Stitches

2. The sun is dappled beneath the tall, tall trees that make a giant green fort that I’m swinging into, higher, higher, pushed by my dad’s big palm. I see things from above, maybe for the first time. On the picnic table, cheese and cracker Dunk ‘Ems. In the air, I’m flying.

6. He dares me. Once, twice, five times. But after recess he stands up before his desk, his chair clanking the desk behind him, his hair shining blonde. He tells the teacher what I did and my cheeks turn so red it hurts. Mrs. Novak and the whole class agree: I can’t kiss Sam Sandon again.

7. She only rode the bus sometimes but she never sat with me until one day when she did. She had rings on every finger and hemp bracelets and colorful strings around her wrists and she was the coolest girl in the sixth grade at least to me. That night while I fell asleep I thought about sitting in the back seat and watching everyone get off the bus but this time, Claire turned and kissed me on the lips.

10. On the other side of the wall my friends are eating Freez-E pops, but I’m slumped against the brown bricks, the trampled weeds, begging my mom to drive me home.  Even at ten I know that I’m wrong and I’m weak, but I don’t want to leave and I can’t say goodbye, tell my teachers and friends that I’m leaving for good. I can’t stay. I can’t stand up, can’t unscrape my arm, suck back the tears so my mom, she drives me home.  

14. After plotting for months on AOL Instant Messenger, it happens unplanned in an attic where five of us sit watching my favorite horror film. Slowly, like peeling an orange. Soft, like a peach. Wet, horrifically wet.

15. When I get to school a girl motions me inside a classroom. Coach Randall has died. I laugh because I can’t cry, ever since I left from the inpatient unit and started taking pills every day. I feel the skin around my mouth tighten and feel everything getting small and sharp. I grasp my left wrist with my right hand. No hospital bracelets but still bony. I touch the pointy crests of my hipbones to make sure everything is all right, pressing them into my palms and making sure there’s no extra flesh anywhere and there isn’t.

18. The light is soft and pink and safe, it’s earlier than I’ve been awake all summer and I’m sobbing on an empty, blurry highway. I’m hoping drivers can see my shoulders shaking and know my boyfriend left forever, understand? We held each other in his car and cried over bagels we didn’t eat. Then his mom tapped the window, said time to go, and I thought about being eighteen and leaving your family for good. Three weeks later I was barefoot on a beach, shoes kicked off somewhere dark, faces soft and red in glow of a pipe passed around. In the sand, in the water, the sky.

19. The only time I ever got stitches was from stepping on steel in that same lake, Lake Michigan, swimming in a thong and bra at noon.  

22. I find a black tulip and tear it off like a talisman. The grass is manicured and wet outside the temple. I press myself into it, hoping to be swallowed up, absorbed. I let tears leave my body and let my body go cold in the dark and the night and the hurt. It’s May. A friend has died.

23. I’m standing outside a bar in New York City because I lost my Drivers’ License and the bouncer won’t let me in. A girl with dark hair comes out and says, don’t cry over Stonewall. I laugh. She touches my face.