Caca Dolce

by Chelsea Martin

  “Is this happening?” I said. “Are you here?”

  “I like you so much,” he said, initiating a hug. “I used to think about hurting myself all the time, but now whenever I start thinking about that, I think about you instead. I feel so much better lately. You are a wonder. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  I started imagining that he was talking to me about raspberries. I imagined that he was trying to offload raspberries onto me because the raspberries weren’t very good and he had to get rid of them. He had so many raspberries that he would have to devote the rest of his life to getting rid of them. I imagined Goth Ryan becoming the CEO of a raspberry-offloading company that marketed the raspberries to people by using slogans like “I like these raspberries so fucking much,” and “The way I feel about these raspberries is so much better than the way I normally feel about raspberries,” and “Buy these goddamn raspberries or I’ll fucking kill myself.” It was endearing to me that he thought he could sell raspberries using emotional manipulation. That kind of naïveté was sweet, in a way. In retrospect I see that I was super, super stoned.

  “I’m going to try to get a job,” he said. “I want to take care of you.”

  I nodded and rubbed my increasingly dry and puffy eyes, simultaneously acutely aware of, frustrated with, and incapacitated by my role in the universe.

  Something was weird about this. Ryan seemed to be saying he was in love with me, but I knew he was sleeping with my best friend, and seemed to not notice that I didn’t love him back, even though I kind of did. So what was the problem? I couldn’t remember what I was trying to think about. What was the question?

  “I need to go inside and . . . ask Marcy . . . something . . . about . . . fruit,” I managed to say.

  “Okay, I’m going to take off, then,” he said. He kissed me on my temple and held my hand as I moved away from him, and we maintained intense eye contact as I went inside and closed the door.

  “Ryan is here?” Marcy said. “Where the fuck did he go?”

  “Um,” I said, “I feel really weird right now.”

  “You should just go out with him already. He is totally in love with you. He didn’t even come in to say hi to me.”

  “I think I might be having a seizure.”

  “Oh, you poor thing!” she said with a big smile. “You ate too much pot brownie! Here, lie down, sweetie.”

  “Goddamnit, Marcy.”

  “Everybody has to grow up sometime,” she said, still smiling.

  “God, I fucking hate you.”

  Marcy and I quickly became inseparable frenemies. I didn’t trust her with any kind of secret, and emotional support seemed to go one way (from me to her), but we were both weird and encouraged each other’s weird behavior, and I enjoyed the fact that we didn’t completely like each other. I didn’t expect much from her, so she couldn’t really disappoint me. And I didn’t have to worry about hiding the unappealing parts of myself from her. More importantly, Marcy was my social crutch, and I was her scapegoat. She made all the plans, got boys to hang out with us, and found rides everywhere. And I would take the fall if anything happened so she wouldn’t look bad in front of her grandma or boyfriend or people she had crushes on or whoever else she happened to be worried about impressing at any given time. She would say, “Sorry we were out so late, Grandma. Chelsea wanted to make out with Ryan all night,” and her grandma would tell me that if I wanted to keep sleeping over I had to start going to church with them. Later, Marcy would tell me, “Don’t worry, I’ll make it up to you,” and invite Zach over to drink Jägermeister and watch TV with us. I was being mobilized and crippled simultaneously, but I was fine with this

  setup.

  Marcy invited Zach over one Saturday night, when her grandma would be visiting family. While we waited for Zach’s dad to drop him off, Marcy called Goth Ryan and invited him to join us.

  “I’m not just going to sit there and watch you and Zach make out,” she said.

  Marcy selflessly swept Goth Ryan away to her room as soon as he arrived. Before he disappeared, I tried to give him a look that said I don’t care what you do, and Like, at all, and Anyway Zach is here and we are in love, we are going to tell each other how in love we are and soon you will be merely a distant foggy memory that rarely occurs to me, and when I’m older I will conflate you with someone else I knew around this time and you will become a half-person, so unimportant on your own that I couldn’t even be bothered to remember you as one being, so utterly useless in my memory that you barely exist, and But in all seriousness, I really don’t care.

  Zach and I watched The Simpsons, filled up on Jäger, and pretended not to hear the occasional moaning and knocking coming from Marcy’s room. We slowly became drunker and more sideways, until we were lying cheek-to-cheek on the couch, both facing the TV.

  “You think that’s funny?” Zach whispered, feeling my smile against his face, a reaction to something Lisa Simpson said about Disney California Adventure.

  “Yeah,” I said, pretending to be short of breath for some reason.

  “You’re wonderful,” he said.

  I smiled again, somewhat suspicious of the similarity of this declaration to Ryan’s description of me as “a wonder.” I imagined that Marcy was secretly choreographing my entire love life, choosing the people I would have my first sexual experiences with, telling them what to say. Maybe she was working her way toward some massive humiliating punch line that more or less plagiarized the movie She’s All That. Something like: “Oh, you thought you were actually cool? Oh, you thought people would like you without me telling them to?”

  “Stay right there,” he said, getting up and moving the coffee table away from the couch. “Now hang your head over the edge. I want to kiss you upside down.”

  Zach and I kissed a little and then continued watching TV. I tried to dismiss my paranoid thoughts about Marcy. I tried to tell myself that she had control over my social life because I was unable to coordinate one for myself, not because she was some kind of mastermind scheming to fuck me over. Zach had kissed me because he liked me and was attracted to me. He had called me wonderful because he saw that I was different from everybody else, different from Marcy, and was amazed by the wonder that I was. I had to learn to accept the good things that came my way, instead of overanalyzing them until they disappeared.

  “I like you, Zach,” I said.

  “I like you, too.”

  The next Sunday before church began, Marcy and I whispered to each other about the other people arriving to church.

  “Can you believe the world’s greatest lover is here?” I said, gesturing to an unshaved, dehydrated-looking man with an oversize white T-shirt that read world’s greatest lover in a cartoon font on both the front and the back.

  “Oh my god, we’re so close. We have to try to talk to him,” Marcy said.

  “We should give him some privacy. I’m sure he gets harassed by girls like us all the time.”

  “I’m pretty sure he wants the attention if he’s wearing a giant fucking T-shirt advertising his talents.”

  The world’s greatest lover stood up to make an announcement about the need for volunteers for the upcoming potluck, and we both lost it.

  “Be respectful,” Marcy’s grandma said to Marcy.

  “Why don’t you tell Chelsea?” Marcy said.

  The tic in my butt started acting up after the sermon started, as sometimes happened when I was in a confined space or forced to be still. I was sitting right next to Marcy, and I knew she could feel it. I had told her about my tics, but I had never been right next to someone while it happened. I was embarrassed, but scooting over would only transfer my mortifying butt motion onto some stranger. My butt tic increased in speed due to the stress.

  “It’s all right,” Marcy whispered to me. “You’re okay.”

  On Monday, Marcy found me in the school cour
tyard to tell me that Zach had given her a letter that morning explaining that he was in love with her. She told me she felt sad for Zach, and guilty that she had to let him down.

  “I mean, I have a boyfriend,” she said.

  I didn’t ask to see the letter, for fear of exposing the pride that made me doubt, at least partially, the existence of such a letter.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know how much you like him.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. I had never hated a girl as much as I did in that moment.

  Later in English class, Tyler turned to me and whispered, “Wanna screw?” He held his hand out to me, revealing a single flat-head screw. It was dopey and perverted but there was something sweet about it. Normally I would have turned to Zach, made some kind of facial expression or gesture to indicate that Tyler lacked the intelligence and grace I desired in a partner. But I chose not to acknowledge Zach.

  “Yeah,” I said. I took the screw from Tyler and stuffed it into my pocket. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

  I could see from a sideways glance that Zach was not looking

  at me.

  After school, Marcy and I had a few hours to kill before Goth Ryan and Marcy’s boyfriend could hang out with us, so we walked to

  Marcy’s cousin’s house down some dirt road a couple miles away from the main part of town. This was a part of town that I should have known the name of—I had spent nearly my whole life here, in and around Clearlake—but this was not the kind of information I tended to keep in my brain. I was allowing myself to be taken places with no actionable plan for how to get myself to a phone or a neighborhood that I could identify by name.

  Marcy’s cousin wasn’t home. With nowhere else to go, we approached two adult men, one of whom was shirtless, drinking beer on a nearby porch.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Marcy said.

  “Just drinking beers, too hot to do much,” the shirtless man said. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  We entered the house and used their phone to call Marcy’s boyfriend and Goth Ryan, to tell them to meet us at this stranger’s house.

  I briefly wondered if Zach lived in the neighborhood. I didn’t know where he lived, so every place I went seemed like an opportunity to run into him.

  The house was hot and stale. There were seven or eight men sitting around a dining table, cigarettes burning in each person’s hand, beer cans scattered everywhere. Marcy and I got drunk very quickly from a bottle of vodka that was being passed around. We played some kind of drinking card game with the men. They stared at us, and Marcy and I teased and flirted with each other, knowing how cute we must look in their eyes, what a spectacle we were. We hugged and rested our heads on each other’s shoulders and forced shots down each other’s throats. We took shots between turns, on other people’s turns, and from the floor well after the game was over. We stumbled into the backyard, where I steadied myself on a garbage can and looked into the sky for celestial clues about where I was.

  It started getting dark, and Goth Ryan and Marcy’s boyfriend still hadn’t shown up. We didn’t have a plan for getting home, and we were way too drunk to start planning something, or even to coherently discuss what we might do if the guys didn’t show up.

  If you had to choose, I thought, drunkenly forgetting the issue at hand and replacing it with semilyrical melodrama, is it better to be with someone who you love or who loves you?

  I wish I could tell you I had some deep emotional scarring or perverse desire for pain that caused me to act this reckless. I wish, even, that I could tell you that I was just a stupid fifteen-year-old who didn’t see the problem with getting raging drunk in a strange house with a bunch of adult men whom I had never met before, with a girl considerably more reckless than I was. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew what could happen to me and I just didn’t seem to give a shit.

  “Ryan has a Prince Albert,” Marcy whispered into my ear, hugging me from behind.

  “What does that mean?” I said. I tried to nudge her away from me. I didn’t feel like flirting with her anymore.

  “A dick piercing. It’s hot.”

  “Okay. Very cool,” I said.

  Marcy kissed my neck and I suddenly became aware that—

  surrounded by strange men who all looked the same to me, none of whom had given us their names, at 1 a.m., in a part of town I probably couldn’t find on a map—maybe I actually did give a shit about what happened to me.

  “Please don’t kiss me,” I whispered, not wanting to embarrass her—not because I was a nice person but because I was afraid of her retaliation. Then, drunkenly realizing that I shouldn’t have to tiptoe around her just to avoid one of her vindictive tirades, I said more loudly, “Get off of me,” and scrunched my shoulders to make hugging me more difficult.

  Marcy and I would only hang out like this for a couple more months. We were already becoming sick of each other’s shit, and sick of the workarounds we had developed to minimize having to deal with each other’s shit, and sick of seeing who we would pretend to be in order to appease each other. I was sick, for example, of trying to make myself appear emotional when she was crying just so she would trust me enough to tell me why she was crying, which was often for a reason I found disappointing. And I was sick of maintaining a consistent level of shyness to avoid upstaging her.

  “You’re such a fucking bitch,” she said. “You’re such a fucking pussy little bitch. Hit me. I know you want to, you fucking stupid bitch.”

  “Shut up,” I said. I had some real zingers back then.

  “Just hit me, you stupid slut. I want you to. I won’t hit you back. I want you to hit me, you fucking stupid pussy.”

  She was making it sound pretty good. I slapped her on the cheek.

  “You fucking bitch, I can’t believe you did that,” she said, and slapped me back.

  Blood started pouring from my nose onto my clothes and the carpet we were standing on. To be fair, she hadn’t hit me that hard. I’ve always been prone to nosebleeds.

  “You need to call your mom,” Marcy said almost immediately, as a joke I guessed, but who could really tell with her?

  I pinched my nose hard, walked to the bathroom, and stuck my face under the sink faucet. I knew there were certain things you could do to make a bloody nose stop bleeding, but I didn’t do any of them. I just let water run over my nose, washing some of the blood down the drain but mostly just diluting it and splashing it all over my face and the sink.

  “Chelsea,” a male voice said, entering the bathroom. I imagined that Zach had seen me and Marcy fighting in the backyard somehow. Maybe he lived around here after all. Maybe he had come to rescue me, to explain that the note he’d given to Marcy had been misinterpreted, or that she had made it up, to tell me again that I was wonderful. We would walk off into the sunset and I would touch his penis, miraculously knowing what to do this time, and he would like it.

  I could hear the familiar din of Marcy fighting with her boyfriend somewhere else in the house.

  “I’m sorry we’re so late,” the voice said. I was being hugged from behind by pale, claw-like hands with black fingernail polish wrapping around my waist.

  “It’s okay,” I said, and intentionally blew out the blood clot that was beginning to slow the flow of my bloody nose. I wanted my nose to keep bleeding. I wanted Goth Ryan to see what I let Marcy do.

  I watched the blood drip onto the ceramic sink, splattering into dozens of tinier droplets and then recollecting to form lines that emptied into the drain. I considered stopping the drain so I could see how much blood I was losing.

  “I want you to be my girlfriend,” he said, making no indication of whether he approved or disapproved of the blood pouring out of my skull.

  I looked up at myself in the mirror. Goth Ryan was still holding my waist. I made a face at my reflection that I had seen cartoon characters make to indicate a
resignation to something unpleasant but inevitable: eyelids half closed, making direct eye contact with the camera, lips pursed.

  “Yeah, great,” I said, still looking at my reflection. “That would be perfect.”

  But my sarcasm sounded false and cloying. I knew I wasn’t the victim I wanted to believe I was. I knew that I was letting my nose continue to bleed. I was not making any effort to stop it.

  8

  ceramic busts

  “Hey,” I said. He didn’t hear me.

  I was shy enough to have waited until the fourth day of driving school to say something to him, but not so shy that I wouldn’t insert myself into company that didn’t explicitly want me. I was selectively shy. Or I wasn’t shy at all, but awkward and antisocial. Anyway, in this case, I had nothing to lose. This driver’s ed course was only two weeks long, and I was only in Los Angeles visiting my dad for three weeks. He looked like the star of a movie about cool teenagers. His scarf and denim jacket were extremely impractical for the Los Angeles summer. His long mousy hair covered most of his face, so mostly what I was attracted to, I guess, was the exposed tip of his nose and his mouth and chin.

  The class was mostly made up of adults who had been court-

  mandated to complete a driver’s training course after what I presumed was negligent driving. There was one other nerdy teenage girl who was trying to get her learner’s permit, like me and this boy.

  “Hey,” I said again, sitting down next to him on a bench during a class break. “I’m Chelsea.”

  “Sandy,” he said.

  I said nothing else, confident about where the conversation had gone.

  It was as if my whole life to this point had just been practice, and this was the real thing. The perfect boy. The limited time frame. The rigid, semi-educational setting.

  Sandy stood up and took a call on his cell phone. He walked to the street and kicked the fence halfheartedly with his white Converse. I watched him unapologetically, knowing immediately that I was in love.