Open Mind: Chapter Seven

It was all downhill from there. I made several panicked calls to my mom, but each time the call went to voicemail. It wasn’t like her to not pick up the phone. One of the girls offered to take me home with her, but it was clear that she was making this choice for Heather, not for me. I was in no position to refuse her, so when her father showed up in his little white minivan, I got in without a word.

“Where to …?” Her father asked the question with a leading tone, having clearly not been given a name for this poor girl he was tasked with taking home.

“S-sorry,” I stammered. “I’m Skylar. I live on Pacific, right off the highway.”

“Those apartments on the south side? The Grove?” The man had a judgmental tone that made me recoil.

“That’s it,” I said. “The Grove.”

The girl turned on the radio to drown out the silence that fell after her father got the information he needed. I stared distantly out of the window, eager to put the whole night behind me. Rain started to drizzle outside -- slowly at first but picking up speed as we traveled. My heart was still racing, but it was beginning to fade. My breathing was still ragged as I attempted to calm my nerves -- focusing on the rapping of the rain splashing against the fog-covered window.

When we arrived to my apartment, I thanked the man in hushed tones. He waved my direction with a half-hearted smile and sped off without even checking to see if I made it into my apartment. I shrugged the gesture off and climbed the slippery stairs to my apartment. The deck light that had been flickering off and on every night since we moved in had been replaced -- a overwhelming white light that illuminated every inch of our deck space. I guess Dave has been here.

At my front door, I was greeted by an unusual sour, stale stench. It called to mind the smell of the foggy smoke that had lingered throughout Grandma Helen’s house when I was younger -- a specific brand of cigarettes that I could not place. I walked through the front door to the sight of my mother --dressed in nothing but her lacy white bra and panties, sitting on the lap of some man I could not see from around her. My stomach turned upside down as my mother jumped to her feet and screamed. I slammed the door and stumbled backwards. The combination of the smoky haze and the breath caught in my throat made me light-headed and I stumbled forward. My outstretched hand made contact with the mossy brick wall as I steadied myself. I staggered over to the wall beside the front door, leaned my back against it, and slid down until my butt hit the wet lumber deck.

After several minutes, the front door opened and Dave strutted out. He nodded in my direction awkwardly before my mother shooed him out with a hushed “I’m so sorry,” as he glanced back at her. My mother stood in the doorway for a moment, her silky pink nightgown wrapped haphazardly around her torso. She struggled to catch her breath. She did not look at me, and instead she closed the door. While some parents might have tried to comfort me and reassure me that everything was okay, my mother knew better. The absolute last thing I wanted from her was to hear her explain herself.

I allowed my thoughts to race -- something I have been told many times before and since then to never do. I recognized the stinging betrayal of my mother. She was willing to sully Dad’s memory with Dave, of all people. Goddamn stinky, blundering, muttering Dave. A man whose greatest contribution to our family had been lightening the shade of yellow in our bathtub from piss-yellow to inside-of-a-banana yellow. I convinced myself in that moment that I hated Dave. That nasty orangutan was all I could think of.

I bolted to my feet and threw open the front door. With tears streaming down my face, I stormed to my bedroom. I crossed to the closet and threw open the wooden sliding door. I saw several flannel jackets on hangars and cried out from the pit of my stomach -- an aching, guttural scream that had been building for months. I ripped the jackets from their hangers and threw them around my bedroom. One of the sleeves of a blue flannel jacket, one of my favorite jackets, ripped and it threw me even deeper into my rage spiral.

My mother cracked open my bedroom door and watched in horror as I continued to throw my tantrum. She said nothing at first and only watched. I sensed her behind me, but I didn’t stop. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father’s guitar, placed so delicately on his stand. I approached it like some feral beast, completely overtaken by primal fury and disgust.

“Skylar…” I heard my mother call out weakly. “Please…”

I lifted the guitar from the stand and turned to face my mother. My hands threatened to snap the bridge of the instrument in half as I walked towards her. I wiped a few stray tears from my cheek and laughed.

“What do you want?”

“I’m… I’m so sorry, Skylar. I didn’t think you’d be home.”

“I tried calling,” I snapped. “But I get it. The bases were loaded and you were on third.” I mocked her with a swing of the guitar like a bat. “But I ruined your home-run.”

“Stop, chiflado” she growled. “I’m not doing this with you. Not tonight.”

“Then go away. Leave me the hell alone.”

“So you can destroy your whole bedroom? I don’t think so.”

I took a step back. I lifted my bat to point to the ceiling fan. “If I bust out this light, you’d have to call Dave back, right? Sounds like a win-win to me.” I pulled the guitar back and smashed it against the ceiling fan. It sent a shower of broken glass down on the floor.

In a instant, Mom lunged at me. I sent the guitar crashing into her side with a sickening thud that echoed out from the body of the guitar. She grabbed the bridge of the guitar with one hand, ripped it from my grasp, and tossed it onto my bed. With her other arm, she wrapped herself around me and held me tight. She drug me, kicking and screaming, away from the bedroom and tossed me onto the hard vinyl floor of the hallway. I tried to crawl away on my stomach, but she grabbed my left leg. I kicked at her with my right, but she grabbed that leg too and dropped to her knees. She stumbled up to my torso and wrapped me in her arms in a gesture that felt simultaneously reassuring and threatening.

“Enough, Skylar.”

I cried out, every muscle in my body firing and trying desperately to claw out of her grasp. I could smell the combination of Dave’s smokes and Dad’s whiskey on her breath and it threatened to choke me, but I continued to struggle for several minutes. My mother didn’t relent, and we eventually wore ourselves out. We fell asleep, curled together on the checkered hallway floor, in a messy pile.

Everything was downhill from that night. The girls had made sure that no one in the entire school would talk to me. Overnight I had gone from the awkward, quiet girl in third period to a psycho bitch who could snap at any moment. I thought I knew what being alone felt like, from months of rejection and isolation from just about everyone at school, but that was just a trial run for what being a pariah really was.

Due to the amount of alcohol at Heather’s party, the girls all made a pact to not talk about what had happened. Candice had tried to pass off her cuts as an attack from a very large house cat, which her parents accepted with some skepticism. That was until the following week when they paid Heather’s parents a visit and found that they did not, nor had they ever, owned a cat. The grapevine eventually made its way back to my mother. She confronted me one night on the back porch from the open doorway.

“Heather’s parents are claiming that you attacked one of the girls at her party?”

“I don’t remember.” I kicked two empty beer cans under the seat. They were Dave’s from his visit -- he hadn’t come back for them, and surely he wouldn’t miss them.

“Is that why you came home early that night?”

I didn’t know what else to say. The odds were not in my favor.

“They forced Candice and I to play Bloody Mary. The lights were off, Candice tripped, and she got beat up by a razor or something. I don’t really know.”

“Bloody Mary…?”

“You know, you say it a handful of times in the mirror --”

“I am familiar,” she said before stopping herself abruptly, mid-thought. “Is that why you asked me to take the mirror out of your room?”

“N-no,” I snapped with embarrassment. “I just didn’t like it.”

My mother scoffed, then brushed her curly bangs from her face. “Heather’s mother sounded very serious, Skylar. She does not want you around her daughter anymore.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “You were the one who forced me to go to that stupid party, don’t forget.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Mom muttered dismissively. “Another good thing I try to do for you that you had to ruin.”

I opened my mouth to argue, then snapped it shut. I was not going to argue with her. We had just finally gotten to a point since our fight on that night where we could co-exist in the same room -- albeit awkwardly.

“That was unfair, I’m sorry,” Mom said. She walked onto the balcony and took a seat in the chair beside mine. She took a deep breath before speaking up again. “I’m just worried about you, chica. I’m trying to take things slow with you and respect how difficult this must be for you, but it will never be like it used to be.” I said nothing, and she sighed. “You cannot spend your whole life looking backwards.”

“That’s the only part that was any good.”

“Skylar…” Mom cooed. “You’ve got your entire life ahead of you. You can make it anything you want to make it. Moving here was the first step, but you’ve got to take the next steps on your own.”

“That first step was into dogshit, Mom.”

“Don’t say that word, Skylar!”

“Fine, into puppy-caca.”

Mom laughed, in spite of herself. “You know what I mean, young lady.” She sighed. She looked out over the treetops, her gaze distant and contemplative. She said nothing for several moments -- a rare moment of silence from her. When she spoke again, her voice was unusually soft. “Your teacher called me this afternoon.”

I was genuinely caught off guard. “Which one?”

“Mr. Murphy. He mentioned that the other students were treating you badly. Avoiding you and refusing to work with you. He just seemed worried --”

“I wish he would mind his own damn business,” I snapped. I had liked Mr. Murphy, but he was completely out of line. Why didn’t he talk to me first?

“He said he was going to ask you, but he didn’t want to upset you. He came to me to see if I knew what was going on. I think he may have thought you’d shut him out.”

“He would be correct.”

“Please don’t, Skylar.”

“Why can’t you all understand that I like being left alone? I like being able to be with my own thoughts. Other people annoy me, like buzzing gnats in my ears, droning on and on about parties and boys and One goddamn Tree Hill. I don’t care. All of their lives are so uninteresting to me. None of this matters!”

I stood up, light-headed with woozy legs, and walked over to the railing of the balcony. I wanted to get away from my mother, but I knew that there was no place in our apartment that I could go that she wouldn’t. I felt like a caged tiger, my frustration and desire to run bubbling beneath my toes.

“No one wants to be alone, Sky. And you are not alone.” Mom rose to her feet. “As long as I’m here, you’ll never be alone.”

“And how long is that? How long will you be here?”

“Skylar.”

“Here today, gone tomorrow.” I hopped up onto the rail, my bony thighs resting on the rickety wooden frame. I could see my mother gasp. The wood groaned beneath me. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s really worth it. All of this hurt. And that’s when I realized. You can’t miss someone if you never even know them, right?”

“Enough, Skylar. Please stop.” Mom took a step towards me, and I leaned back threateningly. I extended one arm out to her, pointing accusingly with my finger and swaying with the rain-slicked breeze.

“You’re the last one left who can hurt me. The one who never takes no for an answer. The one who will never leave. And the one person, more than anything, that I never want to see ag-”

Before I could finish what I was saying, the wood snapped beneath me and I tumbled backwards off the balcony. I watched in horror as my mother’s face slipped from view. The last thing I remembered was the wind against my back and the stinging of the cold rain against my face before everything went dark.