Sisters in Sanity (3 page)

When I was growing up, I never had the sense that someone had my back, because I never knew what it was like when someone didn’t. It would never have occurred to me that I could end up alone and vulnerable, since in those days, my family was the best, the coolest, the tightest.

My parents met at a U2 concert. Dad was working as a roadie, and Bono pulled my mom onstage to dance. He used to do that at every concert. Every girl in the audience probably thought she was worthy, but Mom
really
was. She had this thing about her, this light—an energy that made you want to be around her because when you were, life was giddy.
Free spirit
is such a clichéd term, but it totally fit my mom. When she went floating backstage that night, she looked up at Dad in her post-Bono ecstasy and kissed him. He was probably a goner right there and then.

After that, it was like some bohemian fairy tale. They tromped around Europe and Africa together, with Mom selling her paintings to earn money. They got married on a cliff top in Morocco, and she got pregnant with me in a Portobello Road hotel in London—hence my name, Brit (middle name is Paula for Bono, whose real name is Paul). Then they moved to Portland and bought a ramshackle house on Salmon Street and started CoffeeNation, a coffeehouse/art gallery/club.

I don’t know how many kids can say that they once crayoned in a Muppets coloring book with Kurt Cobain, but I can. Tons of musicians and artists hung around CoffeeNation, which was funny because neither Mom nor Dad knew an A from an A minor. But they had a weekly open-mic night, and a lot of bands got their start there, and I think the place just got a reputation as a music haven.

We pretty much lived at CoffeeNation. After school, I’d sit down at my own reserved table, and
Dad would fix me a hot chocolate before I started my homework. It never took me long because I had like forty pseudo big brothers and sisters there to help me—musicians are weirdly good at math, which is probably one reason that back in my own school, I would’ve been taking calculus in my junior year. My favorite customer was Reggie, a tattoo artist whose arms, legs, and torso were like a mosaic. A lot of people probably thought he looked like a thug, but he was the nicest guy ever. He loved to read almost as much as he liked to talk, and he used to check out a copy of whatever book I was reading for school, so we could have literary discussions together. I was only eight when we met, and Reggie and I read
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
together.

When my friends complained about their parents, I didn’t even pretend to agree. I hung out with my parents most afternoons at the café until Mom and I went home to cook up these wild dinners—like the night she decided everything had to be purple (eggplant stew with beets and grapes isn’t half bad, by the way). We’d eat late when Dad got home, and I never got sick of being around them.

Just before seventh-grade winter break, Mom got
it in her head that we should escape the gray and go live on the beach in Mexico for a month. She whispered her idea into Dad’s ear, and next thing you know, Grandma is running CoffeeNation, and we’re living in huts on the Yucatan Peninsula, eating fish tacos for breakfast. What kind of parents let their kids do something like that, even if it means missing a couple weeks of school?

Looking back, to tell the truth, I guess Mom didn’t care quite enough about stuff like school, but Dad did. Where she was like a rainbow after a storm, he was like the umbrella during it—the solid one keeping us dry: the doctor-appointment maker, the lunch packer, the worrier. Dad was the parent, and Mom was more like another kid. So maybe that’s why when she started to change, no one noticed at first. She’d do odd things, like insist that we unplug all the phones and leave on the downstairs lights at night—to prevent spies from watching us, she’d say. Or she’d leave for work and show up at CoffeeNation four hours later, with no memory of where she’d been. When she took a knife to her paintings because “the voices told me to,” we started with all the doctors and their diagnoses. First “borderline personality disorder.” Then
“paranoia.” And finally “paranoid schizophrenia.” But Mom refused to admit anything was wrong and refused any treatment. My grandma moved up from California to take care of us and begged Dad to have Mom committed to a mental hospital, but Dad just kept saying, “Not yet; she might get better.” I think he really believed that. Until the day she left us.

After that, Dad had to close down CoffeeNation and go to work at a software company, which is where he met Stepmonster, who’s the kind of woman who freaks out if her handbag doesn’t match her shoes perfectly. Within a year they were married, and my wonderful family was history. Then I understood that having someone watch your back isn’t automatic. It’s special—and it can be taken away from you.

“How’d they get you?” Bebe asked. It was my second week working the cinder-block piles. Autumn had arrived suddenly, cooling the desert furnace and making the sky turn an unbelievable shade of blue.

“How did
who
get me?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw V snicker. She and Bebe had some kind of weird friendship—constantly insulting each other affectionately—and because Bebe and I were roommates, I ended up spending a lot of time around V. Unfortunately, everything I did seemed to irritate her.

“Cassie, this is our ignorant newbie, Brit. Have you met?”

“We’ve howdied but that’s all. Nice to meet ya.”

“You too.” Cassie was from Texas, strong like a ranch hand, and great to work near on the quarry.

“Red Rock, darling,” Bebe explained. “How’d you get here?” she asked again.

“My dad drove me. How else would I get here?”

“An escort, of course,” Bebe said.

“Like a date?” I asked. V laughed again, right in my face this time.

“Now don’t laugh, V,” Cassie said, giving me a sympathetic look. “More like a kidnappin’. That’s how they got me. They came for me in the middle of the night and hauled me away like a stray dog or somethin’. They even handcuffed me. I thought it was some kind of abduction, until I caught sight of my folks watchin’ from the window.”

“They did it because you’re…gay.”

“Well, they think I am.”

“Are you?”

“I’m bi. But don’t get all squirrelly on me. You don’t hit on every guy you meet, so it’s not like I’m gonna come after you.” She was right about that. I didn’t hit on
any
guy I met. I just crushed hopelessly after Jed.

“It’s nice to see that Cassie’s given you her introductory homophobia lecture. Forgive her,” V said. “She can’t help herself.”

“Yeah, well, half the girls in this place act like they think I’m checking them out all the time. And most of them ain’t even cute.”

“But you were kidnapped and brought here? That’s awful, Cassie.”

“Darling Brit,” Bebe interrupted. “It’s called an escort, and it’s standard operating procedure.”

“So your parents did that too?”

“Parent, singular. Dad’s out of the picture. And Mother, well there’s no Four Seasons within a hundred miles of this place. She wouldn’t be caught dead here.”

“Are your parents rich, Brit?” V asked.

“That’s none of your business.” I could tell that V’s were. She had that money smell to her.

“Don’t get all
OC
on me, newbie. I ask because if you have money, you’re screwed. Insurance pays for the first three months of your stay. If you’re poor, then suddenly at three months, boom, you’re in level Six and out the door. Cured by the miracle of Scam Rocks. But if your family has the money to keep
footing the bill, that’s an entirely different set of circumstances. You could be stuck for life.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Virginia. Until you’re eighteen,” Bebe said. She looked at my panicked face. “When you’re eighteen, you can check yourself out.”

“How long have you all been here?”

“Six months,” Cassie said. “My parents aren’t rich, but they’re desperate to straighten me out.”

“Four months,” Bebe said. “But you can guarantee I’ll be here or at some other school a while. I’ve been at boarding schools for years. Of course, this is my first RTC.”

“RTC?”

“God, newbie,” said V. “It’s a residential treatment center. They call it a school, but it’s a loony bin, a bogus, bullshit, behavior-modification boot-camp warehouse for unwanted misfit teens.”

Argh! Sometimes I really wanted to hurl a brick at V, to knock that all-knowing expression right off her face. My dad would never shuttle me off to boot camp. The thought of it made me want to cry. “My dad doesn’t want me warehoused!” I said defiantly.

“Right,” V said. “He just sent you here to rest up. Sure he did.”

“It wasn’t the dad,” Bebe pointed out. “She’s a Cinderella story. The stepmom sent her here.”

“I’d reckon your stepmom reads
LifeStyle
magazine,” Cassie said.

She did. There were stacks of them in our kitchen. She claimed she liked the recipes.

“Red Rock advertises in the back, promising quick results to cure the surly child,” Bebe said. “You can’t totally blame your stepmom, though. They make this place seem like a therapeutic Club Med.”

“That’s why they encourage the escorts instead of drop-offs. They don’t much appreciate parents seein’ this place in its skivvies,” Cassie added with a sly smile.

“That’s also why they monitor your mail. To preempt any complaints you may have,” V said. “There’s this whole section in the brochure warning parents to expect their kids to complain about how badly they’re treated here. Our lies are part of our sickness. It’s pretty clever. They really know how to cover their asses.”

“Oh my God, it’s a total gulag.”

“That is the first smart thing you’ve said, Brit.” V tapped me on the forehead. “Of course, every gulag
has its secrets, escape routes, and codes.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are ways to subvert the power.”

“What?”

“Patience, newbie. You’ll learn,” V said.

“All will be revealed,” Bebe promised.

Cassie put her hands together and bowed forward like a Tibetan monk who knew the secrets of the universe, and we all cracked up. It was the first time I’d laughed at Red Rock. But then the guards heard us having too much fun and separated us.

Out in the yard, you’d think no one was paying attention, but Bebe was right—there were eyes everywhere. The next time I had my appointment with Clayton, she immediately brought up V.

“I hear you are spending a lot of time with Virginia Larson,” she said. “You girls call her V, I’m told.”

“We sometimes build cinder-block walls together, and sometimes we take down those walls. If that’s how you define spending time.”

“Brit, you may think your quips are winning but they are only self-defeating. In any case, I would discourage you from getting close to Virginia.”

“But why? She’s Level Six. Isn’t she supposed to be
a positive influence on me?” I still wasn’t sure whether V was friend or foe, but Clayton’s warning made me lean toward the former.

“Virginia is Level Six for now. But she has a way of backsliding, so, no, I don’t think I’d qualify her as a positive influence. Now, I need your word that you’ll steer clear of her, and if you give it to me, it will prove that you are responsible enough.”

“Responsible enough for what?”

“To get a letter from your father. I’ve had it a while but I didn’t think you were ready.”

What right did she have to withhold mail from my dad? I wanted to lunge across the desk and wring her skinny neck until her pilgrim head popped off. But I wanted the letter even more. I bit my lip. I was doing a lot of that lately, so much so that part of it was turning purple. I told her I’d avoid Virginia, so she handed me the letter, watching me expectantly. As if I would open it in front of her. No way. I held on to it until dinner.

Up until that point, I’d been left out of the CT circles, but two days after I got my letter from Dad, Sheriff decided to lead group. And guess whose turn it was for the hot seat? Sheriff played it like a twisted game of duck, duck, goose, standing at the head of the confrontation circle, cocking an imaginary trigger with his finger, squinting like he was looking through a rifle sight. “Which one of you little girls thinks you can hide from the truth?” he asked in his gruff cowboy voice. “You? You? You?” he asked while he pointed at each of us. Then he stopped on me and motioned me to the middle.

“Why, Miss Hemphill, I don’t think we’ve heard from you. Word has it you got a letter from your papa. You got anything to say about that?”

I knew what I was supposed to say: that the letter made me angry, that I hated my father for dumping me here. It was standard CT hazing practice to start in with the obvious. The thing was, the letter
had
made me angry. Angry that Dad was making Red Rock seem like his decision, angry that he insisted on calling Stepmonster “your mother” as though saying it would make it true and erase what came before. And angry that he assumed that Clod was broken up, and I was out of it—as if that had been his grand scheme. But then, a tiny part of me felt bad for being mad. Because while I was furious with the After Dad, the one who’d let Stepmonster shove me off to this place, I could never fully forget my once-upon-a-time Before Dad. Before Dad was the gentle worrywart I’d grown up with, the heartbroken softy who’d fallen to bits when Mom went crazy. Before Dad was a pushover, only back then it was Mom he adored like a kid loves his new puppy. After Dad was a pushover for Stepmonster.

“It seems Miss Hemphill needs a little encouragement from you girlies,” Sheriff said. “Maybe one of
you can get inside that angry little head of hers. My goodness, could she be so angry that she’s turning red right to the tips of her hair?”

I heard the girls in the circle titter. As if magenta streaks were the freakiest thing they could imagine. Whatever. Pink streaks are not a form of rebellion. Lots of my parents’ CoffeeNation friends had neon hair, and Mom used to help me dye my hair with food coloring when I was a kid.

Besides, I didn’t even care about what anyone said—even Sheriff, who tended to scare me as much as he infuriated me. I was too busy thinking about Dad’s letter—the little gift he’d inadvertently put in it. Because though “Firefly” is a song, I’m not the one who wrote it.

It’s always seemed like some sort of miracle that I got to be in Clod. Jed, Denise, and Erik were not only years older than me, they were all competent musicians—Jed on guitar, Denise on bass, and Erik on drums. I, on the other hand, was fifteen when I first tried out for the band, and to say I sucked at guitar at
that point was a compliment.

Learning to play had been one of my Stepmonster-avoidance strategies. When she and Dad got married, she quit her job, so she was home all the time, redecorating the kitchen, talking on the phone to her sister in Chicago, making me feel like I no longer belonged there. So I did my best not to be there. I lingered after school. Spent hours nursing coffees at a greasy-spoon restaurant. Then one weekend I picked up a secondhand electric guitar and amplifier at a yard sale. I holed up in the basement, learning to play from a book, trying not to remember the days when I would’ve had twenty musicians lining up to teach me.

I’d been playing all of five months when I saw the notice at the X-Ray Cafe:
PUNK-POP POWER TRIO SEEKS RHYTHM GUITAR PLAYER.
Considering my lack of experience, I was pretty nervous when I arrived at Jed’s house to try out, and when I first laid eyes on him, my nerves turned to full-on jitters. Jed was tall and lanky with adorably sloppy brown hair that curled over the nape of his neck. His eyes were green, with a glint of warm brown in the middle. I’d been around cute rock guys all the time at CoffeeNation, but something about Jed totally flustered me. I turned
away from him and busied myself plugging my guitar into my amp, but I was so distracted that I didn’t notice the amp was turned way up. Then I heard the feedback loop bouncing against the walls.

“Yow!” screamed Denise. She had bleached blond hair and eyes that dared you to mess with her.

“Cool,” Erik shouted. “I think she dislodged some earwax.”

The feedback was still blaring. “Do you want to turn that down?” Jed shouted. I continued to stand there like a moron. Jed had to click off the amp himself. “I think we’ve established that you can make some good feedback,” he said.

“Yep,” I said, snapping out of my haze. “I was practically raised on the Velvet Underground, so it’s in my blood.”

Jed smiled at that. “Okay. Let’s hear how you play. We’re going to do ‘Badlands.’ It’s pretty basic. GCD. Listen and fall in when you’re ready.”

At first I was hesitant to jump in, and when I finally did I sort of tripped over myself for a few chords. But then the weirdest thing happened. I relaxed, and something clicked. I may have been the worst guitar player in
Portland at that point, but with Clod, I rocked.

Jed called me a few days later to tell me I was in. “Boy, you must have had some crappy candidates,” I joked.

Jed chuckled. Even through the phone his laugh was warm and rumbly. “No. We had some very talented musicians. But four people playing instruments perfectly doesn’t necessarily translate into a good band,” he said. “I dunno. We all liked your vibe. And you were definitely the best at distortion.”

“Thanks. I’ve been working on that,” I said, and Jed laughed again. “While we’re sharing, I should probably tell you that I can’t play bar chords.”

I heard him sigh, but he didn’t waver. “We’ll want to work on that,” he said. “Bar chords can be important.”

As soon as I started playing with Clod, it was like I’d always been in the band—even with my deficiencies, which Jed helped me to overcome. After practice, Denise and Erik would go upstairs for a bagel or a beer while Jed stayed behind, going over whatever parts of the songs I was having trouble with. Sometimes he’d lean over me to position my hand on
the fretboard, and I could feel the hair on his arm tickling mine. It was pretty much impossible to keep my mind on the music.

I practiced every day until my fingertips turned first raw and then hard like leather. I got better, a lot better, fast. When I mastered bar chords, Jed did this little absentminded nod and smile. And then he insisted I start working on vocals.

“I can’t sing,” I told him.

“Yes you can.”

“No, really. I can’t.”

“Brit, I should let you in on a secret,” Jed said. “You are
always
singing. Songs. TV jingles, you name it. And when you’ve got your headphones on, you sing
really
loud.”

“No joke,” Erik said, laughing.

“We’ve all heard you,” Denise added. “You’ve got voice.”

So, I started singing a couple of the songs. Then I started writing lyrics. Then I started writing riffs to go along with my lyrics. And then suddenly Clod was playing
my
songs. And I couldn’t help but notice that more often than not, Jed did that little nod-smile thing at me.

“Brit, you’re in denial. And I’m not talking about a river in Egypt.”

I jerked my head up. A Level Four girl named Kimberly was glaring at me. Sheriff loved that stupid denial joke. That little suckup probably just bought her ticket to Level Five at my expense.

“That’s right. You know you’re gonna have to come clean sometime,” Sheriff said. “Might as well stop wasting all our time. ’Cause that moment of reckoning is coming soon. Ain’t that right, girls?”

“It is.”

“Coming soon.”

“Happens to us all.”

“Gotta look into the mirror.”

The chorus of psychobabble went on. I tuned it out and went back into my head.

I knew it was pointless to be in love with Jed. At the end of every show, there was always a handful of girls waiting by the backstage door: cool-looking girls with
sleek black bangs, funky granny glasses, or buzz cuts and nose rings. After we loaded our stuff, sometimes Jed would slip away to meet with one of them. Occasionally, I’d think he had a girlfriend, but the gig-girls never seemed to last longer than a few weeks.
See,
I told myself.
It’s better to be his friend, his protégé, his little sister than some two-week stand
. That was how I comforted myself, anyhow.

I was so grateful to have the band in my life. Especially once Stepmonster saw the double blue line on her pregnancy test. Then and there, whatever respect she’d had for Dad’s and my relationship vanished, and suddenly it was like I became the competition. She started talking to Dad about me right in front of me, about my bad grades, my late hours, my being too young to be in a band.

She should’ve been glad about Clod. It was the only thing that kept me from heaving her off the Hawthorne Bridge. I was a mess at practices back then. I’d start crying mid-set or just flub a song I knew really well. I was sure they’d chuck me from the band, but instead they’d stop playing, Jed would make a pot of coffee, and they’d wait for me to calm down. Denise would ad-lib funny songs about Stepmonster
on her bass to try to cheer me up. Erik would offer me a bong load.

I lived for those practices and our shows, when we’d all pile into Jed’s Vanagon, stopping at a taqueria near his house for pre-show burritos. Then we’d play, usually a house party or a coffeehouse, but sometimes even a twenty-one-and-over club. Being up on stage, watching people totally rocking out to what we were doing, I felt that same sense of clicking that I’d experienced when I tried out for Clod, only a thousand times stronger. After the shows, we’d all be hyper and we’d pack up our stuff and go to Denny’s to pig out on pancakes and coffee. I’d go home feeling happy, like I belonged, like I still had a family.

The day Stepmonster went into labor, though, I had this awful sense that as soon as the baby was pushed out of her womb, I was gonna be pushed out of my dad’s heart completely. I didn’t want to be at the hospital and I didn’t want to be home alone either, so I got on my bike and just pedaled without thinking. It was only when I was three houses down from Jed’s that I realized where I’d been headed. It was one of those perfect spring days you sometimes get in Oregon in March—clear blue skies and warm.
Jed was strumming an acoustic guitar on the porch. I didn’t want him to see me, so I turned around and started to ride away. Then I heard him shout, “You’re doing a roll by? That’s just rude. Get up here and hang out for a while.”

I dropped my bike against his front steps and climbed onto the porch. I must’ve looked awful, because Jed, who wasn’t big on PDA, opened his arms and let me collapse into him. I cried so hard that I soaked the sleeve of his T-shirt, but he didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t act like I’d gone all basket case on him, either. He just stroked my head and kept saying “It’s okay.” Then he made us some coffee and came back out with two mugs and a cold washcloth for my face.

“Thanks,” I said. “Stepmonster’s having the baby.”