ADOLESCENCE

I am unpaid labour on a farm before Children’s Aid moves me to an assessment-receiving home, which they call a more appropriate placement. The staff can only smoke in their office, so that’s where they stay unless they hear screaming or something break.

I take a long time in the bathroom with my OCD, and group home staff lack imagination. Only two explanations occur to them: self harm and drugs, so they drag me out naked in front of the kids. I stop showering, which serves to ostracize me.

I get lost trying to find my new school, never having used public transit, and wind up on the outskirts of Toronto. By the time I make it home it’s after curfew, so I’m locked outside. The doorstep is cold, so I go and sleep over the ventilation duct of a Chinese restaurant. When the cops bring me back I get the dead girl in a dumpster speech because the staff claim I ran away.

It’s after dinner but before bed, and to fill the hours my roommate and I are cutting ourselves with pieces of broken glass. She has a sadder story than me, but it keeps changing, so I dismiss it and make up my own. She cuts her boyfriend’s initials into her forearm to prove loyalty, but I just do it because when it hurts nothing else does.

Maybe the staff notice we aren’t watching TV. Maybe they have an instinct when it comes to liability that doesn’t kick in when I’m choke-fucked in the basement by a peer, but they barge in yelling of the inconvenience, then call 911. We’re taken in separate ambulances to the same psych ward, where again staff sit behind glass while overtures are made by adult patients. Help is offered in the form of heavy sedatives, and we sleep through our pointless care.

They split us up when we get back, and each of our new roommates is annoying. Mine describes her sexual adventures with caregivers as though she were esteemed by them, and chosen for these experiences because of her trustworthiness and rare maturity. I am not required to reply, but neither am I able to sleep, and I know more about sex abuse in one day than I think shrinks accumulate over their professional lifetimes. When I’m finally sent away to what is referred to as an even more appropriate placement I’m relieved.

On my first day at Hincks we are trucked to a neighbour farm to drag dead trees out of the mud on the banks of a stagnant pond. On my second we pick rocks out of a field by hand. We are given no money, and our labours are referred to as treatment. Some of the staff are nice, but the cabins are cold in the winter and the kids talk of nothing but mushrooms and going AWOL. They bore me, but we go on a canoe trip in the summer, which is the first time in eight months I haven’t laboured ten hours a day. I belly flop off a cliff and lose my bikini top, which makes me famous.

Raphael is persistently manic, and to someone who hasn’t figured out yet that fucked does not imply fascinating, this dazzles me. But beyond acid trips and opportunities for travel which his economic privilege has supplied, he has no compelling stories. Without a sense yet of what substance should feel like, I am overjoyed when he offers to take me to the city, but the night before we plan to run away he leaves without me. Betrayed, abandoned, obstinate, I go anyway.

I assume if a farmer in a truck gives you a ride you give him a hand job, but this guy takes me right to the bus depot for free, and even gives me twenty bucks. I am stunned, thank him mumbling as I board the Greyhound unsure if everything I’ve been told by my cabin mates is true. This bodes poorly for my urban survival, as I have based my strategy on their accounts.

In the city I sneak into the CNE behind a family, and call my old teacher from a pay phone. I stay with him and his son for a few days before his girlfriend decides I should go to a shelter. I know she means well, and wants to protect him from something that might seem questionable. It remains important to me that he did come get me: no one else has even sent a card.

On a gym mat among gym mats on the shelter floor I sleep on top of my belongings, wear my boots so they won’t disappear in the night. Like the rest of them I have shed all but my most meaningful cargo, and juvenile pimps check in who know this. A picture is worth nothing, but you’ll barter for it back or give them pee to pass a drug test.

I have to line up every evening for a bed, and some nights I’m not lucky. After a stretch of these and nothing to eat I go foraging. There is a narrow window: after the restaurants close and before the city trucks come, but I miss it, and the dumpster has been sprayed for rats. I don’t remember what I eat, just the lurch of its regurgitation, tasting blood as I vomit down a sewer drain.

I stumble upright, eventually. I eventually walk, and sleep somewhere. I feel daylight as pain, an unfathomable thirst, but am too weak to go find water. Maybe it’s sensual benevolence, maybe it’s opportunist predation which intercedes with a fondle and a crisp bill, but either way I drink, eat, survive.

Back in the shelter after what seems an epochal era they commune at the coffee station, stirring in their heaping spoons of whitener. Some minimize, some glorify similar experiences, but it’s the quiet ones I sit beside.

I meet two kids and they are both called George. One is a boy and one is a girl. Girl George goes missing, but no one is looking for her, so she’s called a runaway. Her undiscovered remains will feature in recurring nightmares. Boy George likes heroin, and his father used to make him fuck his sister while he watched. He teaches me to pluck my eyebrows, shave my legs, and walk in heels.

I often have to sleep in the park. I am mistaken for male once and pissed on by froshmen, who kick me in the guts, cunt, and skull, chanting “AIDS fag!” It would be worse if my gender were obvious, but luckily I’m underfed and androgynous. At the hospital they assume my stumbling is drunkenness, and are callous accordingly. I am discharged back to the street with a concussion.

I get a bed at the shelter the next night, but they call me to the office, a bad sign. They know I’m not fourteen, and bar me from leaving until my worker shows up. She takes me to another assessment-receiving home, where a boy who lures girls with drugs, and trades girls for drugs on construction sites is told he’ll be going home: I refuse to eat the cake. No one has come forward for me, so I break a chair against the wall and beat him with a splintered leg.

I am sent to a secure facility for psychiatric treatment, and stay there almost three years. It’s the best time of my life. No one can hurt me: a rush of orderlies will descend if they try. I am among the outcast with no need to explain how or why. On my first day I play badminton with a rapist, on my second basketball with an arsonist, and on my third me and Bonnie, who has fetal alcohol syndrome, sit on either side of Michael and take turns kissing his cheeks. He has drug-induced psychosis, and mumbles Sartre tirelessly until we get bored and go watch TV.

Mike is an important friend. He has been to France, and wears black trench coats from Kensington Market, such a contrast to my mother’s numbered prints. His father produces art house films, while mine quoted mystics and beat his kids. On my birthday, which I keep a secret, Mike gives me my first kiss.

Mike is actually informed and consistent in his outlook. I venerate him even through his psychotic breaks, when he accuses me of programming his thoughts and attacks me. We are given passes away from the facility, and entrusted to each others’ care, so when he jumps over the railing at the mall I fail. After discharge, in the chaos of life outside bars where we lose contact, he finally kills himself, and I know I’ve failed him permanently. I will not stop finding men to rescue in his place. I will not stop failing to rescue them.

My formative connections are dead, missing, incarcerated, addicted. The fate of those processed through the system is a statistic no one seems impelled to keep. Unadoptable, unavoidably destined for criminality in the vocal opinions of our resentful caregivers, our lives are forfeit before they begin. To the social workers I must appease for allowances, mine is a comparative success story, even though I rarely have enough to eat. I’m told I must prevail on behalf of my peers, and this indictment plays on a relentless loop. This isn’t success but stubbornness, an unwillingness to succumb because it’s expected.

I witness, up way too close, the ease with which substance abuse can claim personalities. It screams in its sleep beside me, cuts itself in front of me, and pulls it’s hair out by the roots without words for the suspicion that we aren’t expected to thrive. Life is relentlessly brutal, and my peers aren’t in a position to dismiss any available succour. Who knows how long it or anything will last. The very nature of our existence is impermanence and displacement.

After juvie, which it was, except for crazy kids, I am put in a group home for sex abuse survivors, and learn the finer points of self harm. It is basically eating disorder immersion, and the staff there, aggressively feminist, try in vain to correct our body image, which was never the point. The Heritage Front targets the agency because of its inclusive hiring, and leaves a fire bomb on the back porch. The group home is closed, the residents are scattered, and most of us remain that way. It has been a place where I connected with decency not defined by suburban norms or grandiose ideals, and I doubt I can recreate it elsewhere with my inadequate toolkit.

There aren’t enough places to put everyone, so those of us with Children’s Aid are given an independent living allowance and shuffled away into disreputable rooming houses. Someone slides pornography under my door nightly, starts trying the handle after about a week. I go to an adolescent resource centre to see if they can help. A housing worker, whose job it is to find me shelter space, invariably tells me there are no beds, but knows I’d fare poorly on the streets, so offers me his sofa. Unsurprisingly, he takes liberties. I just let them happen. I am used to reality changing abruptly. It just seems like another thing I have to get used to. Every time the shelters are full I go back, it being a choice of how many and who by, which I learn under a footbridge near High Park, where I am attacked by residents of a nearby homeless encampment. Later, when I find a place, he will do what he calls check-ins, which means he gives me ten bucks and a sandwich for a blow job. He never wants anything except what I’m uncomfortable with, but I dissociate adeptly, so eventually he tries to rape my ass.

I meet Adam as a psychiatric inpatient, and it’s my job to prove he isn’t gay. When while on top of me he can’t keep an erection he’ll order me to act enthusiastically. I make him feel like a rapist, he says. He beats me when I can’t perform to his satisfaction. One night he leaves me in a room full of his friends to ostensibly go get beer, despite having no apparent money. He is gone a long time, during which two friends approach me, and slide their hands between my legs. They are confused when I protest. They have been told they can have their way with me, that I am in on it. They demand I oblige, as Adam has been paid, and by the time Adam returns every one of them has forcefully relieved himself.

I have almost nothing to eat. I steal and suck on ketchup packets, or mix them in a paper cup with water and call it tomato soup. I’m not sure what I weigh, but a child’s size ten pants fit me. I wind up with pneumonia and a quinsy infection, and have to be hospitalized. They want to take my tonsils out, but can’t schedule surgery without a number or address to contact me at. They have to wait for the infection to subside, but my immune system is such that it will not. Somehow I track down my brother. He agrees to take me in and in the same breath asks how much CAS will give him to look after me. To my worker this is reintegration with family, so she closes my file, meaning I lose the money and my brother’s charity evaporates.

Eventually I find a place in a pink rooming house on Beverley, with the help of the aforementioned worker. Tibor is my neighbour, and finds condoms desensitizing. I am good enough to fuck but not to spawn his seed, as he, in his words, is art royalty from the Netherlands. He claims he can legally make me get rid of the baby. I go to a clinic and am informed otherwise. In response to this Tibor beats me unconscious. I leave, and let him believe I lost the child, which may not even be his, as I am still fucking the housing worker for sandwiches and toiletries.