Authors: Liz Murray
When class let out, I followed Samantha through the crowd and started down the stairwell that was parallel to hers, pretending to travel close out of coincidence. I wanted her to notice me again. Together, we began circling the caged, symmetrical staircases, making the rounds until we shared in a laugh, and then the circling became a kind of game, a race helter-skelter to the bottom. When we got there, side by side, heaving for breath, we became friends.
“What’s your name?” she asked, pressing her palms to her thighs. I almost said Elizabeth, but thought again when the name echoed in my head from the mouths of angry social workers, angry group home girls, and, worst of all, Ma’s crazy voice, the voice from her breakdowns.
“Liz, my name is Liz,” I said, testing out the shape and feel of it.
“Well, good to meet ya, Liz. I’m Sam.”
“Cool. Do you want to walk together?” I offered, motioning toward the double doors.
She must have said yes, because we ended up walking together, but all I can remember is that big, bright grin of hers, smiling at me.
The next day, I sat alone at the far end of the cafeteria table, arming myself with a book, avoiding contact with the other kids. A foam lunch tray sat beside me and I was picking at my food when, out of nowhere, someone’s fingers landed—
splat
—in my applesauce. It was Sam.
“You don’t wanna eat this,” she said. “It’s poison, I think they’re trying to kill us.” I laughed and looked up, smiling ear to ear. I loved how bold Sam was; she could make an ordinary day suddenly thrilling. She flicked the sauce off her fingertips. “Scoot over,” she said, plopping her sketch pad down on the table. Sam was penning a picture of a pouting fairy with a voluptuous body and a set of complicated butterfly wings. She was wearing what looked like her father’s button-down shirt. Undone in the front and draped over her woman’s body, it made her look like one of those girls in movies who look sexy in too-big men’s clothing. The sleeves were rolled up midway, revealing colorful, small, red-and-yellow ink drawings of flames scrawled onto her arms.
“That’s so cool,” I said, lifting my bag to make room for her lunch tray.
“She’s a slut, and her name is Penelope,” Sam answered without looking up. “This girl would do anyone, even Mr. Tanner, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
I laughed instantly, almost too loudly. Mr. Tanner, an older, head school figure with gray hair and rough skin, had entered the cafeteria right on cue. A moment earlier and her comment would have been different. She’s quick, I thought. We watched him stop and cup his hands, forming a bullhorn. Hundreds of kids across the cafeteria all fell into a hush. He spoke, and to my surprise, the cafeteria called out with him, “The outer yard is now op-en.” Sam rolled her eyes, returning her attention to the page; she was coloring the fairy’s wings in emerald. Her attitude was either temperamental or mysterious. “How long have you been drawing?” I asked. Kids began filing out into the schoolyard, holding apples or gulping down the last of their pints of milk. “I mean, your stuff looks good.”
“Eh, it’s all right. What I really want to do is be a writer,” she said. “If I write one book by the time I’m thirty, I can die in peace. In fact, I’ll kill myself.”
Almost everything she said was dramatic in that way. Over the years of our friendship to come, I would see her offend numerous bystanders with foul language, loud belches, and general socially unacceptable behavior. Back then I savored her rebellion; it made me feel accepted, understood somehow. Something about how offbeat she was synched up perfectly with how different, how separate, I felt from everything. Just by watching her be weird and borderline offensive was like testing out my own weirdness on the world, except when I was with Sam, the world’s rejection mattered less because we were with each other. This made her courageous, almost victorious, in my eyes.
“What kind of things do you want to write about?”
A boy sat down near Sam, interrupting us. He was black, dressed in semi-baggy jeans and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt—the typical urban style that boys my age wore, but neater and more put together.
“What radio station would you guess I listen to?” he asked me, an eager look spreading across his face.
It was happening again—another student speaking to me. I searched for his motive, too, and decided that sitting next to Sam made me look cool. It was as if I’d borrowed some of her allure for myself.
“Come on, guess,” he insisted.
“Um, I wouldn’t know, really.” I tried to look laid-back, like someone who casually made friends this way all the time. I said, “You can’t really guess those things, not accurately anyway.” Plus, I was embarrassed by the fact that I never listened to the radio and couldn’t name one radio station if I tried to.
He seemed satisfied. “Didn’t think you’d get it.
Z100
. The answer is Z100. Most people think because I’m black, I like hip-hop,” he said. Sam looked up from her drawing and pointed a pen right into his face.
“You’re a strange one . . . you go by your last name, Myers, right?” The boy smiled, bowed his head dramatically, and said, “Yes. And I like your drawings, Sam.” It didn’t surprise me that he knew her name, although she wasn’t sure of his. Sam must draw attention from guys all the time, I thought.
Bobby, the white boy who’d been flirting with Sam the day before, slid down to our end of the table, too.
“Whatcha guys doin’?” he asked, smiling at me, and then turning to Sam, who poked her tongue out at him. “Hey,” he yelled. She exploded into laughter, so did he, and then so did I.
Bobby’s hair was a wavy brown puff that sagged over his hazel eyes. He had this perpetual smirk on his face, a sort of half smile, as though he was always about to laugh at something. Any time I looked at him, that little half smile made me always ready to laugh at something, too. Sitting there with him and Sam instantly made me happy.
Another friend was with Bobby, a tall guy in baggy jeans who introduced himself as Fief. “They call him that because of that cartoon mouse in that movie,” Sam told me. “ ’Cuz of his ears, he looks like him.” Fief was Irish, slightly red-faced, with slightly big ears. He resembled someone who might have been in my family, I thought.
“ ’Sup, guys,” he said, sliding over.
For the entire duration of our lunch period, we talked as a group, apart from the hundreds of kids around us. I was one of them, jumping in, making people laugh, suggesting plans outside of school. When the bell rang, we walked upstairs together, parted in the halls, waving back at one another until we passed through our individual classroom doorways, out of sight. For the first time ever, I had no doubt that I would be at school tomorrow.
Brick’s work schedule dictated the routine in his house, and every day was a carbon copy of the last. Each morning, I awoke at 7:15 a.m., to the oldies DJ playing “Happy, Happy Birthday” for the daily birthday movie ticket raffle. As the radio called out listeners’ names, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke from Brick’s Marlboros came floating above Lisa’s head and mine, in the living room where our bunk bed was stashed in the corner. I could hear him shouting for Ma to wake up.
“Jean, Jean,” he’d grumble. “It’s morning; time to go.” She’d prepare the coffee and get us on our feet while he showered. It was the closest I’d ever come to having a responsible routine. Certainly it was unique to Ma, who always had trouble waking up, until Brick yelled moistly into her face and sometimes pulled her off the bed with a rough jerk of the arm in order to make her listen. I knew that what caused her exhaustion was no longer drugs (she finally wasn't using any), but the illness progressing. From overhearing their conversations, I knew Brick knew she was ill. But he didn’t show any awareness or sensitivity in the way he treated her. Watching him in his wrinkled, too-tight boxers standing over her small, resting body revived a growing sense of anger I’d felt since I’d first met Brick. Anger that arose in me each time he’d called Ma away from the phone, interrupting our delicate conversations, back when she’d first left. No one had ever bothered Ma while she slept, especially not Daddy. He never needed anyone to start his day for him, much less feed him. Thinking of his independence sent a wave of worry through me. Was he doing okay on his own? The phone had gotten cut off on University again and we hardly spoke anymore. I both wanted and didn’t want him to see the way Brick was treating Ma. I also wondered whether Daddy’s lack of attention, his life of secrets, had caused Ma to gravitate to Brick in the first place. But this couldn’t have been what she’d expected.
Soon after, Brick and Ma would head out together, him to work, Ma to the bar, where they came to know her so well that she was served before the general customers came knocking, while the glasses were still being wiped clean and last night’s stools had yet to be lowered off the counter. There was no real reason for her to get up in the morning except that Brick said, “This is when people wake up,” and so she did. To kill the time, she went to Madden’s and drank. By noon, she would return home, drunk beyond the capacity for speech.
Lisa beat everyone at getting up in the morning, except that it was not like before, when she made it a point to get me up for school, too. Maybe it’s because we were sharing a space—the living room—for the first time, but Lisa was more aggressive with me than ever. She had developed a hair-trigger temper with me, snapping if I asked her even the most basic questions.
“Lisa, is there any more toilet paper?”
“I don’t know, Liz, you live here now, too, can’t you figure it out?” I couldn’t help but feel as if I had invaded her space.
She readied herself at around six
A.M.
, staring into a large mirror on the side of Brick’s living room wall. But instead of searching her image or experimenting with facial expressions, Lisa approached her reflection the way an artist would her canvas. The process was graceful, and each time the transformation surprised me. She began with a dainty zippered bag from which she pulled all types of soft pencils and wands. First she lined her lips, then filled them in with a bright creamy red. Sometimes, if she was going out with her new boyfriend, she drew symmetrical upturned tails at the edges of her dark eyes, like Cleopatra’s. Lisa’s vision had worsened but then stabilized over the last few years, causing her to lean in, allowing just enough room between herself and the mirror for whatever tool she was using. She left in a brilliant flash of glistening gold hoop earrings and tightly gelled hairstyles, going either to school or—in the evenings—to a life she’d carved out for herself elsewhere.
Many nights she’d return with a faded version of the vivid artistry she’d left with, dark pigment rimming her lids, dull pink smudged around her lips like runny watercolors. I didn’t dare ask about the dense maroon blotches, like bruises, spotted around her neck, but quietly willed her to sit on my bottom bunk and confide in me about her boyfriend, and what being seventeen was all about.
“Do you have MTV?” Sam asked the first time she visited Brick’s house. On television, O. J. Simpson was crossing and uncrossing his legs in an LA courtroom. A camera zeroed in on his facial expressions as some new evidence was being revealed. We were cutting school for the day. I’d managed to be in semi-regular attendance for almost two months, so I didn’t think it would be too big a deal to miss a day or two at this point. Lisa wasn’t home yet, and Ma had already returned from the bar and passed out on Brick’s bed, bordered by an impossible amount of loose laundry, crates of cans, and stacks of old magazines. We sat on the couch in the living room, Sam painting her toenails a glossy black.
“I think we might have it, but you have to check. I’ve never had cable before.”
“Anything but this,” she said, hitting some buttons on the remote. A jumble of guitar strings shot out from the TV speakers. Sam curled her foot to her chest and puffed out her cheeks, blowing on her toes.
“This is a cool place,” she said. “Your mom’s boyfriend is almost never here, for real? And your mom sleeps all day?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Sounds great.” Even though it didn’t feel great to live under a stranger’s roof and to have Ma drained of all her vitality, I knew from my one visit to Sam’s house why she thought so. I wasn’t delegated responsibility over a younger sibling. I didn’t have to deal with the intimidating father she described, around whom everyone at her house walked on eggshells. I hardly had to deal with adults at all, apart from my caseworker’s checkups.
Leaning on the arm of the couch, Sam reached to the back of her head. With one jerk of a single brass pin, her light brown hair, phone-cord curly, soft as silk, dropped from a tightly wrapped bun down to her waist. Colorful rubber bands were worked into a single, thin braid within the larger mass. Together, the range of color in the braid made a complete rainbow.
“Oh my God,” I marveled. “Damn, look at your hair. I had no idea it was so long. It’s really nice.”
“It’s a bitch to comb, I’ll tell you that much. My dad is the one who’s in love with it. If he likes it so much, he should grow his own,” she said, unraveling the bottom of the braid with her fingers. The smell of peach conditioner carried up to my nose.
A Nirvana video came on; Kurt Cobain filled the screen. “Oh, he is so hot,” Sam said, perking up. “Oh my God, I would so do him.”
The comment had taken me off guard.
“Yeah . . . I guess he’s cute,” I said. I didn’t know how to join in here; boys hadn’t occurred to me yet. They might as well have been bigger versions of females. The only difference to me so far was that every so often I found myself staring a little longer at one, or feeling slightly more curious or impressed by things they did. But I couldn’t say I’d ever really been
attracted
to any boy. I watched Kurt’s face, covered in blond stubble, as he strummed his guitar in wide circles for the camera. Studying his features, I imagined what it might feel like to cup his cheek, to hold his hand. Suddenly, his face became Bobby’s face, smirking his half smile at me.
“Yeah, I guess I would say he’s definitely hot,” I told Sam. I didn’t know why what I’d said embarrassed me so much. But from her face, there was no sign that she noticed.