Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (13 page)

Andrea often looked like she’d been sleeping in eyeliner—which sometimes was the case, especially when we crashed after bingeing on OxyContin. But the look kind of worked on her. Even when goth was kind of passé, she could pull it off—I think because it always seemed like she was secretly so vulnerable.

When I look back on my days with the posse, I see in my head all of us who crashed at one time or another at Poacher’s. It was not really a wild crowd—it’s not like we were having raucous parties. Mostly we were just trying to survive, and the sex and the drugs and the robberies were not the product of some rager or keg party gone crazy. It was just how we kept a roof over our heads and tried to stay warm until, finally, we just hated ourselves so much—which was a very high bar, trust me—that either we left or we OD’d. The regulars, in addition to Andrea and me, included Missy, who was nineteen and was from Concord, Massachusetts, and came from unbelievable buckets of money. She had a pink sports car when I first moved in—not kidding—a Miata convertible. But one day her dad and mom appeared out of the blue to bring her home, and when she refused, one of them drove home in her car, so we lost that set of wheels. They couldn’t believe what a rat hole their daughter was living in. We couldn’t believe that they found her. She once told me that her house in Concord had six bedrooms and four fireplaces. She did cocaine for a while, which most of us didn’t, because she had the wallet to make cocaine happen. Poacher
loved her for that. But it also wasn’t going to last. She claimed her older brothers used to abuse her, which was why she was so fucked up. I never quite believed her. I think, like a lot of us, she was just a head case and made stuff up.

On the other hand, I do believe that Lida, another girl, really had been abused by her stepfather. I don’t think she could have made up the crap she told me. She was my age. After her mom and dad divorced, her mom remarried, and her stepfather turned out to be a total pig. He used to make her suck him off for her allowance, usually in the car after he’d picked her up after softball or field hockey. He got her to do it the first time partly by scaring the shit out of her and partly by seducing her. Of course, the “how” doesn’t really matter. As a kid, once you do something like that, you’re kind of stuck. You feel ashamed and you feel violated and you feel like the worst daughter on the planet. She was eleven years old that first time. She would do it for four more years before she would finally hit the wall and go to her mom. And her mom—who was spineless and pathetic and clearly freaking terrified of her second husband—accused her of lying. Yup, took her husband’s side over her daughter’s. Claimed that Lida was making the whole thing up. As they say, the River Denial is wide. Anyway, once you put something like that out there, you’ve pretty much torched any chance of a relationship with your mom, at least if your mom claims she doesn’t believe you. So Lida ran away.

Poacher’s boys tended to come and go a lot more. Trevor. Joseph. PJ (for Poacher Junior). Trevor and Joseph were older than I was, but PJ was younger. Maybe fourteen. We called him Poacher Junior because his eyes became the same slits as Poacher’s when he was stoned, and his arms got as wobbly as those Styrofoam tubes little kids play with in swimming pools. It was like he had a garden hose for bones. The boys—and they really were like boys; sometimes it was like us girls were their babysitters—could sit around playing Poacher’s Xbox for days. They really could. I think they were as beyond help as the girls, but they didn’t show it. Not really.
Teen boys are often more chill than teen girls, but inside they can be just as fucked up.

The big difference is that most of the time the boys could only bring in money by stealing, especially once the teen shelter wouldn’t let them back into the life skills classes. But we girls could actually earn cash. We could earn our keep and our drugs because we had something we could sell. (I know now that boys can do what we did, but back then I didn’t realize there was a market for underage male hookers. In some ways, I guess I was weirdly naïve.)

But once in a while we did break-ins with the boys, which brings me back to Andrea and sleeping in eyeliner and the robbery.
The
robbery, the one where we all almost got ourselves killed. We’re talking a Bonnie and Clyde kind of cataclysm, minus the guns, because only the police had guns. But it was pretty bad. You get my point.

As I said, Andrea didn’t sleep in eyeliner because she wanted that zombie smudge look. Usually she did it because she just crashed. Boom. Wilted. Out. And the downside to sleeping in eyeliner, aside from the fact that you look like you just got dumped at the prom by your boyfriend and have been sobbing for hours in the bathroom—See? Sometimes I can come up with analogies that are “age appropriate” and not batshit crazy—is that you can get eye infections. And eye infections just suck.

The plan was to break into Missy’s aunt and uncle’s house in Shelburne. Shelburne is a very swanky suburb just south of Burlington. When Missy first left Concord, she was supposed to live with them. That’s how she wound up in Vermont in the first place. The family thought that a change of place might straighten Missy out. (There was another girl like that at the shelter. Like Missy, she needed a lot more than a change of place and a different roof over her head.) The house where her aunt and uncle lived was kind of like mine back in Reddington: unapologetic meadow mansion. It was on a hill that looked out at Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, and it had these awesome ports for iPods on a
wall in almost every single room. It was two years old, but it still smelled brand-new. The floors were a beige wood and still shiny as glass. There were white throw rugs and blue throw rugs and huge black-and-white photographs of leaves over the couches and beside the fireplace.

And there was an alarm system, but Missy knew the code to turn it off.

At least she did once.

Or at least she did when she wasn’t high as a kite on Percocet and beer.

You can probably see where this is going.

There were five of us squeezed into Missy’s convertible: Missy and Andrea and Trevor and PJ and me. Ridiculous, I know. I honestly don’t know why Andrea and I were there. I don’t know why PJ was there. It really just should have been Missy and Trevor—or even just Missy, if she was willing to take a few trips.

Even though Missy hadn’t really lived there for two months, the plan was to steal some of her shit, too, so that she could throw a hissy fit and insist that she had had nothing to do with the robbery. We were going to steal a lot of silver and her aunt’s jewelry that we could pawn at a few places in Montreal, and whatever electronics we could fit in the Miata—which, given our brain-dead decision to cram five of us into a car meant for four people, two of whom were clearly supposed to be dwarfs, wasn’t very much.

We went there on a Friday night in October when her aunt and uncle would be at some gala in Burlington for the hospital, where her uncle was a heart surgeon. Her cousins were both away at college, so the house would be empty. We would just drive in, open the front door with Missy’s key, turn off the alarm, and start piling shit into the car. We didn’t even bother to park with the front of the car facing away from the house—you know, in the “getaway” position. We figured the worst that would happen would be Missy’s aunt and uncle not believing her when she said she had nothing to do with the robbery, but we figured they weren’t the type to tell the police they thought their niece was involved.

The alarm system was idiotproof, but we were less than idiots. It was the kind of system that has little boxes on the windows and doors to tell you if one has been opened, and a couple of motion detectors on the ceilings on the first and second floors. When you unlock the door when the system is on, you simply go to a keypad and punch in some numbers, and it turns itself off. You have, like, a minute to punch in the numbers.

The night of the robbery, that minute seemed both like a second and an hour. The keypad was in the front hallway, right beside the switch for the porch and the hall lights, and the minute we open the door and kind of tumble inside, we hear this robotic female voice telling us to deactivate the alarm. At first we’re all laughing because we really are pretty stoned. The voice is straight out of a bad sci-fi drama on Spike. But then it dawns on us that Missy is trying to press the buttons with her gloves on, and she keeps hitting two buttons at once. (Incidentally, we were all wearing gloves. We’d all watched enough TV dramas with cops to know that we didn’t want to have sex on the beds, use the toilets, or leave fingerprints anywhere. We didn’t want to drop a bottle of pills or a cigarette pack anywhere. In hindsight, Missy didn’t need to wear gloves because her fingerprints were
supposed to be
all over the house because she’d lived there for a while. But, again, nothing about this robbery was very well thought out.) And so she keeps screwing up the code to disarm the system. Then, maybe because she is wearing gloves so her muscle memory is off, she realizes she has forgotten the code. I’m not making that up. She can’t remember the numbers or the order or even the word the numbers would spell if she were to use the letters beside the numbers on the keypad.

And that’s when the madness really began.

In most ways, I didn’t look or act like a rebellious teenager. Slacker? I guess. Underachiever? Could have been my middle name. But, for instance, I didn’t do a lot of insane shit with my
hair. Actually, I didn’t do any, unless you count not washing it for days because you’re homeless or stoned. But a lot of girls like me really make a statement with their hair (and often that statement is somewhere between “I just saw a Tim Burton movie and want to look like Corpse Bride” and “I need serious amounts of help and have no idea how to ask for it”). They shave their heads or they dye their hair or they spike it. They get dreadlocks. They get Mohawks. But that wasn’t my way of trying to get people’s attention. I mean, I’m not even sure I wanted to get people’s attention. I wanted to get my parents to stop drinking. I wanted my parents to be happy. I wanted to figure out why, it seemed to me, my brain didn’t work like everyone else’s.

But, still, my parents and I found all kinds of reasons to fight and sometimes my parents’ behavior completely sucked. Here is one memory that I think about a lot. And, in all fairness, I probably think about it because it was one of the moments when I really hadn’t done anything wrong. I have plenty where I’m the culprit, and they haunt me, too. I’ll get to some more of them, I promise. But this one? I’m just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was a Friday night and I was thirteen. I was in eighth grade and it was sometime in March. I had been at my friend Lisa Curran’s home, watching videos on YouTube (tons of movie previews, which for some reason we could watch for hours) with her and her mom and another friend of ours, a girl named Claire, and baking cookies. Lisa’s mom loved to bake. We didn’t always do such incredibly wholesome stuff as bake cookies, but we happened to that night. About eleven o’clock, Claire’s dad came to pick her up. I figured my dad was right behind him. When he’d dropped me off, I’d said, Please pick me up at eleven. But eleven became eleven-fifteen, and eleven-fifteen became eleven-thirty. I knew Lisa’s mom wanted to go to bed, so this was getting seriously awkward. So, I called my house and my mom answered the phone, which surprised me because usually she was out like a light by eleven-thirty. But I recognized the tone of her voice instantly: it was this low, controlled, throaty voice she used when she was trying not to
appear drunk. I asked if she or Dad could come and pick me up, and she said she would be right over. She said she thought Claire’s dad was bringing me home, which was a total lie.

The Currans had a pretty short driveway. They lived about four miles from us in an old farmhouse that Lisa’s dad, the airline pilot, had restored when he was younger. But like a lot of farmhouses, it was pretty close to the road. And so we saw the brights of Mom’s Subaru as she was speeding down the road and then heard the brakes as she must have squashed the pedal to the floor and tried to make the turn into the driveway. She made it, barely. But she sideswiped the Currans’ metal mailbox, ripping it off the wooden post. It would be a few years before I’d key Philip’s mom’s Beemer, but I’d seen other cars keyed by then, and the passenger side of our car looked like some kid had keyed it in a parking lot somewhere. I wouldn’t see the full extent of the damage until the next day, but even at night we knew it was scratched and had a pretty impressive dent.

And we sure as hell all heard the brief, acidic metal-on-metal grunt of her hitting the mailbox in the first place. “Sounds like a robot just farted,” Lisa said, which was pretty funny—and pretty accurate.

Of course, Lisa’s mom didn’t think it was funny. She was worried and ran outside. My mom didn’t even have time to get out of the car before the three of us had sort of surrounded it: the Currans on the driver’s side and me on the passenger side. We were all wearing blue jeans and sweaters—actually, Lisa was wearing a Bruins hoodie—but my mom was in her nightgown. When I opened the passenger door to get in, the light went on and we could all see not only that my mom was wearing this ivory Lanz tent with little blue flowers on it, but that it was covered in red wine. I don’t know why we all knew instantly it was wine and not blood. I guess this would be a more dramatic memory if I pretended we thought it was blood. But none of us did. And I know that because Lisa and I would talk about this later. We knew it was wine.