III

I must have met V at some point in the third grade because the first thing I can remember thinking was that we both wore glasses and that made her cool. At that age going to somebody’s house to play was like entering an alien planet and having four eyes was really about the only thing we had in common. Her house smelled strange. Her mom was manic depressive and spent most of the time alone in her room. Her family ate red meat, big floppy steaks grilled in a pan on the stove. Her older brother was shy and creepy. They drank whole milk. I can remember the way the kwik chocolate mix rose to the top of my glass of chocolate milk along with the fat. My family usually drank 2%. I remember trying to swish the milk around in the glass, grossed out by the idea of having to drink a layer of fat. But V was easy to be around. We both liked the same Reba McEntire song and we were both quiet, strange and sensitive children. Both our families were poor. I was jealous because her family had insurance so she got to pick out new glasses frames once a year. I was going to wait three before I could choose new frames. An eternity.
One night in the fourth grade V called me up and told me a secret, “I got my period. Don’t tell anyone. I’m really scared.” She told me that her mom knew and that they had gone to the doctor because she was only 10 years old. “I get to wear a pad. I’m a woman now. You’ll probably have to wait until you’re 12 or 13 because that’s the normal age but I don’t know, I’m special or something.” Later on I learned from my mother that the doctor had told V’s mom that her period had come early because of hormones in the red meat they ate. Once they stopped buying such shitty meat V’s periods stopped coming.
About a month after her periods stopped V called me again, “I’m pregnant.” She said that was the reason her period stopped. She told me all about how she had confessed her love to the cutest boy in the fourth grade and how he had called her every night for a week. They had talked on the phone for hours and hours and finally she snuck over to his house after dark and into his room and they had done it. It was a secret she said and I wasn’t supposed to talk to anybody about it. Not the boy, not my mom or dad, not any of our friends at school, no one. If I told anyone something bad would happen and they wouldn’t let her keep the baby. She wanted to keep it because it would always remind her about the time that the boy had loved her. At first I was devastated. Then I was horrified. I must have asked too many questions, I just didn’t believe her. There was no way that this boy would have been stupid enough to have sex with her. She was obviously crazy. Plus I knew where he lived, at least I knew what neighborhood he lived in, and it was too far from hers for a 10 year old girl to get to after dark in a town like ours. It just didn’t make sense. I could tell that she wanted me to believe her. So I acted like I did.
In the sixth grade V started stealing cigarettes from her grandmother’s purse. We would hang out after school under the gigantic olive tree in her front yard and she would pull out a cigarette and offer me a drag. She would act like she was the coolest, sexiest, most mature 12 year old on the face of the earth. She would talk about that Tiffani song and how sexy it made her feel. She would talk about how her brother was always acting creepy around her and trying to walk into her room when she was naked. I remember the smell of rotting olives coming from the ground, the anxiety I felt just being near her while she smoked her cigarette out in the open on the quiet cul-de-sac. I remember thinking how creepy her brother was, how she probably wasn’t lying about him. It was around that time that I figured out the tall smelly plants her parents kept in the back yard were marijuana and that not only was her mom bi-polar, she was also stoned most of the time. After V got caught stealing cigarettes from her grandma’s purse she started rolling joints with the scraps and rolling papers left on their coffee table. Sometimes there would be hardly anything to roll. A little tobacco, a little weed. Once I remember her telling me she rolled pencil shavings in to a joint and smoked them. She acted like it was totally normal. Like only the most mature, sexy, and rebellious twelve year olds knew about smoking pencil shavings.