By Jody Rae

*Content Warning from the author: this piece engages in the subject of suicide, however there are no graphic scenes.

 On some mornings, the base of Simplot’s Hill was littered with white, malformed ice blocks abandoned on the grass from the night before. We never saw the people who brought stacks of ice blocks, purchased from the Shaver’s grocery store farther down Bogus Basin Road, only to sit on them and ride down a particularly steep incline which, over time, gouged the earth and left raw, muddy wounds in the otherwise pristine green grass. 

My mom and I jointly judged those ne’er-do-wells, those suburban hoodlums who carved their inconsiderate glee into private property. Mr. Simplot was never stingy with his estate. He didn’t mind the ant-like march of schoolchildren across his hill each morning and afternoon; our little legs straining and slipping against the tilt of each rise in the dewy, lumpy hillside; our dirty backpacks full and awkward over our coats or t-shirts. He didn’t care if we tossed our backpacks on the slope to roll ourselves down the hill, shrieking as the world spun faster and faster, just so we could share the thrill of dizziness and grass stains when we stood up at the bottom, only to climb back to where we dropped our book bags. In the winter, his was our favorite sledding hill. 

 Though he was conspicuous in his consumption and material wealth, we regarded Mr. Simplot as a benevolent distant uncle or a prestigious forefather of Boise’s white settlement. We would never recognize him on the street; he remained faceless and voiceless, always, yet we considered him a legitimate member of our community. Neighborhood lore kept us in awe of his financial prowess and might; it was said that trick-or-treaters who broke away from the lower neighborhoods on Halloween to traipse up to his mansion and knock on the door would be rewarded with full-size candy bars. Nobody we knew actually trick-or-treated at Simplot’s mansion, but the myth of regular sized candy earned him our respect, and we pledged allegiance as much to his rumored philanthropy as to the enormous American flag that flapped above his mansion on a twelve-story steel flagpole. 

 I was never really interested in seeing the interior of the Simplot Mansion, nor did I fantasize about living in it. I loved our own house too much, even if it was the dumpiest house on our block. Amidst grand English tudors and elegant Cape Cod style homes nestled against the Boise Foothills, ours was a shoddily-constructed, two-story wood-shingle eyesore that my parents painstakingly painted a light grey with teal trim, by hand. But it was the largest house we ever lived in. The second story, merely a reading loft with a master suite, made me feel rich. I loved my bedroom, with the high vaulted ceiling and morning sunlight. I loved the three tall pines in our steep, private backyard that may or may not have been a retaining wall hazard, and I loved our two and a half bathrooms. I loved our street at sunset. I didn’t need a palace perched on a hilltop to feel at home. I didn’t need the grandiose staircases and sweeping views of the Highlands that many of my friends had. 

 At night, snug in my canopied bed under the moonlight and the shadow of Simplot’s flagpole, I silently gave thanks for my quiet bedroom tucked against the backyard, and my own telephone on my bedroom wall. Sometimes one of our cats, Jasmine or Mocha, would nudge my door open and crawl onto my bed to doze on my chest. “I have everything,” I would whisper to the cat. The cat would purr and knead the bedcovers with its front paws. 

 Occasionally, my friends gathered the remnants of melting or evaporating ice blocks and tried to sail the morning frost of Simplot’s hill, but I remained indignant, chin in the air, resolved to rise above my station. Nobody was instructed to quit ice-blocking on Simplot’s Hill, per se. The police were never summoned. No private security guards ever drove down the mountain to scold anyone. And yet, for the most part, ice blocking was only ever done after dark, as if everyone knew it was at least somewhat disrespectful and uncouth. 

And so, when our refrigerator broke and we were forced to store food in Dad’s creaky old Coleman cooler in the garage, I was horrified when Mom’s outwardly judgmental position on ice-blocking shifted from loud scoffing when we drove by the jagged remains to an air of opportunistic complicity. For weeks, if she spotted the gleaming white shards of ice on the grass near the road, she pulled over and ordered me and my sister out of the car. 

“Hurry!” She said. “Run out there and pick up as many as you can! Quick, I’m parked illegally!” 

We scampered to and from the car, carrying lumps of muddy or grass-flecked ice in our bare hands, ice blocks that strangers sat upon the night before, to deposit on the floor of Mom’s light blue Subaru sedan. Then Mom raced home to dump the scavenged ice into the cooler, where we kept our milk and cheese and yogurt; items that soured no matter how many ice blocks we picked off of Simplot’s Hill. 

“People’s butts touched these ice blocks, Mom. This is butt-ice,” I said, picking grass off a particularly battered block. 

“Oh, just make sure to get it underneath the milk,” she said. 

 My grandparents stopped by one day and expressed dismay over our cooler in the garage, where we tried to quarantine the sour smell. They asked my mom why she hadn’t replaced the broken refrigerator yet, and I was stunned when she told them, “I don’t want to buy a brand new refrigerator for a house that’s going up for sale! Let the new owners buy themselves a refrigerator.”

This was news to me. Selling our house, the house I loved and wanted to live in forever, seemed unthinkable. And yet, hadn’t Mom been dropping hints for years?

My sister remembers the day Mom seemed to give up, ostensibly on housework but as it turned out, on a lot of things. According to my sister, we were ten years old and Mom was in the middle of cleaning the house when she sat on the stairs leading up to her master suite and numbly said, “I just can’t do it anymore”.

Instead of gardening for hours in the evenings, or sewing velcro strips into the seams of her blouses to affix shoulder pads while watching TGIF shows, Mom took long naps after work and got a prescription for Prozac. 

That summer, as soon as school was out, Mom drove us to California to visit Aunt Carole and other relatives. After only a couple of days at Aunt Carole’s house, I woke up to find that Mom had driven herself back to Idaho, leaving me and my sister behind. Aunt Carole couldn’t understand why Mom hadn’t told us her plans to leave us there, but she also couldn’t believe Mom didn’t pack enough underwear for us. We shuffled between relatives’ homes for several weeks, our suitcases bulging with new pieces of clothing or stuffed animals to augment our vagabond wardrobes. As my duffle bag swelled, I felt like a growing burden with each passing day until my aunt and uncle finally drove us partway to Idaho to meet my Mom, who acted as if silently leaving in the middle of the night all those weeks ago was a totally normal, stable thing to do. 

I didn’t understand depression so, with Mom already deep in the pit, I was prone to uncharacteristic fits of jealousy. Back at our own house, I yelled at her and tried to coerce her. I ripped her precious shoulder pads out of all her blouses and dresses and blazers. She responded by either ignoring my antics or hollering. On at least one occasion, when I argued with her about her endless threats to move away to California, she yelled, “Well, how about I just kill myself! How would you like that, huh?” I feared I would find her in a bathtub with her wrists cut for the next five years. 

But she was serious about moving us away to California. We would have to leave our dad behind, who came to see us on weekends and holidays and special events. We would have to leave the only friends we’d ever known, the community we grew up in. My house. 

When I came home from school to find our cats sniffing a For Sale sign in the yard, I dropped my backpack on the grass and tried to pull the sign out of the ground, but it was surprisingly rooted into the topsoil. I didn’t care if neighbors saw me karate kick that sign loose enough to wrestle it out of the ground and toss it over our back fence. When the realtor stopped by the next day to replant the sign, she gave me side-eye, but I gave it right back and called her a Homewrecker behind her back. 

I turned to some of the adults I felt close to at the time, or at least trusted enough to open up to about my impending crisis. Seeking an ally, I prodded grown ups to advocate for me. But they were squarely in Mom’s corner.

“Don’t you want your mom to be happy? She deserves to do this for herself. You’re the kid, don’t you see? Your feelings don’t matter.” Over and over, Mom’s friends and relatives admonished me for not supporting her decision to spread her proverbial wings, take flight and learn to love herself, at the expense of our family. “Your mom has done a lot for you. It’s time she does something for herself for once.”

I walked through our house in a daze, touching walls as I passed by, trying to memorize the contours of the layout and the textures of the wood or plaster surfaces. In my bedroom, I cranked my cassette tapes up loud and performed elaborate dance routines in front of a slim wall mirror propped against my closet doors. The movement helped me expel just a little nervous energy each day. With no one watching or judging, I could escape into fantasies of Mariah Carey music videos or backup dancing for Paula Abdul. If I kept moving, it seemed, everything else might stay the same.

When the Homewrecker sold our house in October, we moved into my godmother’s basement for the next five months to prepare to relocate to California. My godmother, Skylar, and our godsister, Willow, lived in a huge house built into a cliff in the Highlands with broad views of the foothills, the Crane Creek golf course, and a distant, clear shot at Boise’s handful of downtown skyscrapers. Before we moved out of our house, I stowed one of my journals in the secret room behind Mom’s closet, believing I could come back one day to find it and prove to the current owners that I had a claim on the property, and they would obligingly sell it back to me. 

 Skylar’s basement had two tiny windowless bedrooms with low ceilings, a comfortable den, and a bathroom with a bathtub but no shower head. My sister was the Alpha so she got her own bedroom and slept in a twin bed. I was forced to share a full sized bed with my mom and our two cats. Mom snored and listened to Louise L. Hay audio books as she tried to go to sleep, which meant I had to listen to them, too. I barely slept at night with all the racket, and soon my forehead erupted in tiny red zits that persisted no matter how many times a day I washed my face with Clearasil. Puberty was nigh, and I was in no way prepared for hormonal or stress breakouts, nor the hygienic requirements thereof. The boys who were my friends growing up started being mean to me; adults had a sadistic habit of pointing out my budding acne. My godmother once greeted me in the kitchen one morning by way of commenting on how my preadolescent zits reminded her every day how fast we were growing up. I responded to this chaos by chain-reading novels like a literary junkie. 

Each night, Louise’s sonorous self-help voice would haunt my dreams if I managed to fall asleep before the tape ran out, and I resented her when I started memorizing her instructions for creative visualization. 

“See peace breaking out all over the planet,” Louise read, and I could only imagine the Earth’s surface breaking out in tiny red volcanoes, making it ugly and unbearable to look at, impervious to the Creator’s brand of zit cream. Louise L. Hay became a target for the extreme hatred I felt towards my circumstances. Instead of following her nightly instructions, I wrote long missives in school about how much I hated the sound of her soothing voice and I creatively visualized her having terrible Christmases. 

The heat in Skylar’s house was used sparingly. While lying awake all night, I tried to remain as still as possible, because to move a half inch in any direction meant all the heat I’d gathered against my skin would leak rapidly into the dark. To touch the ice-cold wall immediately to my left was certain to shock my senses, but I refused to snuggle against Mom, who slept soundly while presumably dreaming about palm trees and seashells. I learned to drape the next day’s clothes over myself on top of the bedspread. That way, by morning the clothes might have absorbed some of my body heat and I could squirm into them while staying under the covers, my teeth chattering in the dark. 

Because the basement bathroom didn’t have a shower head, I didn’t shower during the entire five months we lived at Skylar’s. Instead I ran a bath each night and washed my hair in my own bathwater. I thought this was an effective way to stay clean, until my friend Jenny walked behind me in single file on our way to P.E. one day and began swiping at the dandruff and dried soap flakes in my hair. Later that day, Mr. Loveless, our P.E. teacher asked me, “How come you never smile?”

The only showers in the house were way up at the third level, and those were Willow and Skylar’s quarters, so I never went up there unless they were home and watching TV on the loft. Mostly I stayed in the cramped room I shared with Mom, listening to Bryan Adams while reading a stack of library books. 

My sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Henderson, was my first role model for feminism, art appreciation, and outrage against the Patriarchy. She was tall and slender and had long dark hair. She was married but waited tables three nights a week to cover her bills. I’m not sure we deserved her. But she looked out for me in a lot of ways. I was obviously struggling at home, but what may have initially tipped her off was when it was my turn to present on current events for the week and I mounted a half-hearted defense of Dr. Kevorkian. 

While windshield-wipering my bony legs on a tall squeaky stool in front of the class, I grasped the lank news clipping between my fingers as my only visual aide while describing how the doctor assisted terminally ill patients with end-of-life wishes.

“Last year, the judge dismissed charges of first-degree murder, but the state of Michigan revoked Dr. Kevorkian’s medical license. And this week,” I told my peers, “the Governor of Michigan signed legislation temporarily banning assisted suicide. So. Legally, Dr. Kevorkian isn’t allowed to help people anymore.” I shrugged. They stared at me, slack-jawed, at a loss for words. Most current events stories were human interest pieces, or anything NASA-related. Brandon had just reported on the New York Yankees signing a new pitcher. Mrs. Henderson glanced nervously around the room before excusing me back to my seat. 

At Skylar’s house, I was embarrassed about not having a shower, or a room, or a bed of my own. When we first moved in, my godsister Willow, eager to maintain her reign in her own house, told her mom that I didn’t want a ride home from school, so I walked the mile and a half home, entirely uphill, in the winter. I did want a ride, but I also missed privacy, so I didn’t mind the cold or the gray skies. I liked the fresh air and I liked imagining myself living alone in any of the fancy houses I passed on the sidewalk. I wiped my runny nose on my coat sleeve as my body curved under the weight of a backpack wider than my shoulders. My ankles ached against the steady incline. I didn’t have a space to dance to my favorite songs anymore, so I began to look forward to the cold walks and the clarifying burn in my chest and throat. It was often the best part of my day. 

Meanwhile, a new family moved into our old house, and they had a daughter who was our age. Her name was Kelsey and she enrolled in my sister’s class, which was a blessing because, even though I liked her, if I had to look at the girl living in my old bedroom every day at school, I would not have handled it well. Kelsey found the journal I stowed in the secret hideout and she read it. She knew who I was, and she felt compelled to return it to me, so she delivered it to my sister. “Please give this to your sister for me. I would return it myself, but I’m worried she might be mad at me for living in your old house. Tell her I promise not to erase the height marks she made for herself on the bedroom wall.”

I wasn’t mad at Kelsey, no, not really. And I appreciated her sensitivity to the situation, which actually showed a great deal of maturity on her part, for an eleven-year-old. I didn’t know what to do with the old journal where I had written all my deepest fears and thoughts and lists. But I did know I wanted it to stay preserved, in Boise, so I tossed the journal into the storage space behind the washing machine at Skylar’s house, ceremoniously, like they were my own cremated ashes. But a few weeks later, Skylar cleaned out that long dark cavern and found the journal. She returned it to me, thinking it was misplaced somehow. What the hell, with trying to offload this damn journal? I thought. 

It was during one of my long walks home from school that I hatched a plan. If I could turn everyone at school against me, they would be mean, and I wouldn’t miss them so much when I left. Because, oh, how I would miss them, and already did; these classmates I cherished and wanted to keep close forever. In my young brain, sabotage seemed like the only solution.

It was an obnoxious revelation that backfired gloriously. When one boy made a benign wisecrack at me, I walked behind his chair and yanked his hair. When my friend Beth, who sat directly behind me, tried to talk to me in her unwavering kind and friendly manner, I blatantly ignored her. At recess, I took a book outside or kept to myself, leaping from one slick ice mound to another on the playground, hoping I might slip and knock myself unconscious. Perhaps I would enter into a coma and my mom would have no choice but to stay in Boise, working at the public library, while I struggled to survive at St. Luke’s hospital, her plans ultimately thwarted. 

The other kids gave mostly bored or dismissive responses to my alienating scheme. The girls, not yet hardened by middle school social warfare, left me to my own devices and wasted no time or attention on me. The boys were insensitive but not cruel, save for the two boys in my class who were, we later realized, raised by abusive fathers. In me, they saw an easy thing to verbally torture. Stopping just short of any physical harm, the two boys attacked from separate angles, with no coordination between themselves. Their words are lost on me now, as they were then. Nothing they said to me gave them any indication that I was bothered, and this seemed to both excite and infuriate them. To hurl invectives and insults towards an unresponsive or aloof girl like me became less about hurting me and more about performing for everyone else. 

After some time, their behavior wore on everyone. “Come on, just leave her alone, will you?” The boy I loved since fourth grade said one morning, while keeping his head down on his schoolwork. He didn’t love me back anymore; he just wanted some peace and quiet. Mrs. Henderson occasionally overheard one of the two boys’ vitriolic rants and she intervened. “Why would you say that to someone? How do you think that makes her feel?” She yelled. 

“I’m fine,” I’d say. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings.” After all, I reasoned, my feelings didn’t matter anyway. 

The worst part was saying a slow goodbye to my dad. My parents split up when my sister and I were three, but I never suffered the pain of divorce because my dad was always at our house on weekends, or we were with him in McCall, a hundred miles north. He was with us every holiday, every birthday, and a lot of major school events. My mom assigned constant projects for him around her house, even though he didn’t live there. On any given weekend, our outing involved walking the wide concrete aisles of a hardware store while Dad shopped for materials for Mom’s house. As we slowly transitioned out of Idaho, he was visibly breaking down. Sometimes he wiped his eyes while driving us around in his loud Chevy van.

My godsister Willow was watching her own parents split up at the time. She spent half her time at her dad’s house and half at her mom’s, and even though we were raised together like sisters, this was never something we discussed. I remember being told not to talk about it unless Willow brought it up, which of course she didn’t. She was ten. 

Instead Willow became extremely attached to her terrier, A.J., who never left her side. While her parents divorced, A.J. was Willow’s solace and constant companion. That is, until we let him follow us down the street to a friend’s house and we watched him get run over by a car. Nothing will erase the sound of Willow’s screaming sobs when we raced towards A.J.’s still body; nothing will erase the small pool of blood seeping from his ear onto the asphalt. Nothing would ever compare to the helpless feeling of watching tragedy strike someone I loved, while not being able to stop it, even as I stood right beside her.

That afternoon, while Willow’s parents handled A.J’s effects, Willow and my sister and I roamed the main floor, wailing separately, like three ghosts passing from room to room, unable to look at each other. Now, not only was Willow dealing with her parent’s divorce, she had to mourn her dog, too. With the two of us living together, it became a very bleak house indeed. 

When Christmas arrived, my dad seemed to panic. He took me and my sister shopping and bought two of everything we wanted so we wouldn’t have to share. That meant two boomboxes, two sets of the same cassette tapes, two pairs of Reebok Pumps – those sneakers with an internal inflation device that they didn’t even make in kids’ sizes. Dad bought us adult sized Pumps because we thought they were cool and because it fit his shopping philosophy that I would “grow into them someday”. The sales guy at the shoe store said something like, “Seriously, man, don’t do this.” I wore the Pumps at school, but changed out of them before and after recess so they wouldn’t get dirty. We in fact never grew into those Pumps. 

I wasn’t aware at the time that my dad, who doesn’t go to the mall on purpose, was having a prolonged emotional breakdown. But while I memorized En Vogue’s Funky Divas album in its entirety, it occurred to me that he was desperate because his daughters were moving away soon. 

I tried to picture my life without the classmates I’d grown up with, even the ones who were mean to me, and that was unbearable. But when I finally realized how much my dad was hurting, I sealed off some important part of myself and tried to absorb as much of the impact for him as possible. If I tried to keep a stiff upper lip in his presence, maybe he could think about things other than the clock winding down and the calendar flipping towards the inevitable. Sparing Dad’s feelings became a priority, but the weight of despair sunk me further into a cold darkness. 

“You can stay behind and live with Skylar or move to McCall to live with your dad, but I am going to California with or without you,” I remember Mom saying flippantly, while rolling her hair in curlers before bedtime. I was angry that she refused to wait until I finished sixth grade to relocate. For the first time, I felt forced to choose between my parents. When I asked Dad if I could live with him full time, he told me, “Well. I’d like that. But I just don’t know how to raise girls…” As if anyone does. 

In my vocabulary tests, I began to reference Dr. Kevorkian in example sentences. Mrs. Henderson noticed. So one day my mom pulled me out of school to visit a psychologist. If I had to guess, my gingerbread house at Christmastime was the final straw for Mrs. Henderson, when I added a graham cracker gallows platform in the frosted yard, complete with a red vine noose. Also, not one for subtlety, the entire roof of my gingerbread house was aflame in orange gumdrops. Next to everyone else’s cheerful and cozy cottages, mine was a Halloween hellscape of spun sugar and red sprinkles, “for blood splatter,” I explained to one of the room moms, who pursed her lips and furrowed her brow with matronly concern. My cry for help could not have been more shrill.

I certainly was not a little Wednesday Addams at the beginning of the school year, so Mrs. Henderson took the only action within her power, forming a protective dome-like barrier over me in her classroom. But then I submitted an Historic Figure report on Billie Holiday, with a strong emphasis on her heroin addiction and tragic death. I don’t think Mrs. Henderson worried so much that I was aiming for Lady Day’s trajectory. To her, this was just one more chilling message shot over the bow of my sinking ship. 

The psychologist across town on Parkcenter Boulevard was a friendly lady, with short silver hair and kind eyes, but she remained silent throughout the entire session. I recognized the office park because my friend Tyler’s family owned the Red Robin across the street, and my friend Jennifer’s grandparents owned the Garcia’s Mexican restaurant where we used to eat fried ice cream, back when friends used to invite me places. In the psychologist’s office,  I played with a toy train in a sandbox while my mom waited in the lobby. Even though the psychologist let me stay quiet for almost a whole hour, she must have mastered her technique, because five minutes before our session was over and without any prodding, I burst into heavy tears. 

“Please tell my mom not to move me away from my dad and all my friends,” I begged her. “I hate living in someone else’s house and I want my own bed. My dad says he doesn’t know how to raise me, so I have to live with Mom. But, please, she won’t listen to me.” The psychologist’s face, held for so long in a soft and pleasant stare, hardened into a thin-lipped, straight mouth. She glanced at her watch and handed me a tissue. 

“I would love to see you again soon,” she told me as she escorted me into the waiting room, softening once again. I beamed, as if I had passed an exam. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to speak with your mother for just a few minutes.” 

My mom took me out for ice cream afterwards at the Baskin Robbins on Broadway. She was chipper and she smiled, but I never saw that psychologist again. 

Louise L. Hay’s voice continued to interrupt my sleep habits. I remember crying after Mom fell asleep when Louise airily stated, “If you can’t get close to other people, it is because you don’t know how to be close to your own inner child. The child in you is scared and hurting. Be there for your child.” Since Mom was fast asleep, I wanted to elbow her awake to ask, What about the child right next to you? What about her?

At school, I sometimes looked at my arm resting on my desk over an open textbook, and I suddenly felt like the arm didn’t belong to me, as if it was a weirdly detached mannequin’s arm inside a too-short jacket sleeve, the white cuffs dingy and hollow above the wrist where the elastic wore out. Whose arm is this, I wondered. If the classroom became loud during group activities, the sounds elongated near my ears so that everyone sounded very far away, or like I was underwater. I no longer raised that mannequin arm in class to swiftly answer questions incorrectly or tell long-winded stories to stay alert and interested in the topic at hand. I wrote love notes to Idaho on my desk, desperate to leave a mark of my existence on a place I would leave behind. 

On another long night while Louise droned on, the words landed haphazardly in a way I’m certain the author never intended. 

“Responsibility is our ability to respond to a situation. We always have a choice,” she read. Yes, I thought. I do have a choice in this situation. And that choice is to run away. Surely running away would communicate to my mom how desperate I was to avoid moving out of Boise. In a colorful note with hearts drawn along the borders, I informed my friend Beth about my plans to sleep under a bridge somewhere. I didn’t know of any bridges in the Highlands, so I would have to walk downtown, or perhaps curl up inside one of the long metal tube slides at Camel’s Back Park. Beth begged me in a reply note not to run away. She pleaded with me to stay logical and consider the real and perceived dangers of sleeping outside in the winter. 

After Beth tried to convince me not to run away, I walked home to my godmother’s house, searching out alcoves and hideaway spots near the street where I could camp. In Skylar’s basement, I started packing a book bag with supplies like snacks and a blanket, but when it came to clothing, I didn’t know where to start. I had never owned a quality winter coat and any ski gear that still fit was packed away in a storage unit with the rest of our belongings. It was below zero outside and I lost my nerve. Instead, I daydreamed about opening the car door while Mom drove us on the highway to California, losing consciousness the moment I hit the blurred pavement. 

I didn’t know much about how suicide should be accomplished without Dr. Kevorkian’s calming voice at my bedside, leading me to the other side with an intravenous tether, but I’d heard that ingesting massive amounts of multi-colored pills or drinking chemicals from under the sink ought to do it. No stranger to chemicals under the sink, growing up I fancied myself a yet-to-be-discovered genius chemist. I frequently locked myself in the bathroom with a notebook and a tall water glass, where I would mix various cleaning solutions and record the results of each reaction in a notebook. I didn’t know about volatility, so I didn’t consider how close I came to mixing rudimentary napalm through one of my under-the-sink potions. It was years before my folks broke down and finally bought the small chemistry set I kept asking for. But I was older and wiser now, and I suspected I could decipher a noxious poison from an inert substance. The thought made my heart quicken. 

In the meantime, I read my books, one after another. Biding my time.

Mrs. Henderson led a reading program that rewarded students who read the most books each month with a pizza party. I never missed a single pizza party until we left Idaho. I lived for those monthly pizza parties with just Mrs. Henderson, a few classmates, and maybe a special guest faculty member. For every book we read, we got to write the title on a large green paper leaf that Mrs. Henderson attached to a giant papier-mâché tree trunk that crawled up the front wall and across the ceiling over our heads. At the end of the year, after I had already left the school for California, they counted up the leaves and I had the most, with sixty-three leaves. Nobody else came close. 

Mom left us with Skylar to move some of our stuff to California. 

“I’ll only be gone a week! Stop crying, right this instant!” 

Uncle Roger arrived in a giant moving truck and loaded all of our stuff out of the storage unit. I knew this was serious because Mom took Jasmine and Mocha with her. While she was gone, I finally had the whole bed to myself, but I didn’t sleep because I was terrified Mom wouldn’t come back, and I would be the last to know, just like that summer she left us behind in California. As angry as I felt, I spritzed her flat pillow with her amber-colored perfume, which was called something like “Wild Musk”. That week, I took her pillow upstairs to the den to watch TV with Willow and Skylar. Willow snuggled with an old bone that her dog A.J. used to chew. She wrapped the jagged bone in a fuzzy blanket and tucked it into its own bean bag chair, or she cradled it absentmindedly while I curled up on the carpet with my musky Pillow Mom.

Once, during a commercial break, Skylar said, “You know, you’re welcome to stay here with me if you want to keep living here.” I shrugged with my back turned to her. My throat constricted in a silent sob. Don’t kids belong with their Mom? I thought, even if they don’t? 

If I stayed with Skylar, how could I live in the basement all alone? I don’t have my own alarm clock anymore. How will I wake up for school in the morning? I need Mom to help with my homework, I reasoned. Looking back, I am surprised this was a concern for me. I could have asked my friends and their parents for help. I could have asked Mrs. Henderson to find me after-school tutoring. I could have stayed behind, but I had already secluded myself at school and severed the most important ties in my life. And doesn’t a kid belong with their Mom? 

In March, Mom moved us to Aptos, California and rented a mildewy duplex on Seascape Boulevard that exceeded our budget, but was within walking distance to the beach. I gathered Jasmine and Mocha into my arms and murmured into their fur, talking shit about Mom. They concurred through a twitch of a tail, a short yowl, a violent purr. I telepathically whispered to them that I would find our way home. 

We enrolled at an elementary school to finish out the last two months of sixth grade. The school was woefully overcrowded, and reeked sweetly of rotting food and garbage from the playground. My sister had to share a desk and textbooks with a girl in her classroom. The only reason I got my own desk in my classroom was because it was vacated by a boy who went to rehab or a psychiatric hospital for sniffing glue.

It is difficult to articulate the arrival of rage that had surely gained momentum over time. When it made its presence known, it gave no indication that it was inside of me, other than it was the only thing that seemed to bring feeling back into my mannequin arms. During heated moments, when I looked at my hands, I felt every nerve tingling down to my fingertips. Destruction was not instinctual before, but suddenly I wanted to mindlessly wreck things. I meditated on how I could pull the entire wooden entertainment center away from the wall, and let it crash across the kitchen table. The garage was lined with shelves, stuffed with all our belongings that couldn’t fit in our tiny duplex. Those shelves could come down with a shove, and kiss my ass on the way down. Though I didn’t act on it, my desire to topple heavy pieces of furniture frightened me, and soothed me all at once. 

After just three days at my new school, I sat on the stairs in our duplex and whispered, “I just can’t do it anymore”. I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on a soft, tasseled champagne bathmat while I emptied cleaning supplies from the cabinet beneath the sink. I opened and sniffed each bottle, some of which still had the faded green “Mr. Yucky” stickers I brought home from school, where they taught me not to do the exact thing I was now doing. I didn’t want any of the dyed solutions, which felt impure and I wondered if perhaps the dye diluted the strength of the active ingredients. I chose a small brown bottle filled with clear liquid that had an ominous name. 

I sat cross-legged on the bathmat and brought the bottle to my lips, my hand shaking, and I thought my final thoughts. My plan was to haunt my old elementary school in Boise, in a friendly way, but scare bullies away from the loners. I thought about my dad and my friends in Idaho who I didn’t think I would ever see again. I thought about my new school and how impossible it was that I wasn’t sitting in Mrs. Henderson’s class that very moment, bored with plant cell structures, instead of staring down the open mouth of a dark bottle of poison. What I wouldn’t give to hear those two abused boys unleash their fury on me, just to be in Boise again. Leaving everything I ever knew behind, while knowing everything was still progressing day by day without me, felt like a death. As if my absence didn’t really affect anyone.

I drank from the bottle and coughed immediately. I anticipated discomfort, but I did not foresee the burning in my throat and the roof of my mouth. Terrified by the sensation, I remembered hearing on an after school special that milk can neutralize acid, so I ran upstairs and gulped milk straight from the jug while my mom and my sister watched Golden Girls in the living room. Gasping, I immediately confessed to my mom and my sister, my eyes watering and my voice shaking. 

“Well, you seem fine now,” they said. God, Mom could be such a Sophia. And my sister was always such a major Blanche.

Later that night I heard them snickering together in the bathroom over the scattered bottles on the floor. Sons a bitches, I thought. I had tried to poison myself with hydrogen peroxide, which at best may have caused vomiting and at worst would have caused tissue burns. 

Then Mocha ran away, leaving me and Jasmine behind. For days I sat on the front porch, stroking Jasmine’s giant gray belly while he sunbathed. Every once in a while, he jerked his head towards the street, his light blue Siamese eyes fixated on nothing, and I thought he sensed Mocha returning. I hurried up and down the unfamiliar road in socked feet, calling her name. Maybe she was lost and couldn’t find her way home? I cried for all the neighborhood to see. 

I made posters every day after school and taped them on every corner mailbox within walking distance and on the bulletin board at the Seascape Village. The signs were torn down as quickly as I put them up, and it became a sort of cold war between me and the culprit as my mission shifted from Missing Cat to, I’ve got no real friends here and all the time in the world to make flyers, Asshole. I drew Mocha in haughty repose, her fluffy black lion’s mane crowding under her ladylike chin; I drew her mugshot, straight-on and in profile; I drew her dainty paw prints, like inked fingerprints that would somehow crack the case. 

One afternoon, I came home after my daily flyer distribution, and our living room was filled with all my aunts and uncles and older cousins. It was a Welcome to California party, where they mostly sat in the living room watching footage of the Branch Davidian compound tragedy in Waco, Texas. I forgot they were coming over to see us.

“Is this a shoulder pad intervention?” I asked. “Because maybe you’ve noticed my mom is out of control.” 

“Oh, stop that,” Mom yelled from the kitchen. Later, they failed to comfort me with platitudes bordering on guilt trips. “Think of your mother’s happiness,” they said. “She deserves to be happy”. The implication was that I didn’t deserve to be happy as much as my mom did.

Eventually, we admitted to ourselves that Mocha was likely overtaken by a gang of vicious raccoons. Or hit by a car. I thought of A.J. lying in the street back home, and I recalled Willow’s agonized moans, and I wondered which was worse: never knowing Mocha’s true fate, or witnessing her sudden death and forced to grasp the finality of it. 

Along the beach, atop sheer cliffs of sandstone and granite, enormous houses as big as Simplot’s mansion sat silently like a row of sturdy, gleaming teeth. The residents and owners of those mansions were faceless, but also nameless. None of them possessed the mythical reputation of Mr. Simplot. None of them allowed hundreds of schoolchildren to cross their property, ever, let alone daily. None of them even seemed to like having neighbors; iron gates and thick stucco privacy walls kept them enclosed and separated from the rest of society, discouraging even the most intrepid trick-or-treaters. Their mansions spoke above the fog bank, you can look, but you can’t touch. 

Like other things I’d lost over the past year, I held onto Mocha’s disappearance like a hard, frozen tangible object close to my heart, letting it gouge raw grooves into a place struggling to regenerate. Louise L. Hay would never approve of my methods, but during rare moments at that time when I felt my heart warming towards the future, or glimmer with hope, or grow affection for anything other than my cats, I gathered those losses close, preserving them and letting their weighted, cold touch cool any warmth in my chest. I had to. To allow those losses to evaporate meant losing them forever, even when I knew I couldn’t keep them forever: my dad, my house, my room, my friends, my cat, my school. My whole world. No, letting go of all of these at once could only mean that nothing really mattered at all, least of all my feelings. 

About the Author: Jody Rae’s creative nonfiction essays appear in The Avalon Literary Review, The Good Life Review, and From Whispers to Roars. Her short story, “Beautiful Mother” was a finalist in the Phoebe Journal 2021 Spring Fiction Contest. She was the first prize winner of the 2019 Winning Writers Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest for her poem, “Failure to Triangulate”. She lives in Colorado, and her work can be found at www.criminysakesalive.com.