Chapter 1
“Where did you get the drugs from, Lee Roy?” Valerie Lang’s mother said in a controlled voice. Valerie tried not to listen to anymore of the conversation between her parents. Had her mom actually found drugs? Yeah. She probably had knowing her dad, but her mom was going through it and could have easily mistaken a Taco Bell crunchy taco for a syringe of heroin. Her grandfather had died, Valerie’s great-grandfather. A man she only remembered meeting once in her life. The funeral service was taking place just outside of Bakersfield, a city nearly four hours away from where they lived, and Valerie had school the next morning.
So, Valerie was to stay home with her dad while her mom went to the funeral. Her great-grandpa was one of four family members who had never done a single thing to her, meaning to or not, but her mother said that she and her great-grandpa barely knew each other and it was better she stayed put. That reasoning made her feel an anger that was hotter than the desert sun. She should stay put in the care of someone who apparently has drugs? She mentally jotted that down in her mental notebook of how not to raise a child for if that time ever came for her. But as she munched on the burrito, she watched her mom snapped her suitcase shut, watched as those meaty skin on her bare calves revealed cobwebs of arteries beneath the stretched out flesh. “Try not to do drugs while I’m gone,” her mom hissed, trying to keep her voice low enough for Valerie not to hear.
But it didn’t work, Valerie heard every word. Preteens were good at that. She watched as her dad tried to kiss her mom, but her mom whirled around in a huff and stormed towards the front door. She pointed a finger at her daughter. “And you! You be good!” And with that, she slammed the door behind her.
Valerie swallowed the last of the burrito and looked at her dad. He drummed his hands on his jeans before rubbing them on the rough fabric. “You wanna head on over to Blockbuster and rent some movies for tonight?” He asked her.
That actually sounded nice, and she smiled and nodded her head. Her dad stood up and opened the sliding glass door that led to the patio and washer and dryer. It was crisp out, but nowhere near hot. “Go and get your Razor scooter, I think some air will do us both good.”
His code phrase for when he knew he was going to get another asshole chewed out of him. Valerie got up off the floor and hurried to the hall closet where she got out her purple handled and wheeled Razor Scooter. Her favorite toy in the world. Her dad grabbed his keys from the bowl near the door, and Valerie raced off on her scooter, leaving her dad to lock the door to apartment 241 behind him. When she was getting her scooter from the closet, she also nabbed her walkman, and she was sitting near the mailboxes, searching for her favorite song on the CD.
It was the soundtrack to a movie she couldn’t stand, but liked the music selection of the film, 13 Going on 30. To be fair, she didn’t make it to the end of the film, she only made it to the guy dancing in his underwear scene before she got up and left the living room, needing a pallet cleanser of Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan, now, there was a man she would have paid money to see dancing in his underwear, Jason Voorhees. She got another asshole chewed out of herself. It wasn’t her fault, rom coms were just not her jam, she was a horror nerd, always sniffing around the nastiest and goriest little films she could find.
And that wasn’t her fault either! Her parents showed her a slasher when she had been four, and her dad then got her a doll of said slasher the next day at the local mall! So, whose fault was it that rom coms were not her bag? Her parents, that’s right.Though if she tried to bring that up to her mom, her mom always made her feel bad. She only allowed Valerie to watch that movie because she thought it’d scare her and she’d sleep with them in their bed, keeping Lee Roy from raping her.
But it hadn’t scared Valerie, and she slept throughout the night, in her own room.
She put the first track on and began to scoot around the parked cars, waiting for her dad. Even through the Go-Go’s lyrics, Valerie heard her father whistle and she looked, her stood in an empty parking spot, arm raised in the air, hand closed around the keys to their apartment. She scooted over to him and they began the walk to Blockbuster. “So, why couldn’t I go to great-grandpa’s funeral?” Asked Valerie, pausing the song. “I liked him.”
“The Kennedys really don’t like you,” said her father, speaking of course about her mother’s side of the family. Valerie’s shoulders sank and while she still kicked her scooter, her kicks seemed lazy and sad. “But I think they don’t like you because you’re way cooler than they could ever hope to be!”
She didn’t believe that for a second, but it felt nice that her father was trying to make her feel better. Her father held up a pudgy finger as he dove his hand in his pocket. Someone was calling him, and she rolled her eyes. “You know the code to get out right?”
SkyCrest Apartments was a gated complex of apartments, you needed a code to get and out — regardless if you were driving or walking. Valerie nodded her head that she did know the code.Her dad reached down and patted her butt, she was eleven, it was the sort of thing you stopped doing at the age of five. The last pat he did, he lingered too long, squeezing her butt the way he would her mother. It was dark, perverted, and a lot unhinged.
Valerie sped down the hill, only stopping to punch in the code, before allowing the door to shut, she glanced back and saw her dad coming around the bend, and decided to hold the door to the gate open for him, but he saw this and frowned, waving angrily for her to go on and get. She made a confused face back at him, but did what she was told to do though it made little sense to her. She allowed her scooter to pick up speed before stopping again, but this time she didn’t turn around to look at her dad, she stopped and looked for cars before crossing the street.
She allowed her scooter to pick up speed as the path to Blockbuster was all downhill, she loved riding her scooter to Blockbuster, but she hated coming home, all up hill and just to see her parents?! Ugh! Charlie took a quick glance behind her and saw her dad was starting the downhill path. What had been his problem? She didn’t see it as very fair, if she had done that to her dad rather than her dad doing it to her, they would have walked right back to the apartment, but when her dad did that, she was expected to take it in stride. And her parents wondered why she was so withdrawn from them.
