The door to Group whooshes open. Casper sidles in, takes the seat next to Sasha, who wriggles and smiles at her like a puppy. Casper’s wearing brown pants and her elf clogs. There’s a red bandanna like a headband in her yellowy hair. Moon earrings, pink cheeks, she’s a goddamn rainbow.
I wonder what she was like in high school. She must have been a good girl, the kind that holds her books over her tits, always has nice combed hair, bites her lips when she takes a test. Probably on yearbook, or math team, maybe debate.
But there must be something else, something under Casper’s scrubbed surface that we can’t see, like a hidden hurt, a tender secret or something, because why the fuck would she make being with us her goddamn life?
She passes out paper and markers and we tense up. When we have to write, we know Group will be rough. She makes us put the pens and paper on the floor, do our accordion breathing. I can’t concentrate. I’m watching the clock on the wall; I get to leave early. Today I get my bandages off. The thought of it makes my stomach flutter.
Casper says, “I’d like you to write down what you say to yourself before you harm.”
Blue groans out loud, runs her tongue across her mouth, flexes her naked feet. She never wears shoes. Silver rings glisten on three of her toes. From across the circle, she looks as young as any of us, but up close, in dining hall, or Rec, you can see the hard grooves at the corners of her eyes. I haven’t drawn in such a long time, I hardly ever go to Crafts, and looking at Blue is hard because she makes me ache for my pencils and charcoals. There’s a something in her that I want to put on paper.
I don’t write anything at first, I just make little lines with my red marker and then I sneak looks at Blue, to sketch her, lightly, faintly. It feels good, my fingers holding the marker, feeling my way around her cattish eyes, the fullness of her mouth. It’s a little awkward, pressing the paper against my thighs, but it’s like my fingers never forgot what to do. Like they’ve been waiting for me to come back.
Blue’s mouth is so full. My own lips are kind of thin. Ellis would say, You have to accentuate. Take my chin in her fingers, press the cool lipstick to my mouth. But it never worked. It never looked right on me. I didn’t see someone with a beautiful mouth. I saw someone who had lipstick on the skin of her face.
My brain starts to circle, circle, even as I keep drawing Blue. There are things happening that I don’t want to think about, not right now. Words happening, like sorry and attic and underpass and hurting me.
Sasha sniffles. Francie clears her throat.
My pen writes OUT. GET IT OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT. I put a big red X over the drawing of Blue’s face, crumple up the paper, shove it under my thigh.
“Isis.” Casper folds her hands, waits for Isis to read from her paper.
Isis picks at her nostrils, her face reddening. “Okay,” she says finally. She says, so softly it’s almost a whisper, “Why can’t you ever just fucking learn? This will teach you.” She squeezes her eyes shut.
Francie says, “Nobody. Blank. Who cares.” Rips her paper in half.
Sasha’s body is so warm from crying a weird heat shimmers off her and I shift my chair a little away. I can feel Blue’s eyes on me.
Sasha looks down at her paper and chokes out, “You. Fat. Ass. Fuck.”
Bird-quick, Blue is up and across the circle, yanking the paper from beneath my thigh. She glares at me from the middle of the circle.
Casper looks at her evenly. “Blue.” A warning.
Blue uncrumples the paper, smooths it flat. As she scrutinizes it, a smile spreads across her face, slowly. “Is this me? This is pretty good, Silent Sue. I like that you Xed me out.”
She shows the paper to the group. “She erased me.” She crumples the paper back up and tosses it in my lap. I let it fall to the floor. On her way back to her seat, she tells Casper, “She said it better than I could. That’s pretty much what goes through my head when I self-harm. Erase me.”
Casper turns to Sasha, but before she can start, Blue interrupts her. “You know, Doctor, it’s very unfair.”
“What’s unfair?” Casper regards Blue. My face starts to heat up. I look at the clock. Just a few minutes to go before I can get up and leave, get these clubs off.
“She never has to say anything. We all have to talk, spill our fucking guts out, and she doesn’t have to say shit. Maybe we’re like a little comedy show for her.”
“Group is voluntary, Blue. If a member doesn’t want to speak, she doesn’t have to. In Char—”
“Tell everybody what you wrote on your paper, there, Silent Sue,” Blue says. “No? Okay, I will. She wrote, Out. Out, cut it all out. Cut what out, Sue? Pony up. It’s time to pay the piper.”
Fucking Frank wore heavy silver rings, malevolent-looking skulls he was forever buffing across his shirt until they gleamed with perfection. His fingers were stained and singed from lighters and they dug into my neck, lifting me off the attic floor. Evan and Dump made kitten sounds behind him, but they were just boys who needed drugs. It was freezing outside. April had dropped a surprise snow that turned into freezing sleet. That was the worst kind of weather to be outside in: icy water that froze your bare face and turned your fingers to stiff husks of bone.
I should’ve known when Fucking Frank greeted us at the door that he wouldn’t let me stay for free. I should’ve looked closer at the faces of the girls on the ripped couch as Evan and Dump carried me in. In my stupor, my lungs like cement, my eyes blurry, I thought they were just stoned, their eyes gone hazy. I know, now, that their eyes were dead.
Just do it, Fucking Frank said that night, my breath disappearing in the tightness of his fingers. Do it, like the other girls. Or I’ll do you myself.
If you were a girl, and you were at Seed House, and you wanted to stay at Seed House, there was a room downstairs with only mattresses. Frank put girls in the room. Men came to the house and paid Frank, and then went into the room.
OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT. Cut out my father. Cut out my mother. Cut out missing Ellis. Cut out the man in the underpass, cut out Fucking Frank, the men downstairs, the people on the street with too many people inside them, cut out hungry, and sad and tired, and being nobody and unpretty and unloved, just cut it all out, get smaller and smaller until I was nothing.
That’s what was in my head in the attic when I took broken glass from my tender kit and began to cut myself into tiny pieces. I’d done it forever, for years, but now would be the last time. I’d go farther than Ellis had. Wouldn’t fuck it up like Ellis had: I would die, not end up in some half-life.
That time, I tried so hard to fucking die.
But here I am.
The music in my head makes my eyes cloud over. I can barely see Blue with her smarmy face and her fucked-up teeth but as I walk toward her, I can practically taste what it will feel like to grind that face into Group floor. My body is weirdly heavy and light at the same time and a little bit of me is leaving, floating away—Casper calls this dissociation—but I keep lurching in Blue’s direction, even as she kind of nervously laughs and says, “Fuck me,” and gets up, alert.
Jen S. stands up. She says, “Please, don’t.”
On the street, where I used to live, I called it my street feeling. It’s like electrical wire is strung tight through my whole body. It meant I could ball my fists and fight for the forgotten sleeping bag by the river against two older women. It meant I could do a lot of things just to make it through the night to another endless day of walking, walking, walking.
Casper’s voice is even and clear. “Charlie. Another altercation and I cannot help you.”
I stop short. Charlie. Charlie Davis. Charlotte, Evan said, his eyes shiny, drunk, smears of my blood on his cheek, that night in the attic. What a beautiful name. He kissed my head, over and over. Please don’t leave us, Charlotte.
My father taught me to tell time by telling me how much time was left. “The long hand is here, and the short hand is here. When the short hand is here, and the long hand here, then it is time for Mama to come home.” He lit a cigarette, pleased with himself, and rocked in his chair.
The hands on the wall clock in Group tell me it’s time to get my bandages off.
I lurch, the stupid bootie catching on the rug, until I reach the door. I let it slam shut behind me.
