Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (5 page)

One night Andrea showed me her kit, and the first thing I thought was this was a really twisted version of my old babysitter’s bag. I didn’t watch her slice herself, at least not that night, but she showed me the cuts. I think she thought it would turn me on and then, maybe, I would cut myself, too. You know, join her or something. Which, I guess, I did.

We were sitting on the mattress we shared on the floor at Poacher’s, and she was wearing nothing but her underwear and a T-shirt that said “War Is Over” and had one of the Beatles and his wife on it. She’d lifted it from the Urban Outfitters on Church Street the day before.

“This is what you do,” she said, and she sounded like a very confident kindergarten teacher.
Children, this is the way you clean up your blocks. This is how you do it
. You know the tone of voice. She was sitting cross-legged, and she pointed to the insides of her thighs. It was like a cat had scratched her over and over, or maybe a much bigger animal with much bigger claws. Long, swollen red marks, some pretty new and some pretty well healed. There were some scars, too. Most were on her left leg because she was right-handed. One of the cuts was infected: it was straight like the others, but bloated and raw and there was a pretty gross discharge. Her kit had old-fashioned razor blades and an X-Acto knife and Band-Aids and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There was a roll of gauze. There was a tube of Bacitracin. There was a pair of scissors. She kept her
tools in a very elegant Estée Lauder cosmetics bag she stole from Macy’s. That was her kit.

I make it sound like we were always stealing stuff. I guess we were. Sometimes we stole things just because we wanted them, like that T-shirt with the Beatles guy on it, and sometimes we stole stuff because we had to. Either we hocked it for money for food or drugs or we hocked it for money for Poacher. Sometimes if we didn’t feel up to fucking the guys he brought over, he wouldn’t make us if we gave him roughly the same amount of cash. Then he’d have another girl do the john—you wouldn’t think Vermont guys are gross because the state is so “peace, love, and tie-dye,” but I’m telling you, they can be as gross here as anyplace else—and he’d have twice the money to feed us and get us whatever drugs we wanted.

Andrea’s mother and father used to deal out of their apartment in the North End until they were both arrested and sent to jail. She told me that when her mother was badly strung out, her dad would make her do seriously creepy stuff before he would give her a fix. Once he made her do another drug mom while he watched—just for kicks, he did that. Another time he brought her out to some physical therapy place and had her fuck his cousin. (At least that was for money.) Andrea had left home by the time the two of them were busted. Like everyone else, she had no idea that my dad was one of the engineers at Cape Abenaki who the NRC blamed for fucking up and helping to cause the meltdown.

That night when she showed me her kit, I said to her something kind of ridiculous like, “Do you know how bad for you that is?” Obviously, she knew how bad for her it was. That’s one of the main reasons why she did it. “Do you really want to go through life with all those scars?” I asked.

She tried to hand me a razor blade in its little cardboard folder, but I wouldn’t take it. “Let me show you how,” she said.

“No.”

“Why? Because it will hurt?”

“Yeah, for starters,” I told her. But she pulled the blade from
its packet and dropped it into my hand. I thought the metal was very pretty in an engineered sort of way. I’d never held one like it before. All my razors were plastic and pink. They all sounded like sex toys. Venus Vibrance. Close Curves. Bikini Trimmer.

“It will only hurt for a second. And then you’ll feel great. Besides …”

“Besides what?”

“Even the pain is, I don’t know, cool. It’s out-of-body. You’ll get a rush, I promise.”

“Not interested.”

“Try it!”

The fact was, I had already tried a lot of shit and nothing really worked. So why not try this, too?

“Where?” I asked.

“Take off your pajamas.”

“No, I’m not wearing underwear.”

“Since when did you get all modest on me?”

I shrugged and pulled off my pajama pants. Maybe I was scuba diving for the bottom of the sea. Still, I scooted an extra foot away from her so I’d have a little privacy. I pressed the razor blade on the inside of my thigh, pretty high up—close to where my underpants would have been. I’d figured out that the point was to cut yourself where no one would see. But I only pushed it against my flesh, and I didn’t quite break the skin. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So, Andrea did it for me. Before I could stop her, she took my wrist and the back of my hand and in one almost instantaneous motion yanked my fingers down toward the mattress. She moved so fast, I couldn’t stop her. It stung—not a huge surprise, I know—and I yelped. I pushed her away, and then together we peered down at the pencil-thin line about two inches long. For a second I didn’t understand why it had hurt so much because I didn’t seem to be bleeding. Then, like a creek bed filling with water after a summer storm, the narrow little gash started to swell. As if we had never before seen a cut bleed, which of course we both had (though she a lot more often than me), we stared at it. We watched some blood
trickle down my thigh onto the mattress. I wondered how long it would bleed if I did nothing. I wondered how big the stain would be on the mattress.

Andrea spoke first. “You won’t need any hydrogen peroxide,” she said. “That was a brand-new blade.”

“Just a Band-Aid?”

“Yup.” Before she gave me a Band-Aid, however, she took the scissors and cut off a square of gauze. She pressed it very tenderly against the cut, and I was so stunned that I had let her do this whole thing in the first place that I didn’t stop her, despite how close she was to the edge of my pubic hair. After a minute she took her fingers away and handed me a Band-Aid. The pad wasn’t as long as my cut, but it would do.

“Feel any better?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered, which was the truth. I mean, I knew I felt ashamed. But that would pass. By then I did all kinds of crap that left me feeling ashamed. I just didn’t know if I felt—to use her word—better. Maybe I did. Maybe I hated myself a little bit less.

When I was a little girl and we still lived just outside of New York City, my parents said I would punish myself. When I misbehaved as a toddler, they had a “time-out” chair for me. It was a little wooden ladder-back chair, meant for a two- or three-year-old. I guess it had once belonged to my grandfather—my mom’s dad, not my dad’s. We kept it in a corner of the dining room. But my parents said they almost never had to put me there. I would put myself there. Most of the time, they had no idea what I worried I had done wrong. I was a very well-behaved tyke. At least they thought I was. Apparently, I thought differently.

So who knows? Maybe all along I was ripe for cutting. Anyway, that was the first time.

Did you know that the little kids in Syria who have been fucked by the civil war only want to color with red crayons? They almost always draw people with some kind of bullet wound or stab wound or injury from a grenade or a mortar. I can’t remember where I read that, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

Chapter 3

One time I keyed
a boy’s mother’s car. I got in pretty serious trouble for that one, but I am going to plead extenuating circumstances. (My parents had a friend who was a public defender, and one time when she was at our house for dinner, she said that a lot of her clients’ stories began, “It’s a long story.” She said nothing good ever comes from “a tale of woe”—her expression—that begins, “It’s a long story.”)

It was a Saturday evening and I was fifteen. I had just spent the day in New Hampshire at Story Land, which is sort of like Disneyland except it’s a million times smaller and still in the 1950s. But it has a few cool rides, and it was always fun to watch the little kids who didn’t care that Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage had an engine as loud as a snowmobile and the paint on the metal horses was seriously chipped. I had gone there with a seventeen-year-old boy named Philip Christiansen, and it was kind of like a first date. His family was from New Jersey. It was the summer before his senior year and the summer before my junior year. His dad was like forty-five, but already retired. Not kidding. He had been some kind of hedge fund manager—I honestly have no idea what a hedge fund is, except that it’s clear if you run one you wind up with more money than Jay Z, and supposedly Jay Z has crazy money—and the family had moved to northern Vermont so he could ski and ride his bike most of the time. Not all of the time. Sometimes he would fly to Tampa or Phoenix or New York to meet with people about “the
fund.” And they still had that house in New Jersey and an apartment in New York City. When they were deciding where to chill in New England, they chose Reddington because of the Academy.

Philip and I had had a pretty good time that day at Story Land. Definitely promising, I thought. But then I blew it.

The two of us parked his Prius in the driveway beside his mom’s Beemer SUV and his dad’s Mercedes. (That’s what I mean about how loaded they were. They also had a pickup truck to bring their garbage and recycling to the transfer station and a tractor for who knows what.) Then we went inside for sodas because we were parched from the two-hour drive back to Reddington. His family’s Vermont place was a farmhouse they had transformed into something that looked like a museum home with velvet ropes and signs that said a president had slept in one of the beds. His mom was in the kitchen when we got there, and she was bent out of shape. I don’t know why, but she seemed pretty PO’ed at the world. So Philip whispered to me that we should just split. But his mom pulled me aside.

“Have you given my son the gas money?” she asked.

I had no idea what she was talking about. Gas money? I was all, what the fuck? Who does that? But I didn’t say anything.

“Mom, I didn’t even ask her,” Philip said. Then he kind of shrunk a little and mumbled, “Yet.”

Here they are with Gringotts Goblin Bank piles of money, and his mom is pressing me for a few bucks for gas. “It’s a hundred miles from here to Story Land,” she said. “I checked.” And she was standing there with her arms folded across her chest, leaning against this stainless steel refrigerator big enough for a moose.

“I don’t think I have any left,” I mumbled. I had brought money, of course, but I’d spent it already. I had maybe a crumpled-up dollar bill on me somewhere. So, you can see how awkward this was. But I can deal with awkward. What I can’t deal with is getting hissed at for being “inconsiderate” and trying “to take advantage” of her son. Her precious Philip. I was embarrassed and I didn’t get
why. And I was royally pissed—way more PO’ed by the time we left than Philip’s mom.

Now, a normal girl would probably have just gotten in Philip’s car and gone home. A normal girl would probably have just steered clear of that whole whack-job family. Not yours truly. As part of the celebration a few weeks earlier when I had gotten my learner’s permit, my dad had made me a set of keys to our car. So, I had them on me. As we walked past his mom’s robin’s-egg blue Beemer SUV, I stopped and said to Philip, “I think I’m going to owe your mom for a little more than gas.” Then, right there in their driveway, I took my car key and keyed in the letters FU on the passenger door and scratched away as much of the paint as I could before Philip stopped me.

I think I’d made my point. But my parents took away my keys for a while and my phone for a week, and I was grounded for almost the rest of the summer. And Philip and I never went on a second date, and we totally avoided each other when school started again in September.

Still, see what I mean about extenuating circumstances? I was a jerk, but so was Philip’s mom.

I knew the school buses were driving southwest. I knew we were on Route 100. I wondered how far away they were going to take us. Some of the kids were stunned and super quiet, and some of the kids were going on and on about what they were reading about the disaster on their phones. I was seated against a window, which was filthy because of the rain, and I was glad Ethan was on the aisle between me and the next kid. Still, I had a girl named Sara from my history class in the seat behind me, and she knew my dad worked at the plant. She knew my mom and my dad both worked at the plant. It was why we had moved to Reddington when I was four. And she kept pestering me, asking me questions, and was even getting a little hysterical.