Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  I drive home and open and close my hand around the tiny cut, making the bead of blood rise to the surface and subside again. More than anything, I want to find the right words. To find the message. To have legions of people step into that hall and find the person who’s been sitting quietly in the dark for years, waiting for the world to see her. I just don’t know how to turn on the light yet.

  Caro, too, is remaking herself. She sits with me at night and sometimes cries. In the daytime, though, she is building herself back up again. We travel to our old haunts, and I can see the uncertainty in her as she picks through skirts at Goodwill—is this the new her? Is this? What can she be, what can she become, in this world without certain love?

  She smiles and jokes with customers at Java Jane, like always, and giggles with me as I perch by the espresso machine, doing dramatic readings of awkward, R-rated Puzzle Piece fan fiction. But there is a new weight to her, a certain sad gravity. Like a depth the rest of us can’t reach. I’m giggling over the phrase “palpitating Lump” in a Christmas-themed story called “Holey Night” one evening when I realize I’m laughing alone. I look up to see Caro leaning against the sandwich bar reading The Invisible Man. She catches my eye and lowers the book, holding her place with a finger. She is wearing lipstick for the first time in two weeks. She’s still picking up the pieces of herself, but the girl I see is beginning to look like Caro again: healthy, smiling. Our bathroom mirror has become plastered with new note cards: I don’t need anyone to build me up, so no one can break me down, and No matter what happens, I’ll always have me.

  “Do you ever look at these with Howie?” She shapes the words delicately, distantly, as though handling wet paper.

  “What?” I bookmark a juicy-looking fanfic called “Puzzle of Love” and close the laptop “Ew, no. That’d be weird.”

  “Weirder than sharing them with me?”

  “What? That isn’t weird,” I say. “You’re my friend. That’s what friends do. You know? Talk about sex stuff.”

  “We never talked about my sex stuff.”

  “That’s different,” I say.

  “How?” she asks.

  “You and Todd were, like, you know.” Boring. Terrible. “Established.”

  “Not always.”

  I open my mouth and close it again. Remembering how I listened and burned with curiosity and shame when Caro told me about losing her virginity to Todd, the boy she’d been seeing for six months but whom I still thought of as new. How later she’d bring up stories casually, with a blush, beginning, “So we were in bed and,” and I’d change the subject, the way one might, in polite society, steer the conversation away from politics, or from the massive shit that the old and arthritic family dog is taking on the living room carpet.

  I say, “I didn’t have any sex stuff to talk about then.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “well, I did.”

  A man at the counter taps the service bell. Caro ignores him, keeps her eyes on mine. I hold her gaze as long as possible, not wanting to be the first to look away. But I blink.

  “You had other friends you could talk to,” I say. “They knew about those things.”

  “You’re my best friend.”

  The man taps the bell again. Caroline says, “In a minute.”

  My mouth feels dry.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Thanks.” Then she goes and takes an order for an egg salad sandwich.

  I bike home, face tightening in the chill. In my backpack, my laptop hums, and I realize stupidly that I forgot to turn it off. All those sex dreams of strangers spinning themselves out into the dark.

  I never realized Caro noticed. Or I guess I did. But I never realized she cared.

  But . . . I realized that, too. I just didn’t think she’d ever call me on it.

  I’m thinking I’m a little frightened of this new Caro when I see the first of the flyers.

  They are in five colors. They litter the telephone poles on Wade Avenue, on Hillsborough Street, weave their way through the small neighborhoods between. I pull my bike to a stop, pluck one from its staple with a gloved hand. The photographer in the car beside me slows, pulling up to the curb, and I turn my face away as I read the text: four words, in block print.

  HOLE GIRL I’M SORRY

  I glance up, feeling the cameras slide from my back. Traffic streams by, unaware. Above my head, polychromatic flyers flutter the rest of the way up the pole: HOLE GIRL I’M SORRY HOLE GIRL I’M SORRY I’M SORRY HOLE . . .

  There’s a URL in tiny print at the bottom: www.myholestory.com. I turn the paper over, looking for a note, a signature, anything. But it’s blank.

  I stuff the flyer into my backpack, and then yank down all the others I can reach. I stop at the next pole to do the same. It takes me an hour to get home from Java Jane, the bag on my back crackling, heavy with crumpled paper.

  Safely in my room, I tap out myholestory.com with trembling fingers. The page loads nearly empty: just an image of a hammer and a line of text, Story under construction. Check back in 15 days.

  I mouse over it, but there are no links or even hypertext. Just the words, flat.

  I head to Public Scrutiny to see if anyone knows anything, and that’s when I see the news, a flashing announcement pinned to the top of the screen:

  MANSION CONDEMNED!!

  37

  I bike frantically back to Java Jane, where beautiful dishwasher Johnny directs me to Walgreens. I haul ass across town, ribs aching, and burst across her counter, breathless.

  “You goddamned overachiever,” I gasp. “What are you doing here? You were literally just at work.”

  “Filling in for Jasirah. I’m trying to make some Christmas money.”

  “Don’t you have—whatever. Caro.” I catch my breath. “The Mansion’s closing.”

  “What do you mean?” Her eyes dart to the photo counter, where her coworker Jeanine, glares pointedly. Jeanine’s been at Walgreens for a year and has 1) aspirations of becoming assistant manager, paired with 2) a passion for ratting out colleagues. I pick up the weekly coupon mailer and wave it generally toward Caro’s face.

  “It’s been condemned,” I say. “They’re closing later this month. It’s going to be bulldozed and turned into condos.”

  “That’s urban development for you,” she says, straightening the gum display. I catch her hand.

  “Caro, it’s the Mansion,” I say pleadingly.

  Her fingers squeeze mine, a butterfly kiss.

  “I’m sorry, Morgs,” she says. “I know that place meant a lot to you. But you haven’t even been there in weeks.” (Not since Chad, I fill in silently.) “Maybe it’s good that it’s going.”

  But I think about the dusty cherubs drowsing open-eyed on the ceiling. Think about Frank and his umbrellas. Think about the magic melting upward through the floor and filling my bones.

  “It was so much more than that,” I say, softly, pointing to a coupon for diapers. “It’s where I came out.”

  “And now you’re out. I know you love it, sweet pea. I’m sorry. But maybe you don’t need it anymore. And maybe that’s okay.” She studies me, and her brow furrows. “Do you have a fever? You look flushed.” She reaches for my forehead to test my temperature.

  “It’s chilly out.” I shrug her off. “I just wish there were something I could do.”

  “Then do something,” she says, and then, “I am sorry, ma’am, that expired a week ago.”

  I turn. Her manager, Tricia, is right over my shoulder.

  “This is a ludicrous price for ChapStick!” I proclaim loudly, and duck from the store.

  I bike home in the dark, stopping at every telephone pole and ripping down the I’M SORRY posters as though that will make it all okay.

  “It’s not exactly shocking,” Howie says the next day. He’s lyin
g on my bed with my portfolio, flipping through the pages. “I could have told you that building wasn’t up to code, and I only vaguely know what up to code means.”

  “Mmm,” I say, clicking into my email.

  An email pops up in my inbox. Lately I’ve been letting everything go to spam. It’s overwhelming—the messages from agents, scouts, producers, screenwriters; the fan mail and hate mail from people who still haven’t forgiven me for snapping at Howie on the news: bitch you dont deserve him you should go die you cunt. I delete most things without looking. It’s not worth the blood pressure spike.

  My cursor is hovering over the spam icon when the subject line of the message catches my eye. It reads, simply, Lunch? I open it, and read:

  Morgan,

  I’m coming into town for your show, and I was wondering if you’d like to get lunch. How about the day before it opens? I’d love to catch up, but I understand if you say no.

  Sincerely,

  Archie

  “I like these texture collages from freshman year,” Howie says. “Why did you quit doing them?”

  “My dad wants to have lunch,” I say.

  Howie drops the binder on the quilt.

  “When?” he says.

  “Right before my show.”

  “Thanksgiving?”

  I blink through a mental calendar. Marcel’s planned a Black Friday opening, banking on the foot traffic from the City Market nearby. “I guess.”

  My hands are trembling, and I don’t know why. Howie opens his arms. I come and nestle in them, the Lump poking me gently in the back.

  “I never really knew him,” I say. “He left when I was so little.”

  He runs his fingers through my hair, making all the motions of comfort. His actions seem to pertain to something far away and unrelated, and I realize, distantly, that it’s me.

  “Well,” he says softly, “it’s your call. Do you want to see him?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “Should I? I’m supposed to, right?”

  “I don’t think there is a ‘supposed to.’’’

  We lie still a long time. My eyes trace the cover of my binder. I stare blankly at the name Morgan Stone like the letters might collapse in on themselves at any moment.

  “I don’t know what I would even do with a dad,” I say at last. “What’s it like?”

  He shifts against me. “What?”

  I say, “Having a dad,” and my lips jump hotly closed, the world blurring.

  Howie turns my face toward him and I turn away, wordlessly. He lets me keep my face to myself, holds and rocks me, thumbing circles in my hair.

  “He’s . . .” He pauses, considering. “I think he wants to be a lot tougher than he is. It was always Mom who grounded us and stuff.” He shifts. I can feel his voice in my back. “He always talks about how every time one of my aunts brought a guy home, my grandpa would get him alone and tell him, ‘If you break her heart, I’ll kick your ass.’ He brings it up every time Riley even says a boy’s name.”

  “Did he ever do it?” I ask.

  “Do what?” he asks.

  “Kick their boyfriends’ asses.”

  He laughs. “Maybe once or twice,” he says. “Though if they were that bad, my aunts usually gave them the boot themselves. They raise tough women in my family.”

  I think if Howie broke my heart, Mother would probably rip his body to shreds with manicured nails, then boil the bits down, distill them into perfume and market it under the name Heartbreaker. Or Ladykiller.

  Or else she’d tell me, disinterestedly, that she told me so, and turn back to her planner.

  I lift my head.

  “Howie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you ever break my heart, I’ll kick your ass.”

  He laughs and clasps my hand in his own. “I know,” he says. “That’s what I like about you.” That word like yawning under its own weight.

  After he goes, I try to paint out some answers. I’ve been working up a new composition on a huge canvas: double-stranded DNA topped with emergent human faces, Howie’s and mine; the two liquid bodies twisting around and around each other in a dance. I stretch as I survey the piece, wincing. My joints feel swollen and achy. It’s been an exhausting week.

  In the kitchen, I pour a glass of nearly flat ginger ale, make popcorn. I mix up olive oil, cracked pepper, seasoned salt, reaching for comfort in the familiar smell. I check Public Scrutiny while my Netflix tab loads, neatly avoiding the email inbox where my father’s unanswered message sits. There’s a photo of flyered telephone poles with a brief blurb on the main city events page: Street art? Viral marketing? Tell us your take on the Hole Girl posters! But nobody has weighed in with anything definitive, and it’s half-buried beneath new headlines. Couple Vanishes from NCMA Cloud Chamber? and Woman Arrested in Texas for Possession of 27 Dildos. My mystery and I are old news. I go to the site again: Check back in 14 days.

  A pinch of fear curdles somewhere near my descending colon. I hope to drown it out with television, but it drags on through three and a half episodes of Twin Peaks, and I finally pause the episode and log into my email. I don’t know what I’m hoping for, but there it is still. Lunch.

  The pain abruptly sharpens, and I rush to the bathroom. My insides seize, and popcorn and ginger ale surge violently up my throat, into the toilet. Hooray. I’ve barfed a circus.

  I lean my forehead against the cool porcelain, flush with my eyes closed. My heart is racing.

  I hear a door close downstairs, the sound of footsteps. “Morgs?” Caro calls. She stops outside the bathroom. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  She lingers in the doorway, looking worried.

  “You look like hell,” she says.

  “Yeah, I just threw up.”

  “No, I mean generally,” she says. “You look like George Romero and Tim Burton had a baby, and it’s directing your life.”

  I rinse my toothbrush and scrub at my tongue.

  “My dad wants to get lunch,” I say indistinctly.

  “Holy shit,” she says.

  “My life is exploding.”

  “Do you want me to call Dr. Morse?”

  I lower the brush from my mouth, feeling dizzy. Not an overwhelming, swimming surge. Something less obvious and therefore more insidious—a sense of things moving half inches to the left and jumping back again, stealthily, each time I blink.

  “Morgan?” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe.”

  Her eyes meet mine in the mirror, and we both wait a minute for the joke, for some sarcastic snark about how terrible Dr. Morse is, how evil and conniving. But I don’t say anything, and the line in her brow deepens. She turns to go get the phone, leaving the silhouette of her concern hanging in the air behind her.

  38

  I wake up the next morning to a chill rain, still feeling nauseated. I’ve got a check-in with Taka and Dr. Morse at 3 p.m. today. I feel weaker, an intermittent ache slicing across my stomach like a razor. I curl into myself, wishing the time between then and now could just vanish. Caro tucked a thermos of broth and a bottle of Pepto on my night table before she left for school, but it only dulls the edge. When the misery is coming from inside your body, there’s nowhere you can escape.

  Welp. At least now I have a name for my metal band.

  To distract myself, I curl in bed and make a list: people who could be sorry. (As in, HOLE GIRL I’M SORRY flyers all over town sorry.)

  Dr. Morse, for turning my life into a media circus

  Marcel, for being a douche

  The YYSers for ignoring me at their shitty parties

  Todd, for making Caro miserable

  Creepers on the Internet

  Chad, for being gross

  Zeke, for firing me

  Gallery woman for
passing me over

  Darcie McGill in sixth grade for calling me a skank

  Father

  Mother

  I stretch for a red Sharpie. Then I go down the list, appending:

  Dr. Morse – def not repentant but maybe doesn’t hate me now?

  Marcel – ditto

  YYSers – maybe?

  Todd – posters would say CARO, I’M SORRY

  Creepers – would be nice, but will never reform

  Chad – is he smart enough to pull this off?

  Zeke – posters would say ALAS FAIR MORGANA

  Gallery woman – maybe?

  Darcie – we’re Facebook friends and she still sucks

  Father – maybe

  Mother – never

  I study the list, considering. And because I can either feel shitty while bored at home or while out on the road, I pull on a sweater and start with the most straightforward place: the Loblolly gallery.

  It is just as empty as before. Few people care to drive halfway into the country for art on a weekday. I park and jog across the rainy lot, holding a creased Hole Girl flyer tightly against my body. The flyers do have the feel of an installation piece: the scope, the boundlessness, the simplicity of the five colors against the variegated cityscape. The sense of a great deal of work and complication for very little profit.

  I wonder if the gallery owner will greet me with her copy-and-paste smile or will have forgotten who I am. But there is no one behind the low, sleek desk. I leave my dripping boots by the door and check around, but Karen is nowhere to be seen. The elephant is also gone.

  The art installation space in the middle of the vast cement floor is now occupied by a full-scale cocktail party, complete with bar and buffet: backlit plastic drinks glowing in martini glasses, glistening wax shrimp and lemon tartlets on silver serving trays. The floor is covered in gumballs. There are hundreds, possibly thousands: an impossible number of pink gumballs. A graven sign reads, neatly, please do not disturb the gumballs.