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I climbed out and followed him along the pathway of broken concrete to the front door. The door was slightly ajar, and inside, a kid was crying.
“Goddamnit, will you shut the fuck up!” Screamed a woman.
I started to shake. I knew that voice.
It was my mom.
My hateful, junkie mother.
Alex pushed open the door and I followed him inside, and immediately, the sour stench of garbage and stale weed hit me, curling in my nostrils and taking me back to a life I wanted to forget. It was dark inside because the shades were drawn, but it was easy to see the chaos and filth. A dirty couch lined a wall mottled by yellow stains, while cigarette butts spilled from an ashtray on a coffee table littered with frozen dinner plates and drug paraphernalia. I glanced around us, absorbing the house I had grown up in. The putrid green carpet. The dishes piled high in the kitchen, and garbage gathering maggots in the corner. The sickly stench of desperation, frustration, and neglect.
The room was empty, but as we stood there looking around us, the sound of a crying child grew louder until he suddenly appeared in the hallway. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen months old, and he was filthy. He wore nothing but a diaper and judging by the state of it, it hadn’t been changed in a while. When he saw us, he stopped and wobbled unsteadily on his little feet. He was distressed, his face slimy with tears and snot.
My instinct was to go to him. To scoop him up in my arms and take him from this terrible, terrible place.
But then she appeared. My mom. Or, as I called her, Maggie. Because I had stopped calling her mom the moment I realized she wasn’t much of one.
At first, she didn’t notice us standing in her living room, and yelled at the little boy again. But then she saw us, and her face paled with recognition and her eyes narrowed. Slowly, she removed a cigarette from her lips with two dirty, nicotine-stained fingers.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she drawled, blowing out a puff of smoke.
More spit formed in my mouth as the bad memories I’d long since buried raced through my mind. The abuse. The yelling. The inappropriate touching. The yearning for something better. The need to escape this pisshole.
“Maggie,” Alex said her name coolly. “Do you know who I am?”
Her hollow eyes focused on him. “Of course, I do. You bring the gear? Playboy told me you were bringing the gear.”
I remembered Playboy. He was my parents’ dealer. The one they tried selling my virginity to when I was twelve.
Ignoring the little boy, she sat down on the couch and squashed her cigarette onto a discarded dinner plate before lighting another one.
I could only stare at her, and she noticed. “You got something to say to me, girl? Or you just going to keep standing there staring?” I was afraid to open my mouth. I was barely keeping down the vomit collecting in my stomach. “What’s wrong with you? The cat got your tongue?”
“Is he my brother?” I finally managed.
She rolled her eyes and sighed, as if my first words to her in ten years were a disappointment. “Of course, he is, why else would I put up with his hollering all day if it wasn’t because he was my son.”
“And where is my father?”
Her face hardened. “Dead. Going on three months now. Stupid junkie fuck. Got himself caught up in some bad shit, and ended up with a bullet in his gut. Didn’t think about me and Noah before he went and got himself involved in all that gang shit. Now I’m left holding the bratty kid.”
Noah.
My brother’s name was Noah.
She looked up at Alex. “Where’s the gear?”
“You’re still using?” I asked.
“Is the Pope catholic? What the fuck does it look like to you.” She shoved her arms out. They were covered in scabs. Ugly track marks, both old and new. “Also got some real nice ones on my feet, you wanna see them too?”
When Noah started to cry again, she yelled at him. “Shut the fuck up, you little shit.”
“He needs cleaning up,” I said, barely containing my anger. The rage was coming back to me. The darkness of my past. “He needs his diaper changed.”
“Well, why don’t you go buy him some, then. Look around you, Miss Hoity-Toity, does it look like I got money for diapers laying around here?”
My eyes narrowed with disgust. “But you’ve got enough for your next fix, I’m sure.”
She glared at me. “Don’t you judge me.”
I shrank back, remembering the tone in her voice and the beating that usually followed. I turned to Alex.
“We can’t leave him here,” I said desperately. “Please, Alex. We have to take him with us.”
