SHOUT

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by Laurie Halse Anderson


  4. It’s all about the pH levels. Vinegar is an acid, pH 2.4; skin is acid, too, pH 5.5. Wet concrete is wicked alkaline, pH 12.0; that’s caustic enough to eat you alive.

  5. They called us dirtbags: the clan of X-kids who smelled of cigarettes and weed and farm work and clothes worn without washing because the laundromat was expensive and the priority was staying warm. We weren’t the only ones whose parents were drunk or violent or absent . . . but we were the poor kids dealing with that shit. Our school was organized by income brackets, with the kids who skied in Colorado over winter break at the top and the dirtbags at the bottom.

  6. It was probably more complicated than that, but that’s what it felt like sitting in the shadows at the base of the social mountain.

  7. The concrete keeps burning even after you wash it off your skin. The gift that keeps on giving, the death that keeps on deathing.

  8. Once I sat in the backseat of a Chevy with four other people; there were three more up front, plus the driver, and we were profoundly wasted and we drove around the rim of an old quarry and something happened cuz suddenly the driver took us straight back to his house and didn’t say anything for the rest of the night. Next day I went back there and found our tracks; we’d come inches from plunging to the bottom. I didn’t hang out with those guys after that.

  9. Concrete burns through your skin and your meat, then it burns down to your bones if you don’t get help.

  10. One night I mixed cheap whiskey with spiced Russian tea that tasted like moldy oranges. Numbing drunk was what we did in my family when horrible things happened that we didn’t talk about, like being fired, or having the electricity shut off, or Mom eating cereal for dinner so we could have the hamburger. Or being raped; we definitely didn’t talk about rape. Ever. The color I vomited for hours after those drinks was really quite astounding. I still can’t touch whiskey or spiced Russian tea.

  11. I started being stupid to turn down the volume of my internal emergency alert system. But blundering stupid through life makes everything way more complicated, creates cascading avalanches of new problems.

  12. I wasn’t just encased in hardening concrete up to my chin; it was pouring down my throat. I was in a race to see if I would die from the outside in or the inside out.

  diagnosis

  I knew that if I fell and scraped my knee

  ejected headfirst through a windshield

  chopped off a finger or lost a leg to a shark

  I’d apply pressure to stop the bleeding

  use towels, blankets, Goodwill sweaters

  whatever it took to start clotting,

  slow the fluid loss

  I’d close my wounds with fishhooks and twine

  or a stapler or a nail gun

  welding torch to reconnect my spine

  I’d knit skin grafts, if necessary.

  After I pulled myself back together

  I’d need a doctor cuz my dark corners

  would be invaded

  by bacteria, viruses, parasites, and more,

  infectious

  vectors of disease, some lethal, some merely

  debilitating, chronic cripplers.

  I knew that. I paid attention in health.

  But I had never seen a first aid kit for the spirit

  or heard the word “trauma” to describe

  the way I’d hide, slide through the days unseen

  or scream into the pillows

  at the bottom of my closet

  door closed even though no one was home.

  Rape wounds deeply, splits open

  your core with shrapnel.

  The stench of the injury attracts maggots

  which hatch into clouds of doubt and self-loathing

  the dirt you feel inside you nourishes

  anxiety, depression, and shame

  poisoning your blood, festering

  in your brain until you will do anything to stop

  feeling the darkness rising within

  anything

  to stop feeling—

  untreated pain

  is a cancer of the soul

  that can kill you

  Salinger and me

  I never thought of killing myself

  not on purpose, though I was in grave danger

  of a stupid accident, riding sorrow’s hamster wheel

  living with a popsicle, momsicle, sisicle,

  all of us frozen in confusion

  me tongueless but alive

  When I was little I loved Bread and Jam for Frances

  the book about a fussy badger

  who seemed quite sensible to me.

  The author, Russell Hoban, was a fan of J. D.

  Salinger—dude who wrote

  The Catcher in the Rye, which is a whole

  other story.

  Hoban said this gobsmacking thing

  about Salinger, called him “a man without eyelids”

  the line always stuck with me

  I was a girl without eyelids that year;

  I couldn’t blink

  I. saw. everything. all. the. time.

  my eyes raining constantly from all the seeings,

  my throat dry from lack of use

  Salinger was a mess, another World War II vet

  who came home with nasty memories

  shoved into his head

  he and my dad would have made great pals

  they would have cried and fought and punched

  the walls and each other when the lid came off.

  We tiptoed, terrified, for years, afraid

  my father would kill himself, once and for all,

  but he held on, like Salinger, and showed me

  that holding on was worth it.

  speaking in tongues

  When I was a little girl, a friend and her family

  moved to the Netherlands and she had to learn

  Dutch. I asked if the cows

  and the chickens spoke Dutch, too.

  Then my brain grew and my mouth grew hungry

  for languages—I studied French and German,

  tried to read a Russian dictionary.

  Exchange students

  roamed the halls with their mysteries,

  circling in orbits

  around Mr. P., my French teacher,

  the only one who always smiled

  at screwed-up kids like me

  and looked us in the eye, like he cared

  cuz he did

  one afternoon Mr. P. asked me why

  I hadn’t joined the International Club

  he said I’d like it

  (answer: because joining clubs meant being with people I didn’t know, which scared me, and I had to do that for classes, which is why I forgot to go to them a lot, but there was no way I was going to do something that stupid in my free time, no way)

  I told him I was kinda busy

  but I’d think about it

  locker up

  Sound of slamming lockers triggers

  me with the spread of metal

  across my tongue

  as if someone pushed my face

  into the steel soldiers lined against the wall,

  patiently holding our books, our lunch,

  decomposing bananas

  and an army of fruit flies,

  the combination to open sesame

  always slipping past

  spin the dial again until it opens, crouch

  head in the dark, act

  like I’m looking for something important

  crowd swelling, banging riot

  in the unwatched spaces

  me worrying my stack of books

  like I can’t
hear the conversations around me

  about some girl who was crying

  at the back of the bus,

  potato chips and retainers and tryouts,

  football players

  shoving jockstraps in the faces of girls

  no one will defend, essays, big tits and small

  dicks,

  National Honor Society infighting, drama,

  so much drama

  I thought I was the only person this alone,

  too afraid to lift my head to check, can rats get in our lockers did I leave that book at home how much longer do I have to stay and pretend to pray to this empty altar, when will the bell release me so I can flip the page of this script to the shoulder-slumping eternal sigh of time to go to class again

  This is life with your head

  inside the jaws

  of the beast.

  scrawling yawps

  when I wasn’t stoned

  the only thing that helped

  me breathe

  was opening a book

  mist enveloping, welcoming

  me into the gray space

  between ink black and page white

  leading me along to the Shire

  to start the long trek to Mordor

  again

  questing for unknowable treasure

  the majesty of Tolkien’s adventures

  cast a blood spell on me

  sap rose from the ground where I was rooted,

  filtered through my imagination

  it dripped from my fingers as ink-blotted

  poetry, scrawled escape recipes

  I scribbled,

  writing at the speed of life

  gauntlet, thrown

  My high school was designed by an incarceration

  specialist to make the herding, the feeding

  and the slaughter proceed as efficiently as possible

  that’s what we thought,

  anyway

  the isolated back hallway was an icicle

  laid along the school’s spine,

  I avoided it, cuz it was filled with jocks

  but

  after detention one day, at the end of ninth grade

  tired of wasting my time

  going the long way around

  I walked down that cold hall,

  itching for a fight.

  A gym teacher stepped out. The short one

  the intimidating one, radiating more energy

  than Jean Grey on a cranky day, she pointed

  her finger at me and I snapped to attention

  and when she said I was a big girl

  I said “yes, ma’am”

  and when she said I should go out for sports

  teams in tenth grade, I said

  “yes, ma’am”

  because I was terrified of that woman

  In the fall, I dove

  into the cold, bleaching water

  swim practice;

  my hair clean for the first time in a year,

  I lost myself in underwater meditation

  of lap after lap after lap after lap

  and that winter I skied

  in blue jeans, not caring

  that I couldn’t afford snow pants,

  not giving a shit what other people thought

  cuz I was fast, so strong I carved my mark

  on the face of the mountain

  come spring, I threw shot put and sucked

  at throwing discus, but I began myself again

  stopped smoking

  started chipping away at my concrete cage

  went to class every damn day

  cuz cutting classes meant I couldn’t practice

  pulled my grades out of the toilet

  stopped phoning in generic answers

  and sleeping through class

  didn’t need to, I slept

  finally

  at night, too worn out to entertain

  the monsters in the closet and under my bed

  the nightmares receded into the River Styx

  for a while

  I experimented with friendships

  girls I met on the team,

  dusting off the concrete, my fists

  uncurled a bit, I stopped

  being rabbit-scared

  most days

  God bless that short gym teacher

  for caring enough

  to call me out

  and hold me up

  candy-striped

  Mom made me get a job

  the summer between

  ninth and tenth grades,

  between silence

  and nervous laughter,

  burn and infection.

  Anything but babysitting, I said,

  and poof, I was a candy striper, hospital

  volunteer wrapped in a dress with thin stripes

  white and tampon-box pink,

  I arrived on time five days a week

  filled water jugs, delivered flowers

  counted hours, fluffed pillows

  snuck cigarettes to old folks

  in need of a fix. The real lessons

  were found in the accidents:

  taking a jug of ice

  into the wrong room and finding there

  a new mother, holding her baby

  who’d arrived so broken inside

  he couldn’t be healed,

  wouldn’t live long enough to be a bored

  teenager, would never blow out

  a single birthday candle,

  the baby’s mother—not much older than me—

  she asked for Kleenex and I gave it

  and she grabbed my hand

  I stood next to her, our fingers entwined

  my eyes on the floor

  felt wrong to look at her

  or the baby

  so we held hands

  and the ice in the pitcher melted slow

  to give them more time.

  Another day I took files to the morgue

  because computers were still waiting

  to be invented. The restless dead hungry

  to come back to life, that’s what it smelled like

  down there, chemicals and meat. Dead-guy hand

  on the edge of a table freaked me out

  so much that when one of the not-dead guys—

  a junior assistant lab rat or something—

  asked me for my number, I gave it to him

  without thinking

  then sprinted for the surface.

  He called me. A movie on the first date,

  garlic pizza on the second;

  movies and pizza was just my speed

  slow, turtle-paced, with dumb jokes

  and eventually a little kissing

  until in the front seat of his car

  he pushed my head into his crotch

  frantic-fumbling with his belt buckle;

  I escaped and avoided

  the morgue after that.

  ignorance

  We didn’t get our textbooks in health

  in tenth grade until the cold stripped

  the trees in late November

  cuz the school board ordered the books

  to be gutted, they demanded that the sex

  chapters be surgically removed

  so explanations of the menstrual cycle

  and pics of diseased penises

  wouldn’t send us into frenzied orgies

  in the halls or cause us to drop out

  so we could do the sex all day.

  The school board barred />
  as much practical education

  as they could. Maybe they

  just really liked babies and wanted us

  to start breeding as soon as possible.

  chronological cartography

  1. I clawed my way through ninth grade breath by breath, second by second. Kids living in war zones should get extra credit just for showing up to school. The fact that my parents didn’t see how messed up I was, and how stoned I stayed to avoid dealing with what messed me up, proved they were fighting hard battles of their own. Dad was hanging on by a thread, but Mom was a warrior. She kept us alive and made sure we had a place to live—two incredible accomplishments, when you think about it. But I didn’t think about it, not then. I focused on breathing in, breathing out, then breathing in again.

  2. Sophomore year, I tried to be a student, minute by minute. Sometimes hour by hour. My X-kid friends were mad cuz I wouldn’t party with them anymore. But I made friends with a girl who swam with me and she was good at discus and I threw the shot put, which landed me with the nickname Moose. I joined the International Club and went to meetings, and Mr. P. was right—I liked it. My guidance counselor was not impressed with my progress; he shook his finger in my face and yelled at me and said if I didn’t get my act together, I’d wind up in jail.

  3. By eleventh grade, living hour by hour was habit and every once in a while I could see a little further ahead. I remembered to return library books. I got a job and wasn’t fired. Some of my friends’ parents didn’t like me; they could smell the desperation, the faint whiff of disaster that clung to my clothes. Whatever. I branched into the nonfiction section of the library and read about Russian history and Japanese etiquette. I wrote down important things on a calendar. I watched the musical and went to a couple basketball games, just for fun.

  cardboard boxes

  I visited kin in the mountains

  late in high school, pinned

  down in a small town; no car, no cable TV

  (internet hadn’t been invented, or gaming—hell,

  they barely had lights)

  our choices were simple: weed, beer, or grain

  alcohol mixed

  with pink Kool-Aid by spotty boys eager for sex,

  sad little puppies living in crumbling houses

  or decomposing trailers with pregnant girls from

 

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