by Kyla Stone
A tangle of emotions unspools inside me. I want to protect him, to keep him safe from anyone who would hurt him, but I can’t. I can’t even protect him from the people who live in this house.
He has to learn to do it himself. He has to learn how to be strong. “Stand up for yourself, Aaron.”
“He doesn’t dare,” Frankie says. “Aaron’s afraid. Wussy Aaron wouldn’t know what to do if a girl attacked him.”
Aaron huddles over the drawing pad, his messy curls falling across his face. Frankie leans across the table and snatches it.
“Table’s real interesting to look at, isn’t it?” Frankie throws the pad on the floor.
Aaron grips the pencil he’s holding with whitened knuckles. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything. He just takes it.
“Stop it, Frankie. Leave him alone.” Fear for Aaron tightens my throat. I give him back his drawing pad and rub his back in slow circles, like I used to do when he was a baby. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Look, you can’t keep letting people bully you around, alright? Not even Frankie. You have to stand up for yourself.”
He nods.
“Jackson Cole mess with you today?”
Aaron looks up, tears trembling in his eyelashes. “No. He wasn’t at school. Did you do what you promised?”
“I pinkie-swore, didn’t I? Don’t worry. I took care of it. He won’t bother you anymore.”
Aaron wipes the snot dripping from his nose with his shirtsleeve. The enormous grin he gives me makes it all worth it. I would do the same thing a hundred times over, no matter the consequences.
I turn on the faucet and start the dishes. I’ve barely scrubbed the first pan when Aaron yelps.
I whirl around and grab Frankie’s arm. “Did you kick him again? What’d I just tell you?”
“Screw you, Sid-Ney!”
“Shut up! You want to wake up Ma?”
Tears spark at the corners of his eyes. “You’re hurting me!”
I realize how hard I’m gripping his arm and let go, but not fast enough. Four red half-moons appear on Frankie’s upper arm. Guilt stabs me, a razor-sharp blade sliding right between my ribs. I just screwed up. Again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Frankie, I—”
“Sidney!” Ma stands in a puddle of sunlight in the kitchen doorway, her nightgown stretched tight across her plump body. Her brown hair is stringy and slick against her neck. Her face is swollen, her eyes glassy, unfocused. “What’s all this racket? I thought I told you to keep quiet.”
My fists curl and uncurl at my sides. The anger drains out of me, and suddenly I’m very, very tired. “You should go back to bed now, Ma. You know you’re not feeling good.”
I don’t want the boys seeing her like this. I take Ma’s arm and lead her through the narrow hallway back to her bedroom. She smells like sweat and alcohol.
“Are you hurting those boys?”
“No! I mean, it was an accident. I just—I’m sorry.” I have to be better. I have to control this anger that’s consuming me from the inside. I can’t let it touch them. It’s my job to take care of them, to protect them. No one else does.
“All I asked was for some peace and quiet.” Her voice slurs. She lies down, and I roll the covers over her doughy legs. “Can’t you even do that right?”
I wince. I try not to let her get to me, but the words still sting. They always do. “I’m trying, Ma. Okay?”
Used tissues, bottles of Advil and Tylenol, and half-empty glasses of beer litter the nightstand. The TV is on, as always. I pick up the beer glasses, balancing them in my arms to keep from spilling them.
I remember Ma’s laughter, from a long time ago. Remember sitting next to her at the kitchen table, drawing while she did her needlework art projects or knit me a scarf out of wooly yarn she let me pick out myself. The memories are from so long ago that they’re gray around the edges.
“You think your dad will be home tonight?” She looks up at me hopefully, as if my answer can make her wish come true.
“I don’t know.” I edge toward the door, stepping around several piles of dirty clothes. I hate the smell of this room, soured with sweat and alcohol and something else, something dank and unwashed. “You know Frank. He comes, he goes.”
“He’s been gone for weeks already. I text him and he never answers. And don’t you go calling him Frank. You know better. You and your smart mouth.”
I stand in the doorway and stare at the slight hump in her belly. “You shouldn’t drink, Ma. You’re pregnant.”
Ma’s gaze fixes on the TV. “As soon as your father comes home, I’ll stop. A couple of drinks are fine. Everyone does it. Frank knows how lonely I get when he’s gone.”
“Whatever you say. Look, I spent all of my tip money today on groceries. The electric bill and the water bill are due at the end of the week.” I say the words slowly, with a patience I don’t feel. I want to shake her right out of her stupor.
“Your father will bring money when he comes back.”
“Who knows when that will be? He always skips town and leaves us with nothing.” He disappears, Ma takes to her bed, and I’m the one left with everything else: the bills, the boys, the cooking and cleaning. Even so, Frank gone is always better than Frank here, with his temper and his ashtray breath and his leering gaze.
She scowls. “Look at you, always talking bad about him. Are you trying to make me more upset?”
“No. I’m trying to tell you we’re broke.”
“Then we’ll call Aunt Ellie. Ellie’s rich. Well, rich enough.” She coughs and wipes her mouth on her nightgown. “Her house has more bathrooms than we have bedrooms. She could give us some, she could, but she never does . . . the self-righteous old hag. She always did think she was better than us.”
Aunt Ellen lives somewhere in Ohio. I haven’t seen her or spoken to her in years. She practically disowned my mother when she married Frank, as did the rest of that side of the family. There were one or two strained get-togethers. I remember running around a brown grass lawn with a couple of much older cousins. I remember skinning my knee.
Ma takes a swig from a flask she’s hidden somewhere in the bed beside her.
“You’re going to hurt the baby.” I say it louder this time.
Ma just ignores me. “We’ll be fine. Frank will come home. He always does.”
I sigh. Trying to reason with her is pointless. “Are you hungry? You want dinner?”
She pinches the flab on her arm. “Stop trying to make me fat. It pisses Frank off.”
“Suit yourself. Good night, Ma,” I say, though it’s only 7:00 p.m. I go back to the kitchen and put the beer glasses on the counter, since there’s no room in the sink. The boys are gone, probably hiding out in their room. There’s a loaf of Wonder Bread, a jar of peanut butter, and two empty cans of sliced pineapple on the kitchen table. They made their own sandwiches, a favorite concoction I first created for them years ago.
They know when to leave someone alone in this family. Neither of them will bother me tonight. I grab the crunchy peanut butter jar and head for my room. My bedroom is on the other side of the living room, separated from all the other bedrooms. Frank insisted I have that room when I turned thirteen, said girls needed their privacy. Yeah, right. I need Frank’s privacy like I need a shot in the head.
I close the door to my bedroom and flop on the bed. I keep my Strathmore drawing pads, charcoal sticks, Prismacolor colored pencils, kneaded erasers, pastels, and blending stumps in the nightstand drawer. My pencils are artist quality, a rare gift from Frank for my eighth-grade graduation. Their pigment is as smooth and saturated as oil paint.
My art wall is next to my closet. Most of the drawings in cheap plastic frames are of butterflies, a few of my brothers, or landscapes of places I’ve never been. When I ran out of frames, I taped my drawings directly to the wall. I like to look at the butterflies, the rich, dappled colors, the sleek shape of their wings lifted in flight.
My stomach growls. I open the lid to
the peanut butter and gouge out a large chunk. It sticks to my finger like a giant slug. I lick it off and do it again. And again. I eat until I am stuffed, past stuffed, until I’m bloated and a little sick. But the pit inside me never fills. When the jar is half-empty, I screw the lid back on and put it on the nightstand.
Pain gathers behind my eyes. I need relief. I’m desperate for it. I dig beneath my mattress for my baggie of razors and bundle of tissues and lean back against the wall. The blade glints in the twilight slanting through the curtains. I yank off my jeans. A dizzying parade of wounds decorate the soft white expanse of my upper thighs. Fresh red slashes crisscross the white lines of scar tissue.
I never cut my wrists. That’s the coward’s way out. If I ever do it, it won’t be like this. I’ll use Frank’s gun, the big Glock .22 he tucks beneath the mattress he sometimes shares with Ma. My father and I are the same this way; we keep our most sacred things beneath us when we sleep.
I make three new cuts, horizontal and lined up next to each other, each about an inch long. One for me, one for Frankie, and one for Aaron. They’re my brothers. They’re my responsibility.
Frankie’s cut is deeper than the others. I press the blade hard, until the sharp sting equals my guilt. Shame washes over me. I don’t want to be that girl, the one who hurts what she loves.
I’ll do better tomorrow, make it up to him somehow. I’ll be more patient. I’m just so tired. And he’s so hard, so angry. He’s too much like me.
It’s after ten when I finish. I press my leg with an old washcloth until it stops bleeding to keep any seeping blood off the sheets. I pull on the boxers and oversized T-shirt I use as pajamas.
My fingers twitch. There’s still something I need to do. I open my nightstand drawer and get out my sketch pad and graphite pencil. I draw a cartoon of Ratty Bunny. Ratty Bunny was just Bunny when it was mine, an adorable white stuffed rabbit with black button eyes and the softest fur I’d ever felt. When Frankie was born, I gave Bunny to him. And when Aaron came three and a half years later, Frankie passed on the tradition.
Aaron still sleeps with it every single night. Now the fur is matted and dingy, with one button eye hanging loose. The stuffing started drifting out of a rip in the paw. One day, Ma asked, “Why do you want that old ratty bunny?” But Aaron cried, so she sewed it up with pink thread during one of her good days. And now we call it Ratty Bunny.
In my drawing, Ratty Bunny has enormous, cartoony eyes. He’s wearing a cape that swirls heroically behind him. He stands on a stick figure lying on the ground, his little paws raised in triumph. I always make Ratty Bunny the hero who comes riding in on a magnificent steed or swooping down Superman-style to save the day. I tear off the page and fold it into a triangle, the only half-assed origami trick I actually learned back in some middle school art class.
A honey-colored buffet stands in the narrow hallway between the bathroom and the boys’ room, too bulky to fit in our tiny kitchen. It takes up too much space, and looms out of the dark to stub toes or scrape shins and hips during middle-of-the-night bathroom trips. The drawers are full of junk no one ever uses. Except for this.
I tuck the paper triangle into the front left corner of the left drawer. This is our message center, when we need to share the things we can’t say aloud in this house. I draw Ratty Bunny cartoons for Aaron. I used to leave funny-shaped rocks for Frankie. He liked to glue googly eyes to them, add a silly mouth with permanent marker, and stack them up on the top of his dresser. He doesn’t do that anymore.
Before I climb into my own bed, I check on Ma. She’s passed out, snoring loudly, the nub of a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I take it out of her hand and grind it out in her empty water glass. Then I go back to my room.
Headlights from passing cars make strange designs slip and slide across the walls. I watch the alarm clock’s green numbers blink from 11:59 to 12:00 a.m.
The hours pass, and I cannot sleep. The weight of the darkness, the ceiling, the house, the sky splattered with spiky stars—I feel them like a heaviness, like iron in my bones.
A heaviness that will not go away.
If you enjoyed this preview, you can purchase Beneath The Skin HERE!
