"Crystal and Powder – Xania"

Nobody knows that I am a great connoisseur of movies. Give me some random quote and I can tell you within five seconds what movie that quote is from. Maybe it's a side effect of being with my foster mom for half my life, being subjected to all sorts of twentieth-century shit that for some reason she insists must live on. Whatever. Even without that influence one of my all-time favorite quotes was from an old Disney movie that I'd watch over and over again as a kid, incidentally from that century.

"Like my friend here Timon says, you gotta put your behind in your past."

Put your ass in the past, huh? So what's that, was Pumbaa telling me to moon my past? Fart on it? Take a giant steaming dump on it? Hell, I could do that without being told to. That's all my life with my original family was anyway, shit. Then again, the past has a way of coming up to bite you in the ass, and hell, if you're putting your behind in it, wasn't that just like begging for it to come bite you in the ass? I knew what it was like, literally. As the great scholar Forrest Gump once said, "Something jumped up and bit me. Bit me right in the buttocks." Except the bullet that bit me practically snapped my tail right off too, but that's neither here nor there. Safe to say, though, that it was a pain I did not want recreated in any way, shape, or form ever again. No fucking way.

Putting my behind in the past…sit on it, maybe? Or inviting yourself to get ass-raped by it? I'm sure that wasn't what Pumbaa meant; I mean, he had the mentality of a pre-teen. Food, sleep, and fun, that's what his life was all about. Sounds like a good life to me, even if our definitions of fun were completely different. His probably consisted of splashing around in a wading pool or hunting for bugs. Mine consisted of something a bit more, ahem, adult. But to each his own, right? Hell, before she came into town Rosho's form of fun was hunting down Boomers. NOT my idea of fun, for sure. But damn, was that cool, seeing her and her friends in their armor…

I wished I could take that warthog's advice and put my behind in the past. But it seemed like whenever I tried to, it was like sitting on a barbecue, except instead of scorch marks on my ass, they were left on my soul, in my head. Sure, the wounds would heal, but the scars would always be there, and with every glance at those scars I'd get reminded of the events that caused them. For a long time I just wanted to cut those scars out, forget everything completely, not even realizing that cutting them out would just leave new scars behind. Not fucking fair at all.

Once I left for college in the fall of '56, heading to the greatness that was the University of California at Berkeley, I found all those wounds reopened. Wasn't a surprise though; after all, my goal was to be a social worker, something of a champion to kids who were caught in the same situation I'd been caught in. You could almost say, in a way, I had ten-millionth-degree burns on my ass for the first few months of my freshman year. Rosho had been amazingly astute in detecting my escape methods, those being boys and sex, when I hadn't even realized it until she'd said something. At the time I'd joked with her that maybe my standards for guys were going up, since I hadn't gone out and gotten laid since I screwed with that guy at the secret gun place she got her Spitdevil from. Maybe it wasn't that at all. Maybe a part of me really was ready to confront my past. After all, she did give me the opportunity to bypass Needles when we were on our spring break road trip our senior year of high school…

Oh, hell. Was I really growing up? Me, the nympho? The fact I did NOT seek guys out to screw when I was trying to deal with what being a social worker would entail? The hell did that all mean?

And yet, here I was, in the summer before my sophomore year of college, about to sustain the deepest burns to my ass that I'd ever have, yet well aware of – and hating – the fact that they would be necessary burns. Here I was, preparing myself to visit the prison where the people who had ruined me as a kid were incarcerated for their crimes.

The prison that held the people I was fucking loath to call my parents.

They say drugs make you crazy. Well, I was sober as a nun and I knew I was fucking insane to pull this shit. Surely any sane person would just leave them to rot. But no, something called curiosity nagged at my brain. Why? Why? The why stabbed at the back of my mind. I figured what the hell, may as well bite the bullet. My ass had already bitten one once, anyway.

Fuck. I really was insane. And the scary thing was, I didn't really care.

Middle of the night. Couldn't sleep. I hated that. It always seemed like in the evening you'd be dead tired and wanna head to bed ASAP, but the moment you lay down, you're wide awake. Go fig. I'd fallen asleep and woken up several times, and I was trying my damndest not to look at the clock, knowing that would only stress me out more and make me even more unable to fall back asleep. I envied the guy next to me in bed, snoring away without a care in the world. Of course, considering what we'd been doing earlier in the evening, little wonder he was out like a light. I'd normally be out too, but hell. I was in a strange city, and about to take the biggest leap I'd ever taken in my life.

I got up and slipped on a robe, sitting down at the desk, where a stack of folders sat. The case files from my youth, when my parents had gotten arrested and subsequently headed to trial, certain that they'd somehow beat the charges against them. The fuck were they thinking? I flipped through one of the folders, which had evidence photos gathered from the day of the arrest, as well as pictures of me. I grimaced as I came upon one picture, a close-up of a bald spot on my head. I remembered that. I was nine years old, getting my hair pulled yet again. I was always getting it pulled as punishment when I'd toss out the shit they were cooking up in the kitchen, but that time had been different. The memory flashed in front of my eyes, as if it were happening at that moment…

"The hell is goin' on with you?!" Mom demanded, her alcohol breath making me gag in my mouth as she got in my face. "The school called me, y'know?! They were saying you've been getting into all sorts of trouble, taking kids' food from their lunchboxes. Picking fights! Why the hell are you doin' that, huh? We feed you, and take care of you!"

I didn't say a word. She was probably so out of it she couldn't tell time, so out of it that she didn't know it had been weeks, months since she'd made a half-decent meal for me. Of course I'd had to steal from others' lunches. I was starving. She took better care of her fucking drugs than she did of me. Her meth was her baby now, not me.

"Answer me, you little harlot!!" she screamed, grabbing a handful of my hair. I screamed as she gave a hard yank, pain shooting through my head and scalp, my neck muscles straining. "I give you everything you need, right here! Me and your daddy!"

"Stop it!!" I pleaded. "It hurts!!"

"So ANSWER me!!" Another yank, along with the unmistakable sound of ripping as hair fibers began to break.

"It hurts, Mom!! Oww!!"

Another tug, and more ripping. It was enough. I just wanted her to stop. I kicked her in the stomach, forcing her to let go of my hair. I could see her drop a handful of black hair as she stumbled back, putting a hand to her stomach, unable to give chase as I ran upstairs to the bathroom, my scalp screaming in pain from where the hair had been ripped out. I couldn't let her do this anymore. No more hair pulling, no more of this. I grabbed a large pair of scissors from the cabinet, held them up to my scalp, and just started cutting anything and everything. Black hair piled at my feet as I cut away, and when I was finished, I was almost completely bald, only short wisps of hair adorning my head.

Mom finally caught up to me, and screamed when she saw what I had done. Somehow, I had the feeling that she would've grabbed my hair for cutting my hair off, but the sweet irony of the situation prevented that.

I opened my eyes and gazed down at the photo again. It had been taken six months after that incident, and the day after my parents' arrest. There were two-inch-long pieces of hair surrounding the bald spot, which was only starting to show signs of hair growing again. It took another year for that spot to fill in, but even now, I was trembling with the memory, scratching at the spot on my head she had ripped the hair from, as if her ghost was standing behind me poised to do it all over again.

Along with that picture, there were others. Pictures of the house, of the kitchen/lab, of the faint bruises left on my arms from when she or Dad would grab me just a little too hard. And of course, their mug shots. The first one was of my mom, measuring 5'7" according to the height chart she was standing in front of, stringy black hair hanging down to her tits. Drugged-out brown eyes stared back at me, surrounded by deep black circles and crow's feet, her closed mouth hiding the damage done to her teeth. Scars on her cheeks and forehead left from picking at them in the midst of her drug-fueled paranoia. The sign she held up said RANDALL, TANJA, and below that, the date, 9/17/47.

The picture of my dad was no better. The chart behind him measured him at 6'1", but when you're as little as I was, he seemed more like a hundred feet tall. His formerly black hair was streaked in grey, especially at his temples, and like my mom, he had deep circles around his eyes and a major case of crow's feet, glaring at the camera as if it was responsible for everything. I had feared those hazel eyes of his, almost more than I feared my mom. Sure, he had never pulled my hair, but he knew how to hit me so hard I couldn't sit down comfortably for a week. Kids at school would just think I was nervous. The teachers thought I had ADD. No, what I really had was a case of bruising on my ass and thighs, but I thought I could handle it. I thought if I just loved them enough, put up with it, then they would stop, that they would stop hitting me and cooking their 'grown-up candy'. Thought if I just loved them enough, that I would be worthy of love too…

I shut that folder and shoved it aside, almost shoving it off the edge of the desk. I was sweating, and if I hadn't been awake enough before, I sure was now. I turned back to the guy in bed. Yep, still asleep. Not wanting to wake him up, I picked up the receiver on the vidphone and started dialing a long-distance number. The girl I was calling would be awake for sure. It would only be late evening where she was, assuming she wasn't 'out'…

A few rings later and I heard the receiver on her end click, followed by a brunette-haired girl appearing on the screen, said hair tied back in a tight braid. Weird to see her like that, but she'd been growing her hair out, for whatever reason.

"Moshi moshi?" she said before her eyes lit up, recognizing me. "Xania!! Isn't it the middle of the night there?!" she exclaimed, having switched to English. "How are you?"

I yawned. Damn, NOW I was feeling tired all of a sudden. Of course. "I'm doin' ok," I said. "And yeah, it's late, or early, depending on how ya look at it. But that's alright, I couldn't sleep anyway. How're things over there?"

"Oh, I'm still slaving away at Linna's gym," Rosho joked. "Gotta pay the rent somehow. And I took in this girl last night also. Her name's Emi, and I just found her in an alley near here. Some guys had just dumped her off, and I felt sorry for her, so I'm letting her stay here for a while until I can find something out about her."

Okay. That came out of left field. I frowned to myself and held my chin in thought. "Uh, what about her parents?" It was the first thing that came to mind besides "What the fuck are you doing?! She's not some stray cat!"

"That's the thing. She has no memory of anything. Farthest back she can remember is waking up in the truck she was dumped from."

"Amnesic, huh? That's just super," I groaned. Had to hand it to her; she always was finding some interesting shit to do, or in this case, finding interesting people. Felt like I was friends with a soap opera character sometimes. "I don't know the laws there, Rosho, but I'm pretty sure what you're doin' is kidnapping."

She scratched her head. "I call it being a good Samaritan," she said with a shy smile. "I couldn't just leave her. She'd have been killed before too long. And don't talk to me about hospitals. I already went over that with Nene."

Took the words out of my mouth. "Hey, I agree with ya," I said, nodding, "but I'm learnin' all sorts of stuff bein' in college for this social worker shit, and this is what the law says. I've gotta know this stuff cold by the time I graduate."

"That's not for three more years."

"Yeah, but I've gotta start memorizin' it now." I let out a breath. "Did I tell ya what I'm doin' right now?"

She blinked, her curiosity suddenly piqued. "No. What are you doing?"

"I'm trackin' down my parents. I'm in San Jose right now readin' up on their files before I head to the prison to pay a little visit."

I swore that Rosho almost dropped the receiver. Couldn't blame her. I HAD given her shit many a time for bringing them up, so to her I was sure this was a bit out-of-character for me to do. "Seriously?" she stuttered. "You're…you're really gonna go see them?"

"Yup," I said with a nod, my face hardening. "I just want to ask them somethin' before I toss them out of my life for good. The 'why.' That's been buggin' me for the last…shit…last ten years now. I know I probably won't get the answer I want, but I want to at least hear their side of things."

"But you never wanted to hear it before," she pointed out. "Why now?"

"Honestly, I don't know." I sighed. "I don't—"

A scream from Rosho's end interrupted us. She made a comical face – well, it was funny to me anyway -- and screamed, "EMI!! Ittai nani o shita?!" as she ran off-screen. Thanks to having taken a first-year Japanese course at Berkeley I understood perfectly what she said. Roughly "What the hell did you do?!" I just sat and chuckled, waiting while she took care of whatever her new girlfriend had done.

A few moments later, she sat back down, looking somewhat frazzled, mumbling an apology. "What was that?" I chuckled. "What DID she do?"

"Oh, you understood that?"

"W'll, duh. I did take a first-year Japanese course. If I didn't understand what 'Ittai nani o shita?!' meant, the teacher would shoot me!" I said, letting out a laugh.

"Nice to know I had some sort of good influence on you," she said, chuckling along with me. "Did you memorize the kana alright?"

"Yup. The kanji are hard too, but I guess I just gotta practice. The teacher said I'm one of the best students in the class, and that she's looking forward to seeing me in the second-year class next month."

She smiled. "Well, that's great, Xania. You should be proud."

"How would you say that in Japanese? The lookin' forward to next month thing? I know the tanoshimi ni shiteiru part, but what about the rest?" That in Japanese meant 'to look forward to,' but since tanoshimu by itself meant 'to enjoy' or 'to have fun,' I had originally thought it'd meant something like that. Dunno what I was thinking when I decided to try to pick Japanese up, but then again, English is probably backwards for anybody not familiar with it.

She grinned. "Let's see…it'd go something like raigatsu ni wa ni-nen no jugyoo ni Xania-san o miru no wa tanoshimi ni shiteimasu. But if she said 'August' instead of 'next month,' you'd replace the raigatsu with hachigatsu."

"Gotcha." I let out another yawn; damn things were sneaking up on me. "Damn, I need to get back to bed."

"Yes, you should. I know how you like your sleep," she teased. "Let me know how things go with your parents, ok?"

I grunted and nodded. Yeah, I was reeeally looking forward to that. "I will. I'll call ya in a couple days, ok?"

"Ok. See ya later."

"See ya. Bye."

I hung up the phone and sighed, leaning back in my chair. Now my body felt awake and tired at the same time. God damn it. Why couldn't it make up its mind? Now my thoughts were going to the situation with her Emi friend. But hell, I couldn't do anything from here; I knew shit about Japanese laws. I was sure she'd figure it out somehow. That's what her friends were for, and besides, I had my own situation to think about.

Damn, I was all discombobulated now.

"What're you doing up?" a voice mumbled from the bed, the owner of that voice sitting up. "Come back to bed, Xania."

I grinned shyly and slipped off my robe, sliding into bed beside him. "Couldn't sleep," I said lamely, kissing him.

"Try not to worry about it, alright? I'm sure the visit tomorrow will work out just fine. They won't be able to hurt you. You know that."

"Yeah, yeah," I said, trying to find comfort in his warm body, now pressing against mine as he held me close. Wish I had his optimism. "Wish I knew that, but wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster."

"Things worked out with us, didn't they? I told you I would take care of you."

"I know, Greg. You did say that, but…"

"But? I'm here."

"Yeah, on leave."

"So? Only a few more months in Pakistan then I'll be home for good. Give me that chance. I can show you the world isn't out to get you. Okay?"

"Okay. But you know what'll happen if you fuck up."

"Oh, I know," he laughed, kissing me again. "I know. Here. Let me make you feel better."

I moaned into his mouth as his lips closed over mine, feeling our bodies joining together. For now, at least, I could let myself feel good, let him comfort me. I needed all the help I could get, to prepare for what was to come tomorrow. I hated not knowing what was gonna happen, but for right now, I was lost in Greg's embrace, and for right now, that was all I needed to happen.

The funny thing about Greg and me being apart for so long, first breaking up, then having him join the Army and get deployed to the Middle East, was that he had no idea how much I'd changed in all that time, so naturally it seemed like the only way he knew to get me to be happy was to try to satisfy my sexual desires. I'd been with him longer than any of my previous partners, so he was more in tune to what I liked. As a result, we were in bed all morning, but eventually my stomach reminded me that it, too, had to be satisfied, so finally around noon we both got dressed and headed out to a fast-food place to grab something, even if by now it was more like lunch than breakfast.

"I know what you're tryin' to do," I said, biting down into my burger. "But it's not gonna work."

"Isn't it better to make love than make war?" he said. "I mean, I would know."

"I know you know." I swished my tail behind me in frustration. "Don't ya think people woulda done that if it were just that easy? I guess it takes less energy to hate than to love."

Greg nodded. "Yeah. But that's exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing, why I couldn't stop this morning. You need to focus more on the good things than the bad things. I don't know why you want to see your parents so bad. It's just not like you. You've always been a live-in-the-moment kind of girl. That's what caught my eye, your spunky, go-get-'em attitude."

"I never said I wanted to see 'em," I mumbled, taking a large slurp from my soda.

"So why?"

"It's complicated."

"There's no such thing as closure, you know. If that's what you're looking for, forget it."

"I'm not stupid, Greg. I know that. I guess I just wanna show 'em I'm not that ten-year-old they smacked around before they got arrested. I dunno."

"Is it that you want to forgive them?"

I grumbled. "Hell no. Fuck if I'll forgive 'em for all that shit they put me through."

He put his hands up calmly and stated, "I'm just saying is all. Like you just said, it takes less energy to hate, and that's probably why there have been all those wars throughout history. It's easier to fire a weapon than to just try to talk things out, but with some people there is no talking, only fighting. They think their opinion on certain matters is fact, and damn the rest. With your parents I'm sure you'd rather feed them to a rabid pack of pitbulls than say you love them and forgive them. And I'm not saying you should forgive them. Whether you do that is up to you."

"All that forgiveness bullshit, you're sounding like my mom." In this instance, of course, I was referring to my uber-religious foster mom.

"I know, I know. And I'm not meaning to. I'm just asking, why? You haven't seen them in ten years, haven't so much as written them a letter or talked to them on the phone. You yourself have said that they're dead to you. So why now? Why bring all this up?"

"Why are you askin' so many fuckin' questions?" I spat, sucking on the straw until my soda was gone. "I told you, it's complicated!"

"I think you want to believe there's such thing as closure, even if you know there isn't. That's nothing to be ashamed of. But let me tell you something, Xania. I know what's gone on. You spent the first ten years of your life in that hellhole, and you've spent the last ten of it trying to distance yourself from it, pretend it never happened. But finally you're making it work for you. You're using it to help out other kids. You, the one who'd've rather just ignored it all. That's something you should be commended for."

"I'm not lookin' for a medal out of all this, Greg."

"I know." He stopped, chewing mindlessly on his fries.

"I didn't say stop. Keep talkin'."

He smirked and swallowed. "Okay. Well, anyway, this must have something to do with that. Right? It's safe to say you'd know what you're dealing with, since you came from such a horrible background, but this isn't about showing off to your parents, is it? And I don't think you're only now wanting to see them because you're no longer a minor. If that was the case you'd have gone to see them two years ago. I think what's going on now is that now that you've grown up, you know what you've lost. What could have been. And you're only now starting to mourn. They're not dead to you, not yet, because you never got to say goodbye."

I shook my head, suddenly finding my fries very attractive at the moment.

"Look up at me, Xania. It's ok. Nobody needs to take a psychology class to figure you out. It's pretty simple if you get down to the bottom of it."

He reached down to put his hand on mine, and I pulled away. The hell was he thinking? It wasn't as simple as he was making it out to be. Even I couldn't come up with the reasons why I had to go visit them.

"Xania. Look at me."

I reluctantly looked up.

"You don't have to be ashamed, not around me. And you don't have to do this alone. That's why you called me when I got back on leave, right?"

"So?" I mumbled.

"So it's okay to have someone there with you. Really, it is. Rocío was there with you when you revisited your old house in Needles, and I can be there with you when you go to that prison and see your parents. I know you wouldn't have called me if you didn't want me to be here."

I shook my head, suddenly feeling the need to wipe at my eyes. "Dammit, Greg. Stop. You have no idea how sappy you're sounding right now."

"I know exactly how sappy I'm sounding, and I don't care. This is what a guy does for the girl he loves."

"The hell does that mean anyway? Love? Ha."

He leaned over the table and planted a light kiss on me. "You know what it is. Don't be so cynical. I know you can't say it right now, but that IS how I feel about you." He stood up. "C'mon. Let's go see a movie. It's not like you having such a drawn look on your face."

I smirked and stood up as well, tossing my burger wrapper and empty soda container in the trash. "Who says I'm drawn? It's just weird seein' ya talk about all this love shit."

"It's how I feel and you can't change that," he said bluntly with a smile on his face. I had to admit, seeing Greg smile made it hard for me not to smile as well.

"Don't you dare finish that with 'You complete me,' or you die."

He let out a whoop of laughter. "Oh, no! I know better than that!!"

"Good! Now let's go see that movie! You said you were takin' me to one, so I'm holdin' you up to that!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

The movie we ended up going to did distract me for a little while. So did the bullshitting around the mall we did after that, but once dinner came around my mind found its way back to what I was gonna be doing tomorrow. Tomorrow. It still scared the hell out of me. What was I supposed to expect? I knew they weren't going to look the same as I remembered them; ten years in prison in addition to all the drugs they did were bound to age a person. Hell, my mother had been a beautiful person at one point. Part of me wanted to think that if she hadn't gotten started on all that, that we would look more like sisters now than mother and daughter, or if my imagination was right, grandmother and daughter. And my father...I didn't care. If I went to the prison and found out he, or both of them for that matter, had killed themselves overnight rather than face me, I probably wouldn't have cared. But that would also have made all this effort, all the bravery I'd mustered to even try to do this, for nothing. If they knew what was good for them, they better NOT kill themselves. Not before I had my say, at least.

I did have some consolation. I'd promised myself if I did this, I'd never have to do it again, that once would be plenty. One time was enough to tell them to go to hell, if they weren't well-acquainted with Lucifer already.

Greg tried to sex me up again once we got back to the hotel, but I turned him down, much to his surprise. He knew why, though, and seemed to understand. He sat and flipped through the channels on the TV while I sat at the desk and looked through my parents' files again, going past all the horrible pictures of them and me and the state the house was in when they'd gotten arrested, and going for the list of charges each of them faced. I took out the piece of paper and looked it over. I'd already done so about a million times, but for some reason I kept coming back to it, mostly out of disbelief of how few charges they each had faced.

Each of them had been charged with the exact same things. One charge of possession of the chemicals needed to make meth, for which someone could face two, four, or six years in the slammer. One count of possession with intent to sell or transport meth: sixteen months, two years, or three years. One count of sale or transportation of meth: two to four years. One count of child endangerment: two, four, or six years. One count of child abuse: again, two, four, or six years. And the last, one count of resisting arrest, which unlike the others was only a misdemeanor, and was punishable by up to one year in jail and/or a $1,000 fine. Even with only one count of each of all those, if convicted of all of them they each had faced a maximum of twenty-eight years in prison. And somehow, they each had only been sentenced to twelve, less than half of what they could have gotten, less than half of what they rightly deserved.

One count of each charge of child endangerment or child abuse. What a crock that was. After everything I had told the cops about getting my hair pulled on, about being the taste tester at least three or four times for their concoctions. Hell, they had the pictures of the bald spot, of the bruises on my arms. They were the ones who had to scoop me out of bed when they were arresting my parents because the chemicals and fumes had leeched into the walls and made me ill. They'd had to decontaminate me in the street, told me I couldn't take anything from the house with me, because it was all ruined. What the hell made them decide only one count of each was adequate?! And there was one other thing that got me: how lenient the punishment was for child abuse. It wasn't that much more severe than for any of the drug charges, only a year or two more. Guess that showed how much the justice system cared about abused children. It pissed me off.

I let myself smirk. Maybe I should've been studying to be an attorney instead. I could lobby to get the laws changed, or at least make them a hell of a lot stricter than they currently were. I couldn't have been the only one outraged at the level of 'punishment' for child abusers. I just shook my head; sure, I could do that, but first things first. I had to see how things were at ground zero, on the front lines. Maybe I could spend ten years doing the social worker thing, study on the side, take the bar exam at the end of all that, then because of my experience on the field, be a hundred times more persuasive in tweaking the laws.

I'm sure it wasn't as easy as it seemed in my mind, but it sure made me feel good. I could do that. Yeah. Thanks to Rosho's aunt Sylia it wasn't like I didn't have the resources to go ahead and go to law school too. But no, one thing at a time. I had to at least finish college for the social worker stuff first, then I could go ape-shit on the law stuff.

Heh. So this was what it was like to look forward to the future, to feel like you can really make the world better. Sure, it'd still be a shithole for the most part, but this corner of the world, at least, I could try to make a little better, a little more tolerable. I had to at least try.

"What're you smiling about?" Greg observed, laying on the bed with his arms folded behind his head as he turned his attention from the TV.

"I just got an idea for an alternate career move."

"What's that?"

"Xania Peters: attorney at law."

He groaned loudly. "You sure you're not high?"

"Didn't touch 'em today. Why? It's not THAT out there."

"You're not gonna turn into another Jack McCoy-type person, are ya?"

"Would you prefer Lennie Briscoe?"

"No, I'd prefer Olivia Benson. Or just you as you are."

"Hey, you went and joined the Army even though I didn't want you to. Who the hell are you to tell me what I can and can't be? It's my life."

"The job's known for burning people out, that's all."

"Don't worry about me doin' that. I've got too much for work for to do that."

Greg gazed at me in thought. "No."

"No?" I repeated, confused.

He smiled. "No, I'd say you're more like Elliott Stabler…"

I laughed. "Oh, fuck you."

Today was the day. For the first time in ten years, I was going to be face to face with my parents. I was so nervous that I felt like I was gonna puke before I'd even eaten anything, but Greg said the best thing to calm my stomach down was, indeed, something to eat, so he took me out for a light breakfast of eggs and hash browns, and I'll admit it did make me feel a little better. My hands kept clenching into fists the entire morning, though, as if getting ready for a fight. Couldn't be helped.

I had been warned beforehand about the rules I would have to abide by when visiting. No shorts more than two inches above the knee. No cleavage. No notes, no money, no denim besides jeans, no underwire bras, no shades, and no wearing of jewelry with the exception of wedding rings. So instead of my usual shorts, which weren't Daisy Dukes by any means but were still too short anyway, I settled for a pair of dark denim jeans, and topped that with a V-neck shirt that was flattering but didn't expose any cleavage. I could change my clothes easily enough, but having to do without my shades was gonna feel weird. I always wore my shades.

I sighed to myself as Greg and I made the drive down to Morgan Hill, which was a forty-five minute drive south of San Jose, feeling the knot in the pit of my stomach doing its best to take root. I hated not knowing what to expect. Were they going to be happy to see me? Angry? Surprised? It was a stupid question to be sure; I'd had to submit a form known as CDCR Visitor Questionnaire Form 106, which my parents had to send me themselves, so obviously they knew I was at least thinking about visiting, plus I'd had to submit my fingerprints and subject myself to a background check, which I wasn't worried about. Any trouble I'd gotten into with the law would've been expunged from my record upon turning eighteen anyway, not that said trouble would've been anything for the prison wardens to worry about anyway. I'd warned the visiting sergeant beforehand about my tail, so presumably that wasn't going to present any problems…

I must've been spacing out, because before I knew it, we were pulling up to the prison. San Andreas State Penitentiary, built in 2033 according to the sign, and from what I already knew, it was a medium-security facility with a population of about two-thousand inmates, many of them serving time for drug crimes like my parents were, along with a few who were in there for murder, though the worst of the worst were kept over in San Quentin. Not that that made me feel any better; I didn't fear any friggin' axe murderers. It was my parents that scared me. I think I'd have rather been locked in a room with Manson than with them, but here I was.

Upon pulling up to the gate, both of us had to hand over our IDs, plus submit to a search of the car to make sure we weren't smuggling in anything, and once the guards were satisfied, they let us on through, and we pulled into the visitors' parking lot and got out of the car, with Greg taking a long pull from a bottle of water he'd brought along.

"So what happens now?" he asked.

"What happens now," I said slowly, "is that you're gonna sit out here with the car while I go inside." I handed him my shades.

"What? Why?" He looked confused.

I smiled. "Thanks for comin'. I just needed somebody with me to make sure I didn't chicken out. But I think I got it from here."

"You sure? You're shaking."

"Of course I'm shakin'. This is like goin' in for a root canal when you've never even been to a dentist. But I gotta do this, and I gotta do it alone. Hopefully this won't take long."

He stood back and nodded. "All right, Xania. But if you need me, don't hesitate to yell for me, okay?"

"Okay. Thanks."

I kissed him, then headed inside, a guard escorting me to the entrance to the visiting area, where another guard, the visiting sergeant, took a look at my ID.

"Xania Peters?" He took a look through some papers. "Here to visit…let's see…Tanja and Ronald Randall, correct?"

"Yes, sir," I stated.

"Do you have a copy of the 106 with you?"

"I do." I handed it over to him, along with a copy of my fingerprints, and upon taking a look at those, he nodded and handed them back to me.

"Go ahead and step through," he said, nodding at the metal detector. I nodded acknowledgment and walked through, predictably setting it off. A third guard went over my body with a wand to be sure I wasn't carrying any metal on me, but the only part of me that went off when she ran it over me was my tail, which twitched in reflex to the wand going off.

"You warned me about the tail beforehand," the sergeant recollected. "Was it attached for medical purposes?"

"No."

"Does it do anything besides just act as a tail?"

"You mean does it have a mike or a secret carrying compartment?" I chuckled. "No. It's just a tail. What you see is what you get."

"Alright, then." He nodded past the metal detector. "Mr. and Mrs. Randall will be seated at a table to the far left of the room. They'll be wearing orange jumpers, like all the inmates, with IDs clipped to their chests identifying them. You may not recognize them offhand because it's been so long since you've seen them."

I was confused. How did he know that? "Have they not had any visitors besides me?" I queried.

"No, ma'am. Besides their attorneys, they've had no visitors whatsoever."

"Heh. Maybe I shoulda kept it that way," I muttered darkly as I headed in. "Thanks."

The visitors room looked to be about the size of a middle school gym, with picnic-style tables lined up in neat rows throughout. The walls were a drab beige, with the jumpers of the inmates providing the only real splash of color. I counted seven inmates in the room, with family sitting and visiting with four of them. The fifth one was sitting at a table in the middle, arms folded, waiting patiently. He turned and looked at me with a lecherous smile, and I turned away quickly, focusing on the remaining two, who were sitting at a table to the far left, talking amongst themselves. I swallowed hard. That had to be them.

I walked up to them, and upon hearing me they both looked up, interest in their eyes. It hardly looked like them at all. They had aged at least twenty years in the ten since I had last seen them. Black hair had turned silver, and wrinkles had broken out across their faces and around their eyes like so much bad acne. The man who was my father, in particular, had jowls that would've made Walter Matthau proud.

"Bridget," he said in a gravelly voice. "Sit down, huh?"

I did so, my legs feeling like they were about to turn into butter.

My mother smiled, and I had to keep from recoiling. Most of her teeth were gone, and what was left were in various colors that teeth should never be in, broken and rotting. "When did you get that tail on?" she asked. Her voice hadn't changed at all; my brain instantly recognized that tone, and I could already feel a tension headache forming as a result.

"When I was thirteen," I said.

"It looks good on you," she said. Her attention turned to my hair. "Don't tell me you just rolled out of bed without combing your hair."

"It's always like this."

"Why don't you grow it out? You used to have such long, flowing hair."

"Yeah, well, you know why I cut it," I spat.

"You're still sore about that? That was a long time ago."

I gritted my teeth. "Why wouldn't I be sore about it, huh? Ever had your hair pulled?"

"Enough," my father growled, clearing his throat, which sounded full of phlegm. "Why are you here, Bridget? Just to talk about all that?"

"Yeah, pretty much," I replied bluntly. "It's not like I suddenly decided we should be a family again. We never were. Your family was made up of you two, your drugged-out friends, and the stuff you cooked in the kitchen. I had no part of it. All I was to you was a lookout, a fuckin' taste-tester."

"Language," my mother barked.

"Oh, fuck you. You had quite a mouth on you yourself when you were yellin' at me and tellin' me to leave your crap alone. You really fancied yourself to be good parents, huh? Well, why the hell do you THINK I was stealin' from other kids' lunch boxes, huh? Certainly wasn't 'cause I was stuffed! Why do you think I hid out at our neighbor Jill's house when you two would start fightin', gettin' paranoid that somebody was spyin' on you?! You two scared the living shit out of me! And even back then I knew that wasn't normal! Not all parents are like that! Parents shouldn't be like that at all! So tell me, Mom and Dad. Tell me. What the fuck made you think meth was worth sacrificin' everything for, huh? Tell me, was it worth it? Was it worth losin' me, losin' twelve years of your life to this dump? Ten gone, two to go, right? So what're you gonna do once you get out? Gonna move back to Needles and start up again? Huh? Huh?!"

My father leaned back in his chair and rubbed at his chin, almost looking amused. "Look at you. Getting so worked up. You think you have it all figured out, huh? You think it's as simple as you're saying?"

"I DON'T know. That's why I'm asking YOU." I hadn't even said anything yet and it already looked like he was mocking me. "What made you start on that shit, huh?"

"Nothing made us start on anything," my mother said with a frown. "You know how Needles was back then. Nothing to do there unless your idea of fun is drinkin' and fuckin', and your dad here has had something of an ED problem since you were born, so that left out the fuckin' part of the equation."

"Heh. Too bad," I said with a smirk.

"You think you're any better than us, Bridget? Meredith has told us what's goin' on with you," she said, pointing a finger at me. "She's told us about your whorin' around, about you fuckin' anythin' that moves."

My smirk turned into a sneer. "I ain't been whorin' around. What I do with my body ain't her business, and you're makin' it sound like she's been sayin' I'm a prostitute. I ain't. I like sex but that doesn't mean I fuck anything that moves. I like sex but that doesn't mean I ain't careful. Abortions? Zero. STDs? Zip. I put a glove on it before I touch it. That's how it's supposed to work. You can't exactly do that with meth. No such thing as bein' careful with meth."

"It's still a vice. Drugs are a vice. Food is a vice. Sex is a vice. Your father and I may have been addicts, but so are you, dear. And any vice can kill you. Any vice can destroy you."

I laughed out loud, despite the knot in my stomach forming again. "I know what you're doin'. You're tryin' to make me sound just as bad as you. Well, I'm NOT anywhere NEAR as bad as you. I haven't gone and fucked up other people's lives because of it. I haven't hurt myself because of it. Now meth, that's ALL that meth does. NOTHING good comes out of it! It wrecks your body, your teeth, your mind, everything! Don't you DARE try to take me down to your level! That's what bullies do, and that's what you are! That's what you always were, just a pair of bullies!"

It was true I liked sex, but addicted to it? Hardly. The hell was she trying to do, make it sound like I was just like her, just like Dad? There was no fucking comparison! "What the hell started it anyway, huh?" I demanded. "You tellin' me you started on meth just 'cause fuckin' got taken out of the equation? That's a laugh."

"A friend introduced me to it one day," Dad said, letting out a few wet coughs before continuing. "But it's not something you can do only once and be done with it. Once was all it took, and it was no fun to take it alone, so I had your mom try it out some time later, and it became somethin' that we could do together, as a couple. Gather the ingredients, then come home and cook 'em."

"Oh yeah, a real wholesome family activity," I jeered.

"You obviously weren't old enough to take part, but we didn't have to worry about you when we were busy cookin'. You knew how to look out for yourself and stay out of trouble."

"Old enough to taste-test the results though, right?" I growled. "Stop it. You weren't saints by any stretch of the word." His and her bullshit excuses were starting to make me sick. Maybe the meth had eaten holes in their brains too.

"Neither are you, Bridget."

"Heh. Maybe I'm not, but I'm a lot closer to sainthood than either of you will ever be. Hell, maybe I oughta thank you two for fuckin' up my life. Thank you so fuckin' much."

They both looked confused.

"That's right, I'm thankin' ya both. Know why? 'Cause it's made me that much more determined to make sure no one else ever gets their life fucked up like mine got fucked up. Aintcha proud?"

I leaned back and laughed out loud, pressing my hand to my forehead. It had just come to me. It didn't matter what they thought. Didn't matter if they were proud of me, didn't matter why or how they had started on the meth. They did, and that was that. Why the hell was I here searching for answers, when I didn't need them at all? Why had I thought I had needed them? Why had I felt this burning need to be validated? Did it matter whether I was validated or not? Weren't my experiences validation enough?

I realized, I won.

"Yes, yes," I hooted, "you oughta be very proud. Your dear daughter is gonna become one of those social workers that you hate so much. You fucked up in the greatest way ever. Congratulations. I'm gonna make sure that no kid ever has to suffer because of people like you ever again. So in a way, yeah, I guess you two are real heroes. Real fuckin' superheroes. But if you think that makes what you two did excusable, then hell no it doesn't. It's somethin' I never should've gone through. No kid should. The job I wanna do shouldn't even be needed, but hey, the world's a shithole, right? I guess that means by necessity I gotta become a superhero too."

I jabbed a finger at the both of them. "Two years, right? Two more years till you two get out?"

"Yeah," Dad replied. "What of it?"

"Heh. Take those two years and choke on 'em. This is it. If you thought I was gonna start visitin' you regularly and hopin' we could be some sort of 'family' again after you two get out, forget about it. After this, I am done. Don't even bother to look me up or try to track me down. I ain't a Randall no more. I ain't your daughter no more, nor was I ever, because you two were never any sort of parents to me. Bridget Randall died a long time ago. Right now you've only got Xania Peters, a loud, proud girl with a tail and a wail, and right now she is gonna tell you to do the world a favor. Pull your lower lip over your head and swallow. Good day."

I got up and marched out of the visitors room, with the two people formerly known as my parents yelling after me to stop. But I didn't look back. I was done looking behind me.

"Xania!" Greg exclaimed when he saw me. "How did it go? You're smiling."

"I told 'em I'm done with 'em," I said. "I didn't come here to play catch-up. That's all I wanted to say."

"Meredith just called me a little bit ago. She was wondering if you were still gonna go through with it."

"Well, call her back and tell her I did. And that it wasn't nearly as scary as I thought it'd be."

"It wasn't?"

"Nope. It's the case of the little girl growing up to be just as big as the monsters. Not nearly so scary when you're the same size and the monsters are nothin' but decrepit old fools."

He smiled and put an arm around my shoulder. "Wanna get out of here?"

"Yeah. I'm done."

Five minutes later we were back on the highway, heading north. I put my shades back on and leaned back, feeling the breeze blow through my hair. Twenty years old, and for the first time in my life, I felt truly free. No more monsters under the bed or in the closet. I hadn't exactly made peace, nor had I had closure. Closure really was a myth. I hadn't found the answers I was looking for, but at the same time, I'd realized I didn't need to.

I'd found my own, and that was enough.

END "Crystal and Powder – Xania"