Scar Girl

by Len Vlahos

  “Nothing,” I answered. “It’s just my period. Can we let it go?” But I was feeling too crappy and was too freaked out for Agnes to buy my excuse. In that moment I don’t think I could’ve convinced a three-year-old that Santa Claus was real.

  Agnes waited a beat, looking from me to Theresa and back again. Theresa was staring at the floor, which was a pretty obvious sign that something was wrong.

  “Wait, are you pregnant?” Agnes didn’t know how loud her voice was.

  Theresa and I both shushed her.

  “If Mom and Dad find out, they’re going to kill you!”

  “I know,” Theresa said, shushing her again, “which is why we need you to keep it down.”

  Agnes nodded and then looked at me. “But why are you bleeding if you’re pregnant?”

  I started crying.

  “C’mon,” Theresa said, taking charge. “We’re getting you to an emergency room. Now.”

  “But Mom and Dad can’t find out,” I blubbered.

  “Fine. We can go to Planned Parenthood. It’s cheaper, and they won’t call home.”

  They helped me up and got my clothes off. There was a lot of blood. Well, not all blood. I don’t really know what you’d call it. It was a brownish, reddish, stickyish fluid, and it smelled awful. It smelled like death. I thought I was going to throw up again.

  My two sisters—my two younger sisters, both still teenagers and both still in high school—helped clean me up. They loaded a fresh pair of panties with so many pads that I could barely walk. Agnes gave me a pair of her sweatpants and a loose-fitting shirt, and we left.

  HARBINGER JONES

  When I finally got up the next day, it was almost 11:00 a.m. I’d stayed up late the night before, leafing through this thick paperback guide to colleges that had been lying around my house since I’d been a sophomore in high school. My dad had given it to me in this big show of what he thought was moral support. Where my mom always surprised me with fun presents, like a new comic book or a package of blank cassette tapes, my dad would lie in wait with college guides and articles from the New England Journal of Medicine on the latest advances in plastic surgery, like that was supposed to make me feel better.

  But the more I looked at that guide, the more I liked the idea of college. I don’t know if college was exactly what I had in mind when I started thinking about a life change, but it made sense. Applying would make my parents happy, and like it was for so many other people, attending would be the path of least resistance.

  It was fun to read about all the different programs of study offered; fun to read the sections called “campus life” and imagine myself fitting in somehow, and fun to lose myself in the student population totals, the number of applicants versus the number accepted, and the outrageous tuition costs.

  I had made notes in the margins back when I was thinking of applying the first time. Leafing through the second time, after I’d been out of high school for six months, I saw what an amazing exercise in self-delusion a book like that can be. I had notes next to Yale, Brown, and Cornell. Until you start sending out applications, the possibilities are limitless and they are real. It’s kind of like Schrödinger’s cat. The college has neither accepted nor rejected you until you apply.

  Of course, the listings also showed what grades and SAT scores you needed to get in, so maybe the cat was more dead than alive. For the record, my grades sucked. Like, Hoover-vacuum-cleaner sucked. As for my SATs, well, let’s just say that both the reading and math scores started with a four. I couldn’t have even gotten into Transylvania University if I tried. And, yes, there really is a school called Transylvania University. It’s in Kentucky. You can look it up.

  CHEYENNE BELLE

  I was feeling so bad and so scared that I don’t really even remember how we got to the clinic. I know we took a cab, but I don’t remember the drive there at all.

  When I stepped onto the curb I was pulled back to reality because, of course, there were protesters. Just a handful, which I suppose isn’t bad for a Saturday morning, but it was enough. They were in our faces the second the cab pulled away.

  Some were women, some men, all of them yelling at us. They were like a disorganized pack of wild dogs.

  “You fucking whore,” one old bat screamed.

  “Don’t listen to her, child,” a middle-aged man said. “But don’t confound the sin of fornication with the sin of murder.”

  “Just ignore them,” Agnes whispered in my ear. She locked arms with me on one side, Theresa on the other.

  Just before we got to the last part of the walkway—I don’t think the protesters were legally allowed to go right up to the door—this Stepford wife jumped in front of me, holding what was supposed to be a fetus in a jar of red liquid.

  “Please,” she begged us. “Please don’t do this. Don’t do what I did.”

  I think she wanted us to believe she was holding her own aborted fetus. My adrenaline kicked in, because for a minute I forgot about the pain and forgot to be scared. I defaulted to my usual emotion when things weren’t going right: anger. Without really thinking, I wrestled my arm free from Agnes and I shoved the woman.

  I didn’t mean for her to fall, but she did. Everyone gasped, even me. Theresa tried to catch the jar as it floated up in the air, but she couldn’t. It landed hard on the walkway and shattered.

  The woman yelped like a coyote and, with lightning speed, gathered up her fetus. But not before I could see that it was a plastic fake. We just stepped around her and went inside.

  “You fucking bitches!” she screamed after us. My sisters had to stop me from turning around and kicking her.

  The waiting room was small. There were half a dozen chairs, a small pile of magazines on a coffee table, and pamphlets and posters everywhere about reproductive systems and reproductive rights. There were two other people there: a girl about my age reading a book called Crossing to Safety, and a guy in his thirties holding a clipboard. I figured he worked there.

  “Hi,” he said, coming up to us before we were all the way in the room.

  I was too out of it to answer, so Agnes took charge.

  “Hello,” she answered. “My sister needs to see a doctor right away.”

  “Oh,” he said as his face went flush. “I’m sorry, I don’t work for Planned Parenthood. You need to check in at the desk.” He nodded to the registration area, which was basically a wall of what I guessed was bulletproof glass with a small sliding window. An older and tired-looking woman sat behind it, watching the four of us.

  “So what,” Theresa snapped at the man, “are the fucking protestors coming inside now?”

  “What? No, no. I’m not a protestor.” The guy, who had jet-black hair and the bushiest eyebrows I’ve ever seen, was knocked way off his game. “I’m here working for Planned Parenthood, registering gir—women, I mean registering women, to vote.”

  Agnes, Theresa, and I looked at each other. My sisters burst out laughing. If I hadn’t felt like I was going to die, I might’ve laughed, too.

  “Yeah, Mister,” Theresa said. “I’m sure all the girls coming in here”—and she underlined girls—“are in the right frame of mind to perform their civic duty or whatever.”

  I was feeling worse by the second, so I touched Theresa’s arm. She looked at me and understood right away.

  She brushed past the guy, maybe a little rougher than she needed to, and escorted me to the desk.

  The room was too small for the guy to get far enough away from us, so he called out to the woman behind the glass that he was taking a break and left through the front door.

  “Don’t be too hard on him, girls,” the woman said, and she underlined the word, too. “He’s actually donating his time to help raise awareness about what we do here. As long as we have those lunatics out front, we need people like him in here. Now, does one of you have an appointment?”

  “No,” Agnes said. “My sister is—how pregnant are you?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know.
I think about four months.”

  “My sister is four months pregnant, and she’s bleeding a lot. And her stomach hurts a lot.”

  The woman, who had been calm, almost sleepy, sat up straight. She pushed a clipboard at Agnes through the glass window. “Fill this out for your sister. And you,” she said to me, “come with me.”

  “Can one of my sisters come, too?” I asked, my voice a squeak as another wave of pain hit me. Theresa, who still had her arm locked through mine, gripped tighter.

  HARBINGER JONES

  An eighteen-year-old kid applying to college shouldn’t be a big deal, but for me, it was.

  When the band was gearing up for our first tour, during my senior year of high school, I lied to my parents and told them I’d been accepted at the University of Scranton, that I would be attending in the fall. I hadn’t even applied. It was a pretty elaborate lie—I forged all the admission documents and pretended to mail my dad’s check to the school—and I rode it all the way to the end, until I got caught. My parents did not take it well. The idea of college now was, for me, like a career criminal deciding to go straight.

  When I was leafing through the guide, I thought for a little while about applying to music colleges, like Berklee in Boston or Julliard in New York. But I wasn’t that kind of musician. I didn’t read music, didn’t really want to read music, and didn’t have any interest in a career playing wicked guitar solos on television commercials for deodorants and cat litter.

  And because I didn’t have a backup plan, I didn’t have a clue as to what colleges to target. So I applied to the only school that made sense: the University of Scranton, my fake alma mater. Maybe this time I could get in for real. I still had a clean copy of their admissions package—once you’re on a school’s mailing list, they send you lots of the same stuff over and over again—so I took it out and went to work.

  The application was pretty straightforward, and it only took an hour to complete, except for the essay. I can’t tell you how many times I started and stopped writing that stupid thing.

  Each time my pencil hit the paper, the essay came out as really dry, boring crap about what a great student I’d be. I read and reread the instructions and kept getting hung up on the word count. I was supposed to tell them something interesting about me in two hundred and fifty words or less. Two hundred and fifty words!

  I tried to take a fresh eye to the instructions and shifted my focus. This was what I landed on:

  YOUR PERSONAL ESSAY WILL

  HELP US BECOME

  ACQUAINTED WITH YOU BEYOND YOUR COURSES, GRADES, AND TEST SCORES.

  They wanted to know who I really was.

  So who am I? I thought. I’m the guitar player in a thrashing, smashing, ass-kicking punk rock band, but I’m also a disfigured monster with all kinds of crazy social anxiety, and I’m an almost-twenty-year-old virgin who has kissed exactly one girl, and that kiss lasted for all of five seconds. But when I really thought about who I was, about what I could tell them to help them know me beyond my dismal grades and test scores, I kept coming back to the same thing.

  I, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, am a coward.

  CHEYENNE BELLE

  The doctor’s room was cold, not just the temperature, but the aura, too. Sometimes, a place can just give off waves of coldness, you know? I was told to take off my clothes, put on a paper-thin gown, and lie down on the examination table. I noticed that the cushion on the table was graying with age and cracking at the seams.

  “I’m still bleeding,” I said, embarrassed that I was going to make a mess. The woman went into a closet and pulled out what looked like a giant maxipad, or maybe a maxipad for a giant. Almost like what you would use to house-train a puppy.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re a gynecological office. Lots of our patients bleed.”

  I nodded and did what I was told.

  The woman waited for Agnes to finish filling out the forms and took the clipboard back. “The doctor will be right in.” And she left.

  “Are you doing okay?” Agnes asked while we waited for the doctor.

  I wasn’t doing okay. I was still bleeding; my gut felt like someone was trying to wring it dry, like a washcloth after a shower; and I was suddenly hit with the thought that I had no idea how we were going to pay for any of this.

  Agnes, who, like I said, is the most mature one of us, must’ve read my mind.

  “Don’t worry about the money,” she said. “I have a lot saved. You can pay me back.”

  “I can give you some, too,” Theresa said. I didn’t think Theresa had any money, and I didn’t think she really wanted to give it to me, but Agnes’s generosity had shamed her into making the offer.

  It’s not that Agnes shamed her on purpose. It’s that girls like Theresa and me just sort of start out from a place of feeling shame. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s the truth.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter. They had both offered, and it calmed me down, at least a little bit, and it made me love my sisters more than I ever had before.

  Then a new woman came in, this one wearing a white lab coat.

  “I’m Dr. McCartney,” she said. “You must be”—and she looked down at the clipboard—“Cheyenne.”

  I was surprised that the doctor was a woman. I’ve been so trained to think of doctors as men that it never occurred to me that this doctor would be anything else. It made me happy.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a nice name. So tell me what’s going on.” She was young, and she had dark brown hair that was pulled back in a ponytail and charcoal-colored bags under her eyes, almost like she’d got beaten up.

  “I’m pregnant, and I think something’s going wrong.” I told her as much detail as I could about the bleeding and the cramps.

  “Okay. Are you a patient of the clinic or do you have another OB/GYN?”

  “This is my first trip to a doctor.”

  “How long ago was your last period?” Concern etched itself into the corner of her mouth.

  “I don’t know, like three or four months ago.”

  Dr. McCartney froze and looked from me to Theresa.

  “Are you sure?”

  I knew enough to be embarrassed about not having come to the doctor sooner, so I just hung my head and nodded.

  The doctor, who was probably used to seeing dumb little girls like me, forced a smile.

  “Okay, then, let’s see what we’re dealing with.” She pulled a rolling stool up next to the examination table and grabbed a plastic tube of Vaseline. “This is going to be a bit cold.” She squirted a bunch on my stomach, and it was cold. It made me flinch, which made me hurt.

  With my shirt off, you could see the barest hint of the bump that was my baby trying to push its way out of my belly. The doctor took out this flat black paddle thing, which was hooked up to a machine with what looked like a telephone cord. Like one of those things they use to start your heart when it stops.

  Seeing that freaked me out. But the paddle wasn’t for hearts. It was for sonograms. Agnes, Theresa, and I watched the grainy black-and-white TV monitor as the doctor moved the paddle all around my stomach. The room was quiet, and my attention wandered from the monitor to the doctor’s face.

  Every muscle in her jaw and neck had pulled itself tight, and her forehead was scrunched. After one last go-round with the paddle, she bit her lower lip, pushed her stool back, and looked at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  The doctor put the paddle back in its holder and took my hands. She looked me straight in the eye.

  “I’m sorry, Cheyenne,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “There’s no heartbeat. You’re having a miscarriage.”

  One of my sisters gasped—I’m not sure which one—and at first, I didn’t know why. Dr. McCartney kept holding my hands and watching, waiting for me to catch up.

  I did.

  No heartbeat.

  My baby was dead.

  HARBINGER JONES

  I’m a s
ocially awkward, disfigured, guitar-playing coward. Try to tell that story in two hundred and fifty words or less. It can’t be done. I mean, it literally can’t be done. I know. I tried. At least twenty times I tried.

  I finally decided that I should just ignore the word count in the Scranton essay instructions and get everything I could think of down on paper. Then I could go back and edit later.

  I had this English teacher in high school who liked to say that “all good writing is rewriting.” I didn’t know what that meant at the time—if she hadn’t taken pity on me, I think I would have failed her class—but now I understood. The musical equivalent is “We’ll fix it in the mix.” When you record music, you try not to worry too much about equalization or effects when you’re laying down basic tracks. You just need to make sure the performances are good. Anything else can be corrected when you mix all the tracks down to the master. Fix it in the mix.

  I didn’t know where to start my story, so I started with the obvious: the day I got these scars, the day I was tied to a tree during the thunderstorm. At first it was hard to drag those memories back to the surface. I’d spent a lifetime trying to bury and forget them, like they were the bones of someone I’d murdered. But the more I wrote, the more I needed to write.

  I filled pages with details of the storm and the aftermath of being severely burned: the endless medical tests and procedures, how other kids treated me, all that time I spent with Dr. Kenny.

  By the time I got to the part of my narrative where I met Johnny, in middle school, the pencil was flying across the page. I remembered every detail like it was yesterday. I could still see the bully—Billy the Behemoth—who Johnny stood up to on my behalf. I could still see Johnny’s eyes staring Billy down.

  I finished writing that scene and put the pencil on my desk. Maybe, I thought, the story of my life is really the story of my friendship with Johnny. I never had any siblings, and Johnny was like an unofficial brother. And like all brothers, we loved each other as much as we resented each other.

  But did our relationship really define me? Was I so dependent on Johnny that my life didn’t have meaning without him?