The Saving Bailey Trilogy 1: The Bullet List

Chapter 5

                                                                        Chapter 5

        Shortly after our dancing ends, the final bell rings and we depart for buses, cars, and for me, the sidewalk. Clad catches me right before I leave the building and asks, “Do you ever go clubbing?”

        “Yeah, why?” I ask. I’ve never stepped foot in a club.

        “Have you heard of Indigo? It’s a bar and club in Fort Myers,” he says, a nervous twinge in his voice.

        “Heard of it? My mom works there!”

        “That’s awesome, want to come dance sometime? I have a truck and I could pick you up.”

        “That’s not a bad idea,” I say, switching shoulders with my tote bag. “Except I’m illegal.”

        “Your mom could get you in,” Clad suggests.

        “Mom would kill me if she knew I was at Indigo. How do you get in?”

        “Fake ID,” he says trying to sound slick. “I can make you one.”

        “That’ll work, text me on the details,” I say.

        “See ya’ around kid,” he says and raises his hand to wave but perhaps thinks better of it.

        “See ya’ around.” I salute him like a soldier.

        The sidewalks wind nearly all the way from the school to our apartment in Parkway Village; they are safe even for an assailable kid like me. The sun is shining brightly, warming the top of my bruised head. It makes me sleepy and I can’t stop yawning.

        I don’t ride the bus home because I would rather be running or strolling, alone with my thoughts. I am never able to think on the bus, with its loud air conditioning and the driver’s radio blaring country music. I do, however, take the bus each and every morning for Mom’s sake.

        “I could walk to school,” I had proposed at the beginning of freshmen year. Her face had washed out in horror. “It will be dark outside that early in the morning. Someone might kidnap you, or you could be hit by a car. What if you get lost?” She tightened her lips into a thin line of worry. “I might never see you again.”

        It was settled then, I could walk home in the daylight, but in the morning I was to take the bus.

        School has never been an easy thing for me and I don’t just mean academically. Whether it is the teachers or the students, going to school has always been like digging in a cereal box for a prize: the further you dig and the more cereal that piles onto your table and in bowls, the more hope you have that you are closer to that prize. I keep getting myself further into trouble while at school, only going because my mother makes me and because I blindly hope there will be some prize for the brutality that is being inflicted on me. Were it up to me, I would have given up on it years ago.

        Today, I am relieved that it’s over. If only I didn’t have to come home to Mom and face the reality that I forgot her birthday and made her promise to purge the house of her precious spirits.

        She and I both know that the alcohol is her life-line. Without it, she would surely slip into oblivion; and I have seen it happen once before when she tried quitting cold-turkey. The ache in my feet as I walk reminds me that although it is her medicine, it is also her poison.