belonged together!
One time I was bringing the girls over to Caroline and Johnny’s, and we stopped at a grocery store so I could get a bottle for Josie, because Rene hadn’t packed one. I let the girls each pick out a piece of candy. I told Mandy to pick one out for Alexander, as well.
“Is the third piece for your mama?” asked the cashier, when we paid for the items.
“No, its for my brother, Alexander,” replied Mandy. “He’s waiting for us at home!”

Alexander’s sixth birthday was that winter, and Caroline and Johnny had a party for him at Enchanted Castle, a popular local indoor theme park. Mandy and Josie were both invited to the party, of course. But Mandy was going to sleep over, and Josie was not… only because we wanted the sleepover to be extra special and fun for Alexander, instead of just a regular weekend of me taking care of the girls. So, Rene came to the party with Josie.
One of Caroline’s bosses had also come, with her grandson, who was a few years younger than Alexander. At some point in the evening, forty dollars disappeared from Caroline’s bosses purse. Of course we all suspected Rene had taken the money. She had spent a lot of time alone in the party room, while all of the other adults had been off looking after the little party guests. And forty dollars was a common amount of money to buy a rock with!
A week or so later, when I mentioned to Rene that someone had lost some money at the party, she immediately replied, “I hope they don’t think I took it!” I assured her that that wasn’t the case… but it was! Plus, a person who hadn’t stolen the money probably wouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that everyone suspected they had stolen it!

One morning, I called Rene’s house, and her mother answered the phone. Her mother said that not only were Rene and the girls not home, but she had no clue where they were, and she had been hoping that I knew! A few days earlier Rene had disappeared, taking their car and some money. Rene’s parents had reported the car missing.
I promised her mother I’d try to find her. Then I hung up, and called Rene’s cell phone. She answered right away.
“Your parents reported the car stolen,” I told her. I could almost hear her rolling her eyes. “Maybe you should call them!”
“They know where I am. They didn’t report the car missing,” Rene retorted. “They’re just trying to scare me.”
“Oh… well, I was wondering if the girls could come spend the night,” I said. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Rene gave me directions to an apartment complex not far from Rand Grove. When I got to the apartment she directed me to, I was surprised to see that she and the girls were staying with Young Jerry! Young Jerry (not to be confused with Old Jerry) was another drug dealer, an acquaintance of Tiny’s. He was much more discrete than the other dealers. For one thing, he didn’t smoke crack himself, and that left him money to buy nice things, like a fancy leather couch, a big screen TV, and a new car. He had a four-year-old daughter who lived with his mother… but unlike most of the people I knew whose children didn’t live with them, Young Jerry still had custody of his child. He paid his mother to take care of the little girl so her life would be more stable, and also paid for her to go to an expensive private preschool for gifted children. Young Jerry saw her regularly. I had met her myself, over the summer, when Young Jerry had invited me to a friend’s barbeque. I had played with her in the friend’s pool. She was a tiny munchkin with the vocabulary of a ten-year-old!
Anyway, Rene had convinced Young Jerry to let her and the girls stay with him. Of course the girls were trashing the apartment! They were bored out of their minds there. Young Bobby had some toys in the apartment for when his own daughter visited, but the girls had already broken most of those. Young Jerry told me in private that Mandy and Josie jumped on the furniture, crayoned on the walls, and threw toys, behaviors he never would have tolerated from his daughter. Plus, Rene hadn’t been taking Mandy to school, which probably part of the reason why she was climbing the walls!
“If something happens to Rene, will you take care of the girls?” I asked Young Jerry.
He raised his eyebrows. “They’d be better off with you, Angel.”
“I don’t have anywhere to bring them,” I protested. “I’m staying with my sister. I’m lucky enough that I can even take them on the weekends! I don’t have anything of my own!”
I wouldn’t have bestowed Mandy and Josie to any of the other drug dealers. But I knew Young Jerry was a good person, and that he took good care of his daughter. I hoped he’d find a way to help the girls.

Tiny Gets Jumped, And I Get Out.

2010-01-22T18:11:00.000-08:00

Tiny got out of jail the next day.
I knew that was a little odd. None of the other people who’d been arrested with her had gotten out yet… and it had been Tiny’s apartment! I thought maybe Big or someone had bailed her out.
But then, one afternoon, Tiny got jumped in the stairway of our building. She got jumped in broad daylight, by people she knew. I was at work, at the time, so I only found out about it that evening, from Della. I heard that they had broken her ribs and her nose, and that she’d needed staples in her head! It turned out, Tiny had gotten out of jail so quickly by ratting out some other drug dealers from Rand Grove… young kids barely out of high school, kids who were used to hurting their enemies bad and thought it was fun to get revenge.
For some reason, Tiny wrote to Casper and told him that I had been there and seen it all. She told him that, when she called to me for help I had laughed and walked away. I never could figure out why she told him that, and why he believed her. I would have never laughed and walked away from anyone who was hurt.
Tiny was only partially conscious by the time an ambulance came for her, so maybe she was hallucinating. That’s the only thing I can think of.

I was starting to feel like I needed to get out of Rand Grove. I have never been good at leaving places, though. I had made friends here. I felt like I belonged here. So on one hand, I couldn’t picture leaving Rand Grove. But on the other hand, I was praying for a miracle that would make it easier for me to get out.

I hadn’t seen Rene and the girls since the raid. Wherever Lyle was dealing out of, that was probably where Rene was hanging out now. It may have been a Motel 6. Shortly before the raid, Lyle and Jeff and Ricky had been staying at a Motel 6, and Rene and the kids and I had stopped by there to visit. The short visit had resulted in Lyle and Rene getting another room in the motel for themselves, while the girls and I ended up spending the night at the first room with Ricky, Jeff and all of the crackheads who came through there. The next morning, when Rene had come back to retrieve us, she had told me, “I love motels, but I will never be able to stay in a Motel 6 without thinking of it as a crackhouse!”
Meanwhile, I was trying to find other things to keep me busy, to improve my mind. I joined a women’s spirituality group at the Unitarian Universalist church near Rand Grove, as a way of trying to find some feeling of peace.
One of our activities was a Native American peace pipe ceremony, run by a Native American man who studied and followed his tribe’s traditions and tried to teach them to others. The ceremony involved saying a prayer in your mind and heart, and holding it for a minute as you smoked the pipe. I prayed, “Please let me find a place to belong!”

On Halloween I decided to surprise Mandy by waiting for her after school. I met up with Rene and Josie there. Mandy was dressed as Pikachu, and Josie was dressed as a princess.
Mandy hugged me tightly when she saw me. “Will you come trick-or-treating with us, Angel, ple-ease?”
“Yeah, of course!” I missed the girls a lot, and I was desperate to spend time with them.
It was a cold and rainy day, like Halloweens always seem to be. We tried to go trick-or-treating in Rene’s neighborhood, but soon the girls started to whine about being cold. So we decided to try trick-or-treating at a near by mall.
It turned out to be a good idea! We went to each store and collected candy and other random goodies. Some of the restaurants were giving out samples of snacks. Mandy and Josie were wild and running around like crazy… especially Mandy… so it was probably better that they were running wild in a well-lit mall than in a dark, cold, rainy neighborhood. Plus, when the girls started getting hungry, we were right by the food court!
I didn’t get home that night until nine-thirty or ten. I went up to Rene’s apartment, but it was locked. I had a key, but for some reason the key wouldn’t work in the door. And when I knocked, nobody answered.
Confused, I left, and went back to my car. I figured I would go to sleep in my car. I had a sleeping bag in my trunk, and a few times when I had not felt like going back to wherever I was staying, the back seat of my car had made a warm, cozy bed.
Then I remembered I had another option.
I drove to the grocery store and called Caroline and Johnny from a payphone. Johnny answered the phone. “Are you guys still awake?” I asked him. “I’m locked out of Rene’s apartment. Can I come crash by you?”
I heard Johnny repeating my question to Caroline. “She’s locked out of Rene’s apartment, and she wants to come over. Is that okay?” To me, he said, “She says, of course! Do you need me to come get you?”
“Naw. I got my car,” I reminded him. “I’ll be there soon.”

Before long, I was in the warmth and comfort of Caroline and Johnny’s living room, explaining how I had gotten locked out.I told them about trick-or-treating with the girl, and about the raid.
“Why don’t you just stay with us?” Caroline asked. “Seriously. You’re living in a place with drug addicts and crazy people, and you aren’t even guaranteed to be able to sleep there every night. Would you seriously choose all that over us?”
I glanced over at Alexander , who was asleep on the couch next to me. He’d started sleeping on the couch because he was afraid of falling out of his bunk bed, a fear that had been keeping him from falling asleep in his own room. “but I’d have to get up so early to get to work…”
“Not that early. You know how close we are to the highway?” Caroline reasoned. “And you start work pretty early anyway, so traffic wouldn’t be that bad, I bet!”
I didn’t want to leave Rand Grove. But right now, sitting with Caroline and Johnny and Alexander, I didn’t want to leave them!
So I nodded. “Okay. I’ll stay.”

Caroline went to bed, but me and Johnny, for some reason, decided to clean Alexander’s room. It was a major undertaking. The room was a tangled mess of toys, just about every little boy toy imaginable! Full of pent up energy, we dug into the room, putting toys away for hours.
When we were finished, Johnny went to the kitchen and brought back two cans of Dr. Pepper. He popped one open and handed it to me.
“I missed you, this time, for some reason,” he said.
It was a moment I would hold in my mind for years to come.

An Ending

2010-01-21T20:50:00.001-08:00

Not too long after that, I ended up moving in with Della. I had been going over to eat with Della and Felix and them a lot lately, and I would babysit Olivia and Tillie once in a while. When Felix moved out to live with his new girlfriend in another building of our apartment complex, Della asked me if I wanted to move in with her. I would have to share a bedroom with Olivia, but it felt like a step up to me! At Della’s, I never had to worry about crackheads stealing my money, or about being hungry all the time. (Stella always had plenty of food, and she was a great cook!) The only stupid part was that I was supposed to pay Stella a hundred and fifty dollars a month. At Tiny’s, I was theoretically supposed to pay a hundred a month, but I had borrowed Tiny money so many times that she had long since told me my rent was paid up for all of eternity!

I couldn’t really bring Mandy and Josie to Doris’s, though. But now we always had the option of going to Caroline and Johnny’s. We’d go there a lot on the weekends. One time I even brought Olivia along with us. It was almost Halloween, but we dyed Easter eggs!

Caroline’s place became like a safe haven to me. Della’s apartment was better than Tiny’s, but still stressful.

For one thing, I had to take care of Olivia and Tillie a lot. On the weekends, or any timem I had a day off from work, Olivia and Tillie were mine during the day. Not that I minded! They were the sweetest little kids, and they were happy for any attention I gave them… but not hyperactive like Mandy and Josie. They didn’t go to school or day care or anything, so they spent most of their time just existing in the apartment. I tried to do stimulating things with them. Unfortunately, at the time, the best I could do was read to them… the school nurse at my work had given me a huge sack of little kid books for them… or let Olivia play with my crayons. I would turn on “Play With Me Sesame” and try to get Olivia to do the little games and songs along with the puppets. I would take them to the playground sometimes, and I would go on the swings and slides with Olivia, with Tillie strapped to my chest in a sling. One time I tried to make playdough, out of flour and water, but I forgot a whole bunch of ingredients and just ended up with paste. Olivia cried when I threw the whole batch in the garbage.

I loved Olivia and Tillie, but between them, and school, and Mandy and Josie, it seemed like I spent every moment taking care of kids! At Caroline’s, at least I could hang out and talk with her and Johnny while we all looked after the kids.

Another stress factor was when Della invited a new “roommate” to stay with us. Vivian was an old high school friend of Della’s. She had a son named Miguel, who was two years old. Vivian had lost her apartment and had been sleeping in stairwells around Rand Grove. Della had invited her to stay with us until she got on her feet. So now there were three adults, two two-year-olds, and a baby, all living in Della’s two-bedroom apartment!

Vivian seemed nice at first. But she was weird, too. She drank a lot, popped pills, and ditched her kid a lot to go out and party. She didn’t particularly take care of Miguel. We found out one day that, while neither Della or I were home, Vivian had knocked on random neighbors’ doors until she had found someone willing to take care of Miguel while she went out with her friends. Della came home and heard Miguel crying from a neighbor’s apartment, so she rescued him and brought him back home. When Vivian came back, Della confronted her about it, and Vivian blew up. They had such a loud, angry argument that the building’s security guards came to our door to break it up!

Della also complained that Vivian was a dirty person. She shaved her legs and didn’t clean the tub out, she didn’t clean up after she ate, and she even wiped her butt and threw the dirty toilet paper in the bathroom trash can instead of flushing it! I never noticed these things myself, but Della told me about them every day.

“She’s Mexican,” Della explained. “That’s how they are.”

I could have argued that I had lived with Mexican people before and their household had been perfectly clean and sanitary. But I never felt comfortable arguing with Della!

One night we were eating dinner when we heard a huge BOOM out in the hallway. It was followed by the sound of the fire alarm, and lots of shouting! I ran and opened the door, poking my head out and looking around. The hallway was filling up with smoke. Cops were milling around all over the place.

One of the cops saw me and barked, “Go back in your apartment!”

I shut the door and reported to Della, “The cop says to stay in here. But there’s a ton of smoke!”

“Nun-uh, we are not staying in here,” said Della. She picked up Tillie and I grabbed Olivia, and we headed out the door.

Another cop snapped, “Go back into your apartment!”

“We gotta go!” I replied. We walked down the hall quickly. To my surprise, the cop didn’t try to stop us again.

Giant fans had been placed at either end of the hallway, and they were sucking up the smoke. There were fire fighters walking around in full gear, in addition to all of the cops.

And outside was even more chaos! It seemed like everyone in the entire apartment complex was outside, like a big block party! The parking lot was filled with cop cars, fire trucks and ambulances. Little kids rode their bikes in circles around them. Some people were even cooking food on grills as they watched the show! Everyone was talking to each other, trading stories about what they had been doing just before all hell had broken loose.

From listening, I found out that the cops had raided Tiny’s apartment! The cops had, apparently, set off some sort of smoke bomb, and then they had knocked down Tiny’s door. I wasn’t sure what the smoke bomb had been for, though. At any rate, a few people had managed to escape Tiny’s apartment in all of the confusion. Some had jumped out Tiny’s bedroom window, risking life and limb with the two-story fall. But Tiny had been arrested. I saw the cops lead her out in handcuffs.

When the cops, firefighters and ambulances finally left, I figured this was a good time to go into Tiny’s apartment and grab the rest of my stuff that was there, before the cops came back to collect more evidence or something. A few of the others who had been hanging out at Tiny’s decided to join me.

The door at Tiny’s was still standing, but the door knob was busted, so all I had to do to get in was give it a push. The place had been ransacked! The table was overturned. Paper and garbage were strewn about. The closet where I used to hide had been emptied out. It looked like the cops had enjoyed tossing everything around!

We grabbed what we could find of our stuff. Nobody wanted to stay in there long. Something dark and evil was lingering in the apartment. It hardly even looked familiar to me now. But as I left, I gave the place a backward glance, and I felt sad. It felt like part of my life had ended forever.

If You're Here, He Might Kill You...

2010-01-19T20:16:00.000-08:00

I was alone at Tiny's late one night, asleep on the mattress in the living room, when the phone rang. Half asleep, I answered it.

"Angel! Jeff and I are on our way to the apartment. I need that forty dollars you owe me," Tiny's voice snapped in my ear.

I blinked hard, trying to wake up. "What forty dollars? I owe you?" That was virtually impossible. I had borrowed Tiny so much money since I'd moved in, that she'd long since told me my "rent" to her was paid for the rest of my life!

"Yeah, I need it tonight," said Tiny.

"But I don't have any money... and... wait... how do I owe you money, again?" I stammered.

Her voice lowered to a whisper. "Don't worry about it. Just play along."

"Okay..."

"So we'll be there in a little while, alright?"

"Sure, I guess, whatever," I replied.

I fell back asleep, quickly. I was so tired all the time, back then, that I could drift off to sleep on command! But beore I had slept very long at all, Tiny and Jeff and Walter burst into the room, waking me up.

I played possum.

"There's Angel," said Jeff. "Don't you wanna wake her up and ask her for the money?"

"Not yet. Let her sleep a while longer," said Tiny. "She hasn't been feeling good lately."

I listened as they sat down at the table to smoke and play cards. I dozed on and off, listening to them talk. Every so often, Jeff would suggest that Tiny wake me up, and Tiny would tell him to let me sleep a little longer.

Finally Jeff said, "I gotta go. I'ma just wake her up, myself, if you're not gonna."

"Its up to you, but she's hard to wake up," said Tiny.

Jeff crouched down near my head. "Angel! Angel! Hey, Angel!"

I tried to play possum again, but then Jeff started shaking me to wake me up. He shook me so hard, I would have had to be a corpse to not wake up then!

So I sat up and grinned sleepily at him. "Hi, Jeff!"

He smiled back. "Hi! Can I have that money now?"

I yawned and rubbed my eyes. "What money?"

"The money you owe Tiny," he explained.

I gave him my best confused look. "What are you talking about, Jeff? I don't got no money!"

Jeff turned to Tiny. "What the fuck is going on?" he demanded. "I thought you told me she had your money!"

"Maybe I lied," said Tiny.

"What?"

"Maybe I lied! I'm a good liar! I guess you lose!" Tiny laughed flippantly.

"Fuck you!" Jeff shouted, as he stormed out.

I looked at Tiny. "Are you sure that was a good idea?"

Tiny shrugged. "Fuck Jeff. Its his own fault for believing me."

The next day I was sitting on the floor drawing with my new oil pastels. Tiny was in the bedroom talking on the phone, and a few of the usual customers were gathered around the table. Someone pounded on the door. Ken went to open it. That was his first mistake. I never would have opened the door, because Tiny had trained me to peer through the peekhole and yell, "Who is it?" and if it wasn't someone I knew really well, like Casper or Walter or Felix or Rene, I had to come get her. It wasn't just a rule for me. It was a rule for everyone in the apartment. When you live in a crack house like we did, or you're constantly pissing people off the way Tiny was, there was no telling who would come barging through that door!

This time it was Lyle, followed by Ricky and Jeff and a few random guys I didn't know. They shoved Ken aside and stormed in, slamming the door behind them.

"Hey Lyle!" I said cheerfully.

"Hey, Angel. Where's Tiny?"

I shrugged, as I realized how mad Lyle was.

Lyle spotted the phone cord stretching down the hall towards the bedroom. He yanked the cord out of the wall, ripping it right in half. "Tiny!" he bellowed.

"Uh, I gotta go," said Ken, edging towards the door.

"Nobody's going anywhere," Lyle shouted, as two of his friends blocked the door.

Tiny came marching out of the bedroom, yelling, "What the fuck?" She stopped short when she saw Lyle and the others. I saw a weird look pass over her face for just a moment. Then she scowled at Lyle. "Who let you in? Why'd you break my damn phone?"

"Where's my money, Tiny?"

"I don't got your money. If you didn't have idiots working for you, you wouldn't have had this problem in the first place," said Tiny.

Lyle shoved her hard. She fell backwards, landing on the floor on her elbows. "You better get me my money by tomorrow!" he warned. "You don't wanna fuck with me, Tiny! I'll blow this whole place up!" He turned and stormed out, followed by the rest of his crew.

Tiny stood up. "Why did you let him in, Ken?"

"Its Lyle! I didn't know there was a problem," Ken replied nervously.

"I gotta get out of here. Come on, Angel, we gotta leave right now!"

"I don't wanna leave," I protested.

Tiny stared at me. "What do you mean, you don't want to leave?"

"I gotta go to work tomorrow! I gotta wake up early. I gotta take the bus to work. I gotta sleep tonight," I tried to explain. If I went running off with Tiny to one of her friends' houses, there was no guarantee at all that I would be able to manage any of those things. "I gotta stay here," I said. "Besides. I hate sleeping in different places all the time. I just wanna stay here."

"But Lyle is going to come back and blow this place up," she reminded me. "If you're here, he might kill you to get back at me.

"He won't come back," I said. "I don't think he'll come back."

Tiny sighed. "Well, I can't force you to leave. If this is where you feel safe, then stay. Walter and Angeline are right nextdoor if you need anything."

I was right about Lyle not coming back. He didn't. Walter came over to bring me some dinner Angeline had made, and to plug in a telephone he'd found in his closet, so if Lyle did come back I could call the cops. But it was a peaceful night... one of the best nights of sleep I'd gotten since I moved in with Tiny!

The next morning, on my lunch break, I made some calls.

First I called Lyle.

"Hey! Angel!" He sounded genuinely happy to hear from me. "Whats up?"

"Nothing..." I really had no idea what I wanted to say to him. I just knew I wanted to hear hear his voice and make sense of the situation in my head. The Lyle I knew was the guy who talked to me and brought me McDonalds and always asked me if I needed anything... not someone who really would burst in and kill us all!

"So, whats up? What happened last night?" Lyle asked. "Did Tiny call the cops?"

"Naw! Not Tiny! She hates the cops!" I assured him. "She just said we had to leave, right away. But I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay! So I did. I stayed, and she left." I paused for a minute. "Lyle... are you going to come over and shoot us all and kill us? Because Tiny says you are."

Lyle chuckled. "Don't even worry about it. Angel. You got nothing to worry about at all. We're friends, right?"

"Yep," I agreed. "We're friends."

The next person I called was Rene. I told her what had happened at Tiny's apartment, and that Lyle was really angry with Tiny. "So you probably shouldn't go there anymore," I told Rene's voicemail. "Lyle and them won't be there anyway. And if they are, they'll probably be there to shoot Tiny." I wasn't afraid of Lyle... but you could never be sure about people, you know?

The Bad People Will Hurt You

2010-01-18T21:08:00.001-08:00

The girls and I sometimes still hung out at Tiny's, like times when Rene only planned on staying for a few minutes. For short little stints, being at Tiny's was manageable. Tiny and them mostly smoked in the bedroom now, so the id and I were free to roam the rest of the small apartment. We had our crayons, and there was always TV! Tiny had even moved the mattress from the bedroom into the living room, so I could sleep there or put the girls to bed there.

One night, Josie started asking for juice. Of course we didn't have any! Josie went into a Terrible Two Tantrum about it! She jumped down from her seat at the table, and ran towards the kitchen. I let her go, expecting her to open the fridge and see for herself that there was no juice. But she veered off towards the bedroom, pushed the door open, and burst in!

I darted after her. Rene and Tiny and the others were, as usual, smoking rock in the bedroom. They were frozen in surprise now, trying to make sense of the little blond toddler in the room!

Josie threw her arms around Rene's legs, crying, "Mommy! Mommy!"

Rene just stared down at her, like a deer in the headlights, her pipe poised by her mouth.

I scooped up Josie and backed out of there, kickng the door shut on my way out.

Back in the living room, Josie was madder than I'd ever seen her! She struggled to get out of my grasp, throwing her head back against my chest as she screamed, "I want Mommy! I want Mommy!"

I sank down on the mattress, and held Josie in the basket-hold restraint, the way I held the angry children at my work and the way I sometimes held Mandy. I wanted to hug her, and comfort her, but she was screaming too loudly, and thrashing too wildly! I waited for Rene to come out of the bedroom and get her.

But it wasn't Rene who came out. Tiny came out. She crouched down at our level and glared at Josie. "Stop crying right now, or the bad people will hear you, and they'll come in here and hurt you!" she snapped.

My heart caught in my throat. "She's only a baby! She just wants her mama!"

"Well, her mama is in there smoking rock and not caring about her, so she needs to shut up," Tiny retorted.

I wanted to throw up. I decided right then that I hated Tiny, I hated Rene, and I hated this place! I wanted out. I wanted something better in life, maybe not for my own sake, but definitely for those two little kids.

Places To Go

2010-01-15T19:11:00.000-08:00

Eventually my social worker from the police station helped me to get my car out of mechanic. That made a huge difference for me and the girls! I could pick Mandy up from school and get Josie from Rene's parents' house, and off we would go. The school where I worked got out about an hour earlier than Mandy's school, so I could stay a little bit late and get some work done, before I went to get the girls. They only lived a few blocks from the school. On nice days, I would park by Rene's parents' house, walk to get Mandy, and walk her home. (Usually I ended up giving her a piggy back ride most of the way!)

Every day when Mandy got out of school, her teacher would make each kid point out the grown-up who was there to get them, before they'd be allowed to leave. When Mandy pointed to me and said, "I see my big sister!", my heart would just about burst!

Not that life was perfect, or even close to it. If the girls and I were a family, we were still a dysfunctional one. Mandy and Josie were used to being left to their own devices while Rene was busy. They craved attention. They seemed to be able to sense when the adults around them were stressed out and distracted. While some kids might learn to walk on eggshells to stay out of trouble, Mandy and Josie would just get crazier! It was hard to take them anywhere, because they'd wreak havoc.

I talked about the girls a lot to my co-workers. One of the lead teachers in the classroom where I worked, Jean, invited me to bring the girls to her house after school one day. She had two little boys who were the same ages as Mandy and Josie. She lived in a town a little ways north of where we lived, in a sprawling, colorful house with tons of toys and pets, a big backyard, and a park near by with a river meandering through it. She had a huge black lab named Happy. Taking the girls to her house was the best idea ever. Jean had the heart of a hippie, and believed in letting kids go wild as much as safely possible, providing them with tons of exercise and fresh air, and plenty of art projects on the side! Mandy and Josie got along well with Jean's boys, and everyone had an awesome time that afternoon.

So awesome that, when it was time to go home, Mandy and Josie didn't want to go! They threw a fit, running around the house and hiding from us, and wouldn't put their jackets and shoes on. Embarassed, I ended up basically dragging Mandy to the car, while Jean carried Josie out.

I was fuming! I lectured the girls as we drove away. "That was so not nice, you guys! That is not the way to act at someones house! Do you think Miss Jean will ever invite us back over to her house again?"

Mandy just laughed wildly, the ay she did when she was too wound up. It made me more angry. "You know what? I'm just going to drive to a Wal-Mart parking lot somewhere, and we'll just sit quietly until your mom is ready to come home!" I snapped

In the back of my mind I knew I was overreacting, even being cruel. I was alone most of the time with tw little girls, one of whom (Mandy) could be especially challenging. My car was my only resource. It had felt great to hang out with Jean, but now I felt like she probably thought I couldn't handle the girls. I knew Mandy just acted out to get attention, something she definitely deserved but didn't often get. And Josie followed her big sister's example. I should have been a more patient person, and found ways to help Mandy control her behavior and get her energy out. The best I had to offer... endless car rides to entertaining places where they could kill time while their mom did drugs... wasn't good enough.

I was mulling all of this over as I drove in the general direction of home. I stopped at a gas station to call Rene, but she didn't answer her phone. The Wal-Mart plan was actually looking like our only option, unless we went back to Rand Grove. I had no money, and the girls were exhausted.

Then I thought of somewhere else I could bring them!

I had only been to see Caroline and Johnny a handful of times since I'd come back to Illinois. I only vaguely remembered how to get to their new apartment. But I drove there now, heading to the western suburbs on I-355, and then just trying to remember landmarks until I found my way to their apartment building.

They lived in a two-story apartment building behind a church. The parking lot of the building was so small, guests were supposed to park in the church parking lot and walk over. I parked at the church, and gently woke the girls, who had doed off on the long ride. "Come on, I think we can hang out here for a while," I said.

Even if Johnny and Caroline weren't home, I knew they usually left their door unlocked, and we could at least chill there until I got ahold of Rene.

I ushered the girls into the apartment building and up to the apartment. I knocked, but nobody answered, and I couldn't hear anyone moving arond inside. So I tried the door knob. Sure enough, it was open!

As we walked in, Caroline appeared from the hallway. She gasped, and ran to hug me. "Oh my God! Hi! Where have you been?"

"With Casper, mostly," I admitted. "These are my little friends, Mandy and Josie. Josie, this is Caroline, my best friend in the whole world!"

"Hi, Mandy and Josie!" Caroline greeted them. "I have a son about your age, Mandy! Do you think you'd like to play with him for a while?"

She called Alexander out of his room and introduced him to the girls.

Alexander smiled shyly at the girls. "Do you like Pokemon?"

"Yeah!" Mandy absolutely loved Pokemon!

"I have Pokemon cards! You wanna see?"

"Sure! Come on, Josie!" Mandy took Josie's hand, and the girls followed Alexander to his room. Just like that, a friendship was born.

It had been months since I'd talked to Caroline, except maybe briefly during Casper's phone rampages. I had to catch her up on how Casper had become a total crackhead, and how we'd been living in what had become a crackhouse. I explained how I had met Mandy and Josie, and why they were with me most of the time. It didn't even shock Caroline all that much. For every crazy story I told her, she could probably match me with one or two of her own.

Meanwhile, Mandy and Alexander were getting along so perfectly that, when I finally got ahold of Rene, I got permission to just keep the girls there overnight. I would get them up early and bring them back to Rene's parents' house in the morning, on my way to work.

One Big Happy Family, Sometimes...

2010-01-11T20:40:00.000-08:00

I didn’t spend all my time taking care of the girls, though. When Rene wasn’t smoking rock, she was a good friend to me. Lyle was glad when I started hanging around with Rene, instead of being stuck in Tiny’s apartment all the time. “Rene is a good person for you to hang out with,” he said. “She’s always going places, doing something. She’s a really good person.”

She seemed like a good person to me, too. She managed to give her kids a pretty normal life, except for her inconvenient crack habit! She would pick me up and we would ride around with the girls, running errands, stopping for lunch, talking and hanging out the whole time.

She would talk to me about her crack habit. She’d smoked crack forever, she said, and she didn’t think she was addicted, because she’d managed to control it for all these years. But sometimes she would hint that she was, maybe, addicted. She’d say things like, how she sort of wished she didn’t have to drop me off at Tiny’s because it was so hard for her to drive up to Rand Grove without stopping in to buy something. She also mentioned a few times that she hoped that when…not if, but when… her addiction began to get so bad that she wasn’t taking care of her children, one of her brothers and sisters would step in and take them away from her. She said that she didn’t want them to live with their father. She told me that he was not a very good person. He was verbally, and sometimes physically, abusive, and very controlling. She barely let him visit with the kids, let alone have them live with him!

Over Labor Day weekend we went to the carnival. I was really happy about that, because of course my brother had made me miss all of the carnivals that summer.

Rene didn’t have much money, but she made sure we went on every ride at least once anyway. We would rush onto a ride before the carnie could ask for our tickets. If the carnie came after us, Rene would pretend to have lost our tickets, and she’d beg the carnie to let her come back later and pay him. Rene would bat her eyes, I would look pleadingly at the carnie, and the kids would just be cute little kids. It worked every time.

My favorite ride was the hang-gliding one where you had to lie on your stomach and hold your arms out in front of you. We kicked off our shoes before we went on, and as we soared through the air, the wind tickled our feet and it felt just like we were flying.

That night we all sat on the grass to watch the fireworks. Mandy and Josie sat on my lap, and we all oohed and ahhed.

“Angel?” said Mandy. “It kind of feels like you’re our big sister, doesn’t it?” She paused, and added, “I wish you were our big sister!”

Rene laughed. “Melissa wants a big sister so badly,” she said.

“How about, I can be your big sister when we’re together,” I suggested.

Rene took a picture of me and the girls that night, standing in front of a game booth where the girls had won little stuffed dogs. I had my arms around them, and we were all smiling. For that night, at least, we really did look like some sort of family!

Another time, we went to the Holidome overnight. The Holidome was a Holiday Inn with two pools, a basketball court, pool and foozball tables, an arcade, and a big play structure, in the middle. I had never been there before, but Rene said she tried to go there at least once every couple of months with the girls. “Its like a mini vacation,” she said.

On this particular mini vacation, Rene called up Lyle and asked him to bring her some rocks. Lyle showed up along with Ricky and a few others from Tiny’s. They all spent the first evening getting high, while the little girls and I spent most of our time downstairs in the pool or on the play structure.

The hotel advertised that they had an art room and a movie room that they opened up on Friday and Saturday nights, which I thought would work out great because I’d have something to do with the girls when they got bored of the pool. But when I asked the hotel employees about it, they just handed me the keys to the two rooms and told me to help myself! So, I was pretty much running the art room and the movie, not only for Mandy and Josie, but for any of the other kids around the hotel who showed up.

There was one little girl, probably between Mandy’s and Josie’s ages, who kept tagging along with us everywhere we went. I couldn’t figure out who her parents were, so I kept an eye on her too. That first night while we were watching the movie, a lady came up to me and introduced herself as our little friend’s mother. She put out her hand for me to shake. When I took it, she pressed a twenty dollar bill into my palm.

“This is for watching our daughter,” she told me.

I tried to give it back to her. “No, no, that’s okay, she was playing with my girls, so its no big deal,” I said.

“I know, but you’ve been very nice to her, and we appreciate it,” the lady replied.

Mandy tried to snatch the money from my hand. “I want it! I want to go to the arcade!”

“No, hands off!” I stuffed the money into my pocket, and smiled at the lady. “Thanks!”

Meanwhile, Rene had managed to wrangle an extra night at the hotel. She had complained at the front desk, saying that there was something wrong with our room key. I guess she complained so much, that the manager finally offered her an extra night for free, just to shut her up! So, the next day, I used my twenty dollars to get lunch for us from the McDonalds down the street, and that evening I used the rest to buy stuff to make sandwiches for dinner.

After spending two straight days there, the Holidome felt like home. I’ve always gotten easily attached to places. The hotel seemed magical, and the time we had spent there seemed to have lasted years. If the four of us could have lived there forever… if Rene could have kept on getting us free nights there, and I could have made a living looking after other kids at the hotel… maybe life would have been perfect.

The mood was a lot different the next day. The kids were tired, hungry and crabby. And we were all out of money. Rene had spent all of hers on crack. I wasn’t ready to go back to Tiny’s, and Rene wasn’t eager to go home either, so we just drove around.

We found a church that was having some sort of little festival, with a band and a free petting zoo. We decided to take the girls there to kill some time.

They were selling food at the festival, and the smells of hot dogs and fried treats were enough to drive us crazy! It was set up so that you had to buy tickets at one booth, and then spend the tickets on food at other booths.

It was around lunch time, and the sun was hot enough to fry us alive! We sat down in the shade of the big tent where the band was playing. Mandy whined that she was hungry, and Josie crawled into my lap and cried for a bottle.

Rene nudged me. “Look, there are some tickets over there,” she said, pointing to where someone had left a string of tickets by one of the craft booths.

I nodded. I knew what she wanted me to do. I strolled towards the craft table, and pretended to be looking at the crafts. I picked up things and put them down again, edging towards the abandoned tickets. When they were right in front of me, I tucked them under my T-shirt. I looked at a few more crafts, and then turned and wandered back towards Rene and the kids.

“Thanks,” said Rene. She took the tickets and went over to one of the food booths.

“You got tickets? Are we gonna get food?” asked Mandy.

“Yeah, your mama is getting food,” I assured her.

“But I thought you said we didn’t have any money!”

“Shush! I forgot I had some more money in my back pocket.” I felt bad about stealing from a church. But churches were supposed to help little hungry kids, right? Maybe, next time I had money, I’d come back here and put five dollars into the church’s donation box, if it would help save my soul.

Plenty Of Next Times!

2010-01-10T18:06:00.000-08:00

Next time. Of course there was a next time… there were plenty of next times… over the next few weeks. But we got better at it, Rene and the kids and I. Rene almost always remembered to bring a bottle with milk or juice for Josie. I bought crayons and a pad of paper from Pop’s, so I could at least keep them busy coloring when we were stranded in the bedroom.

When we were lucky, Rene would drop us off at McDonalds so the kids could play at the Play Place while she did what she had to do. (We sometimes spent five or six hours at McDonalds before Rene remembered that we existed, but at least it was better than the bedroom!) I had my first burst of maternal protectiveness there, one afternoon when some boy was being mean to Josie in the ball pit. The boy was about eight or nine, and he was chucking plastic balls at Josie so hard that they left red marks on her arms and chest. Josie wailed, and I rushed over to help her. I glared at the boy through the mesh wall of the ball pit. “What are you doing? Leave her alone! She’s only two years old!” I snapped. Before that, I would have never dared scold a kid who I wasn’t directly in charge of!

Mandy and Sarah-Jo were really hyper little kids. Especially Mandy. She would run around like a banshee, screaming and laughing, just to amuse herself! When we were at Tiny’s she would run up to random people and laugh in their face, poking them with her fingers. We spent so much time at McDonalds that it barely interested her anymore, and she bounced off the walls there. Josie would follow her lead, just to be like her big sister. Mandy would try to climb up the outside of the play structure and jump off. When I hollered at her to stay off of it, she’d laugh and run around screaming some more! People would stare at us and frown. Sometimes I would grab her arms and hold her tight, the way I had learned at my work to restrain little kids who were being violent. She would laugh her head off, screaming and thrashing around in my arms, and I would just keep on holding her, hoping she’d get some of her energy out!

If we were even luckier, Rene would let me take her car… although it wasn’t that much luckier, I guess, because I had to keep going to payphones and calling Rene’s cell phone to see if she was ready for me to bring the kids back yet. One of the days, when the girls had had just about enough of McDonalds and we were about this close to being kicked out anyway, I called Rene and asked if I could bring the girls back. She said that I could bring them back, but asked if I would stop at this one liquor store and pick her up a rose pipe* on my way.

So now I had to take two little girls into a liquor store to buy drug paraphernalia. There was no way I could let them wait for me in the car, either… Mandy was so hyper, she probably would have climbed into the front seat, put the car in neutral, and rolled backwards into traffic!

“Don’t touch anything,” I told the girls as we walked into the liquor store.

They then proceeded to run around the store, shouting and laughing and grabbing things off the shelves and doing everything but turning green and spinning their heads around.

The rose pipes were kept right at the front counter, but I had to wait in a long line to pay. I spent the whole time saying, “Stop that! Put that down! Come here! What are you doing? Be careful! Shush!”

“Can we get candy?” Mandy shouted.

“No, you ate enough junk food already today,” I replied. “Besides, you’re not doing very good listening, so why would I buy you candy?”

Mandy scowled and stomped her feet. “You’re mean!”

“You’re mean!” Josie echoed, stomping her own little feet.

An older lady near the front of the line turned and looked pointedly at me. She nodded at a bowl of Dum-Dum suckers on the counter and asked the cashier, “How much are these?”

“Twenty-five cents,” said the cashier.

“Give me two,” said the lady. She took two suckers and held them out towards the girls. “Here, girls. Is that better?”

Mandy and Josie snatched the suckers.

I forced myself to smile. “Wow, thanks! Say thank-you to the lady, girls!”

“Thank-you, lady,” they chorused, suddenly angelic.

I hurried up and paid for my crack pipe so I could grab the girls and get out of there.

As I was strapping them into the back seat, I heard someone say, “Hey, Nicki!”

I almost didn’t turn around, because barely anyone called me “Nicki” in those days. But I turned around, and there was this guy named Jay** who I went to school with. In elementary school he had been a class clown, and in high school he had started to remind me of Matt Dylan. He’d never blatantly been mean to me like a lot of the other kids did, but he’d never been particularly friendly to me either. But now here he was, grinning at me, still looking like Matt Dylan, and asking, “Do you remember me?”

“Yeah, I remember you! Your name is Jay! What’s up?”

“Not much! What have you been up to?”

“Nothing, just taking care of these guys,” I stammered. I was already getting into my car.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” he said.

To this day, I often wish I’d stayed and talked to him for a minute, like a regular person. But high school was still too fresh in my mind. I couldn’t fathom why anyone from high school would be happy to see me. It was the little girls that made me interesting to him, and the fact that I had apparently turned into a Crackhead Ghetto Mama From Hell!

I still wish I had talked to him. It would have been nice to have had a friend who wasn’t smoking crack!

*If you’re not familiar with smoking crack, you may not know that some gas stations, liquor stores and convenience stores cater to drug addicts. For instance, they’ll have an aisle with steel wool and butane lighters right next to each other. The steel wool can be used to make filters in crack pipes. At this one liquor store Rene was sending me to, you could actually buy a crack pipe, disguised as a glass tube with a tiny rose inside. The glass tubes are pretending to be something sweet to give as a gift to someone you love. But people who smoke rock just take out the little rose and turn the tube into a crack pipe!

**Not to be confused with my younger brother, Jay, or any of the other Jays who will eventually appear in this story!

How I Met Mandy and Josie

2010-01-10T15:07:00.000-08:00

When Lyle and them moved in, they brought all of their usual “customers” with them. I was used to people from Rand Grove hanging around day and night, and sometimes people from Old Robbie’s who would follow Casper and Tiny homein hopes that they’d share the wealth. But now people came from near and far! Some of them would sit at the table with the others to smoke their rocks. Friday nights were busy because people would cash their paychecks and then come straight to our place.

I remember one guy who, although I’d never seen before, came up and stayed there all night. He was a Mexican guy, in his mid-thirties, who wore blue-collar workman clothing and spoke in broken English. What people would do was, they’d start out spending forty dollars on a rock, and if they were sticking around to smoke it they’d give a little piece of it to whoever was around, in some sort of unspoken tradition or custom or whatever. But that first forty dollar rock always went way too fast, and they’d buy one more and one more and one more. By morning, they’d be broke… in money and in spirit.

This guy I’m telling you about, he cried in the morning, because he had a wife and children at home, and he’d spent his entire paycheck on crack. He wept, “My babies, my babies…”

All sorts of people came to our place. There were working class people, and people in business suits, who stopped by after work. There were young rich kids who thought that coming to our apartment complex was as dangerous and exciting as going to Cabrini Green. There were homeless people, who had either started smoking rock to escape from the reality of their situation, or who were homeless because of their addiction to crack. People of all ages, races and backgrounds came through there. Some just hurried in and out like they were ordering take-out dinners. The ones who stayed around usually stayed because they needed a place to smoke it, either because they were homeless or because they lived with people who didn’t know about or approve of their habit. And others, I guess, were just lonely, and liked being around people who shared their habit and didn’t judge them for it.

There was one lady named Rene who used to stop in and leave in a hurry. She looked like an average suburban mom, with nice, clean clothes and a tidy haircut. One day she came up, looking for rock, buy Lyle and the others weren’t around. Rene waited around a while, but she was nervous and jittery, her eyes darting left and right. She kept saying that she needed to leave soon, because her friend and her children were down in the car waiting for her.

“Next time just have them come up with you,” ordered Tiny. “I don’t want people waiting around in the parking lot, just in case the cops drive through. It looks bad.”

A few days later, Rene brought her kids up. As soon as they came to the door, Tiny shouted for me to take the children into the bedroom.

I was tired, because I could never manage to get enough sleep in that place, and I didn’t feel like babysitting. But there were these two little girls standing there in the bedroom, looking lost.

I knelt down and smiled at them. “Hi! My name is Angel! What are your names?”

“Mandy,” said the older girl, a skinny little kid with freckles and brown pigtails.

“Josie,” said the littler one, a pudgy cherub with blond curls and big blue eyes.

“I like those names! How old are you?” I asked them.

“Five and a half,” said Mandy.

“Two,” said Josie, holding up two fingers to prove it.

“So,” I said. “What do you guys want to do?”

The only problem was, the bedroom was basically empty. There was a dresser, and a closet, and a bare mattress on the floor.

So we did what we could. We bounced on the mattress. I put the mattress up on it’s side, and leaned it against the wall, and we used it as a fort. We played hide-and-go-seek, even though the only hiding places were in the closet, behind the mattress, and next to the dresser. By the time the kids had started climbing up onto the dresser and leaping onto the mattress, hours had passed, and I was expecting Rene to come back for them at any moment!

Finally the bedroom door opened. But it was only Tiny.

She looked around the bedroom and frowned. “Why is the mattress on it’s side like that?”

“We made a fort,” I explained sheepishly. I thought it had been a pretty creative idea. I mean, coming up with ways to entertain two little kids in an empty bedroom was a real mindbender! But Tiny seemed unhappy.

“Why don’t you take them down to the playground?” she suggested.

So I tried that. I hustled the girls out of the apartment, and took them out to the playground. It didn’t go that well, though. The other little kids at the playground wouldn’t play with or talk to Mandy and Josie, and then one of the other kids got into a fight with Josie over the slide, and Josie threw sand at the other kid, and soon everyone was crying. So, back upstairs we went!

I rapped on the door and hollered, “It’s Angel!” so that Tiny opened the door.

“Why didn’t you stay down at the playground?” she demanded.

“We got in a brawl,” I said.

Shorty frowned at Mandy and Josie. “You don’t play well with others, huh?” she said, with no humor in her voice. She turned and walked away abruptly.

Nobody seemed to be smoking anymore, and Shorty hadn’t ordered us back into the bedroom, so I looked around with Rene.

She didn’t seem to be there!

“Where’s their mom?” I asked Ricky, who was playing cards with Walter.

“She went with Lyle somewhere,” Ricky replied.

Huh? “Is she coming back?” I asked.

Ricky shrugged. “I dunno. She said she’d be back.”

Then Josie said, “I’m hungry!”

“Me too!” Mandy added.

I scavenged around in the kitchen for something to feed them. There was a box of macaroni and cheese, but no butter or milk. I mixed up some powdered milk and made do with it. The kids didn’t seem to notice the difference. I guess the orange coloring was more important than the actual taste!

“Hey, Angel,” said some random guy I didn’t know. “Can you run to the store and get me a carton of smokes and a case of beer?” He dropped a wad of money in front of me.

“Sure,” I replied. “Ricky, can you watch them?”

He didn’t look up from his card game. “Yep.”

“You gotta really watch them,” I said. “You don’t gotta play with them, or anything, but at least make sure they’re okay!”

Ricky still didn’t look up. “This isn’t something new, Angel. Rene leaves them with us all the time.”

I had forgotten that Rene was one of Lyle’s customers. Wherever Lyle was selling rock out of, that was where Rene went. Ricky wasn’t a stranger to the girls.

“Okay, then. Thanks,” I said. I told the girls, “I gotta go to the store. I’ll be right back.”

“No!” shouted Mandy. She jumped out of her seat and hugged me tightly around my waist. “Don’t leave us! Don’t leave us! Stay here!”

Josie grabbed my leg and added, “Stay here, Angel! Stay here!”

“I’m only going to the store. I’ll be right back,” I told them, surprised at their reaction.

“Take us with, then!” Mandy pleaded.

“But I don’t have a car right now. I gotta walk.

“That’s okay! We’ll walk too!” The girls kept hanging onto me for dear life, begging, “Please please please please please please please!”

“Uh… okay,” I sighed. It wasn’t a far walk, just across the apartment complex, maybe equal to three blocks. “I guess I’ll just take them with,” I told Ricky.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “Just tell them no. They’ll be fine here.”

“I know, but…” I glanced helplessly down at the girls. I doubted they could actually be this emotionally attached to me already, but still, being left by your mom in a crack house had to suck. I was, to them, a friendly face in a scary place.

We went back downstairs, and headed to the store. It was dark out by then, and the people who slept all day were starting to come out. I thought maybe taking the girls out with me hadn’t been the best idea. I knew nobody would blatantly bother us, but there was always the chance of getting caught in some sort of crossfire.

Josie raised her arms up to me. “Pick me up?” I hoisted her onto my hip. She was a solid kid, heavy for a two-year-old!

We made our way to Pop’s. I bought the beer and the cigarettes, but I wasn’t eager to start the long walk home. So I hung back and let the girls gaze longingly at the candy rack for a while. If I had had my own money, or even Casper’s or Tiny’s, I would have gotten them something.

Walking back was more complicated, because now I had the cumbersome case of beer. I carried the beer under one arm, and carried Josie in the other, and had Mandy carry the bag with the cigarettes. The walk seemed to take a million years.

When we got back to the apartment, I set Josie and the beer on the floor, and rubbed my sore arms. Rene wasn’t back yet.

It was getting late, and the girls seemed to be running out of steam. Mandy flopped down on the couch, and Josie started to whine for a bottle. Tiny actually came up with a bottle, which she said was left over from when her son had lived with her. I mixed up some more powdered milk and hoped for the best. Josie cried for a while, but eventually she curled up on the couch next to Mandy, with the imposter bottle, and they both fell asleep watching “The Simpsons.”

When Rene finally spun her way back to the apartment, it was early the next morning. She acted like it had just been an ordinary babysitting job. “Thanks for watching them,” she whispered to me. “Sorry it took so long! Were they okay?”

I nodded. “Josie cried a little before she fell asleep. Tiny found a bottle for her, but all we had was powdered milk.”

“Powdered milk? I’ve never tried that,” said Rene.

“We get it a lot from the food pantry,” I explained.

“Next time, I’ll bring a bottle for her,” she said, as she lay down on the other end of the couch from the girls and shut her eyes.

Mandy And Josie

2010-01-10T13:44:00.000-08:00

I started off writing a section about Mandy and Josie because these little girls were very important in me.
So, in the beginning of this section, the year is 2002. I am living with my fake big brother, Casper, and his girlfriend, Tiny, in Tiny's apartment. Casper and Tiny are crack addicts. Althought they originally just smoked crack in their own apartment, or traveled to the apartment of the local drug dealer (Old Robbie), they recently got an offer from another drug dealer named Lyle. They will let Lyle use the apartment as his headquarters to sell rock from, and he will pay them with free rock. So...

INTRODUCTION

2010-01-10T13:34:00.000-08:00

My name is Nicki, aka Angel, and this is my memoir. I've been meaning to write it for years and years, but this time I've got a great start!
Some people might wonder why I think my life is worth writing about. I think my life has been pretty strange and kind of interesting. Some of the things I've experienced in my life so far include...

Having ADHD and Asperger's Syndrome that went undiagnosed for the first part of my life, so that most of the time I was just assumed to be weird or crazy!
Being homeless starting when I was still a teenager
Working with children in foster care and with kids with special needs
Having a lot of people in my life who were on drugs
Helping to raise my nephew and nieces
A lot of stuff can't think of off the top of my head.

My plan is not to write it from beginning to end, but to write sections as they come up in my mind. For instance, I've started out writing about fifty pages about two little girls named Mandy and Sarah-Jo. Eventually I'll piece all of the sections together in the right order.
I'm going to post the chapters here, as I finish typing them up. I'm hoping people will read them, ask questions, make suggestions and comments, etc. You don't need to sign up or anything to comment... but if you don't feel like publicly commenting, you can always email me!
Thanks for your help! I hope you find this to be worth your time!

Yours truly,
Nicki

Test

2010-01-09T21:16:00.001-08:00

Does this work?