Read Online Sliding Into Home by Kendra Wilkinson - Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t exactly what my mom had in mind when she sent me there.
    We got drug-tested but we also took pills that flushed out our systems. It only worked some of the time, and I did get caught on a few occasions, but we never really got in trouble when we got busted.After all, we were already in reform school. Where else could they send us?
    I knew the place was bad for me. I was doing drugs as often as possible and I could feel myself going crazy again. I told my mom that I wanted to go back to Clairemont. I told her that there were more drugs at this school than there were at my regular school. I begged her for another chance. She agreed and somehow convinced Clairemont High to take me back for my sophomore year.
    Back in my old school, I almost immediately fell back into my old habits.
    I started hanging out at the apartment complex where most of my troubles began. Some of the characters were still the same, but during my sophomore year I met a new guy. His name was Mario. He was Puerto Rican and very romantic. He had that Rico Suave thing going on but, more important, he always had drugs, so he immediately became part of our crew.
    I was always just friends with the guys who hung out at the apartment complex. It was just a place to chill and get high; nothing romantic ever developed with any of them, and it was probably better that way. With Mario, though, things would be different.
    I’m not sure exactly how it got started, but I think we were on acid that day. We hooked up and immediately began a relationship that would ultimately change my life. I started spending every day after school with Mario. Sometimes I would skip school, and all day long we’d do coke and have sex. Looking back I wouldn’t call him my boyfriend. I never loved him. We just had a lot of sex and did a lot of coke.
    Mario would give coke away to anyone and everyone who wantedit. It was pretty nuts. His parents were great people who lived in San Juan, but Mario had some local friends who definitely weren’t so great.
    At the time I wasn’t concerned with any of that. I just loved hanging out with him. But since I was living at home I had to sneak around to make it happen.
    Luckily my mom had a regular routine back then. She’s still a creature of habit, but during that time especially you could keep time by her daily rituals. Every night at exactly nine o’clock she would go into the bathroom and brush her teeth, take off her makeup, and get ready for bed. From there she would crawl directly under the covers and call it a night.
    Each night when I saw the bathroom light flick on I would sneak out of the house. I couldn’t go out the front door because it made too much noise and it would have to stay locked, but we had a sliding glass door in the back that I could open quietly and sneak out, leaving it just a little bit open for when I came home. I would slowly creep out the back, hop over a big wall, and fall to the ground on the other side where a road led me to freedom—and to Mario. My legs would get all scraped up but I didn’t care. I’d stay out all night, doing lots of coke and spending time with Mario.
    Like clockwork, my mom was always up at six A.M. , and five minutes later she would be in the shower. I’d sneak back through the sliding door while she was showering, put on my pajamas, crawl into bed, and pretend to be asleep. A few minutes later she’d get out of the shower and wake me up for school.
    It worked every time.
    I’d be a mess at school, of course, because I hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before and was coming down off a night of heavydrug use. I would fall asleep in class and pass out on a bench during study hall or on the soccer field during PE. I was clearly in bad shape, but most people at school had already given up on me by that point so no one really cared.
    One night, about a month into my routine, I snuck out at nine P.M . on the dot and spent the night getting messed up, as usual. But when I returned,