With or Without You: A Memoir by Domenica Ruta Read Free Book Online

although they were both crazy and brave enough to continue trying.
    What was I supposed to do with them?
    “
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is on. You missed the first half hour.” I’d seen it before and was willing to catch them up, but only if they asked. I offered them a seat on my bed, which neither accepted. They just stood there blinking at me.
    “What would you do if someone on the school bus offered you drugs?” Donald asked me gravely.
    I knew from previous playdate punishments that he and Lisa had learned everything they needed to know about life from the networkafter-school specials that were so popular in the 1980s. It took all my strength not to smack him.
    “I think our father’s an … an … alcoholic,” Lisa confessed on another visit. She looked at Donald, who was wringing his hands. Tears welled up on the pink rims of their eyes. I was not moved. Even when these kids were happy, their voices quavered as though on the verge of tears.
    “So what?” I said.
    I swear—I didn’t mean to hurt their feelings. I just wanted them to go away so I could finish my movie. Gluttons for punishment (their father probably
was
an alcoholic), they would come back again and again. Every time Donald got a new computer game or Lisa got a tube of lip gloss, they would run over to my house, thinking, for some reason, that this concerned me.
    “What do they want?” I would yell from my bedroom when I heard knocking at our door. As my mother had the kind of guests who just let themselves in, we both knew these visitors were for me.
    “They probably want to play with you,” my mother would yell back.
    Neither of us would bother to get up from our respective beds to answer the door. I’d turn up the volume of my television.
    “Tell them I’m sick.”
    “You tell them.”
    “Please! I called in sick for
you
last week.”
    Even if I had nurtured solid friendships with the neighborhood kids, nothing could have redeemed me after the summer I got head lice. My mother made me walk up and down the street and confess this to any neighbor whose house I’d ever entered. Like a registered sex offender, I had to knock on their doors and identify myself as the carrier of a plague.
    “You should probably throw away all your hairbrushes,” I said, scratching behind my ears. “Wash your pillowcases and towels in hot water. It wouldn’t hurt to dump in some bleach.”
    One group of girls saved a hairbrush that I may or may not havetouched and sealed it in a Ziploc bag. “The Nikki brush,” they called it. It became a weapon whose power mushroomed with every succeeding year. They would throw it at one another and scream, the way young girls do, with churlish delight. Even Lisa had been party to this. Poor thing, she was probably grateful that, for once, the joke was not on her.
    THANK GOD I DIDN’T go to school with those kids. It was one of my mother’s few life goals that I never set foot in the Danvers public schools. She had endured twelve years in that system, and what good had it done her? Within a week of my sixth birthday, she enrolled me at the local Catholic school, St. Mary of the Annunciation, then helped someone move a brick of cocaine and paid the full year’s tuition, twelve hundred dollars, in cash.
    I would have to wear a uniform every day, which I loved. From a distance, I would appear just like everyone else. “It’s hideous,” my mother said. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers. “Ugh. Polyester.” She looked ready to spit.
    The jumper was red-and-green plaid. Underneath we had to wear a white button-down blouse with the compulsory rounded collar.
Never
pointed collars, I found out the hard way. Pointed collars, I guess, were for Protestants, Jews, and tramps. Only a sedate shade of red or hunter-green socks was allowed, and our sweaters were supposed to match our socks as closely as possible. The school sent home notices to reinforce the dress code, and I seemed to get these notices more often