Girl Code Page 7

  “Touch her again and I will hurt you, Theodore Tackard,” she said, her voice full of emotion.

  My parents stumbled into the room asking questions. Tack continued to yell at me, Leslie continued to threaten him, and I tried to explain to my parents what was going on. It was a big mess of voices until my dad shouted for everyone to shut the hell up.

  “What the hell is happening here?” he asked when we all fell silent.

  “Tabitha was in my room going through my shit,” Tack said angrily.

  Mom looked surprised, but then gave me that you know better look.

  “I was going through his shit for a good reason,” I said patiently. It was clear that I had to tell them. The seething monster in the room was not my brother. In the past, I could have gone through everything Tack owned and he wouldn’t have become the raving lunatic that he was at that moment, breathing fire and ready to shove me through a wall, and I wasn’t at all sure that he wouldn’t hurt Leslie, either—or try to.

  “What reason could you possibly have for going through his personal items?” Mom asked, crossing her arms. She was already taking his side without hearing all of the details.

  I looked at Leslie and she finally relaxed her kick-ass stance and picked up the bag off of the bed. I expected Tack to try to wrestle it from her, but he stood still with his large arms crossed over his chest as she passed the bag to my dad.

  “What’s this?” he asked as he began to pull the zipper on the bag.

  “It’s not mine,” Tack said immediately. His eyes found me and they were full of so much anger that it made me shudder.

  “I’m pretty sure Tack is doing drugs,” I said, my voice quavering. I tried blinking back tears as my father pulled out a couple of the needles and the tourniquet. His brow furrowed and his mouth fell into a deep frown.

  “What is this?” Mom asked, sounding nearly hysterical. I knew how she felt. I wondered if she was going to start laughing.

  “What does it look like?” I sighed.

  She looked from me to Tack and back at the items in Dad’s hands. “You found this in his room?”

  “We found it,” Leslie spoke up, hastily stepping out of Tack’s reach.

  My dad looked at my brother, shaking his head. “What explanation could you possibly have for this, son?”

  “It’s not mine,” Tack repeated. “Yeah, it’s wrong to have it here, but I’m holding it for a friend. He’s diabetic.”

  I rolled my eyes and even my mom looked at him like she was calling bullshit.

  “Okay,” Dad sighed. “There are too many damn people in this room. Tabitha and Leslie get out.”

  Leslie had given Tack one last threatening look before we filed out. When we sat down on my bed, Leslie watched me nervously, waiting for me to break down and cry. I had every reason to cry. It was the beginning of what little world I had falling apart; it was the beginning of me losing the only real family I had. The brother that always kissed my skinned knees, made me smile, and feel safe was coming undone. The brother that threatened anyone who ever considered hurting me, was the one that hurt me. I felt a heavy sense of loss because I knew it was the beginning of the end. I should have been choking on my sobs, but when I looked over at Leslie, all I could see was her bouncing on her feet, ready to karate-chop Tack in the face. The laughter that took me at that moment wasn’t the hysterical laughter I had earlier, but Leslie still looked at me like I had cracked.

  “What the hell is your problem?” she asked, eyes wide with disbelief. “What’s so funny?”

  “You are, Chun-Li,” I managed to squeeze out. Chun-Li was a female fighter in the Street Fighter II game Leslie and I used to play obsessively when we were a little younger.

  Les’ lips twitched as she tried not to laugh. “That’s not funny.”

  “If I press X really fast, will you do the lightening kick thing?”

  Leslie burst into laughter. We fell back on my bed laughing so hard that it hurt. When we finally calmed down and just laid there, staring at my ceiling, I let only a couple of tears slip out of my eyes. Leslie didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She held my hand and I instantly felt better.

  After another few minutes of silence, I said, “I’m completely hetero, but I think it would be hot if you wore the little outfit with the ribbons in your hair.”

  “Shut up,” Leslie said, and then we were laughing again, laughing away the pain and worry, saving it for another time.

  I wish I could say that things improved, that my brother stopped doing drugs and my parents weren’t purposely dumb and blind, but that wasn’t the case. After they talked to Tack that day, they came to my room and droned on about how much stress Tack was under, how much pain Tack was in, and that mistakes happen, but everything will be okay. I still had no right to go through his things and make crazy accusations. Somehow, Tack’s drug usage was totally turned around on me—I should have minded my own business. Even though my brother was obviously on a slippery slope that ended in a bottomless pit, my mom swore it was just a phase. She also failed to see what was happening to my cousins, too.

  Over the next several months, Tack, along with Emmy and Mayson, leapt head first into a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol. The only one to come out of it, seemingly unscathed, was Emmy, which was just ironic, since she was the main source for their drugs. She seemed to have had an endless supply of money to pay for their fixes, but when she decided to get clean, she just left Tack and Mayson to drown in their addictions. Without the flowing money to buy what they needed, Tack and Mayson resorted to lying and manipulating to get money. Things started to disappear from the house, including some of my own things.

  Leo was there with me the day the Ticking Tack Bomb detonated and shit hit the industrial size fan. It was a rainy Friday afternoon in our junior year of high school. Leo and I had just left Leslie’s after dropping off her missed schoolwork. Les had come down with a bad stomach bug; she had been out of school all week. We didn’t stay long since she was still very ill and neither of us was interested in having the icky two-ended-sickness she had. Leo lived a few blocks past my house, so he always ended up practically walking me home, even when I didn’t want him to—and even after my frequent threats to push him in front of a truck.

  We were bickering about something unimportant. Leo was following me up the walkway to my house so that he could come in and steal some of the homemade cookies my mom made every Friday for Tack. I wasn’t sure why she made them every Friday as if everything was normal, like how it used to be. Coke and heroin destroyed my brother’s appetite for food, or for anything really, that didn’t involve him snorting it or injecting it, but my mom still made those damn cookies every Friday.

  “I hope you choke on a cookie,” I said to him as I walked up the steps to the door.

  He opened his mouth to make some smart-ass remark, but we both pulled up short as I opened the front door. It was like opening a door to an alternate universe. My parents were yelling at each other. That was my first indication that something was terribly wrong. Well, something was always terribly wrong. Usually, the one doing the shouting was Tack, not my parents—or at least, not at each other. My dad was usually very quiet, and even when they did have a disagreement, it never, ever got loud. The second indication that something was wrong was that my dad was home from work early. He usually didn’t get home until almost seven every night. Leo and I halted in the foyer and looked at each other in bewilderment.

  “What’s going on?” he whispered to me.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back.

  I left Leo in the foyer and followed the shouting into the kitchen. My dad was about to yell at my mom but when he saw me, he stopped, closed his mouth, and looked away.

  “What the hell are you guys yelling about?” I asked, looking from one to the other.

  “It’s nothing that concerns you,” my mother said sharply.

  “The hell it doesn’t,” my dad growled, looking at my mother with fury in
his eyes. I had never seen him look at her—or anyone—like that. It was scary, not just for me, but for my mom apparently, because she shrunk back away from him, blinking as if she could blink him and his anger away.

  Fear twisted in my gut as I waited for an explanation. It felt like hours had passed by the time my dad turned to face me, though it had only been seconds.

  He looked at me for a long moment, still scowling, but with tired, sad eyes before letting out a long breath. “Tack has been tapping into our savings. Overall, he’s taken about thirty thousand dollars.”

  I was a kid that got everything she wanted and needed, though I never wanted too much more than what I needed, but I never had to really go without anything. I had some concept about money, but I never had to think about it. We didn’t have a share in a family fortune like Emmy’s family, and to a smaller degree, Mayson’s. Somewhere along my direct family line, our share of a great deal of money was squandered. We had significantly less money than our cousins, but my parents worked hard and they spent wisely. Every penny that they had saved, they had done so on their own. More money would not appear in their accounts at the end of the quarter like it did for some of our relatives. What they had was what they had, and when it was gone, it was gone.

  I felt like I had been kicked in the chest. I gasped loudly as my heart pounded with fear.

  “Thirty thousand dollars,” I breathed.

  “Yes,” Dad said and sighed heavily as his gaze settled on my mom. The little bit of softness he had just shown me seconds before was gone. His face was hard and furious again. “Your mother has been covering his tracks, moving money around and hiding the bank statements to keep me in the dark.”

  My mouth fell open as I looked at my mom. I could understand if she hid a few hundred dollars for something she wanted, but she had hidden the loss of thousands. Thousands. I was stunned, struck speechless and slightly stupid, because I could not wrap my mind around that number and how it had gone so quickly. How the hell much did coke cost? Didn’t the drug dealers give discounts to people buying heroin since they had to reduce it to its liquid form themselves?

  My personal hysteria most often presented itself in the form of some kind of laughter, and I could feel it threatening to come out of my mouth. I could almost see the “Ha, Ha, Ha!” in the air. Discounted heroin was funny to me, but in reality, there was nothing funny about the shit.

  “What the fuck were you thinking, Kelly?” Dad asked gruffly as he rubbed his forehead between his thumb and forefinger. I was under the impression he had asked her this question several times before I arrived. The hysterical laughter was cut off before it began when Dad dropped the F-bomb. I had only ever heard him say damn or hell, never anything worse than that, and never directed at my mother. Their relationship was…I don’t know…they weren’t affectionate, at least not that I knew of, but they had a very amicable relationship. He always treated her with respect and honor.

  He looked at her again. The fury was still there, but disappointment, sadness, and confusion also shown on his face. “What the fuck were you thinking?” he asked again.

  I looked at my mom. I wanted to know, too. I wanted to know what the fuck she was thinking. I also wanted to know where the fuck Tack was. Why the fuck wasn’t he there to deal with the fuckery he had fucking caused.

  The hysterical laughter threatened again and I actually had to pinch my lips together to keep myself quiet.

  “He doesn’t mean to hurt us,” Mom said with a trace of desperation in her voice. “He’ll get better, Theo. It’s just a phase. It’s just a phase and he’ll pull himself together soon and he’ll pay us back. I know he will. Tack’s a good boy.”

  “A good boy?” I finally spoke up. I looked at her with disbelief. “He’s not five, Mom. He didn’t steal a candy bar from the grocery store. He’s twenty years old and he stole thirty thousand dollars.”

  “I know that, Tabitha,” she snapped at me. She was ready to spit more words in my direction, but my dad cut her off.

  “Kelly, you went behind my back and borrowed from our 401K to cover Tack’s tracks. Did you think about those consequences? Did you think about the money you took away from our future? More importantly,” he said, putting his hands on his hips, “did you think about Tabitha and her future? A large portion of the money Tack took was meant for her education.”

  Oh. I inhaled deeply as it dawned on me. Tack had scholarships to pay for his education, and the money my parents had originally set aside for him was used for his medical bills and one and a half stints in rehab. I was sure that I could nail down a decent scholarship or two for school, but nothing was for sure, and it went without saying that I’d still need financial help. My dad had never wanted Tack or I to be stuck with financial aid bills that we would never be able to pay off, but my mom and Tack pretty much screwed me.

  My odd urge for neurotic laughter was gone and replaced with anger. I glared at my mom and waited for her to answer my dad.

  She looked at me with maybe a flicker of regret, like maybe she was a little sorry, but not really. Turning her eyes back to my dad, she said, “Well, we can still help her a little, and there are financial aid and scholarships. She can get a job.”

  I didn’t mind having to get a job, and if we couldn’t afford my education just because we were poor or because the money had to be spent on a mortgage, car payments, and other costs of living, I would understand. I would be the first in line at the financial aid counter, but that wasn’t the case. My mother’s blind love for my brother extended to no one else, not even her own daughter.

  God that hurt. It tore into me like a sharp blade, chopping away at my insides.

  “Kelly, it’s not just her education!” Dad yelled, making me jump. “You have completely scrambled our resources, do you not understand that? Do you not see what you have done? It’s not just thirty grand gone, Kel. The money you took from the 401K, the loan you took out behind my back, and I’m sure that Tack will have to go back to rehab any day now.”

  My eyes bulged. “She took a loan out?”

  Dad picked up a stack of papers off of the table and started throwing them, physically tossing them at my mom.

  “Our crippled savings, a fifteen thousand dollar loan, and a horde of credit card bills,” Dad said vehemently as the last of the papers floated to the floor at my mom’s feet.

  “What did you expect me to do!” Mom shouted. “My son was in pain, Theo!”

  “It’s called fucking withdrawal, Kelly!” he shouted back at her as I flattened myself against a wall, blinking back tears.

  “It’s painful! It can kill him! Don’t you give a damn about that? And he’s better as long as he has what he needs, he’s better. He doesn’t get upset, he’s not in pain, and he feels better. Why can’t you see that? I would rather give him what he needs than to see him out there on the streets, getting hurt or killed doing something desperate.”

  “Maybe he needs to be on the streets,” I said harshly. It hurt me to say that about my brother, but he really wasn’t my brother anymore. He hadn’t been in some time. “Maybe he needs a dose of cold reality. Maybe he needs to know what it’s like when his mommy doesn’t supply him with his nose candy.”

  Her brown eyes narrowed on me. “Someday, Tabitha, I pray that you have a child that you love so much that you would do anything for so that you will know how it feels. Maybe then you won’t make such ridiculous suggestions. You have no idea how much…” She clutched at her chest as tears brimmed in her eyes. “…how much you can love a person, and what you’re willing to risk for them.”

  The blade pushed in deep and twisted and twisted and twisted. If it were a real blade, I would have been bleeding out, dying on the floor.

  “You’re right.” I nodded. “I have no idea, and I have no idea what it’s like to be loved like that, either.”

  Her mouth fell open and her eyes widened as if she just then comprehended what she said and what it meant for me.

  “Tabitha,
” my dad started gently, but I didn’t want to hear it. He was really not much different than my mom; though he didn’t love Tack obliviously in the way that she did, he wasn’t exactly a fan of mine.

  “Forget it, Dad,” I said, hitching my backpack further up on my shoulder and straightening my back. I swallowed hard, refusing to cry in front of them. I took a step toward my mom, just one small step. I was about to say something so incredibly horrible, so mean and so heartless, and something so unlike me—but then again, like my brother, I was changing, too. “You go on and keep supporting Tack’s habit. Then when he overdoses and dies you’ll know how it feels to kill someone you love so damn much.”

  I didn’t expect it. Not even a little bit. I didn’t even have time to prepare myself or to move because it was so unexpected. My mom moved so fast that even my dad didn’t have time to react before her hand cracked against my cheek—not once, but twice. She hit me so hard that tiny dots of white danced in my vision, and I was literally stunned. I stood there, blinking as my father pulled her away from me. A hand closed over my arm and pulled. I followed without hesitation as the strong hand led me up the stairs and into my room. It was only when the door closed and Leo stood before me did I even remember he had been in the foyer the entire time.

  “Shit, Tabs,” he whispered as his fingers trailed over my stinging cheek. “Are you okay? Of course, you’re not okay. Shit, Tabs.”