Sorta Like a Rock Star(68)
Inside I have to walk through a metal detector, show my driver’s license, my CPHS school ID, and my visitation permission letter—and then I am frisked and searched by a large woman in a guard uniform. She’s packing heat too.
When she concludes that I have no weapons on me—that I am only a harmless girl—she leads me down a hallway and through two sets of guarded and locked doors, where she has to yell, “Visitor coming through—searched and clean!”
At the end of the fourth hallway, she opens a door and says, “This is it. I’ll wait for you here.”
Right before I step into the room, I get really nervous, and for some reason I just can’t make my legs carry me into the visitation room, so—in my mind—I conjure up my all-time Amber-and-her-mom number-one moment to give me courage.
I wasn’t going to tell you this, but my mom’s last boyfriend—A-hole Oliver—well, he didn’t exactly throw us out of his apartment.
The whole deal went down something like this:
Mom, BBB, and I were watching the debut episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the season one DVDs, which I had borrowed from Jared and Chad. Buffy was just about to save her new friend Willow from the vamps when A-hole Oliver came home and told us that he wanted to watch the Sixers game, so I immediately turned off Buffy—right at the good part—and handed AO the remote, because it was his apartment and his DVD player and I really didn’t feel like arguing with A-hole Oliver, because he was pretty stubborn and would cut you down in a heartbeat with one of his mean, straight-for-the-jugular insults.
He put on the Sixers, which didn’t really bother me all that much because AO pretty much controlled the TV whenever he was home, so I wouldn’t have expected anything different. But Mom, she was sorta into Buffy after watching season six—which Chad and Jared gave me for my birthday the year before, saying that season six was the best because that one has the musical episode, Once More, With Feeling—and it was actually Mom’s idea to borrow season one from my boys so we could watch the whole series in order, together, mother-and-daughter style.
I think that maybe Mom dug the show because Buffy kicks so much apple bottom for a regular chick, even if she is a slayer. She’s really like a role model for women. But Buffy keeps it real too. She may be a superchick, but she still hangs out with her dorky friends Xander and Willow, who are totally like real people even if one falls in love with a demon and the other becomes a powerful witch, so you sorta believe in Buffy—like she’s real—even though she kills vampires and monsters and lives on a hellmouth. The show gives regular chicks like Mom and me hope. True? True.
We watched the Sixers for a while, nobody saying anything, and then A-hole Oliver went into the kitchen and didn’t come back for a few minutes.
“Why did you make us turn off Buffy if you aren’t even going to watch basketball?” Mom yelled to her man.
“I’m listening to it,” AO said from the kitchen, making himself a sandwich.
I was shocked when Mom got up from the couch, took back the remote, and put the Buffy DVD back on.
AO returned to the living room, sandwich in hand, and said, “I’m watching the Sixers!”
“We were watching Buffy,” Mom said, which surprised me because my mom never stuck up for herself at all.
“When you start kicking in some more bucks for rent, you can control the TV,” AO said. “You’re responsible for two of the three people living here and you don’t even cover your half of the bills. So as long as I’m picking up the entire cable bill, we watch the Sixers whenever they’re on.”
Oliver sorta pushed Mom aside, ejected the Buffy DVD, and threw it at me like a Frisbee, but too hard. The disk rose up, hit the wall over my head, and then fell behind the couch. BBB began to bark.
“Hey, what the hell?” I said. “That’s not mine. You’re paying for it if it’s scratched.”
AO pointed to the DVD player and said, “That machine’s not yours either. Nothing in this apartment is yours. You don’t own anything besides that found mutt. And if it weren’t for me, you’d be out on the streets—and don’t you forget it.”
“I work,” I say.
“And do I take any of your water ice money?” AO asked me as if he was a hero or something.
“No.”
“Well then,” AO said, and then sat back down.
I looked at Mom and could tell that she’d had enough of Oliver, but I wasn’t ready for what she said next.
“Amber, go into your room and put all of your clothes into trash bags. Pack up all your belongings. Don’t forget your comforter.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because we’re moving out,” Mom said with this real determined look on her face.
“Where are you going to live?” AO said with a laugh, flashing a mouthful of half-chewed lunch meat—laughing at us. “On your school bus?”
Mom went into the kitchen; I followed her. When she grabbed the trash bags from under the sink, went to her room, and started stuffing all of her clothes into the bags, BBB and I went to my room and did the same thing. We didn’t have that much stuff, so we only filled six bags.
With coats on, bags in hands, we walked past A-hole Oliver, and he said, “You’ll be back. See you in a few hours.”