Valerie
17
Reward My Thirst, but Also Other People's: A Memoir
The sun rose and everything fell. Before my eyes, a fleet of pink used car ads tumbled across the pavement like a gaggle of wild geese in the early dawn light. The vested woman, head packaged in a plaid fringed scarf and brown sock hat, turned to me, the crosshairs behind the square lenses of her glasses lining up on me and the boy with the yellow sheepdog hair. “Climb up there and walk around – see if you can hold 'em down,” she said. The smell accompanying ages of mildew and dust descended upon me like a veil. As I boarded the grimy bars and swung myself into the pit, the boy shifted before me on the mass of weather reports and editorials, a lanky, wobbling paperweight.
As most teenagers have done, I have spent a considerable amount of time around dumpsters due to the dark magic known as extra credit. As if by witchy incantation, students’ Saturdays vanish from 8:30 – 9:30 a.m. at the chanting of biology teachers across the city, and in this time slot habitually used for catching up on sleep, we find ourselves donning orange and gold fluorescent vests and carrying beer bottles from the back of someone’s van. I reflect spitefully on how I’ve been wronged as I separate piles of paper and plastic into their corresponding bins, hollow bottles clattering in a high-pitch rockslide as they rain from an empty cat litter tub. I will earn those ten points, I tell myself solemnly, swiping a grocery bag into its rust-stained bin with a flourish. At least I’m not doing the weird chanting.
Through the toil of many Saturdays I spent at Wesselman Recycling Center my freshman year, idle chat between students was customarily reprimanded by the adults at work, primarily the park groundskeeper, who held a brown half-peeled banana in one hand and brandished the other in the wind like a banner as he directed traffic. Likewise, I did everything in my power to avoid recycling as I waited for wheels to skid across the pavement and slow, fifteen-year-olds pacing round their trunks like a pack of ragged dogs encircling a stray cat, howling. I considered sifting through the discarded magazine bin to uncover the celebrity gossip of old as I kneaded my frozen, clammy fingers together, too grossed out to slip them into my jean pockets for fear of Miller Lite residue. Sitting on the concrete beside the aluminum disposal trailer, I was just recalling the Brangelina breakup of ’06 when a man with a silver, feathery head brusquely ordered get back to work. Begrudgingly, I did, and my world changed.
This is when I discovered Coke points.
I had never before noticed the thin, black letters inked in the guts of a flimsy, cardboard 12-pack, but as I shoed through truck bed after truck bed of junk, I sometimes noticed a long, rectangular strip clipped from the corner of a Coke or Sprite. As I would later discover, the codes inside the boxes were part of a Reward My Thirst campaign, an incentive to buy Coke products, wrangle in points with the box codes, and spend those points on prizes from the website. It was perfect. If other people weren’t going to use their codes, I would, and reap the glorious rewards of their points. Eagerly, I researched the prizes I could earn on the site, but the only one of interest to me was more Coke.
My family has long wrestled with an addiction for soft drinks, me especially. Considering that I was then newly proclaimed street-legal, working a minimum wage job, and just cashed my first pay check two minutes before the bank closed, I felt like nothing could hinder me from satisfying that desire for a 79-cent drink. The freedom was biting. For me, a short trip to town would almost always merit a Polar Pop from the Circle K, a tall Styrofoam cup filled with sweet, bubbly death liquid that flooded the lid when I punched in the straw. A gas station for me has since become a House of Vice. Drinkers get their booze. Gamblers get their lottery tickets. And for people like me, we get our Coke.
I realize how dangerous my artificially-sweetened addiction can be. In fact, I often imagine my future self in vivid detail twenty years from now, thirty years from now, still shackled to my old habit. My face comes into focus as I’m lying on the couch, reaching toward a lofty 44-ounce cup. It stands tall, proud, sealed with the shining red crest of Circle K. Stretching fiercely, my eyes form narrow slits and my features harden to rock. The table is maybe three feet away, but I can’t reach it because my upper arms weigh 500 pounds. It is a nightmare grounded in reality that daunts me and my family alike, but I can’t admit my true concern to my family for fear they would stage an intervention, take steps to slow the Coke intake. I’d go through withdrawal.
Just to back up and clarify, I am not an obese monster. I’m no stretch of wire, but I’d deem myself average in body mass. I’m healthy and seventeen, two facts I assert as my excuse for returning to the demon drink. And when Coke points came into my life like a sweet blessing from Jesus, I had all the more reason to keep Coke in my life, and to get it for free, mailed via coupon. On Saturday mornings, you could find me at the recycling center, hidden stealthily behind a green paint-chipped dumpster with my stash of cardboard boxes, ripping the codes free like a rat hunched over a discarded box of chow mein.
In this way, I succeeded in concealing this hobby from my friends and the other students in order to avoid being framed as a thrifty sociopathic weirdo. It was the high-school-world equivalent of a body in the freezer. Or it could be worse; the story could spiral beyond the realm of truth. I could already hear the rumors buzzing around violently like wasps in my head. “Did you hear about the Valerie girl?” someone would say in the cafeteria, directing her friend’s eyes to me, unsuspectingly eating my chicken sandwich tray a few tables over. “She collects cardboard. From dumpsters.”
“That’s not what I heard,” the friend would say, eyes shining with an air of scandalous importance. “I heard she takes it home and eats it. Like a goat.” And then a drop of ketchup would land onto the flap of my zipper.
Although I was self-conscious of this odd little quirk, it was not something I could hide from my family. As I amassed more and more points from the Cokes other people paid for, coupons sailed into the mailbox, and in turn, my family began saving codes for me. My sister, Jaclyn, would send me texts of upturned bottle caps and so did her fiancé, Gage. In a way, helping me get my codes had become a family rite of passage of sorts. My sister Susan’s new boyfriend began asking his coworkers for their bottle caps on his work trips to Chicago, presenting to me the plastic bag from his jacket pocket like a shiny gift with which to win over my heart.
However, as the school year winded together and recycling days grew fewer, I hungrily sought more codes to replenish the rippling stream of coupons. At weddings, I’d frequent the refreshment table, pour a Mello Yello from a two-liter, and forget to screw the cap back on, cupping it in the palm of my hand and slipping it into the narrow pocket of my pink dress. Gage would assist in the effort by going on brief missions of his own, feigning indecisiveness as he selected an assortment of shallowly filled bottles one by one and dropped their caps into his outer suit jacket pocket. We’d then return to the candlelight of our white, silk-clothed table, passing our little victories to Jaclyn who would then save them for me in her purse.
There was one person not compelled to love me by an everlasting blood bond with whom I did share my secret: my best friend, Erin. That fall, our moms dropped us off at the West-side Fall Festival on Tuesday after school. The oil and grease were condensing in the air, so heavy I felt them seeping into my pores as we filed through row after row of paint-scratched parish food booths. With bratwurst in hand, I took in the sights of festival season: the moms with cumbersome two-seat strollers, young children gripping puffy, foil-wrapped pretzels, the stoners giving each other tattoos in the grassy median. Suddenly, I dug my rubber heels into the blacktop, swatting Erin on the shoulder as we passed one burn-barrel-sized ice cooler. Folded stacks of cardboard in Christmas colors were tucked discreetly beneath, lighting up and glowing in the back of my head like the strings of bulbs on an evergreen.
I could taste the bubbles.
I turned to Erin. “Would it be wrong?” I asked. “Would it be wrong?”
We approached the dark-haired woman beside the cooler who sat in a green mesh lawn chair, wiping icy water from the cans with a dirty shop towel as she collected dollar bills. I bought a Cherry Coke and Erin bought a Mello Yello. “Excuse me ma’am,” I asked. “Do you think I could use that cardboard there for a school recycling project? It’s for school, I swear.”
She skimmed me up and down with her eyes, interrupting the rhythm of money-taking. “I guess so,” she said, flashing her gaze from me to Erin to her tin box of cash.
“Thank you!” I pulled case after case free and swerved in the opposite direction, laughing feverishly as I handed all but one box to Erin, and began to tear.
In May, I found myself at the final Saturday of recycling, my last haul. The air felt fresh, almost unusual, radiating with warmth. I quietly scrutinized each car, surveying the make and model, understanding from experience that older, rickety cars often demonstrated the owner’s more blatant disregard for health and safety, thus making them more likely assets to my cause, and also duly noting that old men tended to be more likely to buy name brands, a characteristic I speculated derives from their sense of comfort in the familiar, the reliable. My eyes were squinted in fixation at the “Proud Nam Vet” bumper sticker on a dark green Grand Am when I noticed a brown paper bag on a pathway directed straight toward the largest dumpster in the lot. In the arms of my bio classmate, Maggie, I could see the gleaming red and white cardboard flicker at me, a bittersweet goodbye smile, and it occurred to me that all this cardboard junk we’ve been collecting is basically Hindu; the image of a Raisin Bran box struck my mind like quivering thunder – this Coke in the next life. The scene rolled frame by frame as I saw the bag passed along to a boy hanging from the dumpster’s side ladder, preparing to fling it to its doom, its reusable, eco-friendly destiny.
“Wait!” I yelled, sprinting in front of a Buick which had just shifted to drive. “Can I see that one sec?”
Maggie’s eyebrows lifted. She dropped the bag to the ground, holding her hands up as if to surrender. “What are you doing?” She stared at me behind long, dark bangs as I sifted through the rubble, plucking out the Cokes.
“The codes,” I said. I handed the rest of the bag up to the boy. “I wanted the codes.”
I latched my eyes to my fingers bending the cardboard until I heard a laugh pulsing through the air. The lines of her face softened, eyes glinting. “Awh!” she said. “That’s so cute! You’re like a little old lady!”
I laughed shakily, ripping the fold from a Mr. Pibb with the other three flattened cartons pinched under my arm like a clothespin. My pockets bulged with the shape of folded cardboard.
And in that second, it was over. I had done it. I was reckless. In a fleeting instant, my secret was revealed, my body in the freezer uncovered. I searched myself for the aching sensations of dread, embarrassment, regret, but somehow I returned with pocketed hands as if I had taken a stroll through my heart and come back with little to show. Now that I had set the truth free, it didn’t feel at all like I’d imagined. The boy on the ladder was rifling through the top layer in the dumpster, glancing down at me and back. “Here,” he said, passing down a Sunkist box. “Does this help you out?”
It wasn’t even Coke brand; it was Dr. Pepper/Snapple Group Inc., but I guessed normal people wouldn’t know that. “Thanks,” I said, smiling, and accepted the empty box.
Around me, the same bustle as always churned in motion, melting into the smell of hot gasoline. My elbows swelled with cardboard, and quietly I ushered the pieces to the serene, deserted side of the corner dumpster. Sunlight seeped through the ladder spaces above me and onto the shoulder of my shirt like a warm hand. “Alex.” I heard the voice of the Wesselman Park woman, and down the lot the sheepdog boy moved in her direction. “Take these to the trailer. Watch it when you walk in, though – there’s tons of paper. Actually, I might have you climb back up there with the newspaper if the wind picks up.” From the corner of the dumpster wall, I followed the yellow head as he mounted the stringed bales of paper into the crook of his arm and stepped up the trailer’s metal platform. In a quick wrench, he tightened the stack to his chest. I could feel him take a breath as he paused, fingers digging into the pages. My mind swirled back to the two of us in the rusty dumpster, the pinch of frail slits of cardboard I had carefully concealed against my thigh, like the key to a diary. A moment passed. Alex stared at the door handle and slowly turned the knob.
