As She Grows Read online

  “Bitch,” she spat back, bolting up from the table and pushing me back into the brick wall. Before I could say or do anything, Jasmyn stormed into the house. I watched her through the glass, talking to a youth worker, fingers ferociously pointing and zigzagging in the air, as if she were spelling out each letter. A couple of minutes later, Pat, the house supervisor, poked her smiling face out the back door. “You must make a good first impression. Jasmyn asked for you to be in her room. Is that okay?”

  I shrugged my shoulders unconvincingly, as if it didn’t matter, which seemed to satisfy her and she went back inside. And I sat on the picnic table, finishing my smoke. Thinking maybe I was mistaken to believe that leaving my home was the same thing as leaving my life.

  I return to my room, hide the plastic bag in with my dirty clothes, and climb into bed. I can’t handle school today. I curl up in a fetal position, realize what I’m doing, and then unfold into a straight line. I get all hot and sweaty and I start to see fuzziness out of the corners of my eyes. My heart feels like a basketball thrown up against the walls of my hollow chest. A few minutes later Jasmyn comes back into our room, hair dripping, wet feet slap-slapping the wood floor. She looks my way and kisses her teeth. I switch to face the wall. I feel her eyes on my back and hear the psshh of my expensive L’Oréal hairspray. There’s a pause and then the psshh again and I picture Jasmyn spraying the can into the room like it was air freshener. My hairspray, the cause of many past arguments, seems stupid to me today. Everything seems stupid to me today. She turns the radio on, loud bass vibrates my bed. She tries her hardest to get a reaction out of me, but I retreat under the covers like an unimpressed animal at the zoo.

  When Jasmyn leaves there is silence for only a few moments before, next door, Nicole begins her morning routine of refusing to get out of bed. She has composed it well: the rattle-bang of clock radio hitting the wall, the hollow-thump of a pillow, a bassthud of a foot hitting drywall by my head. And then there are words. Nicole has the foulest mouth of all the girls in the house and can combine swear words together in ways I never thought possible. The chaos is intercepted with Staff’s warning of grounding, which means Nicole won’t be allowed to visit her boyfriend this weekend. Minutes later, I hear the shower running.

  We are a family of women. We have no fathers. Only eight shift-work mothers who proclaim themselves rule-maker, lesbian, feminist, activist, college graduate, do-gooder, “I’ve been there,” and rah-rah cheerleader. Together, they are a collective, featureless being named “Staff.” It’s unimportant to specifically name them. They are all the same. But no matter what I call them, they’re still better than Elsie.

  I hear a faint knock which is meaningless, because Staff are entitled to enter any time they want. I stay buried under my covers, closing my small air hole around my mouth.

  “Snow, you okay? Feeling sick?” I feel the bottom corner of my bed sink, springs squeaking. It’s Miranda, my “primary,” the youth worker who has been assigned to me, which essentially means she’s the one who is paid to annoy the hell out of me. I know it’s her because I can hear the crazy collection of bangles lining both her wrists clang and jingle as she speaks. Fortunately for me, she’s the coolest youth worker in the house. She gives us all henna tattoos on our birthdays and sometimes teaches us how to make the wire-and-stone jewellery she sells as a side job. Unlike the other youth workers who recite psychology textbook words from their mouths, Miranda will talk to us straight up. Tell it like it is. Which makes me wish it were Tina at the end of my bed today because if you feel sick, Tina is the one who’ll make you tea and tuck you under cozy blankets in front of the TV. Miranda is more likely to just tell you to get the bug out of your ass and get on with it. And Staff lets her get away with this kind of talk because she’s the first one to clean a girl’s puke or unclog a toilet.

  “Yeah, my stomach hurts,” I groan, in my most sleepy, pathetic voice.

  “Jasmyn mentioned something was up. Should I call the school and let them know you won’t be in?” Her voice is warm and soft, unlike the annoyed, harsh tone I heard a few minutes ago outside of Nicole’s door. It makes me believe she’s up to something.

  “Okay.” I am taking advantage of this. Of being new. Of being good. Of being a resident who hasn’t yet slipped sleeping pills in Staff’s drinks in order to extend a curfew. There are benefits to being well behaved in a house of six troubled girls. I am spared the threat of consequences, loss of privileges, and time-outs in a locked room, for now. Staff calls it “honeymooning,” because I’ve only been here three weeks. They are waiting for me to flip onto my damaged side like a helpless bug, legs flicking in the air, so they can reach out and turn me over. They are convinced that one day I will snap: throw a chair, stab a fork in an unsuspecting hand, take the van for a joyride. They can’t imagine that any girl who leaves her home is a person in control of her life.

  “You’ve been really tired lately,” Miranda says. “A lot. Maybe you’ve got a bug. Do you want me to make a doctor’s appointment for you?”

  “No appointments,” I murmur from under the covers.

  “What about your appointment at four with Eric? Think you can go to that?”

  “I’ll try,” I say, knowing that if I don’t go, I’ll be on “sick routine” and won’t be allowed out of the house tonight. I poke my head out from under the covers, just halfway, my chin still hidden. Miranda is smiling at me. She raises her hand to move her dyed cherry-red hair, cut like a geisha girl’s, out of her eyes.

  Left alone in the silence of my room, my reality pulsates in my head. Tears start spilling out of me and I press my face to the pillow, muffling the ugly noises coming from the depth of me. For the first time since I’ve arrived at this house, I want to go home. I want my piss-stained curtain, my Billy Bee glass, my fraying pink towels and sixties flowered sheets. I want things that aren’t bought in bulk or bleached white. I want that dull tint of colour: a yellowed mug, a yellowed pillowcase, the yellowed rim around the toilet bowl. I want stains.

  “You idiot, you idiot, you idiot, you idiot,” I repeat over and over and over again. I clamp my jaw down harder and harder each time, suffocating the words, until my teeth are clenched shut and my tongue spasms about my mouth like a trapped moth. I count backwards. I have missed at least three periods. My mind races through the options. Abortion. Adoption. Keep it. Live with Mark. Wish it away. This baby will ruin everything. I press my hands into my stomach, squeeze skin in my fists, and then push hard and deep into me. I squeeze out the thought of a baby. I squeeze out Elsie’s laughter.

  And it starts as a fleeting thought. Just like that. Whipping past my mind like a swooping bird. But then it returns, slower this time, lingering long enough for consideration. Till soon, all I’m thinking about is the paper clip on the table beside me. And I need it. I need it. I need the release of me. I reach for the curled wire and decisively open it up. Then I extend my arm and start scraping back and forth, line by line. Pain tingles up my arm, shooting through my numb legs. Thin white lines fade like streaks of dissipating smoke, and so I press harder and harder. And I feel like I’m going to burst if I don’t split myself open, so I press a little harder and faster. Till finally skin spreads, parting like clouds, exposing a vast red expanse of me. And I recline back into my pillow, drop the paper clip to the floor, my mother’s disappointment seeping from skin like warm red tears.

  In the afternoon I drape a blanket around my body and head down the creaky stairs to make some toast. They call it a group home, but there is nothing homelike about a group of troubled girls other than the house where they eat and sleep. It stands neglected among other three-story Victorian houses on a shady treed street in the west end. Brown prickly bushes surround its bay windows, cigarette butts are scattered like dandelions, half the lawn is paved for parking, and a British flag lines the top window, even though no one in the house has ever been to Europe. My first day, I stood on the curb with Aunt Sharon and just stared at this house for a goo
d long time before we took a step forward.

  Inside it’s like a hospital or a motel: a place that is not interested in making you so comfortable that you’ll desire a longer stay. If someone was looking for beauty, say an abandoning parent or an optimistic social worker, they might find it—if the lights were low and it was the day after house-cleanup chores. They’d wander through the house and say something like oh, it’s so antique, while running their fingers along the dark wood trim and hand-chiselled mantel. Or they’d crank their necks and look to the high ceilings and the little stained-glass window in the stairwell and comment on how lucky we are to have such a nice, big house. Perhaps, on a well-chosen day, this visitor wouldn’t see that the photos on the Welcome to Our Home bulletin board are replaced so often it’s hard to find cork thick enough to hold a thumbtack. Perhaps they wouldn’t notice the names penned on food packages in the fridge, the locks on cupboards, the reused blackened birthday candles with dried cake on the bottoms in the kitchen drawer. Perhaps they’d think that jingling noise down the hall is a playful puppy and not the keys dangling from Staff’s wrists.

  And the girls here are the same. At first glance, they seem normal. But shine a bright light into their corners and you’ll see the dirt caked high. They are incomplete, missing parts. Not like people born without sight or limbs or even without a second kidney. They are missing the stuff you get after you’re born, the stuff that makes you connect to people. It’s like I’m talking to them and they are only three-quarters there. It sometimes makes me wonder if Elsie actually did something right with me, though I’d never admit it aloud.

  I mostly keep to myself, which seems to suit everyone fine. There is no one here exactly pleading for my friendship. Because I go to a regular school in Don Mills and not to classes in the basements of churches or office buildings, the girls in the house think I’m a suck-up. They make jokes about my schoolbag and my pencil case and can’t seem to get over the fact that I actually use my locker. I just laugh off their comments, thankful for this gap between us, this hour-long commute on bus and subway, a distance that ensures I am nothing like them. And it’s funny that way: I only know who I am in terms of who I’m not. I am not the girls in this house. I am no one at school. I am not Elsie.

  At first Carla was envious I moved into a group home. She thought it sounded cool having no parents around. She imagined slumber parties and giggling girls giving each other manicures and lip-syncing to old Spice Girls songs in their pyjamas.

  “What are they like?” she asked my first week. I had called her collect from the phone booth on the corner because at the house the phone is in the hallway and Staff listens to every word you say, even though they pretend they don’t.

  “They’re idiots,” I said. “Real fucked-up idiots. I don’t like any of them.” And I described each one to her.

  Jasmyn lived with her mother in Jamaica, but was sent to her white father’s house in Winnipeg when she was six. She ran away from home eighteen times until she finally took a bus to Toronto when she was fourteen. She’s tall, has a great body, and lots of tattoos, but the best one is of a teddy bear peaking up over the top of her nipple. She’s a bit of a slut, but it’s only Tracy who gets called that because once when Nicole called Jasmyn a slut, Jasmyn pushed her head through the front-door window. “Basically, Jasmyn is chickenshit, but she’s got a lot of friends, so watch your back,” Tammy warned me. “She also had sex with her dog,” she adds.

  Tammy is the fattest girl I’ve ever seen up close, but she has a pretty face. She came from Port-something up north. Apparently she and Jasmyn hate each other, but Tammy’s too much of a freak for Jasmyn to care. Pretty much all of the girls say she’s crazy. She wears dark-blue eyeliner and her eyes are crossed, though you can barely tell because her bangs cover them. She wears short miniskirts that barely cover her fat thighs and tops that make her breasts look like fleshy stomachs. “She goes out with guys who fuck her two at a time, waddles home with her legs spread wide, crying because it’s too sore to close, and then Staff sends her to the clinic on the corner for a STD test,” says Jasmyn. “She’s a baby. Cries that her stepfather fucked her for three years and thinks that gives her rights to sleep with your boyfriend. Watch your back.”

  Nicole’s downright ugly and there seems to be nothing that can help her looks. The girls have tried, told her what to wear, how to cut her hair. She calls herself Goth, but I think she’s just trying to cover that ugly face as much as possible with all that white powder, black eyeliner, and lipstick. She writes things all over her knapsack like Die, Die, Die and Fuck Jesus. She keeps AWOLing, ending up in Brampton or Orangeville till the cops bring her home. “Nicole’s just white trash,” Tammy says. “She’s a dyke. There are a lot of dykes around here. She hates men but she’ll tell you she’s bi.” Apparently, she got charged last week for beating up some ex-girlfriend with a broken beer bottle at a party. “She and Mute Mary had a thing going,” says Tammy, “till Mary started seeing this married guy.”

  Tracy is the real cocktease of the house. “The slut who will do anyone,” says Nicole. “She thinks she’s so much more mature than everyone, but just last month she held a fork to Staff’s neck and got timed out from the house for two weeks.” Everyone but Jasmyn pretty much leaves her alone. Apparently, she’ll be moving back in with her parents soon, once she’s successfully completed anger management and finishes family counselling. “Watch her though, she’ll turn on you just like that,” Nicole says, snapping her fingers.

  Mary is the quiet one who just stares at me. Everyone calls her Mute Mary, and when she does speak, she raises her voice at the end as if it were a question. Mary has the kind of looks that you can’t remember. Looks you can’t really describe, just mousy hair and thin lips. “Like white trash,” Tammy says. Other than that she seems to be totally normal, and I have no idea what she’s here for. Apparently Nicole says when Mary was little her mom would make her use a kitty-litter box instead of a toilet and she ate out of cans until she was six. But no one else knew that. She’s been in the suicide ward six times this year and now checks herself in regularly. “She’s a nice girl,” Staff said, suggesting I join her in the living room to watch TV one night.

  “Sounds like a bunch of freaks,” Carla said, slightly happier that she wasn’t missing out on anything fun.

  “How’s everything going?” Eric playfully turns in his new swivel chair, pressed between the filing cabinet and the small desk. Each Tuesday at five o’clock the group home forces me to come to this office. It’s a condition of staying at the group home. Each Tuesday, Eric sits staring at me like this, rolling a pencil in his fingers as if rubbing a genie lamp, wishing for significant words to come out of my mouth. He thinks he’s being subtle, gently coaxing me to release. I sit there, unresponsive, focusing on my swirling stomach, my racing heart. My entire body worries about this pregnancy. All of it. Down to my toes. He clears his throat and my eyes frantically search the posters of rainbows and people climbing mountains for hints of what he wants to hear.

  Eric is a long, skinny man, with a big Adam’s apple that he tries to cover with a reddish beard. But I like his gentle eyes, poking through the harsh contours of bone, like small pools of water in rock. They tell me he’s a good person and that is why I secretly don’t mind coming here almost every week. I notice he’s wearing the same socks as last week.

  “Fine.”

  “I thought we’d talk about your mom this afternoon,” he says carefully, lifting his pencil up to his lips. I look at him suspiciously. Until now we’ve talked about normal things, like school and friends. I think how ironic it is that he bring up the topic of Mother today. I wonder if he can tell I’m pregnant. I pull one knee up to my chest and pull my sweatshirt over it to cover my stomach.

  “You mean my grandmother?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Your grandmother.”

  “Nothing to say,” I reply.

  “I think what you mean, Snow, is that you don’t want to talk
about it, not that there is nothing to say.”

  I start to get angry—it’s the last thing I want to talk about today. “Whatever.” I bite off pieces of my Styrofoam cup and then thhpp out tiny pieces like watermelon seeds.

  “You don’t like her?” he asks, leaning forward and moving the garbage pail closer to me.

  I forcefully spit a large piece of cup into the bin. “No.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “No.” I spit another.

  “You can’t think of any reasons you’d have such strong feelings?”

  “No.” I start to squeeze the few remaining pieces of the cup tightly in my hand.

  “I know this might be tough to talk about. It hasn’t been that long since you left, but it might help you get through this better. You have any ideas on how you came to think this way?”

  “No.”

  “No idea why?” His persistence bothers me. His mouth gaping open and shut like that. He reminds me of a baby bird, its stretched transparent neck frantically bobbing up and down until a juicy worm twice its size is shoved down its throat.

  “Well, let’s see.” I crush the remains of my cup up into a little ball and chuck it across the room. “She’s a crackhead alcoholic who lets her boyfriends fuck her, hit her, then leave her. I’ve had to clean up after her barfing all night, undress her when she’s shit herself, and make up excuses when I call the ambulance. That’s just part of it, but that may be why I don’t like her.” Of course, he already knows that. He’s read my file. But it buys me some silence in our hour time slot.

  Eric’s tone changes. “Was she always like that?”

  “No. Only during my lifetime.”

  “That’s a lot to deal with.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t deal with it anymore, right?” I stare at the corner of the table, chew the inside of my cheek.