Finding Me (2 page)

I pulled it out from behind my back, waved it in Mikey’s face, and he cracked up. He fell for that trick every single time. For hours we entertained ourselves with silly games like that. And every time we drove over to the orchard, we hid so many of those apples in back that we sometimes forgot where we put them. That’s why the whole car stank.

I don’t know how we ended up homeless—or how we got to Ohio in the first place. My parents never talked much about their lives. Over the years I did pick up on a few things. Like one time Ma told me she was mixed with Irish, black, Hispanic, Indian, Arabic, and Italian. “We’re mutts,” she said. That must be where my big lips came from, especially because she had them too. And sometimes I heard her saying words in Spanish or Arabic, so at least that part must have been true. She also liked to say, “Children should be seen and not heard.”

I had lots of questions: Did she grow up speaking those languages? Did her parents teach them to her? Had she always lived in Ohio? But the adults I knew didn’t tell any of us kids what was going on. As my dad would say if I asked a question about his life: “That’s grown folks’ business.” That’s why I have no clue where or how they grew up.

I think we spent maybe a whole year in that station wagon. Once we did move, our life wasn’t much better. I don’t know what that first neighborhood was called, but I do know our three-bedroom house was in the ghetto. There were prostitutes, pimps, and drug dealers standing on the corners. There were drive-bys. And down the street there was a liquor store that stayed open all night long. We were only in that house for a hot minute. All throughout my childhood we moved so many times, it wasn’t even funny. I think we must have gone to a new house every two or three months. Seriously. My aunt and cousin moved along with us. A lot more family members came later, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

No matter where we moved, it was always in one of the worst parts of town. Cleveland has two sides, east and west, and the Cuyahoga River runs right through it. We mainly stayed on the west side. The couple of times we drove to the other side of the river, I noticed that people over there lived in huge houses with big, green front yards. The streets looked so clean, like you could eat right off of them. The air even smelled better. I wished we could have lived in that part of town. I didn’t want to go back home; it was a dump. Whenever I saw something on TV about the projects in another city, I would say to myself, “That looks better than our neighborhood.” To be honest, it was a real pit.

I do remember one area we moved around in a lot—Tremont. It’s near downtown. In the parts we stayed in there were a lot of gangs and drugs. The sidewalks were littered with needles. At least once a week I heard a gun go off in the middle of the night
. Boom!
Eddie, Freddie, Mikey, and I all shared a room back then, and we’d go hide in the corner of the tiny closet.

“Are you okay?” I asked Eddie. His lips were shaking.

“Yes,” he whispered. I could tell he was just as scared as I was. But being the protective older sister, I faked it and acted strong. “It’s going to be okay,” I always told him.

I thought the inside of our first house was gross. It had an upstairs and a downstairs, and there were four bedrooms. The carpet was brown, with some nasty stains on it. Our bathroom was nasty too, and the stove was broken.

After we moved into that house, a whole bunch of relatives came to stay with us. I kept thinking,
Where were all these people while we were living in that station wagon?
And aside from all the aunts, uncles, and cousins who came to stay with us, I met even more relatives when I got a lot older, like my cousins Lisa and Deanna. Every time a new person moved in I asked, “Who’s
that?
” No one ever answered me.

At one point twelve people lived in that one house, so things were very hectic. Plus, total strangers always seemed to be coming and going at all hours of the day and night. The doorbell rang a lot, and scary men often dropped off packages. A lot of nights it was hard to sleep because of the loud parties the grownups were having. Most of the time the whole house reeked.

I didn’t have a bedroom that was just mine. My cousins and I were always being switched to different rooms.

“Where are you sleeping tonight?” one of my aunts once asked me.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ll just find a spot.”

That night I took my little blue blanket into the room where Eddie and Freddie were and went to sleep right next to their mattress on the floor. Sometimes I slept in my parents’ room. Sometimes I even slept downstairs on the living room couch. My brothers and Mikey moved around some too, but they usually stayed in one particular room. For some reason I was the kid who got moved the most, especially if someone new came into the house. It was chaotic, to say the least.

When I was still very young, something happened that changed me forever. In the middle of the night, thirsty, I got up from the twin bed where I was sleeping. I stumbled over a pile of stuff in the dark. When I got to the living room, my mother was sleeping there with her clothes on. I went into the kitchen, put a chair next to the sink, and got some water. When I came back to my bed, a man from my family was sitting right there.

“Don’t try to get away,” he said in my ear.

I started to cry. My mind went crazy:
Why is he on my bed? Can Ma hear this?

“Just do what I tell you to, and you won’t get hurt,” he said. He put one hand into his boxers—and then he put his other hand on my head and pushed me down in front of him. I wanted to scream, but when I tried to, no sounds came out. “If you tell anyone about this,” he said, “I will kill you.”

I was so scared. All I could do was try to hold back the noise from my crying. Afterward I lay there feeling dirty and all alone.

I never told Ma. I kept thinking about what the man said about killing me. And it didn’t happen just that one night. From then on he started messing with me in all different kinds of ways. At first it was a couple of times a week. But as I got a little older, it was almost every day. No matter what bed I wound up in, it seemed like he would sneak in and come find me. I was so frightened, it got to the point where I didn’t even want to go to bed at night. Sometimes I would try to stay up really late and hide in a closet. If he couldn’t find me, then maybe he would forget to do those nasty things to me. That is what I always hoped, but usually it didn’t work.

M
ORNINGS
WERE
NUTS
in our house. Sometimes we were able to brush our teeth. Other times, not really. When we could, we did, and that was probably about twice a week. The inside of my mouth always felt grimy and sticky.

“Come over here, Eddie,” I would say to my brother, trying to stick a brush in his mouth. While I worked on his teeth, Freddie, Mikey, and about six of my younger cousins would be running all over the place and playing around. We often ran out of stuff like soap and toothpaste, so even after I finished with Eddie, there usually wasn’t enough left in the tube for everyone else.

After I got one of the kids’ teeth cleaned, I started helping Mikey, who couldn’t give himself a bath. “Thank you, Me-Shell!” he would say with a huge grin after I’d washed his hair, dried off his skinny body, and taken him out of the bath tub. He had a hard time pronouncing certain words, including my name. But he was always the sweetest kid.

If there was food in the house, we ate breakfast. My brothers usually had a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. It was the generic kind, but they loved it.

“Fruity Pebbles! Fruity Pebbles! Fruity Pebbles!” The twins would sometimes chant together in the mornings while they ran around upstairs in their Superman underwear. Fruity Pebbles were one of the only foods they would eat. I couldn’t believe they had the nerve to be picky when we barely had enough. Even back then I thought that was weird. I wished my parents had more money to buy us the basics, but it seemed to me that neither of them were able to keep a job for long. Ma did once have a steady job as a nurse, but it didn’t last. I’m not too sure what my father or the other adults in the house did. All I knew is that there wasn’t enough cash to go around.

For breakfast I usually had a Pop-Tart. I didn’t care that much what I ate—I just wanted
something
to put in my stomach to stop it from growling. We rarely had hot food. When our stove was broken, I tried to heat up some ravioli from a can by putting it up against the radiator. That didn’t work, but I gave it a shot because I wanted my little brothers and cousins to have something warm for a change. One time I did manage to heat up some hot dogs on that radiator.

“Come over here, you guys,” I said, trying to round up all the little ones. “Sit down here on the floor and eat.” I lined them up across the dirty carpet and handed out the not-too-hot dogs one at a time. We didn’t even have buns. Hot dogs, ramen noodles, cereal, SpaghettiOs, and ravioli—those were the things we always ate. Most of it came out of a can or box.

Before school I always helped my brothers get their clothes on. Freddie was usually bouncing around the room, singing. Eddie, who often copied Freddie, sometimes joined in. Although they looked exactly alike, they didn’t have matching outfits. It was all I could do to get a complete set of clothes on each of them, much less something that matched. Whenever I came into the room they most often slept in, their clothes were all over the place! Underwear, socks, shirts—they just threw everything right on the ground. I was always cleaning up after them.

Once I got them dressed and picked up some of their stuff, they left for school, which was different from the one I went to. Then I would brush my shoulder-length brown hair, squinting at myself through my Coke-bottle glasses (I’d always had bad eyesight ever since I could remember), and went to catch my own bus.

Half the time I was barely even in school. It seemed like I missed at least one or two days a week. The first school I can remember is Mary Bethune—I think I was in second or third grade. My mother often came to the school to take me out. It was either a doctor’s appointment, a dentist appointment, or some other kind of appointment: a death in the family or someone was getting married. Then I had to make up the work, and there was tons of it. I hated falling behind like that. For some reason I felt like I was taken out of school way more often than my brothers were. But all I wanted was to be in my class—and to be normal, like the other kids.

When I did go to school, I felt like an idiot. I’d ask the other kids, “Can you give me the homework assignment from last week?” If anyone gave it to me, I wrote it down, and then I did my best to do the work at home. The main reason I hated doing homework was because I missed so many classes. That’s how I ended up flunking out of some grades. By the time I was twelve and going on thirteen, I had barely made it through the fifth grade! I was always the oldest kid in the class, and it stunk.

A few of my teachers did seem worried about how badly I was doing. A couple of them tried to keep me after school so they could help me catch up. But that’s hard to do if you’re only in class two or three days a week. Why even bother if you’re just going to get behind again?

One year a teacher who knew I was failing asked me, “Is everything okay at home?” I paused for a second, but then said yes. As nice as she was, I knew I couldn’t tell her the truth about what I was going through.

Nobody was my friend. And I do mean
nobody
. When I was in fourth grade, I went up to a girl in the cafeteria and tried to introduce myself. I said, “Hi, I’m Michelle.” I stuck out my hand so she could shake it, but she backed away from me really fast.

“Ooooh, your breath stinks!” she yelled.

I felt completely humiliated. That stopped me from wanting to talk to the other kids, so I hid in the back of all my classes. When the teacher asked me something, I didn’t want to talk. One time she said, “Michelle, what’s the capital of Ohio?” I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to say it out loud because I had trouble pronouncing certain words.

“Colum … um, I mean Columbus,” I tried to say. Everybody laughed at me. I wanted to shout, “I’m not retarded!” But I don’t think it would have made a difference because people already thought I was slow.

That teacher did try to make everyone be nicer to me. “Class, it’s not nice to laugh at another person,” she said.

I could tell she felt sorry for me. She and a few other teachers tried to get the other kids to be my friends.

“Why don’t you sit with Michelle and share her book?” my reading teacher once told a girl in my class.

“Yuck, she smells funny!” the girl said.

The teacher scolded her and made her come and sit with me anyway, but whenever the teacher turned her back, she pinched her nose. The other kids giggled, and I felt like falling through the floor.

And there were plenty of times when the other kids could make fun of me when the teachers weren’t around. In the hallway they yelled “You’re so dumb!” and “Stink-ass!” A boy in my math class once said, “You’re an ugly retard.” I didn’t look at him. “The only way a guy would ever love you is if he put a bag over your head,” he added.