Supergirl Mixtapes Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART TWO

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART THREE

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright Page

  for my family

  PART ONE

  1

  I’m not going back. The words pounded through my head as I sat there in Penn Station. My fists were clenched and my throat was tight. I’d been fighting off waves of queasiness for the last few hours. I didn’t know where I was going, or how I was going to get there, but I knew I could not, under any circumstances, go back. Not yet.

  I didn’t want to prove them right. My grandmother and my dad. My grandmother never liked my mom, and whenever she wanted to needle my dad, all she had to do was bring up “that woman you married who had the nerve to abandon her own child.” In my mom’s defense, Dad would say, “It’s more complicated than that.” And, for him, that was saying a lot. He was never the type of dad to scream and yell and threaten to ground you for a month. On the other hand, we had our share of awkward silences.

  Last night, when I was leaving, he finally spoke up. We were sitting in his truck, in the parking lot of the train station back home. The sun was going down. The wind blew fast-food trash across the parking lot, dead leaves skittering along behind.

  “When I, um.” My dad cleared his throat. “I spoke to your mother last night. She sounded excited. That you’re coming to stay with her. But.” He stopped. Tapping his thumb softly on the steering wheel.

  “But?” I felt something sinking in my chest.

  “I’m worried she won’t be able to take care of you,” he said.

  “Dad.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m almost eighteen. I can take care of myself.”

  “You’re sixteen, and the problem is, your mother thinks she’s sixteen, too.”

  “Then we’ll take care of each other! Anyway, it’s not like you’re around to tuck me in at night.”

  I felt bad as soon as I’d said it. I’d already put my dad through a lot, and now I was leaving, maybe forever if things worked out. He stared out the window and swallowed hard, like he had a big pill stuck in his throat.

  “I’ve been trying to help you through this, Maria,” Dad said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear. “A girl needs a mother in her life. And I hope that you two get along—I really do. I just don’t want to have to say ‘I told you so.’”

  “Why wouldn’t we get along?” I asked, not expecting an answer. “She’s my mom.”

  My dad didn’t have anything else to say after that. We sat there in silence until it was time for him to load my duffel bag onto the train. Then he kissed my forehead, told me to be good, and that was that. I was gone.

  I rode all night. My grandmother said it was a good way to see the country, taking the train. I didn’t ask her how much of the country I was supposed to see in the middle of the night. I called home as soon as I got to the station, but my dad was still at work. I left a message and told him everything was fine. My mom was supposed to meet the train at six a.m. Now it was almost five thirty in the afternoon. And I was still in Penn Station. Nobody was answering at her phone number. And I couldn’t call my dad again. Not yet.

  I had another number in my pocket. I pulled out the crumpled paper and looked at it. A page from my grandmother’s day planner, printed with loops of flowering vines trailing from the corners down the page. In bright blue ink, in her looping handwriting that matched the vines, she had written a phone number and a name. Nina Dowd. Some old lady my grandmother knew. Call her the moment anything happens. If you need any kind of help at all.

  She meant help with my mother. My grandmother still didn’t trust her. What did she think my mom was going to do, anyway? Drop me on my head? I guess I shouldn’t have been on my mom’s side, considering she wasn’t really around when I was growing up. I should’ve been angry, but I wasn’t. I understood why she left. My mom was an artist. She needed to live somewhere like New York, not some podunk town like Millville, South Carolina. She needed to be around people who understood her talent, instead of people like my grandmother, who expected her to be some perfect little Southern belle. That was kind of how my grandmother wanted me to be. And I guess that’s why I was on my mom’s side. Even though I hadn’t seen her since I was twelve, I knew how she felt. I was pretty bad at being a perfect little Southern belle, myself.

  I wadded up the paper and put it back into my pocket. Forget it. I wasn’t calling one of my grandmother’s stick-in-the-mud friends. One more hour, I told myself. Then I’d check into a hotel. Do you need credit cards for hotels? I didn’t have one. Maybe I should call the police. No, just give her another hour. I’d been giving her one more hour all day. Maybe I should go look for her. Maybe something happened. She said she’d meet me in Penn Station. So keep waiting. She’ll be here. I know she will.

  “Marinee-beanee!” a voice shrieked across the station. I looked up, too relieved to be embarrassed. It was her.

  “Mom!”

  “Look at how big you are!” She grabbed me up in a hug. The stacks of bracelets on her wrists clacked, digging into my back. It was true—I was huge. The last time I’d seen her, I was just a little shorter than she was. Now I was taller by about half a foot.

  “I know. I’m a freak.”

  “No! It’s good to be tall! You could be a model! You look amazing—they told me you were sick, so I thought—”

  “I’m not sick,” I corrected her quickly. “I’m fine. It was just—”

  “Honey bear!” she interrupted, looking into my eyes. “Are you crying?”

  “I’m just happy to see you.” And I was. My mom looked the same as she always did. Thick, curly brown hair. Wide smile, serious blue eyes, heavy mascara. She was skinnier, and there were lines around her mouth now, but otherwise she looked exactly the same as she did when I was a kid.

  “Your train came early! We thought we’d get here before you and buy flowers.” For the first time, I noticed that my mom was part of a “we.” The guy behind her was younger, dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans. His T-shirt said CHAOS THEORY and his hair stood up in glossy black spikes.

  “My train came in at six.”

  “But it’s only five thirty!” She was grabbing my bags, the usual whirlwind.

  “Six a.m.”

  “You’ve been here all day?” The guy spoke. Mom was already walking ahead of us, lugging my duffel bag.

  “Hey, Travis, you’ve got extra tokens, right?” she yelled over her shoulder.

  “Yeah.” He dug into his pocket and handed me a coin with a hole in the middle. We pushed through a wave of people all walking in the opposite direction until we got to a row of turnstiles.

  “We’ll take the A to West Fourth, then get the F to Delancey,” my mother told me. I nodded as if I understood. “We’re down on Rivington.” I knew Rivington was the street my mother lived on, the address where I’d always sent her Christmas and birthday cards and copies of the latest stupid-looking, wallet-sized school picture.

  “Come on! It’s here!” I had just walked through the turnstile when my mom broke into a run. Travis caught up and took my duffel bag from her. I ran along behind, almost tripping on the graying, yellow-nubbed strip along the edge of the platform. We squeezed into the packed subway car like kids stuffing themselves into a phone booth in one of those old pictures. Everyone was dressed in fancy work clothes, suits and dresses, and gave us dirty l
ooks over their magazines and folded newspapers as we crowded in.

  “Grab a pole!” Mom warned. The train lurched forward, and I fell into a young guy in a three-piece suit carrying a leather shoulder bag and a portable CD player. He pushed me back upright without a word and adjusted his headphones. Finally, being tall was an advantage. I arched my arm over grim-faced heads to reach a long silver pole running along the top of the subway car. It felt oily, and I thought of what my grandmother had said.

  “Filthy place, New York.” She literally turned up her nose at lunch that day. “We will absolutely get you a pair of gloves. I wouldn’t touch anything in that city, unless I wanted to catch my death.”

  The train shuddered and sped up, the wheels squealing. I reached higher and tightened my grip.

  I’m always trying to recognize the streets, to see if I still remember. I watch the cop shows and movies they shoot in New York, and I wait for some street corner, some apartment building, to jog my memory. I was born here, but we moved when I was two. The only picture I have from that time is one of my dad holding me right after I was born. He’s sitting in the windowsill of their apartment, the rusty fire escape ladder behind him. In the distance, there are rooftops and water towers. There’s a tall building, fuzzy in the background, and I’ve asked my dad if it’s the Empire State Building, but he can’t remember. He says he just remembers that the apartment was downtown somewhere. I don’t see how you could forget looking out your window and seeing the Empire State Building. But he says he guesses he was too busy looking after me.

  I don’t have any pictures of my mom from back then, but one day, when I was around eight or nine, I was home sick from school and that movie Desperately Seeking Susan was on TV. I became obsessed with it, because Madonna dressed like my mom. Or maybe my mom dressed like Madonna. But I had this memory of my mom getting dressed up like that before we went out somewhere. Piling on bracelets, tying her hair back with a piece of lace. Wearing oversized Wayfarer sunglasses. Bright pink ones.

  I have some memories of New York, but I’m not sure if they’re things that actually happened, or if they’re places I’ve seen on TV. I remember waking up between two bodies, my mother and father, keeping me from rolling off the bed because I didn’t have a bed of my own. I remember going with my mother to a corner store that had stacks of glossy red apples outside. Those bright pink sunglasses staring down, floating above her wide smile. I remember falling down on concrete once and crying, and some strange woman stopping to pick me up. I remember my dad being upset, reaching out to take me back with his giant hands. Those same hands holding me, his voice singing me back to sleep, “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” I remember going over one of the bridges, standing up in the back seat of a car. The water a long way below, the city stretched out beyond, lit up in the dusk, looking like it went on forever. But they’re just little flashes. My dad says he doesn’t see how I could remember anything from back then. I wasn’t even two.

  It was right after my second birthday that we moved down to Millville. My dad had a friend who worked in a textile mill there, and he said he could get him a job as a security guard and we could live in a trailer he owned on a little piece of land by a stream. Dad said it would be warmer and cheaper, and my grandmother was only a few hours away in Atlanta and she could help take care of me. He and my grandmother had this thing about money—she wouldn’t give him any, and he wouldn’t ask for it. But she would buy anything I needed, because I guess she figured it wasn’t my fault that my parents were always broke. Anyway, the trailer lasted two years. My mom left when I was four. She came back for a while, when I was six, but she only stayed for a few weeks. I remember her telling Dad that she wasn’t cut out to be trailer trash. It was right after that that Dad bought the house near the mill where we still live, but it was too little, too late, Mom said. She filed for divorce and never came back to live with us again.

  My mother had barely stopped talking since we left Penn Station. Now she was telling me about Travis’s band, Chaos Theory, between mouthfuls of fries she stole from his plate. We were sitting in a booth at the Waverly Diner on Sixth Avenue. I was staring at a club sandwich I knew I couldn’t eat.

  “They were so freakin’ good, they were just so, like, augh!” She made her hands into claws. “But then Jimmy and Angel wanted to move to LA—”

  “And I was like, hell no.” Travis shook his head.

  “So they broke up. But Travis is putting a whole new group together, and the new bass player—what’s his name? It’s the name of a band, like Rush or something—”

  “Slade.” Travis laughed.

  “Slade! Oh my gosh, he’s so amazing!” She looked at her watch suddenly. “Ooh, honey, we’re gonna be late.” She pointed at my sandwich. “You want a to-go box for that, right?”

  “Um.” I looked down at my plate.

  “I’ll go get one.” She reached into her front pockets. “I’ll get some change, too.”

  “She’s totally psyched that you’re here,” Travis said, sipping his Coke.

  “Really?” I swallowed. “I know it all happened kind of fast.”

  “I think it’s cool.” He smiled. “It’s like a little family.”

  I didn’t know how much Mom and Travis knew. I didn’t know if they knew how bad it’d gotten. How I told Dad and Grandmother that I was going to New York and I didn’t care what they said. The doctor convinced them that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. But Mom could’ve called my bluff. She could’ve said she didn’t want me. But why wouldn’t she want me? She always said that she couldn’t afford to give me the education my grandmother wanted. That was her excuse last time I’d asked to come up and live with her in the city, back when I was thirteen and bored with Millville. This time, my grandmother said she would pay for the school herself. All my mother had to do was help me get back to normal. Whatever that was.

  Mom came back to the table, slapping down singles for a tip and shoving my sandwich into a Styrofoam container at the same time.

  “Okay, come on, hurry! We’re running way behind!”

  “What’re we late for?”

  “Travis and I have tickets for Lou Reed tonight. We have to take you to the apartment and then get back to the Knitting Factory.”

  “A knitting factory?”

  “It’s a club. Come on!”

  And we were moving again, slinging bags and food and shoving out through the crowd and down into the subway, toward home.

  “I wish we could’ve gotten another ticket, but it’s kind of like a secret show. Lee got an extra pair of tickets totally by chance. Oh my gosh, I can’t wait for you to meet Lee! You’re going to love him.”

  Mom finally had to stop talking to catch her breath. We were on the last of the five flights of stairs we had to walk up to get to the apartment. I didn’t know how she and Travis managed to walk up all those stairs every day, but I guess I was going to have to figure it out, too.

  “Okay, this is it.” Mom undid two locks and the dull brown metal door of 5A swung open. I walked in, ducking beneath a strand of Christmas tree lights that was falling down from its tacked-up place over the doorway. Travis reached up and tucked the lights back above the doorjamb, and Mom flipped them on. I looked around.

  “Come on, I’ll give you the tour,” Mom said. She pointed to a closed door. “Back there is where me and Travis sleep. The door next to that is the bathroom. This is the kitchen, obviously. And over there is your room.”

  “The living room?” I knew her place was small, but I thought there was more space than this. The living room was about half the size of my bedroom at home, and it was full of shelves, stacked high with books and records and videotapes. There was a TV and a couch, and a window with an air conditioner jammed into it, taped up in plastic bags for the winter.

  “Don’t look so worried.” Mom laughed. She walked over and kicked at the couch. “It’s a futon. It pulls out.”

  “Oh.” I laughed. “Right.�
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  “And, hey, Miss Popularity!” My mother shoved a fat manila envelope into my hands. It was decorated with foil stickers in the shape of stars. “This came for you in the mail today.”

  I looked at the return address. Athens, Georgia. Dory! I couldn’t believe it. Dory Mason was my best friend, even though she was older than me, already in college. Her parents were my grandmother’s neighbors. Dory started making me mixtapes a few years ago and sending them in the mail. I couldn’t believe she’d already gotten my mom’s address and sent me a new one. Especially since we’d been kind of drifting apart over the last year.

  “Okay, we’ve gotta run, but make yourself at home. There’s plenty to keep you occupied, you know, books, magazines—I’ve got the new Mojo on the table there. We don’t have cable but you can watch whatever movies you want. Just put it on channel three for the VCR. Ah, I almost forgot! We left some records for you. Come here!” She grabbed my hand and tugged me over to the low shelf with the stereo, where she’d set up a display of records in a crooked march along the rug. I knelt down beside her.

  “Here’s our Welcome Wagon,” she said, picking an album from the lineup. “Listen to this one first.” She grabbed my head, her palm flat against my forehead. “It’ll blow your mind.”

  I put Dory’s package down and took the record from her. The cover was a stark, black-and-white photograph of a defiant-looking girl with a black jacket slung over her shoulder.

  “Aahh! All right! Time! I know!” Mom kissed her hand and smacked it lightly against my cheek. “Don’t wait up.” She grabbed her keys and Travis and pulled him out the door, slamming it behind her. As soon as it was shut, it opened again. “What am I thinking? Keep this locked, okay? And don’t open it for anybody but us. Not anybody! Okay, seriously this time, we’re gone. Have fun!”

  And she was gone. I looked around and exhaled.