thirteen

We were thirteen, and I knew enough to know that was absurd.

We still shared a schoolyard with children learning their ABCs, and girls our own age still wore training bras.

Aren't our brains, like, too underdeveloped for this?

A few nights, I just watched.

They came in fun colours, like the vitamins a mom would set out with your breakfast

I found the whole thing anxious and boring. Anxious because it was drugs, and we were thirteen, and what if we got caught or what if something happened. Boring because they bored me.

Nothing happened.

I made sure they had water and popsicles and candies to suck on.

"You'll bite your tongue off," Kallie had said one night.

A small trickle of blood came from her mouth a while later, and she looked pleased. I knew she'd done it. When I looked at her, I wanted to call her a liar.

"I know," I wanted to say, "You did that to yourself."

I felt very young and very old all at once.

They asked for lotion—lotioned themselves from head to toe.

One night, one of the girls did a runner. Just opened the front door to suburbia and took off into the chilled night air, down the street in nothing but shorts and a tank top.

I worried about her, but I didn't go after her.

There were babies to look after, real babies. Six years old and one year.

I don't remember their names, but I remember caring about them. I remember feeling sad for them.

Every weekend their mom would leave. She was pretty and young and had a thirteen-year-old she trusted to handle things.

"Where does she go?"

"To the bars in some small town. I think a guy lives there."

They had family photos in the house. She had a husband. I remember wondering how things had fallen apart so quickly. They'd had a baby only a year ago, and now they were getting a divorce?

Except they weren't—he just worked out of the city for months at a time, and neither of them cared, I suppose.

I sat on a bed with the 6-year-old once, playing a game or reading a story, I heard laughter downstairs, and I was so angry.

I was angry that no one cared that there were children upstairs. I was angry that I would put a child to bed who had a mother but seemingly didn't. I was angry that I had to do it at all—that I was expected to.

I didn't want to handle it.

I wanted to call my mom.

I wanted to tell her what was happening and that someone needed to hold these babies or feed them right and love them. Because surely, I didn't know how.

But I didn't want to ruin the fun. I didn't want Kallie's mom to be in trouble. I didn't want my mom, who also had a seventeen-year-old who just couldn't seem to keep it together, to realize that a house she'd deemed safe by proximity in our good neighbourhood probably wasn't.

"Give me one."

No one teased or questioned it; they just handed over the small plastic bag.

I don't remember what it felt like, only that I didn't care for it. I didn't understand it. I was bored by it.

I stopped going.

I started to see my childhood best friend, Maddy, a lot after that. She was pretty, athletic, loud, adventurous, and young, my age but young.

She lived a few blocks away, in the opposite direction from Kallie.

Her mom was in the midst of a divorce. She was older than most moms because Maddy had been a "surprise." A blessing, she'd say, but a surprise. So, the rest of her kids were grown and gone. She'd done it all, seen it all.

We were in the eighth grade, just a few months away from high school, when she offered to buy us booze.

She promised it would stay within the walls of the house, and my parents wouldn't have to know. She just wanted us to get a feel for it so we could test our limits and learn our boundaries.

When she presented us with those sickly-sweet orange coolers, I winced. Alcohol had never really interested me. I didn't feel mystified by it or interested in it.

We drank them anyway.

We had one each. Then shoved two more under our thick sweaters and walked to the nearby park.

There were always kids in that strange age range where you have some sense of freedom without actually having any, and you crave it always. You know how to sneak alcohol and ask people outside the convenience store to buy you cigarettes.

Uncool teens acting very cool, leaning against slides and monkey bars we earnestly used only a few years earlier.

By then, I'd decided I liked Logan. He was in high school already, two years older than us, and seemed nice and attractive enough to like, so I guessed I did. I showed him the stashed coolers under my sweater and shivered when the air hit me. He offered me his jacket.

I was only wearing it maybe a minute, not even long enough to brag, when the sirens hit and the park was lit up with red and blue. Everyone scattered in different directions. We hopped a fence and then another and another until we collapsed on her lawn, one cooler lost to our epic and brave journey.

The patrol car circled the block.

"It's almost 2 am," they told us. We nodded.

They asked how old we were and I told them we were 16.

Maybe they believed us because it was dark but perhaps they didn't because we weren't.

"Do you live here?"

"Yes."

"Go inside."

We did.

I didn't drink much after that. All we could get our hands on were drinks that seemed to be a half pound of sugar and something that tasted like mouthwash. The group favourite was Troika which smelt like hand sanitizer and cost about $25 for more than a litre. Everything was vodka.

I was immediately and violently ill whenever I drank any of it.

My entire body would flush, an ache in my collar bones that radiated and buzzed down my arms and go on and on and on until I'd have to peel my clothes off and stick myself to the coldest surface, let my body wretch and wretch until I'd vomited everything.

I'd find out a few years later that I'm alcohol intolerant, specifically triggered by vodka.

But I'd given up trying long before then. Found my way to pot. I loved it immediately. It calmed me down. It made me laugh. It made me hungry. I suffered far fewer embarrassing stories and hallway whispers than most.

I had a starring role in only one story that would go down in infamy.

There was a birthday party. Someone had made an ice cream cake that was immediately forgotten in favour of solo cups and bongs. I smoked my own joint and remembered that cake. In a haze, I found myself alone in a tiny storage room in front of a deep freeze. Opening the lid, there it was, creamy and beautiful.

"Fuck yes."

Then the door opened.

I turned, and there he was. He was the hottest guy in our grade and he'd been calling me a dirty hippie for two years. I closed the lid.

"What are you doing?" He asked

"Waiting."

"For?"

"You."

He looked confused. I had no reason to wait for him. I hadn't even spoken to him. I was 16 and stoned, and I wanted to eat an ice cream cake at this dumb birthday party by my fucking self. I pushed myself on top of the freezer.

"Come here."

He did. We made out on top of the freezer until I felt he was sufficiently distracted and my job was done, and then I pushed him out of the room.

Then I ate some of that cake alone as I'd intended.

Upstairs my best friend sobbed in a bathroom. Wrapped in teenage angst and hormones, she could be prickly, angry, and deeply unaffectionate.

She wanted to be alone, but I stayed—shoved myself into a corner of the bathtub as she refused to look at me or tell me why she was so upset. I waited her out.

Suddenly, she confessed something to me quietly. She'd made out with that guy—the hot one from on top of the freezer—at a party the weekend before. I hadn't known, and she hadn't stopped thinking about him, and he hadn't looked at her since.

"I just want him," she whined.

"I just made out with him on top of a freezer."

She turned her startling green eyes on me. "You what?"

"I don't know," I felt deeply guilty, "there was a cake inside."

She choked, and then she laughed, and then I laughed. We left, and we laughed the whole walk back to wherever we slept that night.

I went to a performing arts college with less than twenty students, which became lesser and lesser as we viciously vied for the same thing. There were no parties or binge drinking, or even any outings. We worked quietly and quickly and most kept to ourselves.

If school was a competition, I won.

My instructor called me into his office, "I want you to go to this interview. You're ready."

I wasn't supposed to be graduating for at least two, maybe three months. I wasn't ready. But I went. I got the job, and I left the school and the city.

I was alone and I was terrified. I was working most hours of the day and waking up every morning feeling like I'd made a massive mistake. I hadn't, I was just 19 with no idea what I was doing, only that people seemed to believe I could and I couldn’t understand why.

As I became an adult, people I loved became sicker and sicker with addiction. I stopped smoking pot almost completely. I'd found alcohol that didn't upset my entire system, but I never drank alone. I was afraid that if I did, I wouldn't stop. I'd fill the hole, and then just like them, I'd never learn how to be whole on my own. I went for runs, and I journaled and worked and tried to make friends.

I came home for a weekend to go to a party where I felt 13, lonely and bored. I wanted to leave.

The best friend I'd made a few years earlier, Elliot, cornered me in the empty kitchen. Most people had settled into the living room for conversations or the basement for beer pong, and I hovered in the kitchen, feeling entirely silly in my cheap white dress.

Elliot smelled like whiskey while he hugged me and I wanted to cry. I'd missed him.

We'd had plans to grow up together. We'd rent a house, spend afternoons drinking beer, working on our art, and break into stunning careers before we were 25.

I cried when I took the job that meant I'd leave our dream behind.

He pulled out of the hug in that kitchen and looked at me for a long time with big open eyes. A nearly childish, wide stare. He took a deep breath before he told me, calmly, that he was in love with me.

I pulled away from him, startled, and hit my hip hard against the stove. I was angry immediately, my cheeks flamed while my hip bruised, and I mumble a weak “ouch.” The anger bubbled into my chest—because I was gay, because people had been telling me he was in love with me for years and I chose not to believe them. We slept in beds together when we were drunk. His mom knit me a sweater for our graduation. He kept telling me I was his best friend and I felt my trust had been broken. What could I do with that?

I loved him, but I couldn't be in love with him. If I could’ve, I would've wanted to be. He was so good.

And I was so mad because he was drunk.

I was sick of my phone ringing in the middle of the night, unknown numbers and familiar voices with whispered confessions. I was so tired of people telling me things that weren't true because they were using and they knew what I wanted to hear. I’d grown an irritation that buzzed under my skin as people made promises and told me they loved me. I was just so fucking sick of everyone being wasted on something all the time.

But it wasn't his fault. I wanted to be gentle with him. I should've been. It was just—well, there were so many things.

"What am I supposed to do with that?" I asked him.

"I just needed you to know."

I left. He called me so many times, he left slurring voicemails I deleted and never answered. I went back to my small town and my small job. I re-read his texts, "I'm sorry, I was drunk," over and over and felt no relief.

I didn't drink for a long time.

A man I thought I knew told me he was in love with me.

I found a person I loved, cold and blue, on a floor and hit her so many times before calling our parents, “I can’t get her to wake up.” And felt an overwhelming nothingness when she gasped for breath.

People hated us as they vomited on themselves in the back of vans on the way to a dry-out centre.

Life was so tiring.

When I moved back to the city, I found comfort. I could drink and be fine. The world didn't end, I didn't crave it in the morning or when things got hard. I started smoking pot again. It calmed me down, it made me laugh. It made me hungry.

I took mushrooms a handful of times with my friends. I cried the first time because I felt like me—present and responsible and in control and so profoundly, disappointingly myself. I'd wanted drugs to be a void, even if I never took them. I wanted to believe that somewhere there was a way to just not be myself for a while.

I was bored with myself.

I wanted to escape, and it wasn't happening.

But the second or third time, I learned to enjoy them for what they were and felt all too proud for simply having a nice time.

I begged my roommate to come to this EDM show with me. It was my co-worker's birthday, and she'd always been excessively, exceedingly lovely to me. When she sheepishly asked if I would be interested in going to this live show to celebrate her 37th, I swallowed down the price of tickets and said yes—emphatically.

Matt, good-natured and so easy, said yes. He liked live music and whiskey.

We got there, and she was alone.

I asked about her husband. He stayed home with the baby. And her friends? Coming, she said.

There were three of them. I thought back to days she'd cried to me in the bathroom and the coffees we'd shared in her office. I'd always thought of her as a sort of leaky faucet, spilling out without control. I hadn't realized I was actually just in her circle—one of five.

She got adorably drunk. "Mom's night out!" They all chanted, and Matt and I stood off to the side a bit while I apologized to him on a loop for pitching this night as an in-and-out affair.

"We can just leave whenever. I'm sure she won't notice." I'd said.

Eventually, she asked me if I wanted to "score" in the alley. I laughed because it sounded so seedy and suspicious coming from the mouth of this suburban mom who I only knew sitting in a blazer in her office next to family portraits.

I asked Matt if he wanted any. No, he'd brought his vape pen.

We went outside—me, her and her curvy friend with the insane curly hair. A guy stood there anxiously bouncing his foot and the exchange was made quickly. She turned back and announced, "To the bathroom."

The bathroom? Fuck, it'd seemed seedy and suspicious because it kind of was.

"Dumb stoner," I thought to myself as we marched back inside with the bag of cocaine I assumed would be a Ziplock of weed.

I don't like coke. It makes me angry.

She lined it up, wide-eyed, on the hard back of her red wallet. She yammered and mumbled and stumbled over her words quickly and excitedly. It'd been years, I couldn't tell anyone at work, her husband could never find out. Was I sure?

Again, I felt bored. "I'm sure."

The friend took her bump and turned back to me, "What's your sign?"

"Cancer."

Her eyes were frenzied like I'd said something important.

"I knew it. I'm a Scorpio." She wound her fingers into the hair at the back of my neck and whispered to me, "We're like sisters." Then she kissed me hard and square. Her breath was sour, her lips were chapped, and she pulled away with a toothy grin before offering the wallet up to my nose.

I looked at them, their excitement. I felt the overwhelming emptiness in my chest. I felt sad for someone, them or me, and how dull I found the whole thing to be.

I sniffed it through a receipt from a kids' play centre and wondered, idly, if there are people who believe mothers don't behave this way.

I wiped and sniffled and felt the light burn in my crooked twice-broken nose, now irritated by thin white powder.

"Well, that took for-fucking-ever," Matt yelled over his whiskey.

"It wasn't pot."

"Did you do it?"

"Yeah."

He laughed, slung his arm around my shoulders, and we moved into the crowd of dancing bodies. Mostly I felt sober and a little annoyed about the money I'd spent.

I found the group, buttoned one of their torn open shirts and hugged them goodbye.

Matt checked his watch in the cab, "We have to be up in, like, less than 5 hours," he groaned and then called the wing place near our apartment to make sure we could have some delivered.

He's a sneaky drunk. You never know until it's too late. As he poured himself a whiskey at our bar cart, I knew it was too late.

We settled on the couch, waiting for our food. He kept dozing off, and I kept saving the glass tumbler he refused to relinquish from falling to the floor and sloshing all over our new area rug.

When the food arrived, I ran to get it. I had the energy.

I decided to take the stairs and took a turn too sharply, smashed myself against a railing and yelped in pain. A bruise blossomed on my arm before I got back to our apartment.

I tried to sleep and kept waking with my knees knocking and my thighs wobbling. Matt came to my door, bleary-eyed and dull. It was 6:30 am. I hadn't slept for more than seven minutes at a time.

"We gotta go, G."

I looked at my packed bags on the floor. We were driving to his mom's, 2.5 hours away.

"Yeah, I'm ready."

He turned away and called over his shoulder, "Happy Easter."

Jesus, I laughed. It is fucking Easter.

And while I sipped my third mid-afternoon coffee over a card game with his mom and sisters, I guessed if I was going to decide I probably never had to sniff anything through my nose ever again, Easter was as good a day as any.