Girl Broken (excerpt)

excerpt from Girl Broken, by Shelley Stoehr

chapter 1


         Tweaked,
         Sometimes I am so alive,
         Sometimes I vibrate with joy,
         I create, I write, I become.
         But sometimes, tweaked,
         I am a shadow,
         I do not know myself.
         Or...
         I wish I didn’t.
         I wish the night away.
                             -- Jenna Walker

         
         I huddled in the back corner of their bedroom while my best friend Paige and her boyfriend Kevin fought.  My mouth was dry from the speed we’d done earlier before the fight.  Tears were held back by my clenched eyes.  I couldn’t stand this anymore, I couldn’t stand listening to another beating.  I loved Paige.  I hated Kevin.
         With my fingers clasped together and arms wrapped around my knees, I dug my fingernails deeply into the skin and scratched, the pain feeling good and solid and true and like relief.  I tried to imagine myself somewhere else, anywhere but here.  But that was useless, because where was I supposed to go?  This had been my home since I’d run away two weeks ago and Paige had taken me in. 
         I glanced up at the TV, the noise of which didn’t shield me from the rage-fest going on in the other room, even though it was a rerun of my favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I’d seen throughout its run, and still kept watching every night in syndication... where all the girls wore cute outfits and were strong, strong, strong... 
         Paige was a year older than me.  I’d known her from when she was editor of the literary magazine at my school that I’d worked on too.  Funny that the girl voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in her class should end up here, still dating her high school fuck buddy, the once football star Kevin Shithead.  Kevin was always a loser, even when he was a winner on the field, but Paige?  No one could’ve predicted she’d drop out of college, get herself a big crystal meth habit, and start exchanging blows with a guy twice her size.  Everyone would’ve said she was too smart for all that.
         Maybe one day they’ll say that about me too.
 
         It started out more like we were all just hanging out together -- me, Paige and Kevin -- not so different from when we were all in school together, only now we hung at Paige and Kevin’s house instead of under the school bleachers smoking joints or me and Paige at her house or shit like that, and I didn’t spend time alone with Paige anymore, Kevin was always around.  But you know, like at first when Paige had dropped out of college and started living with Kevin, I’d go over to their house after school and we’d all get high... but then one afternoon turned into an overnight, and another turned into a weekend, and that was when my mother told me if I stayed out all night like that again I shouldn’t bother coming home, so I didn’t.  I was always running away.
         Like, I remembered when I was around four, before my real father left my mother and me, and I got upset over something and threatened to run away, and my mother was so upset she said, “Go ahead,” and opened the front door.  I took my teddy bear and my pillow and a sheet, and I went to the corner of our yard, behind a bush, and set up my stuff -- my world -- and stayed there until it got dark and windy and the shadows looked like monsters.  Then I ran back to the house and begged to come home.

         But now what was I supposed to do?  Now the monsters were real.  Unclenching my eyes, I stared up at the picture of Frida Kaylo’s face embossed on hanging bamboo beads across the bathroom door.  I pretended Frida was my mother, stern, but looking kindly down at me, saying, “It’s okay Jenna, you just get yourself out of there safe and sound.  You just come home baby.” 
         Ha.  Like she’d ever say that.  Maybe she would’ve before Frank came into the picture, but my stepfather had a hold on her.  He made her a different person.  She didn’t love me anymore, only Frank, it was all about Frank, no matter what he did, no matter anything... Frank, Frank, Frank.  I hated that motherfucker at least as much or more than I hated Kevin.  He beat up my mother lots of times, and sometimes he hit me too, so I had a reason to hate him.  Once he twisted my arm so badly, I thought it was going to break.  Yeah, I hated him.  And I hated Kevin. 
         I hated me, for being in this life.  Had it ever not sucked?  I tried to remember... 
         Back before my real father left, I remembered him reading me his poetry, and I thought he was a God, even though he basically ruined my mother’s life, leaving us all alone most of the time... but whatever.  I remembered how every now and then he’d come out of his well of self-indulgence, and dress me up in pretty frilly things he’d bought me at the mall, and dress up my mother too, and we’d go eat someplace silly and fatty and good, like Kentucky Fried Chicken or Dairy Barn. 
         Great, right?  But since he left us, I stopped eating in those places, and I never wore dresses.  So yeah, I guessed I hated my father too.  It was incredible how much hatred I had in my young body.  Nothing-special-me, except for a bunch of notebooks filled with my lame-ass poetry, and a knot of hate inside.  What else?  Fat pouch of a tummy hidden by oversized shirts and big jeans.  Skanky hair no matter what color I dyed it, black today.  No makeup.  Pasty white skin out of place in Southern California for sure...  And now curled up in a corner of a bedroom that wasn’t mine, listening to my best -- my only -- friend get the crap beat out of her -- I was Jenna the wuss, when I wanted to be like Buffy on TV, running out and kicking my sneakered foot high into Kevin’s chin, busting him over backward, knocking him out and ...

         “I’m gonna kill you bitch, I swear I am this time!”  I heard Kevin scream from the other room.  And then the thud as Paige no doubt hit the floor, or the wall, or tumbled over some piece of furniture.
         Gripping my knees tighter, I thought, Wasn’t this what I was running away from?  The only difference between the fights at my house and the ones here was that Paige gave as good as she got. 
         I heard the crash of a dish or a lamp breaking, and hoped it was against Kevin’s big fat head, the scum sucking bastard.
         Jeez, what the fuck happened?  We were all just sitting around, passing a pipe, getting all spun, getting our tweak on, smoking Kevin’s meth, when pow!  It all blew up.  I think maybe Paige called Kevin a homo or something stupid like that, just joking around, and then out of nowhere he hauled off and punched her in the cheek.
         “Jenna, you’d better go,” she’d said.
         So I’d slinked back to the bedroom, to this corner to hide.
         It smelled rank in here, the residue of three unwashed bodies hanging in the air like smog.  No one had showered in days.  We had more important things to do, right?
         Not.
         I missed school, crazy, huh?  I mean, I hated all the cliques, and the stupid rules and the homework of course, but it was safe there, yeah, there was that, and also there was the literary magazine, where I kind of fit in, and I made, like, a contribution or something.  Where I mattered.  Damn.  I remembered before my mother became my-mother-and-Frank, when she was just Mom, and she -- we -- had our problems, but she’d sit on the edge of my bed at night, and tell me about how much she’d really wanted to go to college, but then she got pregnant, and I wasn’t a bad thing, but still, she hoped I’d get the chance to do what she didn’t, like go to college.  I really wanted to, I dreamed about it, even more after Frank came along, because college meant freedom, right?  Only now, freedom was Paige and Kevin’s smelly bedroom, stomach cramps, and feeling more confused than I ever had before.

         The bed was unmade, and more than tousled, it was a wreck.  It looked like wild tigers had done battle there.  In a way, they had.
         Crumpled in the corner was a half-finished quilt Paige had started making out of Kevin’s old tee shirts.  The tee shirts were skanky to begin with, and even worse now that Paige and Kevin had been sleeping, or fucking, or whatever all wrapped up in the quilt. 
         Laundry everywhere, and in the corner across from me was Paige’s sewing machine, which last night she’d wielded like a club at Kevin, making him back out and stay out when she locked the door on his ass.  But of course she let him back in after he’d outed his rage on most of the rest of the house.  She always let him back in.  Maybe she loved him, but truth was, last night he had the drugs.  Most times he had the drugs, since he was the one with the fancy job that paid so well.  And that always went a long way toward our forgiving him.  Shit, what a mess we’d gotten into, Paige and I.

         “You fucking bastard!  You fucking fucking bastard!”  Paige yelled from the living room, “Look what you did to me!  I’m bleeding, Goddamn I’m bleeding!  You’re trying to kill me is what you’re trying to do, isn’t it!  I don’t have to take this from you, not from anyone, I...”
         “I’m killing you?  Look what you’re doing to me!  How can work if my hand is broken?”
         Kevin worked as a graphic artist,  Mr. Big Time Artist, gets paid like fifty grand a year just out of high school, designing logos and shit on his computer for products made in third world countries for pennies......
         “Your work your work your work, that’s all I ever hear!  What about me?  What have you done to my face?  What about my work?”
         Paige worked every now and then as a model, she was petite but beautiful, even now, when she wasn’t taking care of herself, only Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.
         Another crash of something being thrown was followed by the louder crash of what sounded like glass breaking, maybe a lamp falling.  Then Paige started screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God oh my God,”  and next thing I knew she was opening the bedroom door, and coming in with a line of blood sliding down her forehead, a patch of hair partly pulled out of the top of her head, a bruised cheek, and she was jumping up and down like she was standing on hot coals.  Her bare feet left bloody footprints everywhere she hopped.
         “Jenna, there’s glass in my feet, glass in my feet, help me Jenna!”
         That brought me out of my slump in the corner and rushing to her side.  First I shut the door and locked it so Kevin couldn’t come in and do any more damage.  Then I picked Paige up -- she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds.
         “I stepped in the glass when the lamp broke,” Paige said.  “There’s lightbulb glass everywhere, Jenna it burns!”
         Her cheek was starting to swell up too.
         While I picked glass out of her feet with tweezers, Paige sucked and bit down on a washcloth.  Meanwhile, Kevin threw things around the house for a while.  Soon though, he was at the bedroom door.
         “Come on guys, let me in.  Paige, honey, that was an accident, I swear, come on.  Come on!  I’ll get you high...”
         “Maybe you’d better...” Paige began.  Her foot was almost glass-free, as far as I could tell.  I wanted her to go to the hospital, but she said she was too high.  I worried about infection though.  I didn’t think I was doing a good enough job.  The glass was so small, and there was so much of it, and so much blood in the way of me seeing.  Pinprick bubbles, like those red hot candies I ate when I was a kid, but these were discs of blood, bubbling out of the holes in Paige’s feet. 
         Paige started to slide away from me.  Tossing the washcloth aside, she said, “I’m gonna let him in.”
         “No!”
         “Jenna, it’s my house, don’t tell me what to do.”
         She had me there. 
         So Kevin came in and hugged her, lifting her off the ground and carrying her out to the couch in the living room.  I just stood there, looking dumb and feeling dumber.  I pushed back my black hair, and shoved back behind my ears the two blond streaks Paige and I had bleached last night while we were projing out.  I looked down at my uneven fingernails.  Backing up, I rolled up my sleeve and noticed that the old bruises Frank had so kindly given me -- the most recent ones even -- were gone.  Even the self-inflicted wounds I’d given myself -- when everything became too much for me and I needed some release and control over my world -- even they had turned to scars, white and innocent, except for the scratches I’d made tonight, but that was nothing. 
         “Everything changes and everything remains the same,” I thought.  Well, this time I wasn’t playing along.  Instead I pulled my duffel bag out from under the bed and started stuffing it full of my dirty clothes, rummaging through the piles and stink on the floor, trying to recover something of myself.  I grabbed my poetry notebook, and a couple books I kept rereading, like Smack and Closer and Crank -- I liked to read about people doing drugs, because it was so much like my life these days.  I especially liked Crank right now because it was about my fave drug, and because it was written in free verse, and I wished I could write poetry like that. 
         I loved reading about fucked-up lives, because it made me feel better about my own, and I thought someday maybe I’d be able to write about my life and make other kids feel less alone... God I was rambling, God I couldn’t believe I was doing this.  I was leaving.  Paige was my best friend and she was in trouble, but I was bailing.  I was going back home.

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