Sometimes We Build Walls

Chapter One

Under his glasses, I had a feeling that the officer’s eyes were boring into my back, waiting, watching. No funny business would be allowed. I had no chance of outrunning him. Looming before me stood a past door, another threshold into a different world. The yellow shade, meant to produce happy emotions, only succeeded in making me want to scream.

My stomach dropped, passing through the doorway and entering the narrow hallway, my breathing became shallower, the chances of throwing up were heightened.

In a few hours, my life was going to change again.

It all started when I was living with my mother in our apartment at Clear Creek, the rundown complex just behind the mall. We shared one bedroom, overlooking the back entrance of E&K Cafeteria, where there was at least one employee with a hairnet smoking outside. Running alongside the complex was a small, murky creek that overflowed its barely existing banks and flooded everything three or four times a year. Since we were on the top floor, we didn't get the water itself, but the smell of the mildew saturated everything. God only knew what sort of mold was in the walls. Suffice to say, I'd had a cold for two years straight.

No matter how far I'd push my mind back, I could not think of a time where it wasn't just my mother and I. That I knew of, I had no siblings, no cousins, no aunts, uncles, and I could clearly remember asking her where my father was, and why he wasn't here.

 "Things just didn't work out between me and your father."

I realized later on that my existence was probably just a last minute attempt to save a relationship that was already destroyed.

She wasn't much of a people person. In certain situations, she could have been friendly. If you put her within five hundred feet of a man who would treat her like shit, she'd find him perfect before you could convince her otherwise, and I knew, because I tried, a lot. On the other hand, my mom tried avoiding communication with cashiers, school administrators, ex-boyfriends, bosses... which was why she was lucky she had me. For as long as I could remember, I was my mother's representative to the world. Whenever she pulled up to the store and needed a Coke but was too hung-over to go in herself, or when she saw a neighbor coming to complain about her late night banging around, or when the owners of our apartment building wanted her money, it was always the same. "Rain," She'd say, pressing the can of beer against her head. "Please, just go talk to them."

I did. I would make conversation with the girl in the checkout lane while waiting for my change, nod at the neighbor while he complained to me about the noise upstairs, and make up some lie when we were threatened to be evicted. I was always ready for some sort of explanation. "She's at the bank right now." I'd tell the owners of the apartment when they wanted their money on the other side of the half-closed door. "She's in the shower." I'd tell her boss when he called, wondering why she wasn't present at work. And finally, the biggest lie of all, "Of course she's living here. She's just working a lot lately." Which is what I told the cop that day I'd been called out of sixth period during school and found him waiting for me.

My mom and I constantly fought; whether she was drunk or sober. Most of the time, she was drunk. And when she drank, things got heated between us, even more than usual. Maybe it wasn't the alcohol, maybe it was the lack of crack in her system at the time. Whatever it was, as soon as I'd tell her to get her life together, she'd smack me with a cold hand and spit nasty words at me, as if I compared to the drunks she'd argue with at various bars across the town.

Apparently, that life was completely ideal for my mother, and I didn't understand why. Nothing my mother did made any logical sense to me. I couldn't help but relentlessly think that I was nothing to my mom. I was just the one who would order her Diet Coke's, the one who would talk to her bosses. I was her caretaker.