“Guys, really, I’m fine. Just a fluke thing,” Angeni said.
Erik approached with a tray of food, a makeshift charcuterie board by the looks of it, complete with slices of meat, crackers, cheese, fruit, and nuts.
They all oohed and aahed at the effort he’d put into their snacks and started reaching for various things. Angeni felt the weirdness in the air dissipate and the usual tranquil energy return.
Erik sat next to Angeni, leaned over to kiss her cheek. She and Erik would be fine. They were solid. Weren’t they? She did her best to quiet the questions, to calm her nervous system.
“You okay, babe?” Erik whispered in her ear.
Yet another question she wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Chapter 15
Britt
After Britt and her mother drove away from Steve’s house, they stayed on the freeway headed east for over an hour, not saying more than a few words to each other. Britt had no idea what the plan was and had to assume there wasn’t one.
Her mother pulled off the freeway at an exit that was totally unfamiliar to Britt.
“I took some of his cash. We’ll stay here tonight,” she announced as they pulled into the parking lot of a motel flashing a neonvacancysign.
They hadn’t even gotten out of the car before Britt realized this motel was one of those places that charged by the hour. A couple of women lingered near the entrance, wearing tight-fitting crop tops and miniskirts, making no attempt to hide their profession. Britt’s mother just walked right by them.
“Isn’t there somewhere else we could go?” Britt asked.
Her mother whipped around, eyes bulging with impatience and anger.
“Britt, seriously. You are too much. What more do you want from me? You’re lucky we’re not sleeping in our car.”
The room was dingy—stained carpet, faded floral bedspread, rusted bathroom fixtures. There was only one bed—a queen. Britt and her mother lay next to each other, not touching. Britt stared at the cottage cheese ceiling and marveled at how quickly her life had gone from decent to destitute.
They spent two days in the motel before Britt’s mother ushered her to the car again and they drove back on the highway the same way they’d come. At first, Britt thought she was returning to Steve’s house, and she cringed at her mother’s desperation. She couldn’t bear seeing the pity on Steve’s face when they showed up.
They didn’t go to Steve’s, though. They went to the mobile home park instead, which was a few blocks from their old apartment. Britt got her hopes up, tentatively. If they were staying there, she could continue going to the same school and hanging out with Becky and Rainbow. There could be some stability in the midst of her mother’s chaos.
“I’ve got a lead on a place here,” her mother told her.
The place was a dilapidated home at the back of the park. It had afor rentsign out front. Britt stayed in the car while her mother went to knock on the door. A middle-aged man with an enormous belly answered. They exchanged words, and then her mother turned around and gave Britt a thumbs-up. This would be their new home “for the time being,” her mother said.
Turned out, it would be the last home they would ever share together.
When Britt turned thirteen, Rainbow threw her a party to “usher in a new era” (Rainbow’s words). Britt resumed spending most of her time with Rainbow and Becky, who had come to understand her plight better than anyone. Rainbow was less of a mother figure and more of a friend—both to her own daughter and to Britt. Rainbow allowed the girls to smoke weed with her, reasoning that they were teenagers on thecusp of adulthood and she’d rather they experimented with her than with kids their own age.
“It’s not just about getting high,” Rainbow told them. “It’s about seeing where this plant medicine can take you within yourself.”
Britt nodded, but for her, it really was just about getting high.
She loved weed from day one—the way it softened the edges of her everyday life, muted the cacophony in her head. Rainbow encouraged her to talk about her feelings when she smoked, said that marijuana could help her process the strife with her mother and find her way to peace. Even in an altered state, though, Britt was uninterested in wasting any time thinking about her mother.
When she was home, which wasn’t often, Britt saw past versions of her mother resurrected. She was a drunk, again. She was dating drunks, again. She was unemployed, again. She was struggling to make rent, again. Britt thought about selling the guns, not to help her mom so much as to prevent them from being evicted, again, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The guns were all she had left of Steve.
She walked by his house once, a few months after she and her mom had moved out. She saw him through the front window. He was vacuuming the living room. She wanted to go to the door, knock. She wanted to suggest they go shooting, because that was less vulnerable than suggesting he resume being her pseudo father. Then she saw a woman come into the living room, and this woman sat on the couch with a kind of comfort and ease that implied she’d been in his house many times. Did she live there already? Was she the real reason Steve had ended things with Britt’s mom? Britt couldn’t blame him, but she also couldn’t shake the feeling of complete rejection.
She decided to go shooting by herself. Without a ride, she couldn’t get all the way out to Swakane Canyon, so she wandered the trails in the woods near the mobile home park until she found a far-enough-away clearing. She didn’t know anything about the legality of shooting outside a designated range, but she didn’t think anyone would care or report her. She figured the cars on the nearby highway would drown out any sound.
Becky thought it was weird, the shooting. In true hippie fashion, Rainbow wasn’t supportive either. “The only purpose of guns is violence,” Rainbow had said. Britt disagreed. She tried to explain how shooting made her feel better, like hitting a punching bag. She could channel all the anger and sadness in her body and direct it to her finger as she pulled the trigger. The expulsion, the bang, was the ultimate release. She created her own targets on the trunks of trees. Sometimes, she took out the rifle, but she mostly used the handgun. Seeing her bullets hit the makeshift bull’s-eyes was validation that this mess of feelings inside her, scattered and chaotic, could be channeled into a straight line. The precision, the perfection, gave her a sense of calm. It was probably similar to how her mother felt when she drank. They were chasing the same sensation, the same peace, just with different methods.
