A week later, at the beginning of my shift, he showed me a quart-sized baggie fat with green clumps of pot, then shoved it deep into the zippered interior pocket of my backpack. “It’s good stuff,” he said. “Two hundred should do it.”
My stomach turned, a weird, queasy flip-flop. I’d pictured myself at a party this fall, casually producing enough to roll a joint. I couldn’t possibly hide this much at Holmes House, where Mom would sniff it out with her razor-sharp sense for whatever I was doing wrong. I thought about telling Marcus that I’d made a mistake, that I couldn’t do it—but that would mean losing whatever reputation I had with him. It would mean, most likely, losing him. Maybe I could ditch it somewhere on my way out of Hartford, make some homeless person’s day when he found it in a Dumpster.
“I know you’re good for it,” Marcus said, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek, and I said, “Course I am.”
That afternoon, I was replenishing paint palettes from giant tubs of tempera when the police officer came in, a radio crackling at his hip, a drug-sniffing German shepherd at his side. It was like watching an after-school special, some cautionary tale about what happened when a good girl met a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. I watched as the officer and my supervisor chatted with their heads bent close together before they disappeared into the break room. Later, the rumor would be that someone had smelled marijuana and called the police. More likely my supervisor had been watching Marcus and me all along.
A minute later, she reappeared in the doorway of the break room, scanning the studio until her gaze settled on me, frozen in place, a blob of yellow paint running down my arm.
It was one thing to flirt with disaster, to tiptoe up to the edge of the canyon and peek over the side. It was another thing entirely to jump.
I said, That’s my backpack, but I don’t know what that stuff is.
I said, Someone must have put that there.
I said, I need to make a phone call.
A lawyer met me at the police station, demanding that I be released immediately. Marcus, it turned out, had a previous misdemeanor; he was cuffed and led away, and he passed me without making eye contact.
I never knew what my parents did, what strings they pulled or how they’d known to pull them in the first place. That night, I was cited for a misdemeanor and released, and my name never made it into the papers. At home, Dad paced while Mom did the talking, her voice losing its customary coolness. Did I understand the damage I had caused? Did I know what something like this might do to Dad’s career, to his reputation, to our family? Was I aware of his stance on drugs, the hypocrisy of his daughter being involved with a drug dealer, being found with an amount that constituted a felony? And just what did I have to say for myself?
I asked what would happen to Marcus, whether he would have to spend the night in jail.
“Wake up!” Mom hissed. “What do you think will happen to him?”
A few weeks later Mom wrote a check, I pled to a lesser charge and my record was sealed. My only punishment was the type of community service that would eventually work its way onto my résumé.
More pot had been found at Marcus’s loft, a place I’d tried to imagine over the six weeks we’d been together, when I’d fantasized about the two of us in an actual bed, on an actual mattress, with actual sheets. For bringing drugs into a place whose official mission was to serve children, Marcus was charged with a felony. That fall, I served a Mabrey-imposed house arrest, only leaving my bedroom on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Mom brought me to a local senior center to serve out my sentence.
One day that October, she slapped the Hartford Register in front of me, open to an article about an inmate that had been killed in a brawl. He was identified as Marcus Rodriguez, twenty, of Hartford, awaiting trial for felony drug sales. The article didn’t mention that he’d been a student at Capitol Community College, that he’d coordinated the new mural at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, that he’d had a kind smile, that he liked to talk after sex, that his girlfriend had sold him out.
In November, Dad won the senate race by a landslide.
* * *
I spent most of that fall on my childhood bed in Holmes House, shifting from hysterical to catatonic like they were the only settings that had been programmed into me. Marcus was dead, and I was going to come out unscathed. Marcus was dead, and his death was directly related to me, set in motion by the kiss I’d given him that night at the slop sink, my hands soapy with water, as if a line could be drawn between the two, a simple dot to dot.
Mom had spread the word that I was suffering from a bad case of mono, and from time to time get-well cards arrived from my classmates at Reardon. I completed my coursework that semester through independent study, moving zombie-like through worksheets and take-home tests.
Once Mom found me on my bed, sobbing into a pillow. “What now?” she asked, as if I’d done some new horrible thing.
I wiped away my tears, but my voice came out weak and blubbery. “He was so young.”
Mom leaned close, and for a moment I thought she might do something to comfort me, like pat me on the shoulder or tell me it would be okay. Instead, she slapped me across the face. “You will snap out of this,” she ordered. “You’ll get on with your life and we will never speak of this again, do you understand?”
She was true to her word; if Kat or MK knew anything about what I’d done, they never mentioned it me. Dad had already leased an apartment in Washington; after the election, that became his permanent residence, his stays at Holmes House brief and rare. Up until then, Dad had been a buffer between Mom and me, a mild-mannered negotiator. Now that he was gone, the silence stretched between us, too large to be breeched with a phone call.
Once I wandered downstairs while Mom was hosting a meeting for the local branch of the League of Women Voters, pausing in the hallway as the women chatted and sipped tea from china that had been in the Holmes family for a hundred years. Hildy, our live-in domestic help, passed me with the tea service rattling faintly on a silver tray.
“How is poor Lauren?” one of the women asked, and I started, hearing my name.
Mom didn’t miss a beat. “We were so worried about her, but she’s been growing stronger every day. This virus just hit her hard, poor thing.”
I leaned against the wall, listening to the women’s sympathetic murmurs as Mom reinvented my troubles—fevers and listlessness, loss of appetite, how devastated I’d been not to participate in more of the campaigning. “Lauren’s a strong girl, though,” Mom said. “She’ll be back to her old self in no time.”
It was an amazing performance, award-worthy. Somehow, Mom had managed to erase the drugs in my backpack, the hours I’d spent in the police station, Marcus bleeding to death in the Hartford Correctional Center, the months I’d spent crying into my pillow. She’d reinvented me as a brave warrior, a dutiful daughter.
She was so convincing, I almost believed it myself.
Megan
The alarm on my cell phone went off at 6:25, then again at 6:30 and, as a last call, at 6:35. Marimba—the world’s most hateful sound. Bobby’s side of the bed was empty, and when I entered the kitchen five minutes later, he was already draining his first cup of coffee and filling his thermos with the thirty-two ounces that would get him through the day.
I stood in the doorway, yawning.
“Well, if it isn’t the woman of my dreams,” Bobby said, grinning at my disheveled state. I was wearing one of his old UMass shirts, the decaying hem hanging to