I don’t think I’m afraid of Vinnie, but I track the movements of his hands carefully, bring my street feeling to the surface, just in case. When I was little and couldn’t sleep, I used to rub the bedsheet between my forefinger and thumb. I do this now with the underwear, the soft pink underwear, brand-new, left on my narrow bed with a little card. There were seven pairs, one for each day of the week. They had no holes, no stains, and they smelled like the plastic wrap they came in, not like funk and piss or period blood. Thinking of the underwear, feeling the clean cotton in my fingers, makes something shift inside me, like the loosening of stones after one is plucked from the pile, a groan, a settling, an exhalation of air—
“Nurse. Ava. Bought. Me. This. Underwear.”
I don’t know why I whisper it. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why words have formed now, I don’t know why these words. My voice is scratchy from not being used. I sound like a croaky frog. It’s a long sentence, my first in I don’t know how many days, and I know that he will dutifully log this: C. Davis spoke in a complete sentence while bandages being removed. C. Davis spoke about not having underwear. Patient does not usually volunteer to speak; Selective Mutism.
“That was mighty nice of her. Did you say thank you?”
I shake my head.
When I cut myself in the attic, I was wearing a T-shirt, underwear, and socks and boots. There was so much blood, Evan and Dump didn’t know what to do. They wrapped me in a bedsheet.
“You should thank her.”
I came to Creeley in hospital scrubs and slippers. Nurse Ava found clothes for me. Nurse Ava bought me brand-new underwear.
I should thank her.
The gauze and pads from my thighs look like stained streamers as Vinnie holds them up and lobs them into the bin. He pulls and clips with the tweezers.
It’s the same as my arms: it doesn’t hurt as he removes the stitches, but my skin twinges, prickles, as he pulls the tweezers up and out.
In a rush, it happens again, only this time it’s remembering what it’s like to cut, and cut hard. The way you have to dig the glass in, deeply, right away, to break the skin and then drag, and drag fiercely, to make a river worth drowning in.
Oh, it hurts to make that river. The pain is sharp and bleary all at once; curtains part and shut over your eyes; bull breath from your nostrils.
It fucking hurts, hurts, hurts. But when the blood comes, everything is warmer, and calmer.
Vinnie catches my eye. I’m breathing too fast. He knows what’s happening.
“Done.” He watches me carefully as I sit up. The delicate paper beneath me tears.
Ladders. The scars on my thighs look like the rungs of ladders. Bump, bump, bump as I run my fingers from my knees to the top of my thighs. Vinnie’s creamy hands are very dark against my paleness. It feels nice. When he’s done with my thighs, he motions for me to pull up my shorts and hands me the blue-and-white tub of cream. “You apply this twice a day. That shit’s gonna itch real bad now that it’s out in the air. Gonna feel tight and kinda prickly.”
I hug the tub to my chest. I can still feel his hands on my legs, the gentleness of his fingers on the ugliness of me. I kind of want his hands back, maybe curving around me this time. Maybe just being so light on me that my head could kind of fall against him, and I could stay there awhile, breathing him in, no big deal, heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat, like with my dad. Pressure builds behind my eyes.
I wipe my face, ignoring my trembling hands. Hot. My body is starting to heat up. I feel afraid. Vinnie clears his throat.
“Everybody’s in Crafts, girl. You want me to walk you there?”
“Room.” I hug the warm tub to my chest. “Room.”
Vinnie looks sad. “Okay, baby. Okay.”
—
Louisa is not in our room. They’re all at Crafts, bent over gluey Popsicle sticks, bags of buttons and yarn, reams of glittery star stickers.
My eyes are fierce with water and I bury my head in my pillow so no one hears me. My body is so, so sore from my wounds. I want Ellis, the Ellis who would dab my cuts and steal wine from her dad so we could cry together in her room, sipping from the bottle and listening to our music, watching the solar system night-light rotate and glow on her ceiling. Because when you’re hurt, and someone loves you, they’re supposed to help you, right? When you’re hurt, and someone loves you, they kiss you tenderly, they hold the bottle to your mouth, they stroke your hair with their fingers, right? Casper would be proud of me for my rational thinking.
I’m in a place filled with girls who are filled with longing and I want none of them. I want the one I can’t have, the one who is never coming back.
—
Where do I put them, these dead ones, these live ones, these people who hover about me like ghosts? Ellis once said, “You were too young to lose a dad.”
A little over a year ago, Mikey cried on the phone to me, “She never cut, that wasn’t her thing. Why did she cut? You were right there.” But he was miles and states away at college and didn’t know what had happened between Ellis and me. It was the last time we talked; after that, I was on the street, becoming a ghost myself.
My mother is alive, but she’s a ghost, too, her sunken eyes watching me from a distance, her body very still.
There are so many people who are never coming back.
When I’m done, when my body gets that worn, washed-out feeling from crying too much, I get up and stumble back down the too-bright hall to the nurses’ station. Vinnie was right, my scars itch horribly.
The outside of me is on fire and the inside of me is empty, empty. I can’t cut, but I need something taken away from me, I need relief.
Vinnie gives me the gold smile from behind the nurses’ station. All of the nurses have photographs pinned to the cubicle wall behind the desk. Kids, tons of them, chubby ones, skinny ones, unsmiling teenagers, and dogs, lots of dog pictures. Vinnie’s girls, they must be the ones in the frilly white dresses, with the dark, dark hair, just like his.
I point to my own hair, that awful nest. Just smelling it makes me feel sick, all of a sudden. I want it all gone, that last bit of being outside.
“Off,” I say hoarsely.
Vinnie holds up his hands. “Nah, nah. You wait till you earn your Day Pass, girl. Then you go out with the others, go to Supercuts or something. I’m not touching no girl’s hair.”
I pound my fist on the counter, lean in. “Now. Has to be now.”
“Puta madre,” he says under his breath.
He jerks his fingers to the Care room. “Come, come. And don’t cry, neither. There’s only one way with hair like that.”
In the cafeteria, it’s Isis who speaks first, her little mouth opening, macaroni and cheese sliding back onto her plate. “Holy fucking Christ, Chuck, check you out.”
Blue begins to laugh, a deep, infectious sound that startles Francie, who sits next to her and never eats. Francie smiles, too. Blue says, “I hate you, Silent Sue, but you look a shit-ton better. Almost human.”
Even Vinnie whistled as he ran the electric shaver across my scalp, my hair falling in heavy clumps to the floor. “A face! The girl has a face,” he said.
I peered at myself in the Care room mirror, a real mirror, a long one on the back of the door. I kept my eyes above my shoulders, just looking at my face, but not for too long, because I started to feel sad again, seeing me.
The girls get quiet as I start eating. You wouldn’t think it would feel strange to show your scars to a group of girls who are nothing but scars, but it is. I keep my eyes on my plate.
I’m going to rifle the lost and found for a long-sleeved shirt after dinner. I feel exposed and cold. I miss my ratty mustard-yellow cardigan that I used to wear before I left home. It kept me hidden and safe. I miss all my clothes. Not my street clothes, but my long-ago clothes, my band T-shirts and checkered pants and wool caps.
Isis swallows. “Christ, Chuck, what’d you use? You really went to fuckin’ to
wn.”
Isis has a terrier’s thin, nervous face. She twists the shaggy loops of her braids through her fingers. The others wait. From the end of the table, Louisa gives me a faint smile.
I loved the breaking of the mason jar. You had to strike it hard, because it was thick. Unlike other glass, mason jars broke in hunks of curved, gleaming sharpness. They left wide, deep cuts. The thick pieces of glass were easily washable, savable, slipped into the velvet pouch and hidden in my tender kit for the next time.
Thinking about it fills me with anticipatory shivers, like how I felt in the Care room, which is unacceptable, Casper says, a trigger, and I can see some of the others now, like pale Sasha with her sea-blue eyes, beginning to frown. Blue and Jen S. wait, faces blank, sporks in the air.
I think I want to tell them, I think I want to talk. I feel a humming in my chest and I think I might have some words, maybe, though I’m not sure how to order them, or what they would mean, but I open my mouth—
From down the table, Louisa speaks. Her voice is throaty and lush; the band she sang for was called Loveless.
“Glass.” Louisa gathers her dinner things. She is a peckish eater; just a little bit of this and that, and she never stays for long. “She used glass. Breakfast of desperate champions.” She shrugs at us, wafting to the trash can with her cardboard cup and plastic plate and spork.
The air around the table stiffens at first, as each girl thinks, and remembers her favorite implements. And then the air loosens.
Isis resumes eating. “Hard-core, Chuck.”
I fix my eyes on my glistening mound of macaroni, the single row of green beans, the brownish pool of applesauce.
“It’s not Chuck, Isis. It’s Charlie. Charlie Davis.” My voice isn’t hoarse now. It’s clear as a bell.
Jen S. says, “Whoa. Somebody’s got a voice.”
Blue nods, gazing at me. “Things,” she says, sipping her coffee thoughtfully, “are about to get interesting around here.”
Casper smiles at me. “Big changes,” she says. “Talking. Cutting your hair. Bandages off. How do you feel?”
I reach for the sheets of paper on her desk, the blue ballpoint, but she says, “No.”
The turtle has paused in the tank, like he’s waiting for me, too. His tiny body bobs in the water. Does he like the little ship at the bottom, the one with the hole big enough for him to swim through? Does he like the large rock he can hoist himself up on and rest? Does he ever want to come out?
I pull the hoodie I found in the lost and found box tighter around me, close the hood tight around my face.
Ugly, I tell her, my voice muffled and my face hidden by the hood. Ugly. It still feels ugly.
It isn’t that I never noticed exactly, that Jen S. disappeared every night as soon as Barbero fell asleep on the Rec couch. I mean, she would tell me. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she’d say, her long ponytail falling across her shoulder as she leaned in, looking at what I was doing on the computer. “My stomach is really acting up. I might be a while.” Or, “I’m just gonna go jog the halls. I feel a little pent up. Be good.” And then she’d go.
I was, weirdly, getting a little caught up in this class thing. I had finished twelve units so far, putting me near the middle of a mythical senior year. It was kind of satisfying to click SUBMIT and then wait for Jen S. to come back and do the grading with the secret password. School, it turns out, is super easy once you remove all the other kids, asshole teachers, and disgusting shit that goes on.
So I’m waiting for her, and waiting, and sort of watching Barbero snore on the couch, when it occurs to me she might not be doing exactly what she says she’s doing. But before I can even think about what she might be doing, I think about what I could be doing, while she’s gone and Barbero is comatose.
It only takes a few minutes. I open another window, set up a Gmail account, wrack my brain for his last known email address, enter it, hope for the best, and open the chat box. I haven’t talked to him in over a year. Maybe he’s there, maybe he’s not.
Hey, I type.
I wait, picking at my chin. My head feels a little cold now, with all my hair gone. I pull my hoodie up. He has to be there, though, because it doesn’t say Michael is offline or anything.
And then there he is.
OMFG is that rlly u
Yes
R u ok
No. Yes. No. I’m in the loony bin
I know my mom told me Your mom told her
I’m wearing clothes from the lost and fucking found
Im at a show
Who?
Firemouth Club called Flycatcher U know Firemouth? U wd lk them
My fingers hover above the keys. I miss you
Nothing. My stomach starts to squeeze a little. A little bit of the old feeling is coming back to me: how much I like-liked Mikey, how confused I was that it was Ellis he wanted, even though she didn’t like him like that. But Ellis isn’t here anymore. I bite my lip.
I look back at Barbero. One of his legs has drifted to the floor.
Michael is typing…then: Ill have mom bring u some of T’s clothes
His sister, Tanya. She must be out of college by now. Mikey’s house was always warm. In the winter, his mother made fat, soft loaves of bread and big pots of steaming soup.
Chat says, Michael is typing. He didn’t say he missed me or anything. I take a deep breath, try to stifle the growling little voice in my head that tells me, You’re dirty and disgusting, idiot. Why would anyone want you?
Im coming up in May for a show at 7th Street Entry with this band I work with. Be there for two days. Can u put me on some visitor list or something?
Yes! I start grinning crazily. My whole body has turned to feathers, I feel so light at the thought of seeing Mikey. Mikey!
Michael is typing: I hv to go, show ending have class tmrow I cant blv its u u have a phone # too? and I am up and running to the phone on the Rec wall, where the number is written in black Sharpie ink, along with NO PHONE CALLS AFTER 9 P.M. NO PHONE CALLS BEFORE 6 P.M. I’m running back, repeating the number in my head, when my bootie gets caught on a plastic chair and I go sprawling. Barbero’s up in a flash, quicker than I’ve seen him move, ripping the buds from his ears. He whirls around. “Where’s Schumacher? Where the fuck is Schumacher?” As I try to scramble up, he’s busy, reading what’s on the computer.
He presses his fat finger on a key and the computer screen fades to black. Mikey disappears.
“Back to your hutch, rabbit. I’ve got to go hunt down your friend.”
Barbero and Nurse Ava found Jen S. in the emergency stairwell. Her stomach wasn’t bothering her, and she wasn’t doing laps. She was, Louisa informs me later that night, doing Doc Dooley.
I’m under my sheet. When I blink, my eyelashes brush against the fabric. I grunt at Louisa.
“They’ve been fucking for a loooong time,” Louisa whispers. “I’m surprised they didn’t get caught sooner.”
Down the hall, there’s a flurry of activity: phone calls being made, Jen S. crying at the nurses’ station. Louisa says, “Too bad, really. They’ll kick her out now and fire him. Or maybe he won’t get fired, just reprimanded. He’s only a resident. They fuck up all the time.” She pauses. “I hope Jen doesn’t think they’ll get together on the outside, because that is not going to happen.”
She peels the sheet from my face. “You’re young, so you don’t really understand.” She hasn’t taken off her makeup yet. Her mascara is smudged beneath her eyes.
“He chose her because she’s easy. We’re so easy, aren’t we? Hell, I thought I found the one, too, once.”
Tentatively, I say, “Maybe…he really liked her, though.” He could, couldn’t he? Doc Dooley is a dreamboat, he doesn’t need to troll on damaged girls. He could get anyone he wanted.
Louisa’s eyes flicker. “Guys are weird, little one. You never know what floats their boat.” She places the sheet back over my face and climbs into her bed. Her voice is muffled now, li
ke she’s under her own sheet. “I let this guy—I thought he was so beautiful, and kind—I let him take pictures of me. Then he turned around and sold them to some freak site on the Web.”
Is she crying? I hesitate. Jen S. is really sobbing out there now and I can hear Sasha starting up in her room, a low, mewing sound.
This whole place is a world of sobbing girls.
Louisa is crying. The whole fucking hallway is crying, except me, because I am all cried out. I kick off my sheet and climb out of bed. Mikey was so close and I lost him. I lost him.
Louisa mumbles, “They should tell you, right when you get here, that that part of wishing is over. What we’ve done, no one will love us. Not in a normal way.”
Her hand snakes from beneath the sheet, groping in the air. I step into the cradle of her fingers. Her nails are painted a glossy blue, with tiny flecks of red. A sob catches in her throat.
“You need to understand, little one. Do you understand what it’s going to be like?”
I do what people say you should do, when someone is hurt and needs help, so they know they are loved. I sit on the edge of Louisa’s bed, on top of her Hello Kitty bedspread. She’s the only one of us who has her own bedspread and pillowcases and a selection of fuzzy slippers peeking from beneath the bed. I peel the pink-and-white sheet off her face slowly, just enough so that I can pet that hair, that wonderful riot of hair.
I think of Jen S. later, after the hall is quiet, after she’s been taken back to her room to pack, to wait. She’d been screwing Doc Dooley this whole time. Where did they go? Did they use the Care room, did they spread the crinkly paper on the floor? Did they do it on the table or always in the stairwell? Was it cold? What did they talk about? They’re both so tall and good-looking, clean-faced and sexy. I picture them pushing at each other and the insides of my thighs get warm. And then Mikey is in my head, his blond dreads soft and never gross-smelling, smiling at me and Ellis from the old lounger in his room, letting us get wild and play music as loud as we wanted. I was never with Mikey, but I would have tried, I mean, I wanted to, so much, but he loved Ellis. The boys I found smelled like burned glass and anger. Dirt streaked their skin, and tattoos, and acne. They lived in garages or cars. I knew those boys would never stick. They were oily; they would slither away after what we did in a dirty back room at a show or in the bathroom of someone’s basement at a party.
Girl in Pieces Page 4