By: Haley J. The Bat ©

Summary: A girl spends three days living with her ghetto friend and learns some new things about life.

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Sometimes we need to get a reality check. We need to realize that life isn’t just what’s in front of us. Life is everything around us. Around the block in a small double is another world from where I grew up. I spent three days and two nights become accustomed with the new world, and now that I’m back home . . . I have a lot to think about.

I believe in experiences. I want to have experiences in things that I would never do, because being a writer isn’t about being yourself. I seek inspiration in everything. My friend Tiffany invited Laura and me over to her brother’s house on Wednesday. We’d seen glimpses of her Ghetto life before, but never so strongly as this weekend.

We went over to Tiffany’s house after school so that she could pick up some clothes. It was fall break, and she planned on spending the rest of the week with John and Ronda, her brother and sister-in-law.

Laura and I were lying on her bed. I was staring at the ceiling and thinking about my boyfriend, Tiff’s cousin. Then Tiffany came in and shut the door, shaking her head. “I can’t believe they just did that. Did you hear anything?”

“Hmm? No,” I said.

“Oh, well. Never mind.”

“No. Come on, tell us,” I said. “You would have told Leah. We’re cool about this stuff. Can you see me going to the cops?” I arched an eyebrow.

Tiffany laughed. “It’s nothing. They were just talking about their business.”

I figured the rest out on my own. “Oh, right. Pot.”

“It’s weed, Lauren. Weed. And no.”

“They have a new business?”

“The same one.”

“Oh . . . what else do they sell?”

Tiffany snorted. “Everything. My dad has back problems, and he gets stuff like Vicoden for it. It messes him up, so he sells it.”

After Tiffany packed, we all drove over to John and Ronda’s house. Tiffany, Laura, and I walked in. There was a baby on the floor screaming, and I saw a dark haired girl go running for the back of the house. I recognized Ronda coming out into the kitchen. Tiffany picked up the baby and started cooing.

“Who was that?” I whispered to Laura, indicated the dark haired girl who had run. “Is the baby hers?”

When it was clear Tiffany’s parents had left, the dark haired girl came back in. “Oh, shit. You guys scared me. He’s gone, right?”

I shot Tiffany a look, wanting to know what was going on. Tiffany was too busy with the baby. “Hello, Haley. Aren’t you just so cute! Don’t tell Sarah, but I’m taking you home with me.”

John was sitting in a lazy boy playing a video game. Ronda, Sarah, Tiffany, Laura, and I all sat around the two couches. I felt nervous around people I didn’t know, but after awhile I started to warm up and talk. It was revealed that John was going to work at eight thirty. After that the real fun would begin.

Sarah looked older, but she was only sixteen. I know that in this day and age it shouldn’t shock me, but I can’t believe that she had a baby and everything. It seems like everyone in Tiffany’s family has a kid young. Her dad has his first kid at fourteen; Ronda had a kid at fourteen; Jason had a kid at fifteen; and Tiffany is fourteen and suspects she is pregnant. I always thought that my mom having Alex at seventeen was bad.

Ronda took us to the store to get supplies for dinner. She wanted to be the perfect hostess, so she decided to fix steak. We had fun looking around the store, but we couldn’t get any alcohol because John would find out. Ronda bought me some laxatives. I tried to give her money for them, but she wouldn’t accept it.

Back at John and Ronda’s we ate dinner and waited around for John to leave for work. Once he was gone, the house became busy. Ronda and Sarah were cleaning up like crazy because Ronda’s boyfriend, Alan, was coming over. Ronda took a shower and did her makeup really nice. Laura and I watched Scarface, a very stupid movie in my opinion. Sarah’s friend Crystal came over, and once everyone was ready Ronda pulled out the weed and rolled a joint for us to “calm ourselves down” with.

This wasn’t the first time I smoked pot. I’ve done it a handful of times, usually with Tiffany, and all of them have been a disappointment. This was no exception. I didn’t get high. I still ponder over why people make such a big deal about it, why people like my dad gave up their families for it. It’s really not that great. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s annoying. It usually makes me feel sleepy a little while after I smoke it.

Crystal and Sarah were going to go pick up a friend. They only had room for one other person, and Tiffany picked Laura. I was a little offended because I just don’t see why she did it. I feel like Tiffany and I have more and common than Tiff and Laura. I didn’t mind staying with Ronda though.

Ronda and I got to talking. She kept going on and on about Alan. So I asked, “Do you love him more than John?”

She paused for a second. “Well, no. I mean, I love them in different ways. Alan is like . . . my best friend. He’s me. But I’ve been with John for twelve years. I think I’d choose John over Alan.” She snorted and gestured to her house. “Well, obviously. I’m with him right now.”

We shared a joint, and she told me about her experiences in drugs. “I’ve tried just about everything. Well . . . not heroin or anything with needles. My favorite is coke. It gets you feeling really nice and mellow without any outside effects. If I was on coke right now, you wouldn’t even be able to tell.”

“What’s ecstasy like? Tiffany said I should try some,” I said, trying to act like I knew more about this life than I did.

“Oh, it’s amazing,” she gushed, eyes bright. “It’s so good . . . It’s something to take with a bunch of your friends.”

Our conversation was interrupted when Tiffany, Leah, Crystal, and Sarah all came back with Jeremiah. It turns out that Jeremiah is this guy who works at Kmart. Tiffany has been telling me about how hot she thinks he is for a couple months now. I found it ironic that Sarah knew him.

Jeremiah was very quiet. He sat on the loveseat with Sarah, and he didn’t talk very much. He wasn’t exactly hot, but Tiffany was infatuated.

We waited for a few hours. It seemed to take forever. Ronda had to banish Dianna, her irksome eight-year-old daughter, to her room. Ronda was in total anticipation. Then we finally heard a loud car pull up, and Allan was there.

Ronda and Tiffany had “warned” Laura and me that Alan was fat but had a great personality. They were just jerking us around. Alan was very, very sexy. There’s no other word for it. He was tall and incredibly muscular.

Alan was friendly and tried to get to know all of us that he hadn’t met before. He pulled out some weed for Jeremiah, and Jeremiah rolled a joint for us all to share.

Jeremiah was quiet, and when Alan asked his name, he murmured. “Harry Potter?” Alan repeated, making all of us burst into laughter. It was an inside joke that we kept bringing up the whole weekend. For me, at least, the thought of Harry Potter associated with the Samples is ludicrous.

Alan and Ronda went into her bedroom, and all of us teenagers were left to hang out in the living room and smoke a few joints. I was getting sleepy from all of the weed and the smoke, but I still had yet to be affected any stronger by the drug.

A little while later, Ronda’s sister came over. Ronda got freaked out because she heard a car pull up and thought it might be John. It was implied that if John found Alan, it might come down to death. Normally I would just roll my eyes, but this family seems so real about it. One thing I noticed about them is that the men especially are quite passionate and possessive of their women.

Becky and Eddie, Ronda’s sister and brother-in-law, joined our little party by rolling a joint. Ronda and Alan stayed out in the living room. I noticed that Alan had his shirt off. It was hard not to - his chest was enough to make the most conservative drool.

It seemed that Jeremiah wasn’t as quiet as we thought. Sarah got up to leave for a little while, and Tiffany started talking to him. Suddenly he opened up, and he seemed pretty funny. Before I had found him rather funny. He looked half dead and kept letting his head roll on the back of the couch. He looked high before he even got a whiff of the weed.

It seemed like Alan was going to stay forever. I was getting worried that John might come home, and I thought Ronda was being a bit reckless. Finally, around two, he left. Becky and Eddie headed out, and Crystal drove Jeremiah and herself home.

Tiffany, Laura, and I went to John and Ronda’s room to crash on their waterbed. We stayed up for a little while and talked. Tiffany told us that she was really into Jeremiah. Laura stayed quiet. She was depressed that weekend. I was glad. When she’s not depressed, all she ever talks about is her crush. I wanted this weekend to be an experience outside of reality; I didn’t want to remember things about my real life because I wanted to immerse myself completely.

John came home around six, and we had to go into the living room so he and Ronda could sleep on the waterbed. Tiffany first told us to sleep in Diana’s room on the top bunk. I went in there and foggily looked at the ladder, trying to figure out how I could climb up there without waking her up. I didn’t make a sound, but somehow I managed to wake the little demon up. I looked at her, and she was smiling in such a creepy way. I just smiled back and hauled ass out of the room back to the living room.

I wasn’t sleepy, so I got out the play station. I started play the Sims, and somehow Diana was attracted into the room. She sat down next to me and tried to tell me how to play when the game isn’t really that hard to figure out. I was ready to strangle her, but I didn’t want to be mean. Finally I just put it up and told her that I was going to sleep.

I pretended to go to sleep, but it was impossible. Their cat, Pussy, was acting like it was on drugs and flying all across the house, making tons of racket. Amongst this noise, Diana came out every five minutes to pat my shoulder. If I was really asleep, I would have woken up and been even more pissed.

When the phone rang, everyone finally woke up. A little while later Laura’s mom came to pick her up. They were going camping, so she couldn’t stay another day. I was already planning on staying that night.

When John and Ronda woke up, hell set in. John was pissed off because we’d lost his weed. We suspected Alan took it, but we couldn’t say anything.

A cable guy came and stood in the doorway for a long time. Sarah lit a cigarette, then Tiffany. The guy was hot, and I didn’t want to be left out. I lit one up, too. I hadn’t been able to smoke them the night before because they reminded me of getting sick the last time I’d done it. After smoking the weed, though, cigarettes weren’t so disgusting. As soon as the cable guy left, I put it out. I couldn’t take anymore.

We went driving around after that. We probably left for three hours, but we only went to Sarah’s house and Kmart. At Sarah’s house I didn’t pay a bit of attention to what anyone was saying. They had the History channel on, and a program about the Manson Family had just come on. I wanted to yell at them to shut up so that I could hear, but I couldn’t do that. I guess I didn’t succeed in being Ghetto the whole time.

We had to stop by Tiffany’s house so that she could get some money. As soon as we pulled in the driveway, Gill, Tiffany’s eleven-year-old brother, was at the door. “Can I come?” he begged. We were planning on getting drunk, but we couldn’t do that around Gill. We didn’t want him to come. Ronda said okay because she didn’t want to be mean.

The ride home was hilarious. Ronda really had to go to the bathroom, so she drove even more recklessly than usual. We pulled into every other parking lot where she proceeded to scream. She whirled the car around so fast at one point that I was, unhappily, thrown into Gill’s lap.

We got back home, and Ronda fixed dinner. She messed up the potatoes, and John yelled at her for losing his weed again. This sparked an all-out yelling match. Ronda stormed out of the house to go “driving.” Tiffany and I went into the bedroom to play their old Nintendo, and not too soon afterward Ronda came back feeling better.

We ate dinner, and then John left. After he left two of Ronda’s friends came over for about an hour. We lit up a joint from some roaches - our last joint of the night. While they were there, Alan called. Ronda didn’t want to see him because Gill was there. Gill had gone into Diana’s room to play the game system. They got locked in, and we weren’t exactly jumping to get them out. Every once in a while we went to the door to act like we were trying, and that kept them pretty tame.

Alan called again later, and he said he didn’t believe that Ronda had gone out with her friends. We all got scared, and Ronda made us go into the bedroom to hide on the waterbed. I didn’t know anything about him, but from snippets of things said that night I gathered that he was a pimp and didn’t like being screwed over. He’d been arrested for gang rape before. I was scared to death.

We had to let Gill and Diana out because they were making too much noise. Ronda, Sarah, Tiffany, Gill, Diana, and I all crowded onto the waterbed and stayed there for an hour.

Alan first called repeatedly. Then he started driving by. We would hear his car, and then the phone would ring once. We all got so scared when the rumbling car went down the street.

We had to give Gill some kind of story. We told him that it was Sarah’s ex-boyfriend, Matt. We told him that we had jokingly told Matt that Gill was the real father of Sarah’s baby. We were going to have Matt over that night, but when Gill came over, we couldn’t. Matt was a stalker, and we were afraid he would come and kill Gill.

Gill bought our story. He kept suggesting we get out the gun or call his dad. Diana annoyed us by crying and not going into her room to watch a movie.

We went into the living room after awhile and sat on the couches in the dark. The phone didn’t ring very often. Ronda was going to have Sarah call Alan to tell him John had come home early. They went into the bathroom so Gill couldn’t hear, but Gill listened at the door. I tried to distract him by making noises, but that got him suspicious. I opened the door to tell them Gill was eavesdropping, and somehow we all managed to fit in the tiny bathroom.

We hung out in there for a long time. We told Gill that it had all been a prank we were playing on him because we were mad that he was coming over. We said that we had Crystal call and Jeremiah drive by. He bought our story.

After that we went back into the living room. It was lucky, too, because John came home a few minutes later. We would have had a lot of explaining to do if we were still huddled in the kitchen. John was in a better mood. We told him about our “prank” on Gill, and he found it funny. He put in the movie Identity. I fell asleep right away. I was exhausted.

The next day passed normally. We basically sat around all day, ate ice cream, and played video games. I reluctantly went home that evening.

Going back home was a shock to me. I’d had so much fun at Tiffany’s that real life seemed like a splash of cold water. I started writing because I wanted to get it all out before I could forget. Maybe others have done more important things like traveling to different countries. Maybe Ghetto life isn’t really that secretive.

But I learned a lot about people in two days’ time. The world is different from everyone’s point of view. Sometimes we need to stable our lives by seeing life through someone else.