Before You Break

by Kyla Stone

  Eli slings his arm around Margot’s shoulders. He’s the captain of Brokewater High’s loser football team, the Wildcats. Eli is one of those human specimens of nearly perfect dimensions. He has a strong, wide jaw, gorgeous amber eyes, and his body looks like it’s been chiseled from granite.

  “Hey, ladies.” He flicks a strand of shaggy brown-black hair out of his eyes and flashes a megawatt grin. He’s shallow and vain and oh so popular, but he’s never been mean to me.

  I turn to him. “Why do you hang out with these mentally deficient Barbie dolls?”

  “Um, hello?” Nyah says, tossing her hair. “Because we’re hot.”

  Eli just grins and shrugs at me, like he can’t help himself.

  “Jazzy, make her apologize before she regrets it,” Margot says.

  “You aren’t pretty enough to be this stupid,” I say. “Get the hell out of my way.”

  Margot’s face hardens. Her eyes go dark and furious. She’s used to girls withering beneath her gaze. She’s not used to this, to me, and she’s royally pissed.

  She’s not the only one. My pulse pounds against my skull. I want to claw their self-satisfied, judgmental eyes out with my fingernails. I would try it, too, if expulsion wasn’t scrawled in red ink across my brain. “I’m warning you. Move or I’ll go nuclear on your ass.”

  Jasmine hesitates. Her gaze flicks to Margot. “Let’s go. I need a shower after being around this disease-infested slut.”

  They’re going to leave. I should shut the hell up, but I can’t help myself. “You need more than a shower to get rid of your diseases.”

  Jasmine’s face blooms bright red. “You’re a psycho-bitch. Just like your mother.”

  Anger mixes with the pain twisting my stomach. I blink back hot, stinging tears. I will not let them see me cry. “And you’re a festering ass-wart, just like your brother.”

  I push past her before I completely lose it. The bell rings, and the rest of the crowd falls away, letting me through.

  “Skank!” Margot mock-coughs.

  “We’re not done here!” Jasmine yells after me.

  But I’m out of there before I start throwing punches. I want nothing more than to slap the smugness right off their shiny, starved faces. My eyes burn. My heart stutters in my chest. Dark, painful emotions threaten to boil right out of my skin.

  I know what I need to do, what I have to do.

  Three

  I bang open the front doors and make a hard left off the parking lot, following the rusted, rundown fence that rings the school property. There’s a gutted section wide enough to scoot through just past the parking lot, hidden by a row of trees.

  The ground around the fence hole is littered with cigarette butts, wrappers, and other bits of trash. A thick band of trees screen smokers and dopers from any teachers peering out classroom windows. Nobody’s hanging out here today.

  Once I’m past the fence, I shove through the tangle of underbrush and maneuver around the black ash, red maple, and white cedar trees to get to the river. Officially, it’s Brokewater Creek, but it’s so wide and deep most people just call it a river. It empties into Lake Michigan about 30 miles west of our tiny town of Brokewater, Michigan, population 3026, plus 99 cornfields.

  The river is the only thing I like about this place. There are several deep spots out by the bridge where people gather in the warmer months to get drunk, stoned, and hook up. Sometimes they dare each other to swim out to the massive rock in the center of the river. I used to show up there sometimes, back in seventh and eighth grade, before everything went to hell. Now, I just want to be left alone.

  The rushing sound of the river pulses in my ears. It feels alive, like some huge, twisting snake that might swallow me whole. Above the trees, a few clouds straggle across the sun. The heat and humidity suck energy right out of the air. I feel heavier with every step, my legs like blocks of cement.

  I make my way along the riverbank for several minutes until I come to a large rock jutting out into the river. It’s big enough for a half-dozen people to sit on, but this is my rock, my sanctuary.

  I sit down and shrug off my backpack. The heat of the stone seeps through my jeans. Insects trill in the heavy stillness. A huge red maple arches over me, shading me from the sun with its reddish, hand-shaped leaves.

  My blood buzzes, my skin hot and tingling. Anger and pain and need collide in my mind, crashing like thunder, ricocheting against my skull. I pull out the plastic baggy containing a fresh razor, several folded tissues, and a few Band-Aids. I roll up my pant leg and push down my sock. The tender spots below and above my ankle are laddered with raised white lumps and fresh cuts.

  Only this can untangle the dark snarl of emotions inside me. Only this pain can sharpen my focus, drown out the roar inside my own head.

  I tilt the razor against an old scar just above my right ankle. The scar is an inch long, thick and bunched like a white worm. I press until I see the bloom of red, then slowly drag the edge over the damaged skin. I welcome the pain, seek it, search it out beneath my skin. My heartbeat slows. The noise fades away, and sweet, languid relief melts through me.

  A black, white-spotted Baltimore butterfly flutters out over the water, its wings flashing in the sunlight. Sometimes I see monarchs or the yellow-brown of a checkerspot hovering over a bush. The sight of one always makes my heart ache, my body filling with a cold, hollow emptiness.

  I make another cut, watch the tiny chasm open in my skin, and let my mind drift back. Back to the time before the world tilted off its axis, back to eighth grade, when Jasmine Cole was still my best friend.

  She talked too loud and too much, and she snorted like a horse when she laughed. She had glasses and braces and was the only kid I knew with an actual microscope in her house.

  Back then, Jasmine was one of those rare people who seemed to know exactly how her life would turn out ahead of time. She loved bugs and science and wanted to study butterflies, to become a lepidopterist like her father, a science professor at Notre Dame who died when she was a toddler.

  One side of her walk-in closet was stuffed with clothes; the other side was lined with shelves containing her father’s old supplies: spreading boards, glass-topped specimen boxes, insect pins, envelopes, tiny forceps, glass and wood containers, a long-handled net, and the killing jars on the top shelf her mother wouldn’t let her touch.

  The walls of Jasmine’s bedroom were covered with framed displays of butterflies, their jewel-toned wings splayed and tacked to display boards with tiny metal pins. Some she’d paid for or received as gifts; others, she’d caught herself.

  Sometimes I went with her on her expeditions, lugging around her supplies in a canvas tote bag while she searched for the flowers that lured her prey. I still remember their satiny, iridescent wings, their names like a whispered promise on my lips: Painted Lady, White Admiral, Mourning Cloak, Dreamy Duskywing, Fluted Swallowtail, Glass Winged Skipper.

  She collected caterpillars in mason jars filled with sticks and leaves. She studied them as they attached to branches and formed their mummy-like shell, the chrysalis. She called them larvae, which always made me think of maggots.

  I would sit on her bed and draw while she worked. I could never kill the butterflies like she could. I drew them instead. I filled up notebook after notebook with wood nymphs and monarchs, admirals and hairstreaks, swallowtails and sulphurs, and my favorites, the blues.

  “Do you know how the caterpillar makes its transformation?” she asked me once. She leaned over her desk, intent as she thrust a pin through the butterfly’s thorax, then used paper strips to hold open the fragile orange wings without tearing the membranes.

  I sat on her bed with my legs crossed, lightly sketching the shape of a large Morpho Blue, its huge, iridescent wings spread in midflight. I shaded in the mid-tones with my charcoal stick, slowly bringing out the depth of shadow and light. “Not really,” I said, because I knew she was dying to tell me.

  “It has to eat its own body. Gross,
right? It releases these enzymes that digest itself and dissolve nearly all of its tissues. Look, I’ll show you.”

  She pulled a chrysalis attached to a small stick out of one of her jars and grabbed a knife. I watched as she carefully sliced open the filmy skin, revealing an oozing caterpillar soup. “That’s disgusting.”

  “I know, right? But check this out. There are still groups of organized cells in all that goo. They contain everything the butterfly needs to develop the wings, antennae, legs, eyes, and anything else she needs to survive. She basically annihilates herself and then rebuilds herself into something completely new.”

  I listened to Jasmine talk, her words spinning their own cocoon around us. I used my paper stumps to blend and blend until the individual pencil strokes were indistinguishable, until the butterfly looked poised to lift off the page.

  “There’s this study,” Jasmine said excitedly. “The researchers discovered the butterflies retain memories from their experiences as a caterpillar, in spite of almost complete cellular disintegration during the metamorphosis. How cool is that?”

  But that was shortly before Jasmine underwent her own metamorphosis. During the summer between eighth and ninth grade, she traded the glasses for contacts and the braces for a blazing white smile. Her mother took her to a salon and bought her a straightening iron, and her mouse-brown frizz transformed into silky white-blonde tresses cascading down her back like a Pantene commercial.

  But it was the popular girls who made her transformation complete. Margot Hunter adopted Jasmine into her Bitch Squad. Plus, Jasmine’s step-dad has one of the only in-ground pools in the whole town, sealing her fate. Jasmine shucked her science nerd persona like a caterpillar’s collapsing flesh. And unlike her butterflies, she didn’t seem to retain any memories of her former life, or former friends.

  I make another cut, sucking in my breath from the sharp sting. I wipe the blood away with a tissue and watch the red bloom again. My heart aches. My whole body aches. I take a deep breath, blinking back the tears.

  Jasmine knew I did this. She knew the things that happened at home. Some of them. In a moment of idiotic weakness, I told her. I don’t know why. It’s only the cutting that brings relief. Only this that calms the frenetic flutter-flap of my heart.

  I thought telling her might change something. It did, but not in any way that mattered.

  I can still hear the words ringing in my ears from the day I put my tray down next to hers at the lunch table. Margot and the others were already sitting, but there was an empty space on the end next to Jasmine. Jasmine wore clothes I’d never seen before: a tight, sparkly tank top that hugged her chest, frayed short-shorts, and wedge heels. She glared at me. “You don’t belong here, you emo, self-mutilating freak.”

  I sat there like she’d slapped me, my mouth frozen in a half-smile, my brain unable to process the horror unfolding right in front of me.

  Two of the girls covered their mouths with their hands.

  Margot’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Jasmine said it like it was nothing, like it was old news. “She slices up her legs with a razor every night. She belongs in a wacko-house or something.”

  “With cushioned walls.” Margot’s lips curled in disgust as she stared at me.

  “Go sign yourself in,” Jasmine said. But she wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was looking at Margot. “You stink like the trailer pigsty you live in.”

  I felt like my chest was about to explode. Pain vibrated through me, radiating into every cell of my being. I felt brittle, hollow, like I might crack wide open and my guts would come spilling out right onto the cafeteria table. I forced myself to my feet, my legs trembling, the heat of humiliation flushing my face. The pain was too much. It was like holding hot burning coals in my bare hands. I felt my skin catch fire, my bones.

  I reached out and tipped over her tray of food, spilling ravioli and red tomato sauce all over her lap. I walked out of the cafeteria to the sound of a tableful of squealing, shrieking girls. I walked with my head held high, but inside, my heart was shrinking, shriveling up into a hard, black pit.

  You can’t give any part of yourself to anyone. They’ll just use it to break you.

  I stare at the reflection of the trees rippling on the surface of the water. A robin chirps from a branch somewhere above me. The memories are still like weeping wounds, four years later.

  Now it’s the beginning of senior year, and I don’t care about any of them. I don’t care about anything. Escape is less than a year away.

  My mind slides away from the darkness. The stinging cuts focus my attention. The pain drowns out the shrieking in my head, dulls the ache pulsing beneath my ribs. I use my last tissue and press it against my ankle until the blood stops seeping. I dab the new cuts with a bit of Neosporin and slap on a Band-Aid.

  I check my phone. I’ve completely lost track of time. It’s already after three.

  I have to get to my after-school job at Bill’s Bar and Grill, where I bus tables. It’s depressing, mind-numbing work, but it’s also my lifeline.

  To escape this hellhole, I figure I need six grand in savings. Three months’ rent in advance for an apartment, since I don’t have much credit, plus the security deposit. Then savings for a start on utilities, food, gas, and car payments. Not to mention college tuition left over after a butt-load of school loans. Bill’s will also provide a steady employment history, which I’ll also need. So I work every day, and as many hours as I can.

  My future is still a hazy, nebulous idea in my head. When I try to imagine it, I can’t.

  I know I have to get there, but when I think past this year, my future is blank. A boiling black cloud rears up in my path. I can’t see through it or around it.

  But the money—the $1876.42 in my bank account—that’s real. And it’s going to get me out. Right now, that’s all that matters.

  I shove my things into my backpack and head back to the hell that is my life.

  Four

  After my shift at Bill’s, I have to stop for groceries. Because Ma’s account is overdrawn, again—I have to pay with my own money. Forty-four bucks down the drain.

  By the time I get home, my stomach is growling, and my frustration levels are creeping higher and higher. I’ll never make my goal when I’m the one paying for crap.

  I grit my teeth and sweep my arm across the counter, clearing off several old newspapers and three empty beer cans. I put down the brown paper bags and start unloading the groceries: off-brand Corn Chex cereal, cans of sliced pineapples, Ramen noodles, and a jug of milk. I toss the leftover change on the counter. It’s all that’s left of my tips from the night.

  Ma’s nowhere in sight. I’m guessing she’s passed out in her bedroom, as usual. And Frank—he’s been gone for weeks. It’s all on me: making dinner for the boys, cleaning up, doing laundry, bedtime routines, and then homework, if I can manage to stay awake that long.

  I try not to look at the state of the house: the shabby furniture, the scummy counters, the cabinet door half-swinging off its hinges, dirt gathering in the corners. It doesn’t matter how much I scrub; nothing ever looks clean.

  Waning sunlight spills across the worn kitchen table. My little brothers sit across from each other: eight-year-old Aaron slanting forward over a drawing pad, small shoulders hunched so tightly his neck is barely visible; eleven-year-old Frankie leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, a cigarette sagging from his lips.

  I slam the orange juice against the counter. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothin’.” Frankie bites into the cigarette.

  Hot anger flares through my veins. I rip the cigarette out of Frankie’s mouth. “You’re smoking now?”

  Frankie barely flinches. “Who cares? Screw you, Sid-Ney.” He says the last part of my name in a whiny singsong, dragging out the ney. He’s been calling me Sid-Ney since he was three, when he would toddle after me with Ratty Bunny, his favorite stuffed animal clutched in h
is little fists, his swollen face wet with tears and snot. He’d cry for me to pick him up and take him away from the screaming and shouting and the sounds of ashtrays and liquor bottles being thrown against walls. Back when he was still soft and trusting, before he’d started turning into Frank.

  “It’s poison.” I struggle to keep my voice even.

  “Who cares?” Frankie stares at me, returning the same flinty gaze. His eyes are cobalt twins of mine, his short, spiky hair the same shiny blue-black as mine. But where I’m bulky and solid, he’s long and lean, like Frank.

  My gaze slides away first. I stub out the cigarette in an empty glass stacked on the counter and start unpacking the grocery bags. He’s too damn young. Somebody needs to tell him; somebody in this house has to at least act like a parental figure. “I care. You’re not ready for that kind of stuff.”

  “Okay, Ma.” Frankie rolls his eyes.

  “I’m serious. You want to get suspended again?” Of course, I don’t tell him I’ve just been suspended myself. He’ll go straight to Ma, and I’m planning on keeping this whole debacle my little secret. Frank’s gone and Ma’s so out of it, she won’t even know the difference.

  He just shrugs. “Who cares?”

  I hate the words even as they spill out of my mouth. “You know what Frank will say.”

  “Dad doesn’t care.” But his voice loses some of its fight. We all know Frank cares. A lot. Good grades are the one thing he gives a flying crap about when it comes to his kids.

  I finish putting the groceries away. I crush the paper bags into two balls and toss them in the trashcan under the sink. Both the trashcan and the sink are overflowing. The dishwasher is broken. Again. I’ll have to do all the dishes by hand.

  I turn around just as Frankie kicks Aaron’s shin beneath the table. Aaron shrinks into himself, ducking his head. Where Frankie is tough and hard, Aaron is soft. Even his features are pliant: his cheeks doughy, his nose flat, his eyes wide apart and slanted down at the corners, as if they’re beginning to melt into the rest of his face. Frankie and I inherited the delicate, fine-boned features of our father, but Aaron looks like our mother.