The Best American Essays 2016 (10 page)

The Kilo I knew threw up gang signs and wore baggy jeans and wifebeaters and high-top Air Jordans. He was tattooed and foulmouthed and crazy. He looked at people hard, laughed loudly, talked back to everybody, played streetball, and dunked on half the guys in Normandy Park. The Kilo I knew smoked blunts, drank Olde English 800 by the quart, talked dirty, cracked his knuckles, sucker-punched a guy twice his size, tagged all over the back of the Metro bus, got kicked out of school.

We were like that for a long time, Kilo crying into my lap, holding me, and me not able to say a single word. While I hated seeing him that way, the truth is it also made dying seem like more of an option. And I realized that that was exactly what I wanted—a love like that. I wanted somebody who loved me so much my death would break her.

The first time, I was eleven.

I was living with Mami in South Beach. She’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia three years before and was on a cocktail of antipsychotics and anxiety medications. She was also using cocaine. Our nights together were unpredictable. Sometimes my mother slept for sixteen hours straight. Sometimes she paced around the apartment talking to herself, laughing, screaming at me for doing God knows what. Sometimes she threw plates across the room, or threatened to burn me with a hot iron, or gave me a full-blown ass-whipping. I was five-feet-six by the time I was eleven, four inches taller than my mother, something she loved to remind me of as she was kicking my ass—the bigger I got, the bigger my beat-down had to be. Eventually I started hitting her back. We came to blows regularly.

That weekend I was alone with my mother. She was manic, talking to herself, screaming at me, insisting that I’d stolen a pair of her heels. She searched the entire apartment, turning over cushions, upending tables, emptying all the drawers onto the floor, pulling hangers out of the closets. When she didn’t find her shoes, she made me search, standing behind me as I opened and closed and opened and closed drawers, as I turned over mattresses and emptied out the bathroom cabinets. I did this over and over, and every time I didn’t find the pair of heels, she’d slap the back of my head, harder each time. Until I refused to search anymore.

I knew what it would mean, to defy my mother, but I did it anyway. I turned to her, balled my hands into fists, took a step back, and said, “I didn’t take your goddamned shoes.” I turned to leave, and that’s when I felt the whack on the back of my head—hard, much harder than before—and then a shower of blows.

She beat me until I fell, and after I fell, and stopped only when she was good and ready.

Afterward she put on multiple layers of makeup, slipped into a slinky silver dress, found a substitute pair of heels, and announced that she was going dancing.

I was still on the floor when she walked out the door, couldn’t have gotten up even if I’d wanted to.

I got up a few hours later and took my mother’s pills, all of them—antipsychotics, sleeping pills, anxiety pills. I washed them down with half a bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid. I’d heard the stories about toddlers who’d gotten poisoned with Drano, or detergent, or bleach, but all we had was Dawn. If we’d had any Drano or bleach, I would’ve downed that too. I was determined to die.

Later I sat in the living room, waited for my mother to come home.

When she found me, I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, throwing up blue.

I don’t remember falling asleep, or making my way from the living room to the kitchen, or being on my knees.

There is the faint memory of riding in the ambulance, sitting up on the stretcher, someone’s hand pressing hard against my chest, shaking me, bringing me back from wherever I was.

There is a woman’s voice:
What is your name? Open your eyes. What did you take? Don’t fall asleep.

There I am sinking, sinking. Then I’m gagging, a tube up my nostril, down my throat.
Don’t fight it. Don’t cough. Swallow.

There is chaos, the shuffle of people all around me, moving me, prodding me, holding me up until I’m throwing up charcoal into a plastic container.

There I am: stomach thrusting against the back of my throat until my eyeballs are almost bursting until there’s charcoal vomit splattered down the front of my T-shirt until there’s nothing left inside me and I realize I’m in a hospital and I’m in a hospital bed and there is my mother and there is my father and there I am. I am eleven and I am alive.

I used to imagine that the French woman knew something about pain, about planning. That she had tried before, as a child, as a teenager. That she sat in her bedroom and listened to whatever was on the radio, wrote poems about darkness, dreamed of jumping off bridges and arsenic cocktails and death by electrocution. Because she was no ordinary girl.

I’d like to think that someone loved her—before she jumped, and after—even if she didn’t know it.

Or maybe she did.

That Halloween we decided to throw a party. We spent the night at Kilo’s and woke up around 2:00 p.m., crusty-eyed and cotton-mouthed and ready for trouble. I called up my aunt Titi, who lived a short walk from Kilo’s neighborhood—and smoked weed all day every day—and told her we needed a place for a party. An hour later we were at her apartment on Harding Avenue, smoking her Krypto and listening to her ’80s freestyle. We called everyone we knew with the details. Bring your own weed, we told them, and wear a costume.

Whenever somebody’s mom would ask about a chaperone, we put Titi on the phone. She gave them her address and phone number, said
please
and
thank you
, laughed easily. She was every teenage hoodlum’s dream, my aunt. Like an older best friend who would cover for you, go to court with you when you didn’t want your parents to find out you got caught stealing at Woolworth’s or the bodega around the corner, who acted like a teenager even though she was in her twenties. She partied with us, smoked us out, then took us to the movies or skinny-dipping on South Beach. She taught us not just how to fight but how to fight dirty, to bite the soft spots on the neck and inner thigh, to pull off earrings and hair weaves, to use anything as a weapon: pens and pencils, keys, a sock full of nickels, Master combination locks.

That night Boogie and I dressed up as toddlers, parting our hair into pigtails, dotting our faces with eyeliner freckles, baby-blue pacifiers hanging from the gold chains around our necks. We wore Mickey Mouse and Pooh Bear pajamas, sucked on Charms Blow Pops, drank malt liquor out of baby bottles. The apartment filled up with our friends from Nautilus, Kilo’s friends from the barrio, Titi’s weedhead friends. We sat in a circle on the living room floor and passed around a Dutch, blasting House of Pain on Titi’s stereo, until Kilo and I got bored of watching everybody jump around and stole a dozen eggs from her kitchen.

Outside, we climbed onto the hood of somebody’s old Chevy Caprice and flung eggs at trick-or-treaters, some old scutterhead stumbling down the street, a guy in a pickup. Afterward, when all the eggs were splattered down Seventy-Seventh and Harding, we jumped off the car, Kilo all sweaty, the malt liquor in my baby bottle already warm. Kilo lit two cigarettes, handed me one. I slurred a faded version of Lil’ Suzy’s “Take Me in Your Arms,” and we started slow-dancing right there on the sidewalk, Kilo breathing smoke into my neck—danced in the yard next to Titi’s apartment building and collapsed onto the grass. Then we lay there, side by side, laughing and laughing at nothing, at everything. Everybody else seemed so far away, even though we lay there listening to their coming and going, the building’s front door opening, closing, footsteps scurrying across the lawn, our friends coming over to say, “You got grass all up in your pigtails,” and, “I think they passed out,” and, “The hell you doing down there?”

When Boogie and Papo came over, one of them kicked my sneaker. Then Papo said, “Think they’ll notice if I piss in their mouths?”

“I’ll fuck you up,” Kilo said.

“You dead?” Boogie asked, giggling.

“My eyes are open,” I said.

“Don’t mean you can’t be dead,” Boogie said.

I didn’t look over at Kilo, but I could hear him breathing beside me. He wasn’t laughing like the rest of us. I wouldn’t realize it until much later, after the Krypto and the Olde English had worn off, after that miserable fall with my mother, after going back to my father’s house, after Kilo had cheated with a girl from the barrio and gotten her pregnant and named the baby Mikey, like he hoped this Mikey would be the one to save him. After hating her for stealing him from me, after stealing him back years later, even if only for a little while, after the two of us, trying to be those same two kids we’d been, got drunk at the beach on a Saturday night, snorted an eight ball in just a couple hours, after he watched me take one bump of scutter after another and told me to
Slow down, ma
and
Watch out, baby girl, go easy, that’s how motherfuckers OD
and I told him that that was exactly how I wanted to go and that it would be the best way to die and that nobody would miss me anyway, after he snatched the baggie from me, took my face in his hands, his breath rank like stale cigarettes and Hennessy, and said
Don’t ever let me hear you say that shit again
and
I don’t wanna lose you
and after I let him hug me and thought about the two of us lying in the grass that Halloween when we were only thirteen and fourteen, how we were just kids but seemed so much older, already so tired, so damn tired it was like we’d been fighting a war. That’s when it would hit me, that Kilo wasn’t that different from me, that maybe back then he’d also been dreaming about dying. Maybe it was seeing his homeboy shot down right in front of him and having to look in the mirror every day, face himself, accept that he was still here, still alive, Mikey’s memory like a ghost that was always calling.

But that Halloween, the two of us on the grass, all I knew was that I felt nothing and everything all at once. Boogie and Papo lingered for a while, joking, smoking, laughing, and I didn’t even notice when they sneaked back to the party. I couldn’t tell how long we lay there—could’ve been minutes, could’ve been hours—but I sat up when we almost got trampled by a pack of kids running wild through the yard toward Titi’s building. There were like six or seven of them, boys and girls we went to school with, sprinting, pushing each other out of the way, calling out, “Move!” and “Run!” and “Go-go-go-go-go!”

Later, in the middle of Titi’s living room, with the music turned down and their eyes wide, everybody listening and holding their breaths, they would tell a story about how they’d been hanging on the corner of Seventy-Seventh and Harding. How a couple of them had been sitting on the hood of a car, while Kilo and I were passed out in the yard or pretending to be dead or whatever it was we were doing. How some guys in a pickup had pulled up right next to them, how the passenger had rolled down the window, pulled out a gun, and asked which one of them had thrown the eggs. And while I stood there, the spinning in my head already fading, the dancing and the laughing and Kilo’s face against my neck already like a dream I was sure to forget, I wouldn’t feel guilty for egging those guys, and I wouldn’t feel bad that my friends almost got shot because of us. I would resent them for being that close to death. I would imagine, like something out of a movie, the truck pulling up, the slow opening of the tinted window, moonlight reflecting on the glass, then the barrel of the gun, like a promise.

I walked into the school counselor’s office one afternoon, on a whim. I told myself it was because I had a math test during fifth period that I hadn’t bothered to study for, that I didn’t want to see Ms. Jones’s face in front of the class as she handed out the test, how she’d be staring at me as I took one and passed it back. Truth was I couldn’t care less. Every time Ms. Jones called me to her desk and asked, her voice almost a whisper, why I hadn’t turned in any homework that week or the week before that, or why I never brought books to school, I just shrugged, rolled my eyes. The last three times, she’d threatened to send me to the principal’s office if it happened again. Next day, same shit. I’d walk up to her desk again, cross my arms, say, “My bad,” and act like it was the first time in my life I’d ever heard of books or homework. Eventually Ms. Jones gave up, like I knew she would.

I didn’t know what I’d say when I walked into Ms. Gold’s office. She was known in most cliques as the counselor for the losers, druggies, troublemakers, kids who got suspended, kids who fought or brought knives to school, kids who flunked so much they were already too old for Nautilus—kids whose parents were drunks or junkies, or whose parents beat them, homeless kids, bullied kids, kids with eating disorders, or brain disorders, or anger problems. So naturally, when I showed up at her door, she knew exactly who I was.

“Come on in, Jaqui,” she said, her voice hoarse, like she smoked a few packs a day. “Have a seat.” She ran her hand through her long mane of orange hair, and I noticed her fingernails were long as hell and painted gold. She dressed like she was a young woman—ivory pencil skirt, short-sleeved blouse, black high heels—and smelled like floral perfume. She was an attractive woman and wore lots of makeup, but up close, you could tell how old she really was. Older than my mother. Probably a grandmother. This made me like her right away.

I stepped inside the small office and sat in the nearest seat. It was bigger than I’d imagined, with a few chairs set up in a circle. I wondered how she knew my name and if there would be other people coming.

“I’ve been wondering when you’d show up,” she said, sitting at her desk chair. She leaned over and opened a drawer, rummaged through some files, then pulled one out. “I was going to get you out of class if you didn’t make it over to me soon.”

I tried not to look surprised. “For real?”

She smiled at me a long time, looking me over, studying me. Then, finally, she said, “I know all about you.”

I doubted that she knew
all
about me, but at the same time, I was afraid of what she did know, and how. “Like what?”