When people would call the house and ask “Is Kendrick there?” I’d act irritated and say, “There are four Kendricks here, you’ll have to be more specific.” I always knew who they meant.
I still idolized him. He still thought I was a liability at best and figured that dictating my social life was in everyone’s best interest.
At thirteen, I was invited to drink for the first time. Mike tore tickets at a local movie theater, and he and the rest of the teenage staff stayed behind after hours one night to throw a party. They had beer, vodka, and coffee brandy, a sickly sweet liqueur that you mix with milk. It’s a staple of the low-income New England alcoholic, so naturally I started there. I wandered around the empty cinema, discovering what a buzz felt like and hearing, “Hey, loser, you still good?” at five-minute intervals.
At fourteen, he let me smoke a bowl with him and his best friend, Evan, whom I’d known since childhood. We went to T.G.I. Friday’s and in a haze I said, “Do you guys feel like we’re in a movie?” They laughed at me.
“Yeah, dude, that’s the kind of stupid shit you need to get out of your system while you’re just in front of us. Rookie.”
That same year he took me to my first party (that’s “rave” for all the people out there as lame as me). It was fun and weird, and I liked trying to pick up the dance style—though I might not have if I’d known how stupid I looked. I kept going whenever he would invite me, but mostly for the bragging rights. Mike told me I wouldn’t be allowed to take Ecstasy until I was sixteen, which was fine with me since I found navigating new environments hard enough when I was sober.
When I was fifteen, we went separately to a warehouse rave upstate. I was paying for entry when a large young woman burst through the doors of the main floor, out into the makeshift lobby. She was still about ten feet away when she pointed at me and said, “No. Go home,” and walked back inside. The guy who’d been taking my money shrugged and started to hand it back to me. If you’re confused, it’s because I mentioned that I was fifteen and you pictured a fifteen-year-old. But at this point, I looked about twelve. There weren’t official age limits for a party thrown in a warehouse—certainly fifteen was old enough—yet she’d decreed I was too young.
This would not stand. It had taken hours to get there, and, more important, it was embarrassing. I paced away from the venue, wondering what to do, and scanned the small crowd of sweaty youths who had come outside for air. I spotted a friend of Mike’s. This wasn’t hard; he knew everyone.
“Hey, Travis! Go find Mike! Tell him they won’t let me in!”
Ten minutes later my brother was outside and dragging me by the arm across the main floor. He planted me in front of the party’s organizer.
“Trish, this is my sister. She’s fifteen. We good?”
Trish took another look at me. “The age limit is sixteen.”
I’d never seen my brother’s powers of persuasion falter before.
“No it isn’t, dude. There’s a ton of kids in here who are fifteen. I’ll bet you some are younger.”
“Yeah, but Mike, look at her. She looks like a baby. If she ODs at my party, imagine how her picture’s gonna look in the paper. No one would ever rent a space to me again. Any fifteen-year-old that is in there at least had the decency to look like a degenerate.”
It was weird, but I kind of got her logic.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that. She doesn’t do drugs. I told her she can’t try X until she’s sixteen. Let her in.”
In your face, lady, I thought. I’d just been described as a goody two-shoes who left her drug-related decisions to her older brother, but I walked into the place looking like the smuggest little twelve-year-old there ever was.
Outside of underage substance use, my only dalliance in teen rule-breaking was some light shoplifting. Jesus, it’s so trashy. It makes me cringe when I think of it.
I visited a friend in New York the summer I turned fourteen and she taught me. Oh, the city kids corrupting us weak-willed country folk! She also tried teaching me to flirt with guys, but soon found that was asking too much. Basically the trick to shoplifting was you went into a store, saw what you wanted, and took it without paying. Cute trick, right? Truthfully, the only thing she “showed” me was that it could be done. I think I would have gone my whole life without it occurring to me that normal people could just steal things. Pray I never witness a murder.
The small mercy was that this phase was short-lived. I got a friend in my hometown to shoplift with me (you know, pay it forward and all that) and for a while no Claire’s or T.J. Maxx was safe. But, like a dying star, the desire burned brightly and disappeared quickly. A few years later I told my mother that I’d gone through a short thievery phase, and she was more surprised than angry. I suppose the statute of limitations for parental disapproval had passed.