Being Audrey Hepburn

“Hey, sis, you look like shit,” Ryan said, startling me as I stumbled through the front door. For a thirteen-year-old, he already had a sewer mouth. But considering the way Mom talked, what could you expect? He gave me a crooked grin and twirled that nasty braided mullet of his. As usual, Ryan was playing World of Warcrack, as Mom called it. The most addictive computer game ever created, where kids with no lives have names like Worgen and are always leveling up.

“Thanks a lot, Ry. Where’s Mom?” I asked.

“She went with Courtney to pick up her car. It got towed.”

“Again? How long ago?” I contemplated whether to flee and crash at Jess’s house.

Car doors slamming and the rusty screech of the screen door gave me the answer—it was too late.

“You don’t know crap!” Mom yelled as she barreled through the door. “You can’t go through life without a plan.” She lit up a cig and headed for the kitchen. She wore her usual pale blue scrubs from the hospital.

“I have a plan! It’s just not your plan!” screamed Courtney, stomping just a few steps behind, tramping around in her furry boots wearing shredded Daisy Dukes. Her deep-scoop tank was so tight that her breasts looked like they’d pop out any second.

Ryan gazed up at me with that glazed look and went back to slaying warlocks and werewolves. A death stare from Courtney made it clear that, unless I wanted to become the equivalent of roadkill, I had better get out of there. Getting in the middle of a blowout was the last thing I wanted to do anyway. In this situation, either Mom or Courtney could train their sights on me, so I made a beeline for my bedroom.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Mom shouted. I froze. Between alcohol and cigs, her voice sounded like she had swallowed a shot glass.

“I just got off work and I smell like bacon,” I said as softly as possible. “I have to take a shower.” She turned to the cabinet, grabbed her coffee mug, and went to the fridge for some ice cubes. I slinked away.

The walls in our house were so flimsy that even in my bedroom I could hear Courtney clomping across the linoleum floor and Mom rattling the ice cubes in her cup of Gordon’s.

It didn’t take much to get Mom going at Court. Toenail clippings left on the bathroom floor? A 2:30 A.M. hookup in the driveway? The fact that my older sister was flunking out of junior college because she hadn’t attended a class? Or just another bad day of work at the hospital for Mom—all of the above could trigger Argumageddon. I did, however, know how it would end. The same way it always ended.

You would have thought Mom would have been happy she wasn’t drunk driving. I guess it didn’t help that Courtney had left her car by the side of the road in a stupor for the second time this month. The three-hundred-dollar towing fee had to hurt.

“A plan is something with a future. Responsibility. Not getting shitfaced, smoking weed with your idiot friends, and leaving your car by the side of the road,” Mom spit out downstairs. “I can’t keep saving your ass all your fucking life.”

“Nobody wants you to!” Courtney screamed.

Mom was wrong about Courtney. She did have a plan. Her goal was to relieve the world of all its alcohol, one Jell-O shot at a time, in Jersey City’s vast array of lowlife nightclubs, while fantasizing she would get picked next season as a finalist on American Idol or The Voice. Courtney believed she should get her own reality show—hey, everybody has that same dream, right? Once, she made up a whole new family and seriously tried to get a slot on Mob Wives. There just aren’t enough of those reality shows around for all of us real people to become famous.

Sometimes, it seemed like Courtney was trying to outdo Mom. See, I knew from Nan, my grandmother, that back in her day, Mom was the same as Courtney, only more so. Before MTV discovered New Jersey, Mom was drinking and cruising the seventy-five exits of the Garden State Parkway from Whippany to Seaside Heights. She practically invented shooting beers. She was like the original JWoww, before rehab became a college alternative.

The door slammed, and the vibrations echoed throughout our tiny house. The walls might as well be hospital partitions. That slam was definitely the kitchen door. I listened for the sound of Courtney’s junker starting.

Nothing. Shit. That meant get ready for round 2.

Really, in this situation, the best thing to do was to lock myself in the closet. I just needed to stay out of the line of fire; otherwise, I’d be collateral damage.

I was the middle child. Staying out of the way was my specialty. In fact, I was so out of the way, I was nowhere, but that was better than being somewhere in the middle of what was going on at home.

“You’re just mad because you’re old and you’re always going to be alone and nobody cares about you!” Courtney yelled. I guessed Court had come back inside.

There was a pause for crying until Mom finally said something that was hard to hear because it was buried in tissues. “You have no right to talk to me that way…” And another pause. “This is my house.”

“Nobody cares!” screamed Courtney. The door slammed again, and I waited.

Inside my closet, the sounds coming from downstairs were considerably more muffled. You probably thought I was kidding about the closet.

My closet was my haven, my panic room, my refuge. Mom usually came home from work at 4 P.M. and got her drink on until she passed out on the couch. Once in a while, she’d get super tipsy and silly—singing old Springsteen songs. That was fun. We’d play along until she fell asleep at the kitchen table. But most of the time, she’d get all weepy, and then start hurling ashtrays. She was always angry.

See, Mom never had a “plan” either. After her party years, she never moved away like she told Nan she would. She expected Dad would make money someday, but instead he ditched us and left Mom with a ton of debt.

Eventually she had to make ends meet, so she went back to her maiden name to avoid all the creditors and spent a year in vocational school to become a nurse. We ended up in South End, which isn’t exactly Upper Montclair or even Lower Montclair. Lower Montclair, which we’re close to, was where all the hip professionals lived. They had three ice cream shops and lots of espresso bars and clothing stores like Anthropologie and American Apparel. In South End, we had the K&G Fashion Superstore and Advanced Auto Parts.

Mom worried 24-7. She worried about the dishes in the sink, about the heating bills, about Courtney stealing her last two cigarettes. Then there was my brother, Ryan. At thirteen, he had racked up so many misdemeanors that the security guards at the courthouse knew him on sight.

And my “plan”? Good question.

My life was mapped out. I’d always been the good girl. As much as I’d missed out on a lot of the kind of wild stuff Courtney did (binge drinking, wet T-shirt contests, and generally waking up someplace and having no idea how you got there), I was fine with following the rules. Honestly, I didn’t want to put myself out there that much. Too many friends and friends of my sister’s ended up pregnant early, drunk, addicted, or dead without ever even getting old. Maybe it was that middle-kid thing (if you consider my younger brother, Ryan, in the category of “kid,” rather than, say, devil spawn or homeland terrorist threat). I never had a rebellious phase.

But just because I was quiet didn’t mean I had no opinions. In my head I always had a witty retort. I just never had the guts to say anything out loud. I’d mumble to myself or write it down in my journal. No one really knew I had a clue, except Jess. After all, I wasn’t sitting home like a shut-in licking orange dust from the last bag of Cheez Doodles or anything. I’d go out weekends just to get out of the house. I drank a little, but I never got in trouble or drew attention to myself.