Chapter 1
I handed it back, and she poured some out into the still, dark waters of the quarry below. “I offer this wine to the gods, in celebration of Rhea’s birth.” She smiled and took another swig. “Happy Birthday.” She pressed play on the boom box, and “Fade into You” by Mazzy Star wafted into the air.
I wouldn’t turn eighteen until the next day, but I never celebrated on my birthday. Always the night before, and usually alone or with a friend like Shelli. I didn’t want a cake or presents or to be the center of a hot, whirring celebration.
All I wanted was one moment where I would look out and feel a connection to the world that was soft and hopeful.
I would know it by a sound in my throat, like a cross between a grunt and a sigh.
It hadn’t happened yet, but I was sure it would come.
I could feel its potential in the air like downy oxygen.
The trees rustled behind us, and two boys from our high school emerged carrying a twelve-pack of Icehouse like they’d slain a bear. I had seen them before, watching from the shadows at parties as I hooked up with their more confident friends.
I grabbed the bottle from Shelli and took a large gulp.
They watched us now as they set down the beer and each took a can. One of them, Rick, had a trace of dark hair on his upper lip, and he approached first, with doughy Steve trailing behind him.
“What’s up?” Rick asked, putting a bit of asshole into his voice.
I held up the bottle in explanation, and we turned wordlessly back to our celebration.
“Lesbos,” Steve murmured behind us. It was the only way he could explain why we hadn’t been waiting for them. Why we were content to be here alone with no one watching us.
Shelli whispered, “Let’s go.”
“No,” I whispered back.
Rick cracked his beer and gestured toward the water. “Bet you never jumped before.”
“Bet you haven’t either,” I answered without thinking.
He snickered. “We’ve done it a bunch of times.”
I turned back and looked him in the eyes. They were gooey and pink like they’d smoked in the front seat of his grandma’s Nissan Stanza.
“Okay, let’s see it,” I said.
He glanced at Steve and shook his head. “Naw. I just wanna get hammered.” He took a lusty sip of beer, and a bit of it dribbled down his acne-studded chin. I couldn’t imagine a more repulsive creature.
I peered over the edge. It was clear all the way down, with no outcroppings to catch on. The water was famous for its depth; a few kids had tried to swim to the bottom, but they’d never found it.
I stood up, pried my Chucks off at the heels, and tucked my socks inside. My feet were soft and pale, like new babies against the smooth, sunbaked stone. I walked up to the very tip of the ledge where it jutted out over the water like a prehistoric diving board.
“There’s no way,” Rick mocked.
It was my favorite time of day, just before the sun set, when the light was almost purple. The California air was so hot and dry it smelled like dust. Thick yellow-wooded pine extended for miles in the distance, and birds dove and emerged from the treetops like they were pollinating them.
I felt the soft grunt in my throat, and I knew this was the moment.
I took a few steps back, then I ran toward the ledge and jumped.
The air was slick against my body, the trees rushing up to meet me.
I entered the water like a needle sliding into a vein.
I let my body sink down until I hit a cold, silent place. Then I opened my eyes, and there was only murky dark blue, like I’d discovered a sliver of night below the water. I floated there, unmoving, just a chunk of debris.
Something smooth thumped powerfully against my ankle, and I jerked, the sudden hot movement sucking down my oxygen.
I kicked against the water and propelled myself upward, my lungs screaming and my head pulsing.
I broke through the surface gasping and barely able to tread water.
It seemed darker out, as if I’d been down there for hours.
My limbs were nearly numb as I pulled myself up on the far bank and lay there for a while, allowing my body to return to itself.
I scanned the ledge above, and I was surprised that no one peered over.
I hadn’t heard a single cheer or scream.
The skin on my arms prickled where it had come back to life, and I shot to my feet and moved toward the trail that led back to the ledge.
My wet jean shorts rubbed against my thighs and the rocks cut into my bare feet, but the pain quickly receded as I ran up the steep incline.
When I got to the ledge, it was empty save for the twelve-pack and the bottle of Mad Dog on its side, dribbling red onto the rock.
I heard murmurs in the trees, and I followed them to a cleared spot where Steve had Shelli pinned to the ground with one meaty knee.
Rick stood above them with his fingers hooked in the waistband of his pants.
I charged at Rick, knocking his body down hard against the earth. We tussled, and he turned over and straddled me.
“I thought you said they were sluts,” Steve said to Rick.
“I know she is,” Rick answered, sneering down at me.
I struggled against him, but I couldn’t throw off his weight. I was trapped and utterly helpless, and the claustrophobic panic I sometimes felt rose up like a toxic gas. All I wanted was for it to stop.
My body took over, and my head smashed into his, his nose bursting into a mass of lurid blood. He rolled off me clutching his face, and I crawled toward Steve, who immediately stood up and raised his hands in surrender. Shelli remained on the ground, unmoving.
I pulled her up to standing, but when I let go, her legs went limp beneath her. I crouched down and threw her tiny body over my shoulder.
As I trudged through the woods to Shelli’s car, my heart slowed, and my creature instincts bristled, then receded back to their hiding place. I was a girl once more.
In my bedroom, Shelli cleaned the blood from my face with shaking hands while I inhaled In-N-Out.
“Are you okay?” I asked gently.
She nodded feebly. “Yeah, I’m fine. Nothing really happened. I was just scared.”
“I would have been scared, too.”
“No. You would have fought back.”
I didn’t know how to tell her that it wasn’t me who had attacked Rick. It was this creature inside me that I couldn’t control.
She picked up a bag of frozen pizza bagels and pressed it to my bruised temple. Then she wrapped an ACE bandage around my head and secured it in place. “Okay, you’re all set.” I looked in the mirror at the ridiculous wrap, and we both giggled.
We got into bed, and Shelli dropped off almost immediately. The clock next to me read 11:30 with its grains of demonic rice. I lay there perfectly still, listening to the white noise of Shelli’s breathing, waiting for my body to shut down.
But I knew there would be no sleep tonight.
Birthdays filled me with dread. They always had, and back then, I had no idea why. When I was little, I thought it was the flu. But as I got older and noticed the sickness always dissipated the next day, I began to think of it as a premonition of the year’s coming misery.
My room in that house never shook off its guest-room origins, even though I’d lived in it since I was seven.
The pastel plaid bedspread and matching curtains, the white wicker furniture, and the fake flowers sprouting from their gray-pink vase all felt temporary, like I was living on the set of a sitcom that was about to get canceled.
The only distinctive feature was the gold cross on the left wall, which was more like the set of Carrie.
My aunt Lorraine’s attempt to passively exorcize whatever evil lay at the center of me.
I absently traced the long purple birthmark that stretched across my collarbone like a scab that wouldn’t heal. People at school gossiped that it was one sliver of an enormous tattoo or a scar from whatever killed my parents.
For me it was like a brand, marking me as the property of some distant, mysterious place, separate from everyone else.
My father died before I was born, and then my mother died when I was five.
I was sent to live with my father’s parents, who croaked just two years later, and then passed along to my father’s sister, Lorraine, and her husband, Carl.
I was like a pestilence, sowing death wherever I went.
My aunt and uncle had only survived out of sheer awfulness, preserved by their meanness like cucumbers in vinegar.
They almost never talked about my parents, except to say that my father had been a good, God-fearing man until he met my mother, a “white-trash drug addict” who was apparently the devil incarnate. They didn’t call her by her name, only her with a curving condemnation to the letters.
I didn’t have any concrete memories of my mother—only a few glimmers.
Some nights I would dream of being held against a warm chest, and I would feel this comfort that was almost muscular in strength, but I could never see a face.
When I woke, I would be filled with this intense yearning to be touched, and I’d wish I hadn’t dreamt it at all, that it was better not to know how it felt to be loved like that.
But I much preferred this dream to the nightmare I sometimes had, of squatting with my small child’s body in a tight, dark space, desperate to escape, a feeling of intense, claustrophobic panic suffusing my every cell.
I would wake with sweat rolling down my chest, and while it was a relief to be in my room where I could move around freely, I never quite shook the feeling of being trapped.
In lieu of a clear mental image or any physical picture of my mother, I had conjured many versions of her in my mind.
But there were two main ones: a soft, fiercely loving woman like Sally Field in Forrest Gump, and a cold, thin-armed, tragically beautiful dope fiend like Kelly Lynch in Drugstore Cowboy.