What do I have without my best friend? Some Internet stalkers, a guy who bought me a soda, a doctor who won’t come clean with me and a confused mess of a fledgling art career that my mom’s more interested in than I am. It’s all okay right now, knowing that I can come home to affirmative sticky notes and sprawling vegetarian chili dinners, to someone who will try optimistically to weave braids in my too-short hair and tell me that of course I won’t be alone forever. But without Caro there to hold it together, my life is just a collection of disparate pieces, incidental and sad. Like that poem we read last year in English, when we did Things Fall Apart: the center cannot hold.
These are the things I’m thinking when a guy jumps in front of my bike.
16
I scream and jerk the handlebars hard to the right, bumping up over the curb. I spill onto the concrete, knees and elbows stinging.
“Oh my God,” says a voice, rushing over. A boy’s hand is in my face, reaching for my arm, helping me up. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say, groggily. I extricate myself from my bike, which clangs to the sidewalk in a protest of clicking spokes. I take in everything slowly, mechanically: the wheels don’t seem bent, which is good. My elbow is bleeding, which is bad. I turn my attention to the guy in front of me. He’s about my age, pale, with thin features and a yellow T-shirt, baggy and oversized.
“What were you doing in the bike lane?” I ask. I feel thick-tongued, stupid with gratitude to be alive. Thanks heaps, adrenaline. “You should be more careful.”
“Yeah,” he says, running a hand over the back of his neck. “I know. I’m sorry. I just wanted to get your attention.”
My focus sharpens. He looks up at me through his eyebrows, gaze guiltily flickering to my stomach.
“You’re Morgan Stone, right?” he asks.
Oh my God.
“Oh my God,” I say out loud. “Are you kidding me?”
He flinches a little. “I know, it was a stupid way to try to get your attention—”
“Stupid?” My voice is rising. “Stupid. You nearly got me killed.”
“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry. Just—look. I found your picture online, and I needed to—”
A trickle of blood runs down my elbow and spatters on the sidewalk.
“Needed to what?” My tone is deadly calm now. “Needed to get a look for yourself? Needed to tell me in person how I can fuck myself? Needed to come get a photo, so your friends, if you even have any, will believe you met the freak in real life?”
The jerk looks completely stunned. Whatever he expected—a cringing girl, a cooing flirt—I am not it.
“I just,” he sputters.
“You don’t need to do anything,” I tell him. “You need to let me live my own life in my own body and respect that it has nothing to do with you.”
I fling my leg over my bike and turn back to him as I push away into evening’s dying light. “Tell all your little friends I’m over this.”
My elbow stings the whole way home, and I can feel a bruise forming on my solar plexus where it knocked into the handlebars, and I have school on Monday and tomorrow I’ve got a mysterious doctor’s appointment where I’ll probably find out that I’m dying, but right now, Lord Almighty, I feel like a queen.
At home, I log into Public Scrutiny. I create a new user: MissAbyss. Enough sitting on the sidelines while other people control my narrative. I am queen of the night. I am do-not-stare-too-long-into-me-because-I-will-stare-back-into-you.
I sweep through the comments sections of all the photos and articles about the Hole Girl. I correct. I excoriate. I do not use emojis. When some idiot proposes omg she could totally do 138, get it, double 69??, I smack him down so hard with anatomical logic that I can practically see his head spin on the other side of the Internet.
It’s full dark outside my bedroom window when I push back from the computer, cracking my neck, and get dressed to go out. Behind me, my laptop chimes, and chimes again, and favorites and notifications and upvotes come flooding into my account. I don’t even care. I own this night.
I breeze past Steve and step into the Mansion, and a roar goes up. I lift my arms and grin, letting the blue and silver lights wash over me. I drink them in. I am filled, and alive. I pull my sweater off and fling it into the crowd, and then a searing light blinds my vision.
I look up through the dazzling dark just in time to see them charging in.
An android-faced TV reporter, immaculately coiffed and lipsticked. She’s flanked by a cameraman and two tech guys in black.
And they’re coming right for me.
Everything slows. The sound in the room warping in my ears. In the million seconds between each beat of “We Found Love,” I hear peopling booing the reporter. Spot the individual faces of people pointing to me, people confused, people jostling into view of the camera. People holding their phones high, recording like they’re about to bear witness. In the back of the room, Viking Hat Girl’s boyfriend shouts to no one in particular, “You assholes, leave her alone!”
The anchorwoman gets in my face.
“Morgan Stone,” she shouts over the music. I think. Even this close, it’s mostly just lip-reading. “Your mother Alanna has made a career from pushing the unattainably, and some would say destructively, perfect body. How does she feel about yours?”
I was eight when Fit or Die blew up. Everything changed for us. My mom’s face was suddenly on magazines in the supermarket. Cameras suddenly in front of us, everywhere we went. Our apartment abandoned for a succession of larger and colder houses; dinner conversations suddenly including an agent, an assistant, a publicist, a producer, including the words spin and market share and brand viability.
“They take everything you say out of context,” she told me one night after a party, five vodka martinis deep over an unflattering story in Cosmo. She was resplendent in a sequined gold dress, fighting to keep her eyes open in the back seat of her town car. “And no matter what you do, they make you look the way they want you to look. You can be a saint, Morgan. A saint. And they’ll turn you into John Wayne Gacy.”
I blink, panicked, into the camera’s spotlight. For the first time in my life, I truly understand the phrase deer in the headlights.
Then I dive into the writhing crowd.
It was one thing to yell at a kid on the street. To anonymously rage at a bunch of trolls on the Internet. But this feels bigger than me. This, I don’t know how to control.
(Also, my mother is going to kill me.)
I crawl to the center of the dance floor and huddle beneath the central disco ball in a half-crouch. I can see the camera’s spotlight bobbing around and I feel like an insect: voiceless, cowering, wanting nothing more than to skitter from the light.
The people around me are too far from the front door to have quite seen the news crew, and mostly too drunk to call attention to me. A large woman in a glittery aqua bodysuit stares at me, and I worry for a second that she’ll out me. But then the rational voice in my head whispers, She’s staring because you’re squatting on a dance floor like a total weirdo, and I straighten up and push away, heading toward the empty stage at the back of the floor.
A hand on my shoulder arrests me. My breath explodes in my throat like a bird. I turn, instinctively about to throw a punch, but then freeze.
It’s the cute guy.
He is taller than I remembered; his eyes, flickering in the strobe light, something beyond blue. I have never tasted anything that color.
He grins, bends down to my ear. “Looks like you’ve got an audience,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. A sudden howl of feedback erases my voice from the room, but he must be able to see the panic in my face. He puts his hand on my elbow. Despite myself, I feel a rushing warmth, my whole universe coalescing into the pads of four fingers, of skin on skin.
The camera cr
ew are circling the dance floor like sharks. I wait for this boy to be the sweet, confident hero. To see through my fear, to fold me in his arms and take me out of this place. To be the one who saves me from myself.
But he doesn’t.
He just stands there.
I’ve been waiting seventeen years for this, but I’m beginning to realize that maybe this is patriarchal, and my patience is wearing thin, and the back door beckons like a metaphor. So I’m the one who says, like everything’s cool, like I’m not about to get completely owned by some gossip-chasing WRAL news crew, “Hey, want to get out of here?”
“Okay,” he says. An easy smile, but eyes jumping from the Hole to my face and back to the Hole again. “Yeah, I do.”
There is a shout behind me. A bevy of college students surges toward us, phones extended and flashing.
“Hurry,” I tell the Coke guy. He laughs and pulls me forward, and the crowd’s protests flutter to the ground like paper as the door slides shut and we plunge together into the night.
We creep past the darkened news vans out front, skirting streetlights. Once off the block, I begin to giggle. I try to smother it, but the laughter crawls up out of my throat, hysterical. The Coke guy starts to laugh, too, but his laughter is a question mark. He gestures back toward the Mansion.
“So,” he says.
I shake my head. “Can we just not talk about it?”
“Sure,” he says. “Not talking. I am excellent at not talking.”
I laugh, and he laughs and I look at him in the streetlight. He jerks his head over his shoulder, like this is a language that we speak now, and begins to walk. Brimming with hope and fear and wishing, I follow.
We trace the veins of the city with our feet and come to rest in a small park. We lie beneath the swings, staring up at the sky. Even now, in late September, the air is thick with humidity, the stars dim through the sweaty haze of light pollution and the collective body heat of the city. We listen to the soft creak of the chains in the breeze, bits of mulch slowly gluing themselves to my back and thighs.
“So,” he says. “You go to State?”
“I don’t, um,” I say. “Actually, yeah. I don’t like to talk a lot about myself. Here. You know. Where I’m—” I gesture to my stomach. “Out.”
He laughs. “All right. It’s cool, it’s cool. We can keep it easy. How about—what’s your name?”
“I’m not really here to make Facebook friends.”
“I’ll tell you mine, how about that, and you can decide if you want to tell me yours.” I turn my cheek to the mulch to look at him, and find him looking back at me, beautiful and very, very close. “I’m Chad.”
I laugh. “Of course you are.”
“What does that mean?” He laughs.
“I don’t know,” I lie. I know exactly. “You look like a Chad. Or a Clint. Or a . . . I don’t know. Masculine Monosyllabic White Dude Name.”
He laughs again, a flash of Ken-doll teeth. His laugh is a little uncomfortable. I regret making the joke. I regret not just saying, You look like this friend/cousin of mine who is also named Chad! Ha, ha, small world! But then there’s the risk of his saying, “Um, I remind you of your cousin?” and then I would stammer and flush and explain that I am not actually incestuous, that that is just a stereotype about Girls With Holes In Their Torsos that is not actually true, and then he would say, “Wait, that’s a stereotype?” and at that point I realize that even my fantasy version of him is pretty dense, and start to question my own lack of self-respect, at which point my brain might actually begin to melt.
“Okay, I guess,” he says. He pokes me in the arm. “Well, you look like a . . . Holly.”
I tingle a little bit, touched by the attention. Somebody thinks I look like a something! Somebody has been paying enough attention to me to think he knows something about me! I laugh, poke him back. “Why Holly?”
“You know?” he says. “Like Holey?”
I try to pretend my world isn’t shattering inside. “Ugh,” I groan.
He chuckles. “Come on,” he says. “I thought it was pretty funny.”
I’m not sure which is worse: that he identifies me as Holey, or that he thinks this is a good joke.
“Hey,” he says, suddenly. He takes my hand. It is an impulsive gesture, sweet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just. I don’t know.” He looks me up and down in the orange streetlight, taking me in. “You’re different from anyone else I’ve ever met.”
I say, “Yeah, most girls don’t have a tunnel through their torsos.”
His eyes flick to the Hole again. It’s something he can’t help, a hiccup. “That’s not what I mean,” he says.
I laugh, but my heart feels bruised. “Sure it is,” I say. “I mean, let’s be honest.”
He runs his knuckles up and down my bare arm. My skin prickles all over, twelve hundred sparks of electricity.
“It’s okay,” I say. I am having a little trouble focusing. His fingers trace my shoulder, my collarbone. “I guess I am kind of”—my voice catches—“different.”
“Hey, don’t say that,” he says, softly. His voice drops, becoming low and husky, and because it seems a little ungainly, a little awkward and uncalculated, I like it. His fingers trace my cheek. “You know,” he says, “you’re pretty cool.”
And then his lips are on mine, and the softness is coming in waves. Beyond us, the world is night; above us, an orange streetlamp is singing hallelujah. I’m not a freak with the paparazzi after her and an ominous doctor’s appointment the next morning; I’m a girl out in the warm velvet night on the earth in the open air in the arms of a handsome stranger who is the first boy to kiss her after having seen her for everything that she is. I feel the earth digging into my shoulder blades, and drink in his kisses like a seed finally cracking its hard outer shell and beginning to reach for the light.
Something begins to build in me, to thrill deep in my belly. A heat. He has thrown one leg over mine and is pressing into me. Hand circling lightly up my stomach, and I am fighting the urge to remove it, or to guide it closer, when there is a startling flash of light, and a shout.
The cameras have found us.
I knock on the door to my apartment long after midnight—my keys probably spilled out somewhere in the dark and humid playground mulch. I lean my head against the doorframe, exhausted. My knocks are intermittent, the coded flashing of a lighthouse out into the dark. I am signaling safe harbors, I am signaling coral shoals to submarine blades. When I’m this tired, everything seems too flat, too hard, too real. Over my head, the stairwell fluorescents mercilessly illuminate everything with the unsentimental detailing of hospital lights: my disheveled hair; my red and blistered pinky toes curling like shrimp in my ill-chosen shoes.
Caroline opens the door after minutes or seconds, face rumpled and unwashed. She makes a sound when she sees me. I am gratified to see the flood of worry in her sleep-small eyes.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I kind of nod, and kind of shake, and without a word, she opens her arms. I fall into them.
She sets me on the couch with a soft flannel blanket, switches on warm yellow lamps. She disappears and returns in a moment with a box of tissues.
“Do I need to call 911?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Are you sure?”
I nod. I cup the tissue box in my lap like a fallen egg. Caro says, “So what happened?”
I look up at her and force a smile. “The press found me.”
It sounds ridiculous the second the words leave my mouth. But Caro doesn’t say, That’s why you’re knocking on our door at 3 a.m.? Instead she pulls my head into her lap, smooths my hair. The apartment is warm with the murmurs of domesticity: the scent of vanilla, t
he comforting echoes of silverware clinking, cabinets opening and shutting. Even the quiet is so much fuller when Caro is here.
Then I feel the weight of the air shift and sit up. Todd’s here. Of course he is. It’s not like Caro’s life pauses when I’m not there. Just the other way around.
“Hey, Morgan,” Todd says, without affect. He looks sleepy, loose-limbed in a white T-shirt and cotton drawstring pajama pants, balancing three mugs of cocoa. “How’s it going?”
I just nod. Caro reaches up to relieve him of the mugs. I reach for one instinctively, like a child.
“I’m sorry to bother you guys,” I say.
“You’re not bothering us,” Todd says, and Caro just says, “Shh.”
I sit between them and we sip our cocoa, Caro leaning against my shoulder, Todd awkward but close, his arm thrown across the back of the sofa. I can feel myself growing warm and sleepy. This is what it means, I think dimly, feeling Caro lift the mug from my hands from somewhere far away. This is what it means to have people who will never leave you. A blanket, a cocoa and two warm shoulders to fall asleep on when everything else around you is exploding in strange fireworks, altering the starscape above your little world forever.
17
My car is still marooned by the Mansion, probably fluttering with parking tickets, so Caro drives me to Dr. Takahashi’s office in the morning. She says little on the ride over, and for this, I am grateful. The radio murmurs softly, and the smell of cooling coffee curls up from an open thermos in the cup holder. I realize too late that it’s meant to be for me—Caro’s a tea drinker—and let it sit quietly between us, warming the car with its fragrance.
We park for a moment and sit. Then she unclicks her seat belt and goes to open her door. “You don’t have—” I begin, with a rush of relief.
“Sure I do,” she says, swinging her bag onto her shoulder. I hurry to catch up.
When we turn the corner, flashbulbs explode in our faces. Caro swears magnificently as the microphones descend like locusts.
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