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It's 1993: year of sex and drugs and self-destruction, year Nirvana and REM sold out to the great grand society that shot out Waco and Boris Yeltsin, and Natalie is only fourteen, more than fourteen, and explosive as a burning sun. Heat and summer feels like bugs, under her skin. Under her damn skin – bugs, bugs, bugs. It's this itch she can't scratch, her first taste of addiction before her big-girl adventures, and it's fucking constant. But not when she's running. No, not when she's running.
Her sneakers are from Payless. Knockoff Keds, but daddy bought them after one of his moods, so she doesn't well complain. Her neighbour with the studded jeans and clumpy mascara and chubby-ass blonde toddler out front in the mud jeers at her as she runs. It's just cause she's jealous Natalia "call-me-Nat" is young, pretty (aka, not a methhead), virginal, gets good grades, all of which happens to be in short supply among trailer trash. Whole bucket of crabs. They messed up their lives, so they hoping to see her mess up hers. Waiting. And none of that matters, because she's running and she's alive and the bugs that live in her are shaking off their terrible youths to crawl into the dirt with the rest of these fuck-ups.
Nat is more spite than girl. Head up high, shoulders back, don't give them a thing.
Assistant coach sees her at track and field that spring and asks if she's tried soccer. She hasn't. Soccer is like, preppy coastal shit for kids whose parents play Sister Christian in their SUV. She won't. She won't, won't, won't – Ass Coach, as she calls him, tricks her. It's not the last time a man'll try swindling her, but it probably is the last time anyone will be so... nice. She keeps waiting for a catch. Like, if Ass Coach is just trying to wait for a moment to jump. But if he is, he hides it well. Keeps telling this little white lies. Appealing to her sense of anti-authority. He wonders who she is to to just give up like that. Prove everyone right about her, he says, and she could swear he's smirking.
Nat wrinkles her nose, clicks her teeth at him. It's an ugly gesture, mama says she does it just like her daddy. She knows who she is.
And what she is, apparently, is homeless. Fight. Got in the middle of him and her mama. Nat is a good daughter, but her mother is a better wife. It was a recent development, no one can blame her for not being so quick. Not running the possibilities and dealing in numbers and weighing what's cheaper: breakfast – lunch – dinner or a good thing of codeine? It's warm. Nat likes warm. Nat likes warm whether it comes in the form of food or comfort or anything else. Maybe too much. If she had her head on straight she would've realized soccer team means showers and showers mean clean. JV Nat. Who knew? Her bugs are all moths, and Invaders are starting to think she's open for business: flies and lice and ugly black roaches. They fall into the drain where they've been nestled in her clothes. Ass Coach lets her do her laundry, too, and doesn't complain she never calls him by his real name. She couldn’t know it if she tried. Nat only knows how to win. Her bugs are all moths and they're itching her towards the light, and when she's looking straight up from the gutters all that's shining on her is the sun like a white-black ball when she's too deep into a trip. They call LSD sunshine, too.
But 1993 is also a doomsday plotter's wet dream. When her daddy's having one of his episodes, raving at the TV again and calling Mr President Clinton on the phone, Nat doesn't count days in months but days in disasters. First she marks practices: a boat capsize (54), crash (83), blizzards (184), hantavirus (13), flood (40), et cetera. It seems like clockwork that every time she gets home from another session with her JV girls, he's in the den talking about the end of the world again. Nat's good at math. She's even in AP Statistics. Her daddy calls her his good-luck charm. Thanksgiving is the 42D Clobber plane that crashes and kills all but one. She remembers midnight mass by the towers that collapsed in Malaysia, how many dead. It's forty-eight. That's how many people live in her trailer town.
But his favorite is Waco. Waco, Waco, no-one can compete with Koresh. Cause Koresh tried to gun down the government for his own kind of order, New World Order, what's the difference? Nat knows there's a sort of man that hates fellow man, the kind that votes libertarian and has all-American fantasies about how he'd gun down his neighbors in the zombie apocalypse. The kind that wants it all to go to shit so he can go right back to being an animal, like being a person was an unlucky detour on the evolutionary tree. She sort-of gets the appeal, Nat thinks. Some nights, she runs bare-footed on the pavement, and she doesn’t need to be high to feel her bugs floating her into a drift.
Grunge is on the radio. It's cool not to care now. She doesn't have to pretend she's not what she is anymore. Like she's someone who's getting out and doesn't tremor in the daylight. Nat takes too much and fights hard and hopes it's the latter that gets her so she goes out loudly and wild and not like something that laid up to die. Nat thinks, somewhere, she could be that kind of woman.