Emily

  Emily:  Pills.

     They’re all over my house.  My Dad takes Vitamin D, a multivitamin, and right now, an antibiotic.  The dog takes doggie-profen and glucosamine.  My brother and I each take three vitamins a day, chewables because he’s only five, and me?  I won’t swallow a pill.  
     Drives my mother nuts.

     She easily swallows her pills, tiny handfuls of them.  She keeps them ordered and ready in one of those big, rectangular pill boxes, only she had to adapt hers, putting stickers over the pre-written days because she takes different combinations of pills on schedule, four times a day.  She keeps the bottles in a big basket in her room.  One day, I checked them out.  Just checked them out.  I wasn’t going to take any.  I won’t swallow a pill.

     Vitamin D, 2000 mg.

     Vitamin D, 1000 mg.

     Multivitamin

     Algaecal (?!)
     Women’s weight loss plus supplement

     Tramadol

     Trazodone

     Cyclobenzaprine

     Neurontin, 100 mg.

     Neurontin, 600 mg.

     Synthroid

     Abilify

     Lorazapam

    

 Me, I won’t swallow a pill.

     ...But I will snort them. ;)  

Gemma's Mom

Gemma’s Mom:  Gemma is a thirteen year old who has just sprouted fairy wings because her mother was an addicted to fairy Dust.  When she burned out and her wings stopped working, Gemma’s Mom ran, leaving Gemma when she was only six.  Gemma first appeared in a short story, “Wings”, then in OGW 9/24/09, 10/29/09, 2/4/10, and now she’s the narrator of a novel I’m working on.  The following is a letter Gemma’s mother wrote to Gemma when she was eight.

My darling girl, my little fairy, my precious Gem,

Remember when I used to fly?

Remember that poem I used to read to you?   “Come away, human chyld/ to the waters and the wyld/ With a fairy hand in hand/ From a world more full of weeping than you can understand.”  I saw it framed on the wall of a friend’s bedroom yesterday, and I began to cry.  I’d tried not to think of you for so long.  My feelings for you came rushing back in that instant, breaking the wall I’d built up around my heart.

Do you still love me?  I used to be your whole world.  Are you very angry with me?  Have you tried to forget me?  Please believe me when I say I love you very much.  I’ve been scared and lonely and trying to heal.  But yesterday, the Goddess showed me that Yeats poem, and I knew it was a sign that I needed you back in my life.  I’ve missed you soooo much. 

You must wonder why it took me two years to write to you.  Maybe you’re wondering why I never came home.

Remember when you couldn’t wait to be like me?  When I left, I didn’t want you to see me so broken.  I didn’t want you to want to be like me any more.  I left to spare you.

Honey, I couldn’t bring you with me, or come back, not the way I was. 

It’s taken me two years, but I’m learning to fly again.  I have friends, I have the Goddess in my life, I’m painting beautiful pictures (like we used to, together.  Remember when we used to paint together?  Is that mural still on the wall in the upstairs hall?  Or did your father paint over it?  He probably did paint over it.  I don’t want to place blame, but in order for you to understand why I left, you should know that your father never understood me.

I should’ve taken you with me.  Every day I’ve thought of you.  Every day.  I have a picture of us from the day you were born, you’re a little doll, porcelein-white, sucking on the long sleeve of a onesy that covers your hand.  Your head is against my neck, and you are at peace.  As am I.

      

I was afraid to write to you.  I was afraid your father had turned you against me.  Do you understand, I loved him so much, but he stopped caring about me.  In the end, he wasn’t even talking to me!  He never understood me.  How devastated I was after Jacob was born, when I stopped being able to fly.

I’m not blaming Jacob -- he was such a sweet boy!  How is he? 

You were tooo young to understand, but when Jacob was born, something inside me snapped.  I think it was what’s called post-partum depression, which you’re too young to understand.  I was just so sad.  I felt like I was in a horror movie, only it was real and it was never going to end.

I felt trapped.  I was dying inside.  My wings had stopped working and were worn out and dull and I couldn’t understand why, but I know now it was because of my heavy heart.  I’d always used flying to lighten my spirit, but it wasn’t working anymore.  Even your sweet, heart-shaped face and contagious laughter couldn’t lift me up.  My wings were heavy weights.  Jacob was another weight I couldn’t carry.  Your father didn’t want to help me.

You used to say, “It’s all right Mommy,” and pat my hand.  But it wasn’t.

Anyway, enough sad talk.  I love you Gemma, I always have and always will.  I am getting better, and when I am fully healed, I will bring you to New York City to live with me.  We were meant to be together.  Goddess willing, we will be.

Please forgive me.  I love you, baby.

Love,

Mommy

Jenna

Jenna:  Jenna is from Spun, a novel I wrote about a girl with a crystal meth addiction.  Here, she’s been clean for several weeks, but her boyfriend Josh convinces her to get high again.

Jenna:  One sniff, and it’s back.

            Confidence, yes.  I mean, Yes!  Who did I think I was before, trying to be someone

            What?  Who?

            This is me.  The real me.

            All that tormenting of myself, wondering if I was worth anything, wondering if it was okay for Josh, or my mother, or drugs to complete me, and now here I am, and when Josh offers me the cd case again, I snort another line of meth without even thinking about it because all that crap about feeling my feelings was just crap, and now I feel it, I feel it all, it’s all good, and I’m all in my head:  Josh, Mom, Paige!  I love you guys!  Ruby!  And that great writer I love too, that Yann Martel who is totally awesome!

            Burning in my nose and brain, and I’m a little anxious and my thinking is going all over the place but so what!

            “Did you ever read Life of Pi?” I ask Josh, whose hands are on me, and it makes me uncomfortable (but I love him!  I do and it. is. all. good. smiles.) The author, Yann Martel said-- 

Don’t know why I’m talking to Josh about a book right now it’s crazy and has nothing to do with me really, and yet it does, because now everything means something.  I want to cry.

            “I love that you’re the smart one,” Josh says, kissing my neck.

            Hey!  I’m trying to talk here!

            Josh isn’t listening, but I say anyway, because I am so profound right now, and I am the smart one, why didn’t I see that before?  “Life and death, birth and love,”

            “Mm hmm,” Josh says. 

            Straighten up, Jenna.  I try to remember the whole quote from that author guy I love whose name I can’t even think of right now because I feel buzzy in my head, and it’s like every book I ever read is spinning around in there.  Suddenly, out of the whirl, I pull out, “Life and death, birth and love….They’re not problems, they’re life itself.”

            That’s it.  That’s me and my experience.  High on meth again, and it’s all in focus for an instant, and I’m not so sure anymore.

Josh doesn’t answer, but I don’t care, I’m just wishing I could get that initial buzz-burn back, that feeling of everything inside of me, but I can’t. 

            Whoa.  I am suddenly empty, I feel nothing.  When Josh tries to lift my shirt over my head, I say “No,” for the first time.

Gemma

Gemma first appeared in an unpublished short story, “Wings”, then in OGW 9/24/09 and 10/29/09.  Gemma’s mother abandoned her when she was a child.  Mom was addicted to smoking faery dust, and now that Gem’s an adolescent she has what all the daughters of dusters got – wings.  Horrified and outcast, Gemma left home for NYC to find her mother, and herself. 

Gemma:  Fear wrapped around my neck like Samantha, Ian’s pet python, gone wild.  Tightening, then loosening so I could almost taste air again… and then tight again, choking me.

Gemma, get a hold of yourself, the reasonable, somehow calm me said inside.

Aaaaaaaa cough cough gasp Aaaaaaa… (sound fading out to nothing) said the real me, the anxiety-driven, wings-fluttering, freaked-out me.

“Are you gonna knock?” said Iris.

“She’s chicken,” said Lola.

“Just knock,” said Ian.

“I’m here for you no matter what,” said Luke.

“Knock!” everyone shouted at once.

I did.  I thrust my arm out and rapped hard on the door twice, paused, and then a third time.  All the voices in my head were quiet.  I was alone in the hall outside the fifth floor walk-up.  My knock seemed to linger in the empty air.  When the air stilled, I knocked again, more gently, calmly this time because I was sure no one was home.

“Who is it?  Who’s out there?”  said a gruff voice, and I jumped back.  “Who are you?” said the voice.  Old woman?  Old man?  I couldn’t tell, but I imagined a milky eyeball pressed against the peep hole.

“Gemma,” I said.  “Um, it’s me, Gemma?  I’m looking for my mother?”

“I ain’t her.  Go away!”

“I’m here for you,” Luke said in my head before I could run. 

“Oh. Um.  Do you know um Belle um Green?  Or, I mean maybe she calls herself Belle LaGuin?  I was told, well, I mean, I heard she lives here?”  I pulled my jacket closer, forgetting for a moment that Luke and I had cut out a hole for my wings and they were out there for anyone to see now. 

I am looking for my mother, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of! I thought, and with that, my wings beat, and I rose up off the floor.  Gemma, me, adolescent faery.  On my own in New York, and doing fine.  I pounded on the door this time.

The door opened a crack.  “All right, all right.  Just come down from there.  I’ll tell you what I know.”  A gnarled hand appeared around the edge of the open door, and a long finger with a sharp, yellowed nail beckoned.  “Come on, quit your lollygagging and get in before someone sees you.  This is a nice neighborhood.”

Meghan

Meghan is a new character.  I sat down to write and thought, "I'm tired.  The Red Bull doesn't cut it for me anymore"... wrote that down for the hell of it, and Meghan emerged!  All I know about her so far is what you read in her Outsider Girls entry.  Her father has a drug problem, maybe her mother too, maybe Meghan herself.  We'll see...

Megan:  I am tired.  The Red Bull doesn’t cut it for me anymore.  My father let me try cocaine once, and it got me up, but not enough, you know?  I mean, it felt good and all that, like it was supposed to, I guess, but

     I am never smoking pot again.  No, really.  Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s what I said about the coke

     Of course I found his stash, well, Stacy who wants to be called Grimelda – no shit –

     “Stop, just stop!” that’s Grimelda, and she’s all yelling and shit at Angel to stop rubbing her back against the edge of the door cause, and I agree, it’s going to really hurt her.

     Grimelda found my dad’s stash of cocaine in his sock drawer of all places, I mean how lame a hiding place was that?  Also a rectangle sample of the same granite we eventually did our counters with

     They weren’t even his regular socks.  Just the holey ones without matches in a drawer covering his coke.

Fuck. Never. A. gain.  No.  More.  Pot 

“Yeah sure,” I say to the offer of a shot of vodka in my Red Bull.  

     Once I heard Daniel Pesco’s dad found his bottle of vodka in the freezer frozen, and Daniel was in like so much trouble, and he’s such an idiot which is why we don’t hang out with him anyway and

     OMG, my mother flipped out when she caught Stacy I mean Grimelda and me into Dad’s stash, she was like, “Fuckin’ A’ Richard—“

     Dad prefers to be called Dick.  No, just kidding.

     I think I want to die here now.  I’m never smoking pot again. 

“Angel, it does not itch that much you’re just stoned!” She better just stop before I before I

     Dad was like, I mean later, when Mom was gone, after she’d stormed off, after she’d made an appointment with me I mean for me to see her shrink

     Dad was like, “Meghan, you just have to ask, honey, you don’t have to steal anything from me, I’m your Dad!”

     I think I’m going to die here.

     I think I might as well.

     Angel stop rubbing your back against the fucking door and everyone just chill out why are you yelling

     Oh yeah, that was me. 

Gemma

Gemma is back!  Gemma first appeared in an unpublished short story, “Wings.”  Gemma’s mother abandoned her when she was a child.  Mom was addicted to smoking faery dust, and now that Gem’s an adolescent she has what all the daughters of dusters got – wings.  Horrified and outcast, Gemma has left home for NYC to find her mother, others like her, and maybe herself.

Gemma:

“Truth or Dare,” I said to Luke.  I didn’t really care which he picked.  I was so f*cked up, I didn’t care anymore.  I just wanted to go home…

Wait.  I couldn’t go home.  I was here.  Here was home now. 

Whoa.  I was really loopy, really a mess.  If I’d just taken the dare or told the truth I wouldn’t have had to keep drinking.  But even with all the magical weirdness in the room – the deformities or whatever – the horns, the tails, the wings, the scales – it still felt freaky to be me.  It still felt like everyone was staring at me.  Wait, was everyone staring at me? 

Lola definitely was.  Well ha ha to her.  I leaned on Luke and asked him again, “Truth or Dare?”

“Or consequence,” said Lola.  She looked like she regretted starting this game.

Luke’s tail lashed back and forth as he thought.  “Truth,” he said, smiling at me. 

Was he really smiling?  At me?  It might’ve been the wine.  Or the schnapps. 

Ooo!  That was definitely Luke’s hand on my knee.  My wings fluttered.

“What did you do the first time you knew you were different?” I asked.  I did care, in spite of all I’d had to drink.  Not only did I care, I had to know.

“I know what I would’ve done,” he said, smirking.  “I would’ve done this –“ 

And then, just like that he kissed me!  His lips were just right too, not too soft, not too rough, not too wet or dry.  Perfect really.  I sighed as his shaggy bangs brushed my nose.

“Your turn, Gemma!  Your turn!” Lola was so pissed off. 

I didn’t dare grin.  But Luke had me all fluttery and smooshy and suddenly glad…

I shouted so loud that everyone laughed, “Dare!” and then I threw off my bomber jacket and let my wings free!

I flexed, shook them out, and… and… and…

I flew!