Page 4 of All of You
“It’s green. Go.” I snap.
“Jeez, kiddo, you’re in a mood.” She playfully tries to swat at my arm but I yank it out of reach.
As she pulls through the intersection, I sit up in my seat again, but don’t look out the window, just in case he’s still within sight.
“I’m not in a mood. I just don’t need you flirting with teenage boys,” I gripe.
“I wouldn’t have to if you did,” she quips.
I roll my eyes. “Gross. What’s the point of flirting with anyone when we don’t stay anywhere long enough to bother with dating.”
“Hey,” she says and looks at me before directing her eyes back to the road. “You don’t need a lot of time to have alittlefun.”
I would give anything to exit the van at this moment.Anything.I envision morphing into a cloud of smoke and filtering out through the seams of the van door or tossing my door open and hurling myself on to the road. But as always, I’m stuck with my mom.
“Can we just not?” I ask.
“As you wish,” she says unaffected.
“How much longer? I have to pee.”
Mom glances around a wisp of nostalgia in her eyes. “Not long enough,” she breathes out.
“Huh?”
“Nothing babe. We’ll be there shortly.”
Sighing, I let myself zone out. I estimate that I have spent thirty-five percent of my life spacing out. I am shards and slices and pieces, made out of broken things—this is what I think about when I space out. Well, it’s a recurring theme of what I think in my checked-out mental state. I’m a bunch of broken fragments that somewhat make me whole. A little bit of water baby, mixed with a dollop of secret journal keeper and a smidge of nature enthusiast and perhaps a dab of rebel whisked with some people-pleasing tendencies.
***
I listen to music, and I watch what passes. I see animals. Snake plants on windowsills. And then we pull down a dirt driveway at a sign that readsLands End. The house rises into view—roof first—black with green moss growing at one shady end, followed by white siding, a front porch with some peeling paint, and flowers hanging all over it. It’s all bursting with possibility. Apple tree blossoms explode with sleeves of perfect pinks and there are wild blueberry bushes everywhere.
Mom passes the house and disappointment washes over me. Of course we’re not staying there. She pulls around a bend in the road, which is really just two tire-beaten strips in the ground. The lot is covered with trees. Big, old, stately trees covered in lichen.
I don’t remember who told me, but I recall that the lichen on trees makes its own food which struck me as strange since it appeared to me that they were consuming the plants andtrees they grew on.
Mom backs in just so, so that the one spotlight of sun through the trees is just outside the door.
“Welcome home kiddo,” she says and nudges my arm gently.
I suck in a deep breath and swing my door open.Home sweet home. A new place because Mom burned another bridge. Mom often did this. She falls in love. It falls apart. We pick up and leave. She catches her breath in the camper van, reminding herself to breathe, that she is still alive, that she still hasme. That life is still an adventure, and we should live it to the fullest.
I grew up thinking all kids had a mom that played with them the way kids play together. I thought it was perfectly normal that we spent most of our time outdoors despite whatever weather we were having. I didn’t realize that other kids didn’t have moms who were home all day long—readily available to be at their beck and call. Even the stay-at-home mom kids didn’t have a mom like mine. Those kids weren’t in charge of comforting their parents when they cried or nudging and prodding them for dinner or lunch or ‘oh hey, today’s actually a school day mom, are you taking me?’
That was the time when I was blissfully unaware that the life I led was altogether different. Some of my best memories are from then. Giggles and joy and so much laughter. That was before I worried about my mom. Before I had to grow up and start paying attention.
I realized people only took vans on camping trips, that they didn’t live in them for more than a few days—maybe a week at a time. Although we always had a roof over our heads, we did spend weeks, sometimes, in the van before finding said roof.
People didn’t move every year. The longest we’d stayed anywhere was a school year and sometimes not even that. It took me a while to figure it out because I washappy. I didn’t mind starting a new school each year when I was little. It was an adventure. I always had the best ‘what did you do over the summer’ stories and my mom was my only daily person so there was no reference point for anything else. I had clean clothes on my back, food in my belly and a mom who splashed in mud puddles with me, took me skinny dipping, chased me around with whirlybirds stuck to our faces and danced in fields and let me stay up late to learn constellations. We were besties.
Until sixth grade.
Until Amber Maher invited me over to her house for a sleepover and her mother asked me questions, that I apparently didn’t give the correct answers to, at dinner. Until someone said the words ‘basically homeless’ in her kitchen when they thought I was out of earshot and then looked at me in a completely different way than before the rest of the night. It wasn’t until then that I woke up and began to notice the ebb and flow of the world around me, how it functioned and how different it was from my life.
Even then, it didn’t bother me at first. I never felt unloved and the various ‘friends’ my mom seemed to keep wherever we went always treated me kindly. I thought maybe we were just getting it right, the wholelifething.
***
