Chapter Eleven
My suede pants feel rough and uncomfortable, too tight, like sausage casings on my thighs. The cashmere turtleneck I borrowed from my mom on Christmas Eve and forgot to give back is making my neck itch.
i dont want to do this
i don’t even know what this is
Today at lunch Marshall barely mentioned the fact that we were hanging out tonight. Only that I should wear something “kinda nice,” and that he’d pick me up at seven. Both of which made it sound suspiciously like a date.
i can’t date
Not now, not yet. The idea of it makes my armpits prickle with sweat.
There’s a knock at my door. “Come in,” I call out, and the knob turns. Dad is wearing that obnoxious grin again, the one that says he’s thrilled about tonight’s excursion and is totally on board with Marshall despite the fact that he spent all of seven minutes with him.
“You look great, Bear,” he says enthusiastically. Not beautiful or even pretty, just great, a generic nothing that makes me even more self-conscious than before. My outsides are supposed to hide the broken parts of me. Not put them on display.
Fingers at my hairline now, I am tracing the tracks of tough flesh. This has become my thing now, doing this instead of twisting my hair. such improvement!
“They feel a lot worse than they look,” Dad says gently. He rubs the raised scar on the inside of his thumb, from the time several years ago when a broken saw blade almost took the whole thing off.
I look away. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You can’t avoid mirrors forever, Bear. You can’t let fear hold you hostage like that.”
“I’m not afraid of mirrors,” I say stiffly.
“No,” he says gently. “You’re afraid of what you’ll see inside of one. A girl with scars. A girl you don’t know how to be yet. But that girl, she’s you, Jessa.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I snap, angry suddenly, rage seeping out from every pore. I can’t remember ever yelling at my dad, not even that first Christmas when I hated him so much I couldn’t breathe. “You think I need a mirror to help me accept how screwed up I am? FYI, I’m pretty clear on it, thanks.” These words cut through the room, shrinking the space between us the way the truth always does.
Dad doesn’t say anything right away. This is how he’s different from Mom. She can’t let a silence sit, she has to tear through it with her voice, always. Dad decides what he wants to say before he says it. I can literally see him doing it now, weighing his words in his head before speaking them; he wants to get it right.
“I blame myself,” he says finally, his voice so heavy it makes my stomach clench. “For what you went through— have been going through. Since the divorce.” He rubs his forehead. “But, sweetheart, you are not ‘screwed up.’ On the inside or the outside. That’s not—”
“Marshall will be here any minute,” I say, turning away from him. “I have to finish getting ready.”
“Okay, Bear.” The disappointment in his voice makes my heart clench. i didn’t mean to be mean i just can’t do this right now. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
When the door closes, the tears spring to my eyes so fast I can’t blink them away. Instead, blinking sends them over my lower lid, a pair of hot, fat drops on each cheek.
i miss mom
Even as I think this thought I am aware that it is a half-truth. I do miss her, but mostly I miss the way she let me be invisible. Being with Dad is a constant interrogation. Every conversation is a question in disguise, him asking and probing and trying to assess. Mom answered more questions than she ever asked, and she let us both pretend that I was okay.
oh-oh-kay
The funny pronunciation pops into my head, a single spoken word, three syllables inside my skull. The voice, a guy’s voice, is familiar, but without an image attached I can’t place it.
oh-oh-kay
I close my eyes, the memory just out of grasp.
you are oh-oh-kay
Bits of context bounce to the surface. The voice was kind, his hands were warm.
The man from the accident. The doctor in the white coat that nobody else at the accident saw. I’d almost forgotten about him. Remembering him now, it all comes back. The awareness of headlights coming toward me, the crunch of metal, the sharp crackle of glass, the sensation of the world being sucked toward me as I sat pinned, powerless, in my seat. The man appearing at my window, telling me I was oh-oh-kay, that the pain would go away. I can’t see any of it, but I remember it, in my brain and also in my gut. The fear, the tiny sparks of hope.
I hear the sound of a car pull into the driveway. Engine cuts out, door opens then closes, steps on the sidewalk up to the front porch. It’s 6:58, he’s two minutes early.
wren was always late
The thought is a sharp pang in my chest.
no boyfriend
deep breaths
“Jessa!” Dad calls.
“Coming,” I yell back, and grab my coat.
Marshall is standing inside the front door in a dark blue button up and khaki pants. For half a second he is unfamiliar, a stranger in preppy clothing I have never met.
marshall isn’t collars and khakis, marshall is skating sweatshirts and baggy jeans
But then he smiles, and though his smile is nowhere in my head, it must’ve been hiding somewhere else inside me because seeing it lights me up.
“Hey, Fancy,” Marshall says. “Look at you.”
Instinctively, my chin drops.
no please don’t look at me, look at anything but
“Well, you two have fun,” Dad says cheerily. “Just be home by eleven, okay?”
I glare at him. “Eleven?” I expected a curfew — it’s Dad after all — but eleven is inhuman.
“Yeah, eleven is pretty ambitious,” Marshall says. “I’m pretty convinced she’ll be sick of me by nine forty-five.”
Dad laughs. “What can I say? I’m optimistic.”
Marshall follows me outside and down the sidewalk toward his car. “So where are we going?” I ask him as he steps around me to open the passenger door.
“A carnival.”
“A carnival,” I repeat, looking down at my clothes.
“Yup. Of ephemeral futility. Otherwise known as an art exhibition at a super pretentious gallery in LoDo.”
“Really?”
“Well, in all fairness, I don’t know if the gallery is pretentious because I’ve never been there,” Marshall says. “But I assume it has to be because it’s in a hipster neighborhood next to the most painfully hipster coffee shop in all of Colorado, quite possibly the world.” He shuts my door and jogs around to his side, his breath making tiny clouds in the cold night air. Seeing his breath makes me think about his heart.
“Whose art is it?” I ask when he gets in the driver’s seat.
“A guy I skate with. And other people, but he’s the only one I know.” Marshall turns the key and immediately the heat blasts, a burst of dry air lifting the hair around my face. I angle the vents away from me, smooth the hair back down.
“Does he go to Crossroads?” I ask.
“Oh – no – he’s old. I mean, not old, but not in high school. Early thirties, probably.”
Autistic kids and thirty year olds. And his twin sister. And me.
He glances over at me. “Why don’t I have normal friends?”
“Well… yeah.”
“Laziness. Normal people are too much work.”
“Makes sense why you’re hanging out with me, then.” I mean it as a joke, but my voice is too tight to pull it off.
“Oh, we’re not hanging out,” Marshall says, backing down the driveway. “‘Hanging out’ implies a pre-date situation. This is absolutely a date.”
“I can’t date,” I blurt out, so awkward.
Marshall slams on the brakes. “That’s it. Get out.”
“Hilarious,” I say wryly, but my heart is ping-ponging in my chest, he’s not serious he can’t be serious.
“Just kidding, you can stay,” he says, easing his foot of the brake. “But I’m super mad at you for withholding this information until now, after I went to the Gap to buy slim fit khakis.”
“They look very nice.”
“No, they don’t. I’m basically Woody from Toy Story right now. Also, why are we going to a lifeless art show if this isn’t a date? We should be going to the skate park.”
“I wasn’t involved in the planning of this outing,” I point out. “My attendance was somewhat compulsory, if you recall.”
“It was, and I apologize. I generally only force girls to go on dates with me. Hanging out is usually optional.” He slams on the brakes again. I bounce forward in my seat. “That one was a little dramatic, sorry. But I just remembered that there’s a skating invitational happening downtown. You game?”
I look down at my cashmere and suede. “Can I change first?”
“Do you see how I’m dressed? No way.” He guns it backward out of the driveway.
The skatepark is crowded when we get there, people everywhere, in makeshift risers and on folding chairs, packed in every inch of flat space.
“Are you cool with this?” Marshall asks me as we pass through the fence. “I didn’t think about the people. More specifically, about the fact that you hate them.”
“Hey. Not all people.” I point at a little boy, nine maybe ten, doing tricks off to the side. “He’s seems cool.”
“Ugh. I hate that kid. There’s this trick I’ve been trying to learn that he nailed in like three tries last week.”
“You should steal his lunch money.”
“Already did.”
We’re making our way toward the biggest bowl, which Marshal keeps calling a “pool.” I’m trying not to feel the weight and heat of the people around us, the sheer number of humans in this claustrophobic rectangle. From every direction, the sound of skateboard wheels on pavement, incessant rolls and clicks.
deep breaths
The risers are packed but we find two empty folding chairs at the front. A skateboarder comes up the side of the pool and sails into the air, then grabs his board and spins it mid-flight.
“Can you do that?” I ask Marshall.
“Yeah, but it never looks that good. Maybe because I can’t figure out how not to make a panicked face when I’m doing tricks.”
“Demo, please.”
He pulls a face.
I burst out laughing. “You look like a cartoon character.”
Marshall nods vigorously. “I know. Like Roadrunner when he speeds off a cliff. It’s horrible. The worst part is it’s not even a fear thing anymore. It’s literally the only way I can do the trick.”
“Have you ever actually fallen?”
“Oh, I fall all the time. That was never it. It was more the thought that my heart would crap out mid-trick. To be clear, there was very little chance of that happening with a hole the size of mine, but no one told me that back then.”
“Hannah mentioned the hole,” I say. “Can you feel it?”
“Nah. Though I guess I really don’t know because I’ve always had it. But it’s not like there’s a huge gaping sensation in my chest. I mean, there is, but only because you said this wasn’t a date.”
I flush, unexpectedly. It’s not the joke so much as the proximity of his face to mine as he says it. We’re both leaned forward, knees on elbows. The bleachers are crowded so our bodies are touching, which means that when we look at each other, like right now, our noses are six inches apart. He smells like spearmint gum.
“Does it freak you out?” I ask, face back to the front, scars out of sight, thank god he’s on my right. “Knowing that it’s there?”
“It used to. Though I always tried to act like it didn’t. Mostly because I didn’t want my parents to worry more than they already were. I could almost forget about it during the day, while I was preoccupied with trying to convince the popular kids I was cool. But at night it was all I could think about. I’d lie in my bed with my heart racing, which only made things worse because I was convinced the racing itself would kill me.”
I try to imagine Marshall as a little boy, laying in his bed with a hand over his dysfunctional heart, terrified but not wanting to burden anyone else with it. I can’t see it, but the thought alone makes my own heart sting.
“So what happened?” I ask. “You seem pretty chill about it now.”
“Well, my parents saw through the act, for starters. Or Hannah ratted me out. Either way, one Saturday morning my dad announced that he was taking me to a support group for kids with disabilities. I wouldn’t get in the car at first — I didn’t want to think of my heart condition as a disability, and I definitely didn’t want to sit in a room with kids with actual disabilities. But then my dad said he’d take me to Little Man after, so, obvi, I went.”
“Little Man?”
“Best ice cream on the planet. We are one hundred percent going there tonight. Anyway, we got to the group, and there were maybe eight or ten other kids there, all different ages, all different kinds of health issues, most of them a lot worse than mine. And right out of gate the doctor in charge of the group had us go around and say three things: what was wrong with our bodies, what was hurting our souls, and which of the two made us sadder.”
“Oh man,” I say softly.
“Yeah. Brutal. Since I was the new kid, he let me go last. So I sat there for an hour, listening the other kids talk about how scared they were, how they didn’t want their parents to worry, how they thought they’d never make friends at school. Exactly the way I felt. It didn’t matter if they had tumors on their face or cancer in their blood. We all had the same stuff going on inside.” He shrugs. “That flipped a switch for me. Realizing that I wasn’t alone in it somehow made it easier to admit the things that I was feeling. To let it be okay that I wasn’t okay.”
My throat gets tight. but what if it isn’t actually okay?
“So you got your ice cream,” I say.
“Ha. No. Because when my dad came to pick me up, I informed him that I’d decided to live at the hospital with the other kids. Him explaining to me that you couldn’t just move into the hospital didn’t deter me. I feigned chest pains until they were forced to admit me.”
“You did not.”
“Heck yeah I did. No parents, as much TV and jello as I wanted, absolutely no piano music anywhere? C’mon. So much better than ice cream.”
My stomach goes sour at the mention of jello. The bright artificial taste on my tongue, the slippery slide down my throat. With the thought of jello comes the rest of it, harsh lights, frigid air, the incessant hum, rough papery sheets on my bare legs, the socks that didn’t fit. No images, just sensations and feelings and thoughts that send a shudder down my spine.
“I hate jello,” I say quietly. and hospitals
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“My hatred of jello?”
“Your accident.”
My instinct is to say no, right away, without thinking. But in this moment I do want to talk about it, if only to get out from under the weight of it, even for a second, for one breath.
“It was bad,” I say finally. “The other car ran a red light.” I take a breath and try to steady the waver in my voice. “The airbag shattered my cheekbone and…I guess the physics of it or whatever made my brain slam against the side of my skull.” I swallow. “There was a lot of glass in my face, too, from the window . . . that’s what the scars are from.”
“Were you by yourself?” Marshall asks.
I nod. “I was coming home from a party. At my boyfriend’s house. He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
Marshall touches the back of my hand with the back of his. “Do you want to talk about that?” he asks.
I shake my head, move my hand away. “No.”
We’re both quiet then, staring forward, thinking our separate thoughts.
A few minutes pass. Then the music changes and a new pair of skaters enter the pool. My eyes leap from one face to the other as they crisscross the pavement, heart thundering in my chest. One is covered in bruises, the other is striped with scars.
they’re not real, i’m imagining it, i’m making them up
“I can’t see things in my head anymore,” I hear myself say. The thing I really want to say, i’m hallucinating, is lodged in my throat.
Marshall turns his head. “What?”
“It’s called ‘aphantasia,’” I say, not looking at him. “The inability to form mental images. I woke up with it after the accident. The doctors thought it might get better after awhile, but…” I shrug.
“You can’t see anything at all?”
“Nope.” I fiddle with the sleeve of my sweater.
“Whoa,” Marshall says quietly. “That’s intense.”
“Yeah,” I say flatly. The rest of it—the all-consuming anxiety, the hallucinations, the fact that the anti-psychotics haven’t helped—hangs in the air between us. A shroud, a storm cloud, a fog. “It sucks.”
All of a sudden Marshall comes around the front of my chair and puts his arms around me.
“What are you doing?” I ask, instantly uncomfortable, too stiff, too aware of my scars pressing against the slick fabric of his coat.
“I’m hugging you,” he says. “I’m not letting you do the thing you do. Emotionally disengage.”
“How do you know what I do? You met me three weeks ago. Not even.”
“I pay attention,” he says simply. Then, quieter, almost too quiet to hear, he whispers into my hair. “I’m sorry. For what happened to you. For the awkwardness of this hug.”
The stiffness gives away and I smile.
“And now I’m not sure how to extract myself from it,” Marshall says, leaning further into me. “What happened to my chair?”
“It’s right here,” I say, laughing, and reach for it. His head drops a little as he fumbles for the seat, and for a second his breath is on my neck.
no boyfriend
My body goes rigid again. Marshall straightens back up. For a second all I can feel is the absence of him, cold air replacing his warmth.
I force myself to focus on the skateboarders, not anything else.
“Wow,” I say as one of them does a backflip in the air and lands back on his board.
Marshall laughs out loud. “That was the most insincere ‘wow’ in the history of insincere wows. I wish Brendon were here to call you on it. Come on,” he says nudging me with his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We just got here.”
“I know, but I’m second guessing it now. First, you’re watching a bunch of guys who are better looking than I am do skateboarding tricks I can’t do. Second, I mentioned Little Man and now Salted Oreo ice cream is all I can think about.” He gets to his feet.
Little Man Ice Cream is a fifteen-minute walk from the skatepark in a building shaped like a giant metal ice cream can in the middle of the block. The patio is crowded with people in parkas licking ice cream cones under flood lights and heat lamps. Indie folk plays through speakers in the pavement. I look at Marshall. “You realize how bizarre this is, right? It’s freezing out here.”
“That’s what the heat lamps are for,” he says. “Trust me, ice cream is so much better in the winter. And by winter, I mean actual winter, not whatever happens in L.A. in March.”
I’m still deciding what flavor I want when Marshall steps up to the window. Eyes on the flavor list, I follow him up, hear him order half scoops of Salted Oreo and Space Junkie for himself. “I’ll have a scoop of Mint Cookie,” I say, sliding my eyes toward the girl behind the counter, not realizing that there is a pane of mirrored glass between the flavor board and the open window until it’s too late. For half a second I think the girl I see is inside the building. Then I see the scars. Instinctively start to count.
one
two
three
four
five
six
I lose count.
there are too many
I jerk back.
“What’s wrong?” Marshall asks.
“Nothing,” I say abruptly, eyes pinned to the concrete beneath our feet. “I’ll go get us a table.” Rattled, I move away from the building. My heart thunders in my chest.
I find an empty table on the other side of the building and slide into one of the chairs. My brain is struggling to process what just happened, to have an opinion about it. But the “it” has no shape now. The image didn’t hold because it couldn’t. Other than this pounding in my ribcage, there is nothing to go on, nothing to assess.
An ice cream cone appears in my sightline. “Let Little Man help,” I hear Marshall say.
I take the cone and try to smile but my lips feel like wax.
“What happened back there?” Marshall asks quietly.
I pick at a hunk of cookie dough with my fingernail. “The mirror,” I say finally. “It just caught me by surprise.”
“Seeing your reflection, you mean?”
I don’t say anything. This is not a conversation I want to have with him, or anyone. i’m so ugly i can’t bear to look
My ice cream is melting under the heat lamp above us and dripping on my hand.
“Jessa,” Marshall says, his eyes pulling at mine. Two fish hooks, trying to drag my insides out. I lick my ice cream, desperate for an activity, anything to keep from looking at him. The mint is real mint, fresh spearmint, the flavor grassy and bright on my tongue.
“I understand the obsession,” I say lightly, between licks. “This is really good.”
Marshall bites into the top edge of his cone. “It’s cool that you just totally changed the subject and are acting like you didn‘t, but I just want it to be noted that I noted it.”
“Noted,” I say.
Neither of us says anything after that. A breathy rendition of a Beatles song plays through the speaker at our feet.
“You want to walk and eat?” Marshall asks suddenly.
“Sure. I mean, whatever you want. I’m fine either way.”
“Then let’s walk,” he says, and stands up. As soon as he does he winces and grabs his calf.
“You okay?” I ask, alarmed.
“Yeah. My leg’s just been bothering me for the last day or so. I must’ve pulled something skating.” He sits back down to shake it out.
“Are you sure you want to walk?” I ask. “If your leg is hurting?”
“It’s either my leg or my eardrums.” He shudders. “Talk about things that make my soul sad.”
“The music?”
“I’m not sure you can legitimately call this ‘music.’”
“This is a Beatles song!”
“No, these are Beatles lyrics, presently being massacred by a girl with a ukulele and a fake Irish accent who most definitely lives in Portland with her parents. As soon as we get back to the car I’m blasting N.W.A. We need a least an hour of therapeutic treatment before I take you home.”
“Just as long as I don’t have to know who N.W.A is first.”
Marshall shakes his head. “In three and a half weeks I have yet to introduce you to the most influential rap artists of all time. I have totally failed you.”
“Well, then,” I say. “You’d better get your head in the game.”