“Morgan?” Caro asks. “Are you okay?”
I carefully lay the knife down in a bunch of kale. “It’s fine,” I say, mechanically. “Like you said, they had to find out eventually.”
Unless they didn’t. Unless I’d just kept my shirt on and my mouth shut.
“Lots of people would kill to get this kind of attention,” Todd points out helpfully. “What?” he asks, when we both glare at him. “#PuzzlePieces was trending this morning. YYS has never gotten more than, like, four hundred views on YouTube.”
Caro squeezes my arm. “Next week, Beyoncé will get pregnant, or Emma Watson will invent a new way to menstruate or something, and everyone will forget you exist. But the world is falling for you right now.” Todd pauses in his carrot stick construction and looks up at her, thoughtfully. “Maybe just . . . wait for it to blow over. Get out of town, or go to your mom’s place for a little bit. You know?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.” I don’t look at either of them as I leave the kitchen.
Alone in my room, I numbly pull my phone out of my pocket and, feeling like the vainest person in the entire world, google my name.
Epitome of Gen Z: The Unwhole Child
Stone Birth Defect Due to Alanna’s Diet Pill Addiction!!
Puzzle Pieces Proof of True Love. Can You Find Yours? Take our quiz!
The headlines are no worse than this morning, but now my old yearbook photos are everywhere. So is everything I’ve ever posted on Facebook. So much for privacy settings. I wonder briefly which of my 239 “friends” shared my information with a reporter. If the articles are anything to go by, anyone I’ve ever known is a suspect. Quotes from classmates whose names I only vaguely recognize pepper the stories. Tanisha Taylor, a girl I haven’t talked to since third grade, has an “exclusive interview” about my troubled emotional past with E! Online. “Classmate reveals Stone’s obsession with witchcraft; hole created by black magic.”
There’s a pressure building, a low buzz that presses against the windows: the weight of the story the world is creating about me while I sit helplessly inside.
Fuck them all. I drop my pajama bottoms to the floor, reach for a shiny skirt. On the bed, I see the phone light up again, and again. I turn it off, slip it into my bag.
I pass by the kitchen on my way out. A few notes from a guitar waft out on a wave of simmering sesame oil and soy sauce. It would smell delicious in another life, but in this one, I’ve lost my appetite.
“Where are you going?” Caro asks, sticking her head through the doorway.
“Out,” I say.
Her eyes flicker over me, filled with a blue concern. “Are you sure? I found a Smitten Kitchen recipe that uses at least half of your vegetable massacre.”
“I can’t just stay in here forever,” I say. “I can’t let the terrorists win.”
She leans against the doorframe and sighs. “Whatever happened to my introverted loner friend who could watch Adventure Time for sixteen hours in a row without blinking, and whine about having to walk all ten feet to the bathroom?”
I lean forward and kiss her on the forehead. “She learned about being brave and loving herself from her amazing best friend. And she’s had a very long couple of days and would like to go dance and pretend everything is normal for a little while.”
Caro hesitates, clearly struggling between the desire to stay home and the need to offer to come with me. I smile, covering my disappointment.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I need a little time to myself, anyway.”
“You sure?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
As I’m lifting my keys from the cracked ceramic dish by the door, she calls, “I’m sorry I freaked you out. I’m sure everything’s going to be fine.” But a line has appeared between her brows, a little comma of worry that injects doubt into her optimism: It’s going to be fine, comma, I hope.
I roll up to the Mansion with a scarf over my hair, my jacket zipped to the neck. There’s a crowd of people hanging around the front gate, but I keep my head down and slip quickly past Bouncer Steve. He pats me on the shoulder as I pass, and I stiffen. I don’t know that he’s ever touched me before. I wonder if being a girl in the news makes your body public property. Or if that’s just another property of being other.
Inside, the multicolored lights swirl over a mostly empty dance floor, occasionally throwing the three college girls self-consciously dancing in a triangle into rainbow relief. It’s a Monday night, after all, and early. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding and head for the bar. Frank spends an unreasonable amount of time getting to me, lingering over the two other patrons before reluctantly pausing before my stool. He doesn’t meet my eyes.
“Can’t accept that fake ID, ‘Emma,’” he says.
“Like you cared to begin with,” I say.
The bass beats between us like a heart.
“Saw you on the news,” he says at last.
“You and the rest of the world,” I say. “Come on, Frank, just give me something. Anything. Surprise me. Don’t act like I’m something special now.”
“You’re fifteen,” he says.
“Seventeen.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered in the seventies,” he says. “Now it’ll cost me my license.”
He fades away, leaving me alone to choke down my frustration. I scratch at the empty air around my shoulders, look around at the slowly filling club. The cherubs in the rafters suffocating on dust and house music. The faint stickiness of the floor that crackles beneath my shoes as I shift my weight. Being dirty and sticky and smelly doesn’t make this place any less magic, I tell myself fiercely. But it feels like waking up from a dream and trying to pretend you can still fly.
Eventually Frank returns with something in a martini glass that’s magenta and clotted with bright pink cherries. The rim is furred with sugar crystals, a frilly pink umbrella. It looks, at some point, like it may have been on fire.
I look at him. “Really?”
Frank pushes his lips out, a lazy man’s shrug. “I thought, now that you were all famous, you’d want something fancy.”
“Go eat a dick, Frank,” I say, just as the music dies. The other customers stir, looking my way. I think I see a ghost of a smile on Frank’s face. He twists away languidly, returns momentarily with a pint of something gut-black and humorless. I lift it to my lips, let the bitterness soak into my gumline.
Frank raises the pink cocktail in a toast and takes a sip, grimacing. His face is all squint lines and teeth. “Better?” he asks. I nod, and he lifts the pink drink again and grins. “This one’s on me. Morgan Stone.”
“It’d better be,” I mutter, and he snorts into his umbrella.
Frank nurses the syrupy cherrytini over the next several hours, slipping me a steady succession of dark, bitter beers. People murmur, eye me. I can feel, between the beats, the information passing around like a pulse: That girl’s on the news.
“So I’m, like, a VIP now, huh?” I shout to Frank, several drinks in. Mouth ahead of brain.
He looks me dead in the eye. “You’re a regular,” he says. “Even if you are a shitty tipper.”
Handsome Chad materializes after midnight. I’m cloudy with alcohol and have somehow made it onto the dance floor. A group of girls wants a picture with me, and I don’t care anymore. A vague, global magnanimity suffuses my veins. I’m famous now, after all. Can I not afford to be kind? I keep my jacket zipped, wave for photos.
“Hey, Holly,” a voice shouts in my ear. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
I am unbelievably happy to see him: a handsome pillar of familiarity in a sea of sweaty strangers.
“Hey,” I say. “Hey. Did you miss me?” I dance up to him goofily, throwing my hands into the air like this moment is a thing I can grab and keep.
He grins. “Of course.” He gra
bs my hips and dances with me, his teeth flashing cherry and blue in the club’s siren lights. His thumbs lightly trace the curves of my hip bones through my skirt, a secret conversation taking place beneath our words. It is thrilling and delicious. I let my head loll, dropping against his chest. He laughs and pulls back, examining me critically.
“You’re wasted,” he says.
“You’re wasted,” I say. This is so witty that I laugh out loud. Chad laughs again, looking around the room in that quick, flashing way that beautiful people have. He squeezes my left hip, and I thrill again.
“Hey, so, did you get home all right the other night? I was worried about you.” I stare up at him, and he says, “At the, uh, playground? Those camera guys started chasing you—”
“Oh, God,” I say. “Oh, that. Yeah. Of course! I was totally fine. It was nothing.”
He laughs again, uneasily. “Okay. Because I was kind of worried, you know. We got separated, and it was pretty late and stuff, and then I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“You looked for me?”
“Well, yeah,” he says. “I mean, I don’t know the proper protocol or whatever for what happens when you’re making out with someone and a news crew shows up, but I was always taught to walk a girl home.”
“You weren’t freaked out?”
“By the press?” he asks. He is a painfully handsome blur.
I blurt, “Or by me.”
“You?”
“The Hole.”
He lifts his head to the ceiling, his laughter swept away in the music and lights and furry air.
“I was making out with you, wasn’t I?” he asks. He reaches down and tweaks the end of my nose. “No,” he says, firmly. “You’re cool. Seriously, quit worrying about it.”
Warmth and misgiving clash in my stomach. Or maybe it’s the beer. “You didn’t talk to them, did you?”
“The camera guys?” He laughs. “Yeah, I’m selling them my life story. ‘I Kissed the Hole Girl.’”
I slap his arm. It is a little harder than I meant. “I’m serious. It’s ruining my life.”
“Hey,” he says. “Calm down. I didn’t come here to get yelled at.” He catches my hand, and rubs it with his, warming it. “I didn’t talk to the press, okay? I don’t kiss and tell.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling stupid. “It’s just—you’re the only guy I’ve ever met who isn’t totally freaked out by the Hole, and then everything—”
He smiles down at me. “Quit worrying, Holey-Holly. I’m not freaked out. In fact . . .” He pulls a pen from his pocket, reaches for my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure I don’t lose you again.” He writes a phone number on my palm, folds my fingers tight around it and kisses them briefly. The warmth of his breath rushes through them, filling my fist like a heart. “Hold onto that, okay?” The beat picks up, and his long fingers pull my hips in close and I melt. The paparazzi is nowhere in sight. I could be any girl on any dance floor: a short, shaggy-haired girl leaning into a gorgeous boy, the happiness in her face nothing if not normal. Just another teenager with a crush. Which, for me, is eight light-years beyond special.
I lift my head, peek at Chad. He’s looking down at me with an expression that makes me dizzy.
“So I guess that’s not your boyfriend, huh?” he asks, casually.
“What?” I ask. “Who?”
He gestures at his waist in a way that I don’t want to understand even as I understand exactly, precisely who he means. Even before he says, because the universe is cruel if not redundant: “The other kid. The one on the news.”
I feel like a television abruptly unplugged: the picture shrinking to a small, bright speck and dying.
“The Lump guy?” I ask. “No.” I try to laugh, but I feel wrecked with dismay.
Chad leans down and brushes his lips against my ear, and a thrill goes through me.
“Good,” he murmurs.
I turn my chin toward his, and a flash of light slaps me in the face.
A girl’s voice to our left shouts, “Morgan, hi! Can you unzip your jacket?”
I blink up through the sunspots at a blond girl waving a clunky black SLR camera in her left hand. She pantomimes unzipping with her right. “Will you pose with him? With—what’s your name?”
I turn my face away, a groan rising in my throat. I can see it now: Hole Girl Cheating on Epic Puzzle Romance! Teenagers These Days, They’re Never Satisfied, Am I Right? Light splashes across our bodies again, and again, and I try, for one last, lingering moment, to hold onto normalcy. But everything is crumbling too fast. Even here, in the arms of a boy who knows exactly what I am and isn’t afraid, my otherness catches up. No matter how spangled my shirts, or cohesive my art portfolio, I am going to spend the rest of my life being followed by strangers who hope to scrape up scraps of everything that makes me weird and small and lonely, and post it on the Internet for likes.
Chad starts to speak, but I break away. He follows me a few steps, and I can hear him shouting, it’s okay and let’s get out of here and just some dumb girl.
But it isn’t.
He catches up to me at the edge of the dance floor.
“Call me,” he shouts.
“I will.”
“Promise,” he says. He looks so uncertain in the strobe lights, blinking between light and dark like yes and no, yes and no, back to back to back.
I reach up on tiptoe and kiss his cheek, then step out onto the back porch, into the cigarette and neon haze. Beyond the porch, the October air is soft and dense, the streetlights stippling the sleeping city skyline like fireflies.
I want so badly to belong in this world. I wish there were another way to be part of it.
But I’m seventeen years old, and I’ve exhausted my options.
I dial Dr. Morse. It is late, one in the morning, but she picks up on the first ring.
“Yes?” she says.
“I’m ready,” I say. “Let’s do it.”
22
I make the trip to the doctor’s office alone on Saturday morning. Some part of me had hoped Caro would come with me again: the two of us hand in hand, battling the flashbulbs and microphones like a sexy phalanx of sisterhood. But she was already gone when I woke up, and so I drive in silence. At the edge of the parking lot, I grip the black binder of forms to my lonely chest, take a breath and wade through the sea of reporters, oglers and fans.
“Morgan, over here!”
“Hole Girl, how do you feel?”
“Tell us about your relationship with the Missing Piece!”
Lumpy McLumpface, I want to correct. But I don’t want to give the reporters a decent sound bite. They shout and wave, their words knocking against me like pebbles in the surf, tumbling over and over my toes. How do they know when my appointments are? Is someone slipping them the schedule, or do they show up every day at dawn on the off chance I’ll be there?
Doctors Morse and Takahashi are standing in the waiting room when I arrive. The team of researchers has been pared down now to a small cluster of people in beige and a pair of brightly scrubbed nurses.
“Good morning,” Dr. Morse says. Her red hair is clipped back into a low ponytail. There is a brilliance to her today—a sparkle where before there was only spark. “Sorry about the press.”
“Are you?” I ask. “I thought you called them off.”
She has the nerve to smile at me, entitlement and teeth in a white lab coat.
“I’m sorry you find them an inconvenience,” she corrects. “The more attention we get, the better our funding.”
“This is about funding?” I ask, aghast. “My best friend is getting harassed at school. There are strangers talking about my vagina on the Internet. I lost my job.”
“I’m sure your mother can cover your lost funds. The publici
ty’s not hurting her career a bit,” she says, turning back to her clipboard. “Howie’s already in the back. Let’s go ahead and get started.”
I go change, feeling like I’ve been slapped in the mouth. A nurse I don’t recognize leads me to a family medicine and radiology room. Somebody’s surrounded the radioactivity sign on the door with cutouts of rainbows and smiling emojis, I guess to make it seem friendlier, but the effect is ominous and depressing. There’s only so much you can do with your kid might be dying and an inkjet printer.
Inside, the room is spacious and well-lit, with twin examination tables tucked beneath posters of apples and kittens. For half a second, I feel self-conscious in my filmy paper gown and poofy medical shorts that make me look like an Oompa Loompa. But when I see Howie, similarly attired in ridiculous shorts and blue gown, Lump tenting beneath the fabric, all I can remember is how he told the press, What if I was put on earth to meet this person? and Chad asking, So, is that your boyfriend? and claustrophobia twists up in me, sour and irritated.
Howie glances at me, but when I don’t meet his eyes he slumps, paper sighing against the table.
Our first appointment is dedicated to physical examination: the familiarizing of both doctors with our bodies to prepare themselves, and us, for the battery of tests they intend to begin later in the week. We give blood samples, urine samples, fecal samples, cheek swabs. The nurses fuss around us with small and comforting sleights of hand: taking height, weight, temperature, blood pressure. My usual nurse, Amanda, jokes with me about her kindergartener and removes the blood pressure cuff with cool, steady hands, and I wonder if the banality of this routine is meant in part to calm my nerves. I glance up and lock eyes with a blond researcher who scratches her ear and looks away again nervously. Even though my forms are signed and the building is secure, there’s something in me that makes these people look at me like a panther pacing in a cage.
I like it.
The nurses fuss with our paper gowns, trying to reveal our torsos without revealing my breasts. Eventually, they work out a system: rigging the gowns so that the material is gathered and tied behind us like giant blue ponytails. I flinch as the paper lifts away and cold air hits my skin. Despite themselves, the researchers murmur. Dr. Morse leans in eagerly, gripping the sides of my waist like a latex-fingered lover.
Hole in the Middle Page 12
