My father is flying my mother up to New York for a visit.
I begged him on the phone—Daddy, she needs you. She needs this. She needs help. I want my mother back, I want her grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and her watercolor paints and her half-remembered, half-imagined stories. I want the smell of her, like gardenias. I want everything about her. I want her to live. But I also know that sobriety will mean I’ll have to go to school again; I’ll have to give the credit cards back. I’ll have to stay home and put my dishes away, and I won’t get to drive my father’s car. I won’t wake up under a highway overpass anymore, or beside a motel pool, or on the beach with horseshoe crab shells in my hair and men I don’t know. Most of all, I know if I have a mother, I can’t keep the girls.
We are curled up in Harley’s bed like cats when I get the call.
She’s leaving, I say. My dad says she’s going to New York.
How long?
Who ever knows, I shrug.
What should we do with your crib to ourselves? Harley wants to know.
We could throw a party, I say.
A themed party? Nelle asks. Please, I love themes! I slay at themes!
It takes us three hours to drive to the Aventura Mall and find the perfect sets of coordinating lingerie. In Hollywood, we pick up handcuffs, whips, paddles, and various colors and sizes of dildos. We drive to my house and get dressed. Harley is playing the role of Jenna Jameson tonight, a cloud of blonde wig, a white-and-blue garter belt, silver glitter, like an angel. Nelle is playing Briana Banks, with a black lace-up corset and smolder eyes. I’m playing the only Asian porn star we know, Kobe Tai. I wear fishnets, a lavender bustier, and several sets of handcuffs attached to my garter belt. Because Harley and Nelle have tits and I do not, the girls help me triple up bras beneath my bustier, pulling my skin up and over it. We paste on thick rows of eyelashes, and press on several inches of acrylic nails. We decorate my house with the dildos. We suction them onto the pool table, the mantelpiece; we leave the small ones on the bar to be used as drink stirrers.
By nine P.M., almost a hundred people arrive at our Porn Star Party. Public and private school kids, a couple dealers we know, the older boyfriends of girls in my grade. Clarissa shows up in a white-and-pink number, and Nelle calls her a troll, tells her to leave me alone. Beth shows up fully clothed, What are you, a pilgrim? before Harley convinces her to change in my room. Several Ron Jeremys appear shirtless, with plungers—Got a leak?—and other girls arrive in thongs, nipple tassels, capes, and extra-padded push-ups.
Harley, Nelle, and I take every shot we’re given. Red Bull and J?germeister, Lemon Drops, Cocksucking Cowboys with cream. We lie down on my pool table and begin to kiss one another while the boys and men cheer us on.
Cousin Cindy once asked me, What do you think love really is?
I think it’s being able to kiss someone whenever you want, I said.
I can kiss Nelle whenever I want. And I do.
The other girls at the party roll their eyes, move to the corners of the room—Sluts, they say. A few of the boys kick off their Air Force 1s and stand on top of the pool table. They begin Crip Walking around our bodies, a dance some of them like to do when the hip-hop hits come on. Tonight, Nelle is wearing her door-knocker tongue ring—my favorite—a heavy hoop of metal that I lift with my tongue. The music gets louder before it turns off.
Somebody’s ringing. Somebody’s here.
Go get it, Kinky Chinky.
When I open the door, two cops seesaw their flashlights in my eyes.
Party? they ask.
What’s it to you? My vision bloats their bodies. I try to snap into focus.
You look pretty young, young lady, says one of the cop-heads. Interested, I think.
If you think you’re going to arrest me, I say, I’m going to have to arrest you first. I take the handcuffs off my garter belt and move toward them, trying to clink the metal rings around one of their wrists. The cops back up. I fall on the pavement and my knee begins to bleed through my fishnets. Look what you did to my outfit, I say.
Rather than evict anyone from the party, the cops declare a lockdown. This means they check all the exits, move us to the center of the room, and take a head count. They write down names and schools. They want us all to call our parents and explain what we’ve done, but we’re all slurring, laughing, calling Pizza Hut delivery instead. They call my parents—We’ve got about a hundred kids here in their underwear—before shaking their heads, Well you better fly back from New York because we need a guardian.
I’ve got a guardian, I say, twisting a strand of bubble gum around my nail. I call my Aunt Trista, Uncle Kai’s wife, who’s new to the family, in the neighborhood.
I’m in a jam, Auntie Trista.
Fifteen minutes later, Aunt Trista comes dressed for the theme. A black glittering corset. A leather miniskirt with two slits up the thighs.
I’m the guardian angel, she says, shooing the cops out the door. When she locks it behind them, she turns to the rest of us, sitting in a circle like we’re playing Duck Duck Goose.
Now, she says, who wants to get your guardian a goddamn drink?
They left.
Harley moved to New York that spring to make it in acting, to find the right light for her face. She gave herself a show name, and we spoke on the phone a couple of times a year until we didn’t. I wish I could say our good-bye was difficult, but something inside me, that gnarled knot of ass-wiping girl-love, was relieved. These days, I watch her on a television drama in which she plays the lifesaving teacher inspiring inner-city students to read books and dream big. She’s a stranger now, a married woman—older, slighter, that upward gaze.
Nelle was picked up in the middle of the night by a Catholic couple in matching blue polo shirts. Her mother waited in a neighbor’s apartment while they took her daughter, kicking and squalling. The couple handcuffed Nelle in her pajamas and carried her into a PT Cruiser, drove her to live in a reform school for girls in rural North Carolina. Nelle would find a job in a ski lodge up there in the mountains and meet a gang of cowboys to buy her cigarettes, send and receive her letters.
This is what she tells me now, anyway. We never wrote to each other.
I got my driver’s license that summer. I was left with my mother, with those piles and piles of clothes, the empty wrappers of horse pills. Left with a dull hammering at my temples when I ran out of cigarettes and didn’t know how to get them. At night, I drove along Deerfield Beach and waited for that fullness in my ears, those voices deep and melodic as a gospel as we crawled through the streets of Miami looking for somebody, anybody—I love you. I love you. I love you, too—alone in my father’s convertible.
He bought me a new car—fancier—the month before he died. I want the old one back.
Dear Tribes of Fatherless Girls: I’m still here.
HOW TO SURVIVE IN BOCA RATON
Some days, in the corner of the school cafeteria, Calorie Valerie feeds dollar bills into the vending machine. She looks over her shoulder to make sure no one is looking, then packs each crinkling bag of chips, each box of cookies, neatly into her backpack. She pushes each package down like she’s trying to drown it, fits more than what seems possible into her little pink bag. Nobody pays attention to druggie freak Valerie anymore, except for me. I watch dollar after dollar after dollar after dollar.