Jessica was just a means to an end for you and you didn’t even cry when she died, even though you were there in her purse during the accident, wedged into a small space in the dark recess of the soft leather, amongst the loose change and roach clips and gum wrappers. Jessica’s parents took the purse home from the hospital after they were called to identify the body, and Jessica’s mother put the purse in her daughter’s room, even though Jessica would never need it again. Later when Jessica’s parents were downstairs crying in the kitchen, you slid out of the purse, opening the storm window, forgetting to close it once you were gone. Feeling the cold draft, Jessica’s mother returned to the room and seeing the open window, she trembled the ghost of her daughter had entered, unable to find peace in her transition. You could hear her mother sobbing platitudes to Jessica’s ghost, thinking her daughter’s ghost could hear, but you knew it was pointless because as you told me later, there were no ghosts. You yourself were not a ghost but a shape shifter, an escape artist, a sorcerer, a shaman. I didn’t call you any of those things until much later because when I first met you I thought it was romance and not an abduction.
I try to think back to when I first met you—it seems another lifetime ago—I might have been eleven years old. There may have been an earlier time, but this is the first time I remember. I was on a ski trip with my father in Italy and even back then you had followed me, regardless of my age and inconvenient location. You were always willing to travel, to watch, to wait. Later on you would tell me it was an old vendetta with my family on my mother’s side. The vendetta started so long ago, the vengeance was more important than the events that caused the ignition; the rabid and lethal directives were inescapable, even to you.
At first I only knew the more recent events, you had tried to kill my great grandfather, and when your murderous urges failed, my great grandfather dying of old age, you turned your attention to my mother. You have been able to injure my mother in unfathomable ways, eaten away at her psyche, ravishing her body and shattering my parents’ marriage, but you have not succeeded in pulling her completely under; so far she had kept her head above water, even on the days her mouth is submerged and her nose takes in water. Later you would tell me how it all started, long ago in Ireland with a tragedy involving our two families, but even you admitted maybe it went back even farther than this, before you were born or before you evolved to have the facility to think, to feel, to remember.
The vendetta was passed down from my mother and you found a picture of me to memorize. You were older than me but now our ages have caught up with each other. Throughout the years you keep trying to kill me but we have also fallen in love. The drama is spectacular and part of the allure. When I felt an irreparable change brewing in me that was almost fifteen years in the making, it was shocking even to myself. I slowly over a period of six months realized I wanted to break free. There was no other way to do it except to kill you. This was not something I had ever tried before and we were both shocked by the decision. It momentarily stunned you long enough that I could push you down the stairs. You came back at me furiously but along with your rage your face revealed you were wounded not only physically, but also deep down in your emotional core. I knew even though most times you appeared to lack feeling, your stone-faced façade was not the reality of your inner life. I knew you were fragile and in that way you were breakable. I had coddled you throughout the years in a way that is hard to explain. Perhaps it is best to start at the beginning, the very first day I felt your presence in my life, that day on the ski slopes in Italy.
2.
My father was a surgeon and routinely traveled to doctors’ conferences around the world, held in locations attractive for extracurricular activities like Hawaii, or Southern California, or the Coast of Portugal, or in this case the Italian Alps. We were a ski family, my father teaching all of us kids to balance on skis as soon as we could stand on our tiny feet. I wasn’t athletic but skiing was the only sport I loved because I could do it well. I didn’t love it for the vanity of my skill, but rather for the sense of freedom it gave me. To barrel down a mountain on the edge of being unhinged, with the innate knowledge I could ride that line and not destroy myself. I’d be able to turn away at the last minute from a tree, or a fallen skier, or a patch of ice, before there was a crash or devastating skidding out of control.
I was only eleven but I was tall for my age and often mistaken for being much older. It wasn’t until someone got close and saw my baby face or tried to talk to me—my naivety and immaturity quickly revealed—before they realized I was not even a teenager. I was the awkward age preceding it, where you teeter between a child and a teen, where you understand the world is not always a safe place but you don’t understand the specifics of the people who might want to hurt you and how they might do it.
On this trip, my father went to the doctors’ lectures in the early mornings and late mornings he would come back to the hotel room to change into his ski clothes where I’d be waiting dressed for the slopes. We’d take the elevator to the equipment lockers in the basement and throw our skis and poles over our shoulders, hoist our boot bags on our backs and trudge through the snowy street to reach the ski shuttle that ran every fifteen minutes, hauling doctors and tourists to the base of the mountain, and returning them in fifteen minute increments back to the hotel. We’d been on the trip for only two days with seven more to go when I began suffering from altitude sickness. It was difficult to eat, my stomach constantly nauseous. This creeping upset in my stomach cast a feeling of unease over me generally and in retrospect I wonder if I knew you were watching me or if I sensed on some intuitive level all that was about to start and all that would follow.
My father and I skied for a few hours until around the lunch hour when he suggested we go to the halfway lodge, named such for being located halfway down the mountain, to sit and rest outside in the sun and have a bite to eat. I wasn’t hungry but I nodded in agreement as my legs were tired—I was used to skiing on the hard packed icy trails of Vermont, not the deep powder of the Alps—and I was overcompensating by bearing down hard on my skis in order to remain in control, rendering my legs shaky from fatigue.
My father and I met at the ski racks and piled our skis and poles together into a queue, locking it with the padlock my father kept in his pocket. Beautiful European men and women of indeterminate age were sitting in wooden chairs with reclining backs, holding bottles of beer and plastic cups of wine. They lounged sleepily in the bright snow with their limbs sprawled out, their mirrored sunglasses glinting, their warm tans glowing, the zinc on their noses and lips shining. Looking at one woman who had cast off her coat to reveal a tight-fitting sweater, I stared at her loose limbs and curved breasts connected to her strong-featured face; I couldn’t imagine myself growing up to inhabit a similarly sensual body.
My father and I clunked awkwardly in our boots up to the food line where my father ordered our lunch in his rudimentary Italian. The workers replied in English but my father refused to acquiesce, continuing the conversation in Italian as he had been practicing the language using a workbook and cassette tapes for months before the trip. He ordered a bottle of beer in Italian, ‘birra’, and even I knew this word in Italian since it sounded so much like the English word. I asked for a Coca-Cola which was the same word in Italian as in English. We carried our trays outside and found two empty wooden chairs so we could enjoy a moment in the warm sun. My father twisted the top off his beer bottle and poured some of it into a plastic cup. I could smell it from where I was sitting and the smell was familiar but not desirable. My father handed me the cup and asked if I’d like to try a sip. I was curious so I took the cup and had a small sip, shocked at the beer’s revolting taste. My father laughed as I leaned over in my chair and spit in the snow, trying to rid the alcohol from my mouth.
As I was bent over clearing my throat, I sensed someone was watching me and I suddenly felt like prey; I was being sized up and considered for consumption. I snapped my head up quickly and looked around but there was no one I could see looking in my direction. You told me later what you saw, a young girl taking a sip of beer from a plastic cup and swallowing, then spitting out what she could in the snow, her soft brown hair fallen over her face, her thin body dressed in a light blue ski jacket with orange stripes that matched her light blue ski pants. Her orange hat was in her lap and when she pulled her head up and looked around her sunglasses caught the glare and her skin was pink from the exposure, soft and round, still holding some baby fat. You told me later you hated the cold and the snow and you especially hated skiing. You weren’t going to stay there long since you knew where I lived back in the States. You headed back to the States the next day and I no longer felt the altitude sickness. Did I really have altitude sickness or was it love sickness or danger sickness or anticipatory sickness about meeting you? Maybe it was all of the above.
I returned to classes after the ten days I had been pulled out of school by my father for the ski trip. My homeroom teacher asked me where I had gone for the vacation and when I said the Italian Alps his face registered surprise. He asked me to confirm what he had just heard, “Did you just say you went skiing in the Italian Alps? As a sixth grader, you had the opportunity to ski in the Italian Alps?” His voice rose and his words were choppy as he bit them off. I was uncomfortable with the knowledge that I had gone somewhere he might never be able to afford to travel on his teacher’s salary.
I wanted to say it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t ask to go, and I felt sick most of the time; I was scared of the strangeness of the language, the gamey food, the dark nipples and curly pubic hair of the women changing in the hotel’s hot tub locker room. I missed my mother and I craved the cold skim milk I drank at home with every meal. I didn’t like how whenever I ordered a glass of milk, the waiters would laugh and return with a hot glass of curdled milk, thinking I was asking because I was a baby in a grown girl’s body. The first thing I did when I returned home was to pull the cold gallon of skim milk from the refrigerator and pour myself a tall glass. When I finished the milk, I kissed my parents good night, grateful to sleep in sheets that smelled like my mother’s perfume from when she had made up my bed.
3.
I think the next time I sensed your presence was the following year in seventh grade when I befriended Jessica, who smoked pot and clove cigarettes and wore a leather jacket throughout the day, even when it was warm. We were seated next to each other in homeroom because our last names both started with S. I was the unassuming good student, and she was the more interesting troubled one. I was fascinated with her smoking, something I wished I could try, but I was too afraid my parents would smell the smoke on my breath to risk it. One morning Jessica was swaying a bit in her chair and I asked her if she was okay. She whispered into my ear, “I’m drunk,” while pushing a metallic thermos on her desk toward me. I unscrewed the cap and sniffed the liquid and the smell was so potent I jerked my head away from the open container with a snort. Jessica laughed as she took the thermos from me and screwed the cap back on. “You shouldn’t drink this stuff,” she said, “You’re a good girl.” I wanted to deny this reality because deep down I knew I was anything but good, my thoughts often disturbed and petty, but again I was too frightened to cross that line from a nonsmoker to a smoker, from a nondrinker to a drinker, from a good girl to a bad one.
I noticed when Jessica shut her eyes and her head fell back, her turtleneck rode down revealing she had a splotch of bruising on her neck—it looked like a mark from a fresh injury—I didn’t know what a hickey was at the time. In another year she would be crushed to death in the passenger seat of a car driven by her high school boyfriend who was drunk driving after a neighborhood party. When I described Jessica to you later you knew her because you knew many teenagers who died.
You told me how you would walk with Jessica to school as a way to get closer to me, and you’d suck on her neck while she drank from her thermos. You’d buy her cigarettes and when Jessica approached the schoolyard, you’d shape shift into a stain on her pants and tremble with excitement when Jessica’s leg would brush up against mine under our homeroom table.
4.
I met you in person, in human form, when I was sixteen, with my swelling sexuality and firm young body. I was shy but curious and my introversion was an effective mask for the growing gloominess I felt inside. I never told anyone my dark thoughts because I was afraid there was something wrong with me. I’d spend hours fantasizing about meeting someone like you, someone mysterious and older, passionately obsessed with me to a degree that bordered on insanity. Someone I could talk to who would understand my repetitive thoughts about death and destruction.
Maybe in this way I conjured you, drawing pictures of someone like you in my sketchbook late at night when I should have been sleeping. I drew a portrait of a man with a narrow long face, slightly crooked teeth and sloping almond eyes with pupils so large they appeared black. I tore the pencil drawing out of my sketchbook and folded the paper into a tiny square and I carried your folded face in the front pocket of my jeans every day, like we had done in middle school with the names of our crushes.
The first day I met you at the gas station my heart did a somersault within the fluid of my chest cavity; I felt the thrill in my stomach the same as when I did somersaults in the swimming pool. You looked just like the picture I drew on the folded sketchbook paper and had opened and closed so many times your paper face was silky soft, like it was in real life, as I would find out soon after.
You were at the counter of the gas station corner store, a location in walking distance from my home. I walked there often out of boredom to flick through the magazines and stare at the cartons of cigarettes while I paid for my gum and soda. I stood behind you in line and you turned to look at me out of the corner of your eye with a sly grin. You flashed your crooked teeth, which of all your features I loved most of all as everyone my age had braces and anyone older had straight teeth. Your crooked teeth made you feel foreign, or of an ambiguous age, like a younger more feral boy who had donned the suit of an older body.
I blushed at your smile and looked down at my bare toes with pink painted toenails strapped in my green flip-flops. I was wearing a tank top without a bra because my chest was still flat but suddenly I felt underdressed. Your glance seemed to dissolve my clothing until I was standing naked behind you, quivering in anticipation—scared, excited, guilty and vulnerable—but most of all complicit. I wanted you even though I knew I was too young.
I could tell you didn’t care.
You paid for your cigarettes and beer and the cashier put them in a paper bag. The bell on the door gave a jangle as you left the store. You didn’t look back. I paid for my items and put the gum in my pocket while popping the tab of the soda. There was another bell jangle of the door as I walked out with my senses on high alert. Like an animal I knew you were close.
The gas station corner store had a park behind it with a baseball diamond and a playground where kids of all ages hung out since it was easily accessible from any neighborhood street. Or I should say kids under the age of eighteen hung out in the playground because once kids turned eighteen and got their drivers’ licenses they no longer came, except at night when they’d park their cars in the parking lot and sit on car hoods to drink beer they’d get an older sibling to buy at the corner store.
I looked around but I didn’t see you, you seemed to have vanished, probably driven away in a car as you were clearly of the age where you could drive. I was disappointed but also relieved, both electrified and unnerved by the look in your eyes when you glanced back at me in line, summing me up, noting the gum and soda and the lack of a bra. I walked around the store to the back and up the slope to the playground, the earth dry and dusty, covering my feet with a thin coating of silt. The swing set was empty; the four black rubber seats hanging from chains looked depressing under the noon sun. I went over and sat in one, the hot rubber burning the underside of my thighs as I tipped back my head to drink my soda. When I returned my head forward you were sitting in the swing next to me.
I didn’t hear you walk over and there was no creak of the rusty swing chains when you sat down. You were slightly transparent now that I was close, I couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the sun or a trick you were able to play on my eyes. I shut and rubbed my eyelids, then opened my eyes and you were still there grinning, fading in and out like a mirage. Your paper bag was at your feet and you reached in and pulled out a bottle of beer. I could feel a cold breeze come off the bottle and my dry mouth watered for some relief from the dust and the sun and the boredom of that age when there’s not much to do at the same time the young body is energetic and strong.
You popped the bottle cap off the beer with a flick of your thumb and the sharp, ridged edge of the shooting cap cut my smooth skin like a razor. I looked down at my shin to see a tiny line of red emerge from my tan and I looked back up at you wondering what came next. You put the cold bottle up to your lips and tipped your head back and I saw the deep sip leave the bottle and enter your mouth, traveling down your throat with a push of your Adam’s apple. You handed the bottle to me and I felt like this moment had been building for my entire life. The cold bottle in my hand gave me an instant sense of relief. I was hot and nervous and when I looked at you, you now had two heads; two heads on two necks and one body and I wondered if I too had sprouted another head but when I swiveled my head back and forth, I looked to be alone. One of your heads was grinning and the other looked much more serious, and both of your heads were locking their eyes on me.
I tipped my head back slowly; intuitively knowing this would excite you with anticipation. I could smell the beer as I held the edge of the glass bottle up to my lips. The rim was slick with condensation and the wet of your tongue and as I slowly poured the liquid into my mouth starting with my lips, I could see you squirm in the seat of your swing as I swallowed my first mouthful of the bitter alcohol. This time I didn’t spit it out, but the taste was still peculiar and unpleasant. My legs broke out in goose bumps, the hair on the back of my neck stood up and a shiver ran through my body from bottom to top. The trembling started in my toes first, than traveled up my shins, surging over my knees and inside my thighs, quickly shuddering my torso. The blood rushed to my head until the convulsion ended at my mouth that stuttered from side to side. I looked back at you as if to get your approval, but when I turned to look you had four arms and four hands and they each held a bottle of beer in their five fingers. You drank all the bottles of beer, one after the other, with your arms flashing like a rotary in a factory line pouring bottles of beer into dislocated mouths. The empties dropped to the ground under your swing and my shoulders relaxed as the alcohol began to work its effects. I had never drunk alcohol aside from the one sip on the ski trip so the alcohol’s effects were strange and swift and I felt free of my self-consciousness, free of my anxiety, free of my boredom.
I slowly drank the rest of my beer and I remember that first beer seemed bottomless; like I could sip and swallow and sip and swallow forever and it would never be empty. By the time I was done my thighs were cold because I had been resting the bottle pressed between my legs when I wasn’t pouring it in my mouth, as I worked to empty it of its contents. When I was finished I put the bottle between my thighs one last time, then opened my thighs to let the empty bottle tumble over and fall onto the ground with a clink against your empties.
I felt a strange pulling sensation in my right arm and I looked down at the spot of distress and watched in disbelief as another hand emerged beside my hand I always had, and that new hand reached over to you and held one of yours. The point of contact was brief, there was a small pop and my second hand disappeared along with your hand, then all your hands, I’m not even sure if you had arms anymore, as your head with the serious face leaned over and kissed me. I didn’t open my mouth because I had never kissed a boy before and I could feel the muscle of your tongue pushing between my lips to pry them apart. I was caught off guard and didn’t resist and when your tongue was in my mouth I automatically met it with my tongue. For a minute we were wrestling before we switched places and I sucked the beer out of your molars while you drew the beer out of the back of my throat. Suddenly you were gone and I was sucking in my cheeks and squeezing my thighs together sitting alone on the swing set while your swing hung motionless beside me.
I didn’t know it at the time but this would start to happen often and when you disappeared you became a smudge on my clothing or body, and in these teen years you would most often shape shift into a spot of grease on a lock of my hair, an awkward length of hair at the front of my face that I tucked behind my ear every few minutes as it continually fell into my eyes. You chose the spot for that reason, I would stroke you for entire days, gently tucking you behind my ear while sitting through classes at school, while watching movies with my brother and sister, while walking through the shopping mall with my mother. It was better than sex you told me later, after I was no longer a virgin and could understand the import of the declaration.
I looked down at my toes that had kicked themselves free of my flip-flops and were dug into the sand under the swing. I held the swing’s chains and pushed off with my feet to start the swinging motion. As I flew higher and higher I thought I had never felt so good before, like I was a bird with a broken wing that had finally healed and as a bird in flight I made a pact with myself to never land and risk a repeat injury.
My phone was buzzing in my back pocket so I skidded the swing to a stop and I was astonished to see the sun was no longer overhead but lowering itself close to the horizon. My mother was hysterical and I lied my way out of trouble by saying I had run into my friend Stacey who lived near the gas station and I had gone over to her house for the afternoon, forgetting to call home to let my mother know my whereabouts. My mother was a nervous woman who feared when she lost a grip on a child that the child was surely hurt and lost or dying. I sighed at her sobbing and assured her I was fine; I was just hanging out with Stacey in her backyard, talking about a school project.
I jumped off the swing and slipped on my flip-flops, gathered up the six empty beer bottles and threw them into your paper bag, finding at the bottom you had left your pack of cigarettes. I removed the pack and shoved it in the waist of my jean shorts and pulled my tank top over the square bulge. I lifted up the paper bag from the bottom as the dredges of beer left in the bottles had spilled out turning the brown paper soggy. I walked over to a large metal trashcan and dropped in the bag of bottles.
I put two sticks of gum in my mouth and walked home, not even thinking about you because I knew once I started I wouldn’t want to stop. My mother hugged me like I had come back from the dead. I turned my head while pulling my waist away from hers as I hugged her back so she wouldn’t smell my breath or discover the pack of cigarettes. When I got upstairs into my bedroom I hid the cigarettes in one of the few spots my mother didn’t know to look: the first drawer of my dresser where I could reach up into the hollow recess of the top of the bureau. There were scattered items already hidden up there: folded diary entries, sketches of nude figures I made from the internet, pages of sex scenes I cut out of my father’s spy paperbacks. Maybe this was the day the more dangerous lies and secrets started, the forbidden items stashed in the cavity of my furniture soon outpaced by the forbidden thoughts I buried inside myself.
I looked in the mirror after hiding the cigarettes, pushing the lock of hair coated with you out of my eyes and tucking it behind my ear. My reflection buzzed; my face was pink and my lips were swollen with sunburn, my eyes were bright with excitement. I locked my bedroom door then took off my tank top and looked at my chest almost expecting my bust to be full, but it was still flat and I showered before putting on my pink pajamas edged with lace ruffles. I was struck by my age, how it could slip back and forth from being a kid to a woman and I was somewhere stuck in the transition. It was a painful place, like a mutation of a half frog, half princess as if I were a girl with a shapely torso whose legs turned amphibian and ended in slick webs.
I sat in the darkness of my bedroom except for the small light clipped to my headboard, pulling my sketchbook out from under my mattress and turning to a fresh page. I could remember what you looked like exactly and first I drew a portrait of you from your shoulders up as they curved into two long necks with two identical faces, one mouth with slightly crooked teeth that was grinning, the other closed and serious. The four eyes were similar in their shape and direction of the stare, all watching me as I drank my beer somewhere off the page. Your hair was straight and black and I hadn’t touched it yet but I longed to stroke it, pulling on the longer pieces in the back.
I put my sketchbook down and examined my right arm, looking for a mark that indicated where my second hand had emerged. My skin looked smooth and clear and I wondered if I imagined it. I turned to another blank page in my sketchbook and drew your body slouched over in the swing as if trying to disguise how you towered over me. I tried to capture how you drank all your beers in a flash before you kissed me, like all the cells from a stop-motion animation were collapsed on a single page—swinging arms, grinning mouths, bobbing Adam’s apple, sprouting necks, tipping head. Your movements made you look like a lizard spying an insect, before snatching me up with your tongue.
5.
I thought of you often after our first meeting and would replay our interaction on the swings lying in my bed in the darkness every night after. I missed you and I missed the loose feeling alcohol gave me, where all my worries evaporated, all my self-consciousness slipped away, the alcohol making me feel invincible, which is no small thing for a bottle of liquid that could be bought for a few dollars with the correct ID.
Ever since I met you I started spending less time with my friend Stacey who was my best friend from childhood. Stacey was also a good student; she didn’t drink or smoke and she was appalled when I suggested recently we hang out at the corner store at night to see if the older kids would invite us over to their cars to drink. I was embarrassed at her reaction, my face turning red with shame at my desire to find that location inside myself again, where I was no longer awkward and sixteen and anxious about everything. I longed to live in that place where I was enveloped by a darkness that felt like a protective shield, like a shroud dropped over my body before turning to black steel.
My parents’ fighting had increased in the past year until it seemed like every night at dinner was a prompt for a fresh battle. Either the chicken was overcooked, the criticism sending my mother fleeing the table in tears, or my father was accused of abandoning his family by working on the weekends, driving him to sleep on the couch in the basement. It was torturous to sit through the silence of dinner, my siblings and I afraid to say anything that would accidentally add gasoline to the fire. I felt an indescribable discomfort almost like a burning itch under every inch of my skin; I would pull off my skin if I could, freeing my insides if only momentarily, until they spilled into a pool of slippery slop on the floor.
I was confused about what exactly I felt during my parents’ fights, but it was some combination of sadness, fright, and rage. As the screaming continued week after week, and I started to avoid Stacey’s phone calls, one night my father threw his dinner plate at the wall, breaking the plate, a slice of roast beef stuck to the wallpaper, my mother fleeing to their bedroom and shutting the door. I went upstairs and groped inside the hollow in my bureau and clasped my hand around the unopened pack of cigarettes. My younger brother and sister retreated to their rooms and while I felt guilty about not going to comfort them, I abandoned them anyway, treading lightly down the stairs and out the front door, slipping into the evening twilight. It was a warm night and I walked to the corner store intent on getting some matches. As I stood outside the store I texted my mother that I was at Stacey’s house, hoping my mother would be too preoccupied with her despair to check up on me.
I entered the store hearing the bell clang behind me as I walked down the aisle to grab a soda and a candy bar. While paying at the counter I asked for a book of matches and the boy at the register gave me two. Sitting on the swing set again I removed the pack of cigarettes from the waist of my jeans. I tore off the top of the pack and put the opening up to my nose. Even though I had never smoked before, the grassy burnt smell of the tobacco soothed me. I shook out a cigarette and placed it in my mouth, striking a match and touching the flame to the tip. It took me a few tries to get the cigarette ignited and my first inhale of smoke caused my throat to seize up coughing. I didn’t remove the cigarette from my mouth while I coughed and the sharp intakes of smoke burned my chest but the physical pain gave me relief from my pent up emotion. I kicked off my flip-flops and dug my toes into the sand and whirled the swing’s chains like we used to do as kids, winding up the chain by turning my body round and round and when the tension was too great and it was impossible to twist further, I released the swing to unwind at a furious pace. When the swing finally came to a stop, I was dizzy from the spinning and the cigarette and I felt free. I started to swing and smoke, the combination a perfect mixture of sensations that emptied my mind from thoughts of my parents’ fighting and my manufactured void was bliss.
I was hoping you would appear but the swing beside me hung empty. I could see from where I was sitting there were some older kids hanging out at the other side of the playground behind the baseball diamond, drinking out of metal cans I highly doubted was soda. I missed you and decided to soothe the ache in my chest by going over. The cigarette made me feel lightheaded and brave and would hopefully rebrand me as older and cooler. There were four older kids in total, two girls and two boys who I recognized as seniors from my high school. I could tell once I got closer they were couples as each of the girls had one of their hands inside each of the boy’s jackets. I could feel all of them sizing me up as I walked closer and when they saw the cigarette between my fingers, one of the boys asked if he could have a smoke. I shook a cigarette out of the pack and handed it to him along with a book of matches. “Hit me too,” said his girlfriend and I shook out another cigarette for her.
“You want a beer?” she asked pulling a can out of a plastic bag that was sitting by their feet. I sat down next to her and she handed it to me. The boy and girl were lighting up their cigarettes as I pulled up the metal tab on the can. They introduced themselves as Jimmy and Jules, the other couple was Tom and Sue, and I introduced myself as Val. The pop and whoosh noise the tab made triggered an overwhelming feeling of calm. I tipped back my head and poured as much beer as I thought I could swallow into my mouth. I miscalculated and overfilled and started coughing as the beer poured into my lungs.
“Ha, ha, take it easy tiger,” said Jimmy making everyone laugh including myself. I lay back on the grass looking up at the darkening sky. The beer was working its way down my throat, spreading across my chest and sinking into my abdomen leaving a trail of warmth. I pictured myself from way up high looking down on my body that lay on its back with my hair fanned out around my face like a pillow. When I shut my eyes I no longer heard the angry words my father had tossed at my mother who had returned the volley with her wicked backhand, my father’s cheeks red with rage. I didn’t want to think about any of these things, let alone feel, it was a waste of my energy—it had nothing to do with me; if I could run away I would. I guess I could run away but it seemed complicated to consider the details, how to get money, what clothes to bring and where to go, and now that I was halfway through a can of beer and multiple cigarettes, my relaxed body was too lazy to run anywhere, never mind out of town.
Suddenly there were feet in sandals next to my head saying my name. I rolled to the side and saw Stacey looking down at me. “Val,” she asked, “Are you smoking? Are you drinking too? What are you doing Val?” The two couples watched silently with amused expressions on their faces.
After missing you so much, I heard you loud and clear when you whispered in my ear, “Go away Stacey.”
“Go away Stacey,” I repeated.
“What? Val come on, let’s go to my house,” said Stacey in a plaintive voice.
“Leave me alone Stacey,” you whispered.
“Leave me alone Stacey,” I said.
I watched as Stacey’s face contorted with surprise and hurt as if she’d been slapped. Stacey walked away quickly, disappearing down the incline that led to the parking lot. I was worried about how I treated Stacey but I was more excited about how you were lying in the grass next to me. One of the boys passed you two beers and you kept one, giving me the other. We propped ourselves up on our elbows and stared into each other’s eyes as we pulled the metal tabs. You only had one head so the interaction was focused and intense. You took two cigarettes from my pack and lighted both of them in your mouth. I didn’t see you use a match. You held one out to me and I opened my lips to let you insert it. We both dragged on our cigarettes and blew the smoke into each other’s faces. “Where have you been?” I asked.
“I’m always near you,” you said, “You just need to know where to look.” You tucked the stray hair out of my eyes and back behind my ears. “You’re beautiful,” you said, “Our relationship is just beginning. You’ll see, we’ll have plenty of time to be together.”
I took the cigarette out of my mouth in order to ask another question but you took advantage of my parted lips to dart in your tongue. It was eel-like and familiar and I sucked on it until you pulled away biting my bottom lip. I drank the can of beer quickly and someone handed me another. My head was filled with the bursting shoots of flowers, or maybe it was fungus and I soon forgot I had been mean to Stacey, making her run home.
I was up high again looking down on us and we were spinning. Technically the playground was spinning, or else I was spinning from up high. I watched from overhead as I sat up and drank from the can while you contorted into shapes next to me. You were wearing black pants with a black t-shirt and blended into the dark like a puppeteer who pulled strings on a marionette. You were handing me another beer and now you had two heads that were tipped toward my head kissing my forehead and my lips at the same time. You sprouted two more arms, then four more arms, then six more arms and you skittered around next to me like a human-sized spider. I could see a new hand emerge from my right wrist like a springtime plant shoot pushing up from the soil in a fast motion movie. My new hand reached for one of your hands and when they latched on to each other, the black color from your t-shirt traveled down your arm into your hand then spilt into my hand, trickling down my arm until it wet my shirt.
Jimmy and Jules and Tom and Sue were dropping the empty cans by their feet as they each polished off more beers in between their furtive kisses and hands fumbling under shirts. When they finished the last beer in their bag, they all stood up at once, rallying us to go to the woods where they found a boarded up one-room cabin with a loose window screen and a wet bar with stools made of carved oak.
We all piled into Jimmy’s car and I snuggled on your lap as my extra hand held one of yours, my head leaning into your chest. We were all drunk and Jimmy shouldn’t have been driving but the cabin was close. At least that’s what I told myself which was a lie to cover up what I really thought, which was I didn’t care if I ended up dead. I thought I’d be dead by now anyway and living to sixteen seemed like a long life and I knew by looking into your eyes you knew what I was thinking and you knew how I felt. And somehow it seemed you already knew what it was like to be dead.
When we pulled off the main road onto a dirt road, I put up the car window to keep the grit from scratching my eyes. I shut my lids momentarily and my stomach did a flip. When we fell out of the car you were gone. It was just me and Jimmy and Jules and Tom and Sue stumbling toward the cabin in the dark with Jimmy leading us with his phone’s flashlight that cast a small beam of light. We weaved and bobbed under branches, around trees and over rocks. Jimmy beckoned us behind the cabin as Tom worked a piece of plywood off a window on the porch. Jimmy popped off one of the screens and we crawled through the hole and once inside someone turned on a light.
There you were sitting at the wet bar with shot glasses lined up for us, a bottle of whiskey in your hand. You tipped the bottle and poured it into your mouth, then into the glasses, filling each shot glass up to the rim. Tom laughed at the sight and Sue flirted with you while I flirted with Jimmy while Jules passed out on the edge of the bar top. We all did our shots together and when we were done you reached over and drank Jules’ shot and before I could register what was happening you pushed me off my bar stool and I hit my head with a crack.
Jimmy reached down and picked me up while I threw myself at you, punching and kicking but you were semi-transparent and my blows were having the effect of kicking fog. This only served to make you laugh in greater gusto until you were doubled over in hysteria. “You fucking soulless eight-armed monster!” I yelled punching at the faint haze of your face. You evaporated into nothingness and Jimmy pulled me onto his lap while he poured us more shots.
When I woke up I was in my twin bed and my phone was on the bedside table; I was bewildered to see the time was 2 am. I remembered being at the playground with you and Jimmy and Jules and Tom and Sue and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and then going to the cabin. Suddenly I remembered telling Stacey to go away and as I pictured her thin back in her tank top moving away from me, my heart sunk with regret. Her pointed shoulder blades morphed into your face and I remembered you pushing me off the bar stool with your two mouths laughing as my head struck the hard oak floor. Your betrayal stung the way my betrayal must have stung for Stacey and I swore I would never treat her that way again.
I tiptoed down the hallway to the bathroom swaying from the alcohol to the extent I bounced from one side of the hallway to the other. I froze when I saw blood in the mirror and as I looked down in confusion I saw the spray of blood was on my shirt. I pulsated with fear at the sight but my delirium was preferable to my previous anguish over my parents’ fighting, and in contrast this excitement felt fantastic, even if it was over an obliteration turned violent.
My head was throbbing and I reached around pressing on the back of my skull, wincing when I felt a lump. With my eyes closed, I saw your face laughing. Last I remember I was trying to hurt you the way you hurt me and maybe I had run from you after. I pushed the lock of hair from my eyes and unknowingly tucked you behind my ear as I snuck downstairs to get some ice.
In the morning my head felt like it was about to split open and my throat was gasping for lubrication. There was a wet sock on the floor I had filled earlier with ice. It was Saturday so there was no school and when I crept out of bed to peek out the window at the driveway I saw my parents’ car was gone and I sighed with relief. I called Stacey and tried to apologize and even though she said it was okay she sounded distant and detached. She was pulling away from me or rather I was being pulled away from her as if by an invisible force, like riding a train backward as it left her station, gathering momentum and speed until her receding figure vanished.
I picked up my shirt I had thrown on the floor last night and brought it in the bathroom to try to scrub out the blood. When I looked at the stain carefully it appeared to be in the shape of a handprint and I checked the front and back of my hands for wounds but they were free of injury. Suddenly the new hand flew out of my wrist and grabbed my throat for a brief second and when I coughed in surprise it flew back inside. I turned my right arm around and around but there was no indication where the new hand was hiding. I wondered if it were you inside me or was this the new me, and the lack of knowledge about the changes in my body sent a trill of terror down my spine.
I swore to myself I would get back to homework at night and get a job after school and stay away from you if I ever saw you again. I went downstairs to make something to eat to settle my stomach and saw there was a note on the fridge saying that my parents and my brother and sister had gone to Maine for the weekend to my family’s cabin on a lake. Maine had been my favorite place to be as a child, the breeze off the lake and the lapping of waves on the shore just steps from the porch of the cabin. I remembered last week my parents had asked me if I wanted to go and I declined; I was obsessed with the desire to see you again and I didn’t want to be far from the last place I had been with you, on the swings at the playground.
The magic of the cabin in Maine seemed far away, like a distant memory of a previous life. I went back upstairs and felt around in the hollow of my bureau and pulled out the crumpled pack of cigarettes and shook it to find there were two left. I opened my window and dug out the matches from the pocket of my discarded jeans and lit the cigarette with my head hanging out the window. I inhaled deeply so my memory of the grassy smell of the Maine lake disappeared into the burn of the smoke; the numbing of the sensory memory from childhood eased a pain inside me. I was jittery, like a low level electrical charge ran through my body and I noticed my hand holding the cigarette was trembling. There were sharp pains in the front and back of my head and I pressed on the lump on the back of my head as punishment for how I treated Stacey and how I let you treat me.
When I finished the cigarette I hid the butt inside the pack and placed it back in the hollow of my bureau. I pulled my sketchbook out from under my mattress and flipped through the pictures of you. I drew a new picture of you when I saw you from above and your extra sets of arms were moving fast and you looked like a spider. I turned to a fresh page and drew a portrait of myself looking surprised as one of my two hands on one wrist turned on myself grabbing my throat. This image deeply disturbed me but like a roadside accident, I couldn’t stop staring.
The life affirming part of myself told the rest of myself this needed to stop. I needed to get back to homework at night, to calm the restlessness inside me, to think about college applications, to move toward the rest of my life with optimism and hope. I turned to a fresh page in my sketchbook and drew a picture of the cabin in Maine on the shore of the lake, with warm waves lapping at rocks. There were daisies and tall grasses along the edge of the property before the landscape turned to woods. I entered the woods briefly and was spooked by the spindly nature of the branches as all the leaves fell and the cold winter wind blasted on my face. I turned back to return to summer but I was lost and the branches caught on my clothes as if to hold me there. I shut my sketchbook.
*****
Valerie Hegarty is a new writer and an established visual artist. Her first published short story appeared in The New England Review and won a 2020 PEN Dau Debut Short Story Prize. She has had nonfiction published in Jellyfish Review, ArtForum, Hyperallergic, and American Art Magazine (a Smithsonian Magazine). Her artwork is in many museum and private collections and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Timeout, The Wall Street Journal, and ArtForum.
