I started this blog as a journal. I posted whatever I was thinking about whenever I felt like posting. I figured no one would read it so there was no reason to worry about what I was saying. I was mostly right. There was one person who started reading it. I will now start calling her Tag instead of The Asian Girl. Because I knew she was reading this, I didn’t say anything about my Plan.
Here’s what happened.
The show was a trap. I was hoping that Tag would show up like she did before to heckle me, burn my car, hurt people, or whatever scheme she had in mind to fuck with me. I suppose it’s a compliment in a way that she’ll drive an hour just to mess with me.
After our last encounter, Tag left home for the University of Illinois (ranked one of the top party schools by Playboy) where based on her social media she’s majoring in bong rips, binge drinking, and using her magic to make dudes go to town on each other while she records it to blackmail them. With Tag occupied by scholastic pursuits, I went back to Lyons to visit with her mother.
The one time I met her before (is it breaking and entering if the door is unlocked?) she was zombified by medication and trauma. And I figured that Tag had mind-screwed her as well. This time she was still pretty out of it. I used a cleansing spell I learned from Stella (RIP Stella, sorry about the zombie thing) to get whatever booze and pills she had in her system out. She was pretty freaked out to find a stranger sitting in her living room with her.
We got past that. I told her I knew what she had been through. I told her she wasn’t crazy. I told her that her daughter really could make her do things. I showed her how I could summon magic light. I showed her that it was all real. When I told her that I had an idea that might help her daughter, she broke down. She seemed so hopeless and so afraid and so lost that I almost started crying myself.
I don’t know anything about raising kids. Maybe some people are irredeemable pieces of shit and you can’t help them. But I like to think that a teenager isn’t set on any path yet. Maybe no one is ever. I asked Tag’s mom, if I could take magic out of the equation, if she was willing to put in the work to try and help her daughter. Obviously it’s hard to lay down the law when your kid can mind control you into making amateur porn.
She blamed herself for her daughter being a blood magic murdering psycho. I guess that’s natural. Blaming yourself is a way to create the illusion of control. Whatever the problem is you tell yourself that you caused it, ergo you can fix it.
I was worried that her “solution” would be to reject her daughter. I’ve seen that many times. Parents have no idea how to help their fucked-up kid so they push them out of their life. The thinking must be that that exclusion will lead to healing. Somehow? Let kids go through their drama and maybe they’ll return when they’re straight again.
The problem with that is that if you treat someone like an outsider, they just become more of an outsider. Dealing with children who fall into addiction or lives of crime requires you to make incredibly tough decisions as to how to walk that line between support and enabling.
But Tag’s mom didn’t give up on her daughter. She said she’s willing to put in the work. I’m not even really sure what “the work” is. Therapy? Whatever the opposite of tough love is? Soft love? I don’t know. I told her that if money was an issue, I could help here and there. If she had to dedicate all her time to helping Tag, I would try and make that work. I told her that I could talk to Tag too, if she thought it would make a difference.
She was pretty shell-shocked. Seems like the normal reaction to someone coming into your house and saying “oh by the way magic is real and your daughter is an evil sorceress”. I stayed there for a couple days and we talked for hours and hours. She may now be the person I’ve talked to the most in my life. It was several months’ worth of talking for me. I was losing my voice by the time I went to bed each night.
She called Tag and begged her to come home so they could start over. Tag’s response was to text her mom a video of her pegging one of her professors. So, the Plan. The easy part was finding someone willing to drug a hot 19-year-old girl at a wrestling show. No surprise there. I won’t give away my recipe but I improved upon Gary’s “cure for magic”. I had someone slip her the concoction while she was in the crowd holding court with her minions and drinking peach schnapps.
Once I was relatively sure her ability to work magic was curtailed, I went out to get her. I know I can’t take her down in a magic duel. She had her normal posse of jock-assholes with her but I had Junior Necro, John Greyeyes, El Cid, and Karl with me. Somewhere out there, there’s probably a frat boy that’s drunk, violent, and pussystruck enough to start shit with 4 badass-looking wrestlers but Tag didn’t have any of them with her that night.
She seemed unfazed by the whole thing (that may have been the Risperdal) until I took her back to a room where her mom was waiting for her. That set her off. Lots of screaming. I was prepared to stick around and do whatever I could, but Tag’s mom asked me to leave. I think my presence was getting her riled up.
I didn’t see them again until after the show. Tag was in her mom’s car and they both looked like they had been bawling their eyes out. Obviously keeping her drugged all the time isn’t a long-term solution, but hopefully it can give them some time to do . . . whatever you do when someone is messed up. I think taking the book away from Tag will help too. I’m not sure how much power she has without it. Hopefully none.
Her mom was so grateful that it was embarrassing. She hugged me and started crying again and people in the parking lot were staring at us. I told her if she needed anything not to hesitate to call me. I would drop whatever I was doing and help in any way I could.
There’s still a big part of me that hates Tag. She murdered people. For nothing. For fucking nothing. And if I’m being honest, some of that hate is self-loathing that I put on her because I wasn’t able to stop it. But she’s a kid. She’s just a kid. She needs another chance. There is no such thing as a lost cause. If it seems like there is, you need to push harder. There’s no such thing as a dead end. If it seems like there is, you need to create an escape route.
Probably it will fail miserably. Probably she’ll come back at me with a death spell and that will be it for Amazing Grace. But I had to try. That’s all you can do in life. Try.
