Things I saw in the homes that made me frightened of real drugs: a boy who collapsed in a field, blue from the neck up; a girl who frothed at the mouth like a wild dog; a girl who got stabbed in the shoulder during a buy; countless zombie shuffles. Still, I envied the empty-headed place they went to, where nothing mattered and nothing hurt. Cough syrup, those hits of dextromethorphan, seemed like a not unreasonable way to manage my life.
I had a case manager, but I kept skipping our appointments. At these appointments, we were supposed to be getting me signed up for emotional wellness classes and college prep at Bridgewater State, even though I did not want to do any of those things.
“How can we be expected to help those who will not help themselves?” I can hear my case manager saying. I was never able to explain that the help I needed was a different kind.
The Stop & Shop was never robbed while I was working there, but it happened one night, at three in the morning, when the cashier who was always trying to put plastic bags over my head was on shift. The robbers wore stockings over their faces and packed the money into black JanSport backpacks, the kind high school students carry. They were very professional. They were out in under five minutes and it wasn’t until after they had disappeared into the night and the police had been called that the manager found this cashier collapsed in Paper & Plastics, a roll of paper towels clasped to his chest.
After that, people knew the Stop & Shop as the place where a cashier was killed in Paper & Plastics. A heart attack was the official cause of death, but we all knew fear was what got him.
*
On the way home from the Stop & Shop, the bus passed a construction site where a metal skeleton was rising slowly from the ground. A doctor’s office with a billboard ad for the flu shot: GET THE FLU BEFORE IT GETS YOU! Laundry World, a Laundromat with pool tables, and Beauty Island, which sold hair extensions called the Cinderella and body lotion with glitter inside. In East Somerville, we passed the evangelical church and a check cashing service and a discount store for maternity clothes.
At my stop, I would see the same man holding a newspaper over his head, even when it wasn’t raining. At my address, I would see the same woman smoking on the fire escape in a Celtics T-shirt and sweatpants, even after the cold began to settle in. I felt both soothed and suffocated by these routines.
In winter, in Harvard Square, nets shaped like gold stars hung between buildings.
Once I got on the wrong bus. I was not awake and not asleep and when I looked out the window, I was in Kendall Square. The bus stopped. I got out. The sky was a bruise. I was unsure of the time. I stood outside the Microsoft building and watched a boy on a skateboard cut through a barren park. For a second, I had crazy ideas about going inside and demanding a job that had to do with computers, but instead I decided to cross the Longfellow Bridge. I thought I would stand on the bridge and look out at the river and the downtown lights and the Citgo sign beaming out from Kenmore. I would walk down Charles Street and look in the shop windows and up the steep cobblestone hills, observing all the lives that could never be mine.
But when I reached the bridge, it was closed for construction. I followed detour signs through a tunnel, a long concrete tube stained with graffiti. I was alone and the tunnel was dark. The longer I walked, the longer the tunnel seemed.
Sometimes the same thing happens when I walk the Hospital halls: the white path seems to stretch on, the stairwell door moves farther away. The echo of my breath grows louder. We believe what we see, whether it’s real or not.
In my basement apartment, where it was dark regardless of the time, I would take more Robitussin and get into bed in my Stop & Shop uniform and hope for sleep. On the nights where the cough syrup failed to turn my brain to sludge, I would stare up at the ceiling and remember.
My second foster, Ms. Neuman, lived in a yellow house on Ferrin Street, between the water and Bunker Hill park, where an obelisk, a monument to battle, rose above the trees. The day I came, she was waiting on the curb, in a pink sweatsuit and flip-flops, her toenails painted gold.
“Joy, Joy, Joy,” she sang as she walked me up the driveway, her hand on the center of my backpack. White Christmas lights blinked in the windowsills, even though it was August. She smelled of cigarettes and rosy perfume. “Will you fill our house with it?”
In the living room, a boy in a werewolf mask was sitting on the orange shag carpet. The black rubber face was bearded with fur. The eyes were red and hungry. The mouth was open in a roar, the teeth long and yellow.
“Say hello to Marcus,” Ms. Neuman said, as though we were already supposed to know each other. She pulled a pack of Virginia Slims from the waist of her sweatpants, lit a cigarette, and drifted into the kitchen.
“How long?” I asked the boy from the edge of the living room, still wearing my backpack.
“Six months.” The wolf ears on the mask were small and pointed, like they once belonged to a gentler kind of animal.
“And she hasn’t killed you yet?”
“Does secondhand smoke count?”
Secondhand smoke did not count.
The boy told me he could read my past and my future. I sat facing him, my backpack heavy on my shoulders. The carpet was soft. The fangs on his mask were as long as fingers.
“How?”
“Let me see your hands.”
I held out my hands and he started rubbing my palms. His skin was warm and soft and I knew I should have been disgusted or afraid, but instead I felt calmed. He pressed the lumps of bone at the base of my thumbs and the rough swirls on my palms. He asked me to cup my hands and peered into them like I was holding something precious.
“Your right hand is what you have when you’re born,” he said. “Your left hand is what’s been given to you.”
On my right hand, the heart and head lines were straight and smooth. On my left, those same lines were broken and wavy.
Soon I would learn that Marcus always wore masks. The Grim Reaper, the Incredible Hulk, Richard Nixon, Michael Myers, Ronald Reagan, Darth Vader. Monsters and dead presidents were his favorite.