Chapter 3

Julie grabbed her backpack and hopped out of the car. When she reached the front door and took out her key, Julie turned back and gave her friend a quick wave to let her know it was okay to leave. Hailey waved back, and Julie watched the front of her 2016 white Kexus pull out of the driveway and head back up the street.

Julie turned the key in the doorknob and tried to brace herself for what she might see. Good thing she did because when she opened the door, she was immediately hit by the reek of booze. There were empty beer bottles littering the floor and the kitchen counters. She stepped over a jacket, socks, and shoes as she walked across the living room to get to the kitchen to clear things up. She took a garbage bag from the cabinet under the sink and started sweeping all the bottles into it. Too late, she realized there was beer spilled on the counter, and she soaked her whole arm and hand.

“Ugh!” She yelled in frustration and reached for a rag and a sponge.

She dried her arm on the rag and then finished sweeping the rest of the bottles into the garbage bag. Then she moved on to wiping down the counters. It finally looked clean in the kitchen, but it still smelled bad, so Julie went to the bathroom to get a bottle of Febreze.

As she walked back over to the kitchen, she sprayed the bottle everywhere, waving her arm madly, trying to mask the awful scent of vodka, beer, and whiskey, hoping to cover the evidence of a night gone wrong. When she felt satisfied that the house was clean, she let herself collapse onto the couch.

She just wasted an hour that she could have spent doing schoolwork. But she knew this was coming. When her mom didn’t come home last night, Julie knew she must be out at a bar. She’s been out more and more these days. The nights would last into the morning, and often, her mom wasn’t home when Julie left for school in the morning. That was the case this morning. Apparently, she came home, though. At least long enough to trash the place, Julie thought, disgusted.

Julie was sick of picking up after her mom. She had been doing it for as long as she could remember, since her dad left them when she was 5. Obviously, her dad couldn’t put up with her mother’s behavior, so how was Julie, an innocent, helpless child at the time, expected to pick up the slack if a grown man couldn’t?

Julie still felt the rage rise in her when she thought of her dad. What kind of person could leave his daughter in a house like this? He knew how bad the living situation was. Just because her mom was a functioning alcoholic, still managing to hold a job and make a living despite her erratic behavior, didn’t mean she was fit to take care of a daughter. But what choice did Julie have? What was she supposed to do – call child services and get placed in a foster home?

No. She just learned to take care of herself. Her mom made a living to support them both financially, but emotionally and psychologically, Julie didn’t have a real mother. She made her own lunches for school since elementary.

She took money from her mom each week to do the grocery shopping. She cleaned and cooked. But more recently, she started having to do more and more around the house. For instance, the bills, which her mom had managed to pay on time each month, started piling up about a year ago, and since then, Julie has taken it upon herself to keep track of all that. She also had to forge all the signatures she needed for school documents since her mom was usually out drinking, drunk, or sleeping it off when Julie came home with forms to be signed.

Julie could call it quits any time if she really wanted to. She could call CPS and report her mom, but besides not wanting to give up her school and friends, there was still a part of her that felt protective of her mom. Like Mr. Peters said in class today, alcoholism is an illness. Yes, Julie’s mom made bad choices, and she refused to get help, but maybe that was part of the illness.

Could Julie blame her mom for something she had no control over? Julie had tried to push her mom to get help, but it was hopeless. She wouldn’t admit that she had a problem at all. When she was younger, Julie begged her mom to stop. She would cry herself to sleep some nights, thinking about the hopeless situation.

About a year ago, she went to a few AA meetings to try to learn more about the illness in the hopes that someone would have a magic solution. One man talked about making sure there was no alcohol in the house to reduce temptations to drink. Julie thought this sounded like a promising idea, so she brought home a bunch of handouts from the AA meeting. There was a list of all the local meetings, a brochure with signs of alcoholism, another brochure about the 12 steps, and another brochure with steps to take to get help.

The next day, Julie laid out all the literature she collected on the kitchen counters and dumped all the alcohol in the house down the drain. She hoped that by getting rid of the temptation, like the man at the AA meeting said, and showing her mom exactly where she could go to get help, she would make a difference. The only difference it made was making her mom violent.

When her mom got home from a late night at the bar and saw what Julie did, she started hitting Julie with a wooden chair. She screamed, “What have you done!? Give me back my alcohol, you bitch!” Julie was in shock. She couldn’t believe that her mom would do this to her. As the chair smacked Julie in the back over and over, a few tears streamed down her face, but she didn’t shrink away. She accepted the beating, the pain, the punishment for being too innocent, too naive to see that she couldn’t fix this. This problem was too big, too ingrained in her mom for Julie to fix.

After that night, Julie gave up trying to change her mom. Julie also tried to keep everything under control at the house, keep everything clean, and stay out of her mom’s way so that her mom wouldn’t have another reason to hit her. The bruises from the chair last year were painful, and they took a couple of weeks to go away. Since then, her mom had only been violent a few times, but each time Julie just took it, she didn’t put up a fight because she didn’t want to make it worse than it already was.

Julie pondered all these moments from the past year. She considered how hard her life had been, and then she started to think about getting away and going to college. She knew that the Ivy Leagues were still a reach despite her stellar grades, so she had a lot of safety schools. She also considered which schools would give the best scholarships because then she wouldn’t need to rely on her mom for much of anything.

If she could fully support herself financially, maybe she could finally make a clean break from her mom. Maybe I can finally be free of all this, Julie thought as she got up from the couch and headed to her bedroom. She decided that the best way to turn that dream into a reality was to keep working incredibly hard on all her schoolwork, which meant that right now, she needed to start her homework that was due the next day.

She threw her backpack on her bed, gathered all the books she needed, and laid them out on her desk. She took her iPod out of her dresser drawer, put on her studying playlist, sat down at her desk, and got to work. She knew all this work would probably take most of the night.

Around 7 pm, Julie took a break for dinner. She went to the kitchen to decide what to eat. Julie picked up the groceries yesterday after her shift at Stop & Shop, so she knew there was plenty of food. She decided to make a simple stir-fry dish.

She took out a package of chicken from the fridge, broccoli from the freezer, and brown rice from the pantry.

She figured she should ask her mom if she wanted anything to eat. She was about the yell out to her, but she zipped her lips closed at the last second, realizing that based on the mess her mom left, she might be passed out in her bed.

No need to wake the beast, Julie thought. She walked over to her mom’s bedroom, cracked the door a couple of inches, and peeked in. There were clothes strewn all over the floor, a few empty bottles sticking out from the covers of the unmade bed, and a plate with half-eaten eggs and toast that looked like it was fresh from today.

She must have just stopped home this morning before work, Julie thought. Figuring her mom must be back out at a bar, Julie turned back toward the kitchen to make her dinner. She didn’t want to touch anything in her mom’s room, despite the mess, out of fear that it would make her mom angry and violent when she got home.

Julie didn’t want to risk it.

Instead, she cooked her dinner, cleaned everything up, and put the leftovers in a Tupperware in the fridge.

Her mom could heat it up if she decided she was hungry when she got home tonight. Julie brought her dinner into her bedroom and got to work on her reading for AP history. She already finished her essay and math homework, so she was in pretty good shape if she wanted to get to bed at a reasonable hour that night. Julie made sure she put her earbuds back in to block out the noise from when her mom finally got home. The music was peaceful; it made her forget where she was and the unpredictability of her home.