The Disturbed Girl's Dictionary

by Nonieqa Ramos

  George walks up to another dude. He has forgotten to slouch. George says, “I want two quarters.” He gets a whole dollar. He walks back and hands the coins to me.

  My eyes stare at it. My hands throw the coins on the floor. Alma’s blood is all over my hands.

  George picks them up and pounds them into my hand. Her blood is on his hands too now. I nod. I can’t speak. He pulls my sweatshirt off. It’s all soaked at the pits but I don’t remember sweating. The washer starts. The water and soap mixes. I stare at the machine for thirty minutes. I think.

  When you wash something, it changes. After enough washes, the color fades. Maybe that stain of barbecue didn’t come out the way you wanted—but it fades. The size may change. That’s the way most thoughts are supposed to be. Faded. Forgotten.

  That is not how my thoughts work. They do not shrink or fade.

  I don’t just remember things. I’m there. I smell what I smelled the way I smelled it. I taste things the way I tasted them. I hear what I heard the way I heard it. Not the way you heard it, motherfoe. Not the way you think you said it. Not the way you meant it. I feel what I felt.

  The spin cycle hypnotizes me. I’m going back. I’m about seven or eight and bitchin about my mom . . .

  Daddy says, “You’ll never believe this, Macy, but your mom would take bafs with you because she knew you was scared of the water. She would get you to lie on her chest and wash your hair. Once you fell asleep in the tub and she stayed in there for an hour because she didn’t want to wake you up.”

  But I know something Daddy don’t know. I woke up. I was underwater. My mother was sleeping, her hair floating like seaweed. Her body jerked. She choked and gasped and pulled us both out the water.

  I swear I remember this too. “Macy (gasp, cough), don’t tell your dad.”

  It wouldn’t be the last time I heard that. Wouldn’t be the last time when my mother, my dad, and me all chose what we wanted to remember about the past.

  The suds and Alma’s blood mix. George and I watch the patterns of soap. A melt of circles, spirals, flowers . . .

  I wonder how many memories I have of our friendship where I thought Alma and I was hearing something the same way, smelling something the same way, tasting something the same way, feeling something together, when . . . when that wasn’t it at all.

  Watching Alma’s blood mix with soap and disappear, I wonder if the way she and I remembered things was totally different. Wonder if every memory she has of me, or don’t have, erases me completely.

  I watch Alma’s blood rinse, spin, disappear. After it’s dry, George and I conversate. George says he’ll meet me by the Dollar General in a hour. He wants to say good-bye to his mom before we make a break for it. I run home, leaving rivers of water and blood behind me.

  My eyes are open but they are blind. Always were. Light don’t help you see shit. It blinds you. If Alma and me wasn’t seeing eye to eye, nobody ever would.

  When I remember, I feel exactly how I felt. I see what I saw the way I saw it. You say you feel me, but you can’t. All I feel is weightless. Empty. I run but I know I’m running in place. Trapped back in that room of mirrors forever.

  Snow

  Noun. Let it.

  Soon as I open the front door, my mother slams her bedroom door shut. She and her latest guest are laughing, horsing around on the bed. I fling the door open.

  Mr. Guest rolls off the bed. “What the fuck?!”

  I carve the air with the machete.

  My mother: “Oh my God, Macy! What the fuck are you doing? Is that blood on your face? On the . . . ?” My mom trips over her guest. “Macy!?”

  I walk toward the bed. “Macy? Who the hell is that? Cause I’m no one. Nothing.”

  I hear: “Fuck this!” Mr. Guest barrels out the house buck necked. My mom runs out after him in a sheet, screaming. I hack at her bed until I hear the clang of steel springs. Cotton fills the air like snowflakes.

  The police come. I watch myself get Tased in the mirror.

  I’m in Canada. I fall onto snow. Make a snow angel.

  To Be or Not to Be Me

  Quote. That is the question.

  I stare at myself in the blank TV screen. A stranger stares back. I can’t have piercings because I might “engage in self-harm.” I’ve looped strands of thread through the holes in my ears and my nose. I look like I am unraveling. My hair is growing back in patches. My furry legs make me think of George’s coat. Can’t use a razor here unless a nurse supervises you. I’d rather become George’s coat. A nurse eyeballs me when I start to scratch my scalp. He takes a note and waits. Says he clips my nails or it’s the Quiet Room.

  Jesus is on the carpet playing Scrabble with a bipolar heroin addict named Suzy. The difference between here and home? All these crazy motherfoes is wearing fuzzy slippers. You can’t have laces here. Could hang yourself. Or you could run away on a smoke break. I choose being barefoot. Another difference between here and home? These motherfoes smell better.

  In some ways this is the sanest place I ever been. The couch I’m sitting on is a couch. The bed is a bed. But daylight never ends. At night the flashlights shine right in your face every fifteen minutes. The White Coats are here to re-suss-itate, revive, force-feed you back your life. I choke. Can’t keep none of it down.

  Vagina

  Noun.

  I’m in a mental institution. We are watching the news. Other people are not in a mental institution. They want long eyelashes. They want pudding. They want war. They want peace. We see clips of Nigeria and something about the election there.

  I turn the volume up. “I remember the kidnapped girls from Nigeria. Where they at?” But nobody’s talking about those girls from Nigeria.

  “Those girls are not being raped and tortured,” I tell Jesus, man who misspells damnation on the Scrabble board. “Maybe they tucked their legs into their vaginas. Folded themselves up like origami. Back into their own wombs until it’s safe to be reborned.”

  Jesus chucks letters of D-A-M-N-A-S-H-U-N at me.

  I kick over the board. “Jesus says I came out his rib. I say he came out my vagina.”

  Jesus stands up. “And he made a scourge of cords and drove them all out of the temple!”

  I grab my puss and sing, “My Cuntry Tis of Thee!”

  Jesus is escorted to a Quiet Room. Doc ups my dosage of pills.

  I’m in a mental institution. We are watching some celebrity. She needs to eat so she can get fat so we can watch her get skinny. She wears different outfits. In all of them you can see her vagina. I was wrong. Vaginas can talk. We watch her vagina go to restaurants. It goes on vacation. We think about whether it is pregnant. Everyone knows where her vagina is all the time, except when she shits. Even then, people have a fairly good idea.

  “Where are the girls?” I ask and ask. “Somewhere there are 200 missing vaginas.” But no one here can tell me where the 200 missing vaginas are. The doctor gives me what is called a cocktail.

  Visitors

  Noun.

  I’m in a mental institution. I’m sitting on my bed. My armpits are spiky. My transformation into George’s coat continues. The holes in my eyebrow and lips are closing. Knock. Knock. I have visitors.

  Black and purple bruises wrap around Velvet’s neck. She is wearing her fur coat.

  I ask, “Is it your turn?”

  Knock. Knock. Alma holds her hair, dripping with blood. She lashes her hair at the wall, at the bed, at me. Droplets spray in the air and rain down. It is raining blood. Alma kneels down and stares at her reflection in a puddle. Screams. Melts. Evaporates into a crimson cloud that hovers over me. Drips. Storms.

  Shoes. A nurse trip-traps into my bedroom. Hands me a folded piece of paper. On it are names that she wrote down. Lots of names. Hundreds of names. Deborah, Awa, Hauwa, Asabe, Lugwa, Kauna, Lydia, Hannatu, Filo, Hijara, Rejoice, Nguba . . . I read and reread them over and over. By the time the nurse comes back in, I have half of em memorized.

  Nurse says, “Yo
u have a visitor.” Blood sprays on the back of her stockings as she wades out. The smell of roses parts the blood as my visitor walks in. The rain stops.

  Miss Black pulls up a chair and sits beside me. I don’t say anything. She don’t say anything. She cracks open a book. The turning of pages is the last thing I hear. When I wake up, I’m tucked under the covers like a little kid. I pull off the covers and plant my foot down beside a grocery bag. In it is muffins. Records. Miles Davis. John Coltrane. The rain starts up again.

  I stuff the bag under my bed and go to the TV room. The nurse walks in. “You’re popular today. You have another visitor.”

  It’s my mother.

  “I forgive you,” she says, plunking on the couch. I freaked her shit out, but she gets it. She once tried LSD and did some crazy shit. “What were you on, girl?”

  I open my mouth like I’m about to sing, then shut it.

  The Purple People Eater Lady the staff insists is called Florence flips from the food channel to the Kardashians eating cupcakes. I see myself on the screen eating from out the couch cushions, chiseling the fridge, chewing on a McDonald’s French fry box. The crumbs, crusts, runaway Skittles, the accidental button, the cardboard still sit in my stomach. I’ll dissolve and they’ll be all that’s left.

  “Whatchu been eating? You lookin like a skeleton.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Your shrink says if you don’t start eating more they gonna make you.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “That’s my girl.” She reaches into her handbag. “Brought you these.” Doritos. A bottle of Big Red.

  “Thanks.”

  She opens the bag for me, lays it on my lap.

  A nurse walks in. “Dinnertime, friends. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Check you out. Getting served. I saw the menu. Salad, meatloaf, potatoes, bread. Dessert. Ain’t you fancy?”

  I hold up a Dorito. Throw it back in the bag. Turn the bag over and read the ingredients like Alma would: maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate . . .

  “Saw your room. Do they lay little chocolates on your pillow too? Can me and Fred get a room?” Fake laughter. “By the way, where’d you get your hands on—”

  Fred? Fred, sodium caseinate, disodium phosphate . . . “Poison.”

  My mother scooches to the end of the couch. “What?”

  “POISON.”

  I launch the Doritos at the television. Purple People Eater stomps them to crumbs.

  An alarm goes off. My mother is escorted out. I’m surrounded by White Coats. Purple People Eater and I lead a parade down the hall to the Quiet Room. When I wake up, I’m led to the Nurse’s Station.

  I hold out my medicine cup. “What’s this green one? And this other white one?”

  “Honey, here’s your water. The doctor decided to adjust your cocktail.”

  “TOO MUCH COCK!” I shout, hurling the cup against the wall. “That is the problem!”

  I am back in the Quiet Room.

  Vanishing

  Adjective. I am the magician.

  I grind my teeth to salt. They wrap me in the cocoon. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. The nurse brings out the snake. It bites. I sleep. Wake up in my house. Jump through a window. Walk through the television screen. I walk past that newswoman reporting on the dead foster girls, only this time I see them do the dead man’s float—past the Nigerian mothers protesting about their forgotten girls, the ghosts of their girls trailing behind them. Missing white girls and brown girls stepping out of posters on telephone poles, falling into step, making a timeline. I just stand there, a fool, angry at everybody but protesting nothing.

  How long have I been in the Fun House? Thinking I’m looking out the window, but all this time all I was looking at was mirrors of myself. Only now I’m realizing my world was so small. Fuck, my world is a snow globe.

  I’m out the Quiet Room. I’m the magician now. I make my pills disappear in my mouth. Reappear in the trash.

  My mother comes to visit me. She takes one look at me and knows. She whispers, “How long?”

  I keep my eyes glued to the TV. “How long what?”

  “Don’t even play.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Where are the pills?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “What difference does it make if you don’t want them?”

  A White Coat starts circling. Too much whispering.

  Me all loud: “Ain’t none of your business.”

  My mother on the downlow: “It’s their business.”

  I nod and sit back. “Tomorrow.”

  We have a deal. I give my mother the pills and she don’t tell the nurses I been skipping. This goes on for a couple of weeks.

  At the top of the third, I’m back at the couch waiting for my mother. My mother don’t come.

  Where she at?

  Where is Alma?

  I sent EMS to Alma’s door. I assume they have her. That she’s checked out the hospital, living—in foster care? Where is she now? Where is everybody?

  I stand up. “I have to call George!” George and I got to figure this shit out. If we don’t take care of her, no one will.

  “Phone. I want a phone!”

  A nurse: “You’ll earn phone privileges in due time. We can talk to your doctor—”

  “NOW!”

  Back to the Quiet Room, where I fall asleep sending telepathic messages to George.

  White Coats

  Noun. They’re coming to take me a-w-a-y.

  It is visiting day. My mom does not come again. Instead Nokia comes. I can tell from her pants and shoes and badge that she is CPS.

  I snatch a peek at her clipboard before she flips it over. “Where is my mother?”

  She plants herself on the couch beside me. I move and sit in a armchair.

  Nokia: “Can we introduce ourselves first?”

  Me: “I’m crazy. Is you crazy too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t you know? They’ll never let you go.”

  Nokia clears her throat. “Well. It’s . . .” She flips through her clipboard. “It’s Macy, right?”

  I say, “Your mother named you after a phone, right? My mother named me after a department store. Could’ve been worse. I had a friend named Velvet. Speaking of my mother: Where that bitch at?”

  Nokia: “You are a character. I have been looking forward to meeting you. Let’s watch the language, Macy, okay? I’m not your enemy.”

  Me: “Because you’re not my enemy don’t mean you’re my friend.”

  Nokia: “Maybe we can become friends.”

  Me: “Okay, friend, where is my mother at?”

  Nokia: “She’s been arrested, Macy. That’s why I’m here.”

  Me: “Arrested? For what? Those guys are her boyfriends,” I say without thinking. Oops.

  Nokia takes out her laptop and beings to type. “I see. Well, that isn’t why. She’s been dealing.”

  I speak carefully but I feel like all my private thoughts are on a teleprompter. “Am I going to be arrested?”

  “No. We know she took your pills but she’s been into other things too. That’s why—” Nokia gets a ring on her cell and excuses herself. I guess she knows I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. She’s gone a long time. Long enough for me to sing along with Leonard Cohen. But two renditions of “Waiting for a Miracle” later she don’t come back into the room. I start to wonder if she was ever here.

  Next thing I know my doctor wants to talk to me. I know something is up because there are two White Coats tailing us as me and the doctor head to her office. I fucking hate being predictable.

  The doctor closes the door. She folds her hands. She leans in close. She sighs. The words about my mother being in the hospital. The words that keep flashing in my head: Daddy got your letter. Daddy got your letter.

  Dear Daddy,

  I love her. I don’t know why those are the first three words I want to tell you. It makes no sense that I’m telling you and not her. I m
ean we fight. But this letter isn’t about that. Okay, it started that way. Revenge. Keeping that promise I made to you, to tell you if anything was going on behind your back—if she was cheating on you. As if you didn’t know already. But the second my pen stabbed the paper I knew this letter was about something else.

  You went behind bars but I feel like we’re all in prison. Zane’s prison is foster care. Mine is my brain. Mom’s is—her body. I can’t picture Mom old.

  Last time we talked you said you wanted things like they was before. But the more I think about it I don’t want anything to be like it was. I want everything to be new. When you get out you’re supposed to start a new life. Is something new possible? Are we possible?

  I love you. Macy

  “Can I go now?” I ask the doctor. The doctor says I can.

  I open the door. The workers waiting outside jump up. “Sorry,” I say. “No freak show today.”

  Words

  Noun. Everything and nothing.

  I ain’t spoken in months now. My words are trapped in the same black hole with Alma’s NO. The only ones that get out escape to blank paper. The only place they are safe. The only place everyone is safe from them.

  Why

  Noun. Reasons 1 and 2.

  Why do I hate? Because it’s so much easier than love. Because hate is reality. Love is a fantasy.

  Why do I write? Let me break it down. Teacher Man taught us about something called haves and have-nots.

  I have not a bed

  I have not a room

  Got nowhere to go

  nothing to do

  I have not a choice

  I have not a door

  I have not a lock

  I have not a place in this world

  I can’t make it stop

  All I have is this blank paper

  and these lines

  and

  they are

  MINE MINE MINE

  Wilma