Don't Fail Me Now(8)

Have you thought about seeking custody of C & D when you turn eighteen? Feel free to call me w/ any questions.

As Aunt Sam peels out of the parking lot, I toss it onto the floor, lean back, and close my eyes. I can’t think about that right now—not that I haven’t thought about it, agonized over it, since I was too young to even know what it was that I was feeling, that impulse to wake up my sleeping sister and run off into the night. I know what’s involved now: the lawyers, the documents, the character assassination of the only person who’s ever loved me, no matter how wrong-headedly that love has been expressed at times. But however I spin it, going after custody seems like a sudden-death game that all of us will lose. Because I know I have no future if I stay here. But what kind of future will I condemn my brother and sister to if I leave?





TWO


Monday Afternoon/Monday Night

Baltimore, MD




“You pull an all-nighter or something?” my friend Noemi asks Monday, sliding into the seat next to mine in Mr. Medina’s AP physics class. She looks me over with a smirk, pursing her freshly glossed lips. “You look like an extra from The Walking Dead. But, you know, in a hot way.”

Normally her digs don’t really bother me—Noemi’s one of those people who thinks true friendship means “being real,” aka brutally honest, at all times, which is both annoying and guilt-inducing, considering how much I hide from her—but right now I can’t work up the energy to appreciate her level of realness.

“I didn’t get a chance to shower,” I say, flipping my notebook open. Inside the front cover are columns of handwritten math I spent the night doing and redoing, trying to end up with a number greater than zero. Later today Mom has a hearing to determine her bail, and usually the bondsman will take 10 percent and let you pay the rest on a plan. I have $200 saved, and I get paid again on Friday, but it will make things tight for a while. Well, more than tight, actually. Impossible.

“Okay, but a rubber band?” Noemi laughs, pointing to my DIY hair tie, courtesy of Aunt Sam’s junk drawer. “Girl, that’s worse than a scrunchie.”

I ignore her. We’ve been friends since ninth-grade Science Club, back when she had braces and bushy eyebrows, and Noemi made me cry laughing when she did a song parody of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” called “Fetal Pig.” But now she’s part of a different clique, higher on the food chain. She’s invited me to some of their parties, but I can never go, so we’re strictly classroom friends at this point. It’s just as well. Months back, I stopped telling her any kind of truth about my home life.

Luckily, Mr. Medina stands up and drums his fists on his desk before Noemi can ask any more questions.

“Please put away your textbooks and close your notebooks,” he says with a thin smile. “I hope everyone did the assigned reading over the weekend, because it’s time for a quiz.”

There’s a collective groan, and Noemi scowls and curses under her breath. At least I’m not the only one who’s going to fail. And how could it possibly even matter if I do? It’s April of my senior year, and I’m not exactly waiting around for the mailman to drop off my college-acceptance letters. I was thinking about it a lot last summer, researching financial aid and trying to put aside some money for application fees, but then in September all of the drama happened at Mom’s job, and everything fell apart pretty quickly. My higher education was just one of the many things lost in the rubble.

“Good luck,” Mr. Medina says cheerfully as he drops a quiz on my desk.

“Thanks,” I mumble, self-consciously pulling the rubber band out of my hair.

I stare at the questions for a few seconds, trying to focus through my exhaustion and see if there’s any way I can fake my way through, but eventually I give up and just leave it blank. I don’t even write my name on it, but hey, Mr. Medina’s a scientist. He’ll figure it out.

? ? ?

I drift through the rest of the school day until it’s time to pick up Denny, half-depressed and half-relieved that no one else has asked me how I’m doing. I skipped my usual lunch date with the Science Clubbers—we officially disbanded as an academic group junior year due to low turnout, and Noemi doesn’t come anymore, but me, Manny, and Yi-Lo have stuck together, mostly because as the social stratification gradually solidified, we’ve all ended up belonging nowhere, to no one particular person or crew. But even though they’re great, I didn’t feel like facing them, so I napped in a corner of the library. When I want to, I’ve gotten good at hiding in plain sight at school, skimming along the surface without sticking, like everyone else is water and I’m a drop of oil that got spilled in by accident.

I cross the parking lot and wince when I notice a group of guys standing on the grass smoking cigarettes about ten feet from Goldie’s front bumper. Next to all of the unassuming compact cars and sleek SUVs, she looks like a joke prop from a movie set, maybe a comedy about someone’s broke 1970s-era grandma who decides to moonlight as a funeral director (Goldie’s rear end is so long and boxy, a lot of people assume she’s a hearse). The paint, which has faded over the years to the approximate shade of a decaying molar, is peeling around the wheel wells, and dark amber rust coats the back bumper, which is dented in three separate places but doesn’t hold a candle to the exhaust pipe, which has detached so far from the muffler that it nearly scrapes the ground. The driver’s side door had to get replaced when I was little—Buck left it open after a night of drinking, and it got torn off in a hit-and-run, keys still in the ignition—but the color had been discontinued, so that door is pale and awkward now, like a patch of skin missing pigment. Goldie’s namesake golden years—if they ever existed—are long gone now. Even Buck didn’t want her anymore—although I guess that’s not saying much, considering his track record of ditching things he once supposedly loved.