I shut down the computer and lock my bedroom door. I crawl into bed, not undressing, the blank eyes of the darkened windows heavy on my back. I hold the Hole to myself in the dark, curled up tightly around this nothing that is mine.
My secret’s out.
And now the whole ugly, frightening world thinks it has the right to come in.
13
I revealed myself to the world exactly once before this, on a trip to New York with Mother when I was a toddler. She wasn’t an empire yet. She had steady work, a growing following. Royalties from her final pregnancy fitness series, Third Try-mester: No Excuses, caught up in production for years, were finally beginning to trickle in. But she wasn’t yet Alanna Stone™. When she looked out at New York from the railing of the Staten Island Ferry, she must have been looking at it with the hunger of someone who was waiting for the world to recognize her greatness. Which is why she didn’t notice me pulling off my clothes.
That day is painted for me in fuzzy, Impressionist strokes: the heat of the afternoon, the stink of river water, the sweat rolling down my neck. I was two. It was hot. There was the relief of the breeze on my bare skin as I shed my little yellow smock, then uproar: a scream, the sudden roiling of adult limbs, the crashing cascade of international voices flooding my ears. Mother crushed me into her arms, shielding me with her body, and the world was dark, then, an eclipse of breast and muscle and the solidity of my mother. Beneath her fear, she would have smelled the way she always did in those years, like sweat and the vanilla extract she dabbed behind her ears because, with the price of my medical expenses, she couldn’t afford perfume.
She wasn’t a single mother yet, but I don’t remember my father being there, either, so she must have been close. She was twenty-one years old.
She kept me in onesies and overalls and corduroy dresses after that, the toddler equivalent of straitjackets, until I was old enough to understand: Shirts can come off at the doctor’s. Shirts do not come off outside.
Mother spent the rest of my life making sure I stayed out of the limelight. “Absolutely not,” she said tersely when I saw a circus on TV at age nine and begged to be allowed to join. I had an entire plan, a magic act: THE AMAZING HUMAN HOLE! I would “swallow” things onstage, make a toy rabbit disappear, dollar bills, a key. I would throw in a few cartwheels. I would be the most famous girl in the world.
She said, “Maybe once your situation is under control.”
My situation being the skin and bones and being of my unruly body, which had just rejected its eighth transplant.
I said, “But then there’s no reason for me to be in a circus.”
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”
I always thought the aim of her secrecy was to keep me out of the clutches of the mad scientists I saw in movies and cartoons, all beakers and lab coats and plans for world domination. But I am beginning to understand now something my mother learned years ago, when Fit or Die blew up and people started calling her “Stone-cold” and “Lockjaw” and other, less kind things: how the world turns you into what it wants you to be—a villain, a symbol, a toy. A character that deserves whatever fate they’ve predetermined for you; a thousand invisible hands shaping you before you can form the word no.
“Fuck those guys,” Caro announces definitively at school the next week. “You’ve got to quit looking at that stuff. It’s not even about you; they’re just idiots being idiots on the Internet.”
“But it is about me,” I say. We’re sitting on the lawn outside the art room at lunch, watching the bright clouds scuttle across the sky. It’s Thursday, and the number of sexually harassing comments online has nearly doubled since the last weekend. Everything in the cafeteria looked phallic. Everything. Carrots. Fish sticks. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the bananas.
“But it’s not you,” Caro says. She leans back, savoring the September air. Three weeks into the school year, the North Carolina summer is finally beginning to loosen its death grip, the sun thinning over the sidewalks and trees. “It’s just the concept: girl with hole in middle. They don’t know you.”
“They might,” I say. “They might go to the Mansion.”
“Those people don’t know you, either,” she says. “You’re just another weirdo they see when they’re drunk. Like the Viking girl. Or that guy with the face tattoo.”
“Thanks,” I mumble, shredding a blade of grass.
A group of sophomore guys shuffle past, bouncing off of each other and laughing. Caro lifts her feet to let them go by.
“You know what I mean,” she says. “People who actually know you think you’re a smart, cool person who’s probably not in the market for an anatomically unlikely threesome.” She waggles her eyebrows at me. “Or are you?”
The sophomore guys slow. I become aware of a sudden stillness, the weight of attention bent toward me. It’s a horror movie moment—don’t look up! But I do.
There are good and bad kinds of staring. For example, the you’re so gorgeous I can’t look away stare. Or its second cousin, the you’ve got something on your face, and it is kind of gross stare. But this stare these boys are giving me is the worst kind: the kind you start to get from older men when you’re a girl and you’re thirteen or fourteen. As though they know a dark, dirty secret about you, and by meeting their eyes, you are somehow conceding that it is true.
One of the boys glances back and mutters something to his friends, and they all laugh. He turns to me and opens his mouth.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I blurt to Caro, leaping to my feet. “Are you coming?”
She closes her eyes, tilts her face to the sky. “I’m good.”
“Caro.”
“What?” she asks, oblivious. “I’ll be right here.”
I cut away from the boys and go and stand in front of the bathroom mirror, forcing myself to breathe. You are a senior, I chide myself. Sophomore boys have no power over you. They tremble at your almighty seniority. I splash cold water on my face like girls do to calm down in the movies, but because it’s public school, the water is lukewarm, and I don’t feel any calmer, just wetter.
I emerge, blinking into the sunlight. Caro’s alone on the grass, daisy-chaining small white clover blossoms absentmindedly. The boys are gone.
“What’s up?” she asks, squinting up at me.
“Those guys were staring at me,” I say in a low voice.
She looks around. “Which boys?”
“Those underclassmen.” She looks blank, and I say, “The ones who were here before. You moved your feet.”
“Oh, right,” she says hazily. “Them.”
I say, urgently, “Caro, I think they know who I am.”
“Yeah, probably,” she says. “It’s a small school.”
“No.” I gesture to my stomach. “I mean, who I am.”
She lifts herself on her elbows and peers across the courtyard. People are scattered in clumps across the concrete picnic tables and benches, talking and eating and checking their phones. Couples are making out while teachers pretend not to notice. The stoner kids are playing hacky sack. It’s basically the world’s most peaceful scene. All that’s missing are Bambi and some cartoon bluebirds.
“Morgs,” Caro says patiently, “you’re getting paranoid. Which is a marker of narcissistic personality disorder, which is, ironically, unlike Narcissus, super unattractive. Kindly desist.”
“But—”
There’s an eruption of laughter and squeals across the lawn, and I jump. But it’s just the popular kids going on about popular kid business: Rich Aycock lifting Gina Martinez over his head as she shrieks and pretends to struggle, his friends egging him on. Several lunchtime monitors are already Dementor-gliding over.
“I love you,” Caro says. “You’re fine. Can we run to the senior lot real quick? I want to grab something from my car.”
I fol
low her across the front lawn. Faces turn up at us as we pass, but fade away again, casually. It’s just an ordinary day; people are having ordinary conversations and living their ordinary lives in which they are the main characters, consumed by their own drama. Almost none of them are thinking about me. It’s a kind of sad but mostly comforting realization. Caro’s right, I think, as we step out onto the heat-shimmering asphalt. I’m becoming an egomaniac—
Caro gasps sharply. I stop short.
My car is covered in doughnuts. Plain, frosted, chocolate, marching like sugared ants across the hood, the roof. Sliding lazily down the windshield, leaving viscous trails of icing.
With whiteboard marker, someone’s written an H in front of each one.
HO. HO. HO.
Hole, hole, hole.
In the office, while Caro’s filing the vandalism report (Principal Crowell: Why doughnuts? Caro: Somebody is clearly making fun of Morgan because she is gluten intolerant.), I text Mother’s assistant to get an excused absence. Then I go home sick for the rest of the week.
I finish all my homework on Friday morning and spend the rest of the time painting obsessively to keep myself off the Internet. It’s rough going at first, the weight of the brush awkward and unnatural in my hands. After a long summer of working in charcoal, paint feels like a foreign language, super parlay voos Fran-says, dónde está el baño? But every time I close my eyes, I see the liquid lights of the Mansion bouncing over the crowd, splashing the world in magenta and violet and cyan, and I want more than anything to flood everything with color. To make my canvases into tiny doors into that safe and liberating world.
I perk up when Caro drops in the door that evening, looking frazzled in her Walgreens uniform and aquamarine eye shadow. “Hi,” I say from the living room floor, where I’m crouching like Gollum in front of the easel. “Hi, hi, hi.”
“Hi, Castaway,” she says. She holds out an azure bottle. “This came from your mom. It’s supposed to be lotus and white tea, but I think it smells like feet, kind of?”
I glance at the label—alanna stone venus rising spa fragrance. pre-market. not for resale—and set it to the side. Caro takes in my rainbow-smeared arms, the variously terrible paintings leaning up against the baseboards of the room, drying. “So,” she says, carefully. “How’s solitary confinement?”
I fling myself backward onto the warped hardwood. “So boring. But now you’re home! Let’s hang out! Let’s watch vintage horror movies and make every flavor of popcorn!”
She collapses into the ratty rose-printed wingback chair we got at a yard sale. “I’m going to a show with Todd tonight at the Cat’s Cradle.”
“Noooooooo,” I moan.
“You’re welcome to come.”
“Noooooooo.”
She studies my painting. “Are those doughnuts?”
I sit up protectively, Secret Service–blocking the canvas with my body. “Maybe,” I say. “The Loblolly lady told me to make art from experience. This is me. Arting from experience.” I add, dramatically, “Arting from trauma.”
“Morgs, I don’t want to diminish your trauma—”
“Thank you. Kindly do not.”
Caro sighs. “Are you coming back to school on Monday?”
I mix up bright pink and start adding sprinkles to a doughnut, spelling slut.
“You cannot live the rest of your life in our shitty apartment.”
“One, this is a great apartment,” I say. “Two, somebody at school recognized me. Soon everyone’s going to know.” I sprinkle the doughnut harder and harder. “I won’t be able to get away from it.”
“And what if they do recognize you?” Caro asks. “You’ve been going out hard for weeks now. Raleigh’s not big. The Internet’s even smaller. It’s not surprising people know who you are. Or if not, that they’ll find out pretty soon.” As I paint harder and harder, she says, “You must have known this would happen eventually.”
I’ve completely mashed the bristles of the brush. I set it down in its jar, where it floods the water pink.
“It’s not that they know,” I say at last. “It’s just. I came out because I wanted to be who I am and not hide it. I want to have that be okay. I want to walk into a room and feel the way normal people do when they walk into a room. Like, Hey, Kevin’s here, awesome! Now we can all keep doing exactly what we were doing, but it will be way better! That’s what the Mansion is for me. Or at least, it was. Now it’s all, Get your camera, I’m gonna hurl, two holes one girl lols!”
Caro crosses the room and sits behind me. She begins smoothing my hair.
“Morgs, your body is weird,” she says. “People are going to be weird about it. You either have to be okay with that or you have to hide.”
“But that’s messed up,” I say. “It’s like guys who say that rape victims were ‘asking for it’ by wearing short skirts. Nobody asks to be raped. I’m not asking to be stalked and fetishized by Internet weirdos and pastry vandals.” I turn to her. “What about you, Miss Body Revolution? When you wear short dresses and fitted clothing, are you asking people to call you fat?”
She leans back from me, chewing thoughtfully on the end of her braid. I see, for the first time, an uncareful exhaustion behind her eyes. I’ve learned in just a few short days how judgmental and mean people can be about an imperfect girl body. But Caro goes out every day in a world where, no matter how smart or kind or awesome or funny she is, complete strangers feel empowered to shout insults from car windows and pull foods they disapprove of from her shopping cart, expressing passive-aggressive concern about her health. I lean back awkwardly and hug her around the neck. She nestles her nose into my hair, sighing.
“No,” she says, at last. “But until the world gets better, I’ve just got to handle it like a boss.”
Boring Todd appears a few minutes later, bearing a small bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace. We sit in uncomfortable silence while Caro goes to get ready for the show.
Thing #347 complicating my instinctive dislike of Todd: he actually knows about the Hole. Caro didn’t tell—he saw it for himself once, popping upstairs while we were getting dressed to go out. Caro took him aside, spoke quietly for a few minutes. I’m not sure if this a testament to his extreme niceness or his extreme boringness, but he took to it incredibly easily. He doesn’t stammer on the word whole or awkwardly avoid looking at my stomach the way strangers do at the Mansion. I wish he did. It makes me feel indebted to him in a weird way. Which makes me extra angry at my body sometimes. Like, if I weren’t so broken, I wouldn’t need to be grateful to people just for being decent to me.
Especially when all I want to do is hate him for the way he makes me disappear when he’s around, or makes Caro disappear—somehow, the two of us don’t exist for each other in the same way anymore.
“How’s it going, Morgan?” he asks. Today he’s wearing shades of brown: shirt, khakis, Sperrys.
“Fine,” I say, my shoulders tensing up around my ears.
He sits down on the couch amiably, as if he’s actually happy for my company. “I’m trying to write a song,” he says. “I think I’ve got the melody figured out. I just need the lyrics.”
“Cool,” I say.
We sit. He hums.
“I had some really good yogurt today,” he pipes up, hopefully. “It was Greek.”
“That sounds great.” I turn and shout up the stairs, “Caro.”
She bounces down in a shell-colored 1950s housewife dress, tied in the back with a bow. Todd looks up at her, and his breath catches. God, they’re gross.
“Morgs, you sure you don’t want to come?” Caro asks, beaming as Todd hands her the Queen Anne’s lace.
“I think I’m good,” I say. I don’t really want to be alone, but I can’t imagine I’ll feel less alone tagging along on their date, and if that’s the case, I’d rather just stay home and avoid the cigarette-hair
smell.
They leave, a bundle of noise and smiles and last-minute invitations. I stare at my canvas a while longer, then run my fingers through the paint, streaking and marbling and digging thick rivulets until the whole thing is a muddy, swirling moonscape, pocked with canyons and craters. The house is bloated with silence.
I take the quick, shameful body shower of the Failed Human Being and lie on my bed, marinating in the chaos of detail that fills my room: art prints on the ceiling by Dalí and Escher, Shaun Tan and Jenn Hales; the bookshelves along the wall overflowing with unopened self-improvement books from Mother. On my night table, there’s a fringe-haired Barbie Caro carved into the stomach of with scissors for my tenth birthday. The doll leans against an x-ray of my ribs: a ghostly black-and-white ladder interrupted by a great Hole-shaped chasm.
When I moved into this room, I wanted to make it the most me space imaginable. But lying here now, itchy and unhappy as beads of water prickle dry on my skin, I can’t help but feel my world is elsewhere.
The comments left on the Public Scrutiny photo gallery have more than doubled. I glaze past anything in written in all caps or GIFs or emojis. There are still plenty of stomach-curlingly detailed sexual comments about what guys would like to do with the Hole, but they feel less shocking now. Exposure therapy, I guess. Like Mother says1: “Whatever doesn’t kill you will shred those abs like a Vitamix.”2
blrrdlinez: that hole tho
GASHer: You wouldn’t even have to take turns? She could make a very profitable business out of this . . .
anayama: this is NASTEE whys she showin ppl this?? nobody wants 2 see that!!
I breathe long and slow through my nose. I think about Caro, unafraid to go out in her cute dress. No, not unafraid: just loving herself too fiercely to give a shit what anyone says or thinks.
Hole in the Middle Page 6
