Thursday, January 13, 2011

ch. 11

Everyone says that graduation is supposed to be the “closing of a chapter and the beginning of another” but, in my opinion, it’s just stupid. My brother, Jason, didn’t walk- of course, we were all just happy that he made it through high school, much less if he walked across the stage to get his diploma or not. But, of course, that was during The Transition, the time that I was in the middle of moving into Mom’s house and was a total and complete wreck. He didn’t want The Nightmare there either, so he just had his diploma mailed and, when it came, went out to dinner.  It’s been too much work to get here- not the school work, because that has never really been a problem, but the physical paperwork that you have, the loose ends that you have to tie up to get out of high school. I had spent most of the last month running around school with the other Seniors, a freshly printed checklist of the things that we had to get done in hand, a red pen to check each thing off in the other, going from the office to the library, from classrooms to get our final grades and any assignments that we had missed, to our homeroom, time after time after time, to get fitted for graduation robes and hats, to fill out the paperwork and get our seating charts. It had been a tough month, trying to get all of this done when the college acceptance letters had just started coming in, and the rumors of so-and-so having sex in the limo on the way to prom and her being two months pregnant were starting to surface. Many of the girls were getting their robes a size or two big in order to try hiding their growing bellies beneath them, trying to just pull the farce over the eyes of the administration in time for them to get across the stage and get that piece of paper that frees us from the horrors of high school and throws us into the party-hearty atmosphere of college.
            The gym is filled to the point of bursting, families, friends, and classmates running around in the same eddies that they have been drifting in for the last four years, spots of blue standing out among the regular clique uniforms of Aeropostal, American Eagle, and Abercrombie and Fitch. Girls teeter on their four inch heels, fixing their pearls and makeup, boys tugging on the ties that they can’t help but hate and wish they could take off. Mothers and fathers stand around in the typical “graduation pose” (one parent flanking the graduate) for the pictures that will grace their desks at work for the next five or ten years, alongside the ones of their new grandchildren, and marriage announcement photos. I push through the crowds, Lee holding my hand in a Deathgrip so that I don’t get lost and pushed into one of the “friend” photos that you feel that you have to get into just so that you aren’t rude, until we finally spot Jess, standing with the graduation photographer right beside the double doors to the outside, passing him a cigarette, with the one that she will smoke tucked behind her ear. Her hair is a higher Mohawk than she would ever be able to get away with at school, but the teachers, preoccupied with getting robes fixed and making the boys and girls keep away from each other, drift right by her- so, really, it’s not that much different from a regular school day- and her robe is folded neatly over her arm. She turns and grimaces at me, shaking it. “They’re going to make me wear it! Even though I made a point of telling them that it was just another way that they were sucking the individuality out of us all and trying to make us into just another nameless face in the crowd.”
            “Wow, they didn’t get the significance of that statement?” Lee joked, nodding to the photographer who, getting uncomfortable that he was standing around, smoking with an underaged girl and her friends, nodded and hurried out to wrestle people into taking “candid” shots for their overpriced graduation packets.
            “NO!” she exclaimed, angrily. I pull the cigarette out from behind her ear, sticking it in her mouth and pulling the lighter out of Lee’s pocket, lighting hers up, then taking one from the pack she always kept tucked into the top of her combat boots, lit that up, too, handing it to Lee. 
            “I’m going to pretend that I’m not seeing this.” Mr. Abrams, the headmaster, mumbles as he walks in the door past us, “But if you two aren’t done with those in three minutes, then we might not let you walk.”
            He turns and Jess makes a face at his back, taking a deep drag on her cigarette. “Just because I need controlled substances to deal with this pack of fucking morons doesn’t mean that I should have my diploma withheld.” She mutters. “I should get a fucking medal that I haven’t killed these idiots in this last four years!”
            The graduation photographer- not the tall, thin, older one that was smoking with us, but a short, fat, old man with grey hair and a purple vest and bowler on- herds us onto the front steps. “Ok, everyonelookhappylookexcitedlooklikeyouwanttobehere!” he yells to us, moving everyone around so that we could all be lined up shortest to tallest, just as we have been lined up since before we could even remember. “Put out your cigarette please!” he calls, and Jess glares at him. “Ok, kids, now let’s scooch a little closer to each other, act like you like each other!” he calls, crouching down behind the camera, looking through it, getting up, moving someone over, getting back behind the camera, and calling out “On three! One….twooo….three!” Jess raises her two middle fingers, her cigarette hanging out the side of her mouth, while Lee pulls me onto his shoulders and I raise my two fingers to the sky, too.
               
            There are some times that Mom just doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand why I dress like I do, why sometimes I fly off the handle over the most seemingly trivial things, why there are some days that I can be fine until someone just makes one comment too many and I bite their heads off. She doesn’t understand why I sleep with my nightlight, or why I close and lock the door when I take a shower, or why I hate when she walks in on me when I’m getting dressed. I’m a very temperamental person, she always explains to others, but she doesn’t seem to understand me at all sometimes. Over Thanksgiving, I had gotten up early, meeting the sun on my run around the block, greeting its cotton candy pinkness with my sweat and tears, pushing through my own pain in my effort to meet its utter, pure beauty. I came in, quietly, holding on to the jamb of the front door to keep it from squeaking, and was on my way to my room when I heard the familiar clink of glass on ceramic- the noise of coffee pouring. I crept to the door leading from the living room into the kitchen, right where they could see me if they looked into the mirror front of the microwave, but that if they turned around, all they would see would be the white painted doorjamb.
            “You know, Dad, sometimes I just don’t understand.” Mom was sitting at the table, her morning coffee in front of her, running her hands through her hair.
            My Grandpa turned another page of the newspaper, snorting, and took a sip of his orange juice. “Well, honey, sometimes we’re not made to know everything.”
            “But it’s like she’s a totally different person. Like she’s not the sweet little girl that I had. There are sometimes that I can still see bits and pieces of it, but it’s like there are parts that are just missing. I mean…this food thing. Where does that come from?” she sighs, taking a long sip of her coffee. “I just don’t understand. The other day, I was sitting there and asked her about lotion that was in her bathroom and she just had a fit! Not a teenager fit it was a six-year-old going to her room and slamming the door and screaming like a banshee fit! I just don’t understand it. And it’s not just me, she does this to her boyfriend, too! It’s like she has these times that she just hates everyone and doesn’t want to be human anymore or something.”
            I sighed, looking up at the microwave clock. 7:02. Time to get ready for church. Tears prick at the back of my eyes as I walk slowly (more like limp) into the bathroom and turn the shower on high, as hot as I can take it.  Getting out, I slowly brush through my hair, taking care to put conditioner on the ends like Momma had taught me when I was little and slowly running a flatiron down it to straighten it out. Taking my time, I button up my shirt, taking care around my rib bones poking through my skin and the scabs healing up on my arms and collarbones. I pull myskirtmylastskirtthatfits on, tucking my shirt in and pulling the suspenders that I hijacked from Grandma and Grandpa’s old house over my arms, tipping the fedora that I found with Lee at the thrift store years ago, at a jaunty angle over my eyes.
            My heels crunch over the stones in the church parking lot, filled with couples who, within the hour, will be dancing around the aisles “een tha pawahful, mercahful naehm of Jey-sus” to the sounds of the “mercy band”. This was the southern Baptist church; welcome to the circus, where, if you aren’t careful, you can end up saved. We walk in slowly, my hand tucked in the crook of Grandpa’s arm, stopping to talk to all of the couples that we have known since before Mom was born, catching up on the monotonous small talk that I had grown accustomed to- even if it still made me crazy. We walk in to the main chapel, Grandpa disappearing into a door set into the wall to change into his choir robes, and Grandma herds us into the pew closest to the front, where all the little old pink haired ladies sit gossiping and talking, daggers cloaked in taffy coming out of their mouths.  We settle in and Grandma turns around, talking to one of her “Oldestanddearestfriends” about the weather (“it’s been hot as blazes these last few days! I do hope that handsome new weather man on Channel five is right and we’re going to get some rain later this week!”) , her grandbabies (“Well, Joshy is doing so wonderful! He’s going to be graduating soon and already has his acceptance letters from Montevallo and Auburn, but poor thing he’s just praying and praying for that letter from LSU. Too bad Jamie has gone by the wayside. You heard about her, of course, running off with that black boy! Well, it just made me happy that her Grandpa is dead because that would have just killed him! We still pray that she’ll find her way back to our precious Jesus soon.”), her husband (“dead twenty years but still in the front of my mind every single day”) and any other trivial thing that pops into her head as she’s sitting at home, watching her bunions grow and her family die off one by one.
            “Now that is just a disgrace!” she whispers, harshly. “Your poor granddaughter, she must be in such turmoil! To dress so unladylike, it’s just horrible! Marilynn, you really should do something about it!” she whispers, poking me in the back with her nails, filed to sharp points like dragon’s talons. I bite the insides of my lips, slouching down in the pew and staring at the preacher, biting back snarky comments about his new toupee and the spray tan that makes him look like the new cast member of the Willy Wonka factory.
            I drop my bags in the front hallway, smiling around at the house, glad to be back here where no one would criticize my dress, or how I talk or act- except maybe Jess, but then again, she criticized everything. It was her job in the cosmic scheme of things. Classes started back on Monday, but until then I had three days of purely nothing to do. I walk up the stairs, open my door, and collapse on to my bed next to Oreo, my cat, who curls up next to me, purring. I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, petting her fur and zoning out when I hear my window open with a creak. I look up and Lee is sitting there, smiling and breathing heavily, struggling to get his jeans off of a tree branch and still maintain his balance. “Are you just an idiot, honey?” I ask, not making a move to help him, laying still so that I don’t disturb Oreo.
            “Well…I thought it would be a bit more romantic if I crawled up to your window and snuck in.”
            I snort, “Oh, yeah, ‘cause broken bones and snapped vertebrae are just so romantic.”
            He shrugs, “It was an idea….”
            “Yeah, honey, ideas from the man who invented the Axe flamethrower are not the most well-planned or well-thoughtout ideas in the world.”
            “Well,” he answers, flopping onto the bed, causing Oreo to jump up and run under the chair, “someone’s a little PMS-y, aren’t they?”
            I groan, rolling over onto my bed, “You have no idea, love. I’m moody and bloated. ”
            He digs in his pocket, pulling out a fresh cigarette pack and slapping it on his palm, handing me the first one. I take a deep drag and hand it back and we sit in silence for a little bit just passing the cigarette back and forth. He takes a deep drag, flicking the butt out the window, and rolls over, pinning me on the bed between his hands and kisses me, exhaling the smoke into my mouth. I roll over, exhaling, and kiss him again. “I missed you.” I smile, wrapping my arms around his neck. He kisses down my neck and I groan.
            “I missed you, too, babygirl.”
            Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump. I wake up, sweating, curled into the crook of Lee’s arm on my bed, the TV a blank blue screen staring at us in the darkness. My heart feels like it’s about to thump out of my chest, it’s beating way too fast. I sit up, and immediately lay back down, feeling lightheaded, shaking Lee’s arm softly, feeling like I can’t get a good grip on it, like it’s too hard to be able to shake or to move. I can’t breathe, and shake his arm harder, willing him to wake up and see me and find out what is going on. He sits up, sleep crowding the edges of his vision, smiling sleepily until he sees my face. “Holy shit, Lilla, what’s wrong?” I point to my chest, making the sign for CPR that we got taught in fifth grade onehandontopoftheotherpressupanddownintheairaboveyourchest. He lays me down on the bed, flipping me over so quickly that if I had any breathe left, it would be gone, and lays his head on my chest, putting one hand in front of my nose. Grabbing his cell phone off of the bedside table where it was sleeping peacefully next to mine, he flips it open and dials, keeping his head on my chest, silently trying to keep up with the beats of my overworked heart. “C’mon, pickuppickuppickup!” he grits his teeth, frustrated, and starts hitting the pillow beside me. A voice comes on the line and he starts speaking, but I can’t hear the words, it’s like in the movies when something stressful or life-threatening happens and you can’t hear what they’re saying, all you can do is see the lips moving and sad, melancholy music playing. I’m watching his lips form words, the edges of my vision getting dark and blurry, and then it’s like a train rushing by my head, drowning out all the words but the ones that are in your head and I close my eyes, see Miranda standing there, smiling.
            You’re going to die, Lil, just get used to the fact. You’re going to die and end up cold in the hospital hall. No one will care that you’re dead, they’ll all be happy that they don’t have to deal with you anymore- your mom will be happy that she doesn’t have a fuckup child anymore. Lee will move on- maybe he’ll even look Bobbi up again and find her to fuck. At least she’s prettier, and probably less frigid than you are. At least he won’t feel like he’s fucking a skeleton when he’s having sex with her. And your brother? Oh, he’ll be ecstatic! He’ll be so happy that he’s the only child again, that he doesn’t have to share the spotlight with some freaky reject that can’t even kill herself right, that had to wait until her body shut down, that couldn’t just put a bullet through her head and get it over with. Your dad, too, you know The Nightmare. Yes, dear, I know about him, I know all about him. The rage that you felt about that, the anger, all the darkness that you stored up in your soul that was telling you to kill him? The anger that made you grab a butcher knife that night? That made you think up ways that you could kill him and make it look like an accident? That was me. That was all me. He spawned me, he created me in your head. You thought that you got away from him, didn’t you? You thought that you would never have to deal with him again, that you could just run away and never have to tell anyone what happened, that you could just ignore his calls and his letters and all of that- that you could just tell your Mom that you didn’t want to talk about it, and that would make it go away? No, it didn’t. He made me, he created me to make your life a living hell, and you fed me until I could be strong enough to not have to have you in the house with him to torture you. Your dad might be the only one that comes to see you, the only one that will come to your grave. Your stepmom, too, the cunt? She’ll come, too, you’d better believe that. You were such an attention whore that she’ll want to make sure that you’re dead and gone, that she doesn’t have to vie with your dad for his attention anymore, that she can finally have him all to herself.
            I can feel myself slipping in to darkness, the vague feeling of Lee desperately trying to push his breath into my lungs and pressing down on my breastbone, trying to get me to come back, but not trying to kill me or hurt me any worse that he had to. I want to scream at him; want to scream so many things, just so that if I do die than I don’t have to think that I left him without telling him all the things that I should have. I want to tell him all about my dad, about Miranda, how much I love him, how I could see angels when we made love, how I could feel safe when we were together, how much I wanted a life with him before this disease and Miranda took away any life that I could have had. I’m screaming at him in my mind, willing him to hear me, even if it’s just by telepathy. I’m screaming all the things that I thought I would have years and years to tell him; screaming the things that you should be telling your loved ones in a hospital room when you’re surrounded by tubes and wires, knowing that you’re going to die soon but being secure in the fact that you have weeks, even days to get out anything and everything that you wanted to. I always imagined that I would have days to plan what I wanted to say, that I would be giving deathbedconfessionals and telling a priest about all of the things that would send me to hell- if there was such a place. That I would be able to tell Lee about anything and everything that I had done to him, that I had thought, that I had wished. I thought that I would be surrounded by children and grandchildren, not just by Lee in my bedroom, his tears falling on my face as he tried desperately to bring me back to life. And then- there was blackness.
            In the movies, when the heroine has almost died, there is always The Scene. You know the one: the screen is fuzzy and starts to fade back in slowly; there’s always A Voice that starts off very far away and gets closer and closer to you, getting louder and louder, like the volume is being turned up slowly. The heroine fades back into either a hospital room or with all of her friends crowded around her like aliens about to start probing her for their experiments. The doctor is always an older gentleman who treats her nicely for the first few minutes, looking older and distinguished with silver hair, a white jacket, and a stethoscope around his neck, looking through charts. He looks up, smiles, and explains to her what a “close call” that was.
            The reality, I shouldn’t have to tell you, is nothing like that. I woke up, alone, in a hospital room. There were voices coming from behind the curtain next to my bed, and the more that I listened, the more I could tell that it was a nurse talking to the patient in the next bed. She’d had a bad drug overdose and the nurse was not helping, I’m sure. I could hear her weeping. The nurse’s soft-soled shoes started toward the curtain and I quickly turned over, closing my eyes against the glare of the florescent lights, waiting until she had walked out and closed the door behind her. When I heard the click, I rolled back over. “Excuse me?” I called to the person on the other side of the curtain, “excuse me? Are you ok?” she was still weeping, but it slowed when she realized that I was talking to her. The curtain is pushed back and she looks at me, a mirror image, almost, of myself. Her long, stringy black hair was pushed off of her face, which was skeletal at best. There was a needle going into her hand, and prominent track marks up both of her arms. She looked at me with dead eyes, as if she expected me to pick up where the nurse had left off. “Are you ok? I could hear you crying….” I trailed off, not sure where to go with this. There is no etiquette for how to talk to people that are in the next hospital bed recovering from a drug overdose.
            “Yeah.” She answered, her voice raspy and sharp. “I’m fine. I’m just great.”
            “Ok…I just didn’t want you to take what that nurse said to heart. She seems like a bitch.” She turns back over, facing the wall, and continues to sob. The door opens and a doctor, a younger man with a hooked nose and salt-and-pepper hair, walks in.
            “Lillith?” he asks, checking his charts, and I nod. “Well, you gave everyone a scare there, dear.” He checked the charts again, “You had a sudden cardiac arrest- a heart attack- but your boyfriend got you here in time, faster than most would, and gave you CPR the entire way, from what he said when y’all got here.” He closed his charts and sat down, looking at me gravely, “You should be out within a few hours, whenever your family gets here to take you home.”
            “Wait, what?” I asked. “I thought that you were supposed to keep me for a week or something.”
            “Four days is the maximum that we generally keep a patient who’s had a heart attack, especially a younger one who seems to become more stable than an older patient, but you have been asleep for at least two days, Lillith. I guess that you didn’t realize it; we did give you a lot to help you sleep, especially for someone of your…” he clears his throat, “weight. Anyway,” he snaps his charts closed and stands up, “your family should be here soon to take you home. I hope that we don’t see you anytime soon, dear. Please take care of yourself, ok?”
            I nod, dumbly, and watch him walk out the door, staring at it in disbelief and then rolling back over to face the curtain that, sometime without me noticing, had been closed back.
            I walk into the door, closing it softly behind me. “Anyone home?” I call out, walking back toward The Nightmare’s bedroom, calling again. No answer. I stomp up the stairs and throw my bag onto my bed, going into the bathroom to wash my face and pull my hair back off of my face, then pulling my school uniform off and throwing it into the laundry hamper. Turning around, I twist my head so that I can see my back, checking the bruises running down the length of my spine that are turning black and blue. Gingerly, I touch some of them to see how tender they are and wince-they’re still incredibly tender- then touch some of the places that are bleeding. I pull the Neosporin out of my drawer in my bathroom, dabbing it onto the cut places and then inspecting the backs of my thighs, starting to dab it on the cut places down there, too. There’s a warm trickle making its way down the front of my thigh and looking at it, I groan “Shit!” the cuts on the front of my leg have opened up. Yet again. Pulling a wad of toilet paper off of the roll, I hold it on the cuts until I can pull my shorts up to hold it in place. Waddling down the stairs, I dig in the container under the kitchen sink for a bandaid, then pull down my shorts to put it onto the cuts. Pulling back up my shorts, I groan softly- even the softest cotton shirts and shorts that I can find still chafe the bruises that They left on me, so everytime that I move, it’s another reminder of what they have done to me. Turning around, I spot the butcher block that The Nightmare bought when he was really into cooking, when I would come home and find fresh-baked bread and there were fresh cookies every weekend. The butcher knife that he uses is sticking out of the top and an idea flashes across my mind. Maybe I can’t stop them from beating me, but there are things that I can stop.
            That night, it’s dark in my room, and I lay on my bed staring at my nightlight, based on a painting made by Degas that I fell in love with when I was taking ballet classes- two ballerinas dancing on a stage, the lights illuminating the smiles on their face, their shoes looking, even in the painting, like they were about to twirl off onto the wings of the stage. I feel swollen and sore everywhere, like I had just been beaten with a huge stick, and stay focused on the nightlight, trying to get to sleep.
            I couldn’t do it anymore. It was just getting to be too much. I was sitting in the floor of my closet, a razor pressed to my wrist, my earbuds in my ears. My back hurt from being hunched over for so long, my legs were screaming at me, chaffing against the cotton of my shorts, against the rough carpeting that had been in the closet for at least twenty years. My arms look as if vines are wrapped around them, red vines twined around my arms from the front to the back, pulling me down into the ground. The edge of the blade is crimsonred and I’m amazed by how dark my blood is- how rich it looks. I lick my lips, tasting salt, and am confused: why am I tasting salt? Why, when I am the happiest that I have been in most of my adult-life, am I crying? This does not compute, Will Robinson. Tears mean sadness, but this is not a time of sadness, this is a time of rejoicing, becoming happy that I will not have to take this for much longer, that soon I will be gone, in the ground, and not have to burden anyone anymore. I think of Lee, realizing that he will probably find someone else relatively quickly- relationships at our age are very shortlived, and someone that you “love” at twelve or thirteen is, by sixteen, just a superficial cut on your heart, one that you can barely see or feel anymore, one that no longer hurts or bleeds. 

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