I first discovered I was trash three days before my
ninth birthday. One year after my father lost his job and moved to San Diego to live with a woman named Charisma, and four years before my mother had the car accident, started taking pills, and began excessively wearing bedroom slippers instead of normal shoes.
I was informed of my trashiness on the playground by Samantha Richardson, a girl in a pink sweat suit who thought she was all that because her house had one and a half bathrooms.
"Salvation Amy's trailer trash," she told the other girls on the monkey bars while I was dangling unside down by my knees and minding my own business, my pigtails scraping the sand. "That means she doesn't have any money and all her clothes are dirty. You shouldn't go to her birthday party or you'll be dirty, too."
When my birthday party rolled around that weekend, it turned out everyone had listened to Samantha. My mom and I were sitting at the picnic table in the Old Farms Mobile Community Recreation Area wearing our sad little party hats, our sheet cake gathering dust. It was just the two of us, same as always. After an hour of hoping someone would finally show up, Mom sighed, poured me another big cup of Cola, and gave me a hug.
She told me that, whatever anyone at school said, a trailer was where I lived, not who I was. She told me that it was the best home in the world because it could go anywhere.
Even as a little kid, I was smart enough to point out that our house was on blocks, not wheels. Its mobility was severely oversold. Mom didn't have much of a comeback for that.
It took her until Christmas of that year when we were watching The Wizard of Oz on the big flat-screen television--- the only physical thing that was a leftover from our old life with Dad--- to come up with a better answer for me. "See?" she said, pointing at the screen. "You don't need wheels on your house to give you that extra push."
I don't think she believed it even then, but at least in those days she still cared enough to lie. And even though I never believed in a place like Oz, I did believe in her.
That was a long time ago. A lot has changed since then. My mom was hardly the same person at all anymore. Then again, neither was I.
I didn't bother trying to make Samantha like me anymore, and I wasn't going to cry over cake. I wasn't going to cry, period. These days, my mom was too lost in her own little world to bother cheering me up. I was on my own, and crying wasn't worth the effort.
Tears or no tears, though, Samantha Richardson still found ways to make my life miserable. The day of the tornado--- although I didn't know the tornado was coming yet--- she was slouching against her locker after fifth perios, rubbing her enormous pregnant belly and whispering with her best friend, Sandra Thomas.
I'd figures out a long time ago that it was best to just ignore her when I could, but Samantha was the type of person it was pretty impossible to ignore even under normal circumstances. Now that she was eight and a half months pregnant it was really impossible.
Today, Samantha was wearing a tiny T-shirt that barely covered her midriff. It read Who's Your Mommy across her boobs in pink cursive glitter. I did my best not to stare as I slunk by her on my way to Spanish, but somehow I felt my eyes gliding upward, past her belly and chest to her face. Sometimes, you just can't help it.
She was already staring at me. Our gazes met for a tiny instant. I froze.
Samantha glared. "What are you looking at, Trailer Trash?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. Was I staring? I was just wondering if you were the Teen Mom I saw on the cover of Star this week.
It wasn't like I tried to go after Samantha, but sometimes my sarcasm takes on a life of its own. The words just came out.
