Alex hadn’t been sure how to act, so she stood with her hands in her pockets until Mosh’s boyfriend offered her the bong they were passing around.
“She’s twelve years old!” Mosh had said.
“She’s stressed, I can see it. And she’s cool, right?”
Alex had seen older kids at her school take drags on joints and cigarettes. She and Meagan had pretended to smoke, so she at least knew you weren’t supposed to blow it out
like a cigarette.
She clamped her lips on the bong and drew in the smoke, tried to hold it, coughed loud
and hard.
Mosh and her friends broke into applause.
“See?” said Mosh’s boyfriend. “This kid is cool. Pretty too.”
“Don’t be a creep,” said Mosh. “She’s just a kid.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to fuck her. What’s your name anyway?” “Alex.”
Mosh’s boyfriend held his hand out; he had leather bracelets on both wrists, a
smattering of dark hair on his forearms. He didn’t look like the boys in her grade.
She shook his hand and he gave her a wink. “Nice to meet you, Alex. I’m Len.”
Hours later, crawling into bed, feeling both sleepy and invincible, she realized she hadn’t seen a single dead anything since the smoke first hit her lungs.
Alex learned it was a balance. Alcohol worked, oxy, anything that unwound her focus.
Valium was the best. It made everything soft and wrapped her in cotton. Speed was a huge
mistake, Adderall especially, but Molly was the worst of all. The one time Alex made that
mistake, she not only saw Grays, she could feel them, their sadness and their hunger oozing toward her from every direction. Nothing like the incident in the grove bathroom
had happened again. None of the Quiet Ones had been able to touch her, but she didn’t know why. And they were still everywhere.
The beautiful thing was that around her new friends, her high friends, she could freak
out and they didn’t care. They thought it was hilarious. She was the youngest kid who got
to hang with them, their mascot, and they all laughed when she talked to things that weren’t there. Mosh called girls like Meagan “the blond bitches” and “Mutant Cutes.” She
said they were all “sad little fishes drinking their own piss in the mainstream.” She said she’d kill for Alex’s black hair, and when Alex said the world was full of ghosts trying to
get in, Mosh just shook her head and said, “You should write this stuff down, Alex. I swear.”
Alex got held back a year. She got suspended. She took cash from her mom’s purse, then little things from around the house, then finally her grandfather’s silver kiddush cup.
Mira cried and shouted and set new house rules. Alex broke them all, felt guilty for making her mom sad, felt furious at feeling guilty. It all made her tired, so eventually she
stopped coming home.
When Alex turned fifteen, her mother used the last of her savings to try to send her to a
scared-straight rehab for troubled teens. By then Mosh was long gone, off at art school, and she didn’t hang with Alex or Len or any of the other kids when she came home for the
holidays. Alex had run into her at the beauty supply, still buying black hair dye. Mosh asked how school was, and when Alex just laughed, Mosh had started to offer her an apology.
“What are you talking about?” Alex said. “You saved me.”
Mosh had looked so sad and ashamed that Alex practically ran out of the store. She’d
gone home that night, wanting to see her mom and sleep in her own bed. But she woke up
to a pair of beefy men shining a flashlight in her eyes and dragging her out of her room as
her mom looked on and cried, saying, “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t know what else to do.”
Apparently it was a big day for apologies.
They bound her wrists with zip ties, tossed her in the back of an SUV, barefoot in pajamas. They screamed at her about respect and breaking her mother’s heart and that she
was going to Idaho to learn the right way to live and she had a lesson coming. But Len had