We Were Wolves

When I was 17, I came back from Seattle and got arrested in Sitka for being drunk and disorderly. I was flown back to my hometown of Juneau, spending a month at the Johnson Youth Center, the juvenile detention center in Juneau, before being released to a transitional house with girls I knew from the Miller Home. I hated being back where I came from, hated how the streets knew my name. The place was pitched as a stepping stone toward emancipation. Somewhere to stand while the state figured out what to do with me. A house that promised “independence” like a coupon clipped from a paper I couldn’t afford.

Our house mom, Lily, was a widow whose husband had been killed in a drunken fight years before. Some days she was easygoing, letting us stay up late or being ok with us switching laundry days without a fuss. 

Other days, she picked at us like a starving crow. 

Five minutes late to dinner and we lost points. Dishes not put away on schedule, points gone. Points meant privileges: phone time, TV, and a later curfew. 

She kept all the good food in her office-bedroom behind a locked door: cereal with cartoon colors, peanut butter that didn’t taste like chalk, anything that wasn’t flour or oats. She smoked skinny Capri cigarettes and played Solitaire on the computer until the screen burned a ghost of cards into the glass. If she liked you, she’d let you smoke in there with her. Her son had the room with the bathroom and never did chores. That was our department.

Still, I was safe, and there was food. That counted.

Soon enough, I took to drinking Little Kings in the bathroom. Small seven-ounce bottles that hid easily in my oversized green ADIDAS sweatshirt. I got a job at the Federal Building, working the register at the cafeteria. I went along with the plan. I was never caught drinking, but I felt lousy about it because I was showing up to AA, nodding along, saying the words. The doctor at JYC had told me my liver was a little enlarged for my age. He said it in a white suit, glowing in a dark orange room. I’d looked in the mirror my first week there and saw a skeleton, something unhuman looking back. I knew what alcohol did to me. I didn’t care enough to stop.

There were good moments in the house, proof that even ruined soil can grow something. A Super Bowl party with so much food it felt like a dare. A shiny Christmas, our tree soft with tinsel, all of us taking turns placing the angel on top like we were promising ourselves something bright.

My roommate was Marion, quiet, sharp-eyed, and demure. I had met her a few years before when she came to the Miller House for day treatment. Depression. Most of us thought she was just a teenage ghost, someone who wouldn’t play along with how we were supposed to be; loud, hungry, flirty. Years later, her depression had a name: Hodgkin’s. One afternoon after she had self-administered chemo, she had punctured the port, and the blood started squirting out. I had about thrown up and took action, getting us into the car, zipping off to the hospital, babies in tow. But that was years later. At the transitional house, we all made room for the fact that each other’s bodies and heads were fighting battles we couldn’t see.

The day Tracy arrived, Marion and I were sitting on my bed talking about Washington, about what life looked like when you pretended it was happening somewhere else. Tracy had been transferred from Sitka to the program a few weeks after the cops pulled me out of a trailer and into the back of a car. I gave her a big hug. I had sent her the most obnoxious Garfield card after I got my first paycheck. Tracy and I were thick as thieves and had run together for years.

“What’s Seattle like?” Marion asked.

“Great, in some ways,” I said. “Hard when there’s no money for food or smokes.” I was deciding whether to crack a Little Kings there or take it to the bathroom and gulp it like cough syrup. I knew Tracy could keep a secret. Marion, I wasn’t sure about, not because she talked, but because she noticed.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m out,” Marion said. “My mom says she can get me on with the state, but I can’t see a nine-to-five job. It sounds boring.”

I bounced up, sitting cross-legged. “I’ve got a secret. Do you two want to drink?”

Their eyes went big; sometimes I felt older than the other girls, like I’d lived three lives by seventeen. It made me generous and mean in turns.

“I’ve got some Little Kings. I’ll share if you want to partake.”

Yeah. I used big words.

We moved like we were planning a heist. We needed to go outside to my stash anyway, so we smoked a cigarette, made sure no one was watching, and pulled a plastic bag out of the sparse trees beside the house. We carried it back wrapped in my sweatshirt. Lily sat in her office, clicking through Solitaire. She didn’t look up.

“Bad thing about these is you need a can opener,” I said, pulling one from my top drawer like a magician. It felt good not to be alone with it for once. We sat between the two beds on the floor and split six bottles. 

Two each. 

The first step toward emancipation was supposed to be moving in with a roommate. A few months later, someone else needed the bed at the transition house.

The Federal Building with the cafeteria I worked at was right across the street from a place my casemanager had found, so she had thought it was perfect. 

“Independent living,” they called it, as if it were a brand. 

What it meant was I had the freedom to spend my whole paycheck on booze and weed and cigs and then steal my roommate’s food when I got hungry. She worked long hours. I hardly saw her. I told myself that not seeing someone meant I wasn’t stealing from them. That’s one of the lies you learn early.

I told myself I’d stop drinking. I’d be eighteen soon. Then what? That’s the question the state never answers. What happens when the busywork ends and you’re still a kid with a grown-up body and no idea how to live life?

After a month, I disappeared and went on the run. 

I remember a party in the Valley in someone’s trailer, a hand on my back, a laugh I didn’t like. I woke in the hospital with an IV in my arm and a nurse telling me I was lucky. When my blood alcohol fell below a number that meant I was allowed to be processed, they walked me over to JYC. It was almost summer—the most precious, shortest season in Juneau—and I was staring at pumpkin-colored cinderblock, a kiddie jail painted sweet. Again. I kept thinking of the sun blushing the water outside, of the way the air smells like a wet coin in June.

A social worker set it up for me to go live with my auntie Leah.

Leah was different. She wasn’t a foster parent or a woman renting me a safe room because the state paid her for it. Leah was family, the aunt I didn’t have by blood but always had in my life. She’d known me since I was a baby. When my mother needed a safe couch or a ride or a smoke and a laugh, Leah was there. They had been best friends from their teen years, and when I was 12 Leah was medivaced to Seattle. She had just returned to Juneau only weeks before welcoming me into her home. 

She picked me up in her blue Subaru on a day so bright the mountains cut the sky open. We smoked marloboros, listening to John Couger Melloncamp in the tape player in the car and smiled, catching eachother up the whole drive. I told her about Seattle and about the transition house; she told me how she’d gotten clean and didn’t drink anymore. She showed me the room that was mine. Really mine. We sat in the little kitchen with coffee and I felt the knot in my shoulders loosen.

She’d told me what happened with her drinking. Years earlier, they’d medevacked her to Seattle when her liver gave out. Hep C from sharing needles. My mom said she got it from my dad, but who knows. Leah never said. She talked instead about school, how close she was to finishing her degree, and how good it felt to have me there.

“Amber,” she said, smiling, all pearl and warmth, “this is your house too. You know that, right?”

I nodded, surprised at the way the words landed like a warm fuzzy blanket.

When we all lived out on North Douglas, I used to go to Leah’s whenever I needed out of my mother’s trailer. Safe wasn’t a feeling I had often, but I had it there. Mom and Leah would sit up and drink and sing to the same songs. “Between a Laugh and a Tear” on repeat while I watched Chris and Tiana, the little ones, and drifted to sleep on the couch with the TV humming.

Summers, once I was old enough to remember, were the best: me in the back of Leah’s Pinto, windows down, music up, the loop downtown again and again.

Past the bus stop, past the cruise ship docks, waving out the window at people we knew. Gossip braided into the wind. 

In second grade, a teacher asked if anyone knew what “cruising” meant. My hand was the only one up. “Driving around downtown,” I said. The class laughed, and the teacher laughed with them. I didn’t know what was so funny. We were all telling the truth in our own ways.

By sixth grade, school wasn’t the point. 

Huffing gas before the first bell, mixing my mom’s weed with oregano and juice and crisping it in the oven, my latest scheme, to trade for a parent’s cheap booze: that was my curriculum. Not because I wanted to be bad, but because when you’re hungry, you learn to hunt. 

You find a pack. You figure out which adults want to help and which want to be heroes, and which will lock the pantry and call it love. You learn to tuck away what the doctor says, what the judge says, and you make a map out of the moments that feel like home.

Tracy and Marion and me, we were just girls doing our best with the scraps we were handed. We counted points. We counted smoke breaks. We hid Little Kings in the trees and shared them like communion. We held each other’s hair back and secrets close. We watched the way the sun slid down the mountains and promised, silently, that someday we’d follow it out.

We were wolves, not because we were wild, but because we knew how to keep one another warm.

Then the years took their cut.

Tracy vanished on February 14, 2019. Swallowed by fog and silence. A poster in the rain could never hold her laugh. Marion died on May 24, 2024, after the long, patient war she never asked to fight. We sat beside each other towards the end, counting breaths, promising to eat, to rest, to be kind. Because that’s what a pack does.

This is how I keep them: I say their names. I say we were girls who counted points and smoke breaks and still made room for gentleness. We earned our warmth. We taught each other how to live long before anyone taught us how to live with loss.

We were wolves. Not feral but faithful. We learned to carry one another through winters that didn’t end. 

Tracy: As I write this, today, October 19, it is your birthday. We will never stop looking. If you’re listening, Marion: I never stop talking to you.

And me. I’m still here, last prints in a stretch of fresh snow, tending the small fire of what we had. When the night comes, I lift my head and call. That’s what a wolf does for her pack. That’s how we find our way home.