ch.5

Today, sadly, it was Gym. Coach Torres couldn’t help that he had muscular calves, sculpted from years of running the miles back on his high school track team. He couldn’t help that he was also muscular from years of being a Gym teacher, having to help girls climb the rope or get off of the rings, from years of running the boys through the rules of football and soccer, and hockey. He couldn’t even help that he wore his shorts just a hair too short, or that he often didn’t wear his shirt because the janitors had no idea how to turn the heat off in the Gym (or the rest of the school for that matter). It really wasn’t even his fault that he would often come up behind you and give you a pat on the back for doing a good job, and was known to give out hugs to the kids that were going through a hard time, like Caroline McGee, whose mom died in a car accident last year. When she came back from being called to the office and went to the locker room to get her things together, he waited until she came out, gesturing for her to come up on the stage and hugging her, letting her fall into his embrace in front of the entire grade. Even this didn’t feel bad or strange to me; he was an older man, already with a full head of silver hair, and was just raised in a different time, a time when it was ok to try to comfort a student that was hurting, one that reminded you of your own children, a time when the only thing that was considered comforting was the physical touch of another human being that could empathize with what you were going through.

            I held together all through Gym, for whatever strange reason, even after Coach came out in shorts that were shorter than usual. Even after he came up behind me and patted me on the back, murmuring a “good job, Lill” to me. I held through after two of the Groping Couples that I had the misfortune of sharing a locker block with, rolled over, slamming my locker shut, and nearly catching my hand in it in the process, just because he had his hand up her shirt and they were two baby steps away from having sex on the floor. I held it together on the way home, when Lee’s hand crept from my knee up my thigh incrementally until he was one step away from giving me a Pap smear in the front seat of his truck. I held it through when I was busily digging in my purse for my keys and heard leaves crunching behind me- even if I did jump thirty feet into the air and yelp as if someone had held my hands over a bonfire, I still held it in. It was just when I walked into the house- shutting and locking the door behind me, and going around to check that all of the doors and windows were locked, as was my custom- and I noticed the blinking red light on the answering machine that I began to lose it. That blinking red eye, the one that never, in my entire life brought good news.

            I debated just leaving it, acting like I had never seen it, and letting Mom deal with it. But, no, I was a big girl now; it had been over two years since I had permanently moved into Mom’s house, not shuttling back and forth between Mom and Him every few weeks. I could handle it, this was just one phone call, and it was just one message. And I didn’t even know if it was from Him. It could very well just be a telemarketer that was trying to offer Mom some new kind of student loan that she didn’t want or need. But by the boulder that had dropped into my stomach when I saw the light, the feeling that I had since Gym class, of being too big for my skin, of feeling like I was trapped in some weird gore film where, at any moment, my organs were just going to explode from my body because they had mysteriously just gotten too big and stretched my skin to the point of explosion, I knew that wasn’t true. I knew who it was. And I knew exactly what He would say. I grabbed my iPod off of the kitchen table where I had thrown it with my purse and books when I walked in, and plugged the little white buds into my ears, turning it up all the way before I would turn on the answering machine. The whine of his voice cut through the music so I left the room, making three laps around the house, then going up the stairs and making another two before I came back, seeing the red button off and hit the button. Message deleted, the automated voice informs me. Thank God, I think.

            In my closet, in the veryvery back, there is a small crawl space. At one point, it must have been where a family of mice or maybe even bunnies (in my imagination, it was always bunnies. We had a class pet that was a baby mouse when I was in second grade, and a class pet that was a family of bunnies when I was in third. I always liked the bunnies best and would often finish my tests early so that I could just go and sit in the Reading Corner with one of the bunnies snuggled up to my ear, feeling the soft down tickle inside, making me shiver with excitement and a happiness that I couldn’t quite put a name to but that I later realized was a feeling of safety and security that was brought every time I could feel another heartbeat next to mine. The same feeling that I got when Lee lay in my lap or held me in bed) that had burrowed through the outside wall into the closet, maybe for the winter. But by the time that I had moved in full-time, any and all animals, rodent or otherwise, had vacated, leaving me a small hole that I could fit my entire arm into, from wrist to shoulder blade (and could have fit in more, if my damn head didn’t get in the way). At first, this was where I hid my Supplies: the laxatives that I took regularly (Health class be damned), the penknife that had been my great-uncles-the one that he took to Korea with him and used to rip open packages when he got home- wrapped in one of Grandpa’s silk handkerchiefs, a box of double sided razors, and a pack of tissue. Later, after Miranda had a name, and grew in her power, I would write things down- the dark secrets that no one would ever know about me, because they were just too painful to tell people about, even things that she told me to write, often getting up in the middle of the night just to root around in the dark for a scratch piece of paper and a pen and scratch out what she’s telling me. I shoved all of my wrappers into a shoebox, filling it with them thrown over old letters from my therapy friends like tissue paper over a present on my birthday.

            I flip the pages that have already gotten brittle, crackling under my fingers like the fried chicken that Mom is making downstairs,  staring at the beautiful women with their huge eyes, puffy lips, thin arms and legs, ribs that you can make out through the wispy silk of their dresses. My scrapbook, the thing that finally convinced Mom that I needed to get help- along with the nightmares, of course- but that, somehow, I managed to dig out of the trash every time she found it and threw it away. Miranda hisses in my ear, but I ignore her, running my fingers over the beautiful faces, the eyes that looked as dead as the bodies should be. I run my hands over the waists that a man could wrap his whole hand around, the arms that resemble the brittle sticks that fell from the trees when the wind came after a hurricane, the legs that looked like the skeletons that were hanging up in the locker down at the school in the A and P classroom. I run my hands over these women as I read the quotes that I wrote in my child-like handwriting, the bubble letters with the hearts dotting the “I”s. this was what I wanted, this was what I aspired to be: beautiful…and dead.