Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  Maybe you don’t need the world to see your art and know you and everything you want to be. Maybe you need just one person who knows that you’re worth it.

  Marcel’s voicemail picks up, and I startle back to the present.

  “It’s Morgan,” I blurt. “I’ve got the theme for my show. We’ll call it What Am I Missing?”

  31

  I wake up at three in the afternoon surrounded by half-sketched ideas, blinking like a disoriented wombat. I drag my weary body to the shower. I’m still braless, my skin sticky with the ghost of vanilla Frappuccino. I peel Howie’s T-shirt away and stand under the water, letting the last two days swirl around my ankles and toes and down the drain.

  The press is delighted to have spotted Howie and me fleeing our last appointment together. The more salacious gossip blogs speculate about where we disappeared to for the romantic interlude. There’s a general scrambling to settle on a tabloid-appropriate name for the pair of us: the Puzzle Pieces, the Perfect Matches, the Soul Mates, Destiny’s Children.

  “HG & LB gave the docs a slip and snuck back late at night—after who knows what,” reports gossip blog Gotcha! smugly. “Nine hours on the run and back to the doctors at dawn—there’s only so far these lovebirds can fly without circling back to the meds!” Whoever spotted us neglected to mention our distinctly unromantic handshake.

  Public Scrutiny is still churning merrily away. There’s some more art, and a fan video for Yum Yum Situation’s “Hole Girl” song: an eleven-year-old girl dancing around her bedroom with a black paper circle taped to her stomach. Despite myself, I smile.

  There’s also a brand-new section dedicated to fan fiction. I click in, even though it’s eight different kinds of mistake. “Match Made in Heaven.” “Hidden Desire.” “A Hole New World: An Aladdin–Hole Girl Crossover.”

  “Is it weird that nothing seems weird anymore?” I ask myself aloud.

  “Is it weird that I talk to myself more now that Caro’s ignoring me?”

  “Is it definitely time to get out of the house?”

  I pat my cheek.

  “Yes, insane self,” I say. “Yes, it is.”

  My phone lights up as I’m digging for my bike helmet. For once, it’s someone I know.

  Howie: Hello, Lady M. I’ve been doing some research into the Tour de Freaks and found someone we should meet. Up for a road trip?

  Me: Mmm, would, but have an appointment with Science. V important.

  Howie: What! Sounds lame. Blow it off.

  I fiddle with the keys for a moment, then grab the phone and call his number. He picks up at once.

  “Wow,” he says, “Morgan Stone, calling me. I’m honored. I’m flabbergasted. I don’t know what to say.”

  “I got tired of typing,” I say. “Who is it you think we should meet?”

  “Helen Rhees Boyle,” he says. “The Fallen Angel of Appalachia. Apparently she lives in a small mountain town outside of Asheville. It’s five hours from here, tops.”

  “How in the world did you find her?” I ask.

  “Research,” he says. “Look at me, Morgan Stone. I mean, not right now, but in the abstract. Do I look like a boy who wasn’t best friends with the librarian growing up?”

  “Yes, yes,” I concede. “You are NerdKing, King of Nerds.”

  “It’s Your Nerdjesty. Anyway. She’s got to be ancient by now, late eighties, ninety maybe. It’s a long shot. But we could give it a try. We’re young. We’re foolish. I have a gas card. Want to go tomorrow? We could make it there and back easily, knock this out before our appointment.” His voice skips lightly over the word, as though this were any other appointment. As though it isn’t the start of a potentially endless round of injections that could give us cancer or kill us or turn us into ordinary people.

  “I can’t,” I say, neatly evading the pit. “I’ve got a meeting with my manager, and then gallery stuff all week.”

  “An appointment I don’t have?” he says. “I’m jealous.”

  “I’m feeling weirdly good about it,” I say. “My project kind of came together last night.”

  “That’s great,” he says. “What did you end up doing?”

  I blink away images of young Howie, bent over his Book of Freaks.

  “Do you want to see?” I ask.

  There’s a pause on the other end of the phone too long and painful to parse.

  “Sure,” he says at last. “I’d love to.”

  We hang up, and I sit still for a moment, trying to list all the reasons my heart could be pounding so hard.

  I spend the rest of the waning afternoon trying to draft an essay about masculinity and solitude in The Red Badge of Courage for English class, but keep jumping up to drift anxiously around the apartment, adjusting things that don’t need adjusting. There’s still no sign of Caro. She has ceased to exist except in lingering scents: her perfume in the bathroom in the evenings; fried eggs this morning; each smell evoking a sleepy pang of happiness in me before I open my eyes and remember again that we’re still not speaking.

  Howie arrives at five, his floppy hair still shower-damp. I’m suddenly hyperaware of the apartment—the dingy corners, the heavy smell of oils and turpentine, the way the light in the kitchen buzzes like something unfairly trapped. It is painfully different from his family’s clean, bright home.

  “It’s nice,” he says.

  “It’s a dump,” I say.

  “I’m staying in that old motel by the dog food factory,” he says. “I’m elated to be in a room without mystery stains on the walls.”

  He studies the brand-new erasure paintings, some still wet where I’ve plastered the sketches to the canvas. The final collection is varied, a wild rash of parakeet colors, but there is a sense of cohesion to it: the clash of charcoal with color, of movement with loneliness. It creates a tension that hums through the room. The figures’ shame and fear have been highlighted, but also transformed. They are washing their failings in color. They hold their chins high. Pride glows from painting after painting.

  Howie studies the legless dancer, saying nothing.

  “It’s like your Book of Freaks,” I tell him, suddenly uncertain. “The theme is, ‘What am I missing?’’’

  He paces from one to the next. “They’re good,” he says.

  “I know that ‘good,’” I say. “That’s the kind of ‘good’ that comes with a ‘but.’”

  He grins guiltily, pauses on a painting of a weaver with no hands. The figure’s brow is creased in concentration as a tapestry assembles itself on the loom before him.

  “What about the extras?” Howie asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  He gestures to my stomach, and I rankle instinctively. I’m still not used to anyone addressing the Hole so proprietarily. I have to remind myself of his history, that he knows what he’s talking about.

  “Everyone here is missing something,” he says. “Like you. That’s how they’re different. But what about the rest of us? The people with extras? Extra skin, extra heads, extra wings?”

  I feel my shoulders caving in.

  “I started this project last year, before I met you,” I say. “Besides, that’s not . . . This is about absence. You know. Loneliness and lacking.”

  “There are plenty of things absent from my life,” he says, preoccupied. “And I’ll bet you a million bucks there are things you can access, looking the way you do, that conjoined twins can’t. Or even just people with extra flesh. Or extra weight.” He peeks into the kitchen, at a limbless swimmer framed in aqua. “Everyone you draw is really skinny.”

  I open my mouth and then close it again, choking down the well of resentment building, stone by slow stone, in my chest.

  There is nothing quite like having someone look at your art, and really see it, and you, and point out that you’re actually not ready to fly at
all.

  Howie eyes me closely. “Oh man,” he says. “You’re someone who doesn’t take criticism well, aren’t you? You’re trying so hard not to be mad at me right this minute.”

  Something in me breaks. I laugh, a small flood. I want to say, How do you know me so well? and can’t because it feels too big, and so instead I just say, “You are so nosy.”

  He shrugs. “I spend a lot of time watching people,” he says. “That’s what happens when you grow up on the outside of the world. You get to know it better than it knows itself.”

  The front door opens and closes. Caro slips into the kitchen and deposits her lunch dishes in the sink. She looks up and smiles. She is occupying as little space as possible.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “I’m Howie,” Howie says, extending his hand.

  She laughs, and I look away from the familiar shine of her brow as she takes Howie’s hand. “I know,” she says. “You’re all over the news. I’m Caroline.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” he says. “We’re critiquing Morgan’s art. Care to join us?” As though there is no division between us. As though crossing that divide is the easiest thing in the world.

  “I’m okay,” Caro says. She raises her glass of water to Howie—to us?—and ducks behind a curtain of hair. “I’m going to go unwind a little bit. Nice meeting you.”

  “Bye,” Howie says to her retreating back. “Happy unwinding.” Upstairs, the bathroom door opens and shuts. “Roommate?”

  “Best friend.”

  He rocks on the balls of his feet, as though standing is a little game, and he is winning. “You don’t seem too friendly.”

  “We had a fight.”

  The pipes giggle in the walls.

  “About what?” Howie asks, pulling me back down to the kitchen.

  I fill my cheeks with air and slowly blow it out.

  “You, actually,” I say.

  He crosses his arms. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about me?”

  I look up at the ceiling for a way to tell this story and make it sound good.

  “She thought I should give you another chance,” I say at last. “After the freaks thing. She said we had too much in common to throw away.” I shift my eyes back to his face, challenging him to laugh or to leave. Instead, he just looks up the stairs, where Caro disappeared.

  “She sounds pretty smart,” he says.

  We sit in the living room and plot out our trip to see the Angel the following weekend. We brainstorm questions. Me: Was it hard to grow up looking like she did? How did she live without loneliness? Howie: Is she personally religious, or is that just a stage persona? What drove her to the stage? Can she fly?

  “She can’t fly,” I say, derisively. I am curled in one corner of the couch, Howie slouching in the other, our bodies tingling with nearness, but not touching.

  “Who says?” he asks.

  “Physics,” I say.

  “Physics is boring.” He sighs to the ceiling. Absently, he reaches up and touches the corner of the breastless mother painting. The pads of his fingers come away sticky with daffodil hue. “Science dictates everything else in our lives. Does it have to dictate my dreams, too?”

  We stare at his yellow fingers. He wipes them on his arm: four war stripes.

  “Are you nervous?” I ask.

  “About getting cancer and dying from a highly experimental treatment?” he asks. He blows on the stripes. “Sure. Aren’t you?”

  “I know I should be,” I say. “But it’s hard to take seriously. It doesn’t seem real, somehow.”

  He blows on his painted arm. His arm hairs ruffle around the stripes. “Like, cancer is a thing that only happens to other people?”

  “No. I mean, if the treatment kills me immediately, I won’t know it. Even if it kills me slowly, in the end, it won’t make a difference, right?” I reach out and touch the wet paint, too; draw a slow spiral on my palm. “In the end, it doesn’t matter; we’ll all die eventually. None of this will make any difference.”

  “People must love you for your optimism.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, if it’s going to happen anyway, then why not risk everything in pursuit of what we want?”

  “What do you want?”

  “To be whole,” I say, obviously. “Don’t you?”

  He nods his head, back and forth.

  “The appointment’s at five on Saturday, right?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “We should ride together.”

  My hand whisks closed. Invisibly, the spiral smears in my palm.

  “What?” he says.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Okay.”

  I make minute adjustments on the paintings that night, readying them for Marcel’s appraisal. I stand for a long time in front of the painting Howie criticized, the one of the weaver with no hands, and think about “the extras,” and the ways in which having too much can add up to an absence.

  I stretch a blank canvas and tentatively sketch out a new weaver, this one with extra hands: with too many, hands spilling out of his arms and legs and chest, cascading from his sleeves. His weaving becomes more intricate, shining in his many fingers. His extra hands detangling knots. One holds food to feed him when he hungers; another pair, down by his ankle, hold each other. I frown as I shade the intimate interlacing of the fingers, and when eventually I lean back and study this sketch, all I feel is a crush of jealousy. I know that Howie’s Lump has kept him from a normal life. But the extras don’t add up to a lack for me—they just look like an embarrassing abundance of wealth and possibility.

  I usually dash gesso across the canvas the second it’s all gone wrong, but I want to keep this awhile. It seems like something I can learn from.

  32

  I wake up sweaty from a dream that Howie and I merged and then fused together, face-to-face. I go into the bathroom, splash water on my burning cheeks. The clock reads 4:07.

  I flip through my phone. I browse idly around Public Scrutiny, and then tap, innocently, because it’s four in the morning and what happens at four in the morning doesn’t count, into the fan fiction forum.

  Morgan stepped into the private pool and sighed with pure pleasure. It was a delight to her to get away like this, after the long days of medical experiments. She lowered herself into the crystal-clear water, gasping slightly as the water poured sensuously through the Hole.

  Her mind went back to earlier in the day, when she was leaving the doctor’s office. Someone had left her that mysterious note in her locker: “Meet me by the pool this afternoon. Wear as little as you dare.

  I can’t help it: I giggle. I look around my room, half guilty, half wishing there was someone there to laugh with me. I open my private message folder and send a message to mindthegap.

  missabyss: Did you see the fan fiction? This is crazy!

  I’m reading Ripples spread into the water as someone entered the pool behind her when she answers:

  mindthegap: lol, I’m avoiding that stuff with a ten-foot pole. What are you doing up?

  I flash back to my dream about Howie.

  missabyss: Insomnia.

  mindthegap: Bummerino. Me too.

  missabyss: Have you done any more drawings lately?

  mindthegap: Yeah! I’m working on one right now, actually. It’s about Public Scrutiny. *nerd* But I started thinking about the comments people gave on my first piece, that I’m totally humbled by and grateful for, and so it’s actually a portrait of all of us with our Holes.

  Whoa, I think.

  missabyss: Whoa. Can I see?

  There’s a pause before her next reply. I stare at the screen, wondering. Maybe she’s in the bathroom. Maybe she’s actually a reporter, and she’s standing in a late night newsroom with all the other reporters, try
ing to figure out how to pull off this lie with grace.

  But her next message comes through with a picture attachment.

  It’s a pencil sketch of a crowd of individuals done with the same clarity and careful detail of mindthegap’s first drawing. There are people of all ages and genders, a monochromatic rainbow of skin tones. I peer closely at the Holes. She’s put Holes in eyes, in hearts, in brains. There’s a woman with a Hole where her uterus should be, and I remember a user named maryanna—if that’s her—writing about her third miscarriage. The woman in the sketch looks like a housewife: heavy hips, nondescript haircut. Someone whose looks don’t hint that she’s carrying a heartache bigger than herself. I think again of my fragile, scrawled charcoal figures and realize the things I’ve been missing.

  I get a new message.

  mindthegap: I just sort of tried to picture what everyone looks like based on the things they said.

  mindthegap: I mean, it’s not done or anything.

  I feel bad, suddenly, imagining her nervousness on the other side of the screen, waiting for my response.

  missabyss: It’s awesome! I love it. Sorry, I was trying to guess who people are.

  mindthegap: Did you find yourself yet?

  My fingers go cold. I click back into the picture, scan frantically. The iconic Hole Girl figure is in the center of the page, in baggy jeans and a crop top, fingers interlaced with those of the figures on either side.

  I have an inkling. My heart thunders into the mattress.

  She writes back:

  mindthegap: Front left.

  I zoom in on the drawing. By the lower corner of the page, there’s a tall, curly-haired girl holding her palms out to the viewer. Each one is pierced by a small, perfect Hole.