November 13, 2007
A blast of humid night air slaps her in the face. Jessie stumbles out the sliding door to the motel balcony overlooking the quaint pool beneath her. Barefoot and armed with a half-empty bottle of bourbon, she collapses on the concrete and peers with black-streaked eyes through the whitewashed rails at the shimmering alcove, wishing she were here in Wildwood with her family instead of with these junkies.
Inside the room, Spike, Anna and Chloe are sprawled out either on the carpet or the bed, high on heroin. They’d tried to give her some, some of that blackish-brown liquid in the vial, what they called “horse,” but she refused because she knew what it really was. What its real name was. What the cops called it when they busted down the door and saw what they injected. She stares meaningfully at the bourbon bottle and then dumps its contents through the railing.
The obese owner of the worthless establishment, armed with a broom, is sweeping up the grime next to the pool and looks over when he hears the splatter of the liquor against the concrete. Jessie’s eyes widen, now seeing she’s not alone. The owner is saying something to her, something that implies that she’d better clean that up, get down there and clean that crap up or pay him a great deal for his pains to clean it up as he forgets his dilapidated broom on a metal and vinyl-lined chair situated at the pool’s side. Jessie for the time being is frozen, almost rooted to the concrete under her. She knows that if Anna, Chloe or even Spike did something like this, they’d probably flip him the bird, tell him to f— off, and then proceed to go back inside and shoot up without a second thought. As Jessie debates this, her mind is muddled from the alcohol and the lingering scent of marijuana in the room, which is hovering slowly out with the air-conditioning, seeping into the air, metal and concrete around her.
The owner is still yelling at her as he comes up the squeaky brass stairs and unlocks the gate, panting. She gazes up at him as he yells at her, not hearing a word he’s saying. You’re vile, she thinks as she stares up at him without any real feeling, numb to the world. After a few flecks of his spit find their way onto her cheek and he’s waiting for an answer, she tells him she’s not cleaning up any damn thing, that the concrete will be nice and dry by the time the sun pokes its lazy head out of from behind the Atlantic on Europe’s side. But the owner is persistent and suggests contemptuously that there’ll be a massive brown stain where she splattered her drink.
She glares at him. “Then get a hose, you lazy piece of crap.”
Before he even begins to protest and remark on what a little shrew she is, she gets clumsily to her feet using the railing for support.
“If you need to get paid to do that, I’ll gladly get it for you,” she tells him with drunken venom, sidling past him into the room.
In a daze on the floor, Chloe is squinting at her upside down and asks her what she’s doing. Jessie doesn’t even bother to look at her when she replies, moving contemptuously into the diminutive kitchen.
“Mind your own business.” When she looks over to survey a reaction, thinking maybe she shouldn’t have said that, Chloe’s not even looking at her — she’s fallen asleep. Jessie rolls her eyes and opens Spike’s wallet, extracting four twenties that will no longer be used to barter drugs, tucking one of them in her bra. The owner is waiting in the doorway, his expression perplexed as he surveys the room. Since he doesn’t seem to realize she’s no more than three feet away, she clears her throat and displays the twenties as one would flaunt a fan of playing cards.
“Sixty bucks. Is that enough for you?” You cheap dunce, she adds in her head as she strides up to him. His eyes flicker to her face as he purses his greasy lips and takes the money. With one last look inside the room, he nods to her and leaves, his spectacle-shrouded eyes almost filled with something resembling pity. When he’s gone, Jessie takes her place at the railing, her eyes hot with tears. Don’t you dare start crying, she tells herself, because crying does absolutely nothing for you.
The last time she tried to run away, that whore Anna found her because, like an idiot, Jessie wrote in the cheap spiral notebook she calls a diary where she was going to stay — some motel on Surf Avenue. She’d left the notebook in this very motel room on the kitchen counter next to the crap toaster, where Spike’s wallet semi-permanently resides. She had hardly gotten past the doorway of her new home when Anna (in a sober moment at 3 a.m.) told the front desk of the motel that she was looking for her “daughter” and the concierge escorted her up to Jessie’ s room, revealing that Jessie was not 18, like she had assumed. If Jessie was their child, she probably would’ve ended up committing suicide before she left the crib, smothering herself in dingy baby blankets and cheap boardwalk plush toys. Rather die than live past age 3 with the junkies.
As she sits at her spot next to the railing with the chipped, white paint, her first encounter with them comes to mind, as well as a million other ways she could have fought back and gotten away, even if it meant her death. Tears spring to the delicate tributaries of her eyes, and this time, she lets them fall.
“Do you have any queens?” The red-haired boy sitting across from her asked. Jessie wryly smiled and relinquished two, tossing them on the blanket next to the card pile. On his parents’ sloping lawn, she and Harold Jenkins were playing their sixth round of Go Fish when they spotted the sparkling blue (but surely stolen) convertible driving down their street. An older guy she had seen before was driving it, and he pulled up in front of her house, which was attached by some combination of brick and concrete to Harold’s. As it was summer, the two were home, and their parents at work. While they didn’t mind the arrangement, today, it had just so happened that Jessie’s sister, Cassandra, was supposed to be keeping an eye on the pair, but was instead smoking pot at her friend’s house. Recognizing the man, Jessie gave Harold a look that suggested that they’d better go back in the Jenkinses’ house before he saw her. Who knows what that guy would do? Harold understood and began gathering up the cards.
“Doesn’t he know your sister?” he whispered as he wound a pink rubber band around the haphazard stack of cards. She nodded without looking at him, shaking out the tan blanket they were sitting on before gathering the scratchy fabric to her chest to fold it up as best she could.
“I think so,” she said, “because I’ve seen Cassie talk to him before. Only at night though.”
She didn’t dare turn around to look at the man, who, as she assumed by a loud banging, was knocking at her door, looking for Cassandra. With a fleeting look at the man’s back, Harold’s eyes turned cold with fear as his mouth mumbled quickly that they should get going. Jessie didn’t need to be told twice and grabbed Harold’s hand, leading him down the second and smaller set of concrete steps toward the sidewalk. Harold glared down at her and tried to yank his hand from her grip, asking her what she was doing in a frantic hiss.
Speed-walking backward, she gave him a look and said, “We’re going around back. So that he doesn’t catch us trying to get in your house.”
Harold nodded, since it seemed like a good idea, and allowed himself to be dragged up the shady, tree-lined street.
What they didn’t know was that Spike was desperate, desperate for his due and another fix, both of which he couldn’t get without this girl’s money. Then he saw her, dragging some kid down the sidewalk, barking at him to keep up. Shading his eyes with his hand, Spike surveyed the girl. Cassie had gotten shorter from the last time he saw her and skinnier too. He shrugged. They were halfway down the street — anyone would seem smaller from that distance. He cupped his hands on either side of his mouth.
“Hey, Cassie!” he called, descending the concrete staircase. They didn’t turn, acting like they didn’t hear anything, but Spike was smarter. They were actually running now, with Cassie carrying some brown thing. Was it a blanket?
Descending the second staircase, Spike decided he didn’t care. He wanted his money and picked up speed, beginning to dart after the pair, calling after them. How dare she run when she still owed him!
“HEY! DON’T RUN!” he bellowed, gaining on them.
The boy was now ahead of her, dragging her instead of the other way around. Her legs are too short, Spike thought with a grin and wound his arm around Cassie’s waist, scooping her and that brown thing up too. She had gotten skinnier since the last time he saw her, and her once ample tits were now gone. She kicked and screamed and cried like a little girl. This wasn’t Cassie. He dropped her ruthlessly on some neighbor’s scraggly lawn and grabbed her friend by the scruff of his neck as he tried to dart away with the girl’s wrist still in hand. The kid cursed at him and struggled in Spike’s grip as he slammed him on the grass with his friend. At least that Adderall was good for something, Spike thought, kneeling to eye-level with this little girl who looked so much like Cassie. He bared his brownish teeth in what to some would seem like a smile. The girl shivered and reached for her friend’s bicep as its owner gave Spike one of the dirtiest looks he had ever seen in his life. Spike would talk a little sense into him later … after he talked to the little girl.
Jessie stared at him, wide-eyed. Even though she’d seen him before in shadow, his unkempt features were like a smack in the face in broad daylight. For one thing, he was dirty and smelled like a horrible combination of body odor, cigarette and marijuana smoke, and something else she couldn’t name. He was disgusting (to say the least), and she wondered when he last took a shower or even looked in a mirror. She knew he was a drug dealer, but sometimes so was Cassie — at least she had some respect for others when it came to cleanliness and always smelled like perfume and soap whenever she wasn’t smoking or snorting anything.
The dude smiled at her again, pulling out a gross pair of aviator sunglasses from his back pocket and fixed them on his greasy nose. “Can you tell me where your sister is?”
Jessie shook her head. She didn’t know who Cassie’s friends were and, quite frankly, she didn’t care. “She’s at her friend’s house. I don’t know him though.”
“Do you know where that is?” His face was getting closer to hers, and it was probably the single-most disgustingly horrifying thing she had ever experienced in her life. She wanted to be sick, but she kept her features as composed as possible as he glared at her through the dirt-speckled sunglasses.
“I don’t know. I don’t know who any of Cassie’s friends are.”
“But you know me …”
She hesitated. She wanted to ask him if he could possibly let them go.
“C-can we go now? Since we don’t know where Cassie is and everything.”
The guy looked highly amused and took a hand-rolled cigarette of some kind from his back pocket — a pocket of hallucinogen wonders she’d come to know well later. “Of course. When she pays.”
Jessie was puzzled, getting to her feet as Spike did the same. “What do you mean? We’re coming with you?”
Spike was highly amused now. “No. Just you,” he said with a mean smirk.
Jessie gaped at him. “No!” It came out as a squeak. “I’m not going anywhere with you. Whatever my sister’s done has nothing to do with me.” Next to her, a now-standing Harold was shaking in anger.
“Oh, it has everything to do with you. You’re her sister, and you’re going to work off her debt if she don’t pay. Plain and simple.”
Jessie stared at him, horrified.
“Screw you!” Harold spat suddenly, lunging at Spike and punching him in the mouth. Jessie screamed, throwing her hands over her mouth.
Spike had him in a chokehold in a matter of seconds. His bleeding mouth leaked onto Harold’s cheek.
A fat, elderly neighbor in a brightly colored muumuu stood at her screen door. “What y’all doin’ out there?” she called out, narrowing her pudgy eyes as she looked on. Spike glared at her as he forced a gasping Harold to the concrete, releasing him. Jessie looked on, too horrified to move.
“Mind your own damn business, fatty!” he shouted crudely at her. Grumbling, the fat woman reluctantly shut her door, probably thinking about calling the police. Harold, on all fours, coughed and gasped for air. When Spike was satisfied she wasn’t coming back out, he whipped a gun from the back of his tattered jeans, cocked it and directed it at Harold’s crown. Harold froze as Jessie screamed, tears beginning to stream down her cheeks.
“NO!” she screeched throwing herself onto Harold, trying to push Spike’s forearm away over her friend. “You can’t!” She cried feebly. Spike gave her a look and fired anyway.
The sound of the gunshot rang perfect in her ears. Her scream was endless, made up of garbled shrieks of “Harold! Noooo! I hate you! I hate you! Harold!” Her knees gave out as she cried and shook Harold’s bloody, lifeless body. “I hate you,” she sobbed into Harold’s bloody neck, awkwardly hugging him under the armpits.
Spike rolled his eyes and lifted her from the ground as if she were an oversized rag-doll, throwing her prostrate over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said impatiently as she struggled violently against him, screaming and kicking at his chest. “Shut up!” he hissed.
Why wasn’t anyone coming out to help her? Didn’t anyone notice the gunshot? Didn’t anyone hear her screams, which echoed shrilly in the humid July air? Her sister was so dumb!
Spike threw her into the back seat ruthlessly, not caring as she smacked the back of her head against the opposite wall, too hard. She was seeing double as he slammed the door shut and strode around the hood of the car. I hate this… was her last thought, succumbing into darkness. She was out for a while.
She was groggy when she woke to the sound of a too-loud hip-hop song pumping from the car’s radio. It was Eminem and Dr. Dre — “Guilty Conscience,” an old-ish song her sister liked to play a lot.
How ironic, she thought, Dre’s gangster shoulder-angel rap colliding with Slim Shady’s biting, devilish rhymes.
“All right, stop,” Dre was saying, “now before you walk in the door of this liquor store and try to get money out the drawer, you better think about the consequence …” Her sister’s dealer was rapping horribly along, trying to look as badass as can be as he drove along some bridge. A bright green sign flashed overhead — Ben Franklin Bridge. Where was he taking her? “… That’s nonsense. Go in and gaffle the money and run to one of your aunts’ cribs …”
Jessie’s head pounded, but she didn’t dare make a sound. She remembered she hated Eminem, and now even more since Spike liked him. Why did he have to play it so loud though? She pressed both her palms against her forehead just above her eyelids. Her head was killing her. She should kill Spike, who was drumming his dirty fingers on the dashboard in traffic, rapping horribly along.
“Yo!” Dr. Dre cried, “This girl is only 15 years old!” A coincidence — but Jessie was fourteen. “You shouldn’t take advantage of her,” he continued, “that’s not fair.”
No, it really isn’t fair, Jessie thought bitterly, wincing at the growing pain of being awake. She shut her eyes. If she had a concussion, why not go to sleep and become comatose? What was worse than being awake?
And now, she’s here. On this balcony, on this piece of graying concrete two stories from the ground. Where are her parents? Where are the police, the help she needs to get away from these junkies? Why her? Why Jessie O’Conner, the now-15-year-old girl with gold hair and brown eyes, whose only aspiration in life was to have fun and be loved?
Jessie shakes her head now, wiping her eyes and nose. “Now or never,” she figures, climbing on top of the railing.
Can she fly?
Well, she’s about to find out …
