hide your heart

I never had an alarm clock that worked so I had to use my own screams as a wakeup call before going for a piss at 3am and by that time I was wide awake at my computer listening to the same 3 songs on repeat til it was time to go to school. 

I Had this recurring nightmare of a past scrap that happened. a handgun pointed at my jaw, the tall hooded figure says, “you gotta hide your heart cause in this neighbourhood people will try to steal whatever isn’t tied down.”

But the computer was always there, I guess. 

Juniper was a tiny square in an MSN chat room, while a single sparrow in the gutters above my basement window was trying to wake the rest of the neighborhood up.

We had been talking for a few weeks and In her profile picture she looked Spanish with her curly hair and olive skin. She was way too pretty to be talking to me. I asked her if she was Spanish the first day and she said no.

“I think it’s time to take our relationship to the next level” Juniper typed into MSN messenger. 

“Okay,” I typed back. “What does that mean?”

The keyboard and mouse were as much a part of me as my clothes were.

“What’s your phone number?”

She called immediately and it was impossible to know what keeping it cool meant on the phone with a person who seemed cooler than anyone I had ever talked to before.

Her voice slithered into my ear. 

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

“…sure.” I said

“Are you a virgin…”

“…no.” I lied

“This place is terrible,” Juniper gestured to the clusters of grimey flat buildings that made up my neighborhood as soon as she got off the bus. “Look, do you have horses and cows in that field?”

I looked to the dead piece of land uninhabitable because of the high tension power lines running through the center of this city in progress. The wires connected the rural suburbs to the hydroelectric dams peppered along the Fraser Valley, but the brain to mouth connection was broken. I was clueless and afraid of this tiny person in a long black skirt and combat boots.

“There’s horses on the other side,” I muttered.

Juniper dug a pack of DuMauriers out of her purse and lit one. The cigarette looked comically large in her hands as she sat in the swing next to me. My old elementary school was still open to anyone to sit in the playground during the summer. 

I point at the patch between the waist of her skirt and the crop top. “Should you be smoking with that on?”

She does this thing with her lip where her bottom teeth show but the corners of her mouth raise like the Grinch.

“It’s a birth control patch,” Juniper says, staring at me so long and silently I got very uncomfortable. 

We went to my house and it was empty except for my brother who was playing pokemon or something in his room. Juniper immediately jumped on my computer and started digging through my documents.

“Where’s your porn?”

“I reformatted when I installed a new video card. I have a rip of Swingers in the video folder.”

We watched the movie even though we had both seen it before. Every time she laughed at the movie felt like a personal victory. It was weird to suddenly become a boring hick in the eyes of a savvy girl from the big city, and then go back to being sort of cool just because of an cult classic movie.

When the movie ended I asked if I could kiss her. Juniper said “No. I don’t kiss innocent boys I just take their virginity and never call them again.”

It was offensive to be called innocent with a messy closet full of weapons buried beneath dirty laundry, but I was too afraid to argue with a hot girl so much cooler than me.

I went to the bathroom after the movie and came back to Juniper on all fours on my bed with her head in her hands and her backside propped up growling like a dog.

“Do you have a curfew?” I asked

Juniper shook her head without moving any other part of her body.

“I can’t take you seriously about drugs until you try drugs,” she said.

She took a baggie and a long mirror out of her clutch and started crushing tiny crystals with her student id.

“Looks weird,” I said holding a small drinking straw from a juicebox before snorting a tiny line. “I don’t think I did it right.”

“No it’s fine,” Juniper had another line cut and she hoovered it up.

“What’s it supposed to feel like?” I felt nothing for a few minutes. “Okay it’s like a cup of coffee.”

“Ew,” she said. “I hate coffee.”

***

We made out for a while and she asked me if I wanted to have sex. She told me how she liked being fingered.

“You’re like a vibrator. Why are you shaking?” She laughed at me touching her breasts.

I gave up, and the sun went down and we fell asleep in the CRT glow of an ASCII dick scrolling in a marquee across the screen.

I woke up to the sound of my fathers truck idling on the front lawn. He was passed out, head back, throat exposed in the cab with the high beams blaring into the front windows of the house.

Someone knocked on my door. My brother was standing there with a frown. “He’s out there again.”

I put on pants and we went out in bare feet to drag my dad inside the house before someone called the cops.

There was a horse trailer backed into the driveway, a ventilated container, but it was too dark to see what was inside.

“Fucking….bitch.” He muttered

My brother snorted, holding back laughter looking at me and rolling his eyes. “This guy sucks.”

I laughed as my father kept swearing at us even though his sons were the only ones trying to cover for his drunk stupid ass. His shirt felt damp and smelled of rye and sounded like he had a cold but we carried him up a flight of stairs anyways.

With my head bowed I tiptoed down the staircase and back to my bedroom where Juniper was sleeping.

“Should we kill your father?” She could hear him grumbling drunk on the way up the stairs. I started laughing and she asked me what was so funny and that she was asking me a very serious question with both her eyes closed in the nonjudgemental glow of my 17” CRT monitor. “I know people.”

I thought about it for a few seconds before she perked up, both big brown eyes open and said “just kidding!”

The glowing CRT kept me awake most of the night.

****

Juniper’s dealer was a guy who did sex education workshops at high schools and she talked about him like he was this super cool genius artsy guy until he took a photograph of her in handcuffs, wearing a schoolgirl outfit, with a broken window double exposed over top and put it on deviant art without attributing it to her. The insinuation she was broken bothered me considering he was in his 30s and she was 16 like me.

“Are you like a model now?” I asked Juniper–over webcam. She was losing weight from doing shake and bake meth and the guy seemed to be hovering over her, watching everything she did on the computer.

“Kinda, I just wanted to say hello,” the dude in his thirties hovering above her was wearing a Batman shirt and kept his hands in his pockets the whole time. Whenever I see the man put both his hands in his pockets now I wonder what gross shit he’s hiding. It seemed weird to not have any self awareness that giving a high school girl meth and posting bdsm themed photos on deviant art was not a very Batman thing to do but self awareness isn’t that community’s strong suit.

I knew better than to ask if she was okay because I could tell she wasn’t. She was always hovering around 100 pounds and I knew because her weight was her third favourite thing to talk about. “Do you want to hang out this weekend? I have a Saturday off work.”

The man behind Juniper reached for the computer and turned off the webcam but the audio continued.

“What the fuck are you doing? I’m going to scream,” Juniper had a strange relationship with men, she knew how to appear distressed, but liked the dance with them when they both knew the man was doing something they knew they shouldn’t be doing. “I’m going to talk to my friend on text and you can read them but if you touch me or this keyboard I will jump out the window and scream rape.”

MSN messenger lit up with a message after she hammered the keyboard at 100 words per minute.

“Meet me at Commercial Saturday noon. My phone is still in rice because of this dipshit.”

“Sure.”

***

Commercial Drive and the other cool parts of Vancouver scared the shit out of me because it felt like I didn’t belong. Older university people would look at me and roll their eyes. I didn’t feel cool. But the downtown eastside people looked you in the eyes and were generally too preoccupied with poverty and dopesick to be anything but friendly to strangers. They were similar to people in Surrey, just less violent and friendlier. 

I waited while trying to smooth out the creases in an old houndstooth dress-shirt that was crumpled at the bottom of my laundry bin. She was late a bit going by the giant clock near the entrance of the SkyTrain station. I heard clicking of heels and turned around and Juniper was there in jeans, a Metallica shirt, and two-inch black heels. Dark round tortoiseshell sunglasses hid her eyes but she had that same strange grin on her face.

“I have to go get drugs,” she said. “I need you to come with me cause the building creeps me out.”

I followed Juniper across Commercial drive and past the older low-rise apartments till we got to one of the last two level dirty roach motels left in the city. We walked up the shitty shaggy staircase that looked like the manager put new carpets in every six months because it was less expensive than cleaning up bloodstains or scrubbing the fibres to wash out the black tar bodies turn into when they’ve decomposed in a hot room for months. The janitors wore thick latex gloves and used barbecue tongs to touch everything to keep themselves from getting pricked with needles riddled with HIV, hepatitis or a leftover hotshot.

There was a single chair at the top of the staircase.

“I’d prefer to wait here,” I said.

“Okay but if you hear me scream it means I’m being held at gunpoint and you have to come save me,” she was a little too deadpan and terse to be believable so I rolled my eyes a bit. “Okay fine that’s not gonna happen.”

I watched her try to hold her balance on the carpet in her heels but she kept wobbling. I watched her knock on the door, and then enter so I stopped watching and tried to think about something different. Like the horses and rabbits and coyotes outside my house 30km away as the crow flies.

After a moment a shorter dude in a leather jacket walked up. It looked like he was swimming in it up the stairs. He didn’t pay much attention to me and walked directly to the same room Juniper and whoever else were already in.

When the door opened again I heard Juniper say “Oh, do you have my drugs?” Which didn’t really go over as a joke but I guess drug dealers didn’t have much of a sense of humour or rather couldn’t have a sense of humour about things.

I went back to watching the stairs and started counting the seconds hoping she would either just leave without drugs so we could both go do something else, or at the very least keep her mouth shut.

“FINALLY THANK YOU,” I heard her say and turned. The leather jacket guy had himself puffed up something fierce and was sort of blocking her in. “Are you two gonna make out when I leave?”

The dude punched the wall right by her face then put his hands in his pockets. “That looked like it hurt.” 

There was all this adrenaline in my body and nothing to do with it besides pray that she just took the baggie and left it alone. Juniper started giggling nervously and the guy took a small revolver out of his pocket and shot into the ceiling above her head.

“Sorry…” she started to slither along with her back to the wall until she got to the staircase. She didn’t look at me, only at the floor.

****

Neither of us said a word till we got to the park. We sat under a tree and Juniper fumbled with her drug mirror, cracking the tiny crystals until they exploded into dust.

“I don’t like it,” I said when she gestured to a small line.

We listened to the summer breeze and the geese and watched older people walk their dogs and chit chat along the paths.

“Does your dad know where you are?” She asked.

“No,” I said.

“Do you think he cares?”

“Probably not,” I said

“My mom is in recovery right now. My dad works and gets real mad when I don’t do what he says. My brother is the favourite, but As long as I answer the phone when he calls it’s mostly okay.”

The only words in my head I could think of was “i love you” but I knew that wouldn’t go over so I said “okay.”

The sun went down and I walked Juniper to her bus stop. I had a hard time looking her in the eyes thinking about the whole day. She had a small smile on her face when she said “My bus is here.” I said “okay” again cause my mind was somewhere across the street buried in the shopping carts full of trash and bottles or the 2000 purses some of the women were carrying.

She pulled her floppy toque on and kissed me on the cheek and laughed before jumping through the swinging double doors of the bus, her heels almost getting stuck in the ridges of the rubber flooring.