Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  I’m waiting to cross a street when a car pulls up next to me and stops. The window rolls down. Something traitorous in me thinks, Chad? and I feel sick.

  “Hey,” the passenger shouts—a girl. Pretty in a pale, goth way. I step toward the car, and the driver leans across to the window.

  “You’re the Hole Girl, aren’t you?” the driver asks. “From the news?”

  I shake my head, instinctively taking a step backward. There’s a flurry of motion inside the car. I cringe away half a second too late, and something strikes the side of my skull with a thud, sprays half of my face with something wet. I stumble into the gutter, stunned. A plastic Starbucks cup bounces in the road.

  “You’re a fucking bitch!” the driver spits and guns the engine, shooting ahead through traffic.

  The wind picks up and whistles cold as I sit on the curb, shaking. I want to call Caro, but she’s not speaking to me. I want to call my mother and tell her how right she was, what a mistake it’s been to show myself to the world and expect to be treated with love. But my phone is on my bed at home, across town, abandoned in a fit of recklessness. I make myself rise on trembling legs, wipe Frappuccino from my nose and push my tired body toward the only place left that can make it halfway right. My feet fall into a rhythm on the sidewalk: I want to be fixed. I want to be fixed. Right left right left.

  Deep inside me, the ghost fingers writhe like worms.

  My back and legs are aching by the time I emerge into the medical complex parking lot. All I can do is sit here and wait for morning. Lay myself at Dr. Morse’s mercy, and say, You were right. I don’t want this thing anymore. Try not to look as her gloved hands reach for my stomach.

  The flat gray facade is lit at night, granting the building a strange, industrial beauty. The parking lot is empty except for a single crappy old car. I give it a wide berth, swing like a satellite toward the amber pool of light by the door. I’m halfway there when a dark figure emerges from the building. For a moment, my heart snaps up to my throat like a rubber band—then I recognize the stooped, eggshell-frail posture and shoulders, and I stop in my tracks, defeated.

  Howie doesn’t look any happier to see me than I am to see him.

  I ask, “What are you doing here?”

  “Parker—Dr. Morse—and I were going over a few things,” he says. The moon is tucked like a bright coin in the sky behind him. I can’t imagine what he and his doctor were talking about at three-thirty in the morning, but I assume we’re operating on a mutual don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. He stares at me a beat too long, and I become painfully aware of my disheveled appearance: mascara smeared and on foot, draped in a man’s sweatshirt. Irritation struggles with concern in his face, and I can’t stand it, can’t stand the weight of the Lump Boy’s pity, and I begin, “I’ll just—”

  He says, “Do you need a ride home?”

  I think about Caro, and how home is so broken, and then I start to cry.

  We sit in Howie’s car for a long time. He says nothing, doesn’t touch me. I wish he would. I want him to remind me that he is here, witnessing my private unhappiness, so that I could hate him for it. But he just looks out the window in silence, letting me be private without making me be alone.

  My sobs dry up to a snuffle. Howie passes me a crumpled paper napkin.

  “It’s the only one I have,” he says, apologetically. I dab economically, blow and wipe.

  “I can’t go home,” I say.

  He doesn’t ask. “Okay,” he says. “I can take you to my motel. It’s not very nice or anything, but I can sleep on the couch, or in the car—”

  “No,” I say.

  A breeze stirs the night. The branches above us throw shadows through the windshield.

  “Do you want to talk?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Do you want to be quiet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  He lets me sit in his car until I am all right. It is hours, centuries, years. Empires of myself rise and fall as the shadows pass over our strange and separate bodies.

  He wakes me just before dawn. The interior of the car is sketched in graphite, thick with the hair of morning breath. Down in the footwell, my feet are freezing.

  I blink, gluey, and he says, again, “Morgan.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Just before five.” He passes this fact to me like a pebble, polished and smooth. I want to rub it with my fingers, tuck it into my pocket. “Morgan?”

  I jolt fully awake. “Our appointment’s at eight,” I say blearily.

  “I know,” he says. “But I figured you wouldn’t want the press to see us arrive together, and they should start getting here pretty soon. So . . .”

  I study his face, slowly glowing into being through the breath-fogged windshield. I can see precisely how I would paint that not-quite-question on his lips.

  “I don’t—” I say. He hears the apology before I can make it and shakes his head.

  “I can drop you off at a diner or a coffee shop or wherever if you can’t go home,” he says. “I don’t know what’s open this early around here, but if you know a place, I can take you.”

  I sit up, rubbing my eyes. A corduroy jacket collapses onto my legs with a long sigh of warmth.

  “My car’s at the Mansion,” I say. “If—I mean, if you could take me there. If you don’t mind.”

  He doesn’t meet my gaze. But maybe it’s because I’m not meeting his.

  We drive past warehouses and office parks, silent except for my terse directions, our still-fogged windows rolled down. I’m cold and want to wrap the jacket around me, but I leave it on my lap. I am afraid of acknowledging the kindness of it.

  Light is beginning to fill the sky when we trundle past the Mansion. My car is the only one on the block. Before he pulls away, Howie reaches into the back seat and unearths a black T-shirt, gigantic and soft. “Take it,” he says.

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s cleaner than what you’re wearing.”

  I pause on the sidewalk.

  “Thanks,” I say. “For the ride, and for not—”

  I am still reaching for the word, but he shakes his head before I can get there.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says. His gaze is on the seat, on the door handle, on the sky behind my head. “I’ll see you at eight, okay?”

  It’s my hand that closes the door, but his voice that pushes it shut.

  28

  I go to Java Jane when it opens at six, hoping and fearing that Caro will be behind the counter. She isn’t.

  In the bathroom, I shed the Frappuccino-stiff sweatshirt and exchange it for Howie’s black tee. It’s soft against my bare skin. I don’t want to smell it, but I can’t help it. It’s all cedar and warmth, too clean for the back seat of a car. I wonder about this boy, and then I wonder about Chad, and I shudder over the sink. I wash my hands, and wash and wash, and when that’s not enough I wash my face, too, cold water and industrial pink pearlescent soap stinging my eyes. I open my mouth wide, running my foamy hands over my tongue and swiping my fingers over and behind my molars, gagging as I hit the back of my throat. I dry my face with paper towels and blink into the mirror. The same old features blink back at me, bewildered, as though unsure why this time, like all the others, didn’t work out for the best.

  I should check on the Hole, but I can’t bring myself to look. I imagine it gaping, disfigured. I want to pull the whole thing from my body, leave it leaking in the restroom’s pink trash can. But instead I buy a coffee and a day-old pumpkin scone and sit by the window. My body feels like a mess of doll parts sacked in skin.

  Ordinary people come in for their daily half-caf and skinny and soy, for regular and extra shots. In the window, Java Jane is dressed as a sexy witch in a Mardi Gras mask and miniskirt, a plastic Halloween bucket dangling f
rom her fingers.

  On my way out, I spot my toroid silhouette on the cover of the Indy Week, and I dump the entire stack of newspapers into the recycling bin.

  Howie is, as promised, nowhere to be seen when I arrive fifteen minutes late for our appointment. The crowd outside is bigger and more raucous than usual. I step from the car and am engulfed in a battery of flashes and shouts.

  “Are you excited for today’s—”

  “What can you tell us—”

  I squint past the expensive recording equipment, past the vitriolic Hole Girl haters, and peer at the people who wait quietly in the fringes, hugging themselves in the chill morning air. They are as young as twelve, as old as seventy—some men, but mostly women, girls in baggy sweaters, in crop tops, cupping coffee, holding signs. Hole Girl, we love you and Puzzle Pieces Forever and We All Have Holes.

  “Have you and the Lump Boy—”

  “Miss Stone, people have been—”

  Go away, I want to say—not to the press, but to these people silently huddled and waiting behind them, certain that they’ve found an empowering metaphor for their lives in me. I feel Chad’s fingers writhe in my stomach as I turn my face away and head inside.

  The nurses have solved the problem of our cumbersome paper gowns by chopping them off at the ribs, leaving Howie and me with floating blue vests. I tug at the edges of mine, intensely aware of my nudity beneath the paper. Amanda told me I could keep my bra on, but I don’t have one, my moon-and-stars bikini top abandoned on the floor of Chad’s living room.

  The research team shuffles to life when I enter, a flurry of paper coffee cups tucking away under chairs.

  Dr. Morse looks at her watch.

  “Kind of you to join us,” she says.

  I’m with Taka today. He makes small talk with me as he presses on my back and kidneys. His eyes flicker to my face as he monitors my blood pressure. He frowns and casts an eye over my vitals.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks.

  “Peachy.” My voice lurches out of my throat like something half dead, coated in soap scum. I wonder if there’s some sort of Victorian test that doctors can perform to verify that I lost my Hole virginity. I sneak a peek down at the Hole through Taka’s busy hands. It sits in my stomach unchanged: same smooth skin, same oblong scoop missing from my midriff. Relief jolts through me. Taka, hand on my abs, frowns and looks up with a question in his face, but just squeezes my hand with his gloved one before retreating to the computer.

  I find Howie, similarly blue-vested, in the corner. Our eyes lock for a second, and then he returns his gaze to the middle distance, erasing himself from the room. I remember the crumpled, snot-smeared paper napkin tucked away in the passenger door of his car. A souvenir of my secret self that I wish more than anything I’d thrown away.

  “All right,” Dr. Morse says at the end of the hour, smiling as she pulls off her gloves. “Let’s just do one initial merge and then wrap up.”

  There’s a murmur among the researchers, a flickering of phones. I look from Takahashi to Morse, confused.

  “We want to fit you together,” she says. “To get some initial data regarding the compatibility of your external mutations pretreatment.”

  “How is that medically necessary?” I ask.

  Dr. Morse faces me full-on.

  She says, “So that we can trace the physiological progress of the treatment. We want to get a sense of whether your deformities regress at the same rate.”

  I swallow. “Use a ruler.”

  She steps closer.

  “Miss Stone,” she says, an exasperated kindergarten teacher.

  I look to Taka, but he turns to the sink, giving me the blank expanse of his back.

  “Howie, are you ready?” Dr. Morse asks. There’s surgical steel in her voice. Across the room, Howie rises.

  It feels as though gravity has collected in a pool around this moment: these events taking on an irresistible weight. The fabric of the universe stretching so that everything in my life slides toward this instant: my birth, my paintings, my dreams. The sandwich I had for lunch yesterday, my mother, the shape of my toenails: everything in service of the inevitable merging of our bodies.

  I look helplessly around the room for sympathetic eyes that will hold mine, but there is nothing. The nurse and aides drift in the background like brightly colored fish, humming from one machine to the next, checking monitors, quiet and calm. Their gazes dart out at our torsos and flash away again from beneath their smooth-handed tasks. I feel the room waver beneath my feet.

  “Wait.”

  Everyone’s attention snaps up to Howie like a trampoline released.

  “Parker,” Howie says, softly, “I need to talk to Morgan for a minute.”

  Dr. Morse’s voice is clamps and grips. She says, “Can it wait?”

  Howie says, “No.”

  The researchers shift and look awkwardly to the floor, to their notepads, to suddenly interesting things on their phones. The nurses busy themselves with restocking tongue depressors. There is nothing but air standing between Howie and his angry doctor.

  “One minute,” he says again. Dr. Morse closes her eyes and, face pinched, jerks her head toward the door. The weight of everyone’s expectations rolls across my shoulder blades as we pass. I follow Howie out into the hushed, low-ceilinged hallway.

  He catches my arm outside the changing room doors, and I flinch. He loosens his grip, but doesn’t let me go. “You don’t want to do this,” he says. “Everyone in the room can tell.”

  “No,” I say.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  He pushes his floppy bangs out of his eyes, clearly frustrated. “Morgan, it’s just bodies.”

  “No,” I say, crossing my arms over my stomach. “It’s my body.”

  He studies me a long moment. Not like before, eyes leaping shyly up and away. But slow and steady, a subtle shift.

  He says, “What do you want?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you could do anything right now. Be anywhere. Where would it be?”

  “Anywhere but here,” I say, honestly.

  He runs a hand over the back of his neck. A small smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

  “You know, that sounds pretty good to me, too.”

  I hesitate. I’m still not sure what side he’s on. If this is a ploy on his and Morse’s part to gain my trust. But I remember the way he didn’t touch me last night. Didn’t make me explain myself. And despite myself, something small and quiet clicks into place.

  I glance back toward the empty bend in the hallway. Just beyond, the room full of researchers waits to fit our bodies together like inhuman puzzle pieces.

  And so for the second time in my life, I look into a boy’s face and ask, “Do you want to get out of here?”

  He grins, the sun splitting the clouds. “Grab your clothes,” he says. “I know a way out.”

  We clatter down a back stairwell to a cold cement-slabbed landing lit dimly by a glowing emergency exit sign. Howie draws up short at the door, studying the warning: alarm will sound.

  He turns back to me, face full of apology. “I thought—” he begins.

  I push past him and slam the red emergency bar with my hip. Sunlight hits me full in the face. An alarm shrieks out into the air behind the building, and for a moment, I’m deaf and blind. Then Howie streaks past, and I follow, giddiness jerking laughter from our bodies as we fly over the landscaping and toward the street where his battered Nissan sits in the sun, waiting.

  Howie cranks the engine to life just as people begin to round the corner, zombie hordes bearing high-tech cameras. I catch one last glimpse of the building as we surge away: faces in the windows, blinking out of view as the sun races across the glass alongs
ide us. And then we’re past the stop sign, past the on-ramp, out onto the highway and gloriously gone.

  Howie steers us down lazily curving roads out into the country, open windows letting the autumn air flow giddily through our hair. It’s weird to be back in his car again under such different circumstances. I search for the ghost of my morning self, sobbing in the shadow-fingered dark. But everything is mellow autumn sunshine and a distant hint of woodsmoke, the kiss of October. It’s like last night never happened, like we’re two ordinary kids skipping school. Not running from mad scientists and national media. Not with hearts exhausted from a lifetime of breaking.

  It happened, I tell myself fiercely. It happened, it was true, everything is not okay.

  I sneak a peek at Howie. The wind lifts his floppy bangs and taps them against his forehead, rhythmically, like a little game. He catches my eye and beams.

  Everything is not okay.

  I look away from him, checking the rearview mirror. We’re all alone. “You lost them so easily,” I realize. “Have you done this before?”

  “Done what?”

  “Dodged the paparazzi.”

  Howie laughs. It is as bright and startling as the first time I heard it: a child’s laugh, purely happy.

  “No,” he says. “I just know the roads. I grew up here.”

  I twist in my seat. “Wait, what? In Raleigh?”

  “Silver Creek.” He sees my dubious face and says, “Just on the other side of Pittsboro.”

  “We seriously live an hour apart?”

  “Not even. Forty-five minutes, maybe. I moved to New York last year for college, though.”

  I study him, struggling to overlay this new information onto his existing features. The pale skin and skinny arms don’t mesh with my idea of brawny, deeply tanned small-town farm boys.