We Were Kids

CW: Mention of: physical violence against minors, statutory rape, substance abuse, murder, suicide. None of it described graphically. Also contains coarse language.

Only with the utmost generosity could it even be called a restaurant. We at least never ate there. No matter how much our stomachs growled and begged for something to alleviate the nausea induced by cheap vodka. The tables were scratched and the floors always sticky. The bathrooms, indescribably dirty. To be used only for extreme emergencies, like retching until there was nothing left to expel.

“It’s rustic,” I told one of our casual friends, the first and last time he joined us there. It was hard to make out his exact features through the dense cigarette smoke.

“Oh, lovely way to put it,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “How about I don’t clean my room for the next fifty years and call it rustic?”

“Fuck off then, if you hate it so much.”

And he did. Fuck off, that is.

Tap, tap, tap.

The heavenly sound of tapping our cigarettes against the chipped ashtrays that nobody ever bothered to wash.

It was still better than going to school, though. Anything was better than that. Smoking cigs on the sidewalk and weed in the park, while passing a bottle of the cheapest gin in existence from one to the other. (A word of advice from the adult me of fifteen years later, though. Don’t mix gin and weed. You won’t have a good time). Being caught by the police in the act of drawing graffiti tags on poles. (Shouldn’t you be an actual graffiti artist to tag? Shut up and hold this. Ok…). Being caught shoplifting. In retrospect, it’s a miracle that I don’t have a criminal record. Thank you, officers whose names I don’t remember, for understanding that we were just kids.

Our usual hang-out also had the advantage that the principal never came looking for stray students there. He focused on the expensive and respectable establishments around our school, where the rich kids lived an altogether different kind of life.

“What do you think it’s like, having actual pocket money?” I asked one morning while we were trembling on the stairs, waiting for Chris to open and counting the loose change in our pockets and bags.

“Shitty. It turns you into a douchebag,” Mike answered. “Though I wouldn’t mind not having to beg for cigarette money.”

I understood him perfectly. It was barely 7 AM and he had already gone through almost an entire pack.

“One of these days I won’t let you in,” a voice from behind us said.

“Fucking finally,” I said. “You’re late, Chris.”

“It’s my place and I’ll open whenever I want.”

“So you’d just let us freeze outside? It’s the middle of winter, man,” Anabelle said, picking at her lip.

“Go to school, then.”

We laughed and rubbed our hands together as we went in. It was marvelous to escape the wind even though it smelled like vomit and spilled beer inside.

“Can you play Pink Floyd, Chris?”

“No. Now go to your table upstairs and don’t bother my actual customers.”

I made a point of looking around the dark and dingy room and gesturing dramatically.

“Stop making your own alcohol in the bathtub. There’s nobody here. Plus, aren’t we actual customers too?” I added, with what was supposed to be a charming smile.

“Definitely not. You’re charity cases.”

It was hard to argue with that. He let us spend twelve hours a day there for the price of a single beer. Not even one per person, sometimes we split it.

Mary joined us after her morning call with her out of town, med school-bound boyfriend. Needless to say, the rest of us despised him, or rather, the idea of him. Since turning sixteen, we had joined the lose-your-virginity-to-someone-cool race. And Mary’s guy was a rich nerd. Absolutely not cool, which reflected poorly on the entire group. I wasn’t performing well in that department either. My own boyfriend wore a uniform to school on purpose and had a perfect attendance record.

“Still haven’t broken up with the loser?” Mike asked her, taking a swig of beer.

She blushed and shuffled her feet while Annabelle and I made gagging noises.

 “Oy, you’re not one to laugh,” he added, wagging a finger in my direction. “I’m bound to punch that pathetic idiot of yours so hard one of these days that I’ll break my hand in his stupid mouth.”

“As if you even know how to do that,” Mary said, tapping her fingers on the table. “It’s not our fault you’re still a virgin, dude.”

“Anabelle, let’s you and I just show these ladies how it’s done, what do you say?” Mike said, winking suggestively.

We felt it before it seeped into the dirty tables and the sticky floors and the foggy windows and our skin. Her pain and rage at something from outside our little bubble and our control.

“You know I’m not allowed to have sex. My dad keeps threatening he’ll take me to a gynecologist to check if I’m still a virgin. For my future husband. As if I’d want the kind of man who cared about something like that. He’d probably beat the crap out of me daily over stuff like his food being too cold.”

Mike’s hand tightened around his bottle.

“Sometimes I wish God was real so he could smite your dad.”

“He’s dead, though. God,” Mary said, rummaging in her schoolbag.

“How very Nietzsche of you. And where the hell did you get that, Mike?” I asked.

“Stole it,” he said, shrugging and pouring a generous amount of vodka from a plastic bottle into Anabelle’s beer glass, which Chris hadn’t bothered to wipe. There were finger smudges all over it.

“I thought we didn’t do that anymore.”

“With the exception of alcohol and cigs,” he said, smiling sadly, his eyes darting to Anabelle. “Are you guys sleeping over tonight? My parents are out of town.”

Anabelle shook her head. She had never been to a sleepover in her life. We didn’t press the matter and I was inwardly glad that my parents didn’t care about my whereabouts.

“We need to take the math test tomorrow though, otherwise we’ll fail,” Mary said.

I groaned.

“That’s what you’re looking for in your bag? Books? You’re going to make me study?”

She looked me dead in the eyes with a blank expression as she took out a deck of playing cards and set it on the table. We laughed. Pink Floyd started playing. I squeezed Anabelle’s hand under the table. And asked Mike to pour me some vodka.

It was the booze, I told myself that night after we kissed. It didn’t mean anything, he was my best friend. I was with someone else. Monogamy and all that. I wasn’t a cheater. Though we did sleep together in his bed and cuddled while Mary slept on the couch. But we did that all the time. It didn’t mean anything. Still, the next day, guilt was gnawing at me, as a terrible hangover corroded my insides. My performance in the test was less than stellar. I had to listen to the teacher lecturing me about wasting my potential while my friends waited impatiently outside the door. It was time to escape. Enough school for the day. We ran past the old security guard at the gate and towards our usual place. Anabelle hadn’t shown up and we had to break the news to her that she’d fail math this semester.

“Your friend’s upstairs,” Chris said after we dashed inside, without lifting his eyes from the beer draught machine.

“Come off it, man, you know her name is Anabelle,” Mary said, narrowing her eyes.

“I really couldn’t care less what your names are, kid.”  

The rickety wooden stairs shook under our stomps. The music was loud and the establishment was already too full for our taste. The lunch crowd had started to arrive. We knew all their faces even though we didn’t interact with anyone else other than to beg for a cig now and then. But this time… this time one of the faces attached to one of the sleazy guys who usually sat alone in corners, throwing sleazy looks at us when they thought we weren’t looking, was at our table. It was someone we saw around pretty often. A thirty something guy. At our table. With his arm around Anabelle’s shoulders. While she laughed loudly and twirled a lock of hair around her finger.

“What the actual fuck?” Mike whispered. “When the hell did this happen?”

It was one of those things that seemed to happen very quickly in your absence, deliberately, only to spite you.

We sat down warily, throwing the intruder dirty looks. He wore a T-Shirt with some band or other, had a bald spot, hadn’t shaved in a long while and looked overall unforgivably grown up. Anabelle’s eyes sparkled almost visibly with glee while I tried to put my thoughts in order. It wasn’t the perfect day for something of this magnitude to happen, what with my hangover and the nagging questions about the definition of cheating boring holes into my brain.

It was hard to catch Anabelle’s gaze because she kept staring at her new conquest and pretending that nothing was wrong. That nothing was disgusting. We had to make small talk until I lost my patience and attempted to kick her under the table. I hit Mike instead. He gave a yelp of pain but said nothing more on the topic. Mary picked at the skin around her fingers with her eyes down. Our reality was coming apart at the seams. It broke entirely when the new dude started arranging lines of white dust on the table with his credit card. Our group had strict rules. One of them was No hard drugs.

“Absolutely not, get the fuck out of here with that. You have five minutes to leave and never come back. And in case you didn’t know, these are kids, you asshole” Chris yelled. He had deigned to leave his place behind the bar to pick up some of the empty bottles.

“Pussies,” the new guy said, but snorted two lines as soon as Chris had gone back down. “Though it doesn’t surprise me, this place is a dump anyway. Why don’t we go to my place, darling?” he asked, nuzzling Anabelle’s neck.

“I do still have time,” she said, checking her watch.

Time she would pretend she had spent in school and engaging in extracurricular activities when she got home in the evening.

“Are you guys coming too?”

Her eyes were pleading and her fingers trembled slightly when she zipped up her jacket.

“Of course,” Mike replied, grinning widely. Mary looked ready to pounce at him.

“What are you doing, dude?” she asked in an enraged whisper.

“I’m not letting her go alone,” he said, gritting his teeth. “You two can go ahead and abandon her.”

“Sometimes I wish you’d spare me the good Samaritan act, Mike,” she spat.

Nevertheless, we followed. It was our responsibility to take care of each other back then. Chris closed his hand around my arm right when I was about to walk out the door.

“That guy is bad news, kid, don’t leave with him,” he said. His voice sounded weird. Almost pleading. “Just stay here like you always do. I’ll even give you a free meal and play Pink Floyd.”

“It’s ok, Chris,” I said, laughing and shaking him off. “We’re not going anywhere with him, just leaving at the same time.”

I hadn’t only said it to avoid eating his food. Chris was cool but he was an adult after all. The first instinct was always to mask our intentions from them.

It was worse than I had imagined on the way there. The apartment was dark, messy, and reeked of too many unpleasant things to be able to identify each of them. His roommates were older than him and played music too loudly, even for our taste. There was a cocktail of drugs on the living room table, some of which I hadn’t even heard of before. One thing was clear though, it was too much to only be meant for consumption by three dudes. Mercifully the evening ended early. Because one of the roommates groped Mary and Mike got a black eye out of it.

“I like him,” Anabelle said in a small voice, while we walked home through the bitter cold.

My feet were too frozen in my summer sneakers to protest, but Mary’s apparently were not.

“Are you fucking kidding me? Is there no other way to piss off your dad than liking a loser dealer who’s old enough to be your dad?”

The silence that fell between them was icier than the snow melting in my sneakers. It wasn’t the time to worry about something like that, but I would definitely catch a bad cold.

Anabelle stopped coming with us to our place seeing as her new boyfriend wasn’t welcome there. When we crossed paths in school, there was little we had to say to each other. Mary was still pissed at having been put in actual danger, Mike’s efforts at mediation failed miserably, and I had my own stuff to worry about.

Still, one day we cornered her when she was coming out of the bathroom. We had to. Purple bruises had started blooming from underneath the layers of make-up she had hurried to freshen up. And we were still responsible for taking care of her. Apparently, nobody else had taken over the role in the meantime.

“It was an accident,” she said, looking down.

“Walked into a doorframe, did we?” Mary said. “Dude, seriously, I’m literally begging you to see reason. This guy is trouble.”

Anabelle shoved us out of the way and marched into the classroom to retrieve her things. For the rest of the day, she was absent. That should have been the first sign of trouble, but it wasn’t. We were always absent. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

A few days elapsed before all three of us got phone calls from her parents. Anabelle hadn’t come home the night before. It was the first night of her life that she hadn’t spent at home. We would’ve said something, truly, we would have, but it went against a sacred code. To our mind, it was still better for her father not to find out.

“I’m sure she’ll turn up,” I said, trying to sound comforting, even though I hated the voice of the man on the other end of the call. He had pushed Anabelle right into the shady guy’s arms and didn’t deserve my politeness. Not that I had much to give.

Word travelled fast in our town, though, and the one who stepped up was Chris. The code had expired years before for him. He was one of them. An adult. He told the police we might know Anabelle’s whereabouts. We found ourselves in the principal’s office with them. It was impossible to dodge their questions. So we told them his address and nickname. It hadn’t dawned on us before that we didn’t know his actual name.

“I have a daughter your age,” one of the officers said before turning to leave. “Stay in school, kids.”

Our information turned out to be enough though. He had prior convictions. They caught him quickly. Afterwards, it was only a matter of applying enough pressure to find Anabelle’s body, buried in a hideout of his in the countryside. Together with other girls. All fifteen or sixteen years old. A media circus so bad unleashed, that we couldn’t talk about it. Some things were simply impossible to unpack.

“I don’t think I can ever go back in,” I said, taking in the stairs to our old place. It was 7 AM. Chris would be there any moment now.

“We don’t have to go in,” Mike said, hugging me from behind. “My place?” He placed a kiss on my frozen neck.

I shook him off with all the gentleness I could muster. Whether I managed to go easy on him or not, I can’t say. It was hard to do anything in my daze.

“We can’t, Mike. And you know we can’t.”

“But… that night. Back then. When…”

When everything was normal. When Anabelle was alive.

“We were drunk and made a mistake.”

“Speak for yourself. I’ve liked you for eight years.”

There weren’t enough feelings left inside me to string together a reaction.

“You choose him, then?” he whispered in my ear.

“No. I choose nobody. This isn’t the right way to grieve, dude.”

“And what if we’re meant to be together?”

“Fuck romance,” I said. “You end up dead and buried in some psycho’s yard because of it.”

The rest of the schoolyear was awkward. We heeded the officer’s advice and stayed in school. For real this time. Keeping to ourselves. When summer rolled around, Mary’s family moved away. Our goodbyes were stilted and we didn’t bother to mask our intentions of not staying in touch. Some things weren’t worth it. It was best to sweep everything under the rug. For survival.

In July, Mike took a trip to the capital. He had always wanted to ride the subway. And he got his wish. I heard he rode it for an entire day. And I can only hope he enjoyed it. At night, when the passing trains were rare, he walked on the tracks, deep into the tunnel. Drunk and high out of his mind. And laid down waiting for the train. The conductor thought he was a doll. He died instantly.

And me? I hope that telling this story will help with the nightmares. Sometimes a few cigarettes are enough to put me back to sleep. But when it gets truly bad, I can’t close my eyes for weeks.