Ballads of Suburbia

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  He led me to the kitchen. Dad would have freaked at the sight of it coated in flour, batter, and grease, but I thought it smelled good and felt warm, and it was filled with laughter like a kitchen should be. Liam and Maya sat beside each other at the table, giggling uncontrollably, obviously in the midst of a food fight. Liam had chocolate smudged on his face and Maya had powdered sugar in her hair.

  Christian chided, “Can’t leave you two alone for a minute. You’re worse than my little sister.”

  He set my plate down in the place across from Liam, but I stood there blinking at the three of them. “Did you guys, like, wake up and start drinking or something?” I glanced around for liquor, hoping they’d left some for me.

  Maya rolled her eyes. “Naw, silly. It’s too early for that. We’re having good old-fashioned sober fun.”

  “Cooking?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yeah.” She grinned. “I came downstairs and Christian had already started on the pancakes, so I joined in. We were both excited ’cause I live in a hotel and he lives in a bachelor pad, so we aren’t used to a stocked kitchen. I found chocolate chips to make the pancakes tastier and your mom’s aprons to make things more festive.” She gestured to Christian’s frills and Liam’s green apron, which proclaimed “Kiss the Cook.”

  “They even dug out Dad’s old hat, but when Christian wears it, he doesn’t burn everything.” Liam smirked, mentioning my father without a trace of bitterness for the first time in forever.

  Christian carried his own plate to the table and sat down across from Maya. I cocked my head in his direction. “You cook?”

  “My stepmother taught me a thing or two. And like Maya said, I live in a bachelor pad, so I have to fend for myself.”

  I studied Christian intently, ignoring the absurd apron and hat and trying to figure out who the hell he was. So many ingredients went into his personality. His usual cocky front that had sparked my early crush on him: the torn jeans, faded ironic T-shirts, and sheaf of messy red hair that hung in impish eyes. The defensive side that emerged when he felt like someone had betrayed his friends: the way he’d freaked out on Mary for insulting me and Maya. Then his softer side: he’d consoled my brother, a kid he hardly knew, during his worst moment; he regularly doted on his sister; and that morning, he’d transformed his little group of friends from broken homes into a family. Adrian had been mysterious, but Christian was complex and genuine. He was sensitive like me-the cocky front and defensive behavior, his way of protecting himself. Unlike with Adrian, I really understood where Christian was coming from.

  Christian also had a sense of humor. He flicked a warm, gooey chocolate chip at my nose and asked, “Why don’t you just sit down and try it?”

  He indicated my food, but when I said “Okay, I will,” I meant I’d disregard my ecstasy comedown-fueled worries and try him, a real relationship, and a new life that might actually contain the substance I needed.

  5.

  A WEEK AFTER HALLOWEEN, CHRISTIAN AND I were making out in his bedroom. He peeled off my cardigan right away. After ten more hot-and-heavy minutes, his hand roamed beneath the long-sleeved thermal I’d layered under my T-shirt. The idea of Christian seeing me in nothing but a bra was not nearly as intimidating as being forced to expose my left arm. I wanted to kiss, not discuss cutting.

  I wrestled Christian off of me and sat up, hands poised at the bottom of my shirts, trying to indicate, Okay, I’ll take off mine while you take off yours. I figured that while his shirt was over his face, I’d lean on my left arm to hide it. But Christian’s eyes were on me, probably thinking I meant to do some sexy striptease. So I took the shirts off as fast as I could and flung my arms around him, hoping he wouldn’t notice the scabs and scars.

  “Whoa.” Christian grabbed my left wrist and held my arm out between us. My cheeks burned in humiliation, so I turned away, but his soft voice compelled me to glance back. “Why do you hurt yourself?”

  I could actually see tears welling up in his eyes. This extremely sensitive reaction was not on the list of what I’d anticipated. I’d expected him to be uncomfortable and I’d be blasé and tell him to ignore it, which he eagerly would. Or maybe he’d be judgmental and then I’d leave because obviously we weren’t compatible. And, of course, deep down, I hoped he did it, too, and we’d share a mutual understanding like Adrian and I had.

  I glanced down at the little red lines in various stages of healing and stammered, “I don’t know. I just do it when things upset me. My family. School. Life.” I cradled my naked arm against my chest.

  Christian reached for it again, but stopped himself, fingers dangling in midair. “Why don’t you talk to someone about what upsets you instead?”

  My laugh sounded jagged and brittle as my scabs looked. “Who wants to listen to my petty problems? Everyone has them. I don’t want to be the one who whines and complains.”

  “Maybe everyone would have fewer problems if they talked about them.” Christian forced me to meet his eyes. His fingers stretched toward my wrist, gently caressing the unmarred skin near my hand. “Please call me before you cut. I’ll listen.”

  I’ll listen. Those two simple words spoken with sincerity summed up what I’d been seeking at Scoville Park. If I had someone who would listen and understand, I wouldn’t have to cut. I mean, I never had to before Stacey bailed on me, right?

  And for the next couple weeks, I didn’t cut. Then again, I didn’t have the urge.

  6.

  I KNEW THE FIRST THANKSGIVING WITHOUT DAD was going to be rough. Whenever we followed our usual traditions, his empty chair taunted us, conspicuous as a nasty lesion on someone’s face. And then Dad tried to invite Liam and me for Thanksgiving at his apartment.

  Before Thanksgiving, Dad called once a week, inviting us over. We always hung up on him, like Liam was about to one night in mid-November, but this time Dad managed to spit out a few sentences first.

  Liam responded, “Fine. Do that. See if we care!” He clicked the cordless phone off and threw it across my bedroom into a pile of laundry.

  “What was that about?” I asked as he slumped against my bed.

  “Dad said if we weren’t going to spend Thanksgiving with him, he was going to Wisconsin to be with his family.”

  Liam might have been summarizing. To be fair, Dad might have asked first, might have begged that we finally come to his place, but all I got was that succinct little sentence that ended with the word “family” and did not refer to us. And, meeting Liam’s glare, I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: Dad gave up.

  Yes, we’d pushed him as far away as we possibly could for the past six months, but he was our dad and he’d broken up our family. He was supposed to let us be pissed for as long as we needed to be and welcome us back with open arms when we were ready. Instead, he’d decided that if we were going to snub him, he’d snub back.

  When I told Mom, she decided, “Let’s do something fun for Thanksgiving. We’ll go for sushi. We never got to eat it enough because your dad hated it.”

  Since I’d rather do anything besides stare at Dad’s empty spot while choking down mashed potatoes, it seemed like a good idea. Perhaps it could’ve become a positive new tradition if Mom hadn’t gotten a little too enthusiastic and drank way too much sake.

  “This is fucked-up,” Liam grumbled as Mom used us like crutches to get to her bedroom. He helped her into bed, but when she started to whimper about how she hadn’t wanted things to be like this, crying about “till death do us part” like she had during her worst moments following Dad’s departure, Liam bailed, heading to Maya’s.

  I wished I could have gone with him. Reassuring the waiter that I was old enough to drive us home had been pathetic, but lying in Mom’s bed, listening to her intoxicated, completely inappropriate ramblings while she suffocated me against her chest like a teddy bear?

  Her worst revelation: “Your father isn’t capable of love, I’m afraid he doesn’t even really love you.”

  Thanks for
destroying what was left of my childhood there, Mom.

  She took it back right away, patting my head and slurring, “No. He loves you. Just not me. He wasn’t capable of loving me. Try to find a man capable of loving you, Kara, but don’t be shocked if ya fail. A good man is hard to find. Most’a them are liars. They convince ya to trust them, then boom! They leave. And what did your trust earn? Two kids and the bills for a house he remodeled in a way you didn’t even like.”

  I really tried to be patient with her. To Mom’s credit, until this moment, she’d managed to survive the divorce without getting completely annihilated in front of her kids. I doubted I would’ve been as strong. But I also wasn’t strong enough to handle her rant about love and trust.

  After ten minutes, I slunk out of her bone-crushing embrace, placed a trash can beside her bed in case she needed to barf, and left her mumbling, “Men lie and they leave.”

  I ran to my bedroom and flung myself on the bed, jamming my face into a pillow to smother the memories that Mom’s diatribe had brought to the surface. Like the day Dad taught me to ride a bike without training wheels. I’d fallen and scraped my knee; not horribly, but at six the sight of blood made me scream.

  “I’m hurt! I’m hurt!” I’d howled at Dad. “You let me go! You can’t let go until I’m ready!”

  “Shh, Kara,” he’d soothed while carefully bandaging my knee. After he’d fixed me up, he urged me to try again.

  “You can’t let go before I’m ready,” I insisted. “And you have to promise that I won’t get hurt.”

  He’d affectionately stroked my hair, fingers gently detangling it. “I promise not to let go before you say you’re ready. I can’t promise that you won’t get hurt, but if that happens I’ll be right here to make it all better.”

  I pounded my fists against my mattress and screeched into the pillow, “I’m hurt! I’m hurt and you’re not here, fucker!” I sobbed so hard I started to hyperventilate. Rolling over on my back so I could breathe, I whimpered, “Make it stop hurting.” I repeated those words over and over until I had the strength to sit up and strip off my sweater. I had to deal with the pain by myself and there was only one way I knew how.

  Just glimpsing my arm eased the pressure in my chest and slowed my tears. It was mostly healed, the freshest cut three weeks old.

  I pictured the gentle look in Christian’s hazel eyes when he’d said “I’ll listen.” But his eyes blurred into my father’s. They were the same color, after all, and Dad had looked at me that way, too, and said similar things.

  The words Mom had been muttering as I snuck out of her room echoed in my ears: “Men lie and they leave.” I saw a slideshow of moments of betrayal as I fumbled in my nightstand drawer for my knife. Adrian kissing me, then kissing Viv. Dad trying to tell me he loved me with the keys to his U-Haul truck in hand.

  Christian will cheat or break promises, too, I thought. Before I could visualize his lips locking with someone else’s, I slashed blindly at my forearm.

  Once.

  Twice.

  I sighed deeply.

  Numbness.

  Relief.

  Then I looked down at the large gashes flanking the blue vein that ran from wrist to elbow. I’d never cut vertically before. That was suicidal and my cutting had never been about dying. Was it now? Should it be?

  I touched the slash on the left. It had split some of my newest scars in two. I liked the fresh pink scars better than the white ones. The white ones reminded me how long I’d been cutting. The pink ones were reminiscent of unmarred newborn babies and made me think I had a chance to be innocent, to heal.

  I almost had, but here I was bleeding again.

  As the blood oozed between my fingertips, soundless sobs shook my body. My arm would never heal. The pain would never stop. Everyone would always lie to me and leave. If that was life, why live it? I placed the tip of the blade to the center of my wrist, on the spot where all the veins that branched out into my hand came together and met the artery that traveled up my arm.

  The phone rang, startling me so badly that I dropped the knife. I sat frozen through three rings, trying to decide if I should answer or kill myself.

  Finally, I picked up, whispering hello. Christian’s voice rushed into my ears. Normal, friendly words reminding me that someone out there cared. “Hey, what’s up? Happy Thanksgiving! Done with sushi? How was it?”

  I stared at my wrist and decided not to tell him I’d cut because he’d probably be really disappointed in me. I pulled a towel over my arm, blotting the blood and hiding the wounds because I was really disappointed in me. “Well, according to my drunk mother, my dad doesn’t love me. So much for a new family tradition.”

  “That sounds pretty bad. At least my dad doesn’t try to cover up the fact that Thanksgiving is just a day he gets off from work to drink with his buddies.”

  “You didn’t even have dinner?” I asked, horrified.

  “I ate pizza. Dad’ll be back in a few hours, totally wasted, or maybe he’ll end up at some chick’s house. Holidays make people so lonely.”

  I glanced around my empty bedroom, the rock stars on my posters the only thing keeping me company. “I’m lonely.”

  “Wanna come over?”

  So I went over.

  And I lost my virginity.

  I hadn’t planned for it to be that way. I mean, virginity-losing is a pretty memorable thing and I didn’t particularly want to remember it every year when I sat down with the family to celebrate genocide over turkey and mashed potatoes. But, as has been made obvious by numerous TV shows and coming-of-age movies, plotting out your own deflowering rarely works. It tends to happen spontaneously when the circumstances present themselves.

  Christian and I had come to the same place Adrian and I had been at a few months before. Sex was the next logical step in the path we were on.

  Adrian was the main reason why losing my virginity wasn’t a big deal to me. I’d mentally prepared for it to happen with him, and then it hadn’t. By the time it happened with Christian it was-no pun intended-anticlimactic. Not to say that Christian was horrible or anything, but I think I had the standard teenage girl experience: a little bit of pain, a lot of wondering if this was how it was supposed to feel, and then it ended in approximately ten minutes.

  The awkward exchange of “Do you want to?” and “Is this okay?” before sex and the even more humiliating finding of the condom is a blur in my mind. The actual physical feelings would be forgotten after more sexual experiences, and the emotions weren’t nearly as strong as the ones about my family that I was trying to escape.

  Certain things were memorable. Images flash through my mind, censoring out the sex like a PG-13 movie.

  He had Star Wars sheets, super old ones from his childhood. They were so worn in some spots that they’d become translucent, like when greasy French fries soak through a white paper bag. But they were also extremely soft.

  And of course I noticed the music. Mark Arm from Mudhoney crooned, “Sweet young thing ain’t sweet no more” over fuzzed-out guitars. Kind of fitting, though it wasn’t like sex suddenly made me more grown-up than I was forced to be earlier that day when I lugged my drunk mother out of the sushi place.

  On a more romantic note, I’ll never forget how Christian and I both kept opening our eyes while we kissed. We did it at the same time, so our gazes met and then we laughed in this cute, embarrassed way. I got uncharacteristically caught up in the sweetness of it all, just wanting to cling to him. I became aware of the way parts of our bodies fit together like puzzle pieces. He was the right height so that my head fit snuggly beneath his chin; the right weight so that he didn’t crush me, but his hip bones didn’t jut out and bruise mine. Fingers interlocked. Toes curled and touched. Hair fanned out on the pillow, his bright red, mine pale blue, together purple. Even the satisfied sigh he emitted as he rolled off of me at the end almost matched my own.

  But then, as my heart rate slowed, I started to feel insecure. I realized that
I was naked, sweaty, and it couldn’t possibly be pretty. Flat on my back, my arms and legs at crooked angles, I resembled a chalk outline of a dead body on the mattress. Christian’s arm was splayed across my stomach, weighing me down. I snuck a peek to my right and saw his eyes were closed. At least he wasn’t studying me, but then I wondered what would happen next. Would he fall asleep like guys always did on TV?

  I wished he had, because when he opened his eyes, his face suddenly darkened. He lifted his hand from its sweaty place on my belly and pointed accusatorily at my left arm. “What the hell did you do?”

  I’d forgotten all about the cuts and apparently he hadn’t noticed them in the heat of the moment. I flipped my arm over, pressing my palm into the mattress. The blood pulsed beneath my new wounds, the confrontation triggering my urge to cut again.

  “I had a bad day, you know that.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to do that anymore,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Do we have to talk about it? Adrian just ignored it, why can’t you?” I sat up, wrapped myself in a sheet, and scooted toward the foot of the bed.

  Christian viciously dug his fingers into my shoulder, forcing me to face him. “I’m not Adrian,” he growled.

  I shrugged him off and rose to sort out my clothes. I shimmied into my underwear with my back to Christian. “I know you’re not. But in this case I wish you were a little bit more like him.”

  Christian punched the mattress and I spun around, startled. He’d put his boxers and T-shirt on and sat at the head of the bed, glowering at me. “Why can’t you just forget that asshole and be with someone who actually cares about you? I don’t know how he could just fuck you and ignore that you were obviously in pain!” He gestured at my arm, which I’d hidden beneath my cardigan. I was fully dressed and ready to walk out on him. But then…“I’m falling in love with you so I can’t just pretend those cuts aren’t there.”

  “You’re what?”