Mick and michelle, p.18
Mick & Michelle, page 18
“I’m so going to regret this,” she sighs. “I have your back. But don’t you dare do anything until I’ve checked the disclaimers and the instructions.”
All the disclaimers in the world can’t stop me now. A few days from now I can stop this shitty body from turning me into a monster.
Clicking “Place order” feels better than any victory.
Chapter 27
I’M SO chirpy I’m not even sad that Gabriel, as predicted, doesn’t show his face at Grandpa’s on Monday morning. I won’t rat him out just yet. The sharp stab at my heart bounces off without inflicting pain, as if I’ve developed a supernatural shield overnight.
I’ve ordered the hormones.
Stop all the clocks.
Life is beautiful.
I hum as I sand off the old kitchen chairs Ma says will bring in a fortune on the street sale if I give them a bit of shine first and then rub the fine wood with some oil to make them look hipster retro.
My cell beeps. Gabriel after all? I’m broken-hearted because of him and over him at the same time, but still I have my hopes up. That’s typical romance stupidity, isn’t it? Oh, rescue me, Gabriel. Come to your senses and kiss me. Of course I forgive you. Blah. So not happening, even if he comes crawling on his bleeding knees.
I head over to the bench, and my heart beats a traitor’s frantic, hopeful rhythm as I swipe the screen. Okay. It’s Di, sending me a picture of herself in a shimmering white bikini, which accentuates, as she’d put it, her fabulous tan. Isn’t this the kind of picture you send to someone you hit on? Or send to your girlfriends for their assessment?
I’m confused.
Me: Day off? I text.
Diana: Jeez, what a compliment, she replies.
Me: Okay, you look good.
Diana: Had yesterday off until abuela saw my bikini and confiscated it.
Me: Really?
Diana: For real. I still get no more than ten minutes on this phone every other day. Nightmare!
Me: Tough. But you’ll get through it, yeah?
Diana: Hope so. Not that many weeks to go now. Plenty of painting left to do, though.
Me: There’s paint on your shoulder. Ha-ha.
Diana: Yeah, miss you too. Gotta go. Sorry :(.
Strange, how my life is undergoing this crucial change, and then she’s not here. Not that I ever confided in her about much, but still. She’s the one I want to tell first among my friends. If I can work up the courage, that is.
My phone beeps again. Just Ma this time, texting to tell me Gabriel’s called in sick. I snort. The chickenshit coward, bastard, asshole. Couldn’t text me with the fake excuse, no, he messages my mother instead to avoid all contact with the freak. I’m wise to wipe him off my mind as soon as possible, which I know is easier said than done. A huge dam is building up behind my eyes, but reinforced with my mind control that water won’t burst, though. Not today. Not on this high.
I swallow over and over, and I tap my feet, creating a steady rhythm to keep me from falling off the edge of that trembling dam wall.
Returning to redemptive work, the fine dust makes me cough. The sound reverberates through the stripped rooms. Wooden floors and bare walls certainly suck up less sound than the carpets and the frames. This house seems huge now. Not that our house is that much larger. It’s pretty much the same size except in ours there was room enough to expand the attic to stow Ash away.
Once upon a time, this Sunnyside mansion housed two adults, three kids, a dog, and an aging granny—my great-grandmother, who had a room of her own due to her seniority—and this was regarded as a small family for this street. If I’m to believe Grandpa and Dad, most families around here had five kids or more, and various grandparents, and sometimes other relatives crammed into the houses. How do you hide your secrets then? I should appreciate and be glad that I live in a modern world.
As I dust off my clothes, I launch into a bit of step dancing. I have the wrong shoes on for a noisy treble reel. The rubber soles tap too softly against the wood. I knock out a good enough sound anyway. Mixed with my breaths and me counting out loud, I’m not so bad. Probably looks silly, dancing all alone and like a maniac, but it’s better than sinking into darkness and ending up on the tracks.
The echoes reverberate louder than before the weekend. The space taken by Gabriel leaves some emptiness, I must admit. I miss him. There’s no ache in this, only an open fact. I miss his company, his tales, his laughter, his relaxed attitude. His curls.
Why can’t he see me?
If his attitude is what I’ll face on a regular basis soon and far into the future, I should prepare and harden. Grow a shield so that the rejections bounce off and leave me unharmed, when what I really want is to be hugged and welcomed.
Ash says I need to prepare for misogynistic idiots and guys who have no respect for women, which isn’t that difficult when I’ve already partaken in those kinds of degrading, objectifying activities with Gabriel. I sort of know what I’m up against. I also know that Gabriel has this sweet side and that he’s not the only guy out there with that trait. Forced to think about it, I guess I should add my dad to the list of men who treat women like equal human beings.
I am a human being. First and foremost. Only I desperately need to be a female human being.
How many days until the pills arrive?
Chapter 28
HOLY HALLELUJAH, my heart stops beating for more than just a second when I discover my secret treasure, the key to my immediate happiness and solution to some major short-term problems, in the mailbox. I take out an anonymous padded white envelope that rattles a little with a soft, promising sound.
All week I’ve timed my arrival home to coincide with when the mail carrier is usually delivering in our street. I’m lucky that she’s here at a time when neither parent has come home from work.
I run up the steps and fumble with my key, and finally on the fourth try I manage to unlock the uncooperative door and head inside. I rip open the envelope and find ziplock bags with the drugs I need inside. A bit unexpected, really, and cause for concern that they sent the pills without proper packaging, but I can’t stop and care right now.
My future is literally in my hands. Look at this!
Everything will sort itself out now.
“Mick?” I hear Ma say from the kitchen.
Oh shit. Shit. She’s home this early?
I run for the stairs. My stash must go away immediately.
I’m not in a panic. This will work.
Dad is at the top of the stairs, looking down at me, drying his hair with a pink towel. His smile vanishes and his jaw drops—so fast it looks set to roll down the stairs—at the exact moment when he spots the pills. I have one ziplock bag in my hand and the opened envelope in the other.
Too late, much too late, to hide.
Busted, so busted.
I stumble to a halt on the bottom stair, hitting my right toes on the first step, and the bag of pills is knocked out of my hand when I bump into the railing.
In painfully slow motion, I see the pills fan out all over the stairs and ricochet off the steps and the wall to spread all over the hall, into the kitchen and the living room. One single pill disappears under the sofa.
Disaster, disaster, disaster.
“They’re vitamins, just vitamins,” I shout, falling to my knees trying to collect all the little pills littering the floor.
How untrue my words sound. I’m not a good enough liar for this. Who keeps vitamins in a plastic bag, anyway? And who tries to hide vitamins?
Dad stomps down the stairs, careful not to trample and crush anything when he reaches me. He pushes me aside, his hands gentle but insisting.
Both of my parents crouch down on their knees, scooping up pills now.
They don’t say a word.
If Ma wasn’t blocking the front door and Dad’s crouching body effectively barring me from running out the back, I’d be halfway to the tip of Long Island by now. I’m caught in the middle. They’re on the job and have neutralized me already.
Oh, this is bad. This is monumentally bad.
The half-empty bag I clutch is torn out of my hands, and without a word Ma and Dad fill it with their catch.
Dad grabs my shoulder and holds a single pill in front of my eyes.
“Vitamins? Vitamins!” he says, the strained wheeze of the repetition flushing his face beet red.
“Uh,” I squeak.
“Explain yourself,” he adds, his hand trembling. He sounds calm and angry, but his eyes are wide open with disappointment and maybe fear, but certainly desperate for a reassuring explanation.
I have no reassurances for him, not really. My tongue overflows with words that can crush, trample, and obliterate everything in its way. I swallow the flood of saliva.
I don’t know how to say this secret. My truth. I want to, so bad.
I betray myself and keep my mouth shut.
“Nessa,” Dad says with his work voice as he wrenches the padded envelope from its squeezed position under my arm.
“I know,” she says, very steadily. Her voice is flat and neutral, as if in a daze.
“Mick. Please say something,” she pleads. “Please explain.”
My mouth remains shut. A war rages inside me. I want to win.
Ma opens the front door, and I hear the cold sound of Dad taking out his handcuffs. Is he seriously going to arrest me?
“Stop!” I shout, my voice high-pitched and girly. Oh, the irony, if I could appreciate it. “This isn’t what it looks like!” I know what it looks like, but my brain refuses to comply with the truth.
I’m speechless when it really matters.
“Then what does it look like?” Dad’s question is maybe hopeful.
The prison gate rumbles down inside my brain, shutting the words in. I’m left gaping, wordless.
“Mick,” Ma whispers. “You know what we have to do if you don’t say anything.”
My tongue. Always wordless. Why?
“That settles it,” Dad says, so low and stern it’s like a bucket of freezing water thrown at me. The handcuffs jangle, but I’m escorted to the family car without them being used on me. Automatically, Dad puts his hand on my head to prevent me from knocking myself unconscious when I wriggle into the temporary jail. They let me sit in the back unsupervised. It’s a tiny two-door car, so I can’t escape. I have no choice but to go along for the ride.
We drive around our block twice, in the kind of strained silence that threatens to smash your brains in, and I’m starting to think they’re just trying to scare me when Ma takes a different turn. Toward work.
Oh God, they really were serious when they said they’d take us to the station right away if they ever caught us doing something really illegal. A colleague of theirs lost his job a few years back after trying to cover up his daughter’s marijuana dealing. Corruption for whatever reason is not part of my parents’ moral code, and I should be proud. But it feels different when it’s me in the spotlight. Utterly different.
“I can’t do this,” Dad says. “Jesus, I really can’t.”
“Gerry… we have to.” They look at each other, ignoring me in the backseat.
“Nessa….”
Ma gives in. She exits the gateway to the police station and we’re heading back to the house again.
“If we don’t get any answers, you get Dolores on the phone,” Ma says to Dad. Dolores Ortiz is the officer who handles all juveniles arriving at the station. Her voice is like a slow melody, hypnotizing and trained to make amateurs like me spill my beans or more experienced juveniles want to confess to something as long as she looks at you like she genuinely cares. To think I spent time on her lap when I was a little kid. Now all she’d see in me would be a good kid gone druggie. Another sad story to tell the colleagues over a drink.
Dad nods.
“This is it, Mick,” he says. “We want to hear what you have to say. We need to hear you say something to explain. Just the three of us. Okay?”
I’m still paralyzed in the backseat, descending into a zombie state.
“Okay,” I whisper so low the sound could all be in my head.
The car lurches forward, caught in rumbling traffic spewing out toxic fumes until we reach our quieter street.
A few neighbors rush by on foot. Some of them greet Dad, and he waves at them. Smiles as if nothing’s the matter. Martin Frezino salutes us as we pass, and I automatically smile at him.
Tell me I’m imagining that he’s catching my gaze and smirking at me with that otherwise friendly face of his. My face, though, is the face of someone guilty. Guilty as sin, crime or not. Ma says I’m an open book, and there’s no use in arguing against that today. Oh, I used to be proud of this easy-to-read compliment until I had matters, serious ones, to hide. Biting my ass with a painful pinch now, that stupid saying. I would rip out the pages of that open book if I could.
Arriving back home, Ma half hauls me into the kitchen while Dad paces outside. She breathes in short and even bursts, as if she’s running one of her marathons and timing her breathing to perfection so that she can endure the exertion.
I’m in seriously deep shit. What have I agreed to, exactly?
Being hauled into the station instead wouldn’t have felt as bad as this. Can our family, in this house, live with the truth? An interview room would be better. When I was younger, interview rooms were a novelty bonus when sometimes spending a few hours of the day with one of my parents at work. I never stayed in such a room with any criminals, of course, but I liked the ghostly thrill the mere feeling of breathing inside there gave me. The sparse furniture, the bare and mostly dull, sickly yellow or mint walls, and if I was lucky, the rooms with mirrors just like on TV.
That I would almost end up in one of these interview rooms as the suspected criminal isn’t something I foresaw. That our own house would serve as substitute is far worse.
I can’t keep up my walls in here. Not now.
Maybe this is the end of my cop dream too.
Everything could end here.
“Sit down,” Ma tells me and lets go of my arm.
I do as I’m told. I’m the good kid. The good girl, but Ma doesn’t know. Yet.
Everything must come out now. Everything.
Panic scratches at my skin, begging to go farther in and overwhelm me. I don’t know what will happen now. I’m clueless. A deer caught in the headlights would know better what to do than me.
Ma grabs a chair from the other side of the table and sits down next to me.
Footsteps echo in the hall.
Dad also sits down next to me.
I’m framed in by my parents, facing the wall where old, childish drawings made by Ash and me years ago work as a sweet wallpaper. I drew myself as a cop very often. My nickname around the station used to be the Apprentice because of my eagerness to get started on that coveted career I have wanted since forever, but now the tables have turned.
Is this what it feels like to make the worst mistake of your life while not thinking it a mistake because I would probably do the same again? I’m no better than the criminals who don’t regret their crimes.
Silently, I make up excuses. I’m not sure I need them. Depends on what I am willing to confess. The ropes around my tongue loosen, slowly. No reason to hold back when it’s my turn to speak. If they let me.
“Would you like to start?” Dad asks, elbowing me briefly.
Here goes. Kind of.
“What does this look like?” I say, taking a side track. “From a cop point of view?”
Dad tosses one of the ziplock bags onto the table. The pills inside clatter.
“You claim they’re vitamins,” he says.
Ma leans forward and scrutinizes the bag without touching it. “Looks like E,” she says. “Could be Rohypnol.”
Oh God, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Holy Spirit too. They think I’m into wild youth drugs and date rape stuff? They think I deal? Use? Everything? This is sort of expected under the circumstances, but I’m still stunned, unable to move when I hear the actual verdict.
I need to convince them they’re wrong. No other way out.
Next to me, my parents both shift uneasily on their chairs.
A thrumming sound starts, but no one moves. Ma thumps me in the side, and the thrumming stops. My right knee has a life of its own, it seems.
“Mick?” Ma turns, looks straight at me, catches my eyes before I can look down and away, and now I’m caught in hell, with the flames licking my shins. I wet my lips, swallow, but my throat is filled with glue.
If I just confess the pills are kind of illegal drugs, seeing as I should really have a prescription and I’m underage, maybe they’ll let me go to my room, and then I can get out of here, run away, and hide before they find out what the pills really are.
“You’re not charged with anything,” she says. Her eyes are teary. The missing “yet” is there all right. “We just need to know what this is.” She leans toward me. “Where did you get these?”
I clear my throat, swallow a gob that feels like disintegrated vocal cords, if I could have those.
“They’re… hormones.”
“Hormones?” Dad asks. “Steroids? Fucking steroids?” He growls the last word, repeats it once more. A curled-up fist lands on the table, but he doesn’t bang it like he does on the very rare occasions when he’s too upset to contain his anger. Uncle Seanin is usually the one capable of bringing out Dad’s frustrations and making him want a punching bag for Christmas. Never me.
“No! Uh… estrogen,” I stutter. “Nothing illegal,” I quickly add. I’m not 100 percent sure if they’re technically illegal or not. Whatever helps my case.
“Estrogen is for women, usually,” Ma says. “You won’t gain any muscles from taking it,” she says and pats my hand.
“I know,” I say, my voice hoarse. Wouldn’t it be ironic if my voice broke just now, for good, when I sit here staring at that bag containing the cure? After I read it can happen literally overnight, I’ve had a few bad dreams. I’m already in a nightmare of sorts, so why not bring out the big guns.
