chippedshoulder: It hurts so much . . .
rickz3: My Hole is that I’m in love with my best friend . . .
janeyz: My Hole is that my uncle molested me from the time I was four until I was thirteen. I’ve never told anyone until now.
My scorn begins to burn away as I read two pages, three, four. None of these people have literal Holes. But some do have other physical deformities, and other sadnesses separate but great. There is something fragile and touching in their honesty, lonely strangers pouring their woes out into the ether, and to one another, and trusting they’ll find kindness.
I pop open a new message to mindthegap.
missabyss: I get what you mean.
And she almost immediately replies:
mindthegap: Really? What would be your Hole?
It would be so easy just to tell her. It might even be a relief. But studying the original picture, I feel weirdly shallow. It’s impossible to ignore that this piece of fan art buried on the Internet is doing what I’ve failed to do in my own work: bringing people together. Changing the world.
This whole girl is better than I am at articulating what it means to live life with a Hole. How disappointed would she be to discover the actual me?
I write:
missabyss: Artist’s block, I guess.
And also that I somehow manage to hurt everyone around me, and I’m afraid I’ll never stop.
And that no matter what I do, I am going to be alone forever.
Then I pull on an overlarge hoodie and slink from the house, the silent sound of failure echoing in my ears.
I bike through the NC State campus, blinking in the bright sunlight and wishing I could afford to go to a movie and escape myself. The wind glides down my narrow chest and whispers around the Hole, the day threading through me.
I want more than ever to talk to Caro. To say, Is that song about me? To ask, What’s so wrong with me that you have to leave? That my dad left. That my mom had to start leaving when I was thirteen. I blink away tears, because tears don’t do anything except make you look more pathetic when the fact is just that you want to change your life, and you can’t.
I pedal harder, the fibers of my thigh muscles burning. Someone shouts to my right, and I automatically ignore it. The shout becomes louder, more insistent, and there’s something blue in my peripheral vision. Something blue against the red-brick sidewalk, and tall, and extremely familiar.
I skid to a stop, the adrenaline roar falling silent in my ears.
“Hey,” he says. “You were really booking it. You’re pretty hard to catch up with.”
I blink up at Handsome Chad. He’s glistening, tan and honey-haired in running shorts and a tank top. I’m used to noticing musculature in a prescribed, artistic way, but the lanky, golden muscles of his arms make something in me seize up. Whoa, I think.
“But really,” he says, looking me up and down. “What are you doing in my neck of the woods? Thinking about signing up for some marketing classes? Because I can tell you now, Intro’s a doozy.”
I blink up at the banner on the enormous building behind him—poole college of management—then back at him, the sweat dewing on his skin in the autumn oak-filtered light.
“You’re a runner,” I say, stupidly. Chad grins and shrugs.
“I work out,” he says. “So what happened to you the other night?”
I unpeel my fingers from the brakes, wishing my body would quit pounding. “I just got sick of having cameras shoved in my face.”
“You’re not into the whole celebrity thing? I thought everyone wanted to go viral.”
“No,” I say, too emphatically. I peer into his eyes, trying to glean some kernel of understanding, but his face is inscrutable.
“Oh,” he says. “Yeah, I guess it’s kind of a drag.” He rumples into a grin and my insides flip. “I thought you were mad at me or something.”
I remember the secret language of his hands tracing my hip bones and am suddenly aware of the sweat stains beneath my arms, the fact that I look like a mushroom in my bike helmet. “No,” I say again, more quietly. “Definitely not.”
He breathes out. “That’s a relief.” He reaches down, traces my forearm with a finger. My skin explodes into points of light.
He says, “You’ve got to quit disappearing on me like that, Cinderella.”
“I’m working on it,” I say.
“Yeah?” he says. “You coming out tonight?”
His eyes are the whole sky’s worth of blue. I look up into them, and try to remember feeling like I was going to die alone, and suddenly it seems like a made-up thing, a story that happened to somebody else. I look at this boy who knew about the Hole and kissed me anyway, and kissing him was like the idea of champagne: warmth and bubbles and golden light.
I say, “Yes.”
On the way home, I take a detour via the pharmacy. I stand a long time in the personal hygiene aisle, pretending to deliberate between brands of tampons as I slowly, unabashedly reach beneath my jacket and knock a mint-green box of condoms into my bag. Cyndi Lauper is singing about how girls just wanna have fun, and because she is right, I wink at the stockroom boy as I saunter toward the lipstick display, a box of shoplifted contraception riding safely along in my purse.
Here are the reasons to not lose my virginity:
Lack of interested partner
Fear it will hurt
Certainty I will do it wrong
Number three is the one that worries me the most. Most of my knowledge of the actual act of sex is vague. Even the romance novels Caroline and I used to read aloud to each other when we were twelve, giggling, gave me nothing to work with: two-dimensional characters with names like Chastity and Randolphe breathlessly penetrating each other’s throbbing sexes with their throbbing sexes. What are you supposed to actually do, though? What if you get all those throbbing sexes mixed up? What if it turns out that sex doesn’t mean what I think it does at all?
But I also never thought I could dance. I never thought I could be myself in public and have anyone still be interested. And so maybe I can do this, too.
The second the sun goes down, I lock my bedroom door and get ready for the most important night of my life. I slip into a tiny barely-a-shirt, a navy blue bikini top studded with rhinestone stars. Even for Mansion me, it’s pretty bold, with perfect little sequined moons adorning the nipples. Night breasts! I had proclaimed to Caro when I found it, promenading into her dressing room at Goodwill. She had rolled her eyes. Morgs, I don’t even want to think about where that’s been. Me: On somebody’s boobs, probably. She’d made me take it to the dry cleaner’s.
I lean toward the mirror, drinking in my naked face: the small green eyes; the sharp, pale cheeks; the colorless lips. My breath clouds the glass. I fade away like a magician behind the fog, pull out the eyeliner I filched from Caroline’s drawer in the bathroom and go to work.
I sketch lightly along the lash line of my right eye with the eye pencil. Step back and survey. It’s not really noticeable. I turn my face right and left, telling myself, Pretty side. Boring side. Pretty side. Boring side.
Fuck it.
I deepen the line, bring it around my lower lid. I blink, and the line jumps a little. “Crap,” I mutter. I try to wipe it down, but it just sort of smears. How does Caroline do this? I switch around, try to give my eyes a shape. I hold my mouth open, eyes perfectly still. I think cat. I think Cleopatra.
When I set down the pencil, my eyes are dramatic and bright, dark-fringed sea glass glimmering palely in my face. I pull out the lip gloss, apply it as if I know what I’m doing. It’s thick and sticky and vaguely lemonade scented.
I step back and look at myself. My mouth is a new and shining thing: full and ripe as a peach. My cheeks look kind of washed out, but I didn’t steal any blush, so it will have to do.
He
y, baby, I mouth at the mirror. What’s your number?
I smile coyly. I bite my lower lip. The strange, sexy me in the mirror looks wild. She looks treacherous. She’s not the girl you fall in love with. She’s the one who leaves you bruised.
“My place or yours?” I ask the mirror, low and throaty. Laugh condescendingly.
I lower my eyelids at the mirror. Let my lips go long and soft. I puff them out, Playboy-languid. I wink seductively at the mirror. I am the world’s sexiest duck.
“Hey, baby,” I say. “Got a lighter? I’d like to smoke you below the belt.”
I’m trying to push my breasts together to make cleavage when my phone rings, and I jump.
The phone rings again, screen glowing cool and blue. Caroline. I sweep the makeup under my pillow, my whole body one big heartbeat.
“Hello?”
There’s a silence on the other end. Again, I say, “Hello?”
Cotton wisps of sound filter up to my ear: a muffling of music, a distant male voice. A pocket dial. She didn’t mean to call me at all.
I grip the phone so tightly that my fingers ache. I want to shout, Caro, hello! I am going to go have sex now with a gorgeous, normal boy even though you’ve spent the last decade of our friendship secretly believing no one would ever want me! I want to whisper, I am going to go have sex for the first time ever, and even though we are fighting right now, I want you to tell me it will be okay!
I pull the phone, still glowing, from my ear. I watch the timer count up slowly, second by empty second. Then I hit end.
26
I blast through the door of the Mansion at full stride. I am a girl on a mission. Or maybe a woman. I’ve never been sure when that transition happens. Maybe it’s tonight.
I snake right out into the center of the dance floor, and like magnets, the two of us come together.
“Hey,” I shout.
“Hey,” Chad shouts. He grins down at me from his great height. Once, this would have melted me down, but tonight, I am elemental. I am fire. I take his hand, place it on my hip.
“You look smoking tonight,” he says, with an easy grin. But there’s something beneath our ordinary language, a palpable thing, throbbing with the music. His eyes search mine a second too long, questioning.
I pull his face to mine, and let our bodies be the answer.
I have never done this, so I don’t know the protocol for getting from the club to his apartment. I don’t even know if it should be his apartment or my apartment, but his seems riskier in a way that I am suddenly unafraid of. So when I don’t offer, he doesn’t ask. He leads me down the sidewalk and unlocks the doors of a low black car. I buckle in, looking at the interior, thinking, This is the car of the boy I am going to have sex with. There is the scent of cigarettes and musk, a masculine tang that I understand, with a jolt, is the smell of him that has accumulated in this small space.
“We’re going to have to stop by the drugstore real quick,” he says, through the silent ringing in my ears.
“I’ve got condoms,” I say.
He flashes me a smile in the dark. “Well, all righty, then.”
I don’t know what to say to him in this space between leaving and arriving, but it turns out not to matter. We make out at red lights, make out when he stops for gas, when he parks the car. His hands graze my thighs, my sides, my breasts—lightly at first, but then hungrily, confidently. He smiles at me, and his smile is the smile of a man who knows where his next meal is coming from.
We fall through the front door tangled, our hands too busy to reach for lights. My sweater is on the floor, his lips on my neck. Everything in me is throbbing with how easy it is not to be alone; I slip my hands under his shirt, not because I think it is something I am supposed to do, but because I want it. I surprise myself with wanting it. He lifts his shirt above his head and throws it away into the dark room. Then he reaches behind me, tugs at the knot of my halter top. It slips to the floor in a hushed cascade of lapis and silver beads, and for a second, I think I might go with it. But then we’re kissing, and it’s skin against skin, and it feels better than I could have imagined: the blood rushing beneath the muscled coolness, the softness, the yielding. I open my mouth to him, hungry.
He makes a low sound, his hands running up and down my sides, my back. There is a shuffling at the door, and he pulls back suddenly, laughs and swears. “Shit.”
“Roommate,” he says, and pulls me by the hand through the dark to more dark. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and ducks back out into the hall.
On the other side of the door, a lamp switches on. I sway a little in the empty space of the dark room, keeping my eyes on the crack of light beneath the door. I am cold. My shirt is still in the front room, and the air that had caressed my bare skin has turned chilly and brusque. I need Chad’s hands to come back, and his lips to keep mine busy so that they won’t form the question I’m trying not to ask myself: What am I doing here?
The room floods with light, and Chad ducks back in. “Hey,” he says, a laugh in his voice. “Sorry about that.” He closes the door with his elbow. He has something in his hands. There’s a whisper-flick of a switch and then a tiny bead of light suspended in the gloom: a lighter and candles.
“Aren’t you romantic,” I say. It is disorienting to hear my voice sounding so much like mine, as though I am not standing half naked in the bedroom of a stranger—the same voice that orders biscuits at the drive-through and says bless you to sneezes. Chad laughs, uncomfortably.
“What can I say.” The flickering light of the candles illuminates the cluttered surface in small breaths. “Keeping it classy for the ladies.”
“Ladies, plural?” I ask. “You’re pretty popular, huh?”
“Yeah, well, you know,” he says, and laughs again. Then we’re kissing before the wave of misgiving can finish washing over me, and he’s pulling me to the bed, and it’s so easy to be pulled.
We devour each other. Everything in those romance books makes sense—the low moans, the urgency, the sense of plundering and being plundered. He looks down and smiles, candlelight painting the side of his face in flickering gold. I melt inside.
He shifts so that I’m on top of him. We’re both shirtless in our jeans, and his hands are on my breasts, and beneath me, the hard lump of his erection. I am both frightened and hungry. Chad runs his hand down my pelvis, dangerously close to the Hole, and I gasp.
“Baby, are you ready for me?” he whispers.
Yes, and no, and I don’t know, and it had better be now or never.
“I think so,” I whisper.
“Have you got a condom?” he asks.
“Oh,” I say in a normal voice. “Yeah. It’s in my back pocket . . .”
I start to turn, to fumble for it, but then Chad grins. “Wait,” he says. “I got it.” I thought we were supposed to be carried away by passion in this moment, transformed into sexier versions of ourselves, but he sounds surprisingly normal. “Check this out,” he says.
Then he starts to push his fingers through the Hole.
I feel myself freeze, choke on nothing. His fingers are thick and hard and piling up against my organs. I look into his face, aghast. He laughs again.
“I thought I could reach it from here,” he says. “I should have lubed up first, huh?”
I look down at the beautiful stranger wadded in strange sheets, still hard beneath me, while his hand struggles against my insides like a worm. I don’t know what I am supposed to do now, what the normal, sexy girl would do. Laugh, or playfully slap his wrist. Something cool and unfeeling that would let us both walk out of here tomorrow unbruised: just two more lovely young people who lie back casually against the pillows after sex, lighting each other’s cigarettes and saying disaffected things about their parents, or life these days, before sliding golden-eyed back into the seamless world, never to see each other again.
I feel bile rise in my throat, and something else.
I reach down and take the thick stump of his wrist between my thumb and forefinger, and gently remove him from my body. Then I climb from his bed and stand on numb feet.
“Hey,” he says. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say. I am in automatic mode. I am a robot. “I’ve got to go.”
His face twists in the candlelight. “Hey, come here,” he says. “What’s going on?”
I step into my shoes, smashing the heels into the floor.
“This isn’t working,” I say. I remember that my shirt is somewhere out on the living room floor, and grab something off the dresser to wrap myself in. A sweatshirt.
He’s sitting up. “Come on,” he says. “Are you seriously leaving right now?” There’s anger in his voice.
“This was a mistake,” I say, very calmly. I grab my bag with trembling fingers, and let myself out.
He doesn’t follow me, and I don’t blame him. It’s not until I get to the parking lot that I lean into the bushes and vomit.
27
I leave that small part of myself in the shrubbery and walk through the dark toward the lights of Western Boulevard. I can’t stop sensing his fingers. They crawl inside me like ghosts.
The street is busy and alive even at this hour, cars slamming through the stop-lit night. I glance into the yellow windows of all-night fast food restaurants as I slide past them. I could go inside, curl into a booth and mop my eyes with paper napkins. But I don’t. I don’t want to go anywhere, because I don’t want what just happened to me to have happened, and I think if I keep moving it will still be happening. It will still be a thing I can change. Not I was violated and then I ate a Cajun chicken biscuit, tucked greasily into my memory like a soiled tissue into a winter pocket.
I dodge the students who trickle by in clumps and the girls who walk by themselves, hurriedly, keys in their fists. I pass in and out of streetlights alone, letting the roars of cars wash over me as they steer toward well-lit homes. I consider, in a clinical, detached way, the force of those thousands of pounds of metal hurtling through the darkness
Hole in the Middle Page 15
