our dealer’s house and spent the money, because—honestly—you do a better job when you don’t have a backup plan.
After that, we walked inside Gymboree like confident, unremarkable adults. I even had Jack wear a pair of sunglasses to help with the shifty eyes. While Jack chatted up the cashier, I slipped a Winnie the Pooh onesie under my jacket. Then we were out of there, no problem. Brilliant! After a series of high fives, Jack and I absolutely had to smoke a bowl in the car to celebrate. We had talent.
We arrived home very high and handed my mother the onesie, still on the hanger, with no bag or receipt. A bit of paranoia was starting to kick in. She examined the garment and eyed both of us. Oh shit. She knows she knows she knows . . . don’t make eye contact . . . she knows sh—
“It’s too big, Laura.”
“Huh?”
“This is a six-to-eight-month size. I said zero-to-six-months size.”
“The baby is going to grow into it, right?”
“Do you want her to think that we think her baby is fat?”
I was too high to even comprehend that last sentence. I stared at her, squinting my swollen eyes.
“Just exchange it. Please.”
“No problemo, mamacita.” I grabbed the onesie back, and Jack and I walked out of there.
You can’t return a stolen item, so we’d just have to steal again . . . twenty minutes after the first time. Is this what they refer to as “spiraling out of control”? Perhaps!
We made it back into the Gymboree. On this caper, there was no time to chat up the cashier. We had to get in and out, unnoticed.
I lunged to pull Jack’s sunglasses over his eyes.
“Stop—stop it! Don’t touch my hair!”
The cashier spotted us. “Oh hey! Back again so soon.”
Jack panicked. “Yeah, well! We had some second thoughts and we know our little diva is going to want a selection of—”
“I’m hungry let’s go!” I interrupted, onesie already in my purse.
“Byeeeee!” Jack waved and we were gone.
The cashier watched us leave, confused. This whole debacle just confirmed that we were geniuses. Maybe our teachers didn’t see it, and our grades didn’t reflect it, but we were fucking smart and we were going to smoke another bowl to celebrate. But then the bowl was clogged. Good thing we had the wrong-size onesie to clean it out!
In our super high state, we totally forgot to discard the resin-covered onesie. My mom found it a couple days later in the back of the car. Or more likely, she probably smelled the stale drugs first. Finding out that the source of the smell was a Winnie the Pooh resin-smeared onesie was just the cherry on top, I’m sure!
That sounds bad, I agree. But I want to clarify that I wasn’t the “bad seed” in a perfect town. As I got older, the polished veneer of Downers Grove started to fade away, blemish by blemish. Suburbs aren’t immune from bad things! Some people there were just completely fucked up.
At the high school down the road, the school librarian, (the mother of a friend of mine, I might add), fucked like seventeen different high school boys. She’d leave notes in the books for them, detailing when and where to meet. Honestly, it sounds like she got the idea from a terrible rom-com. People started to notice something was awry when all the boys at school started clamoring to hang out in the library. Like, how is there a line to get in? And then the boys started gossiping with one another.
“Yo dude, don’t tell anyone, but I banged the librarian!”
“Wait. I banged the librarian.”
“Wait . . . but . . . so did I.” Aaaaand cue terrible moment of recognition that everyone had banged her.
But back to my story. I love my liberal hippie parents, and I love the values I was raised with, but looking back it’s clear I could have used a bit more structure. A few more consequences. Well, I guess they DID tell me to stop getting arrested. And the rest of the world DID try to slam me with consequences over and over again, whether it was my grades, or detention, or getting arrested for marijuana possession. Geez. Okay, maybe I just didn’t listen.
When I was fifteen, a few of my friends and I rented a motel room so that we could party in PEACE. Also known as . . . a place we could get wasted and high without our parents finding out. Things