Don't Fail Me Now (3 page)

“Is the other biological parent deceased?”

I wish.
“No.”

“And does your mother have a boyfriend or significant other?”

“No.”

“Any living grandparents?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But you do have an aunt.”

“Yeah, my mom's sister.”

Janet licks her thumb again and flips back a few pages, looking for something. “That would be . . . Samara Means?”

“Right.”

“And she lives locally?”

“Yes.”

Scribble, scribble, scribble
.

“Any other aunts or uncles?”

“No.”

“And you're all in school full-time?”

“Yes.”

“Do you depend on your mother to take you to school?”

“No, she takes the bus and I drive us.”

Janet frowns, sending a web of lines running down the sides of her mouth and off of her cheeks like tributaries from a river. “You know,” she says, “it's in violation of your provisional license to have other minors in the car without supervision.”

Shit
. “I . . . um . . .” The truth is, I
am
familiar with that particular passage in Maryland's DMV manual, but what else am I supposed to do? Mom works—well,
worked
, anyway—from seven thirty to six, and we all have to be at three different schools spanning six miles between seven forty-five and eight
fifteen, and Denny gets out at two forty-five and then Cass at three ten, and I have to bring both of them to Taco Bell by four for my shift so they can do homework and eat the edible-but-messed-up-looking kitchen errors for free, so we're all screwed unless I take a little creative license with the driving laws.

“Well, I'm sure you can find a suitable alternative for the next month,” Janet says with a thin smile.

“I'm sure,” I parrot hollowly.

“Would you say your family is . . . isolated?” she asks. I wonder how long this checklist is and whether she has some key at the end that'll tell her where we fall on the spectrum between the Cosbys and the Mansons.

“No, we're right here in the city, over in Berea.” Our house is one slightly busted-looking brick row house on a block of dozens. Like most of low-income Baltimore, our street has a few abandoned, boarded-up lots, places you have to stomp by after dark so the rats won't dart out from under the rotting stairs and scare the bejesus out of you. But it's not the boonies by any means.

“Of course,” Janet says, a little impatiently. “I mean, do you see friends, have people over?”

“Yes,” I say. But the truth is I haven't brought a friend home in years, not since I was a kid. There was this one girl in particular I remember, named Excelyn, who was Mexican and had black braids down to her hips. She would come over after school, and we'd watch cartoons or play with Cass while she bounced in this little chair that hung in the kitchen doorway, and Mom would cut grilled cheese into long strips that she called monkey fingers. There was also a girl named Rosemarie who didn't go to my school but was the daughter of one of my
grandpa's parishioners who tried to help Mom for a while after her parents passed. For some reason I don't remember any identifying details about Rosemarie except that in the bathroom at her house, there was a clear, round liquid soap dispenser that matched the seasons. In December it would have a little Santa hat floating in it; in April, a nest of colored eggs; in July, an American flag. At the time, it seemed like an unfathomable luxury item, and later, when things got bad, I sometimes thought of that soap dispenser, convinced that if we were the kind of family who had one, it would have protected us somehow. Made everything perfect.

“So you have a social life outside the home?” Janet presses.

“Yeah,” I lie, trying to sound casual, like I don't eat the same fast-food bean burrito for dinner every night in the cramped booth right by the men's room exit, which is the least popular booth due to the pervasive urinal-cake stench, and therefore the only one my manager will let my latchkey siblings park themselves for hours on end.

Janet scribbles in her notebook and then looks up at me, fixing me once again with Meaningful Eye Contact. We're so close I can see the contact lenses glistening on her slate-colored irises.

“Have any of you suffered physical abuse at the hands of your mother or another adult in the home?” She asks this in the same tone of voice that she used when she asked how old we were.

“No,” I say, forcing myself to keep calm for Denny's benefit. I glance across the table at Cass and see in her face that she's thinking the exact same thing I am:
We could take her.

Janet furrows her brow sympathetically. “I know it's a sensitive topic, but this is a standard question in cases where
substance abuse is also present.” She thinks I'm lying, when for once I'm not. I bite down hard on my tongue.

Denny holds up the drawing he's been working on, oblivious to the tension in the room. “Look!” he cries. “It's a
T. rex
eating a
Brachiosaurus
!” Denny has worn out the red ink cartridge on Janet's bribe pen making spurts of blood shooting out of every possible place on the dinosaur's body, and she smiles at him before jotting something down in her notes. Great.

“No,” I say.

Janet nods. “Not even slapping, spanking, that sort of thing?”

I look over at Cass again. Of course Mom handled us rough sometimes when we were mouthing off or misbehaving, but we got it no worse than anyone else we knew. And if anything, the drugs made her seem kind of helpless. She was always much more likely to float through the house like a ghost or lock herself in her bedroom than take anything out on us. For better or worse, she took it all out on herself.

I briefly consider telling the truth but then decide that I'm not going to give this bitch the satisfaction. “Nope,” I say.

“But you can confirm that substance abuse is present in the home?” Janet looks at me expectantly, pen poised to write down what she thinks she already knows. And I get that she's just doing her job, and that I probably should be grateful that she's using words Denny can't understand, but I still hate her. I hate her for taking the things that make us ache inside and putting them down on paper, which will turn into some typed report that will turn into a file in some computer database so that anyone can just punch in my name and read about the worst parts of my life anytime they feel like it. I hate her for doing it in front of
Cass and Denny, and I hate her for the way she turns the pages in her shitty little notebook. But mostly I hate her for thinking she can crack me. I take a deep breath and meet her gaze.

“No,” I say calmly. “I've never seen her do anything.” It's the truth, actually. I've never seen my mother use drugs. Have I found tiny plastic baggies in the bathroom garbage? Does the aluminum foil routinely go missing, only to reappear as charred little strips littering the ground below my mother's bedroom window? Do I notice the heat blisters on her lips and nostrils that she tries to cover with makeup or pass off as cold sores? These are different questions, with different answers. But they're not what Janet asked. If she wants to know if my mom is a drug addict, she can just march her smarmy pantsuited ass down to the evidence room and look at the eight dime bags of heroin the cops caught her with in the Shell station bathroom while we all sat in the car fifty feet away arguing over what movie to watch when we got home.

Janet narrows her eyes at me as if trying to read my face, and for a second I think she's going to press me on it. But then she just writes something down, shuts her notebook, and turns off the recorder.

“All right,” she says, standing up. “Thank you. I'll just speak to the officers, and hopefully we can get you out of here and into a shelter as soon as possible.”

“Wait,
shelter
?” Cass says, horrified, dropping the deaf-mute act for a minute. “What about Aunt Sam?” She looks at me, wild-eyed with fear, the spitting image of Mom for all the wrong reasons. “She's coming, right?”

“Aunt Sam's not coming?” Denny cries, his big dark eyes instantly brimming with tears.

The panic starts to rise again, and before the dizzying whoosh of blood from my racing heart threatens to render me speechless, I scramble to come up with something,
anything
, I can say to stall whatever's coming next.

“She might not be coming
right now
,” I sputter, “but—”

“Oh, like hell I'm not coming,” my aunt says sharply from the doorway. I spin around to see her, looking tired and pissed off in her nurse's scrubs and running shoes, like a slightly older, less pretty version of Mom from some alternate universe where time marched on in the boring way it's supposed to. “I'm here, aren't I?” She crosses her arms and looks us over one by one with some mix of pity and annoyance. “Dragged off my shift at two o'clock in the morning, left a man with a half-stapled knife wound, but here I am. And they told me I had to take a cab since she left you with that janky car, too. So you owe me $18.” With anyone else, this might be a deadpan joke, but Aunt Sam is serious. She doesn't treat us like her own kids,
mi-casa-es-su-casa
style, or even like the nieces and nephews we are. When we stay at her house, we're lodgers who earn our keep, and she tallies every nickel of what we cost her.

Janet flashes her elementary school art teacher smile at my aunt—
good luck with that
—and holds out her hand. “Mrs. Means,” she says, “it's so nice to meet you.”

“I'm not a
Mrs.
,” Sam snaps. “Who are you?”

“I'm Janet Winters, with Maryland Child Protective Services, and I can't tell you how glad I am that—”

Aunt Sam waves away the attempted handshake. “We don't need you, sister, are you blind? I showed up, didn't I? Now I have to get back to my job, so if you'll excuse me . . .” She claps impatiently. “Come on, let's go, get your stuff.”

I hold out my hand to Denny, and he grabs it with a sweaty palm, but not before stuffing his drawings back into his bag along with the four-color pen. (It's probably not on purpose—he's tired and overwhelmed—but in this family you never know.) Cass reluctantly peels herself out of her chair, gazing almost wistfully at the vending machines, knowing that where we're headed won't be nearly this good. Aunt Sam takes off like a race walker, and we rush to catch up, but as I'm stepping out into the hallway, Janet shoots me a look of real sympathy and presses a business card into my palm.

It's not until I'm buckled into Goldie's passenger seat, smelling her signature scent of old tacos and gasoline and looking out her milky windows at the sad, squat, salmon-colored building where we've been trapped for six hours, that I turn the card over in my hand. On the back, Janet has written:

Have you thought about seeking custody of C & D when you turn eighteen? Feel free to call me w/ any questions.

As Aunt Sam peels out of the parking lot, I toss it onto the floor, lean back, and close my eyes. I can't think about that right now—not that I haven't thought about it, agonized over it, since I was too young to even know what it was that I was feeling, that impulse to wake up my sleeping sister and run off into the night. I know what's involved now: the lawyers, the documents, the character assassination of the only person who's ever loved me, no matter how wrong-headedly that love has been expressed at times. But however I spin it, going after custody seems like a sudden-death game that all of us will lose. Because I know I have no future if I stay here. But what kind of future will I condemn my brother and sister to if I leave?

Monday Afternoon/Monday Night

Baltimore, MD

“You pull an all-nighter or something?” my friend Noemi asks Monday, sliding into the seat next to mine in Mr. Medina's AP physics class. She looks me over with a smirk, pursing her freshly glossed lips. “You look like an extra from
The Walking Dead
. But, you know, in a hot way.”

Normally her digs don't really bother me—Noemi's one of those people who thinks true friendship means “being real,” aka brutally honest, at all times, which is both annoying and guilt-inducing, considering how much I hide from her—but right now I can't work up the energy to appreciate her level of realness.

“I didn't get a chance to shower,” I say, flipping my notebook
open. Inside the front cover are columns of handwritten math I spent the night doing and redoing, trying to end up with a number greater than zero. Later today Mom has a hearing to determine her bail, and usually the bondsman will take 10 percent and let you pay the rest on a plan. I have $200 saved, and I get paid again on Friday, but it will make things tight for a while. Well, more than tight, actually. Impossible.

“Okay, but a rubber band?” Noemi laughs, pointing to my DIY hair tie, courtesy of Aunt Sam's junk drawer. “Girl, that's worse than a scrunchie.”

I ignore her. We've been friends since ninth-grade Science Club, back when she had braces and bushy eyebrows, and Noemi made me cry laughing when she did a song parody of Lady Gaga's “Poker Face” called “Fetal Pig.” But now she's part of a different clique, higher on the food chain. She's invited me to some of their parties, but I can never go, so we're strictly classroom friends at this point. It's just as well. Months back, I stopped telling her any kind of truth about my home life.

Luckily, Mr. Medina stands up and drums his fists on his desk before Noemi can ask any more questions.

“Please put away your textbooks and close your notebooks,” he says with a thin smile. “I hope everyone did the assigned reading over the weekend, because it's time for a quiz.”

There's a collective groan, and Noemi scowls and curses under her breath. At least I'm not the only one who's going to fail. And how could it possibly even matter if I do? It's April of my senior year, and I'm not exactly waiting around for the mailman to drop off my college-acceptance letters. I was thinking about it a lot last summer, researching financial aid and trying to put aside some money for application fees, but
then in September all of the drama happened at Mom's job, and everything fell apart pretty quickly. My higher education was just one of the many things lost in the rubble.

“Good luck,” Mr. Medina says cheerfully as he drops a quiz on my desk.

“Thanks,” I mumble, self-consciously pulling the rubber band out of my hair.

I stare at the questions for a few seconds, trying to focus through my exhaustion and see if there's any way I can fake my way through, but eventually I give up and just leave it blank. I don't even write my name on it, but hey, Mr. Medina's a scientist. He'll figure it out.

• • •

I drift through the rest of the school day until it's time to pick up Denny, half-depressed and half-relieved that no one else has asked me how I'm doing. I skipped my usual lunch date with the Science Clubbers—we officially disbanded as an academic group junior year due to low turnout, and Noemi doesn't come anymore, but me, Manny, and Yi-Lo have stuck together, mostly because as the social stratification gradually solidified, we've all ended up belonging nowhere, to no one particular person or crew. But even though they're great, I didn't feel like facing them, so I napped in a corner of the library. When I want to, I've gotten good at hiding in plain sight at school, skimming along the surface without sticking, like everyone else is water and I'm a drop of oil that got spilled in by accident.

I cross the parking lot and wince when I notice a group of guys standing on the grass smoking cigarettes about ten feet from Goldie's front bumper. Next to all of the unassuming compact cars and sleek SUVs, she looks like a joke prop from a movie
set, maybe a comedy about someone's broke 1970s-era grandma who decides to moonlight as a funeral director (Goldie's rear end is so long and boxy, a lot of people assume she's a hearse). The paint, which has faded over the years to the approximate shade of a decaying molar, is peeling around the wheel wells, and dark amber rust coats the back bumper, which is dented in three separate places but doesn't hold a candle to the exhaust pipe, which has detached so far from the muffler that it nearly scrapes the ground. The driver's side door had to get replaced when I was little—Buck left it open after a night of drinking, and it got torn off in a hit-and-run, keys still in the ignition—but the color had been discontinued, so that door is pale and awkward now, like a patch of skin missing pigment. Goldie's namesake golden years—if they ever existed—are long gone now. Even Buck didn't want her anymore—although I guess that's not saying much, considering his track record of ditching things he once supposedly loved.

“Nice ride,” one of the boys, a thick football player–type who I vaguely recognize from my sophomore biology lab, shouts as I shove my key into Goldie's temperamental lock, shifting my weight so I can press it all the way left while jiggling the door handle until it finally gives and the button pops.

“Thanks.” I toss my bag in the passenger seat.

“We were wondering who drove this,” another one in an Orioles jersey says. “We even got a dollar pool going for awhile. I had my money on that janitor with the lazy eye.” The rest of them bust out laughing, and I resist the urge to give them the finger.

“Yeah, well, until I win the lottery, this is what I got,” I sigh, trying to play along. I get in and slam the door, not even
stopping to buckle my seatbelt as I start the ignition and back out of the space.

“Yo, yo!” The football player calls out, motioning for me to roll down the window. I crank it down halfway, and he flashes a grateful smile. “We were just playing. What's your name, beautiful?”

I roll my eyes. “Why do you care?”

He takes a few steps toward the car and shrugs. “We gotta find out who won the bet.”

“Since none of you know my name, I don't think anybody won,” I say. “Besides, I'm late.”

“Come on,” he pleads.

If I waste any more time, Denny'll have to wait alone on the curb. “Michelle,” I say finally, giving him an
are-you-happy-now?
face. I lean over to roll up my window when I hear another burst of laughter.

“Oh, shit,” Orioles Jersey says. “That's her. The one I was telling you about.”

I narrow my eyes. I've never talked to this guy before. I've never talked to any of them.

“You work at the Taco Bell, right?” he asks, barely suppressing a smile. “In Ellwood Park?”

I smile tightly. “Yup.” Once in a while someone from school recognizes me working a shift, which sadly is pretty much the extent of my post–three
P.M.
social life.

But Orioles Jersey looks too excited to be scheming a crappy discount on his Doritos Locos taco. He turns back to his friends. “I told you!” he cries. “Her mom got busted at the gas station last night!”

For a second I can't breathe. Time seems to stop, one hand on the window crank, one on the steering wheel, my foot pressed on the brake, the outside of my body frozen while the inside cracks open.
How can they know?
I didn't tell anyone. Even my so-called friends don't know Mom's history. Hell, I've studied as hard as I have mostly just so none of my teachers would ever have a reason to meet her in person. My whole life outside of school is spent dealing with my flesh and blood, but I've built my entire life
in
school around pretending they don't exist. And now, in a heartbeat, in one humiliating night, it's all come undone. If these guys know, I realize with a nauseating chill, Noemi knows, too. Everyone does.

I step on the gas without realizing I'm still in reverse, so I shoot backward and nearly hit another car that's pulling out of a parking spot behind me. That driver leans on their horn, and I frantically shift gears, tearing out of the lot with cruel laughter echoing behind me.

You only have a month left
, I remind myself as I stop at a red light a few blocks from the elementary school, gulping air and trying to clear my head.
You can make it one more month.
I know I need my high school diploma to have any hope of doing better than my parents. But even after years of going through the motions, all of a sudden I don't think I can do it for another day, let alone an entire month. I feel like I'm caught in an avalanche, standing still while the rocks pile around me, the window of escape closing in with each passing second.

• • •

At Denny's school, Mrs. Mastino meets me at the curb, looking like a bug crawled up her ass and built a two-tiered skyscraper.

“Dennis continues to disrupt class multiple times a day,”
she says brusquely, shoving a piece of official-looking letterhead through the passenger side window. “He's straining our resources to the breaking point, and it simply can't continue.”

I skim the letter, which is signed by the principal.
Hyperactive . . . defiant behavior . . . requires medication . . . pursue another institution more suited to his needs . . .

“Wait, are you kicking him out?” I ask in disbelief, trying to keep my voice down since Denny is loitering a few yards away, throwing rocks at a sapling that's been roped off with a sign reading
PLEASE LET ME GROW!
I'm still reeling from finding out I'm the hot gossip at my school, and now this. “What did he even
do
?”

“He's just . . . out of control,” she sputters. “Shouting, getting out of his seat, fighting, you name it. And don't get me started on the imaginary friend. He needs help he's not getting and we're not equipped for.” She grabs on to the window, the fuchsia nails at the ends of her knobby fingers clattering against the glass, and leans in so close I can smell her perfume. “I need to see your mother,” she says. “You tell her she needs to return my calls. If I don't hear from her by tomorrow, tell her I'm making a decision without her.” Then she turns and walks off in a huff.

“She's mad at me,” Denny reports, a little too cheerfully, as he clambers into the backseat a minute later. His T-shirt, which was rumpled already when he put it on yesterday, now bears an enormous grass stain flecked with dirt.

“Wanna tell me why?” I watch him chew on a hangnail in the rearview mirror, those dark doe eyes staring out the window, already distracted.

“Ummmm . . . I dunno.”

“Yes you do.” I start to merge back into traffic, but I forget
to check my blind spot and almost hit a taxi, the driver of which rolls down his window just so he can call me a blind bitch to my face before speeding away. That makes two near accidents in less than fifteen minutes. I need to get some coffee—or better yet, some sleep—before my luck runs out. I take a detour into a Dunkin' Donuts drive-through, figuring I can kill two birds with one stone. After all, a six-year-old's secrets can easily be bought for a chocolate-glazed cruller.

“So,” I probe again, slurping down my latte. “What happened at school today?”

“I pushed Jayden,” he says matter-of-factly between bites.

I hope to God Jayden is real, and this isn't some weird junior version of
Fight Club
that “Max” is encouraging. “Why would you do that?” I ask.

“He wouldn't give me a dollar.”

“And why did you ask him to give you a dollar?” With Denny, a story only comes out sentence by sentence, on a need-to-know basis.

“'Cause I won,” he says proudly.

“Won
what
?”

“Our wrestling match.”

In a flash I know exactly where this is going, but the big sister in me can't help but hold out a sliver of hope that I'm wrong. “Did this happen in gym class?” I ask.

“No, at recess.”

Uh-oh. “Did Jayden
want
to wrestle you?”

“I dunno.” I glance in the rearview, hoping to see some trace of shame or guilt, but Denny's happily chowing down on the last few inches of his pastry.

“Well, was he having fun?”

“No,” Denny laughs. “He kept squealing, it was so funny.”

I let out a deep breath I've been holding for two intersections. It's moments like this when I can see how parenting can really go wrong. Because I know the right thing to do now is to stop the car, sit him down, and explain in no uncertain terms that jumping a classmate at recess, pinning him to the ground, and then demanding money is called “bullying,” not “wrestling,” and that he will be in serious trouble if I ever hear about it happening again. But in the mood I'm in, with the day I've had and the limited brain function I'm running on, I just don't have the energy to do the right thing. So instead I suck down the sugary dregs of my coffee and drive the rest of the way to the junior high in silence.

For some reason, Cass isn't waiting at our meeting spot when I drive up, even though thanks to our pit stop we're five minutes late. Despite her relatively newfound tween angst, my sister has always been the most punctual member of our family, so it's a little jarring not to see her sitting on the shallow steps outside the gray double doors on McCulloh Street, looking bored and sketching in her journal. (If we had the money for iPhones, Cass would probably be on the five billionth level of Candy Crush by now.)

I dig my phone out of my bag and text
Here
, flipping on my hazards while we wait. I look for Cass in the crowd of rowdy middle-schoolers spilling out of the main entrance about fifty feet away, but her preferred ensemble of extra-large black hoodie, boot-cut jeans, and black Payless Converse knockoffs is basically urban camouflage. Then my phone buzzes, and I relax a little bit, expecting a text back from Cass, but instead I see I have an unheard voicemail that must have come in while
I was driving. And without even checking the number, I know exactly whom it's from.