This is what happens when you peak in high school, thought Vanessa Phan, looking at a photo of herself and her friends from the late ‘90s. I fit into size 00 Guess jeans back then, she mused, as a wave of bitterness washed over her. I ruled the quad with Jenna Tran and Ana Xayavong. Boys adored us. The possibilities were endless.
She was smoking in her car with her windows rolled down in the parking lot of a strip mall. She checked the time and rolled her eyes, leaning back against her torn leather seat. “Eight more fucking minutes,” she muttered under her breath. Her former coworker, Tina, had left to become a CNA at a senior home nearby. Vanessa’s new coworker, Patty, was nice and all, but kept making mistakes with the register that Vanessa had to fix.
She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. I was beautiful once. But now, shadows grew under her eyes. Wrinkles were starting to form on her forehead—and she was too broke to afford Botox, Dysport, or whatever else people with too much money were injecting into their foreheads these days. She looked like a faded, tired version of who she once was.
Vanessa worked at a chain dollar store in a small, shithole town in the middle of Dusty-Ass California—no, not the cool beachy side or even the cool foresty side, but the side that was as hot as a furnace much of the year. But at least it was not the one she graduated from. That would be too humiliating. From Facebook, she knew that Ana had gone on to earn her cosmetology license and now worked at a salon cutting hair. Jenna went to community college and became an LVN at a big hospital. And Vanessa? Well, her life took a detour after high school.
She never told anyone from school, but her father would snoop.through her underwear drawer and ask her questions about it. And she would hear him checking her bedroom doorknob at night. One night she forgot to lock it and woke up to see him hovering over her from the side of her bed, with his right hand moving inside his gray pajama pants.
After graduating from high school, she moved in with her 23-year-old boyfriend named Peter and hung around with him and his friends. Pete was in a gang and he didn’t talk much about it with her, only that it was better the less she knew, and she never pressed him for more information. During the week, she would work at a pizza shop. On the weekends, she would go out clubbing with Pete and his friends.
A breeze of hot air from outside blew her brassy blond hair into her face. She was long overdue for a hair trim—her parched hair was plagued by split ends. Her nails—well, she gave up on regular manicures and pedicures a long time ago. But it’s not like she was clubbing or raving these days.
But it was so fun while it lasted.
A ghost of a smile crept into her lips as she took another drag from her cigarette.11 PM felt like a beginning of many fun possibilities; 5 AM felt like death, as she was coming down from the ecstasy. But in those sacred hours between 11 PM and 2 AM, the world was magic. The music and bodies melted into each other with warmth and movement. Sound waves swirled around her as the deep bass beat in rhythm. As the high coursed through her body, she felt at one with the world. Infinite.
Then the morning would come. Her glitter and sequins, which had felt like magical shimmers the night before, felt garish and bleak in the unforgiving light of dawn. Her throat was parched, her makeup was peeling, and her head throbbed. She would hide from the world in Pete’s dingy bedroom with the curtains shut, trying to be as quiet and still as possible. Is this all it will ever be? a small voice in her head would ask.
One day, she received a phone call from the police. Pete had been found in a ditch with two gun wounds in his back. The cops wrote it off as gang-related and left it at that. Of course the cops didn’t bother to do a thorough investigation, she thought bitterly. They didn’t give two shits about him. Vanessa cried at his funeral, along with Pete’s friends. Even though they’d had a rocky relationship towards the end, they had also had a lot of good memories together.
After Pete’s death, as she lay in their bed and listened to the overhead fan creak in the ceiling, she reflected on their relationship and realized she had overlooked a lot of things when Peter was still alive—his temper, and how he had punched two holes in the bedroom at separate times during their relationship. One time it was because she kept confronting him about a girl named Angel who kept texting him late at night. The other time it was because a handsome waiter made a joke about the menu and she had laughed back. “Look what you made me do,” he said, as the holes in the wall gaped and cracked. He would also get very close to her and punch the air around her head. Maybe one reason she’d been so willing to overlook these things was because she had nowhere to go. She didn’t want to go back to her father. She didn’t want to leave Peter and the life they had shared together, outside of those rage episodes.
She felt bad for remembering these things. It felt like she was tarnishing the image of him as her hero, the one who pulled her away from her creepy father.
But his death had given her another point of clarity. In the haze of the clubbing and raving, she and her old friends from high school had grown apart. Their friendships had withered away and now it felt weird to text them out of the blue.
Then she’d found out she was pregnant.
Although she had never truly joined the gang or participated in running its businesses, she still wore the gang colors when going out with Pete and his friends. One could say that she was affiliated, even if she wasn’t a direct member. People knew she was with Pete.
She didn’t feel safe in this town anymore. She quit her job at the pizza shop and found an apartment about two desert towns away, which came with a roommate—an older lady named Janice who worked as a lunch lady at a nearby elementary school—and a job at a dollar store. The owners of the dollar store were cheap and there was no air conditioning (only an old, rattling fan), but a shitty job was better than no job.
She had packed all her belongings in her beat-up car and driven down the freeway on a quiet Sunday morning. During the drive, her thoughts drifted as she drove along the desert landscape. Sometimes her free hand would go to her lower belly, where baby Daniel was a little tadpole curled up inside.
When Tommy was born and the nurses plopped him onto her chest, she touched his little hands and little face and couldn’t believe that such a precious thing had come from her and Pete.
And now she was out here with little Tommy, in The Middle of Nowhere, California. It was hot and boring here, but at least she felt safe. She’d gone to the small town’s resource and referral agency, which had given her a list of low-cost daycare options, including CalWORKS and Early Head Start, which Vanessa somehow miraculously qualified for. She would be picking Baby Tommy up after her shift today, like she does every day.
Her phone alarm went off. She turned it off and took one last drag of her cigarette before opening a root beer bottle and dropping the cigarette inside, where it joined a forbidden stew of old root beer and other cigarette butts—a melting pot of tar soup. She looked back at the baby car seat through her rearview mirror. I should quit, she thought. She shook the bottle to drown the cigarette butt and placed it back down beneath the passenger seat.
Her hand caught on something beneath the seat. She pulled it out.
It was a college brochure she had pulled from the mailbox yesterday, that she’d forgotten to take out of her purse. She flipped through it. There were the usual offerings of the nursing degrees, but she saw a program for Certified Nurse Assistant. Her former coworker Tina had left the store to become a CNA, saying the pay was better and that training didn’t take very long, even if the work was harder. Maybe she could text her tonight to ask about how things were going.
Vanessa wasn’t sure if this CNA path was the right fit for her, or if there was anything out in the world that she was “meant” to do like those sappy people talk about in inspirational videos.
She didn’t want to work at the dollar store for the rest of her life, especially since the owners were thinking about raising the prices to $1.99, something about tariffs. A few months ago they had already raised the prices to $1.50—which had already hurt business, as customers grumbled to her about how Walmart was cheaper now.
Tommy was too little right now for Vanessa to work and go to school, but maybe when he was a bit older, she could figure out some daycare options to take classes in the evening.
Right now she was barely making ends meet—having a roommate and using state programs for daycare and food assistance was helping her and Tommy survive, and she had squirreled away some savings when she was still living with Pete. But now she and Tommy could really use that extra cushion. Even if CNA wasn’t the right program for her, the local community college still offered other types of careers. She imagined herself working in an air-conditioned hospital, with the fresh smell of sanitizer and clean walls and floors. She pictured herself typing away on a computer in an office (also air-conditioned), with a stylish little bag next to her, and being able to buy nice things for Tommy.
She tucked the brochure back in her bag and locked the car. As she walked back towards the dollar store, she found herself smiling.
Eden Onpeng 