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picture. There’s a leather choker with a fleur-de-lys on it. A plastic ring, the kind that looks like it came out of a gumball machine. A bunch of lanyards for rock shows, and various VIP backstage passes. Bad Religion. Black Flag. Circle Jerks. Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thelonious Monster. Nirvana. D.I. Social Distortion. Sonic Youth. fIREHOSE. Jane’s Addiction. A beer cap with a hole in it. A
Flipside
magazine with Suck on the cover. A book of matches from someplace called Al’s Bar. Another book from a place called Jabberjaw, with
BR + LB
written in a heart on the inside. A sketch of The Rat and my mom, ripped out of a notebook, with
10/27 outside of Raji’s
scrawled at the bottom. A broken drumstick. A bandana. A scrap of paper with curly writing on it.
Let’s be friends! Yana Banana
and a phone number.
    They are artifacts of my mother’s time with The Rat. I want to understand why these keepsakes are important. I want to piece together the story.
    “I’m not
that girl
anymore,” Mom always says when I ask her.
    They are the only things I’ve ever seen from that time before I was born, before she left behind that alternative lifestyle and never spoke of it again. Before she became my mom.
    “It’s like those Greek myths,” she says, “where someone has to go to Hades and back to get the one that they love. I went to Hell and back and I found you.”
    In the photo, Mom has long blond dreadlocks and she’s standing between The Rat and Sam Suck. The Rat only has a few tattoos on his arms. He’s skinny — skin and bones — and he looks really young. They all do. Sam Suck has a tiny Mohawk, which has kind of flopped over on its side, and there is a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. His eyes are half closed. My mom has her arms thrown around their shoulders. They look as though they are holding her up, like she can’t stand on her own two feet. Her head is tilted back and she’s laughing. Her smile is disarming. She looks totally happy. She looks totally free.
    I love that picture for her laugh.
    I have never once seen her laugh like that with me.
    With me, her laughs have a little twinge of sadness, a little bit of something being held back. Or so it seems. Like she had to leave her real laugh behind in Hell. Like that laugh belongs to
that girl.
In that picture, I imagine that her laugh comes right from her belly.
    I have never laughed like that either.
    I just know I haven’t. I always hold something back, too.
    All I know is that I come from Hell. And The Rat and Sam Suck are where Hell begins. And now I’m with them.
    In Hell.

The Yellow House is a nice house filled with nice normal people. They look like they have money. Even though there are some dreadlocks and spiked hair in the crowd, everyone looks clean-cut. There are a lot of kids running around, but not one of them is my age. It’s all babies and toddlers.
    “Why are there so many babies here?” I ask.
    “They all started breeding late,” The Rat says.
    He probably means they didn’t knock up a teenage girl like he did when he was twenty-seven.
    The Rat grabs a soda pop and then I follow him as he goes over to a bunch of guys, all wearing black jeans, colorful button-down shirts, and black-rimmed glasses.
    After he introduces me to everyone, he gives me a little eyebrow lift, which I think is supposed to signal that these guys he’s standing with, who wave and nod at me, whoever they are, are really cool, and that they make him really cool.
    Maybe I’ve seen them on
Much Music
in a video that I ignored because they are old guys and not the kind of boys that Leticia and I find cute. I don’t mind bands that have cute boys in them, but these old guys are like in their
forties.
    But I have to admit that even though they are not my style, they sure do look cooler than The Rat. Even just standing around these guys look like they could be on the cover of a magazine. They all have this ease about them, a kind of calm as they stand around