by Lena Prodan
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Torquere Press
www.torquerepress.com
Copyright ©2008 by Lena Prodan
First published in www.prizmbooks.com, 2008
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
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Chapter 1
"Hanging yourself is a lot harder than it seems."
"Is it?” Eric murmured.
"It is. Rope. Chair. Neck. Basic, right? Almost Zen in simplicity—"
"What do you know about Zen?” he asked.
"I read shit. But like I said, deceptively simple in theory, but in execution?"
"Execution. Hah.” Eric laughed like someone punched his gut.
Thunderstorms the night before had made the July air muggier than usual. Even the shade under the dark wood gazebo roof was suffocating. Eric and I lay on top of one of the picnic tables which were bolted to the concrete foundation with heavy chains, as if someone might try to carry it away.
While we waited for the acid to kick in, we stared out at the thick woods that surrounded the gazebo. If anyone came down the narrow trail, we'd hear them long before they saw us. It was the perfect place to hide from the Military Police and get stoned.
I sat up, putting my feet on the bench near the dog. She perked up, her tiny white ears erect, but closed her eyes again when she saw I wasn't going anywhere. “The thing that pisses me off is that other kids die all the time from the stupidest things, but MENSA girl here somehow couldn't manage it."
"Hmm.” His long fingers rested on his deeply tanned stomach above a swirled patch of hair so blond it was white.
On the far side of the trees, a lawnmower droned. I could smell the cut grass. My eyes stung.
"Apparently, the job of hangman involves a lot more than blatant disregard for the sanctity of human life and a Henry Ford ‘any color, as long as it's black’ approach to fashion. There are variables. Distance and velocity of drop, position of the knot, type of rope, weight of the subject..."
"Now that you mention it, yeah. I can see that,” Eric said.
"Stuff I never thought to take into account. Math stuff."
"There you go.” He flicked away a sweat bee that hovered over his nose.
I flopped back onto the picnic table and stared at the underside of the gazebo roof. “Math. It figures, right? There are formulas. Did you know that? I can't find them anywhere, of course, but those hangmen had mathematical formulas to calculate it all out."
"Even if you had the formulas—."
"Shut up."
Eric was right though. Math was my bête noire. I groaned. “I was doomed to fail.” Failure meaning that I walked away from that attempt with only a nasty rope burn and private humiliation to show for it.
He cradled his head in the crook of my arm, his sun-bleached hair tickling my elbow. His fingers intertwined with mine.
Eric wasn't my boyfriend. We had no interest in each other that way, which was why we could touch without things getting awkward. There were times I wished we could be like everyone else. It would have made life so much easier.
"You don't know how weird this is for me. Same school two years in a row. That hasn't happened since third grade,” I told him.
Every summer, I peeled off my old skin and become someone else. The identities came and went, fluid. Some I liked more than others, but there was no way to hold on to what I had been. I moved on, the identity stayed behind. I had no control over what I'd be the next time. That depended on what other people decided I was. It was all about perception, not reality. Besides, there was nothing to be gained by telling people what I truly was, because what I truly was ... I didn't have a word for it. For me.
"I'm going to graduate from Park Hills High School. The horror. The horror.” I was still in my Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now phase, as if the connection between the two were a secret I alone understood.
"You gotta graduate from somewhere."
It was my fault I got stuck in that version of myself. When we moved to Ohio, I ignored the tags people tried to stick on me instead of gratefully hiding behind them. Maybe I was like a chameleon that had been put in front of plaid one too many times. No matter how well I blended on the outside, I knew I didn't belong anywhere. That time I didn't try.
"One year as the oddball artsy student was fine, but I don't know if I can survive being myself a second year in a row."
Eric understood that. He couldn't risk being himself, ever. “You're fucked.” He sure had a way of summing up a situation.
"Too late to fly under the radar.” I pressed my hands to the table and felt the layers of carved initials under my palms. “If only I could will myself to disappear. Melt into the ground like an orange popsicle in the sun."
"You talk like you're tripping."
I smacked him. “You know I don't talk when I'm stoned. If I did, then you'd hear some seriously fucked up shit. Oh! Forgot to mention. Saw the new kid this morning. His name is Sean. He has the lewdest lips."
"Are you sure you're not tripping?"
"Windowpane takes longer to kick in than blotter. Be patient."
"What if we're already tripping and don't know it?” Eric asked.
"Now who sounds stoned? Wait until you see him. Walking sex. The dad is white, but Sean's got to be part Japanese or Filipino or something. I didn't see the mom."
"Hmm.” That was an interested ‘Hmm,’ no matter how non-committal Eric tried to make it sound.
"Best part? I saw a guitar case. I told Sean he should join Tony's garage band."
Tony lived in the other half of my duplex. Members of his band were always moving out, collateral damage of military life.
Eric and I left off talking for a while. I kept waiting to realize things were getting weird, but reality wasn't looping and the trees refused to melt.
The dog stood up, walked a circle on the bench, and settled back down into another nap.
Eric squeezed my fingers. “Where did you do it?"
I stared at him.
"Hang yourself."
"Garage."
"No. I mean, where were you living? Not here."
Once he realized how casually I'd take my opportunities, without threats, without dramatic gestures or bad poetry, Eric started asking, in an indirect way, if I'd tried anything lately. Maybe he was worried about being the one to find me. I didn't blame him. Dead bodies were gross.
"California. I remember because it was the bicentennial year. I was eleven."
"But why?"
I talked about suicide all the time. That was the first time anyone asked me why, though. I had to think a bit before answering. Eric and I were closer than I'd ever been
to anyone, but there were things that were hard to say to him because he was a boy and because I'd never talked about such things with anyone. In my parent's house, we didn't talk about our bodies. It was as if we were floating brains, trapped in something too disgusting to ever mention.
How to explain it? “When I was ten, on the day of my tenth birthday, my period started. Up until that moment, I believed that somehow, if I prayed hard enough, God would let me be a boy. After that? I knew my life was over."
I bit my lip, remembering how insanely hysterical I'd been, how humiliatingly ignorant. If it hadn't been for a neighbor teen who calmly gave me the run-down on what she aptly called ‘the curse,’ I would have never known why I woke up with blood on my panties that morning. Mom still hadn't brought up the subject, and I was almost eighteen.
"I was stupid. I really believed, you know? And I prayed hard every day. No matter what else I was tempted to ask for, I only ever asked God to spare me from being a girl. The preachers promised. They said that with prayer and faith, through the mercy of God, prayers would be answered."
Eric waited, knowing I'd say more.
"If I wasn't such a fucking pussy about pain, I'd take a big knife and cut out every part of my body that's female, dump it in the trash where it belongs, and only leave the real parts behind."
Eric said, “Jesus."
I wiped tears from the corners of my eyes. I hated crying. “The day I tried to hang myself, I told Mom that I wanted to be a boy.” I took a shaky breath. “She told me that I'd be happy as a girl if I wasn't so fat and ugly."
He flinched. “She didn't say that."
"I'm translating."
"She didn't say that."
I tried to explain. “You know how families have their own languages?"
He shook his head.
"They do. Like when your dad says he's voting for a team instead of rooting for them. You have code words that everyone in your house understands that make no sense to outsiders, like the way you all act terrified when anyone says Arizona, and then you laugh."
"We had a really bad vacation there once."
"But see, you don't have to tell each other; you just use the code. Your own language."
He nodded like he understood, but I had no idea if he did.
"What I'm saying is that if I told you the exact words Mom used, you'd think I was exaggerating or that what she said wasn't all that bad, so I translated it for you. She didn't say I was fat and ugly, but that's exactly what she meant."
He'd seen Mom work me over too many times to deny it.
"I had to know why God betrayed me. That's all I thought about. You know how in the Old Testament, when someone had a problem with God, they shook their fist at the sky and demanded that God come down to talk it out? They told him flat out that he was wrong. And God listened. I tried screaming at Him for months. He didn't answer. So I figured I'd go up and bang on His door until He couldn't ignore me anymore."
"But suicides can't get into heaven."
I smirked. “One pearly gate, one guard. I figured I'd wait until Peter was distracted by other souls and climb the fence. How hard could it be? I have all eternity to find a way in."
"You're insane.” But he laughed.
"Could be."
"How many times have you killed yourself?"
I grinned up at the gazebo roof. “Successfully?"
He curled on his side, rough, sunburned lips pressed to my long, tangled hair. “Yep."
"Well, you know. I'm working on it."
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 2
On Wright-Patterson's main base, the houses were eighty-year old, red brick colonials with pristine white trim. The Americana prettiness of it seduced me despite how deeply I wanted to hate it, like Disneyland. Peonies, hollyhocks and lilacs thrived in the well-tended gardens. A tunnel of oaks shaded the streets in summer and covered the ground with scarlet leaves in autumn.
We didn't live there. Pop was only a half-bird, a Lieutenant Colonel, so we were stuck in frumpy taupe off-base military housing. Rank, family size, seniority—none of it mattered in the off-base subdivision. Every officer was assigned a three bedroom, two bathroom, two story, half of a duplex. Every unit had one tree, a maple, plunked in the exact middle of a square front lawn, and two squat evergreen shrubs to mark the boundaries of the unfenced back yards. Flowers were optional, but not encouraged.
Mowing the yards that sloped down the hillside was my only source of spending money, other than the ten-dollar bills Grandma tucked into my birthday cards. The grass grew fast in the summer. I had to mow it twice a week just to keep it under control. That didn't bug me since I got paid for it, but every time I did our lawn, resentment seared through my brain. Pop charged me for the mower's gas, because, “You have to learn some time how the real world works,” and didn't pay me to mow our lawn, because somehow I owed it to him.
The grass was really too wet to cut that morning, but Pop made it clear he wanted it done, probably because the subdivision's conformity narc taped a note on our front door, reminding us that the Base Commander expected our lawn to have a regulation crew cut. It might have been a myth, but every military kid believed that our fathers could be temporarily demoted if the MPs caught us doing something wrong. A cut in rank meant a cut in pay, and it hurt any chance at future promotions. I doubted a mere wild lawn could get Pop busted down to Major, and with less than a year to go before his retirement, there was no chance he'd make full Colonel, but he sure acted as if his entire military career hinged on the length of our grass.
I didn't get far with the mower before it clogged. Welts rose on my arms and my eyes stung as I pulled the moist, heavy clippings from the catcher. Grass wasn't my worst allergy, but it was annoying enough.
When I yanked on the starter, the motor still wouldn't turn over. I pushed the mower on its side, shoved my hair behind my ears, and squatted down to get a closer look.
The week before, we'd gone to Chicago for a rare vacation. Pop took me to the Museum of Science and Industry. It was heaven. They had early steam-age machines where the works were exposed, and I could push buttons and watch the harmonious motion of gears like planets orbiting the sun.
The moment that stayed in my heart was when I first caught sight of a huge brass and wrought-iron skeleton dial clock on the museum wall. A pendulum swept out arcs, portions of a circle, but that circle measured time, which was linear. Inside the exposed clockworks, cogs turned, moving the hands around the dial. Cogs and pendulums. Arcs and degrees. Motion and time. Filled with wonder and awe at the pure brilliance of humans, I understood at last how pilgrims could be moved to kiss the foot of a statue.
Machines were predictable. They always did the same thing. This gear always turned that driveshaft. A lawnmower didn't wake you up in the middle of the night and claim that it'd always been a blender, and that you were the insane one for ever thinking it cut grass.
The lawn mower wasn't beautiful in the same way that clock was, but I liked poking around its guts just the same. The simplicity was the thing that fascinated me. No matter how complicated a machine seemed to be, underneath it was a study in minimalism. A few gears and maybe a belt transformed linear motion into circular and sometimes back again. Simple as that. The elegant poetry of engineering.
Fixing the mower was like that—simple. Grass was packed so tightly under the blade of the mower that it couldn't spin. I carefully cleared it out.
"Don't chop your hand off,” Eric called out.
I was about to say something snarky to him, but swallowed it when I saw Sean beside him on the sidewalk. Sean bumped his guitar case with his knees, impatient to move on.
It wasn't that I'd forgotten how hot Sean was. It was just that I hoped my imagination added to his aura. No such luck. He was like a creature from a completely different plane of existence who was slumming with us mere mortals. My nerves crackled, jumping like a leg-humping dog. I didn't want him under my skin like that.
/> Sean ambled next door to the Foster's garage. The door was open and Tony Foster, Lane, and Mark were already there, butchering Led Zeppelin's Black Dog.
I didn't expect Eric to hang around while I finished mowing the lawn, but it seemed abrupt how he left, not even saying he was glad I was back.
After I set the bags of clippings at the curb, I followed the guys into the Foster's garage. Pop ranted constantly about their garage, which was so jammed with boxes that they couldn't park their cars inside. Nothing drove Pop crazier than people who wouldn't live according to his strict rules. Of course, I adored them more because of the fits they gave him.
Eric sat on the clothes washer. I took my usual place on top of the dryer, next to a precarious stack of cardboard boxes that looked like they hadn't been unpacked for several moves. Lane's drum set sat on a greasy square of burnt orange carpet. Extension cords snaked from the outlets to amps and guitars. Thank God, the guys finally stopped desecrating Zep and switched to playing AC/DC. Even Mark could handle those elementary chord progressions.
Tony stood in the middle of the garage with his eyes screwed shut, a mike clutched in his hands as he screeched falsetto lyrics. His guitar was a prop. I rarely saw him play it. Short, with thick glasses and a half-assed moustache, Tony wasn't anyone's idea of a rock star, but he was the only one of us who could sing.
Sean pouted down at his bass, his eyes hidden by his straight black hair. The bass was slung low, so that his long fingers seemed to pluck at his groin as well as the strings. He was short, thin—scrawny, really—but the flare cut of his ripped jeans made his thin thighs look like they went on forever. He glanced up. He had restless eyes that went with the aura of pressurized energy flowing off him. I imagined him jumping on his mattress, practicing Van Halen leaps, until his mom shouted up the stairs to knock it off.
That mouth of his was a little too big for his narrow, Asian featured face, but oh, on him, it worked. I was wrong to call Sean walking sex. Even standing still, he was un-fucking-believable, but I couldn't figure out why. I shoved my hair back behind my ears and cupped my chin in the palm of my hand while I studied him. There was nothing there that appealed to me, except that, as I picked grass clippings off my calves, I was incredibly aware of exactly where he stood, how he moved, and what he said.