My mom is always yelling at me or accusing me of something. Deny, deny, deny. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. When I’ve told her the truth in the past, she’s only used it against me. Punitive measures for lying or telling the truth. No reason to tell the truth. Why should I be honest with someone who is never honest with me?

She has been smelling the insides of my pockets when I shower, she admits. Sneaking into the bathroom and turning them inside out to detect the odor of smoke that’s transferred from my hands to the inside of my jeans. I’ll have to learn to stop standing with my hands in my pockets all the time. She wants to know where I’m hiding the cigarettes. I know better than to hide anything in my room. More often than not, I’ll come home to find her ‘putting away laundry’. I’m not a child. I know laundry doesn’t go in my desk drawers.

“How many times have we told you not to smoke?”

“And?”

“And what? When I tell you to do something, you do it.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so, that’s why.”

I sit silently in the middle seat of the van while she continues on her tired rant. I’ve heard it a million times. Because I said so, this is her theme song.

“You know, I made a promise to my dad when I was a little girl that I’d never smoke and I kept that promise,” she continues, beaming self-righteously.

“Good job.”

“Show your mother some damn respect!” my dad shouts, reaching back from the wheel and hitting me in the sternum with his knuckles. I turn away and put on my headphones, cranking up the heavy metal to drown them out. Through my window, I see a squirrel start across the road. The tires thump as my dad doesn’t try to avoid hitting it. Or hits it on purpose. I close my eyes, feeling the tears starting to well up behind my eyelids.

“Hey mom, you know all those high-school kids who smoke cigarettes? They all smoke marijuana, too,” I hear my brother say through the blaring guitars. I don’t look. I pretend not to notice.

This is the first year we haven’t gone to my aunt and uncle’s house for Thanksgiving. My cousin, their daughter, went on a cruise and got pregnant by a guy she’d never met before. I heard my mom gossiping about it on the phone to her friends. My mom likes for us to live in this little bubble where the real world doesn’t exist. From day one, being fed lies about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Or how babies are brought by God when a man and a woman love each other and only after they get married. Even after I discover her lies, when the kids at school tell me the truth, I’m forced to continue lying to my brothers and sister. Pretending like I still believe this crap. Apparently, it’s okay to spread her lies around to others, but not to lie to her. “You can’t cheat a cheater,” that’s what she always says. God, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny. They’re all invisible spies for my parents. Keeping us obedient, docile. If Mom doesn’t catch you, God or Santa will.

So, instead of spending the holiday with that side of the family, we’re going to my mom’s sister’s house. Rather than trying to explain to us how our cousin could be pregnant without a husband, they’ve decided not to see or talk to that side of the family again. It sucks because that was always my favorite place to go for holidays. When I was a little kid, I used to stay there on my vacation from school. We’d go get Thrifty ice cream and rent video games. On Thanksgiving, we’d always play a game of flag football.

We stay at my aunt’s house for what seems like an eternity. Instead of playing football, the men decide to watch it on TV. I don’t care for watching sports, so I sit out on the patio, by myself, petting their dog, until my mom shouts from the doorway for me to come hug everyone and say goodbye. I hate touching people and I hate being touched. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been forced to hug people every time they come and go. Denying any request from an older family member, no matter how personal, is deemed disrespectful and grounds for a beating later, behind closed doors.

Back home, my mom heads straight to my room and begins pulling the drawers from my desk, flipping them over to dump the contents on the floor.

“Where is it?!” she screams in my face, pushing me out of the way to get into my closet.

“Where is what?”

“I know you smoke the pot, tell me where it is and you won’t be in trouble.” This last bit is definitely a lie. It used to work on me, but I won’t fall for it again. Plastic models crumble into their factory components as she throws them from their boxes in the closet into the pile on my floor.

Not finding what she’s looking for, she reverts to her go-to method of parenting – slapping me across the face. Hard enough to make my ear ring. When I was little, it was spanking with wooden spoons for even the slightest transgression. I can’t count how many have been broken over my back and ass. Now, I’m too old for that. It doesn’t hurt any more.

She pins me against the poster on my bedroom wall, squeezing my throat with one hand as she pulls my hair with the other. I’m crying, but she doesn’t care.

“I’ll give you something to cry about,” she says, twisting my scalp. “Tell me where it is right now!” I can hear my little brother and sister sobbing along with me in the next room.

“It’s not here,” I gasp.

“Where the hell is it, you fucking druggie loser?”

“It’s, it’s up on the hill,” I’m barely able to choke out.

Yanking me from the wall by the hair and throwing me to the pile of broken hobbies and memories on the floor, she orders me to go get it. I walk up the hill to the next property and retrieve the tupperware container with my little metal pipe from its hiding spot between two stones and bring it back to her.

For the next several weeks, I’m confined to my room. Only allowed out at designated meal times and to do the chores assigned to me. I can’t play video games, talk to my friends, or even go to school. I tell her that I need to call Eric so he can get me my assignments, but she won’t let me, saying I’m just trying to “score dope”. Who talks like that? Eric doesn’t even smoke pot. None of my friends from junior high do. They don’t even like that I do it.

Most nights, after dinner, the phone will ring and my brother will answer it. Every time, the caller hangs up. A few minutes later, my mom tells me to watch my siblings because she has to go get gas. There’s a gas station right by our house, but she says she has to go to the one in Coarsegold because it’s cheaper. She doesn’t have anywhere to be but, for some reason, doesn’t think it’s strange that she suddenly needs to go out of her way fill up the tank at eight o’clock at night. It’s a fifteen-minute drive to the gas station in Coarsegold, but it usually takes about two hours for her to get back. This doesn’t happen on Tuesday or Wednesday, when my dad is visiting from his job down in LA, just Thursday through Sunday.

One week, when my dad is in town for Christmas, my parents announce that I’ll be moving to LA with him. They’ve decided to put me on independent study and take me away from all the ‘bad influences’. I can only think of one bad influence in my life.

The Tuesday after New Years, my dad drives me to Oakhurst to meet my new teacher. She works at Evergreen High School. They call it a continuation school. Mostly, it’s where they send the pregnant teenagers. A single portable classroom down the road from the regular high school. We’d pass it on our morning bus ride.

“You’re way behind on your credits,” Roberta sighs, going over my transcripts. Since my parents didn’t notify the school they were taking me out, I’ve failed all of my classes for the first semester and I’ll have to make them up. Roberta tells me that she’s going to have me do five classes to start and if I’m able to handle the workload, I can take more. She explains how independent study is different from homeschool. With homeschool, the parents do the teaching and grade the assignments. With independent study, the parents don’t do anything, so no change there. I’ll be given a list of assignments each week when I come for my hour-long appointment. The following week, I’ll turn the assignments in to Roberta to be graded, then be given the next list.

Before I move in with my dad, my parents tell me I have to meet with three of their friends, so I know what a good influence is. They give me specific orders. While I’m spending the day with each of these people, I have to ask them about marijuana. How embarrassing. And pointless. These idiots with their “just say no” speeches, playing on repeat. None of them have the balls to actually talk to me like anything other than a child, they’d rather just regurgitate dogma. This isn’t an after-school special, it’s real life.

The first guy, he used to be my babysitter, I know he smokes weed. I mean, he’s the older brother of the guy who gave me my first hit. Their whole family likes to drink and smoke, but none of them will admit to it. When I ask him the question we’ve both been dreading, he gives me a rehearsed speech, sounding like a recording of my parents. At least he admits to smoking with a half-truth, saying he’d tried it once.

The second of my parents’ friends, he’s nice enough. He takes me out to the hobby store to watch the RC car races. My grandpa used to build RC cars and race them at tracks like this. I wish he were here now. He’d know what to say. He was more honest with me when I was seven than my family has ever been.

This guy, the friend of my parents, he’s a used car salesman. I’ve known him my whole life. His daughter and I have been friends since we were babies. Back when we were, like, eight, this girl and I had sex. Not actually sex, though, because, at the time, we thought all you had to do was rub the exterior of your genitals together. It must have been before Bennett explained things to me. Maybe we were six or seven.

I’ve never bought a car, but I’ve heard used car salesmen are professional liars. I watch enough TV to know they’ll say anything for a buck. Maybe my parents are paying him. Wouldn’t surprise me. Sometimes, we take family trips together and he and my mom drink several bottles of wine together. I don’t understand how this guy can get blackout drunk in front of his children, but thinks it’s okay to tell me not to smoke or drink.

“Do as I say, not as I do,” that’s what my mom always says.

The third guy I have to spend a day with is the pastor from the local church. He tells me about how he used to smuggle drugs across the border, but then he found Jesus and renounced his evil ways. He tells me about how smoking pot is a “gateway drug” and if I’m not careful, I’ll be getting arrested in Mexico with a brick of heroin in my trunk. It’s the same ineffective crap they tell us in D.A.R.E. class. Take one hit of the evil reefer and you’re a life-long criminal and drug addict.

One more week of this shit and I finally get to move with my dad. I don’t really know him. He’s always been around and all that, but he works a lot. Not that I can blame him. I’d want to spend as much time out of that house as possible, too. When he gets home, we make small talk over dinner, going around the table in turn, giving a narrative of what happened that day, what we learned in school. When I was little, he used to read to me before bed. But he never really talks to me, never consults me about my own life or shows any interest in what I think. Unless he disagrees with me, in which case he tells me that what I think is wrong. They’ve got my whole life figured out for me already and I don’t have a say in the matter. Finish high school, get a job, get married, buy a house, have kids. Just like they did. That’s the only acceptable way to live your life, they brainwash us. How would I know if that’s what I want to do? I haven’t even seen the world yet. If it were up to them, I’d still believe in Santa Claus.

I actually don’t know what my dad thinks about this stuff. My mom always has something negative or snarky to say about everything. Mostly, he just goes along with her. He stands behind whatever she says or does. He’s so much smarter than her, I don’t get it. Maybe with this move, I’ll get to learn what he really thinks about things.

On Tuesday, at Evergreen, Roberta tells me I’ve been acing all of my assignments and I can take more electives to get caught up on my credits.

“What classes can I take?”

“You can pick from any of the textbooks in the library,” she says, “But, look, if you can make a persuasive argument as to why something you like to do is educational, I’ll let you count it as a credit.

“You still have to do the regular classes. English, math, history, but otherwise, I encourage you to learn about anything that interests you.”

“What about golf?”

“Sure, P.E. credit.”

“Video games?”

“Maybe if you were making your own game, but I’m not going to count video games as educational, sorry, bub.”

“I’ll see what else I can think of. If regular school were like this, maybe I wouldn’t be so bored all the time.”

“That’s what a lot of the students say when they come here.”

After getting my weekly assignments, I shove my books and papers into my backpack and head outside to wait for my dad to pick me up. My heart sinks as I open the door to see the blue Metro idling in the parking lot.

“Get in, hurry up.”

I toss my backpack behind the seat and get in. She’s peeling out in reverse before I’ve even closed the door.

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Fine? That’s it? You don’t have anything else to say but ‘fine’?”

“No.”

“I’m sick of your fucking attitude. I can’t wait for you to leave. You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever,” she echoes in her best down-syndrome voice, making a crooked face and sticking her tongue out. “You think you’re soooo cool, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, mister cool-guy, I’ve got a surprise for you tonight.”

We meet with my dad at the house and leave for Fresno before dinnertime. They’re making me go to a psychiatrist. They’re so desperate to control my mind that they’re willing to hire a doctor to do it for them.

The guy says his name is Doctor Zimmerman. It’s funny how doctors and police officers never have a first name. They insist on being called by a title. So desperate to be respected. So eager to show dominance. This guy is nobody to me, why does he deserve my respect?

For an hour, the three of us sit on the couch across from him as my mom exaggerates the terrible things I do. Calling me a loser. A deviant. A druggie. Pleading with the doctor to help her troubled boy. She’s done all she can. She’s given him everything. She’s the perfect mother. How could this happen to her?

The doctor asks me about these things. I start to answer and I’m interrupted by my mom, denying everything I say and calling me a liar, so I sit silently for the rest of the session, arms crossed, refusing to participate.

I guess this is my life now. Every Tuesday, school and therapy. The rest of the time, I’m left to take care of myself. To be by myself, without friends. Without family. Not a real family, at least.