The one activity Val embraced during high school was the drama department. In Middle School, she tried band, choir, and basketball. Before that, she had been in dance for one year. None of those things were her niche, though, but freshman year she tried out for the one-act play. She made the cast and continued being involved in the three plays the school put on each year. Until her senior year, when she started walking down a slippery slope.
I’m not naive enough to think that
she hadn’t been drinking alcohol at parties with her friends. Maybe that’s why
the shrink said I shouldn’t be her best friend; what could I say to make her
stop without breaking our friendship?
When I discovered she was smoking pot
on a regular basis and even skipping school, I had to lower the boom. I
convinced her to go in for counseling. She grudgingly went, but as I had
learned years before while attending Al-Anon meetings because of her father’s
addiction, you can’t force someone to quit if they aren’t ready.
On the day of her graduation, we had
a huge argument. She was going to go to the house of one of her new and sketchy
friends to get ready for the day. I went berserk, telling her the only reason I
was going to graduation was for the foreign exchange student she had convinced
me to let live with us the past fall. The party afterward would be for that
girl from Portugal, not for her. I felt betrayed – so much for being best
friends.
Somehow, we got through the day, and
no one was the wiser. We got through the summer, too. Val managed to hold down
a job, but only so she could use the money to support her drug use.
She had been accepted to a college a
two-hour drive from where we lived, wanting to get a degree in social work so
she could work with disadvantaged kids. Kids who were more messed up than she
was.
Halfway through her first semester,
we received a letter that she wasn’t attending class and her grades were barely
passing. We had a long talk. She said she hadn’t realized the freedom she would
have at college, no one dragging her out of bed in the morning and forcing her
to go to class, no one checking what time she went to bed. She had formed a
friendship with one of the maintenance men in her dorm, who sold her whatever
drugs she could afford.
Needless to say, when she came home
for winter break, she carried the letter that said she'd been kicked out. She
got a D in one of her classes, but she failed the rest completely.
We moved her things home after Christmas.
~~~
One morning, before I left for work,
I told her she had to get a job before the end of the week or look for
somewhere else to live. She could no longer be a freeloader. Through some of
her craziest years in high school, she had managed to keep a part-time,
after-school or summer job. She’d cleaned cabins, bussed tables, and bagged
groceries. She could do whatever she wanted to do; she just needed a kick in
the pants.
She stuck out her jaw and did what
she was told, for a change.
Later that same day, she showed up at the
clinic where I was working. She was there to gloat.
“I got a job,” she announced, and I
thought she might sassily add, “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah,” next.
A woman from our church hired her to
be a waitress at her restaurant. Val had no experience, but her new boss told
her that was what she looked for in new hires. That way they could be trained
from scratch.
It was the first in a long line of
waitressing jobs she held. And being a people-person, she did well in all of
them.
Before long, she moved out of the
house and into an apartment with a girl she knew from high school. Over the
next few years, she moved to different living arrangements as often as she
switched jobs. But somehow, always landed on her feet.
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