Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Don’t worry about Disco Ball Butt. She’ll be first against the wall in your glorious body revolution.”

  “That wasn’t hypothetical,” she says as we clatter out into the stairwell. “Those pants are real. They used to call her the Ass-tronaut.”

  “You know,” I say, “I’m pretty sure that tonight, she’ll be the least of our worries.”

  9

  The Mansion is in a darkened part of town that I never visit, tucked away past a row of old warehouses far from the bright downtown. Caroline parks on the street as a group of girls totters past in painted-on skirts and three-inch heels. For half a second, I think about staying in the car, begging off sick. But somehow I’m on my feet, and Caro and I are flowing like liquid across the street, through a gate, handing woefully fake IDs to a mulleted bouncer who sees nothing but our shining eyes and Caro’s breasts, and we’re in.

  The bare skin of my stomach tingles raw and electric where it rubs against the wool sweater. The Hole feels like a bomb I’ve smuggled in, the crowd around me laughing, drinking, unsuspecting. I always carry the truth of myself with me. The difference is that tonight, I feel like it might explode.

  I take a breath, willing my heartbeat to slow as I look around. I’ve heard about this place, but I hadn’t realized that it actually is a crumbling old Southern Gothic mansion, complete with sagging porch and gabled roof with rusting iron railings. The interior walls have been gutted to carve the entire building into a three-story-high cavern packed densely with bodies. Soundproofing is nailed around an old, dust-thick trim carved with cherub heads and grape leaves. Lights drench the bouncing crowd and empty stage like neon water. The music flooding around and through us is recorded. We’ve missed the first set.

  “Come on,” Caroline screams in my ear, tugging me in the direction of the bar. I make out the dim shape of Boring Todd leaning against a small table with a drink in each hand, and a backlit smile that I want to pretend includes me, but I know is for Caroline alone. I drift behind my best friend like a balloon slowly settling to the earth as she slips her arm around Todd’s waist, and he leans in to softly, almost bashfully, kiss her on the cheek.

  Facts that are true about Todd and Caroline:

  They are very, very sweet, and happy and generally respectful about PDA.

  Seeing them together makes me want to vomit.

  I am probably going to hell.

  “How was your set?” Caro ask-shouts, pulling away from Todd so we stand in a little circle. Wheels one, two and three.

  Todd hands her a drink while he considers. He’s wearing a navy polo, blue jeans, and blue sneakers. Even playing songs called “Feel the Feels” to a screaming club, the boy is monochrome. At last he shouts back, “It was good. Arquette was a little off-key in the first verse of ‘Get It Got It Bad,’ until the part, you know, the—” He whistles a little high-low note through his teeth. “But they’ve had that flu this week that hit their throat pretty hard, so that’s to be expected, even though they’ve been drinking honey tea at least three times a day.”

  Caro nudges Todd’s elbow, and he blinks back to life, seeming to see me.

  “You know,” he says, extending his other drink to me, “I read a really interesting thing about honey last week on Facebook. Or was it a blog?” He pauses. “Or maybe someone told it to me. My brother, maybe.”

  I smile tightly, waving off the drink. I’m just going to go to the bar, I mouth to Caro.

  “You sure?” Caro calls after me as I nod emphatically, backing into the crowd. It’s almost as packed here as on the dance floor, a mix of rainbow-haired college kids and thirty-something hipsters jostling for the bartender’s attention over the shoulders of the Raleigh old-timers camped coolly at the bar. Todd’s diminishing voice, leaking between heads and elbows, declares, “No, it was a podcast,” before being swallowed completely.

  I slip onto a cigarette-scented stool recently vacated by a forty-year-old woman with green eyeliner and survey the room. The Mansion is dark and impossibly loud: a jumble of shadows and strangers and sound. The tension drains from my body like breath. Maybe it’s an introvert thing, but even when I’m lonely, there’s always a little relief to being alone. Or maybe it’s just that there’s nothing quite like the keen awareness that you’re stopping two people from making out to make you feel like the world’s red-headedest stepchild.

  The bartender stops in front of me. He’s a middle-aged man, balding with a hard belly, who hates the world. I can tell because there’s a button pinned to his T-shirt that reads, I hate the world. He looks me over and snorts.

  “What are you, like, thirteen?” he asks.

  I push my ID across the bar. “Thirty-nine,” I say, not breaking eye contact. “I’ve turned thirty-nine the last six years in a row.” I add, in my best sultry voice. “Forty ain’t caught me yet.”

  “Cute,” he says, wiping his hands on a towel. “A-plus. Oscar nominee. Now go home, sweetheart. I’ve got a liquor license to keep.”

  He starts to turn away, and I blurt, the wool itch on my skin making me giddy and bold, “It was good enough for your bouncer. He let me in.”

  The bartender stops and groans. He presses his knuckles into his eyes.

  “Of course he did,” he mutters. “Jesus Christ, Steve. A drunk snow plow could walk it straighter and narrower.”

  He looks up, blinking rapidly as his vision refocuses. He sighs when it focuses on me.

  “Are you driving tonight?” he asks, sounding resigned.

  “No.”

  He fixes me with a hard stare.

  “No.”

  “Fine.” He slides the ID back across the bar without glancing at it. “What’ll it be?”

  I hesitate. Besides the one time Caro and I got drunk on wine coolers at age fifteen and puked blue all night, and the half-dozen beers I’ve opened at YYS shows and then abandoned because beer tastes like, well, moldy bread juice, I know basically nothing about alcohol.

  I say, just as the bartender’s face is starting to fall into hard skepticism, “Surprise me.”

  Good one, Morgan. You have definitely fooled this professional alcohol dispenser into believing you are smart at alcohol. Pat on the back.

  I wonder, as I wait for him to come back, if I could tell him about the Hole. If maybe this is the moment. The thought of it gives me a thrill so intense that I have to turn away, calm myself by surveying the other faces at the bar like a weird rosary: Awkward First Date Couple, Lonely Dude Leaning Over Uncomfortable Girls in Sparkly Earrings, Chick Wearing a Viking Hat, Bachelorette Party.

  I’ve gotten through Face Tattoo Guy and Extremely Hetero College Bros when the bartender returns with a glass of something brown. “Five dollars,” he says, pointing a cocktail straw at me. “Keep your eye on it. Don’t let anyone put anything in it. If you get sick, do it outside.”

  “Aw, thanks, Dad.” I beam. His face remains stony.

  “Tip jar’s that way,” he says, and disappears down the bar before I have the chance to say anything else. I should feel disappointed, but I feel, as I turn back to face the crowd, serene. Caro and Todd are nowhere to be seen. Neither is YYS, or anyone else who knows me already. Nobody looking at me would imagine the secret waiting in my gut. But then, except for the extra pair of eyes tattooed on the side of Face Tattoo Guy’s face, nobody’s really looking.

  Other people have expectations for you, narratives they’ve constructed in which they’ve scripted out your part as a supporting character in their lives. You can behave this way or that way. You’re the funny one. You’re the depressing one. You’re the quiet one.

  But when there’s no one here to recognize you or make demands that you fit into a neat little role in their story, you’re wide open. And maybe then, I think, looking out at Bachelorette and Biker Couple and Shrieking Girl Group—at all the side characters weaving toge
ther like background colors on a canvas—there’s room for you to be the hero.

  And I know exactly the shape of the story I want to paint tonight.

  I stand, feeling the Hole in my middle stretch and settle as I carefully set the untouched drink on the bar behind me. Everything pounds—my blood, the bass, the spaces in and between the molecules that make up my humming body. I let the pulsing of everything pull me to the dance floor.

  No, this is not true. I choose. I go.

  If it were a movie, silence would fall when I step onto the floor. But instead, the music is so loud I’m drowning in it, sinking to my eyeteeth, my body ripped away in the howl of sound and dark. The flashing lights swim over the mad pulse of torsos, of hands. Anonymous faces appear and disappear in the snapshots of strobe lights, Cheshire Cat smiles flashing and gone.

  Beat by beat I let the music erase me until I am nothing but the bassline in my bones, and then, in the throbbing heat of this crowd of strangers, I drop my sweater to the ground.

  Something in my body begins to hum.

  I lift my arms.

  And I’m dancing.

  If people notice the Hole, they aren’t immediately obvious about it. And probably, they don’t. The Mansion is a mess of sweat and bodies, a thousand tricks of half-light. Even if they did see, everyone is so drunk and stoned and high on music that what would they say? The steamy hot air slides around and through my torso, the filmy cotton shirt clinging almost immediately to my skin, shriveling. I see Viking Hat Girl go by in a flash, and the woman with the green eyeliner. I see a girl I don’t know, and a guy. And another, and another. Around me, strangers grind, and I wind my hands into the air and grind with them. I give myself over to the music. I am painting the dark and pulsing air with the colors that are me.

  An anonymous guy dances up on me, grabs my hips. I let him, and we swing together. The beat shifts, and he does, too, to my front. There is a double take, a startled yelp I can barely hear—an offbeat in the music. I close my eyes, feel him vanish into the dark. But as he goes, I hear a phrase echoing in the crowd: Hole Girl. Then again, repeated like a ripple, spreading outward, diluting into waves of curiosity and confusion and acceptance. Hole Girl, I think to myself and smile. I let my body unfurl. I am electric. I am fluid. I dance and I dance and I dance.

  10

  I’m completely useless the first day of senior year because Caro and I stay up half the night screaming oh my God and are you insane and yes, this is awesome, yes. I sleepwalk through the haze of syllabi and ice-breaker games with kids I’ve known since I was six, distantly aware that my body is crusted with last night’s sweat. I thought that last night would be the beginning of a whole new life, lived wild and free, secret-less beneath the bare and certain sky, but in the flat light of day, everything feels anticlimactic. Ordinary. The cafeteria still smells like Chef Boyardee, Principal Crowell still uptalks through the morning announcements (“And the chess club? Will meet? In room 301?”), I still get chewed out by Coach Machlan for not dressing for gym. I feel like Difference must be radiating from my pores, my body shining bright with everything that I know I can be; I keep glancing back at desktops and pens, half expecting to see dusty silver fingerprints lingering behind, evidence of this new magic. But there is nothing but crude graffiti and the freshmen getting lost in the hallways and teachers pushing us to fill our brains so that we can graduate, please, just graduate and get out of here.

  When the bell rings, I brush off Caro and Emmeline and race for home. I force myself to swallow down a burrito while I make a cursory stab at my homework. The top of the precal worksheet cheers Welcome to senior year!, but it feels like a newspaper from a different country: foreign, irrelevant to my actual life.

  The second I’m done, I grab Caro’s sewing scissors and fling open my closet door.

  I go back to the Mansion that night. And then Thursday. And Friday and Saturday.

  It’s like dropping that first sweater has unleashed a hunger in me that my old existence can’t fill. I craft at lunch, covering our cafeteria table with sparkles and spangles and fringe. My collection of belly shirts grows, becoming increasingly elaborate. And at the Mansion, people respond. After the first few awkward questions from the first few awkward guys, the word spreads—oh yeah, the girl with the hole in her middle. Not that people get it. Not that they aren’t freaked out. But everyone pretends they’re okay with it. And so everyone’s okay.

  Caroline is torn at first between worry and support. Finally, though, she caves: picks out outfits with me, rushes to the Mansion night after night and then makes us get up at 5 a.m., scrawling away at our homework over the kitchen table and black pots of coffee. We’re both exhausted, and I’m sleepwalking through my job at the organic foods co-op so badly that I mix up arugula and rutabaga, and Caro starts to drop the word “unsustainable” a lot, but after years of my ball-and-chaining she’s thrilled that I’ve finally started to act like I’m alive.

  We become regulars. Steve, the mullet-wearing bouncer, offers us cigarettes between set breaks. I order a different drink every night. The bartender isn’t nice to anyone and he isn’t nice to me, either, and I feel a kind of love in the way that he doesn’t make me feel special. On nights when there is live music, Caro and I are the ones in the front, throbbing with the strobes, setting the pace for the sweaty and communal pulse. Increasingly, people seem to smile at me. They don’t know my name, my history, where I’m from, and that makes me feel even more alive. In this place, I can be the Hole Girl with the lithe and winding waist, with the shell-green eyes and the dusting of freckles. The Hole Girl who comes early and stays late, who dances to every song with a friend, or with strangers or by herself, her own body, her own skin, the inexplicable hole in her middle floating out across the dance floor like a memory of some eclipsing moon.

  11

  After two weeks, Caro begins to flag. She gets wan and circle-eyed. First it’s, “We have a rough draft due next week for history,” then, “Morgan, have you made your outline yet?” Then, flatly: “Are you going out again?” she asks.

  I look up from the project I’m hunched over on the floor, a shirt I’ve cropped and painted to look like the Raleigh skyline lit up at night. I’m gluing on tiny amber sequins to make the windows on the BB&T building glow. My gallery portfolio is half forgotten under the bed; I’m flooding my life with a new kind of color.

  “Is this about the problem set?” I ask. “I got an extension.”

  “Morgs—”

  “It’s fine,” I say. She just kind of sighs.

  “What,” I say at last.

  “Look, I’m happy for you,” she says, “I really, truly—”

  “Caroline,” I say. “Enough with the happy disclaimers.”

  “I just worry you’re going to wear yourself out,” she says.

  But I’m the opposite of worn out. I don’t know how she doesn’t see that. I am more myself than I have ever been. I am just beginning to know how to wear this skin.

  I’m hungover as hell when my phone goes off the next morning. Last night at the bar I hilariously ordered “shots.” Never again.

  Taka, the screen says. I moan, hit dismiss.

  8 missed calls, the phone says.

  Mother, the phone says.

  Mother.

  Mother.

  Mother.

  Mother.

  Jesus.

  Caro sticks her head in on her way to work—ponytailed and makeup-free, which means she’s got a shift at Java Jane today. She likes to smudge on glitter eyeliner and dark lipstick for Walgreens, a look she calls “corporate whore.” Caro doesn’t strictly need two jobs—our rent is dirt cheap, and we’ve got the whole gap year after we graduate to save up for college—but arguing with her is like arguing with a motivational poster: Success: A Journey, Not a Destination! (In other words, frustrating and full of kitten photos.)

 
“How was the rest of your night?” she asks.

  “Good,” I tell her, blearily. “I met a very handsome bagel baker. He wants me to move in with him and be his bagel inspiration.”

  “I’m so happy for you,” she says. “Can you leave your blender when you move out? I like it.”

  “He will give me one million blenders,” I say to my pillow.

  “Sounds like a keeper,” she says. “I’ve got to go. Don’t be late to the doctor.”

  “Don’t you be late to the doctor,” I say, pointing a finger gun in her general direction. She winks at me and vanishes down the stairs.

  On my way into Takahashi’s office, I listen to my voicemail. “Morgan, I’ve got something important to discuss with you,” my mother’s voice announces drily. In the background, I hear a timid voice asking her for the final time to turn off her cellular device and fasten her safety belt, and Mother exhales, exasperated. “Just clear some time this afternoon for a call,” she says. “Take care of yourself, Morgan.” Even from here, 7,300 miles away and eight hours later, I can hear the echo of the implied threat: Or else I will.

  I slump cotton-mouthed into Dr. Takahashi’s waiting room, thankful for once for the dim fluorescent lighting. I try flipping through Better Homes and Gardens, but the pictures of food make me feel nauseated, as do the teeth of the magazine ad models pretending to joyfully eat salad.

  Dr. Takahashi seems even more distant than usual at my appointment today, distracted. I’ve always found it easy to tell him things, maybe because he never seems to want to hear them. But when I ask him about my health, the weather, his family, and receive nothing but vague, one-word answers, I start to lose patience. At last I blurt, “I finally started having fun like a real young person.”

  “So I hear,” Taka says.

  I blink down at the part in his hair. “Excuse me?”

  His hands, probing the edges of the Hole with sterile gloved fingers, go still for a moment before fluttering back to life, pushing and patting.