“Sammy is here?!” she exclaims loudly. She looks past me into my dark room. Sammy is at Tanner’s and once again she was listening to every other word I said. “Sammy loves his auntie! Hey Sammy! It’s me! Your auntie is here!”
“SSSHHHHH! No, he’s not here, but you’re going to wake up the whole house!” I don’t want to scold her like she is a toddler. I want to talk to her like we used to. I want to have a regular conversation with her like she is still the girl I bonded with when I was four years old. The girl I went to preschool with, the girl I got my first detention with because we talked too much in class. But that best friend, that girl I’ve known my whole life, no longer exists, and in her place is a person I don’t recognize.
Her once auburn hair is now some strange shade of reddish purple. Her once bright green eyes are glazed over and unfocused. And for someone who used to take ballet very seriously and who moved around with ease and grace, she is now as jittery as if she’d downed several pots of coffee. Her nails look as if she has chewed them down to the cuticles.
“So, you don’t want me around your son now?” She crosses her arms over her chest but sways. Reaching out she grabs onto a tree branch for support so she doesn’t topple to the ground. Part of me wants to let her in just so she doesn’t fall and break her neck.
“No. I don’t.” Usually I dance around the truth with her and normally I would say something like ‘Of course, I want you around him, but…’ and make something up. But I’d danced that dance and sang that song for too long and I’ve been watching my best friend withdraw from me more and more, sinking lower and lower into drugs and sex.
It started out as just another teenage girl rebelling against her strict parents. Our freshman year of high school she’d sneak out in the middle of the night and go to parties the seniors were throwing. She’d get drunk. She’d get high. She’d hook up with boys in our school.
I don’t want to cut her out of my life, but I remind myself that this girl isn’t the friend I’ve always known, the one who was more family to me than my drunk of a mother or my controlling father had ever been. But nothing I’d done has worked. She’d been to rehab three times already. During the third time, she didn’t even bother completing her ninety-day stint, and on the day she turned eighteen, she’d signed herself out and walked out.
That’s when her parents cut her off for good. That’s also when she started disappearing. I wouldn’t hear from her for weeks at a time. Then months. Sometimes I thought she was dead and then she’d appear out of nowhere, looking thinner and thinner. Her clothes shabbier. Her hair more brittle. Her skin covered with pock marks and scratches. Dirt caked under her nails. She’d confess to me that she’d been living on the streets. By the time she disappeared again with whatever money I could scrounge up, she’d just appear again at another time, even worse off than before.
“Fine, I won’t come in,” she says, “but I’m starving. Can I have some money? Just enough to last a week or so. Maybe a hundred?. For food.”
“If you’re hungry I can make you some food and bring it out to you, but no more money.” I am so close to cracking, but I hold strong.
“But…” Her lower lip starts to tremble. “Skinny will kill me if I don’t have money for him. I’m supposed to give him fifty bucks tonight, but I don’t have it. I spent it on a cab to come here…to see you.” There it is. The guilt. And it works because I am about to tap into the last of the birthday money from the great grandmother I’ve never met and hand it over to her.
“Who’s Skinny and why does he want fifty bucks from you? Is he your dealer or something?”
“No.” She looked from side to side as if we were being watched then her eyes darted back to me. “He’s my pimp,” she whispered.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell have you gotten yourself into now?” I yell. I pause and wait for signs that anyone in the house has woken up and when I don’t hear anything I lower my voice to an angry whisper. “Why on earth do you have a pimp?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice cracks. “I don’t know where I went so wrong, Ray. I don’t know when I met him. I don’t remember agreeing to do the things I do. But I do them and it’s disgusting and I hate it, but he’s really going to kill me if I don’t bring him some money tonight.” Her head shoots up. “And that’s very judgey coming from you, Ray, Miss Teen Mom America, herself,” She hisses.
Stay strong, Ray. Remember, she’s a master manipulator. She needs help, not money. Both her compliments and insults are trying to play on my emotions, I remind myself, remembering what the articles said that I’d Googled over the last several months.