Chapter 11 Britt
Britt
Britt got her period for the first time a week after turning twelve.
She knew it was coming because girls at school were always talking about it.
Becky had gotten her period a few months earlier.
Rainbow had made her a crown of daisies and her favorite sugar cookies in the shape of hearts.
It was a joyous event at their house, celebrated as a crossing into sacred womanhood.
At her own house, Britt crawled under the blanket on her bed, tucked her knees to her chest, and cried.
It was gross, this blood coming from her body, announcing so violently that she was no longer a girl.
She had a stash of pads that Becky had given her.
She didn’t want to tell her mother that she was now a woman because she knew her mother would never commemorate it the way Rainbow had.
Her mother would just sigh and say something like “Welcome to the worst years of your life.”
When there was a knock at her bedroom door, Britt panicked that it was her mom, that she had seen the pad wrapping in the bathroom trash.
“Yeah?” she called from under the covers.
“Just wondering if you still wanted to go shooting today.”
It was Steve. It was Saturday. They always went shooting on Saturdays.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
Whenever she had a buildup of feelings, shooting seemed to help.
It was like pushing a reset button on her psyche.
She got out of bed and put on a pair of baggy jeans, looking at her backside in the mirror to make sure the puffy pad wasn’t visible.
Then she opened the door to Steve’s smiling face, and off they went.
After they’d each fired a round with the Steyr AUG, Britt was already feeling better. She’d started to load a new magazine when Steve put a hand on her wrist. She looked up at him, scared she was doing something wrong, though she’d loaded magazines dozens of times by then.
“Kiddo, there’s something I need to talk to you about,” he said.
She knew, from just his tone, what he was going to say.
Steve had never proposed to Britt’s mom.
He had bought the ring. But the all-important question was never popped.
Britt waited and waited, hesitant to ask Steve outright what was taking so long.
The thing was, she didn’t need to ask. She’d overheard enough arguments through the walls to know that her mother was backsliding.
She’d stopped taking her medication, saying it made her feel like a zombie and she was tired of feeling like a zombie.
At first, Steve tried to coax her, doling out the pills like usual at the dinner table.
But after she made a scene a few times with Britt sitting right there, he took his attempts to persuade behind the closed door of their bedroom.
When those attempts failed, he gave up, said, “I can’t force you. ”
Predictably, her mother’s wild mood swings returned.
They seemed worse than ever, but maybe it was just that Britt now had a peaceful reprieve to compare them to.
The contrast was stark. She started drinking more again, and Steve suggested AA, said he would go along with her.
He made a show of going to Al-Anon for himself.
When he kept going, saying the meetings helped him, Britt knew the end was near.
The people in those meetings had people like Britt’s mother pegged.
They would make Steve see the light, and when he did, he would leave.
They sat at a wooden picnic table directly behind the shooting range lanes, Steve on one side, Britt across from him. He placed his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together, and let out a long exhale.
“I think this might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
Britt was already shaking her head, denying what was coming. Her eyes were already filling with tears.
“You’re leaving us,” Britt said.
She couldn’t bear for him to be the one to say it. She had to break her own news, to feel some sense of control over the situation.
“I’m not leaving you, Britt,” he said.
Britt felt hopeful for a second before his shoulders visibly slumped. His eyes were cast down, staring at his hands.
“Losing a relationship with you is like an unwanted side effect of this,” he said. “I would never want to leave you.”
“But you are,” she said.
“Things with your mother . . . they’ve just become untenable,” he said.
She imagined he had rehearsed this line, searched for the exact right word. Untenable.
“So it’s over, then? She knows?”
“I’m telling her tonight. I wanted to talk to you first,” he said.
Before the shitstorm was what he meant.
“I’ve really tried,” he said.
Britt stared off at the targets in the distance and said, “I know.” Because she did know. He had tried harder and stayed longer than he should have.
When she looked back at him, their eyes met, and she had to restrain herself from grabbing his hands and shouting Take me with you. He must have noticed her eyes were pleading for something, though, because he was the one to reach across the table, to take her hands and squeeze them.
“I’m so sorry, Britt,” he said.
A fat tear rolled down his cheek. It was the first time Britt had ever seen a man cry.
“I knew this would happen at some point,” she said.
It wasn’t a should have known situation. She had known, all along, that it was too good to be true. She was upset that she’d let herself get swept up in the goodness and been willfully ignorant to the truth.
“I’m sorry that your life with her up to this point has caused you to expect so little,” he said.
It was the most poignant thing she’d ever heard.
“You’ve been like a daughter to me,” he said.
He must have thought she would find that endearing, but it just made her furious. She wasn’t really like a daughter to him. If she was, he wouldn’t leave. Or he would take her with him.
“Where are we gonna go?” she asked.
He was leaving them, yes, in all the ways that mattered. But they were living in his home. Britt and her mother would be the ones doing the actual leaving.
“I’m going to tell her there’s no rush. You two can stay as long as you need to. I’ll help you find a place,” he said, rushing to fill in the blanks. So many blanks.
Britt had become so settled into this life at Steve’s house.
She had made the mistake of getting comfortable, relaxing her vigilance, daring to calm her mind instead of always thinking ahead to the next potential crisis.
She could feel the parts of her brain that had previously been dedicated to managing the chaos of her mother awaken again.
“The minute you tell her it’s over, she’s going to want to leave,” Britt said.
Because her mother was never reasonable in these situations.
“I’m going to try my best to keep things mellow,” he said.
“Famous last words.”
That made him chuckle.
“Maybe we can still go shooting sometimes?” Britt said.
Her voice was small when she said this. She felt silly admitting her desire to stay in touch. She braced herself for his rejection.
“I’d love that, but I just worry about your mom finding out.”
“She won’t find out.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We should probably wait awhile, let things settle, then see.”
She knew then that she would never see him again. Britt stood from the table, unable to see any point in continuing the conversation.
“One day, she won’t be your problem to manage anymore,” he said. “I hope you know that.”
Britt stood, hands on her hips. “She’s my mother,” she said. “She’ll always be my problem.”
He shook his head in adamant denial of this.
“No,” he said. “You’re going to grow up and go off on your own and have your own life. You are meant for more.”
Britt shrugged. “I don’t know if it matters what I’m meant for.”
“You can’t let her drag you down, Britt,” he said. “You just can’t.”
“I’ll try to remember that over the next six years when she’s having one of her phases.”
Britt started walking back toward the car. The pad between her legs felt especially bulky. It seemed somehow appropriate that she was bleeding. The wounds weren’t visible, but they were there.
The drive back was silent until they were a couple of blocks from the house.
“I want you to have the AUG,” Steve said.
Britt kept her gaze out the window as she took in his offering. He wanted her to have the rifle—her favorite one, the first one she’d shot.
“And the 1911 if you want it,” he said.
Her favorite handgun.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
She didn’t want his pity gifts, his attempts to assuage his own guilt.
“I want to,” he said. “I’m going to leave the bag with them in your room when we get back. Please take them. You can sell them if you want.”
They were expensive. She could get at least a couple grand for them.
“Okay, fine. I’ll sell them. We’ll need the money,” she said.
She was just trying to hurt him. She knew she would never sell them. She knew she would keep them forever.
Britt was right, of course. When Britt’s mother got word she was being dumped that night at dinner, she told Britt to pack her things.
Steve was kind and did his best to convince her to give it a few days so they could find an apartment, but she was stubbornly committed to making it worse than it had to be.
Britt filled two trash bags with the possessions she’d accumulated under Steve’s roof and threw them, along with the duffel bag with the guns, into the trunk of her mom’s car. Within an hour, they were gone.
“Where are we going?” Britt asked as they pulled onto the freeway.
“I don’t fucking know,” her mother said.
Her mother was driving too fast, ninety miles per hour.
Britt hoped they would get pulled over. She hoped her mother would get into an altercation with a police officer and get thrown in jail for a night or two.
Britt would have to go to some kind of juvenile center for kids whose parents were fuckups, but that didn’t sound so bad.
As her mother sped along, undeterred, Britt watched her face. It was a face that looked so much like her own that hating it felt wrong. She hated it, though. She hated her mother.
I wish you were dead, she thought.
It was only when her mother said, “What did you say?” that Britt realized she’d said the words out loud.
“What?” Britt asked.
Her mother took her eyes off the road.
“What did you just say?” she asked again.
“I didn’t say anything,” Britt said.
Her mother stared at her until a car honked at them, laying on the horn for several seconds. Her mother was drifting into the other lane.
“Mom!” Britt said.
Her mother corrected, and they were back in their lane, her mother’s eyes on the road. She didn’t ask again what Britt had said. Britt continued thinking it:
I wish you were dead.