paint her toenails lime green. I sigh heavily and then start writing nonfiction for once. When I was in second grade, I got this really cool pair of shoes. The sneakers weren’t anything special–they came from a Walmart clearance sale, but they were made of some fabric that I was certain was magical. They were white indoors but turned a baby blue in the sunlight. I played in them so much I wore out the soles. A few days after I got those magical shoes, Irene kissed me for the first time. I used to stay the night at her house all the time when I was young, and she was my best friend as well as my second cousin. I had started to develop breasts by this point–I was an “early bloomer” –and she was curious since she was two years older and hadn’t started getting hers yet. She wanted me to show her and asked me to take off my shirt and new training bra. I had never been allowed to say no to any request that anyone made of me, so I did as she asked and stood in front of her, naked from the waist up. The kiss was soft, and her hands were calloused from playing on the monkey bars at school as she touched my booblets. Over the years, she wore the soul out of me with how much she played in me.
As I finish typing this memory out, I feel incredibly sick to my stomach. “I can’t turn this in,” I say. “Well, if it’s not working, then pick a different thing to write about,” Ray says. I bite my lip. My teacher is stupid for making me write about my childhood. She’s probably from a super happy family with two dogs and a nice house and all of that bullshit. I tap the track pad a bit harder than necessary when I minimize the story and open up a blank document. Ray looks up at me. “You okay?” she asks. Her shaped eyebrows arch, and I wonder, not for the first time, why she hangs around me. “Fine. Just thinking.” She nods. She doesn’t look the slightest bit convinced, but she doesn’t press the issue and con18
Kiosk16
tinues with the second coat of toenail polish. I frown at myself. It’s not that I don’t want to tell her about it. I just don’t want to talk about it. It makes me feel ugly, and I don’t want to feel ugly around Ray. She’s the only one I’ve ever met who seems to look at me like I’m something important. She knows I’m depressed, sure, but she just assumes it’s because of my mother and the divorce. If I told her the truth about all of these other things, she’d see how pathetic I really am. Much better in the long run to just hide it from her. That way, she’ll never change how she looks at me. I nod once at my new resolve and start typing again. It was another day in the spring of my fifth grade year. I sat alone on my bed, reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (for probably the sixth time straight) over the noise of the blaring television in the adjacent living room. My parents had been fighting again, and my mother had just left, slamming the door behind her. I knew she wasn’t serious about leaving Dad this time. She was only ever serious when she made me come with her. My white bedroom walls seemed to both hug me and cage me in my tiny room. I was sure that they could spill more secrets than the rest of the house combined if they could only speak. After all, they were the only friends I could talk to, and I whispered all of my secrets to them at night when there was no TV or angry yelling to block out my voice. I fidgeted with the cardstock bookmark in my hand, chewing on my lower lip as I read sentence after sentence after sentence. My cedar dresser was a different shade of brown than the other thing with drawers in the room. This thing was either called a bureau or a Bordeaux. I could never remember which one meant this piece of walnut furniture and which one meant mom’s favorite drink. Both furniture pieces took up way too much space in my room, and the cherry hope chest that my grandmother had left for me took up what little space was left next to my bed. I didn’t mind it too much usually. The wooden fixtures in the room did a good job of hiding the beige carpet. My favorite books were
strewn on the top of the hope chest so that my very best friends–my only friends–were always within arm’s reach. I kept fidgeting with the bookmark. I don’t know why everything seemed to hit me so hard on that particular day. It wasn’t like this was the first time that my parents had fought or that I’d gotten picked on at school. Maybe it was the way that my room was stuffy from the door being closed all day and the poor insulation. Maybe it was the way that so much large furniture had been jammed into this tiny room, making everything feel so cramped and making me feel even smaller than usual. Maybe it was the lack of color in the room, as there had always been because my mother preferred neutrals. Maybe it was the one family photo I had on my dresser from back when I was six years old, and we were a happy family. Or, if we weren’t happy, from back when I was too young to know any better. My body couldn’t contain my emotions anymore. My eyes moved over sentence after sentence, but my tears blurred everything, so nothing could be taken in. I wondered if I’d even really been reading at all. I sat there as my tears dripped onto the page. I rocked myself gently. I suddenly became aware of a pain in my left shin. I wiped at my eyes and looked down to where blood dripped onto my bed sheets. What? I’d made a cut on my leg with the friction from rubbing the edge of the bookmark against it. What in the world? It was stained red, but I realized in that moment that as the blood drained from me, so did my emotions. I suddenly didn’t feel anything anymore other than the pain in my leg. And the lack of feeling was bliss.
“I can’t turn this in either,” I tell Ray, who is now reading some erotic novel that she’d shoplifted from the convenience store down the street. She had started picking those up in eighth grade, about a year after I’d met her. I feel even sicker to my stomach now and even angrier at my professor for giving me this bullshit assignment. She puts down her book and looks at me. “But you wrote so much. What’s it about?” “I don’t want to talk about it. That’s the
problem.” I gently scratch my stomach where deep, tender cuts are hidden under my T-shirt. I graduated from bookmarks to razor blades around seventh grade. Nowadays, I cut almost every day of the week, sometimes more than once a day. Ray doesn’t know about it. I’m careful to make sure that she doesn’t find out. I never change clothes in front of her, despite her teasing that I’m
a prude, and I always make sure that my clothes cover the cuts and scars. It’s my firm resolution that she never know about them. She wouldn’t get it. I need the blade like my mother needs the Bordeaux. “Oh, come on, Ren. I can’t help if you don’t talk to me.” I avoid her eyes by looking out the window. The sun is now setting over her backyard. It still isn’t inspiring. “I hate talking about my childhood. You know that.” “Yeah, but you never tell me why. You just say that it sucked.” “It did. You don’t want to know why, trust me.” “But I do.” “You don’t. I promise.”
Destitute of Vision by Bre Van Bochove India Ink
Kiosk16
19