Hell Spelled Backwards

When someone machine-gunned the doorbell and frantically banged on the door, Angie chewed her lip and sunk deeper into the couch. Well, someone. She knew exactly who was on the other side of the door, and her pulse quickened.

Her uncle Danny crossed the small living room and stopped for just a sec, giving her an uncertain thumbs up and a questioning look. Angie crossed her arms and hugged herself tightly, but she did give him the barest of nods. He made his way to the door and opened it.

And Angie’s mother burst in, a tsunami of tears and hitched gasps. She swept through the apartment and homed in on Angie, and then she crashed on the couch and pulled Angie into a bear hug.

Her mother let out a torrent of distressed noises but words slipped between them; enough to articulate, “I was so worried!” And as she rocked Angie back and forth, Angie felt the tightness in her shoulders loosening, a welcome ache bloom in her heart, and her own tears bleared her vision.

And then it began.

“Oh, Nevie, Nevie!” her mother said. “You gave me such a fright, Nevie!”

Angie’s blood froze.

One of her most prominent early memories was her first day of second grade, half way through the year in a new school and a new town. They moved to be closer to Uncle Danny, even though Angie lost all her friends. Salt in the wound after losing her father.

“You’ll make lots of new friends!” her mother said. “They’ll love you, you’ll see!”

The teacher smiled warmly and encouraged her to the front of the room, with a round of applause. Encouraged her to introduce herself to the class.

“Hi everyone. I’m Nevaeh Randall.”

And almost immediately Sally Thompson scrunched up her face and asked, “Nivea? Like the skin cream?” An honest question – and Sally not only apologized later, they became fast friends – but the damage was done. Angie had a new nickname, and Skincream stuck for many years.

Until high school.

Angie didn’t realize she was surrounded by Rita Marley and her posse until it was too late. They looked like the happiest group of best friends ever, and they were so enticingly glamourous. What she would have given to belong.

“Hi!” said Rita, a singsong sweet enough to charm Disney birds. “I’m Rita, Pastor Marley’s daughter. I haven’t seen you around before. What’s your name?”

Angie swallowed. She hated that question almost as much as she hated the answer, and nobody ever asked what’s your middle name. But it was a new day and a new school, and maybe it was a fresh start.

“Nevaeh,” she said.

Rita shared a look with her friends, a secret smile.

“Oh, that’s unusual. Is that French?”

“It’s Heaven spelled backwards,” Angie said.

Rita’s smile grew sharp enough to cut glass.

“Heaven spelled backwards,” she said, “is Hell.”

And that’s what they made Angie’s life.

“Oh Nevie!” her mother wailed. “You gave me such a fright! Oh Nevie, oh Nevie–”

“It’s Angie,” Uncle Danny said, placing a hand on her mother’s shoulder. His tone was warm and devoid of judgment yet firm and implacable.

Angie’s mother took a shaky breath and wiped her eyes. “What?”

“Angie prefers her middle name. Angela. Angie.”

“What?” her mother asked again. She pulled herself up, frowned. “No, but you love your name.”

“I hate it,” Angie whispered.

“But Nevaeh’s so unique!”

“Hate. It.” It was a hiss powered by loathing.

When Danny offered a box of tissues, Angie’s mom grabbed a couple and wiped her eyes. “I didn’t know, honey,” she said. She dried her cheeks. “Oh gosh, since when?”

Angie glanced at her uncle, and he gave her an encouraging nod. They’d practiced this, while her mother was on the way. Honesty. “Always,” she whispered. Then she grabbed her own tissue.

“I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t know. Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh – is this why you ran away?”

Angie wiped her nose, considered the question. She reviled her first name, true, but it was a problem she’d found a work around for, even if her mother was the last to know. It was irritating, but hardly a rational reason to run away – right? It was such a little thing, wasn’t it?

She frowned. “No.”

“Then why, honey? Please, just tell me. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out! Is it because of dinner?”

Earlier that evening: another Thursday night, another Thursday fight. Her mother was running late and texted she’d pick something up on the way home. Angie texted back that she could make something. She checked her saved recipes, a loose combination of sites, social media, and videos.

It all looked amazing, though most of it was well beyond her. But she did spend a lot of time curating a list of beginner recipes that she thought she could handle. She even prepared some of them before, though they never really turned out like in the pictures – and even when they tasted off, her mother said, “It’s the thought that counts.”

She had a salad in mind, an Asian/Mediterranean fusion from a blogger she liked. It had been on her mind for a while and this seemed like a great opportunity. But when she checked the fridge and the pantry, she found both pretty much bare. You couldn’t make much of a salad from canned sardines, three boxes of salt, and an assortment of condiments.

“Can you pick up some things at the store?” she texted. She considered just going herself, but she didn’t have any money because she didn’t have a job, because she “should focus on studying”. This frequently twisted her stomach into knots, since they didn’t have much money to begin with and she knew her mother was overworked at a demeaning job.

But even if Angie did have money, she had neither a car nor a licence, which was mildly mortifying for a sixteen year old – but “cars are too dangerous at your age.”

“dont worry about it ill pick food up :)”

Angie rolled her eyes, surrendering her dreams of salad. “Okay. Just please, not KFC.”

“ok”

When her mother came home she grinned sheepishly and put a bucket of fried chicken on the table. “Oh, I couldn’t resist. It’s tradition!”

Another buried landmine, and Angie exploded. “Mom!” She actually stomped her foot.

“Nevie! You like chicken.”

“I hate it!”

“You need it! You’re all skin and bones.”

“I’m a vegetarian, Mom!”

“A what?” her mother said, taken aback. “But since when? We eat meat pretty much every day.”

“I’m trying to be!” Angie said, her words oscillating between speaking and shouting. “But you keep buying meat!”

“Nevie, please–”

Angie growled with all the pent up fury of a frustrated teen and stomped off to her room.

“Nevie!”

The door slammed. Half an hour later, her mother went to check on her and found Angie’s bedroom empty and her window open. She clutched her chest, for it felt like something had just torn her heart right out.

Uncle Danny set down a tray with two steaming mugs of tea. Both mother and daughter grabbed one. Both blew some of the steam away, and then carefully tested the tea for heat – and both scrunched their noses the same way. Despite the heavy business at hand, the similarity between them made him smile the faintest.

“It’s not because of dinner,” Angie mumbled finally. She buried her face in her hands, trying to keep the anger from boiling over. She knew there was a why of it, she felt it, but pinning it down with words was hard.

She had taken the bus after she bolted. The bus was freedom. It was limited to routes and schedules, but it was freedom. One of the very few perks of being a high school student was the bus pass which gave her the key to that liberty. The likes of Rita Marley turned their noses up at the scuffed floors and the worn seats, and even more so at the people who rode the bus – but to Angie these were beautiful things. They were real things, unburdened things, and unburdening.

What she loved most about the bus was its quiet indifference. Nobody hassled her as she sat lost in thought, nobody corrected her, or criticized, or suggested. When she had just started riding on her own, nobody offered to help her when she missed her stop and had to walk a block. Life just let her make her own mistakes.

She’d since memorized her most important routes. Just a year ago she even convinced her mother to allow her to ride to her cello lessons on her own, instead of relying on the car and whatever brutal shift-trades that meant at her mother’s job. A small victory, diminished somewhat by the fact she disliked the cello, but “I just love when you play and I know you’ll make it big one day!”

One of her favourite routes was to Uncle Danny’s. They got on well, laughing or chatting about pretty much anything, and he encouraged her to ask questions. Danny was the reason Angie got to go camping in the summer, or fishing in the spring, or to an amusement park, or to the movies – and it took a long time for her mother to finally allow that one, because “movies are poison for the mind and the soul.” Uncle Danny said his door was always open – and he kept that promise.

“Mom,” Angie said, sitting forward. She grabbed her mother’s hand, dabbed her own eyes. She glanced at Uncle Danny and again, he offered an encouraging nod. They rehearsed this too, when she had arrived earlier that night halfway to going nuclear. It was a good talk, even if he insisted on calling her mother and letting her know where Angie was.

“I just feel,” she began, and took a shaky breath. “Like, you never listen to me.”

“Oh, honey–”

“–please. I’m sixteen, Mom. I’m not a kid anymore.”

“You’re my baby.” She stroked Angie’s cheek with her thumb.

“I want to get a job,” Angie said, undeterred. “I want to help! You don’t have to do everything alone. Please. I can cook. And I don’t want to do the cello any more. Let me… let me be.”

Her mother leaned in and hugged her once more, simply unable to find words. They embraced long and hard, each again overtaken by tears. “Okay, Angie,” she said, “Okay. We’ll figure it out.” Another long embrace, and Angie clung to her mother like she hadn’t done in ages.

“But you’ll always be my baby.”