And when my brain’s canker sore flares up like that it helps to lie on a bed on my stomach with my face turned to the side, my cheek all squished up into my eye so it doesn’t really work right and everything gets fuzzy. I leave a light on somewhere, something weak so everything in the room is just warm, and I look sort of down into the bedspread so that the pattern on it begins to melt and stretch open. My squished cheek goes numb, my lips pushed up and plugging my nostrils so I’ve gotta breathe loud cold air through my teeth.
It’s not like regular daydreaming.
I’m not thinking of any one particular thing, like, you know, I’m not thinking of a particular kind of life I’ll have when I grow up, when I leave the house, when I’m so pretty that nothing else matters.
It’s more that I’m just thinking about feeling good. Good feelings. That blissful blip between starting to piss the bed, letting it out and loving it, and realizing you’re pissing the bed, cold and wet and having to get up now and deal with it.
Slowly I begin to seep through the cracks in the bedspread’s pattern, then emerge whole on the other side, inside the pattern, floating through patterned space as though on an inner tube.
Patterned space is the perfect temperature, moist-warm insides of a just-done cake; patterned space enters my body and fills it up and spills back out again, scary at first but just for a split second, and then you let it happen, filling up and spilling out and filling and spilling over and over and it’s just so wonderful you never wanna breathe real air again. You wanna die. Because maybe if you die in patterned space you get to stay there forever and it’d be worth the risk.
And the best part of all is, amidst all the filling and spilling of patterned space, my sore brain just kind of vaporizes. And it hisses out of my ears like really a satisfying fart. The kind of fart that may as well be a dump, it feels so good. Then there’s nothing at all left in my head. Once filled with sore brain, now cool and empty.
It’s the best feeling in the world.
But then it always happens that like, in the distance I’ll hear something, like a drop of water fall into a puddle, and it echoes. And I know the good feelings are over. I’m suddenly extracted from patterned space; I’m a dark swirl sucked into a needle then spat back out on the bed. Because that sound, a drop of water in a puddle sound, it MEANS EMPTY. Instead of BEING EMPTY.
Because BEING EMPTY means there’s no puddle of water to hear at all.
This is great. People love poor kids.
The bedspreads at home are old and soft and pilled and peach-colored with big turquoise paisley. Bald spots in the stuffing and weird fishing wire poking out everywhere. Because we’re poor and we don’t have money to buy better blankets, but whatever.
That’s not me. I’m not a poor person.
I like the bedspreads at the hotel but they’re not great either. They’re actually not as soft as the bedspreads at home, even though they’re definitely more expensive. Stuffing quilted tightly put; dense patterns of busy greens and pinks and yellows.
Anyway, like I said, I take a lot of breaks and I go and lie on them and try to do the same thing with them, like, let my ears fart.
Sorry, diary, that was pretty weird.
Actually wait, did I just apologize to a diary? Why would I make my diary so easy to offend? We’re gonna have to thicken that skin of yours. Otherwise you won’t be able to handle this job.3
Alf, who you’ll be hearing a lot about, I’m sure, his name is short for Alfred. Alfred Gustafson. Because I guess his parents hated him as soon as they saw him and wanted to ruin his life with the worst name in the world. It’s the kind of name that’s so powerfully terrible it could make a good-looking person seem ugly. Not that Alf really has to worry about that. He’s just as ugly as his name.
Love interests do not wear turtlenecks and sweatpants. Even if they do.
He’s not actually. I’m kidding. Don’t tell his JOURNAL, diary, if you guys, you know, swap stories, but actually Alf is a perfectly good-looking person beneath his bad haircut and his weird mannerisms and nerdy clothes. Real nerdy, like sweatpants and turtlenecks and asthma. Not the way that some people wear, like, expensive vintage horror movie T-shirts or whatever and say like, “Oh I’m such a nerd for liking this super cool thing to like.”
I make a lot of mean jokes like that, like, about his parents hating him and about him being ugly. I make fun of his walk too. He sort of has this way of walking on his toes that makes him look like an idiot. Between the tippy-toe walk and his name being Alfred, it’s almost a crime not to make him fetch things for you like a butler.
And yeah okay I know I shouldn’t be mean to him, and I swear, in the beginning I wasn’t this bad. If I’m being honest for a minute he’s probably actually my best friend, which seems crazy because we’ve only really known each other for a month, but I don’t know, it’s just what happened. And it’s why, right now, I really can’t help myself being extra mean to him, because right now he really does deserve it.
See, over the past couple weeks Alf has developed this idiotic crush on me. He hasn’t said anything about it, but I can tell and it’s not fair.
It’s not fair because we were getting along fine as just friends. Better than fine. It’s been great. But as usual, as soon as a boy can even have the slightest bit of conversation with a girl he would also have sex with he just ruins everything with a crush. Like friendships with girls aren’t worth preserving somehow, they can be picked off and flicked away like flecks of skin, never safe, always worth ruining with a goddamn irresponsible crush.
And doesn’t that make him kind of deserve it? Deserve my meanness? For only really looking at me like I’m some kind of sex hole? So much so that he’d risk our whole friendship just to be able to have sex with the sex hole. So much so that he hasn’t even noticed what a terrible bitch I’ve been to him since his crush started showing. Or what a ridiculous couple we’d make. Like I could be anything at all around this hole and it really wouldn’t matter. I could have six-inch serrated claws. I could have a mouth full of rotting, maggoty teeth.
I think it makes Alf worse than me. Even though maybe to other people, I’m the one who looks like the asshole.
And I’m sure I’m just sensitive because I don’t make friends that easily. In fact I don’t make friends like Alf at all. Or maybe I like Alf too but don’t wanna admit it because I don’t wanna lose the realest friend I’ve ever had. And, this sounds terrible, but like, I’m a lot better-looking than he is. There. I said it. And I don’t wanna hear it from you, diary, you know you’d feel the same way.
And like, obviously I’m not gonna marry a person that I date now, when I’m goddamn sixteen years old, so why ruin it? Why not just be friends forever? Doesn’t he know how special we are? To be friends the way that we are?
And it makes me mad that I think that way because it means that I like Alf probably way more than he likes me. If I’m worried like this, about not being able to be friends forever, and he’s not. He just gets to have his crush and be happy. He should just never have had the crush in the first place. Even now, just from writing that out, I’m angry with him. And I’m definitely going to be mean to him the next time I see him, whether I want to or not, goddammit.
ANYWAY.
The Boy Meets Girl Inn. Potential title?
The hotel we work at is called The Boy Meets Girl Inn. 4 The sign is this fluorescent honeymoon red, one of those signs that buzz all the time. And the M buzzes loudest because it’s on the fritz, and every few seconds it burns out for an instant and so for a thousand and one instances throughout the day this place is called The Boy eets Girl Inn. The Boy Eats Girl Inn.
So, I know she might have killed everyone, but for the movie Noelle’s our protagonist, not our slasher.
Which is actually a more fitting name when you think about it. 5
But I don’t really wanna thin
k about it right now. I’ll explain later, diary. I promise. I’ll explain everything about the hotel so that you’re good and ready for the rest of our summer on the nightshift.
1. Numbered entries indicate where Noelle seems to have started a new section. Because none of the entries are dated it’s difficult to determine how much time elapsed between each, or whether or not entries were made on the same day.
2. A postmortem CT scan revealed no irregularities.
3. Likely referring to her own job at the inn requiring a certain level of fortitude. The Boy Meets Girl Inn’s grim history is well known throughout town. Over 150 years old and plagued with unusual tragedies, or in some cases the rumor of them; murder, suicide, torture, hundreds of sightings of “ghosts” and other strange phenomena. Most people in the area don’t even like passing by it on the street, let alone spending long stretches inside or sleeping in it. I’ll admit to feeling a certain level of unease when I first stepped inside the inn, however that could be due to the fact that the interior was still covered in bloodstains.
4. This name was part of an ill-conceived effort to rebrand the property as it transitioned from an apartment building into a “romantic getaway location” in 1986.
5. Reference to Margaret Grimley.
Second Entry
I’m not a virgin. There you go. Let’s just get this out of the way now.
I’m sixteen and I’m not a virgin.
I lost it young but I can’t really remember any details because I made myself EMPTY and stared into a bedspread.
Noelle’s gotta be hot but with something weird about her; a severe dye job or big bags under her eyes maybe.
I do remember that his name was Tucker and he was in grade eight and I talked him into it because I just wanted to do it and have it done with.
I wanted to get it done with because I guess I thought in some weird way it might feel good on my sore spot. A balm for it, sort of. Like, with Tucker, or anyone like him really (like, any boy), I could make myself more EMPTY than ever before. WHOLLY TOTALLY ENTIRELY EMPTY for as long as it lasted.
So I guess I had weird expectations for my first time the way that other girls do, but not at all the WAY that other girls do.
I hate expectations. Any kind of expectation. They make it so you can’t ever really experience anything in any real way; everything gets so muddled up. They’re just not helpful, you know? They either make not great things seem better than they are, which isn’t always good, or they create disappointment. Which is the worst feeling in the world.
We’re going to have to scrap all this touchy feely teenage stuff. That’s what books are for.
I hope Tucker didn’t have any big expectations.
I think even if he did have big expectations, he still would have done it with me because it would have been more important to him to tell all his friends about it, to be the first one out of anyone to have sex, than to actually have a good experience that met whatever EXPECTATIONS he might have had.
I know usually it’s the other way around, some pervy older boy talking some younger girl into it, but not this time. This time I did the traumatizing. And I can tell I traumatized him too. Because these days that guy’s stutter could move a sailboat and I don’t think he’s ever had a girlfriend.
SORRY TUCKER.
There. I feel better now actually. That’s weird. Diary, you’re like a priest and this is my confessional. How do I have to punish myself to make it right?
Waiting. Waiting.
Oh I see, your silence tells me that my life is punishment enough? Alright then. Fuck you, diary. You good for nothing bitch.
Oh god, here we go. Falling into the trap of the diary. What a goddam terrible idea, writing all of your most embarrassing and deepest and most terrible thoughts and feelings down in a book. Just begging to fall into the wrong hands. Why does anyone do this?
I mean, I guess it’s kinda dangerous. That’s sort of fun.
You’re like a stick of dynamite, diary, just waiting to GO OFF in the wrong hands. Anyone could find you and you could potentially blow them away. Like if Alf could see all that stuff I wrote about him being a nerd and his parents hating him and stuff.
Anyway, my EXPECTATIONS of my FIRST TIME were met in that, it did feel good on that sore spot. I did go EMPTY like never before.
And in fact something even better than I could have EXPECTED happened.
After it was done and I kinda like, came back from the best EMPTY ever, I could feel the sore spot in my brain, right on my scalp. Migrated through my skull and all the way to the surface. I know that sounds fucking crazy, but it’s true. This weird spot on my scalp that was kind of warmer and squishier, like a bruise on an apple, just appeared. Almost as though the tip of the sore spot in my brain were now peeking out, the way only a small part of an iceberg sticks out of the water. An access point. That I could press and feel kinda good. Not patterned space good, but pretty good.
So I started pressing on it all the time. When I felt weird or anxious or even just bored I pressed. Just pressing, pressing, making sure it was still there, still soft, as close to touching the soreness on my brain as possible.6
Anyway, it’s not like I have sex all the time now or anything.
6. According to Jessica West and Olivia Grieves, this pressing on her head was a sort of twitch of Noelle’s; something she did all the time almost unconsciously. We’re still waiting on reports from the psychiatrists to confirm, but it seems to me to be, potentially, a kind of stereotypy or stim: “a repetitive movement, behavior, posture, action, or utterance; a kind of ritualistic self-stimulation that calms, or in some cases excites.”
Third Entry
Alf and I learned a lot about each other pretty quickly. On the very first night we learned that the reason we’d both applied for the nightshift job was because neither of us likes being home much. Alf’s parents actually do hate him. Which means I should probably NOT make fun of him for it. Like how you’d never make fun of an actual fat person for being fat.
I also learned that when he was five years old he watched his sister drown in the pool in their backyard. He sat on the highest accessible branch in their oak tree, paralyzed with laughter. A therapist would later tell him over and over again that paralyzing laughter is actually a very common reaction to extreme fear. But Alf told me that he wasn’t afraid; that he knew deep down that he was laughing because it was hilarious, because she was such an idiot, jumping in the deep end when she knew she couldn’t swim, thrashing around like a fool, gasping for breath, spitting water, coughing. Of course he didn’t realize then that she could die from drowning, that her body was doing anything and everything it could to preserve itself, not caring how hilarious it might look to basically imitate an inflatable advertising tube man catching the greatest wind of his life.
He says if he’d known that, that drowning would kill her, he would have done something to stop it. And because he knows that for sure, he’s mostly okay about it. Which makes sense to me.
And his parents, they can’t help hating him. And he gets that too, and appreciates how nice they are about it.
“I watched her walk up to the deep end,” he said, “and I knew what she was going to do. And I wanted her to do it too. Because I knew it would be funny. I just, I hope she didn’t see me laughing. I just hope that’s not the last thing she remembers.”
It was three o’clock in the morning on one of our first nights here when he told me that story. He said he’d never told anyone about the laughing before. He said usually when he told people that story, he was trying to get sympathy, or like, one-up someone who was trying to tell him that they had a fucked-up life. So he’d never mentioned the laughing, just that he watched her drown.
The good thing about Alfred is that it didn’t seem to have ruined him in any obvious way.
Except for that he just wants to work at the inn for the rest of his life. I guess that’s not normal.
The therapist also told his parents that often, Alfred’s particular variety of trauma manifests itself as perfectionism, overachieving, being the best possible kid to make up for the fact that the other kid is dead. But Alf was the exact opposite. Too fundamentally lazy to have been broken that other, more common way.
The reason we were talking at three o’clock in the morning is because we’d both woken up from the noises. That was then, though, early in the summer. We’re used to them now. The bumps in the night. 7
I didn’t want to be at home because of my dad. Herman.
Herman has relentless bowel problems, 8 an unglamorous blood disease, 9 and heaps of credit card debt 10 that pester him almost as much as his physical ailments. We’re totally poor because of him. Our house is small and kind of dirty and shitty. I told you about our thin bedspreads already. We eat a lot of fast food and ramen noodles and saltine crackers with peanut butter, and that kind of stuff keeps Herman’s bowels irritable but it’s all we can afford. I’ve had a job in one way or another since I was nine and Herman has been collecting disability and using it to keep giant packages containing utterly useless shit arriving on our doorstep since before I could remember.
At one point in his miserable life he’d actually been in line to inherit a car dealership from his father. He’d worked there since he graduated from college. But when my mother left he bungled it and then he got sick and started seeing specialists and naturopaths and chiropractors and anyone at all who would promise to fix his blood and his bowels.
The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated) Page 2