Girl in Pieces (6 page)

My father was cigarettes and red-and-white cans of beer. He was dirty white T-shirts and a brown rocking chair and blue eyes and scratchy cheek stubble and
“Oh, Misty,”
when my mother would frown at him. He was days of not getting out of that chair, of me on the floor by his feet, filling paper with suns, houses, cats' faces, in crayon and pencil and pen. He was days of not changing those T-shirts, of sometimes silence and sometimes too much laughter, a strange laughter that seemed to crack him from the inside until there wasn't laughter, but crying, and tears that bled along my face as I climbed up and rocked with him, back and forth, back and forth, heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat as the light changed outside, as the world grew darker around us.

Louisa says, “You're so quiet. I'm so glad they put somebody quiet with me. You've no idea how tedious it is, listening to somebody talk out loud all the time.”

She'd been silent for so long, I thought she was sleeping.

Louisa says, “I mean, I'm talking to you, do you know that? In my head, I mean. I'm telling you all sorts of things in my head, because you seem like you're a good listener. But I don't want to take up your thinking space. If that makes sense.”

She makes a sleepy sound.
Mmmmm.
Then, “I'm going to tell you my whole story. You're a good egg, a keeper.”

A good egg, a keeper, a good egg, a keeper—a cutter's nursery song.

In Group, Casper doesn't like us to say
cut
or
cutting
or
burn
or
stab.
She says it doesn't matter
what
you do or
how
you do it: it's all the same. You could drink, slice, do meth, snort coke, burn, cut, stab, slash, rip out your eyelashes, or fuck till you bleed and it's all the same thing:
self-harm.
She says: whether someone has
hurt
you or made you feel
bad
or
unworthy
or
unclean,
rather than taking the
rational
step of
realizing
that person is an
asshole
or a
psycho
and should be
shot
or
strung up
and you should
stay the fuck away from them,
instead we
internalize
our abuse and begin to
blame
and
punish
ourselves and
weirdly,
once you start
cutting
or
burning
or
fucking
because you feel so
shitty
and
unworthy,
your body starts to release this neat-feeling shit called
endorphins
and you feel so
fucking high
the world is like cotton candy at the best and most colorful state fair in the world, only
bloody
and
stuffed with infection.
But the fucked-up part is once you start
self-harming,
you can never
not
be a
creepy freak,
because your whole body is now a
scarred
and
charred
battlefield and nobody likes
that
on a girl
, nobody
will love
that,
and so all of us, every one, is
screwed,
inside and out. Wash, rinse, fucking
repeat.

I'm trying to follow the rules. I'm trying to go where I'm supposed to go when I'm supposed to go there and sit like a good girl even though I don't say anything because my throat is filled with nails. I'm trying to follow the rules because to not follow the rules means to risk OUTSIDE.

When Doc Dooley told me two boys dropped off my backpack? Those boys, once, twice, I guess, saved me. And when he said they said to tell me they were sorry? I've been thinking about that.

Evan and Dump. Were they sorry they saved me from the man in the underpass who was trying to mess with me? Were they sorry when the winter turned so fucking cold here in Minnie-Soh-Tah that they couldn't NOT take all three of us to live with Fucking Frank? I was sick. We couldn't live outside in the van any longer. Evan needed his drugs. Dump went where Evan went. Were they sorry I wouldn't do what Fucking Frank asked? (What he wanted all the girls in Seed House to do, if they wanted to stay.) Were they sorry they didn't let me die in the attic of Seed House?

Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.

I cut that word out, too, but it keeps growing back, tougher and meaner.