[I'm making what is probably my 20th attempt at writing a novel, and for once I'm actually really proud of what I've done so far. This is the first couple of pages--I've written more, but I don't want to get too ahead of myself.]

Imagine you’re at a payphone in a town you don’t know the name of, and you’re dialing 9-1-1 to report a murder that happened in another town you don’t know the name of. You hear: 9-1-1, police, fire, or medical? and you aren’t sure whether you should say police or medical, so you manage to choke out, “I think somebody just got killed.” And then you twist your body around and try to find a sign giving any indication of where you are, but you can’t so you tell the dispatcher you’re in a town with a bus station and a church and a motel called Come On Inn and someone just got shot in a town you’re guessing is about ten miles away. Then you hang up before the dispatcher can ask any more questions and you do the same thing that got you into this whole mess, which is hitchhike.

While you’re walking down the sadly desolate road that needs to be repaved as much as you need a hot shower, you think to yourself how it’s strange that the second time you called 9-1-1 to report a dead person felt a lot different than the first time. When you see a car approaching in the distance, you hope it’s not just a mirage because you are in the desert, and when the car finally pulls up next to you and comes to a stop, you grab the door handle and immediately your heart stops beating for a split second. You’ve seen the driver before, not in person but in a photograph. It was a photograph in the house you were in not three hours ago, and you know the lady driving this car is going to go to that house and when she gets inside she’s going to find her (husband?) dead and it’s kind of your fault. So you let go of the door handle and you take off running down the road until it hurts your lungs to run any farther.

You keep walking and eventually an ambulance and a couple of police cruisers whizz past you and you turn around and watch them until they disappear. You begin to laugh and it turns into uncontrollable laughter, because this is the second time you’ve called 9-1-1 to report a dead person and also the second time you’ve walked away from the dead person to let someone else deal with it. Life is funny like that sometimes.

You’ve walked for an hour or so and not a single car has passed you but it’s a desert so there’s a little town every few miles along the road. You wander into one that’s identical to the town you were in when you called 9-1-1 and you go into the church because it’s a free place to sit down and rest. When you get inside, there are candles burning everywhere and an old couple sits in one of the pews with their arms wrapped around each other and you sit in the very back where you hope they won’t notice you. You pick up the bible and open it to a random page and the passage you read is coincidentally about murder and you begin to wonder if you were led to this church by God to repent for the half-sin you’ve committed, even though you’re an Atheist.

Then you fall asleep and when you awaken, you’re in a bed in the hospital and the nurse tells you you’re suffering from exhaustion and severe dehydration.

Life is funny like that sometimes.

She staggers out of bed on her 29th birthday and finds a card in her mailbox. “Susie, happy 30th,” it says inside, “love, Mom.” She places it in the trash can atop the mound of streamers and plastic red cups and beer bottles from her surprise party the night before (come to think of it, who cleaned all of this up?) and then she steps into the shower. She lets the water flow over her body until it runs cold, then dresses in the clothes she wore yesterday so she doesn’t have to open the closet and see the emptiness of one half of it, the half that still smells faintly of his cologne. She’s 29 today, but she feels 16. Naïve. Vulnerable. Helpless.

Her stomach gurgles with the aftershocks of inebriation, the taste of beer lingering in the bottom of her throat. Coffee, she decides, and she snatches her purse from the small table by the front door. As she pulls the strap and the purse slides off the table, it knocks something to the ground. The ring. She recalls the night before, her cousin Ernie begging her to take it off: “Please, Susie, it’s not healthy. Wearing it won’t make him come back.” He was right, of course. Still, she slides it back down her finger before she leaves the house.

At the café around the corner she orders a mocha and a bagel and she sits on a bench beside a napping homeless man. The sun is directly above her head, making her hair follicles tingle with warmth. The homeless man stirs and runs a hand through his hair. He notices his bench companion and apologizes—“I hope I wasn’t in your way,” he says, and he begins to rise from his seat.

She stops him, asks him not to leave. She offers a half of her bagel, since she has no appetite anyhow. She doesn’t explain why, but she needs someone sitting beside her. It’s her birthday. She can’t be alone, not right now. They each eat their bagel halves, and when they’re finished, he says to her, “You know, it’s my birthday today.”

She stares ahead at the buildings across the street. She watches the people going in and out, the couples and the businessmen and the pairs of friends and the people who are by themselves. She wonders, are they broken-hearted too? But they can’t be. They’re smiling.

Finally, she tells the homeless man: “It’s my birthday, too.” For the first time, they actually face each other, look at each other, read each others’ eyes. She holds her hands in her lap and feels the ring with her right hand, feels its jaggedness and its smoothness…and its coldness. She has been keeping it. It makes the past seem like the present. It makes the truth seem unreal. It makes her believe he will want it back, and he will have to come and see her.

She decides to go home. She needs to call her mother, she needs some time alone. When she stands, she removes the ring. She will never look at it again. She hands it to the homeless man. “I don’t know how much it’s worth, but there’s a pawn shop right around the corner.”

The homeless man examines it. “Lady, I can’t…I shouldn’t…”

“It’s killing me,” she says. “Happy birthday.”

It was clear from the beginning that Anita May and I were opposites. She wore vibrant, poofy dresses decorated with lace; I wore overalls and stained t-shirts. Her parents drove a top-of-the-line Mercedes; mine drove a mid-80s station wagon with an engine problem and a top speed of 40 miles per hour. But the biggest difference between the two of us that I could see was our toys. She had enough toys to fill a toy store—dolls, games, dress-up clothes. She even had a Nintendo console, which I dreamt about for six months straight after the one time she let me play it. My toys—hand-me-down Barbies, jump ropes, puzzles with missing pieces—paled in comparison to anything Anita May had to play with.

Anita May and I were never friends. We never had sleepovers, we never shared clothes, we never sat together during lunch at school. Even at the age of eight we were aware of our living in separate worlds, the richer world and the poorer one. But there were times, when we lived next door to one another, that our parents would insist on our playing together—usually when one set of parents wanted some peace and quiet to themselves—and we would be forced to get along in a friend-like fashion for a matter of hours. Most of these times we were successful, but one occasion turned into a disaster.

We had spent the day watching Disney movies and eating fudgesicles out of bowls so we wouldn’t drip chocolate on her parents’ cushy suede sofa. When the credits for Sleeping Beauty began to roll, Anita May suggested we go upstairs and dress up like princesses. In her room, she began pulling large plastic tubs from underneath her bed—tubs filled with dresses, shoes, necklaces, and tiaras. As she began to sift through the contents of one of the tubs, she turned her head toward me where I sat on the floor.

“You know, we can do makeup too,” she said with a somewhat mischievous smile.

My face brightened at the thought; my own mother never even wore makeup, so imagining myself with rosy cheeks and bubblegum pink lips made my stomach churn with excitement. Anita May pointed to her closet door and said, “It’s in a box on the top shelf,” and while she sorted through her accessories I slid her desk chair to the closet so I could boost myself up and rummage around for the box of makeup.

On the top shelf sat four boxes. Two of the boxes were decorated with pictures displaying the contents hidden inside. One, a building block set; the other, plastic food items for a children’s play kitchen. The other two boxes were cardboard, the same size, and one of them was sure to hold the makeup of which Anita May spoke. I pushed one of the boxes to test its weight and, after establishing that it was not heavy, I slid it off the shelf and opened the cardboard flaps to peek inside.

What I found in the box was not a stash of makeup, but two sachets filled with scraps of paper. They weren’t just scraps of paper, however; the paper was thick, expensive cardstock with vibrant ink and smooth edges, and each piece was decorated with a picture. Some were beautiful women who looked like princesses themselves; some were hats, shoes, purses, articles of clothing. There were hundreds of them in each sachet.

I turned to Anita May, who was busy untangling a heap of beaded necklaces, and held up one of the sachets. “What are these?” I asked.

She eyed the sachet and responded, “Those are my paper dolls,” with a shrug like they were about as exciting as her toothbrush.

“What are paper dolls?” I inquired. Her nonchalance about them made me feel silly for asking, but I had never before seen anything like them.

“They’re like dolls, but they’re made out of paper. You can put different clothes on ‘em and stuff,” she said with another shrug. Anita May always shrugged when she didn’t care about something, like the time I asked if she wanted to look at my photo albums or when I asked her if she liked my new haircut.

I put the makeup on hold and climbed down from the chair to sift through the sachets. I counted fifteen different dolls and I could only imagine how many shirts and dresses and jackets the sachets held. I began to assemble outfits for the dolls: a green sweater with a brown plaid skirt, a crimson dress with a black feather shawl, a yellow tank top with black polka-dot capri pants. I became so engrossed in what I was doing that I didn’t notice when Anita May approached me with an armload of frilly, glittery dresses.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

She was frowning. I immediately gathered the scraps I’d assembled and shoved them back in the sachets. “Nothing,” I replied.

“Samantha, those are so boring,” she stated with a laugh. “I never play with them.”

I fiddled with the clasp on the sachet. I didn’t think there was anything boring about them; had Anita May disappeared from the room I could have created clothing ensembles all day long. Despite how I felt, the fact that Anita May so obviously disliked them made me feel foolish and I pushed the sachets aside and retrieved the box of makeup from the closet.

Playing dress-up had become exhausting. I was changing my dress for the eighth time, my shoes for the third, and I had nine plastic necklaces draped around my neck. I looked like an actress working a movie set, but I felt like an eight-year-old who badly needed a nap.

“What’s wrong?” asked Anita May. “You’re not getting bored, are you?”

She was struggling with the zipper on the back of her dress. I was slumped over the edge of her bed, praying for my parents to return from their friend’s house so I could go back home. I still yearned to play with Anita May’s paper dolls; I continuously eyed the sachets that remained resting in a box on her floor.

“Why don’t you like those paper dolls?” I asked her.

She had succeeded in zipping up her dress and was now removing the plastic rings from each of her fingers. “Because,” she stated with a whine in her voice, “they’re lame. I forgot I even had them until you found them.”

“If you don’t like them you can let me borrow ‘em,” I suggested. “I’ll take really good care of them.”

Anita May giggled as if I’d told her a joke. “Yeah right, Samantha. I know what your house is like.”

“But you don’t even like them!” I argued.

Anita May threw her arms up in frustration. I imagine she inherited the trait from her parents, just like she inherited their love for wearing dead animal furs and skins, and their ability to eat caviar without gagging. Then she said, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you take them to your house. You’ll ruin them!”

Annoyed, I removed my princess attire and sat in the corner of the room like a child who was being punished. I remained there for half an hour until my parents returned, and neither Anita May nor I spoke another word during the rest of my stay.

It wasn’t until later that night that I realized I was missing my Looney Tunes watch; I’d removed it when Anita May complained it was too “un-princessy,” and it was still sitting on the top of her dresser. Though it was close to my bedtime, my parents gave me permission to walk over to Anita May’s to retrieve my watch.

At her house, Anita May led me up the stairs; she was still wearing dress-up clothes. When we entered her room, it remained littered with dresses and faux jewelry, and the sachets filled with paper dolls had still not been put away. Anita May handed me my watch, but not before tinkering with a button on the side and complaining, “This is so ugly, I can’t believe you wear it.”

After enduring her insults for an entire day, my tolerance finally shattered and I stuffed the watch in my pocket rather than fastening it around my wrist. I strutted over to where the paper dolls rested on the ground and, after contemplating for a long moment, I snatched them up and ran into the hallway, down the stairs, and out the front door.

I intended to run home as quickly as possible, but I hadn’t anticipated Anita May would come sprinting after me. After all, she’d made it clear she cared very little about the paper dolls—why, then, was she chasing me as if I’d taken hostage Snow White herself?

I formulated a plan in my head to run through a series of alleyways until I circled back home, in the hopes I could lose Anita May somewhere along the way. But she stayed hot on my trail, shouting things like, “You dirty, geeky little thief!” and, “My mom will tell your mom and you’ll never be allowed in my house again!”

Watching the last hue of daylight fade from the darkening sky, I decided it was time to make a more extreme decision. I knew at that point I would not make it home with the collection of paper dolls—that much was clear to me. But when I recalled Anita May’s words from earlier that day—words about the paper dolls, about my watch, about my being dirty and geeky—I knew I wouldn’t sleep at night knowing she would make fun of them while they sat, untouched and ignored, in her closet.

My legs became rubbery as my feet began to throb, and I ran just far enough to make it to the canal running along the back of our neighborhood. I slowed my pace as I approached the small plywood bridge that crossed the canal, and just as Anita May caught up to me I raised the sachets above my head and chucked them in the murky water.

Anita May came to a halt just before the bridge as she stared blankly at the limp, brown packets bobbing along the water’s surface. One of them came open and began to leak out pieces, shoes and furs and belts and clothes floating in the water like tiny paper boats. I faced Anita May and searched for emotion in her face—after the chase she put up, I expected tears or reddened cheeks, something to hint at how upset she was. Instead, she stood still and calm like a statue, her eyes glued to the sachets and their contents gliding downstream.

I, however, began to whimper as I watched the paper dolls and paper clothes washing up on the side of the canal where they became hidden by clusters of weeds. I didn’t look at Anita May as I said, “Why did you chase after me if you didn’t even care about them?”

Anita May bent over the edge of the canal and removed one of the dolls, whose soggy body split in half as Anita May tried to shake it dry. She stared at it silently before answering, “My grandmother gave them to me. I only met her once. She died when I was four.” And, still holding the two halves of the doll she’d retrieved from the water, she turned around and began to walk home.

Sure, Anita May and I had never really gotten along, and I did think she was spoiled and selfish. But as I watched her walk away and as I recalled the sadness—an authentic, solemn emotion—in her voice, guilt infected my body and made my stomach churn, and I vomited into the dirt along the canal. I began frantically scaling the edge of the water, pulling out paper scraps as I found them and piling them as neatly as I could in my hand. I did this all the way down the edge of the canal until I caught up with the floating sachets. They weren’t quite in the middle of the canal, but they weren’t near enough the edge that I could rescue them from where I stood. I found a long twig on the ground and extended it toward one of the packets, pulling it toward me until it was close enough to reach. I did this with the other sachet, and once they were both secured I opened them to see what damage had been done.

The pieces inside the one that had come open were sopped, but what I had feared the most was that the ink would run. It had not, and I hoped that once they dried they would not be as ruined as I was imagining they would be. The contents of the other sachet, the one that had remained closed, were wet in places and dry in others, and this gave me hope that at least part of the collection surely would be salvageable.

With my arms full of wet paper dolls, I ambled away but I did not head straight home. Instead, I nervously approached the front door of Anita May’s house and, swallowing to ease the second wave of nausea that came over me, I rang the bell.

Anita May’s mother answered the door and instantly I knew Anita May had told on me (how could she not have?). It wasn’t the look on her face that gave it away—it was the sight of my parents sitting on the sofa in the living room, disappointedly frowning the same way they did when I socked Marty Jenkins in the face for calling me “Cootie-Breath” in the first grade.

Arms shaking, I handed the sachets to Anita May’s mother as my own mother appeared behind her in the doorway. “I didn’t mean to. . .I tried to gather them all. . .tell Anita May I’m sorry. . .” Though I struggled to hold it back, a torrent of tears rushed from my eyes and I bawled uncontrollably until I could no longer breathe. My mother embraced me, and my father joined her and they walked me home.

I awoke in bed the next morning; I didn’t remember falling asleep the night before. My eyes were puffy and dried snot was plastered to my cheeks. When I went downstairs, Anita May and her parents were sitting at our kitchen table with a pot of coffee and a plate of donuts. The creaking stairs summoned my parents, and there we were, two rival families in the same kitchen.

My mother spoke: “Samantha, we’re very disappointed in you. You should know better than to take what’s not rightfully yours. I’m sure you know you’ll be grounded for some time.”

I nodded, but kept my eyes on the floor. Then, Anita May’s mother’s voice: “But we also know you’re sorry for what you’ve done. I was sure of that last night, and I think the most important thing is that you learn a lesson from this.”

My parents kneeled to my level and asked why I’d stolen Anita May’s paper dolls. I did my best to explain that it was a combination of jealousy and revenge, but that I also regretted it and I knew Anita May probably hated me more than ever before.

Anita May’s father cleared his throat. “I also think we,” he said, motioning his hands toward his wife and my parents, “have not made the best effort to have a more welcoming relationship between our families. Maybe if we, I don’t know, threw barbeques together or went to the park together, you and Anita May would feel like you could actually be friends?” He was asking a question rather than making a statement, and Anita May and I both shrugged, shyly. I had never imagined a scenario—and I’m sure the same was true for Anita May—in which we were friends.

All six of us sat around the table and munched on donuts while we planned a barbeque for the following weekend. Our parents also made Anita May and I apologize to each other—me, for stealing her paper dolls, and she, for making fun of me. Then her parents dispersed back home, but Anita May lingered behind them. She turned to me and said, “The paper dolls are drying on our back porch. They’re a little wrinkled, but they’re not ruined.” And then she smiled, and I smiled back, the first genuine smiles we ever gave one another.

There was a time when I could have said
It feels like we’ve known each other forever.
Now, I might say
It feels like we’ve never met.
Friendships
That feel like dreams—
Did we really
Once flop over in the yard, sitting cross-legged, sharing different shades of pink nail polish?
Was it real when we
Played hide and seek and hid in strangers’ back yards, feeling clever and triumphant and mischievous and hoping we weren’t still waiting to be found when the sun went down?
Can you remember when we
Argued over who got to be the pink Power Ranger?
Isn’t it funny how we
Wrote notes to each other in sparkly gold ink and folded them into cute little origami shapes?
Wasn’t it weird when most of our conversations
Were about boys and kissing and wanting to be all grown up?
Wasn’t it strange when we
Started getting into trouble?—not the kind of trouble where our parents grounded us, but when the police caught us and the judge sentenced us?
Wasn’t it surprising
When we realized they were all just memories, buried, fading, the way dreams begin to fade upon waking?
Isn’t it sad how we
Share these memories but
It feels like we’ve never met?

Nothing seems peaceful in a place like this.
At the count of three the lockdown begins:
Thoughts bound by chains to the walls of the mind,
Stuck in transition from paranoia to
Solace.
Somewhere in the background, hands are clapping
And you bow as your performance ends,
Trying to find your audience in the twilight that surrounds you.
Shadows, dancing on walls,
Growing,
Stretching, feeding
Off of scraps of light bending as you race
Through what was once only night time, and nothing more.
Now, it is purgatory,
Eating the figments of your imagination that kept you sane,
Sweeping up the hopeful trail of bread crumbs
Meant to guide you home.
Dueling your madness,
You draw the only weapon you have.
A dream of a place with no walls,
No shadows,
No audience.
Solace.
Night time, consoled by figments of your imagination.
Nothing more.

I don't feel protected
by the armor that I wear.
In a battle of patience,
nothing can shield me as well as
a second of composure--
something that, while under the trance of a heartbeat,
is impossible.
Or, at least, unattainable.
Prepared for combat,
I skip stones on a sea of illusions
while I ponder my next move.
Camouflage fading,
heart racing,
insecurities breaking,
I begin to run, shedding the armor
that once supported me.

It was one of the only days I’d ever seen my mother clean the house.

Not only did she clean the house, but she got out the fancy plates and the embroidered placemats and the gaudy silverware that had been sitting in a closet since my parents got married. All this effort was her attempt at securing a promotion at work; her boss was coming over for dinner, and of course she had talked to me about being on my best behavior. At 11 years old, I had the inability to understand the significance of a promotion, let alone the significance of eating dinner with the boss who had the power to give it.

Showtime was nearing, and while mom plastered on make-up in the bathroom and dad finished chopping vegetables, I sat at the table and picked at the cheese plate. Dad sauntered in with a giant bowl of salad, and after setting it down he opened the wine cupboard adjacent to the table. He produced a bottle of wine with a label bearing an elephant wearing a tutu. At my age, I still hadn’t grasped the concept of alcoholic beverages (since they so rarely made an appearance before my bedtime), and the label on the bottle tricked me into thinking it was juice—something made for children.

“Daddy, can I have some of that?” I asked, holding up a glass from the table.

Dad laughed, and headed back into the kitchen. “That’s wine, sweetie. Only adults can drink that. Let me get something else for you.”

He reappeared in the dining room with a corkscrew and a pitcher of Kool-aid and poured a neon green concoction into my glass. I took a sip, but my eyes were still glued to the bottle of wine. “What’s wine taste like?”

The pause before he answered indicated this was his first time describing the taste of wine. “It’s bitter. It tastes like juice, without the sugar.”

“Can I try some?”

Dad tilted his head toward the stairs. He was undoubtedly checking to see if his more conservative better half was headed down yet, and when he heard the hiss of a hairspray can upstairs, he grabbed the bottle. “I guess just a little taste couldn’t hurt ya.”

He opened the bottle and picked up another glass and poured a small amount—maybe a tablespoon full—of wine into it. I took it from him and gulped it down, unaware of the fact that wine may taste like sugarless juice but is not meant to be guzzled in the same manner. I wish I could have seen the face I produced. Dad laughed and journeyed toward the buzzing timer in the kitchen.

No, the wine didn’t taste pleasant. Not in the least. But something drew me to it. It made me feel sophisticated (after all, mom and dad only stocked the wine cabinet for special occasions). It made me feel mature (after all, if there was one thing I knew about wine it was that I was not old enough to drink it). I peered around the corner into the kitchen, where dad was poking at a steaming hot chicken. It was obvious he was going to be occupied for at least a few moments; so, I grabbed the wine bottle and poured a little more into my glass.

At first I was just pretending. To me, it was the equivalency of little girls playing “tea party.” I imagined dining with a queen or a supermodel, and chicly drinking wine and talking about world peace. I was, in a way, a method actor, ignoring the taste of every sip so as to truly feel I was drinking wine with a classy, important woman. Then I looked down and saw that I had finished off round two.

In the kitchen, dad was slicing and peppering and perfecting the chicken. He began to hum the theme to “The Simpsons” and I knew that he would return to the real world only after the last of the food had been placed on the table. The tick of the clock above me became annoying. But what could I do but sit there and mind my manners? I was, after all, told to be on my best behavior that evening.

I figured I was staying out of trouble as long as I remained seated at the table. Dad wandered in, wiping his hands on his apron and peering at the clock. “Doing alright there, kiddo?” he asked. I nodded, and he peeled his apron off. “I’m going to go wash up. Listen for the doorbell, okay?”

I ate another piece of cheese. I picked up my spoon and made funny faces at my distorted reflection. I counted to three hundred (I would have gone further, had I not been at risk for boring myself to death). I turned around and glanced at the clock. Five minutes had passed since dad left the room, yet I felt as if I’d been sitting there for hours. And that bottle of wine sat there in front of me, and mom and dad were upstairs laughing together about something, and I was bored. I poured myself a third dose of wine.

Now, my second dose had been more than my first—maybe a few ounces, enough for a couple of big swigs. This was enough, for a short, stick-thin 11-year-old, to cause a little wooziness and to begin inhibiting judgment, at least slightly. All of this is to say that I may have poured a little too much wine into my glass the third time around. While mom and dad were upstairs thinking about a promotion, I was downstairs sipping on wine and thinking about sitting in a castle and speaking with a fancy accent.

Two glasses sat before me on the table: one was empty, and the other still glowed with lime Kool-aid. I heard footsteps on the stairs and immediately pushed the wine bottle away from me, as if to disguise any evidence.

The problem was, the wine bottle was not the real evidence. I was my own evidence. Mom came in, straightening her necklace so that the clasp rested on the back of her neck, and asked me to complete the simplest of tasks: “Honey, can you go into the kitchen and find some napkins to set on the table?”

As I said, the simplest of tasks. You get up, you go into the kitchen, you open the drawer where the napkins are kept, and you remove them and carry them back into the other room. Or in my case, you make it one and a half steps before falling flat on your face and giggling like a hyena at a comedy club.

Mom ran to me, believing at first I was crying rather than laughing. I managed to stand up and mom began frantically licking her hand and smoothing down my now messy hair. Then she asked, “What happened, did you trip?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t really sure how I’d ended up on the floor. I made a second attempt at walking to the napkin drawer in the kitchen, and was successful—almost.

I opened the drawer, which contained not only napkins but also paper plates, toothpicks, and plastic silverware. The funny thing about alcohol is its ability to make you forget something that would otherwise make you look prematurely senile. I must have stared at the contents of that drawer for at least two or three minutes, before deciding my mother must have asked for toothpicks, and I headed back to the table with a box of multi-colored toothpicks in my hand.

Meanwhile, mom was checking last-minute details, like making sure the porch light was on and that there was plenty of toilet paper in the bathroom. When she came back into the dining room, I was reseated at the table. “I thought I asked you to get napkins?” She sounded confused.

Realizing my mistake, I played dumb. “You did?”

“Yes, just a minute ago. Have you just been sitting here?”

I racked my brain for excuses and explanations, but she saw the box of toothpicks before I ever created a good one. “Did your dad put these on the table?”

Perfect. I’d blame it on dad. I nodded my head.

“Well, put them in a nice glass dish or something, this looks tacky. And while you’re at it, make sure you grab those napkins.” She reached out to hand the box to me, and I reached out to grab it. But, as with many situations involving alcohol, things didn’t go quite as planned. I never did grab the box of toothpicks; instead, I ended up falling face-first after sliding off my chair.

And then, the worst of it happened. Mom wasn’t too happy with my falling off the chair, and she’d certainly grown suspicious of my slightly odd behavior. She grabbed me by the wrist and helped me up, and then I saw a look in her eyes I’ve never seen before. I’m sure it was meant to intimidate me, but I let a giggle slip out.

“Listen,” she scolded me, “you might think this is funny right now. But we had a talk about your manners tonight. Do you remember what we talked about?”

I nodded, trying hard to keep eye contact.

“What did we decide the punishment would be if your behavior was out of line?”

Normally, a reminder of this punishment (grounded and forced to dust every piece of furniture in the house—blech!) would have scared some sense into me. Apparently the fear of punishments is voided under the influence of wine, because my response to her was this: “I don’t need no punishment, lady, I can do what I want!” And I began to shovel cheese cubes into my mouth like they were the last cheese cubes on earth.

Mom let go of my wrist, and stood before me, dumbfounded. Then she inquired, “What do I smell on your breath?”

The sound of dad descending the stairs came traveling into the dining room, and then he joined us as we stood in an awkward silence. Dad began to say something, but he stopped when he saw the odd expression on my mother’s face as she looked in horror at the partially drained wine bottle on the table.

“Honey, was that a new bottle of wine?” she asked, and I could sense the saliva in her mouth begin to boil with anger.

“Yeah, I just opened it after I set the table.”

“And did you drink any of it yet?”

“No…”

The next thing my mother did would have looked great in slow motion. She picked up the bottle and raised it to eye level, where her eyes grew as big as quarters. She swung herself around and held the bottle where dad could see, and his reaction wasn’t much different. Then—and I’m surprised she didn’t drop the bottle—she exclaimed, “My 11-year-old child just drank nearly half a bottle of wine?!”

Bus-ted.

And do you know what I did? I laughed.

And do you know what happened then? The doorbell rang. Mr. Promotion was about to make his appearance.

Mom and dad stared at each other for an unnaturally long period of time before mom finally grabbed my hand. “Honey, get the door,” she said. “I’ll be back down in just a moment.” The next thing I knew, I was being escorted up the stairs (did you know it’s difficult to climb stairs while under the influence?).
“Mom, why are we going upstairs?” I asked just before we reached the second story of the house. Downstairs, I could hear dad playing the role of the good husband as he invited mom’s boss inside and offered to take his coat.

Mom led me into my bedroom and pointed at me, her finger poised like a magic wand of impending doom. “You are going to stay here until my boss is gone. You’ll eat dinner when he leaves. I will not let you ruin this promotion in your current state of mind, you hear me?”

After she descended the stairs, I cracked my door open and listened to the conversation below.

The unfamiliar male voice was commenting on the décor my mother had chosen for the kitchen. And then he said, “Angela, where’s your daughter? You talk about her all the time, I want to finally meet her.”

With no hesitation, mom blurted out, “She’s actually staying with her grandmother right now.” Then I heard silverware clinking against dishes, and knew they were all about to dig into the dinner that was meant to secure my mother’s promotion.

And I sat alone in my room, drunk for the first time, wishing I had the glass of toxic-colored Kool-aid that was sitting on the table, making an obvious liar of my mother.