Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

I’d given up all hope of rescue by that point in time.

The teachers, principal, and Miss Barks all gave me the same lecture on how I was not working hard or living up to my potential. I had no fight with them. You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless. Mainly by getting there first yourself. I wanted to tell them: This right here that you’re looking at is my potential. What the fuck would you call it? Do you seriously think this is the person I wanted to end up living inside of? But hard work? Let me tell you what that is: trying to get through every day without the gangling ugly menace of you being stared at, shamed by a teacher, laughed at by girls, or sucker punched. Again, if you’ve been there, you know. If you have to guess, you might not even be close. All these people had to keep on asking and asking: Why was I flunking out? What could I do but look at the wall and say nothing, just sorry. I was learning to love the brutal burnt screw-you taste of that word I’d been given to eat forever. Sorry.

If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless. The pain of an exploded leg. This tether that’s meant to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing at your brain’s roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether goes still on the floor, and you’re at rest.

The first thing we had to do, she said, was quit thinking this mess was our fault. “They did this to you,” she kept repeating, like that was our key to salvation. Like there was even a door.

They wanted payback. I thought about what Rose said, wanting to see the rest of us hurt, because she was hurting. You have to wonder how much of the whole world’s turning is fueled by that very fire.

I sat letting her words happen, smelling her fruit, and it hit me between the eyes: It was always June. This thing I’d had for the Knoxville women, aka dome house women. All along June, never Emmy, not past the puppy love. This was the full-throttle type love that I never got figured out properly, due to being raised in shotgun fashion. What my twisted little raggedy heart had always, always wanted. A mother, simple as that.

I asked her like what. She got up and walked around the room, upset. No decent schooling, she said. No chance to get good at anything that uses our talents. No future. They took all that away and supplied us with the tools for cooking our brains, hoping we’d kill each other before we figured out the real assholes are a thousand miles from here.

“I know. You can’t see it. I couldn’t either, I had to leave here, and then come back as kind of a different person.” June looked so beautiful and kind. She was killing me. “What if I like the person I am now?” Said with a straight face, no small trick. “I’m not saying the problem is you. It’s not the drugs either. It’s a whole lot of other things that are wrong, and they won’t get better as long as you stay here.”

Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship, they’re the bottle.

Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about. Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they’re locked in. You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?

Everything I looked at made my eyes water. It felt like being in love with somebody that’s married. I could never have this. Staying here, alone and sober, was beyond my powers. And I still wanted it with all my hungry parts.

Age-old heartbreak of this place, your great successes fly away, your failures stick around.