We sit on his stoop. He folds the pink flyer into an airplane, neatly, and chucks it. It loops and dives nose-first into the bushes.
“There were definitely easier ways to find me,” I say, breaking the silence.
He shrugs. “I’ve always been an elaborate kind of guy.” He flashes me the dimpled grin that once made me melt. “The posters were my roommate’s idea, actually. He’s studying advertising. He thought it would get your attention.”
“Attention got,” I say.
Chad lets his head hang. He sighs, a man with the great burden of feeling feelings.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, I felt kind of shitty when you ran out like that. I thought you would be into it. Turns out you weren’t.” He passes me the top. The sequins throw light over my fingers like water.
We sit and stare out over the parking lot. The sky is aging.
“You should have asked,” I say.
“You could have just told me,” he says.
The air is saturated with all the things I want to say to him. You can’t assume and consent works both ways and I hadn’t found my voice yet. But I feel a deep-down, peaceful kind of tired. I turn the sequined top over in my fingers. Dry clean only, it informs me in small letters. The wind picks up, and I pull my coat closer.
“Did you know I’d never been with a guy before?” I ask.
He looks at me. I have lost all feeling for this boy, but his eyes are still arrestingly blue. It seems unfair that someone can mean so little to you and still be so beautiful.
“No shit,” he says. It is half a question and half not.
“Zero shits,” I tell him.
“Huh.” He laughs. I look at him, and he says, “You know, that actually explains a lot.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I dunno. I guess I thought you were some experienced chick or something, playing these messed-up head games.”
“No,” I say. “I just didn’t know anything.”
I laugh. It’s a bright, painful, unfunny thing, twisting up into the air. He laughs, too, and I know it is only because I am laughing. That he doesn’t get it at all.
“What were you going to put on the website when it went live?”
He rumples his hair. “I dunno. Probably just something dumb. Like that dancing banana GIF.” He grins at me, but it is a check-in grin. Do I think this is funny? I do not. I also suspect it is not the truth. “I guess you want us to take it down, huh.”
“No,” I say. “I want you to take it live.” And I reach for a pen and paper and explain the rest.
I don’t know if he’ll do it. I’m not even sure he gets entirely what I mean. But he nods a lot, and in the end, no matter what I feel he owes me, I guess I can’t ask for more than that.
“Hey,” he says, as I stand to go. “You’re still a virgin?”
There’s a time and a place to point out that virginity is a problematic social construct, but this isn’t it, so I just say, “Yeah.”
He squints blue up at me, and I hope, for a minute, that he’ll say, Well, if you ever want to try again—make me some offer that I can turn down, firmly and proudly. So I can say, I don’t need you, Handsome Chad! I have real love now. And smugly watch the disappointment dawn on his face.
But he doesn’t. He just looks at me until the wind rattles the flyer in the bushes, and then he looks at that.
“Life’s funny,” he says, at last.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess it is.”
I pick up my bag, then turn back toward him impulsively. His legs are too long. They fold up around him, springlike, ready to propel him into some next chapter of his life that doesn’t have me in it.
“Do you want to keep the shirt?” I ask.
He looks bemused. “What am I going to do with it?”
“You know,” I say. “Just hold on to it. A memory of the time you almost slept with the Hole Girl.”
“You’re funny,” he says. But he takes the shirt, stands. I look for him in the rearview mirror as I pull out of the parking lot, but he has already disappeared inside, taking a small, sequined remnant of my story with him.
49
I was hoping to make a quiet entrance, but a roar goes up from the crowd outside the Mansion when we walk up on November 25: Howie, looking self-conscious, me with the Hole exposed to the world. Caro follows in a flowy skirt and bikini top, beaming, serene in her own skin. The cameras are there, as is a crowd far bigger than I could have hoped or imagined: people from Public Scrutiny and from all over the city, drawn by the mysterious rainbow flyers to a website promising that at this place, at this date, they could live their own stories in a way they never imagined.
I’m swept up in the shouting, smiling sea of humanity. People grab my hand, wrap me in hugs. I fight back a wave of claustrophobia and lean my cheek against the sticky skins of strangers. The crowd is a seething mix of bodies: large, small, dark, light, scarred, smooth, abled and dis-. People wear white paper circles taped to their stomachs. Addict, reads one. Anorexia. Lost faith. Assault survivor. Haven’t come out to my mom. Some contain long, complex messages: drawings, poems. You’d have to spend a long time with the person to understand their Hole. I watch a man peer at a woman’s stomach for a long, confused time. She regards him quietly, confidently, waiting. Ready to field the answer to his question.
There’s a folding table set up to one side with markers and tape, and a sign pinned to it: the what’s your hole? project. I wave to the two girls tending it, and they—mindthegap and janeyz, I know, though I’m not sure which is which—break into smiles, waving frantically back. One of them, a broad-shouldered high schooler, excitedly flashes me five spread fingers and mouths, Five hundred! Five hundred Holes already out among the crowd.
When we get inside, Yum Yum Situation is just taking the stage. The dance floor is packed, the bar completely mobbed. Frank complained when I stopped by earlier to drop off supplies. “I was hoping for an easy last night of work,” he said. The drinks of the crowd roiling around the bar are dotted with pink-and-lime umbrellas.
Caro puts on a brave face as the band launches into the familiar opening chords of “Go-Go A No-No.” I slip my hand into hers and squeeze her sweating palm with mine. Then we throw ourselves into the fray, losing our bodies and building them back up out of sound. Sweat drips down my back and runs through the Hole, and my arms are leopard spotted with the flashing blue and green lights. My ears are ground away into white nothing; I am throbbing, I am pulsing, I am the beat surging up through the floor and setting me alight. Around me, hundreds of people give themselves up to the sound. Lost Holes cover the floor, the adhesive in the cheap masking tape relinquishing its hold on people’s sweat-pearling flesh. No art is perfect.
Howie finds me toward the end of the last set, sitting on my favorite stool and working on a paper Hole of my own. It’s not perfect, and I’ve had to start over too many times to count as strangers come by to shake hands, hug, share. By my elbow is a growing pile of Holes that people have taken off and given to me. “Thank you, Hole Girl,” one girl said. Another couldn’t stop crying. People drift away from me and then to one another, eyes creeping from stomachs to faces. I’ve noticed knots forming, groups swelling and growing bigger. And couples pairing off shyly, too, LONELINESS scrawled across their torsos.
I’m slapping the back of my neck when Howie comes up. Every time I turn my back, Frank’s been squirting me with a lemon wedge. Howie shouts something in my ear, but it’s lost. His blond hair is slick with sweat, and his body is pale and thin and glistening and shaped exactly like him. My whole body throbs in one painful, sweet heartbeat. There’s an E-chord from the stage, and a scream goes up from the crowd. A spotlit Todd sings, low into the mic: “Hole Girl, Hole Girl.” The crowd choruses back, “I’m falling for you.”
Or is it Whole Girl? I watch Todd’s fa
ce as he searches the audience, and wonder: Is he looking for Caroline? Is she looking back?
I fold up the Hole I’m working on and slip it in my back pocket. It feels like a rough draft and also like it’s finished. I guess there are some things you can never be done saying.
It says,
My Hole is that I wasn’t supportive of you and Todd when I was lonely.
My Hole is that I thought your love for him meant you had less love for me, instead of being happy that you were happy.
My Hole is that you loved me anyway, even when I didn’t deserve it. And when I was truly mean, you drew a line in the sand, because love doesn’t mean you take people’s shit.
My Hole is that I’m still not brave enough to say any of this out loud.
My whole is I love you, and I’m sorry, and I thank you. All of these things will stay true even if you go to college on the other side of the moon, and until the end of time.
xxo, M
Howie slips his arm around my waist, and I lean against his sweaty body. I look out at the floating sea of holes. The dusty cherubs. The many arms around many waists.
“I want to stop our treatment,” I shout to Howie.
He doesn’t seem to hear me for a second. I start to say it again when he says, “I don’t think this is the right place to talk about it.”
“I do,” I say.
“You’re getting better,” he says.
“No, I’m not.”
“The Hole’s going away.”
“That doesn’t make me better.”
Todd launches into the chorus, and the crowd screams, “Reach on down and fall right through.” Howie’s arm tightens around my waist.
“Think about it,” he says.
“I have.”
He turns and leans his damp forehead against the side of my neck, and we lose ourselves in each other.
The song is winding down. People are beginning to look our way again. And I say for the second time ever to a boy in a club: “Do you want to get out of here?”
Howie’s eyes jump to mine and away and back again: little leverets of hope.
“Yes,” he says quietly. “I would.”
He twines his fingers into mine, and we hold each other in this way, dizzy with happiness, while all around us people, still hurting but no longer lonely, sing and dance and lift their arms, wrapping the ending song in their embrace. The hint of everything they can be glimmering in the rising house lights. As if, together, they can touch the sky.
50
Caro stays behind. She hugs me tight, says she needs to take care of a few things, that she’ll get a ride from Arquette. In the background, the band slowly packs up their equipment. One lone silhouette stands at the edge of the stage, tense and searching.
Howie and I climb into my car. The air between us vibrates like a plucked chord, the reverberations thrilling in the Hole. We don’t look at each other. Our fingers dance together and apart and together again.
“I need to make a quick detour,” I say, eyeing the rearview mirror. Howie, dizzy and distracted in the passenger seat, barely notices until we pull up in the alley behind the gallery.
“Did you want to—” he asks. “Here?”
“What?” I laugh and turn scarlet. “I just need to run inside for a minute.”
Howie follows me as I grab a towel from the trunk of my car and unlock the gallery’s back door. I deactivate the alarm and pass through the office and into the main hall without turning on the lights. The words what am i missing? nibble at the corners of their vast wall, glowing blue in the dark. Everything is prepped and ready for the opening later this week. We walk together through a corridor of my wild, lonely paintings, made ghostly in the dark. Missing eyes, missing hearts, missing heads. Missing girls.
Howie pauses before a painting of a girl with no mouth, cupping a wingless bird in her hands.
He says, in a low voice, “It’s weird how much time you spent hiding, when all you really wanted was to be seen.”
“I was really worried that people might not see me the right way.”
“Why did you care so much what other people think?”
I rest a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I can’t remember anymore.”
I make him wait for me outside the final room. It’s empty except for the mirror in its antique frame. It takes less than a minute to pry the clasps loose and slide the glass from its moorings. I wrap it in the towel, lean it against the wall and stomp-kick through it. It gives way with a sickening crack, slumping down within its terry-cloth skin. I step on it again and again, until I’m satisfied. Then I collect my bundle, tucking in the edges carefully and go.
I leave the frame where it is, hanging empty on the wall. What am I missing? the exhibition asks as I leave.
And the answer: nothing.
We drive home with the windows down and the radio off. I listen to the wind and hear nothing but the sounds of two hearts beating.
We climb the stairs to my room carefully, quietly, the edges of our bodies touching. I want to melt into him, for the whole thing to pick up momentum and snowball us forward, but we are both so nervous that even kissing is difficult, complicated by bumping noses and hyperawareness. The entire night has leaned toward this one moment, and now that it is finally here, I am terrified, and he is terrified, and neither of us knows how to go forward, and neither of us wants to stop.
We undress each other. My shirt gets caught on my nose, and he gets tangled in his jeans, but we make it work somehow, and then suddenly, we are in our underwear, facing each other.
And then in our skin. He reaches for me.
Here are the options for our first time together:
Option A: The whole thing is ecstatically, blissfully perfect. We come together like the lost human puzzle pieces we are. We clash against each other again and again; we cling to each other and ride the waves of ebbing bliss. We are turned inside out by passion. We hold each other, gaze into each other’s eyes and know that this is it, this is the great true love that people spend their whole lives searching for. Everything feels like eternity.
Option B: It is sweet, but awkward. We fumble in the dark. Words and ideas like between the sheets cease to be ideas gleaned from movies and dreams and become a thing concrete and moist and real. We can’t figure out elbows. My leg cramps. We laugh, and we stop laughing, and suddenly everything is quiet and candlelit.
It hurts, both more and less than I was expecting. Howie comes almost immediately. The whole thing lasts about three minutes, so short that we didn’t even get the Hole figured out, and the Lump just sort of pressed into my side the whole time. He jumps up and gets me tissues, dabs between my legs at the mess I don’t want to see and can’t believe is finally mine. I feel suddenly shy, tell him, “Don’t.” I reach to take the tissues away, and our fingers brush, and our eyes lock in the candlelight. And that’s when I realize that it is all going to be okay, that this thing that just happened happened with a person I know and trust, and this fact is enough to keep me awake in the dim light long after the sound of his gentle breathing has begun to fill the room.
Or maybe the options aren’t mutually exclusive.
51
I climb quietly from bed around five in the morning. The apartment is quiet, Howie still sleeping. I leave a kiss in the soft hollow of his temple, a piece of the broken mirror by his shoes. I pause to prop another by Caro’s door as I pass along with the folded paper Hole I made last night at the party. Her door is closed, but I hear the low murmuring of breath inside. I strain a moment to hear if it’s one person or two. It’s hard to know definitively, but I know that no matter what, I don’t need to worry. The sticky notes marching around the bathroom door are just one word, again and again, that she posted last night before we left: joy, joy, joy.
I got an email from my dad just before the party. He did
n’t say anything about being stood up, which makes me wonder if he bailed, too. He apologized for having to leave town before Thanksgiving, but said he was eager to get back to Michigan, to spend the day with his family. He sent me the pictures, and I looked at the grimacing smiles of two children who have nothing to do with me but blood. He assured me, though I did not ask, that their torsos are perfectly whole. I haven’t replied.
The other pieces of the mirror chatter in my bag as I pad down the stairs into the quiet living room. The street outside is still—people sleeping in on the holiday, the paparazzi gone home to their own families. I lean my forehead against the glass and think about the still-dark houses in the neighborhoods waiting to be transformed by the warm smells of turkey and pie. I reach instinctively for emptiness, but for once, find none.
We’re having Thanksgiving dinner at Mother’s later with Howie’s family, Caro and Dr. Morse. Mother was going to have everything catered, but Rachel insisted on home cooking. Their family car will roll up to my mother’s enormous house at noon with a back seat full of kids and dogs, and a trunk stuffed with casserole dishes: mashed potatoes, green beans, cornbread, sweet potatoes heaped with marshmallows and ready to go into the oven. I asked Mother what I should bring, and she said, with a pained glance toward my kitchen, “Napkins.”
I lay the remaining pieces of mirror on the windowsill. I’ve marked them out in my mind for Mother and Taka and Frank, plus a few extra for strangers I haven’t met yet. But right now, the what am i missing? mirrors reflect only pieces of sky.
I go to my easel, examine the painting there. It’s the DNA portrait of Howie and me, and it’s wrong, all wrong. I cut it gently from its frame, let it collapse to the floor. Then I stretch a new piece and begin again.
The painting pours out of my hands in rapid, urgent strokes. It is nothing I know, and it is also everything. There is the dancing umber of Howie’s eyes, the bright honey color of Caroline’s hair. I see the crooked shape of Frank’s grin, the cool, elegant lines of Mother’s fingers. And colors and shapes I don’t know. Or maybe will, but don’t yet.
Hole in the Middle Page 28
