The Gorgeous Slaughter

by Christina Hart

  “So what do you think?” I ask.

  A small laugh escapes her. “It’s just so short and blonde. You’ve always kept your hair long.”

  I laugh. “I meant your opinion of it, not just mere observations.”

  “Okay, okay. Let me see.” She stands back a little and studies me. “It doesn’t look bad. It’s actually cute on you. But you have the kind of face that any hairstyle would look good on.”

  “Do I still look like me?” Please say no.

  “Honey, of course you do,” she says. “Come here.”

  I go over to her, knowing whenever she uses that tone she wants to hug me, and I embrace it. I go into her arms and let her hug me, stroke my hair. The kind of rare affection she grants me when I allow it these days.

  “No matter what color you dye your hair, or how you cut it, how you dress, any of that, you’ll always be you underneath. Try to remember that, okay?” she says.

  I nod. “Yeah, of course.” I pull away and finish setting the table. I know her well enough to know that the response was meant to be comforting, but it wasn’t really the answer I wanted. What if I didn’t just want a new look, what if I wanted to be a new person, too? What if I wanted a whole new life?

  A few minutes later we sit down to eat and she asks me about Nikki, about how my summer is going, if there are any new boys in my life. She knows me well enough to know I probably won’t tell her much, but she still asks. I answer briefly, summarizing things in short.

  Nikki’s good.

  Summer’s good.

  No new boys.

  She accepts each answer for what it is and doesn’t pry, doesn’t dig. I ask her how work is. If there are new guys in her life. She doesn’t tell me much either.

  Work’s good.

  Things are good.

  No new guys for me, either.

  I give her the same respect in return and let the questions die there. We eat most of our meal in silence, enjoying each other’s company or at least wanting to. And I wonder when it became like this. This almost-awkward silence between us. This space, here, with things floating inside of it, the things we should be saying, just on the tips of our tongues. We used to be closer. Sometimes I think she’s afraid to get close to me again. I can’t really blame her. I already broke her heart once before.

  Twenty

  I study myself in the mirror after dinner and look at the bleach blonde my hair has become. This color I have never seen paired with my face. I think there’s something about it I like. Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t really look as much like me as I did yesterday. I feel closer to Charlie. It’s silly what a haircut and dye can do for you. How it can make you feel so…different. I look at my features, compare them to Tracy’s in my head. She’s a natural blonde. I can never be that, this is the closest I’ll get, and I still don’t know if it will be good enough. For boys who like blondes. For Charlie. For me.

  There’s something about idolizing someone you hate. Maybe idolizing is the wrong word. I don’t want to be like her. God, no. I’m not crazy. I want to be her. There’s a difference.

  I straighten my hair, make it as straight as it will go. I know my roots will start poking out soon enough and this blonde will look about as natural as purple hair on a coconut. My phone dings and I almost fall over trying to get to it, burn my hand on the straightener. It isn’t Charlie. It’s Nikki.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asks.

  “Nothin, just ate dinner. You?”

  “Bored. Can I come over?”

  I tell her “Sure” without even thinking about my hair. It dawns on me after I hit send and I run to my closet, digging through hats, scrambling for one casual enough to cover it. It’s useless. She comes in as I’m still rummaging and she laughs a little.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  I pull my head out of the closet and turn around. “Nothing. I was just looking for something.”

  “O-M-G,” she says, spelling it out. “What did you do to your hair?!” She comes charging at me like some sort of bull, hands grabbing at my hair before she even reaches me.

  “I bleached it. Do you like it?” I ask, trying to sound calm, trying not to let the panic inside me creep out.

  “It looks so cute! But wait a second, why’d you cut your hair and dye it? You didn’t even ask me for help. I always do your hair.”

  “I know you do. It was just a spur of the moment thing. I should have called you, though. As usual I had no idea what I was doing.”

  “Well, grab your scissors,” she says. “Let me fix it. It looks like shit.”

  I smile. She’s being kind, in her own way. I expected the accusation that I was trying too hard again or something like it. I go to my dresser and hand her the scissors.

  She stands behind me, grabs my brush. Runs it through my hair and starts cutting. “Do you want it to stay this short or do you want to go any shorter? Layers? Anything fancy?”

  “No, just one length is good. If you want to make it a little shorter so it’s even, you can.”

  “Got it.” She looks at me in the mirror and we hold eye contact. She offers a smile, but it’s full of pity.

  “What’s that face?” I ask.

  “I just still feel bad about the other night, that’s all. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. Actually, yeah. Are you really telling me you didn’t know Charlie had a girlfriend?” I ask.

  “I swear, I didn’t know. It’s not like I check up on the kid. I told you three hundred times already, I hardly know him. We don’t even follow each other on anything.”

  She sounds sincere, in the way she spits the words out, almost angrily in defense of herself. She hates when I question her character, when I think she’s doing anything other than looking out for me.

  “Fine. I believe you,” I say. “I just can’t believe he has a girlfriend and we didn’t know. Here I was, expecting…”

  “Expecting what?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Nothing really, I guess. I just thought it’d be different.”

  “I know,” she says. “I did, too. Honestly. You looked so cute. I thought the night was gonna go totally different.”

  “Yeah, so did I.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I bet if he were single, it would have happened with you guys,” she says.

  “Really?” I look up at her in the mirror. “What do you think would have happened? You think we’d have wound up together?”

  She laughs. “Calm down, killer. I don’t know. Sure. You could have been together. Maybe not forever, but at least for a night.”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Hey! Careful! Scissors!” she says, waving them at me.

  “No, it would have been something more than just a night of fun, Nikki. I know it,” I say.

  “How would you possibly know that? You don’t even…”

  “I know, I know. I don’t even know him, you’ve said it enough times. I get it. But I don’t know, I just know it. It could have been something special.”

  “You sound kinda crazy again,” she says.

  I turn around and grab the scissors from her hand and throw them across the room. “Stop saying that! You know I hate when you say that!” I yell.

  She holds her hands up. “Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Just, just calm down. You scare me when you get like this.”

  I sit back down in the chair at the dresser and close my eyes and count. Something I will never forget from therapy. To calm myself down. To get away from the angry place before I allow myself to go there, or stay there. I hate when she says I’m crazy, or that I’m doing or saying something crazy. I am focusing on my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. How come it’s so easy for people you love to rile you up and take you to a place of such anger? Why do they know what buttons to push and they push them anyway? And sometimes, they enjoy it. Sometimes it seems like it’s their goal. Nikki knows me well enough to know this makes me
crazy, and she does it anyway.

  When I open my eyes she’s standing behind me, hesitant. I can see a question in her eyes.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Just another lie to get me through the day. “Tell me about you and Dan.”

  Twenty-One

  I smooth things over with Nikki by letting her vent to me about Dan and all the problems in their potential romance. He’s not enough this, or that. Really, I think what it comes down to is her natural instinct for escaping boredom. She’s never happy for long, with anyone. The longest form of relationship I saw her last in was almost six months, and she dragged her feet the entire way. I almost had to try to convince her to be happy for once. But in the end, she wasn’t having it.

  She cheated on him with some random guy at a party. Self-sabotage. She knows it well, only she doesn’t know it yet. She lets go of the destructive behaviors with the bat of her eyes, sends them off into space somewhere never to talk about them again. And if they return in conversation you’d swear she was talking about a UFO or some other mystical thing she’s never heard of or seen before. Nikki, the one who is always so quick to say I’m crazy, that I have problems. The girl who avoids her reflection more than anyone I know. Sometimes I want to tell her about POTG, I’d like to hear what she has to say about it. Try to have a session or two with her and see what comes out. But as her best friend, I try enough. And if she won’t talk to me, I doubt she’d confide in a stranger.

  She doesn’t think happy is something that is meant for her, at least in the form of a traditional relationship. She says one day she hopes to have an open marriage, and that’s the only kind of marriage she’ll enter into. She at least told me that much. Told me how she thinks kids will kill any form of freedom she’s been given and she’s not sure she’ll ever be ready to willingly sign up for that.

  And with her gone now I feel a little more at peace. The anger in me hasn’t subsided fully. It’s still lurking somewhere there under the surface, I just won’t allow it to come back out. I won’t feed it, give it anything to survive on. I check POTG and open my messages. Some of my patients have messaged me for their weekly texts. I respond to each of them.

  There’s Whitney. A thirteen-year-old girl in Mississippi. She’s struggling with depression and being bullied at school and online. I check my messages from her almost every day, and send her more texts than are allotted in her subscription. But it doesn’t matter. I refused to accept payment from her once I learned of her age. It’s more important to me that she has someone to talk to. She has the number for the pre-paid and we usually talk once a week for a half hour. I do my best to remind her there is life after this, after school. An entire life where she can choose who she is surrounded by. It’s what my aunt always tells me, and it helps. I’m sure you’re thinking, how much can a seventeen-year-old really help anyone? You’re probably right. I’m probably not helping very much, but if one person can go to sleep at night a little more hopeful, then I’m doing my job.

  There’s Billy, a twenty-eight-year-old magician who feels like everyone thinks he’s a joke. A guy who wants to be taken seriously and feels like he has no one to talk to about any of it. With him, I mostly just listen. It’s only through text, through DM. He struggles with finding his place, a way to live off his passion. I don’t know what to tell him sometimes, so I don’t tell him anything. I just let him talk and throw in words of encouragement. I don’t even know where he lives. He wouldn’t fill out the form fully.

  Then there’s Rebecca, a seventeen-year-old girl from Nebraska. She reached out to me when she was raped at a party. She still hasn’t told anyone.

  Countless girls, of all ages, reach out to me with their stories. Rape. Sexual assault. Molestation. You name it, I’ve heard it. Read the stories. Personal stories. How it steals the light inside them. How it makes them feel empty, broken. How they want to get past this. To each of them I suggest seeking therapy outside the web. Something in person. I refer them to support groups. Places they can be surrounded by others who understand. Places that can maybe help them try to heal.

  And boys, too. The amount of boys who have been molested and raped is something that is not talked about enough. I try to raise awareness. I refer them to the same kinds of groups, suggest the same things. And I make sure to tell each one of them that I am proud of them for coming forward, that it is brave. That it will inspire someone else one day to share their story, and maybe even inspire them to start trying to find a way to make themselves happy, even if it’s in small ways.

  This is how little ripples are made in the world. You try, damn it. You try to do something good from all the bad that’s happened to you. You fight. You try to help people. You try to help someone make it through to the other side.

  Maybe I don’t have enough experience in terms of years, or wisdom, but I know what it’s like to struggle with anxiety, depression, trauma, grief. I wish I didn’t, but I do. And if there’s any way some good can come from it, then that’s exactly what I’ll try to do.

  I used to sleep until noon or later on any day I didn’t have school or work. I always thought I just wasn’t a morning person. I was lucky if coffee woke me up after the first cup. Oftentimes it would take two to three cups just to start feeling the blood flowing in my body, just to feel that little ounce of energy that was enough to get me moving for the day. And even then, even with caffeine coursing through my body, I was still tired. Exhausted. All the time. For a long time, I hardly smiled. I didn’t stop to think about missing laughter until one day, I laughed, hard.

  I never stopped to realize my sleeping patterns were probably tied into my depression. But at the time, I didn’t realize I was depressed. It was years of this. Imagine being depressed for years and not even knowing it. I mean, on some level, I think I knew. Maybe I just didn’t care enough to try to get out of it. Maybe I just didn’t know how to get out of it. Where to start, what first step to take. That’s probably more realistic. But when the room becomes you, the way out becomes so far away it’s like another world is just outside the door, only you can’t reach it.

  So, you make friends with your demons. Familiarize yourself with their faces. The things that go bump in the night. At some point you start holding hands with them. At some point you are afraid of who you will be without them. They never truly leave you, even when you find your way out. You just a find a new way to live with them. Because trauma is a stage five clinger and you are the host. But eventually, you realize you need to live, too. The you that you might have been without it. The you that has lived despite it. And you realize there is glory in that. In the surviving through it all.

  Twenty-Two

  I sit down on my bed and open my phone to check both my accounts. Psychiatrists on the Gram has likes, follows, comments, DM requests. My personal account has nothing. I open my DM thread with Charlie. It’s 11:53pm on a Sunday and I think he’ll be awake. Maybe, if I’m lucky, he’ll want to answer. I post his video with the caption. I couldn’t post it immediately, this is a business account. He would have known something was weird about it if it went up right away. And I can’t be weird.

  You sound crazy, Love.

  I take steps, measures, to make sure nothing about this seems crazy. Because I’m not crazy. I plan the post at midnight. I set the pre-timer to go off at 11:55pm so I can prepare the post, the caption, the hashtags. I remind myself I can’t tag him in it, mention his name, nothing. I caption it with what he wrote to me, earlier. The poem he didn’t know was a poem. I hashtag it with a bunch of different things. #Hope. #Love. #Peace. #SuicideAwareness. #Trauma. #Grief. I have them saved. I copy/paste them on each post, to reach as many people who may be looking for posts relating to such things.

  My alarm goes off and once it hits midnight, I post it. I watch the likes and comments pour in a few minutes later. They need time to watch, to absorb. To feel the magic like I did. And some, I’m sure, will be watching this video o
n repeat tonight as they lie alone in their beds. I send it to Whitney and Rebecca, and my other patients, just in case they miss the post. At 12:17am I message Charlie.

  “We posted your video,” I say. “Thank you again for letting us share it.”

  Reset.

  I start the timer.

  Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds go by before my phone dings.

  “No problem,” he says.

  I see it.

  Seen.

  I close it. I can’t respond too quickly, be too eager. Plus, what can I really say to that? He doesn’t seem like he wants to talk very much. And if I pull too much, the entire conversation could unravel before it even really begins.

  I set my timer for twenty minutes. That’s how long I will wait before I answer him again. Before I am forced to ask him another question to try to get him out of his shell.

  Ding.

  But I don’t have to?

  I don’t have to! In a shocking turn of events, he messages me back.

  “You’re still saying we and us. Lol. Isn’t it just you?” he asks.

  Shit. I forgot I told him it was just me. I open up the message. If he’s feeling talkative, I can’t let this pass. “Haha, fine, it’s just me. You got me,” I say.

  Reset.

  My fingers are shaking as I hold my phone. I press the side power button to turn the screen black. Press it to turn it back on. I play this game with myself until I hear it.

  Ding.

  “I already got you I thought lol.”

  And little does he know just how true those words are. He does already have me, in so many more ways than he’s implying. “Oh you do,” I say. “Haha.”

  I realize my slip. “Did**,” I send. Oh my god.

  Seen.

  I wait for the typing and it doesn’t come. I need to ask him a question. It’s the golden rule in trying to start a conversation with someone and everyone knows it. They don’t have to answer if you don’t ask them a question.