Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  “Great, yeah,” I say, and instantly feel bad. The packet from Mother’s assistant has been sitting unopened on the kitchen counter for the last week, getting Jackson Pollocked with oil stains. College puts me in a blind panic. I barely know who I am half the time. How am I supposed to go somewhere else for four years to become more of that? But somehow, tell Mother I’m planning to take a gap year has never made it to the top of my to-do list. “You know what would be a great perfume name?” I blurt. “Defenestrate.”

  “I’m glad to hear you’re on track,” she says. “I put in a word with Tony about a letter of recommendation; you should touch base with him on Thursday. Have you done anything about your extracurriculars? They’re lacking. I set up a meeting for you at Loblolly.”

  “The strip club?” I ask.

  “Hilarious,” she says brusquely. “It’s an art gallery. It’s new, and the owner is hungry. She’s expecting you tomorrow.”

  My stomach sinks.

  “Can we please not again?” I ask. “Not that I don’t love getting patted patronizingly on the head and told to come back when I’m old enough to vote, really, it’s just that I’m, you know, super busy getting ready for senior year—”

  “Morgan Adina Stone,” Mother interrupts. (And reader, I cannot tell a lie: when she trots out the middle name, half of my brain automatically shuts off, like I’ve been programmed.) (I swear, I’m not a robot.) (Which is . . . oh crap, exactly a robot would say.) (Let’s just check back in with Mother’s speech, shall we?) “I locked in my first commercial spot when I was six years old. Six. When I was eighteen, I launched my first headliner video. Do you think the first producers I approached took me seriously?”

  She pauses.

  I say, “Of course they—”

  “Of course they did. Because I made them. It’s all about presentation, Morgan. It’s about confidence.”

  I sigh. The sound disappears into the crisp silence of overseas airwaves. I picture Mother in my mind’s eye: headset looped through a perfect ponytail, abs oiled and gleaming as she power-stalks down the halls of the luxury gym where she’s filming her latest fitness video—something with a vaguely torture-porn title, like The Hard Core or Rip/Tuck.

  Here’s a punchline for a girl with a deformed body: your mother is a celebrity fitness guru!

  Ha! Ha! Ha!

  By all accounts, she’s a beautiful and terrifying woman. She jet-sets around the world, terrifying the rich and famous. She’s made two different James Bonds weep. They optioned her for The Biggest Loser before going with Jillian Michaels. Apparently, Jillian screen-tested sweeter.

  Mother doesn’t believe in failure. Since I was born, both of our lives have been bent around my broken body. Its persistent, relentless inability to conform to the conventional beauty standards she’s spent her life selling to cable networks rubs at her like a splinter. Sometimes I wonder if all her shoots and boot camps—weeks spent in LA and New York and Atlanta, Dubai and Tel Aviv—are less about building her enormous personal brand and more about getting away from me.

  A white guy pulls up in the lane beside me blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd, the bed of his truck crammed with dorm furniture. He gives me a what up girl nod, and I snap my eyes forward.

  “You know what would be a great perfume?” I say to Mother. “Freebird.”

  “Interesting angle. I’ll check the licensing,” Mother says. “What’s that noise? Where are you, a bar?”

  “A bar, Mother? Really?” Beside me, Sweet Home Alabama revs his engine and guns it down Wade Avenue, TruckNutz dangling merrily in the breeze. I say, unnecessarily, “It’s two in the afternoon, and I hate people.”

  “You’re still doing that?” she asks with a sigh.

  “Misanthropy isn’t a phase. It’s a way of life.”

  “Then learn to fake it,” she says. “Particularly tomorrow morning. At Loblolly. Where you’re going to convince a woman named Karen that, despite your questionable taste in shoes, you’re a rare genius, and it’s in her best interest to let you display some art.”

  “I’m not ready for a gallery show.”

  “That,” she says, “is exactly what you won’t say to Karen at Loblolly, unless you’re ready to come home.”

  I grit my teeth and brake for a yellow light.

  “What about an internship? When Tavi Gevinson was your age, she was in Forbes. I can make some calls.”

  “Please just let me get through senior year.”

  “I’m not going to let you waste your life, Morgan.”

  “I’m not wasting it,” I say. “I’m just figuring things out.”

  “You’re bagging groceries.”

  “While I’m figuring things out.”

  “I just don’t want you to believe you’re a failure.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  The phone is silent for a moment.

  “I’m getting you a life coach. What’s your schedule look like?”

  “Full of doctors.”

  There’s a staticky burst behind her: a faint, cringing voice asking for a signature.

  “Tomorrow,” my mother says. “Loblolly, off Lake Wheeler. A dusting of gold-toned bronzer will make you look like you go outdoors occasionally. So that’s a no on Lambence?”

  “Mother—” I begin, and I’m not sure if the next words will be please let me handle my life on my own or you know I don’t own bronzer, but there’s a sharp click, and my mother and her high-powered world drain from my ear.

  I know deep down that Mother pushes me because she loves me. But I also worry that she loves me for all the wrong reasons. Guilt, mostly: my dad left when I was four. It’s the one thing Caro and I don’t talk about. We discuss: poop, boys, French literature, lunch, whose turn it is to buy dish soap, solving world hunger, if it’s worse to die alone or in a loveless marriage, acne and art. But we don’t talk about my dad. That is the broken stair in our conversations, the one we step around so deftly and silently now that it has become a habit. Brokenness is a taboo subject to people from happy families.

  Mother says it isn’t my fault that he left. Half of me knows she’s lying, and half of me doesn’t care. I remember only two things from that time. One is a secret, and the other is this: waking up from my first failed surgery to my parents arguing with a doctor at the foot of my bed. My father glanced up at me, and the expression on his face was panic, sheer and blinding: like when you glance into a puddle just as it catches the sun, and your whole vision sears white.

  A nurse whisked the teddy-bear-print curtain closed. And when he opened it again, my father was gone for good. My mother loved me twice as fiercely to make up for it, but her weeping crept through my bedroom wall some gray nights, saturating the life we’d propped up together.

  I’ve collected scraps from Mother over the years: “He was an idiot,” she told me when I was too old for a simple “he’s gone away.” On my fourteenth birthday, staring into the ripening dusk after a drink-sodden afternoon, all merlot lips and lidded eyes: “I used to think about telling you he was dead.” And finally, simply: “He was afraid, Morgan.” Afraid of raising a kid with a hole in her core, like it would grow and grow and swallow our family whole.

  I try not to think about it. What can you do with a man who won’t love you because you’re a broken thing? Try to be less broken?

  3

  I go to the Simple Earth Co-op, where I spend my shift putting price stickers on organic deodorant made from crystals and trying to block Mother’s waste your life voice from my mind, then home to eat a lonely dinner. The apartment is the kind of empty you can feel before you even unlock the door. I pad around the hideous rescued-from-the-dumpster couch in the living room, heaped with art supplies and books, a forgotten sun hat. I won’t look at the clock to see when Caro’s coming home, I tell myself, promptly looking at the clock.

  Caro and I got th
e apartment together last spring. Her mom’s job got transferred, and it looked for a hot minute like Caro would have to spend her senior year in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Texas. Mother offered to put her up in our guest house, but I begged to be allowed to move out—her enormous, freezing house a temple to The Body, all mirrors and black-and-white photos of women with immaculate abs doing yoga on mountaintops, always empty except for me and a series of terrified maids. She said, “You’re teenagers,” and I said, “You always say young independence gave you grit,” and she said, “That’s different,” and I said, “You’re never home anyway,” and she said, all steel, all Lean Into Your Fire and Feel the Burn Alanna Stone™, “I’m building us a life; your medical procedures don’t fund themselves,” and I stared her in the face and said, “Well, maybe we should take a break from them, then.”

  The next day her assistant sent me a cosigned lease for the apartment we’d picked, in a crumbling building on the verge of foreclosure at the edge of the Meredith College campus.

  When Caro and I moved in, it felt like the start of everything we’d ever wanted: a canvas where we could paint our own kind of life. It’s low-ceilinged and smells perennially like mold, and there’s an almost-definitely drug dealer named George who’s always hanging around in the back stairwell, and Mother never fails to make clear to me that my life here hangs by a thread—if I slip below a 4.0, if I skip the dentist, if I don’t apply to every Ivy—I’m out. But with our side jobs we can mostly scrape out rent, and after years of Caro sharing a too-small bedroom with too many siblings, and of me floating like an echo across Mother’s silent floors, we made our own kind of home. My art on the walls, a yarn bombing in the stairwell, dishes in the sink caked with the remnants of weird recipes Caro finds on the Internet. Lively and busy and ours.

  Most days, anyway.

  My Facebook and Instagram feeds are flooded with photos of the beach trip: groups of girls in string bikinis pretending to kiss, the bright slices of people’s smiles in the surf, Claire Chong finishing a huge sandcastle just as Jerome and Patrick come Godzilla-ing through it. Someone named Aurelis has tagged Caro in a picture with Boring Todd. They’re standing in the soft line where the water meets the sand, talking quietly to each other and holding hands. There’s a flush of real happiness on her cheeks.

  I know everyone feels like a misfit in high school. But for one magic moment, everyone in these pictures looks completely, perfectly like they belong, and I feel like more of an outsider than ever.

  My phone dings with a notification that Emmeline Strauss is live now: Life’s a beach!!

  I stare at it for a moment. Then I delete Facebook from my phone. And Instagram. And Snapchat. And WhatsApp. And my web browser. When the phone lies dark and still on the bed, I even open my laptop and turn off the Wi-Fi. Fuck the Internet. If all it’s going to do is remind me I’m alone, I seriously don’t need it in my life.

  I pull out my sketch pad, the big one that takes up my whole lap. What Mother doesn’t know is that I have been working on a project. A secret one that I’m not ready to show anyone yet. I call it Erasures: a series of careful charcoal drawings of people I see in the waiting rooms of my radiologist’s and gynecologist’s and other doctors’ offices, each with something missing. There’s a runner without legs leaning pensively against a building, and a handless businesswoman staring at a pile of money, unable to touch it.

  I pick up my charcoal pencil and draw a slender nude, small and frail, with a dark pixie cut and a hint of a scowl in a blurred face. There’s a circle at her center, and I try to make it into something new: a balloon lifting her into the sky so she can fly away. A cookie. A bowling ball. The moon. But with every line, the circle gets bigger and bigger, until I pick up a black Sharpie and trace a hole like a howl across her body: the lines thick and circling dark, sucking the entire drawing down, down, down.

  4

  Caro bounces into my room at five the next morning, a cloud of sunscreen and sweat and leftover salt. “Morgs,” she whispers, “are you awake?”

  I groan, and she flings herself into my desk chair. “The beach. Was. Amazing!” she whisper-shouts. “You should have come. Everyone asked about you.”

  “That is a very nice lie,” I say, squinting with one eye in the gloom. She’s glowing in the blue ambient light of my charging phone, the salt-dried curls straggling out of her hair. Someone’s drawn a heart on her cheek: all the lingering detritus of a night fully lived.

  “One: it is the truth, whole truth, and nothing but. Two: you would have loved the anti–back-to-school party. It was at this anarchist commune in West Raleigh with a Food Not Bombs in the basement, where they give out donated food to homeless people, and everyone there was so cool and smart, and political, and engaged. Todd and I ended up talking to Gwynn’s roommate Sierra for hours about body acceptance and fat activism. It was amazing.”

  “Awesome,” I croak into the pillow. She kicks her feet, sending herself spinning.

  “It is awesome,” her voice says in every dark direction. “She pointed me toward, like, forty badass activists to follow on Instagram, and I’ve been scrolling through this one fat trans woman’s Tumblr for, like, two hours, and I can’t even sleep.” She slams her hand on the desk, halting herself midspin. “Morgs. Did you know forty percent of American women would give up three years of their life in exchange for reaching their ideal weight? Isn’t that insane?”

  “Did you know that ninety-six percent of best-friend homicides are provoked by too much enthusiasm before breakfast?”

  She bounces up. “I’m good for you,” she says. “I’m like vitamins.”

  “Vitamins are toxic in high doses,” I tell my pillow.

  “Not the water-soluble ones,” she says brightly. “You just pee them out, like vitamins B and C. C, like Caroline. See? No problem.”

  “Is this going to be a campaign?”

  “Campaigns are good for you.”

  “Please don’t sticky-note the toilet this time.”

  She musses my hair. “I make no promises.”

  I retreat into the comforting darkness of my pillow. In the last few months, Caro’s generously expanded her self-improvement campaigns into self-plus-Morgan-improvement: filling our pantry with chia seeds, stocking the bathroom with thick Great Novels. For the past month, Russian verbs have marched in Post-Its down the stairwell like Cyrillic ants.

  I have never successfully peed out a Russian verb.

  By the time I come down to breakfast, ripe clumps of sticky notes reading, Stop hating yourself for what you aren’t and start loving yourself for what you are and I am beautiful have massed in the kitchen like body-positive fruit flies. I bat them away, pour off-brand Lucky Charms into a mug that reads, Kiss Me, I’m Contagious. Caro sits at the table in yoga pants and a light sheen of sweat, eating steel-cut oatmeal with local honey and raw almonds I smuggled home from the Simple Earth Co-op.

  “What would you think if I did burlesque?” She looks bright-eyed and disgustingly well rested.

  “Do you want to do burlesque?”

  Caro narrows her eyes, tilts her chin toward the ceiling.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But if I did, would you be shocked?”

  “Probably,” I say, curling into a chair. “Because you don’t usually take off your clothes in front of strangers.”

  She flicks an almond at me. “I mean because Americans aren’t accustomed to seeing normative sexualization of fat bodies.”

  “You’re not fat,” I say, reflexively. I pick the marshmallows out of my cereal and line them up on the table, one of each color.

  “I am, actually,” she says. “You can say it. Fat. It’s not a bad word. Saying I’m not fat just contributes to the stigma of fatness. It’s counterproductive.”

  Okay, the thing is, Caro is fat. She’s also blond and very pretty. She’s been all three of these things
as long as I’ve known her (except that military-grade awkward period in middle school, when literally nobody is pretty). But it’s one of those unspoken rules of Girl Code: never tell your friend she’s fat. Even if she is. I don’t know. It’s pretty dumb.

  “You’re counterproductive,” I say. She flicks another almond at me. It sticks to the wall for a moment, then flops to the floor, organic and defeated.

  “Not cleaning it,” I say.

  “Me, neither.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Now there’s oatmeal on our wall forever. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  “I’d be prouder of myself if I loved my body.”

  “You already love your body,” I say, rising with my mug. “You just think you don’t so that you can feel empowered when you accept it all over again.”

  “Stop pseudo-understanding me,” she calls after me. “Where are you going?”

  I fill my mouth with cereal. “A gallery,” I mumble.

  “Oh God,” she says. “For fun or for your mother?”

  I take eight thousand years to swallow. “Definitely fun,” I lie.

  Caro rises and peels the almond off the wall. “Morgs, you don’t have to do everything your mother tells you to.”

  I lift my hands and point at my entire life like, I know.

  She throws the almond into the garbage can with more force than is necessary. “You always come home from these things feeling like shit and then lock yourself in your room and paint angry squares for days. Did she blackmail you again? What is it this time, your car?”

  “Sometimes I paint angry circles,” I point out. “Even rhombuses. I’m diverse.”

  Caro huffs a piece of hair out of her eyes. Upstairs, someone walks quickly over our heads in what sounds like steel-toed boots.

  “It’s our last day of freedom,” Caro says finally. “Just hang out with me today. Cinda’s mom just harvested their whole herb garden, and she’s going to teach us how to make homemade basil ice cream. And then YYS is opening for Sex Hiatus tonight at this club in the warehouse district called the Mansion.” She perks up as she goes, a juggernaut of optimism. “I met their new bassist last night, and he’s is super adorable. I think you’d really like him.”