Some Assembly Required

by Arin Andrews

  “We can go get you some things,” she said.

  We stopped at Danco to pick up Susan before heading to Drug Warehouse. My aunt could sense the mood as soon as she got into the car. “It’s doomsday!” she said, and cackled, massaging my shoulder. “Oh, honey, I hate it too. It’s a bloody mess.” I managed a weak smile.

  When we got to the store, I followed them glumly to the “feminine needs” aisle. I stood at the end. I couldn’t bring myself to walk down it.

  “Do you want tampons?” Mom asked, a little too loudly.

  “Ugh, no!” Susan yelled. “I never stick those things in me!”

  “Keep your voice down,” I hissed, ducking into the aisle and grabbing the nearest box of pads I could reach and tossing it into the basket. “Let’s go.”

  We drove back to Danco, and they ushered me into the conference room.

  “It’s really easy to put on,” Mom explained, pulling a pad out of the box.

  Susan grabbed it from her hands. “Look at the wings!” she said, making them flap up and down, trying to get me to smile again.

  It didn’t work that time.

  • • •

  The next morning I woke up doubled over in cramps. I begged Mom to let me stay home from school, but she wasn’t having it. I was still just spotting, but after my first class I felt this awful leaking sensation between my legs. I tried squeezing like when you have to pee, but it did nothing. I ran to the bathroom, stopping at my locker to grab a hoodie, along with a fresh pad that I slipped inside the sleeve so that no one would notice.

  I got to the bathroom, and there was so much blood. More than I could have imagined. I grimly cleaned up, changed my pad, and headed back to class. An hour later the same leaking feeling started again, and I headed back to the bathroom. It went on like clockwork, every hour for the rest of the day.

  I wanted to die.

  Over the next few months I kept up the same system as that first day for grabbing pads when needed. Since I was the only girl in school who didn’t carry a purse, I’d keep them hidden in my backpack until I needed to head to the bathroom. I’d slip one inside the sleeve of a hoodie before going to the bathroom, and once I was safely inside a stall, I’d open up the pad as slowly and silently as possible. I’d put the used one inside the little metal box on the wall, but made sure to close the lid ever so gently so it wouldn’t make its telltale slamming sound and announce to everyone in the room that I had my period.

  But while I could hide what was happening from the people around me, I was now directly confronted on a monthly basis with the reality of my body. My breasts, hips, and long hair—I’d developed ways to try to block them from my mind, and to hide all the physical traits the best I could with baggy clothes and a hat. Even my pubic hair helped block the sight of my vagina.

  But blood is undeniable. As was the shame it caused. My period was an affront. And my fury about the indignity and unfairness of it caused me to sink more deeply into depression. Tampon commercials on television sent me into a rage. Those perfectly coiffed women in their soft-hued cardigans and summer dresses were supposed to make me feel a sense of camaraderie with womankind. The promise in those ads is that We’re all in this together. But every time my period started, I felt further and further apart from the rest of the world.

  I still had motocross to keep me distracted, along with Papa and Gigi’s farm and our huge, forested backyard, with its boulders and dense trees. I was old enough to start building fires outside by myself. My favorite spot to build them was on the giant rocks, and one afternoon when I was down there, I noticed that a space between two of them would make a perfect little cave if it had a cover.

  I had started skateboarding around this time too, and one of Mom’s friends had helped me build a half-pipe in the garage for me and Wes. There was some wood left over from the construction, so I covered the gap between the boulders and piled leaves and twigs and moss on top. It became my hideout from the world. A place I could escape to and absorb the nature around me. For all the religion I was faced with at Lincoln, I was starting to realize that I felt much more spiritual when I was in the woods or any other sort of natural surrounding. The feel of bark against my cheek while I was up in a tree gave me more peace than scripture ever did. It was becoming increasingly harder for me to ignore the hypocrisy of the students at my school—they claimed to be Christians, but it was in image only. The fact that they could quote the Bible and showed up at church every Sunday didn’t prevent them from being relentlessly cruel. And I knew strongly in my heart that true Christians shouldn’t persecute someone for being different—it goes against all the most basic tenets of the religion, the ones like love, tolerance, and charity.

  I was practicing that last one in earnest by volunteering at an animal sanctuary located in Broken Arrow. It’s home to hundreds of rescued exotic pets from all over the country—peacocks, monkeys, tigers, wolves, kangaroos, and even a hybrid liger named Rocky. I’d get up at seven a.m. every Saturday and Sunday to help out. Since I was a junior volunteer, my chores mostly included shoveling crap, but I also got to feed the birds of prey. You had to work there for several years before you were allowed to interact with any of the larger animals. I didn’t care if all I was doing was minor chores, though; being able to help these creatures out in any way I could made me happy. I understood them—born who they were but trapped by circumstance.

  One morning the older volunteers let me ride in the back of their pickup with them down to the big cat cages to help feed the liger. Technically this was against the rules. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near that part of the sanctuary, so I stayed in the truck bed and helped them chop up raw meat. The workers hooked chunks of flesh onto a large metal pole and stuck it over the fence and into the pen. Rocky leapt up for it, propelling himself what looked like six feet off the ground to get what he needed to survive.

  It reminded me of my own small flights from the earth when I was on my dirt bike. I needed those moments suspended in the air for my sanity, in the same way that the liger needed to leave the ground to catch his food, the very thing that kept him alive.

  That afternoon Dad took me off-roading in his Bronco. We flew across fields that stretched out forever, and laughed when our heads knocked the ceiling after crazy bumps. He pulled over as we neared the edge of a giant quarry, and we walked to the edge to investigate. It looked as if aliens had come and taken a mile-wide scoop out of the earth, exposing steep cliffs that plummeted down into still water. We sat near the edge, absorbing the silence.

  “Your mom and I are getting a divorce,” he suddenly said.

  I let that sink in for minute, but I can’t say that I was surprised. He and Mom hadn’t exactly been spending a lot of time together. He’d come home from work and disappear into their bedroom and watch television while she cooked us dinner and helped us with our homework.

  “We still love each other and are still friends, but I’m going to be moving out,” he said.

  “Okay,” I answered. I didn’t really know how to respond. I think at the time, more than anything else, I was just pissed that he’d ruined such an awesome afternoon. But I knew that he was loyal to us and wouldn’t disappear from our lives. I was right—he ended up moving into a place in nearby Catoosa, and in my mind I got to become the man of the house I’d always pictured myself as anyway. Nothing about the divorce was traumatic—Dad still worked with Mom at Danco, and they actually started getting along much better, becoming the friends that they were way more cut out to be for each other.

  And lucky for me, his new home would soon provide a much needed haven from my mother’s wrath over my first real love—the appropriately surnamed Darian Storms.

  6

  I’d been noticing Darian around the dance studio since I was twelve but didn’t really meet her until I was thirteen and had graduated into the mid-range group at Moore’s Dance Studio—the Electric Shock team. Darian was two years older than me and in the top-tier group, Shockwave. My practice
sessions started a full hour earlier than hers, but our practices overlapped by thirty minutes, so that we could watch her and the rest of the older kids dance and try to pick up some of their fancier steps. But a lot of the time Darian was already at the studio by the time I arrived, since she also helped out the teachers with the much younger kids, whose classes started even earlier.

  Darian was shorter than me, with long straight red hair, green eyes, some freckles splashed across her cheeks, and ginormous boobs. Like, so big that she sometimes had to strap them down with an Ace bandage when she danced if it required particularly vigorous moves—not even a sports bra would cut it.

  Every year Moore’s participated in the Tulsa Downtown Parade of Lights, a huge holiday celebration full of floats sponsored by local businesses. It’s a two-and-a-half-mile-long gig, and we’d dance every step of the way in short-skirted Santa outfits, no matter how cold it was. Despite the stupid costume, I actually enjoyed it—I viewed it as a test of my endurance, since you have to be in pretty sick shape to dance for that long without stopping. But that year I was having trouble learning the steps. The song was “Toy Soldier” by Britney Spears, and it required some pretty complex footwork. Imagine someone barking “hop double double heel step step touch up heel up hop double back hop double hop double pull back” at you for hours on end, and you get a sense of what I was up against. It was like that movie Happy Feet on crack.

  One of the teachers asked Darian to help me learn the dance. Darian practiced with my cousins Cheyenne and Amanda and me until we all had the steps down.

  On the day of the parade, Darian and I were hanging out on some sound equipment when she suddenly asked for my phone number. I gave it to her, and we started texting back and forth. She teased me constantly about the fact that I believed in God and went to a Christian school and was close with my mom.

  She’s trying to keep you cut off from the rest of the world by keeping you there, she’d write. Come on. I know you can’t be that innocent.

  It went completely over my head that she was flirting with me.

  I don’t know what you mean.

  Your whole angel act, she wrote. I don’t believe for a second that you’ve never cussed before.

  Well, one time at my grandfather’s house I got my kite stuck in a tree, and I said, You damn kite!

  She answered with an eye roll emoticon.

  I didn’t know it, but Mom was reading these texts whenever I’d leave my phone hanging around, and she began to develop an intense dislike for Darian. She was convinced that Darian was trying to corrupt me. But she couldn’t say anything, because she didn’t want me to know that she was checking my cell.

  Mom wasn’t the only one who disapproved of my new friend, either.

  “Haven’t you heard about her?” Andi asked me after she saw me chatting with her one day after dance class. “She’s bad news.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Everyone knows she’s made out with a ton of guys.” She lowered her voice. “And I heard she cuts herself,” she whispered.

  In my thirteen-year-old mind, though, this only made her seem cooler. I didn’t realize that she was totally tame compared to millions of other teenagers, but she was the first rebel I’d ever known, and while I’d never seen her kiss a boy, or seen any evidence of self-harm, she began to take on a larger-than-life quality for me. It was easier to believe Andi’s rumors than just ask Darian what was true. And in a way, I didn’t even want to know—I liked the mystery of Darian’s life, and I liked that she was poking holes into the way I viewed what was acceptable behavior. She was just being who she was and not caring what people thought of her, something I was starting to desperately wish I could do myself. I chalked Andi’s warnings up to jealousy over my having a new friend, but made sure to spend extra time with Andi so she didn’t feel left out. But she never came near me when I was talking with Darian.

  • • •

  After a few months of being friends with Darian, both of our troupes were asked to perform on a Carnival Cruise. It was a pretty cool situation—it was a seven-day trip, and we had to do only one show on the boat, so all of our families basically got a fun vacation.

  Before the cruise Mom took me shopping and bought all these girly clothes like tube tops and denim skirts. Along with my five new outfits, I snuck a couple of pairs of cargo shorts and some T-shirts into my bag, and those were all I wore the entire trip.

  Our dance troupe would practice on board for a couple of hours each day—the show was scheduled for the fourth day of the cruise—and we just got to hang out the rest of the time. Wes became obsessed with Darian’s boobs. He took a cell phone video of her dancing during one of our training sessions, and it’s just a ten-minute shot of a headless Darian, with her breasts jiggling up and down.

  After rehearsal Darian and I would sneak off. We’d do things like eat meals together and explore the ship. We would roughhouse in the hallway, and she’d mock punch me in the shoulder or pull my hair.

  “Stop it,” I’d say, taking a timid swipe back at her.

  “That all you got?” she’d ask, and give me another friendly shove.

  The more she pushed me, the more I started to laugh and tussle back. We’d put each other in headlocks and fall to the ground, rolling in the way of elderly couples who’d tsssk at us as they made their way to one of the ship’s many dining rooms. I can remember the thrill of it—the body contact made me feel amazing and warm. I genuinely didn’t recognize it as anything flirtatious or sexual. All I knew was that I wanted to touch her. I was so excited to have a new friend. Andi hadn’t been able to make this trip because of a family wedding, and after being such a loner at school, all of the body contact made hanging out with my new companion that much more thrilling. I was starved for friendship, and every touch—every stray brush of her arm or hand on my back—sent a dizzying rush through me.

  We started staying up late at night, finding hidden corners on the boat’s outer decks that looked out at the ocean. The vast sky exploded with stars, and the moon’s reflection created a clear path of light on the water. It looked like a road forward. I didn’t know it at the time, but Darian was already out to her family and close friends as bisexual. But as she acknowledges now, she called herself bi then only because she wasn’t quite ready to fully admit to being homosexual.

  Conversations under the moonlight on the ocean tend to get deep fast—it’s just the nature of the environment. There’s something about being surrounded by water that makes you want to spill secrets. Maybe it’s some sort of subconscious awareness that as beautiful as the ocean is, it’s also deadly, so it forces confessions. But you can’t confess things you don’t already know, and as much as Darian suspected that I probably liked girls, and as much as she gently nudged the topic, I wouldn’t give anything up, because I didn’t even realize it myself.

  “So, what do you think about gay people?” she asked one night.

  “I think being gay is bad,” I said, before I could even stop myself. For all of my burgeoning questions about Christianity at Lincoln, that was one idea that had been drilled so hard into my brain that the words just slipped out. But they felt immediately wrong, and I could tell she disapproved of my answer.

  We were quiet for a minute.

  “I don’t think that it’s wrong,” she finally said. “So, what kind of guys do you like?”

  “Oh—uh, you know, clean cut,” I stammered. “Um, shaggy brown hair.”

  I didn’t even realize that I was contradicting myself. I had no idea what to tell her, and couldn’t understand why she wanted to talk about guys to begin with. “No tattoos,” I added.

  “No tattoos?” she said, and laughed. “That’s exactly what I do like. Give me someone rough, with piercings.”

  Since she was so specific about what she liked, I felt like I needed to have a better answer for her. That night when I got to my stateroom, I did a Google image search on my phone for “cute guys” so I’d be bette
r prepared to discuss them with her.

  The next morning I showed her some pictures of generically handsome male models and pop stars, and for the rest of the trip, we developed this weird game where whenever one of us saw a guy that was remotely good-looking, we’d call, “Dibs!”

  It makes me cringe to think about it now, but I understand why we did it. Even if it wasn’t directed specifically at each other, we were exerting sexuality, despite it being a false representation of what we really wanted. By pretending to like these random guys, it kept the spark of attraction—however subconscious on my part—charged between us. It was like the G-rated version of two closeted teenage guys looking at a Playboy together, and brushing hands when they both reached to turn a page at the same time. It created electricity, a bond. She even casually brought up masturbation during our last late-night deck talk before the trip ended, and I thought, Oh my God, I’m not the only one who does that?

  It was the most intimate conversation I’d ever had with someone, and even though I didn’t realize it in the moment, it knocked down the last wall I’d built against her.

  On the morning that we disembarked, I found her standing next to her bags and her family near the gangplank. I hugged her good-bye, and the moment my arms circled her body, I knew something was different.

  I didn’t want to let go.

  I’d never experienced anything like it before and had no idea what to do, so I just held on. And she held me back, until I heard Mom calling me. I let go and stepped back, and it felt like I’d left something with her. I was flushed, and muttered “Good-bye” before turning and practically running away.

  We were on different flights home, and I obsessed about her the entire plane ride. I replayed every sentence of every conversation we’d had, felt the press of her chest against mine. My clothes even still smelled like the Victoria’s Secret floral body lotion that she always wore.

  I texted her the second we landed.

  Remember when I hugged you before we left? There was something different about that.