Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

I’m seventeen, and Mr Jackson has his camera pointed at my trembling, naked body, and I’m eighteen years old, alone on a bus from Milwaukee to New York City, putting twenty-seven hours between me and this man, this life.

Your days are numbered. What would the exact equation be to leave that life behind? What calculation of time and distance would enable me to safely move away from the edge of things, from the danger of being pulled back in? Noah shook my hand, bought me sneakers, tells me stories about New York, but would he miss me if I never came back to him tonight? Would he find another stray to fill up the lonely parts of his life, all the corners I have seeped into these past thirteen days?

Does Mr Jackson miss me? Did he ache to find me gone? I miss him. That I should not feel this way doesn’t make it any less true. I have been facing forward for days now, hiding from my old life, but the way everyone walked around that young boy tonight, the way he didn’t seem to matter, this has wrenched me back. A yank at the core of me, turning me around, as if a rope is being pulled. I am at one end, and who—what—is at the other?

If I leave again, would anyone miss me when I’m gone?

SIX

THIS STORY REALLY STARTS IN A SMALL TOWN, SIXTY-SOME miles west of Milwaukee. The first steps toward now, toward here, begin with the waving of a scrap of paper in my face.

‘Go on, Alice. You know you want to call him. Or’—Tammy pulls a face—‘you’re gonna have to work something else out quick. There’s no room up at the cabin and, besides, Dad’s …’

She doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Tammy’s father is drying out. Again. Only this time, he says he has God on his side. Something about a new church by the frozen lake, and being reborn for Jesus, which means he’s ready to repair his relationship with his daughter, too, if she’ll come keep house with him. He wants her there before St Patrick’s Day, thinks she’ll help keep him steady, but he doesn’t know her new boyfriend, Rye, lives one town over from that church, peddling everything from oxy to heroin out of his basement.

Tammy thinks one man will make up for the other.

She is my best friend, but I wouldn’t go to the lake with her, even if I was invited. There is nothing good waiting for me in those cabins and churches, in the basements full of boys who will probably never leave the county, let alone the state, unless it’s to go to jail. It’s been nine months since Tammy and I graduated, a new year has turned over, and I am more certain than ever that small towns are not for me. I wasn’t conceived in one, and I sure as hell don’t want to die in one, either. What I need, then, is a job. The kind that pays well, or well enough, so that the distance between stuck and leaving is shortened, narrowed to an end point I can see.

If I was eighteen already, I could work clearing tables at Jimmy’s bar; Tammy’s cousin has always been nice to me, and the tips alone would buy me a ticket out of here. But my birthday is still four whole weeks away, which also means Gloria D, my guardian, still has signing rights to my bank account, and therefore to my freedom. A regular job just isn’t going to cut it.

‘I promised your mom I’d look after you until you’re eighteen,’ she used to say. But I think it’s more about the government cheques that will stop when I age out of the system.

I stare at the piece of paper in Tammy’s hand, the potential of it.

‘I don’t know, Tam …’

We’re sharing her lumpy double bed, tucked up inside another cold, grey-sky morning. Lying so close to my best friend, I can smell the remnants of last night’s Marlborough lights on her skin, mixed with years-old Chanel No. 5, a powdery scent so familiar I want to bury my face into her neck. Knowing she’ll be gone by tomorrow makes me want to cry. But crying won’t help my situation; feeling sorry for yourself gets you exactly nowhere.

Nowhere. I’m already in the middle of nowhere. Worse—I’m trapped within it. In this town where the sky pushes down on you. Air all heavy and close to your nose, as if the pollution from other, nicer towns has been diverted here, set down right over our heads. I’m not sure what my mother was thinking when she came back to her home state. Why she couldn’t just stay in New York City.

Tell me about where I was made.

I would ask her this all the time. I never tired of her stories about New York, loved learning that Manhattan was an island—‘Not all islands are tropical, Alice’—and knowing there was a place where you could catch trains at any hour, where restaurants never closed, and people from the movies walked right by you on the street. I thought it all sounded so romantic, even if I didn’t really understand what romantic meant back then, just liked the sound of the word, the click of it in my mouth.

From what I know, a man brought us back to the Midwest. Some guy and some promise, both of which ended up broken. My mother stayed because it was a thousand times cheaper than anywhere else, and there were other men and other promises waiting, but mostly, in those early years, it was just her and me, making a home wherever we found ourselves. To be honest, each time we packed up and moved, I mostly felt relief. Knowing another man had gone, and we’d be back to the two of us again. It was always better when it was just the two of us.

‘Why