To My Best Bitch

I first met Mab when we were in middle school and I hated her. She was really nice to me. Said hi to me in-between classes. Smiled at me a lot when she spoke to me. Real earnest shit.

It made my skin crawl.

Becoming friends with her wasn't any better. Mab is the kind of ride-or-die bitch that wears her heart on her sleeve, is very open with her feelings, like to hug the people she cares about.

I have feelings, big ones even, but it takes me about a week to figure which ones I'm having, and they all make my stomach hurt. To this day, I'm still not entirely comfortable with the love and support I receive from all the idiots I've tricked into thinking I'm a good person, Mab being one of them. Some might say this is low self-esteem. They'd say I don't think I deserve it, and I don't think that's it. Maybe it was true at one point but for me right now, it's not really about deserving it, it’s fucking terrifying to watch someone make themselves so vulnerable. Like watching a toddler playing twister on the freeway.

Or more accurately, it's like watching a toddler play twister on the freeway right after watching a semi-truck turn a whole kindergarten into meat paste.

There might be a bit too much child-death in this metaphor.

The point is I've never been able to entirely shake the feeling that people being kind or generous to me aren't making some wildly stupid decision and forcing me to watch. And the fact that I am even slightly emotionally regular now is due entirely to Mab's influence.

Well, her and a small house fire.

Kayso, about two decades ago, I moved into a new apartment complex with my mom. I already knew Mab by this point but it was an exclusively school grounds acquaintance. Moving into this new complex changed things because now I was living in the same complex was Rosaline, a girl Mab and I went to school with. Rosie and Mab were friends but unlike Mab, Rosie was more aloof and inscrutable in a way I found super intimidating. I felt like she was laughing at me and it gave me this strong desire to make her laugh on purpose.

In hindsight, I had a huge crush on her, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

My newfound proximity made it easy for me to hang out with Rosie and Rosie hung out with Mab, so now I was hanging out with both them and all their other friends outside of school. At that point, I hadn’t had friend that knew where I lived in about two or three years, which is a crazy long time for a fourteen-year-old, and those previous relationships had taught me not to assume it was going to last.  For about three months the sidelines of their lives, politely waiting for them to get sick of me and stop inviting me to stuff.

And then I set my house on fire.

It was an accident. I got a new houseplant from my brother's dad and I wanted to arrange my bedroom to best emphasize it's verdant beauty, which in this case involved shoving my mattress (I didn't have a bedframe) up against the window, which just so happened to be right above the baseboard heater.

That night, I went to bed early, gazing up at my window where my propogated pothos sat, neither of us knowing the poor plant wasn’t going to make it to sunrise.  Three hours later, I woke up to the flames licking their way up my blanket and thought, “huh, I should take care of that before my mom notices."

I needn't have worried. My mom was playing cribbage on the computer, six or seven beers into the evening and chain smoking. If she noticed the smoking billowing into the living room, she probably thought it was hers.

I stamped out the fire (or thought I did, at least) before opening my door to let the smoke out, but it was already filling up the hall and making it way to join the cigarette smoke in the living room. My mom finally noticed something was up when I opened the front door. She asked me what I was doing and I said, “Nothing much, I just set my bed on fire, but I’m taking care of it.”

Which is when the fire alarm finally woke up to call me a fucking liar. My mom rushed to my room to investigate and over her shoulder I saw my mattress was completely engulfed in flames and most of the things I’d stacked on the window sill was now charcoal.  

I still feel bad about that plant.

After that everyone in the house woke up. My brother and I briefly fought my mother off from dousing the electrical fire with water and then we got to watch her rush outside to grab the fire extinguisher. She initially tried to punch her way into the cabinet, mistaking its plastic case for a glass one. She still broke the plastic, which was pretty impressive.

She doused my room in flame retardant and I’ll never forget that smell, like laundry detergent and spent matches. It came out like a dust and got into everything I owned. My books, my CD player, my clothes, my backpack. To this day, I can’t listen to Linkin Park without smelling fire extinguisher.

While my mom was drowning my stuff in monoammonium phosphate, our neighbors called the fire department. I was checked out by the paramedics for smoke inhalation while the firemen checked on the contents of my room and that night my brother and I slept over at his dad's house.

The next day I went to school.

There was no such thing as trauma back in the early oughts. As far as my mom and her ex-husbands were concerned, there was nothing that could ever happen to me that would ever trump the things they’d endured so the wisest course of action was to use every misfortune as material for shock my teachers and alienate my peers. And I had a blast telling everyone that I caught my house on fire. As far as I was concerned there was no better compliment than seeing an adult’s eyebrow climb their forehead whenever they asked me how my day was going. Beyond that, and bemoaning the scale of the clean up job waiting for me when I got home, I didn’t think much of it until Mab showed up at my door after school.

I don't know if she'd ever hugged me before then. I doubt it, I'm not a touchy-feely person now but I was worse than a feral cat back then. What I do know is that when I opened the door she flew into my arms and screamed into my ear and seemed genuinely happy to know I wasn't dead.

I haven't been able to get rid of her since, and I'm a better person because of it.