The Knife and the Butterfly (13 page)

I need out of this place. I’m hungry for a crazy night with my homies, at least with my boy Cartoon. He always makes me laugh and forget what shit life is. And he’s always got a good supply of bars.

When I’m just sitting in here, if I close my eyes, I can almost feel a bar of Xanax in my hand. Once I could have sworn I even broke a block off. I was just dying to put it in my mouth and feel the world go soft and me get invincible. But when I opened my eyes I was just holding onto the corner of my notebook.

Today when I got back to my cell after outdoor rec there was a Bible on my bed, the one Meemaw sent for me when she came last, I guess. It was a real nice hardback, but they cut off the front and back covers.

So far I’ve just held it in my lap and traced the words “Holy Bible” on the first page. She said there was a note in it for me. I’m afraid that if I read what she wrote, I’ll start crying again. Since I saw Meemaw, being here seems way too real, and I can’t stand it. I wish I could go home and listen to my music and hug Theo and feel him lick my ear and even have a conversation with Shauna that maybe doesn’t end in shouting if she doesn’t act like such a bitch.

But Theo is dead, and Shauna is a shitty mom who doesn’t even care about me.

I opened the Bible to the back and read what Meemaw put there. She said I was a good person with a good heart even though I’ve been going with the wrong people. She wrote about how when she got pregnant with Shauna at fifteen her aunt helped her out and told her that God cares about everybody. She wrote that He loves us enough to go look for a lost sheep no matter how far it wanders off. And she said that just because you got lost doesn’t mean you’ll never get found.

It’d be nice to believe her.

I just got done being bored off my ass in group therapy. The guy in charge is pathetic. He’s also what Meemaw would call ugly as sin.

Now they’re saying I’m going to go to another one-on-one meeting. I already know it’s a waste of my time, but I’ve got time to waste, so what the hell? I’ll have to see how long it takes the lesbo to give up on me.

I feel like getting in somebody’s face, talking some shit. But they’ve got it set up so that the hour I get my rec in the TV room, everybody else is down in the courtyard for exercise. And when I get to go out there, everybody is inside except the other “special status” offenders like me.

I hate sitting in here, all this thinking. Today Gray Suit said I should start getting materials through the mail from the Houston school district so that I can keep up with my schoolwork. That makes me laugh. I ought to be a junior but I still don’t even got the credits to be a sophomore. That’s my stupid ass for you.

A girl in another unit killed herself. I don’t know how she did it or anything. Everybody is in lockdown for Christ knows how long. Not much of a change for me since I barely see anyone else, anyway. But no group session. What a tragedy.

I can’t get how anybody could off herself. Yeah, life is lame as hell, but I still like it. Since what happened with Theo and the other thing, though, sometimes I’m sitting here feeling so guilty and bad that it makes me want to disappear. I guess that when people kill themselves they’re really just trying to disappear.

I had this crazy-real dream this morning. It was like from the time before we moved to the Montrose duplex, but even though I’m my right age in it, Theo is just a little puppy like he was when Kevin first bought him. In the dream I come through the door after taking him outside to do his business, and there are these piles of U-Haul boxes scattered everywhere in the living room. Shauna is singing Ella Fitzgerald and taping them together.

I ask her why the boxes are out, but she plays dumb. I tell her she’d better not tell me that we’re moving again, and then I unclip Theo’s leash and watch him go crazy sniffing around the boxes, smelling all the houses we’ve lived in before.

She tells me that she found this great duplex on the other side of town, but I’m not having any of it. I go off on her. “Christ, Shauna! Why do you do this to me? You have no idea what it’s like. All you do is think up ways to make my life suck worse!” I start ripping apart boxes. In real life she’d be on me, scratching at me and screaming for me to stop, but in the dream she just picks up the torn boxes and tapes them back together.

She acts all calm, talking fresh starts and new friends. She tells me the place is in the Montrose and acts like I should be all happy to go to Lamar High.

I tell her to screw Lamar, and I mean it. Lamar is all rich white kids. How the hell am I going to fit with them? I tell her I wish I was black or even Mexican instead of white trash like her.

She stops taping boxes together and just stares at me like if she could make me disappear by looking at me, she would.

I tell her I like the friends I have, and I like the North Side. I tell her if she thinks that I’m going to turn into some faggy schoolgirl just because we move, she’s whacked off her ass.

She tells me to stop, says she’s warning me. And when she says that, I know this is the last time we’re going to move for a long time. In the dream, I know something bad is going to happen, but I’m not going to tell her. I’m not going to tell her shit about the bad feeling I have, because I want her to see what will happen. And to know it’s all her fault. So I just stare at her hard.

She grabs my wrists with her bony hands and talks right in my face, asks me, did I ever think for a second that I might like the change?

That sets me off, and I tell her what I should’ve told her lots of other times. That every time we move she says the same bullshit. But moving won’t change anything for us. That I’m still gonna be fucked-up me, and she’s still gonna be fucked-up her.

Red splotches pop up on her too-skinny face, and she looks like she wants to kill me. She lets go of my arms and starts throwing empty boxes at me. She says, “Sorry, princess, but you’re stuck with me. So shut up and start packing!”

I woke up from the dream screaming how much I hate Shauna right into my pillow like I’m seven. The bitch in the cell next to me was pounding the wall telling me where to shove my temper tantrum.

It wasn’t always like this with Shauna. When I was little, she had this boyfriend, Kevin. The only one I ever liked. He even bought this cool house in the suburbs. We all lived there together. It had a yard with a stone bunny statue in it. Theo loved that bunny, humped it all the time. He loved digging holes in the perfect lawn, too. But Shauna and Kevin split up over some stupid shit, and there went my normal life.

I just counted it up, and we’ve moved 19 times in the last 10 years. 19 times. How messed up is that? All the apartments have the same shitty tan carpet, the same white walls we can’t paint. The same tiny kitchen with an empty fridge because Shauna’s so paranoid about getting fat she won’t keep food in the house.

We move so much that we don’t even bother to break down the boxes anymore. They just get piled up in the garage or in a closet. Shauna used to sneak Theo in so we wouldn’t have to pay the pet deposit. Then we’d throw our shit in the closets, and that was it. It was supposed to be home even though Shauna never put anything up on the walls, never tried to make it feel personal. Even my homeboys who are way poorer than us have moms that put up a crucifix or two, the Virgin of Guadalupe, posters, whatever they have. Something to show that people live in the place, at least.

No matter where we move, there are always liquor stores and alleys that smell like old sex. Shauna gets a different job, but it’s always a crap one. She still comes home complaining about filing papers all day, how she got so bored she fell asleep, how the boss chewed her out for it. Or it’ll be that waiting tables sucks, guys grab her ass, the cook gives her shit when she turns in special orders, the manager cheats her on tips. She’ll still stay out late on her payday and bring home some sleazy guy with a comb-over.

It’s amazing just how dumb she is. If moving could fix everything, everybody would do it. But she refuses to see that stupid “fresh start” idea for what it is— complete bullshit. Once we move, I lose everything I had in the old place. It’s a bitch.

I try to stay in with my old friends. I mean, I have a cell phone. Even when I’m grounded, I just take Theo out for a walk and call somebody to pick me up. But things aren’t the same when you live far away from your homies—you’re not there to know when things go down, you don’t know the talk on the street, you slip out of their minds. That’s why when Shauna dumps me in a new school I have to find a place to fit in fast. Because I can only take being on my own for so long.