Paint My Body Red

by Heidi R. Kling

  “No. I like it.” It’s just that eating makes me sick.

  “We need to fatten you up, Paige, don’t we, Gus? You’re as skinny as a wild mustang. How do you even have the energy to get from there to here?”

  Her hands perch on her ample hips, waiting for an answer. I want to disappear under the table. At home we just pretend I’m eating. Can’t we just pretend I’m eating here, too?

  “I think she looks fine,” Jake says.

  Anna grins at him. “You know what they say about California?” she asks mischievously.

  “No. What?” Jake asks.

  “It’s full of nuts and berries.”

  “I’ve never heard that,” I snap. This Anna person is annoying as shit.

  She scratches her nose. “Maybe it’s nuts and fruits. Anyway, your old man says it all the time—” She glances at him. “Used to anyway. Now he uses his computer to do his silly talking.”

  Dad’s hand rests on the keyboard. He’s talking.

  “What did he say?” I lean over to look.

  Can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip, nor can you squeeze water out of a rock.

  Anna laughs. A loud, genuine bellow. “Lot a truth in there, Gus!”

  Where there’s a will there’s a way, he types after.

  She laughs again.

  To shut her up, I scoop up some potatoes and manage to swallow the spoonful down with a glass of milk. I’m grateful to Jake for sticking up for me, even though it’s a total lie. She’s paying too close attention to me, this Anna.

  For the first time, I legitimately miss my mom. At least she pretends the not-normal is okay and doesn’t grill me or put me on the spot. That’s what I’m used to—a world of secrets and denial—but here it seems like they are facing Dad’s illness head-on, everyone accepting it with grace, even my dad. It’s not something I’m used to, and I squirm under the flashlight-in-my-face discomfort.

  After I’ve poked around at the dinner and made sufficient small talk, I excuse myself and do what I do best: I run.

  Angry, frustrated tears slip into the wind as I run. I hope I can count on nobody following me. Cowboys have a code: When someone needs a moment, they take a moment. If they want to talk it over later, they’re welcome to, but if what you need is quiet, quiet is what you get. At least that’s how it used to be. Anna, though? She seems to be all up in my business. Dad, too, with that computer of his, telling Anna this and that. Making jokes about California’s nuts and berries? What even was that? Anger over Mom leaving, probably, and taking me. He was always a good ole’ boy anyway. So Dad thought I was a nut, a fruit, a berry—a skinny, malnourished one at that. Did they know about my Xanax? Probably. I dig into my pocket and take a half.

  When my body calms, so does my brain, and I slow down and watch as dusk settles on the ranch like an encore. I walk and I walk and I notice a sunset explosion of beauty, of reds and gold. A couple of older wranglers setting the horses to hay is a second standing ovation for another perfect day off the grid. The hungry equines snort satisfied noises, scuffing dust into the air with their hooves as I walk past them, past yards of fencing begging for repair, tumbles of scratchy brush, ground critters scrambling to their holes seeking protection against the night, until I come to the red barn. This will do. Actually, this is exactly where I want to be.

  I scurry up the ladder to the hayloft, and after blowing away spider webs and moving rusty rakes and boxes, I reveal the trapdoor—the place where I hid my childhood secrets. I fondle the handle on the door, and it creaks open. Inside is a wooden box. I lift its lid, exposing the treasures of my childhood summers, and watch as those treasures of innocence, of an intact girl from a mostly intact family, roll out before me like not a moment has passed.

  A blue velvet pouch full of gemstones tumbles into my palm: tigereye, moonstone, and the one I called fire-heart with jade and orange veins, my worry rock moonstone. My faux leather headdress, now dulled with age, beckons me to touch it, and I do, at first with trepidation, its blue, red, yellow feathers now molted, only a few threads on each stem remaining.

  Dad and I were in this Girl Scout-esque club together called Indian Princesses when I was little. I was Little Dove and my big, strong, capable father was Chief Big Bear, and it was cheesy in retrospect, yeah, but fun. On those campouts, I ate Pop-Tarts for breakfast, Cheetos for dinner, and didn’t have to brush my teeth. Those were the surface things I loved. But the memories that stayed deeply lodged in my chest were the campfires at night, each Little Princess tucked in the strong cavity of their Chief’s chest as we rocked back and forth singing old country favorites like “Kumbayah” and “Country Roads,” and watched sparks fly up into the darkness. Later, Mom told me my dad was so drunk on that trip that he was howling at the moon, picked a fight, and some of the other dads had to restrain him. I liked my truth better.

  I gently set my childhood memories back into the box, worried if they stayed out in the world too long, they’d be crushed. What I’m really looking for I find next. Under the mini treasure chest of fool’s gold I panned from the Snake, is my diary.

  My therapist back home was always telling me to write it down. If I write it on paper, it may pop the cork off the bottle my chest is holding so tightly closed. If I write it on paper, I might be able to breathe again.

  Under the worn velveteen cover, after pages and pages of familiar childhood words, I find a place to finally confess the secrets that have threatened to bubble up since I landed in Wyoming. My California home, the horror stories from there, seem both so very far away and as close as if I were facing them in a cracked mirror. I’m not sure how to date it, to title it. I just know if I don’t write them down they’ll continue to fester in my gut, slowly poisoning me. And if I’m going to have any chance of starting over—if I have a chance of simply surviving—I have to start distancing myself.

  So I simply write Then.

  Chapter Six

  Then

  Golden Boy. His real name was Cornell because his parents had big, specific, Cornell plans for him since birth, but everyone called him Golden Boy. Everything about him shone like gold: from the color of his hair reflected in the aqua-pool sun, to the golden palette of his tanned skin, to the gleam of his first place trophies.

  Cornell was the first of us to fall, and that may sound melodramatic, but it really was like the crowned prince of school died. Even in retrospect—even after everybody else—his suicide remains the most inexplicable, the most inexcusible, the most painful.

  It was just an average school day when The Boy Who Had Everything—a doting perfect girlfriend (swim team Barbie to his water polo playing Ken), straight A’s, perfect 2400 SATs—killed himself. Why would he, of all people, jump in front of a commuter train on the way to another perfect school day where he’s the most popular guy at school? Where teachers praised him and coaches admired him? Where he was our beloved king?

  There were rumors, of course. The most prevalent whispers were he didn’t get into his namesake school, and he was worried he’d disappoint his parents. At least, that was the surface of it. If it were even true. College acceptance/rejection season was in full force and everyone was a bigger anxiety ridden mess than usual in our We Breed Champions town—the richest town in a Silicon Valley flowing with gold.

  Other rumors circulated, of course. One was that he was secretly pining for his best friend, but Jay had rejected him. That Amanda had been his beard. That he didn’t know how to handle the whole complicated mess. But the Cornell theory was the one that stuck. He’d applied for early admission, and he was passed over. His parents’ dream was dead and now so was he.

  If that was true, I didn’t understand it at all.

  Why would someone kill themselves over college?

  But then again, I was born on a horse ranch in the middle of nowhere. These Silicon Valley ultra high-achiveing “gunner” kids really weren’t my people. Even when I pretended they were, I mostly felt like a fish out of water. Partially living, mostly
observing. It wasn’t until Golden Boy that I was jerked awake. While others seemed to be in a trance of denial and confusion, I started paying attention to everything.

  The day leading up to his funeral felt like scratching through a swarm of flies. I could barely push myself through the smothering grief drenching the linoleum floor of our school hallways, and I felt it, too—this thick layer of shock and grief that someone so young, so beautiful, so beloved, could not only die…but kill himself. It made no sense and turned the whole of our school from driven, top-tier students into The Walking Dead.

  His girlfriend, Amanda, made a memorial in front of his locker. A wreath with this year’s Polo picture—a perfectly ripped, tanned body in red Speedos, sapphire blue eyes shining from a chiseled yet boyish face, full cherry-red lips pursed seriously for the pose, dangled from the front of a yellow poster board scribbled with red and pink hearts and Xs and Os messages like: I’ll miss you, always. We love you, forever.

  What I told her was how sorry I was. I’d known her since I first moved here. We weren’t really close friends, but we were friends. In a breathless panic, she surprised me by saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Paige. I swear. Everything was fine, everything. Those rumors about Jay…they aren’t true.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, without certainty. Who knew what was really in someone’s heart? “People just want answers, I guess.” She looked at me strangely like she wanted to add more, but her mouth clamped shut. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. I just…I just feel sick all the time.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, because I was. At the time I couldn’t imagine going through my life with so much confusion, so much If I Only Could’ve regret. Now I knew.

  Maybe it wasn’t just the college thing.

  Somehow that seemed too simple. He was a smart kid. Well-rounded. He had to understand life beyond college. Right? He wasn’t depressed that anyone knew about. He was always happy, or seemed so, anyway.

  I came by later, after the bell rang to draw the blank-eyed cattle into class, when I could be alone and simply wrote, “I’m sorry.” Maybe he was depressed. Secretly.

  I always understood depression to be something lonelier. Something that happened in a dark room. Depressed people on TV ads crept around unkempt bedrooms with bed-head and weepy eyes usually wearing an old bathrobe.

  Golden Boy roamed the halls with a ten-thousand-watt toothpaste grin and Abercrombie clothes, high fiving and fist bumping his adoring minions.

  Or maybe that was it.

  Maybe it was all just too much. Maybe being perfect for too long was too much. Being perfect at our school was the goal. Look perfect, act perfect.

  When I started at the local elementary school when we first moved here, I found it so odd that everyone had to be included. We couldn’t choose the people to play handball with, for instance. Everyone got to play. Everyone had a turn. I thought it was great as a new student—I was instantly included! It wasn’t like in Jackson when a new kid came and people were suspicious of him or her for a while and they had to work at making friends. Here there was like a welcoming committee—instant besties! While it felt nice enough, something about it felt disingenuine. Fake. False.

  And life continued on like that. No bullying. No excluding. Just this constant climb for success and perfection.

  Some of the kids I knew were forced to take the SATs every year since middle school until they got a perfect 2400. The problems at other schools around the country—bullying for sexual orientation or race or anything like that—didn’t exist here. If the rumor was true, if he’d fallen for Jay and Jay liked him back, they would’ve been accepted. We were a big supportive community of sweet kids from seemingly “nice,” involved families of overachieving parents who, for the most part, either came here from other countries or scraped their way up from nothing. People who could afford to buy two million dollar homes, many with foreign (China) or local tech (Facebook or Google) cash. And they expected their kids to have the same scrappy attitude and relentless desire for success that they had.

  But we were just teenagers.

  We wanted to do well, to please, but we also wanted the things other teenagers wanted. The things we saw in movies or on the bits of TV we were allowed to watch when we weren’t in our ten-thousand extra-curricular activities: to worry about dances and being socially accepted and discovering our passion.

  No one I knew thought about any of that stuff.

  Relationships, real ones, were mostly an afterthought.

  We pursued straight A’s, perfect SATs, and the best portfolio for college.

  Maybe Golden Boy was done being Golden.

  Otherwise, why would he, with his perfect body and perfect brain pull over, lean his two-thousand-dollar street bike against a chain link fence, and lie on the tracks until a train ran him over?

  Because from the outside?

  Unlike Ty…unlike me, he had every reason to live.

  Chapter Seven

  Now

  My room is in the main house.

  Guests don’t sleep here, and by the looks of it, no one has slept in here in quite some time. I am selfishly happy about that.

  The wallpaper in The Garden Room is violet and silver with tiny purple flower buds that press out from the wall like they’re struggling to bloom. This is the same canopy bed I slept in as a child. The same antique white furniture, the claw-footed dresser, the same stubby nightstands with the same old hardcover versions of Little House in the Big Woods and The Bobbsey Twins and Little Women that creaked a little when I opened them.

  When I got back from the barn, everything was quiet. Dad had retired to his quarters on the first floor, and Jake had disappeared to…wherever it is Jake goes. I’m not clear yet on where, exactly, he lives.

  Anna, dressed in a strawberry apron, was drying dishes.

  I watched her for a second through the doorway, the methodical but comfortable way she ran her hand over the greasy plates, scrubbing bubbles into the air like it was second nature to her. She looked about forty, forty-five maybe. Like I observed earlier with Jake, it’s hard to tell the ages of people on the ranch. Exposed to never-ending sun, their skin wrinkled, weathering more quickly than people back home. Then again, the women here don’t dye their hair as much, either. They aren’t Botox-d and face-lifted. Their skin may look older but their eyes look younger. Years younger.

  Before I left the hayloft, I locked my diary away back in the secret trap door. I would never bring it in here. Nobody could ever know those secrets. But writing in the barn got me in the mood to write more.

  In this house, I wanted to write my other story. The long-ago story. The one that wasn’t all my fault.

  I lay my laptop on a lace-edged pillow on my lap, open up a new document, and type, “My daddy is a cowboy, and my mama is a city slicker. There was no way the two of them would work.”

  I read it again.

  And again. Not a bad beginning. I try to type more but nothing comes.

  My fingers sit where they are supposed to on the keyboard:

  A=left pinkie

  S=left ring

  D=left eff you

  F=left pointer

  Space Bar the Thumbs Face Off

  J=right pointer

  K=right eff you

  L=right ring finger (is it even called a ring finger on your right hand?)

  ;= right pinky. (semi-colon, really?)

  But nothing. No mice dancing on glass.

  Before, in the barn, the words came so easily.

  Now I’m sitting here in this violet and silver bedroom in my childhood sanctuary of imagination, and I can’t write anything. I can’t start a new story until I finish the first one. So I sneak out of the quiet house, run back to the barn, and spill my guts into that old journal.

  Chapter Eight

  Then

  After the wake, after the perf
ume-flower rush at Golden Boy’s enormous Tudor house, after holding my breath, nodding, repeating over and over again, “I know, it’s so sad,” to every peer and grown-up there—because it was—I found Ty. Or more specifically, we found each other.

  It was more than sad, our new life—it was a nightmare we couldn’t wake up from. After flipping off my dress-shoes, after tossing them into manicured bushes, after watching the black heel catch on a branch and hang there, limply, I screamed.

  I tilted my head back, looked up into the night and freaking screamed like a werewolf, a lunatic, a banshee.

  Ty, my new stepbrother, was the one who found me hysterical on my bed. Ty, who unlike the rest of my senior class, enjoyed the more “average teenage” parts of life: drinking, drugs, tattoos. At the time, I barely knew more than what I’d learned during dinner table talk—they were from Brooklyn, his father and my mother were very much in love, and he was a complete and utter asshole.

  “I’m a horrible person,” I said, smearing tears off my face like jacked-up windshield wipers.

  His normally cocky, above-it-all face winced. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because I’m wondering why he did it. There has to be a better reason than not getting accepted into Cornell. Tonight at the wake I was just watching his father. I thought, did he beat him? Did he threaten him to be so perfect and that’s why he was? And I was watching Amanda, too. Was she his beard? Was their perfect relationship fake from the get-go? Was he afraid to come out of the closet? I used to be so jealous of her, Ty. She always had the boyfriends and the perfect hair. You know she grew boobs before the rest of us and would brag about it?”