cutting
By November, just six weeks after Girl moved to Alaska, Jack fell in love with her best friend.
She was half in love with Suzy herself, in the way that high school girls get in jealous fights when their best friend hangs out with other girls. Not in a way that involved kissing. Suzy was tiny and fragile, and had eczema and asthma and delicate bones that made everything she wore look like high fashion. It was as if she were made of glass. Suzy didn’t need much makeup to be alluring with her blond hair and green eyes, and next to her, Girl felt like a big, awkward Amazon.
Do you know the sound of the wind, way up high in the atmosphere when there’s a front moving in? It’s a deep roar, almost like the sound of waves. That was what it sounded like when Jack kissed Suzy for the first time, in Girl’s apartment, on Father’s bed. They told Girl to get lost. Girl went into her bedroom and closed the door.
Dark comes early in Alaska’s November. There was a window over Girl’s bed, and outside she could see the lights of the snow-covered city glowing orange like sunset or a nuclear spill. Back home in Rochester their streetlights glowed yellow-white, and in Mother’s house, her walls were soft pink with gauzy white curtains. Here Girl had clinical white walls and mini-blinds.
Father had converted the apartment’s dining room to a bedroom with a wall made of bookcases, and he stored his clothes in the linen closet, all rolled into perfect cylinders that never wrinkled. He used the top drawer of her dresser to hold his odds and ends—old photographs, belt buckles, and pocketknives. Father loved pocketknives. One in particular had a bone handle, and you had to push in a little button on the side to fold it closed. Girl was always afraid it would snap shut on her finger. Father had told her that it was his sharpest blade—sharp enough to shave with, which he proved one evening, using the knife to remove a few long, soft hairs from his arm. Girl took the knife from his drawer and sat on her bed. “It can cut you before you even feel it,” her father had said. Cut you before you feel it sounded exactly like what Girl was looking for.
The blond, four-poster bed frame was her half-sister’s, left behind when she moved to Seattle a few years before. The stained mattress and box spring were found at the curb in the Anchorage ghetto, her father pulling over his Subaru suddenly to ask two boys her age if they would sell it to him. Of course they would—they were throwing it out anyway. There’s a look to a cheap mattress that age can’t disguise: visible springs showing through the cheap fabric—this one red and bright blue, covered with a bold print featuring pilgrims —sparse threads showing needle holes at the welt, a distinctive lack of padding. Girl’s mattress in Rochester was decorated with white roses embroidered on yellow satin. Mother bought the mattress new, though she didn’t have money for extravagances. Father was not only a doctor, but a double specialist in pediatric gastroenterology—the only one in Alaska. He could have afforded a new mattress, but it wasn’t a purchase he was willing to make.
If Girl were back home in New York, her mother would be coming home for dinner soon, she thought as she sat on her dilapidated bed. Mother would have made Jack and Suzy leave. She would have held Girl when she cried. There was no use in thinking about that. This was her father’s house, and he was rarely home, leaving his dog tied up outside and only a Siamese cat to keep Girl company.
Girl sat on the bed, the shiny knife in her hands. She cried—of course she cried. Her shudders were filled with self-loathing. What was so wrong with her that she could not be someone anyone wanted? Girl wanted to pull the pain out of her body and lay it at Jack and Suzy’s feet. She did not want to cry anymore—it gave her a migraine. She did not know how to make herself whole again.
Girl opened the knife. She didn’t want to die, not really, nor did she want to be one of those overly dramatic girls with bandages on their barely-scratched wrists. Besides, Girl had heard that if you cut wrong, you could sever your tendons and be forced to live out the rest of your life with hands dangling uselessly at the end of your arms. If not wrists, what? Something she could hide from parents and teachers. Her ankle.
Girl still sat on the bed, her right ankle resting on her left knee. This new project dried her tears and focused her attention. “My ex-boyfriend and my best friend, my ex-boyfriend and my best friend,” Girl chanted over and over in her head. Jack technically had never considered himself her boyfriend, but Girl had no other word for this boy who broke her heart. She placed the tip of the knife against her skin, drawing it down on a diagonal. Barely a scratch. She pressed harder and produced a thin red line. She added another one.
Girl left her room to see if they were done cooing and kissing yet—they weren’t. “Get out of here, Girl,” Suzy said. It was dark in her father’s room, and Girl couldn’t see them, but Girl could hear their giggles and wet-mouth noises.
