After Christmas break, I figure everyone will have forgotten they hate me and will talk to me again, but that’s not what happens. I spend January without friends, faking sickness so I can stay home and try to come up with schemes to get myself back in everyone’s good graces. I’m not certain I can live with this feeling much longer. I try to separate myself from the Shallow Countdown sensation that has permanently taken over my body, but I already know the only way is to be relieved from the worry, and I don’t know how to solve this problem. I obsess over possibilities, unable to concentrate on anything else: not homework, or boys, or what Amelia is doing right now. Even though I’m not missing like Etan, my friends have made me disappear. Even though I can see my own body, I can’t seem to feel myself. My mom is no help. She continues to insist that everyone is jealous of me, and it’s starting to enrage me. It’s like she’s not even listening, just playing back the same old recording.
Eddie’s been growing out his hair, wearing combat boots, and dressing more like a punk. At school, he’s been part of the bad crowd for a while, with The Worm and Tony the Terror, but now he’s in the biggest trouble of his life. They all played hooky to get David Bowie concert tickets, but they got caught by a police officer and now he’s suspended from school. He is so lucky. Suspension means missing school, and that would solve all my problems. But how does a person who isn’t Eddie go about getting suspended?
On the days I do go to school, I’m saved by Kara, who lets me into her circle. I make her friends laugh, and they adopt me. I get closer to the kids in the art room, too, and I feel a separate space being carved out for me, one my ex-friends can’t touch. Despite all this, though, I stay angry. Angry for being the one who got rejected, mad that I can’t make it go away, mad that neither my mom nor Kara can protect me from such abandonment and betrayal.
At the end of this year Kara is graduating, and we won’t be in the same place ever again. She won’t be with me at Dad’s house, and she won’t be with me at school. To my body, this feels like a terminal diagnosis, and it begins preparing for her death. Who will protect me if she’s not there? Not Eddie. Why do Eddie and Kara know how to protect themselves when I don’t?
Eddie spends his suspension playing guitar, hanging out in the East Village with his hoodlum friends, and listening to punk music that leaks out from under his closed door, filling the house with its intensity. Something inside me I can’t access is being expressed by the music I’m hearing, as if, in life’s great Memory game, I’ve finally turned over a card that matches me.
He agrees to lend me a couple of albums that I listen to over and over. The music makes me feel invincible and fills me with a sense of confidence that disappears the second the song ends. Eddie’s new look matches this music. He looks tough. When you look tough, people are afraid of you and will not slap you and make the entire grade stop talking to you forever. When you are tough, your worries and fears leave and never ever return.
One night, after distracting my relentlessly nervous body from itself by listening to Eddie’s music, I discover he’s dyed his hair, and the bathroom, maroon. Mom is livid. She does not want him going to school looking like that. It’s not just his hair she can’t stand, it’s also his combat boots and ripped jeans and holey T-shirts. Night after night, Eddie sits calmly on the end of her flowery bed, his combat boots dirtying up the frilly bed skirt while she yells at him, but he won’t change. Jimmy stays out of it. He built himself a workbench in the basement, and now he spends time puttering around with Norman Bates.
Outside, on the street side of life, strangers call his name, and when I’m not with him, they stop me and ask if I’m Eddie Stern’s sister. The transformation that’s undoing my mom in the house is raising Eddie’s profile in the world. Maybe I can transform myself.
I know my timing is good. Mom wants Eddie to fit in and he wants to stand out, and I am standing out but I want to fit in—which is what my mom wants for all her children. Appearances matter to her. She wants us to be normal, and we’re not. She and Dad both are like this—there’s a type of kid they want us to be; it’s obvious by the clothes they make us wear, and the schools we go to, and how we have to dress up when we go on an airplane. They want the world to look at us and be impressed. To be envious of us, and of our parents. The kids they want do well in school and don’t have tutors or stay behind a grade or dye their hair maroon. They want us to match the pictures in their heads, but we don’t. I wait until Eddie leaves and then swap places with him at the end of her bed.
“How do I look more like my friends?” I ask.
“I don’t know. How do your friends look?”
“They all have straight hair,” I say without hesitation.
“So let’s get your hair straightened.”
I feel my octaves grow higher. “You can do that?” I ask. “That exists?”
“Of course,” she says. “People chemically straighten their hair all the time. I’ll make an appointment.”
And just like that, my world opens up again. In one week, I’ll have straight hair and my friends will take me back. But even as this thought makes me deliriously happy, a prickling dread appears.
I tear out images from magazines: Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford, along with other beautiful blond models with silky waterfalls of sleekness. When I hand the hairdresser the small pile, he laughs and explains that he can’t “perform miracles” or give birth to a brand-new me. He says he has to work with “the mess that exists,” and then he gets busy burning my eyes with the chemical fumes and wrapping hundreds of pieces of tinfoil in my hair. When he’s finished, my hair is a glossy chestnut brown, and longer than it’s ever been. All the way to my collarbone. He promises me that even after I wash it, it will dry just like this. I’m at once thrilled that my mother suggested this and furious at her for keeping this information from me for so long.
I don’t wash my hair all weekend. On Monday, the teachers all compliment me and other students do double takes. I feel like I’m in an issue of Seventeen magazine. I see Madison, Amelia, and Tatum down the hall. They’re staring at me, I can tell, but I don’t look back. Suddenly, I’m nervous and worried I’ve made a mistake. To prevent myself from walking in their direction, I open my locker and stick my head inside until my breathing slows. It’s not until second period that I come face-to-face with Amelia, when she’s assigned as my lab partner.
“I like your hair,” she says, staring at a test tube.
I can’t believe this. My hair made her speak to me! A long Torah scroll of things I want to change and improve about myself unfolds in my brain. “Thank you,” I say. My mom is a genius.
“How have you been?” she asks with pity.
I know I’m supposed to satisfy this pity. Otherwise, she won’t take me back. “Not very good,” I say, throwing her the same martyred expression my mom uses when she feels she’s been wronged. I hope it works.
“That’s too bad.”
We follow the lab directions and pour some solution into the left test tube and watch it bubble over.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” I say, admitting to nothing.
“Me too,” she says.
We turn the right test tube into a bubbling soda.
“Do you want to sit with us at lunch today?” she asks.
I look at her. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell the other girls we’re being nice to you again,” she says.
“Great!” I say. “Thanks!”
I can’t believe this has been the answer all along. My parents are right. If you look and act like everyone else, you’ll be accepted, and all your bad fortune will reverse. If only I’d straightened my hair when I was a baby. I guess it’s time to dye it blond.
It’s not until we’re all at lunch together, pretending like nothing happened, that I feel something stuck inside me, a residue of despair. As happy as I am to be past this awful experience, I don’t feel as good about myself as I thought I would. I still feel like a bad person, a stupid, ugly person, even with my new hair—which, while it says I must be accepted because I match everyone else, also reminds me that the way I used to be, the way I was born, wasn’t good enough. Even my mom thinks so.
When I hear the other girls making jokes about reversing the decision to take me back, jokes just like my dad would make, I realize I don’t trust them, or anyone else in my grade. I sift each word carefully before saying anything, and even when I say it, I float away from myself just in case it’s wrong. I am constantly floating away.
Turns out, they were wrong about my hair because when I wash it, it doesn’t dry straight, it dries frizzy. Kara tries straightening it for me, but it just turns into straight frizz. It’s not just mortifying—it’s an actual threat to my social life, and therefore my life overall. If I don’t look like them, my friends will bump me out again. Kara suggests a french braid. Lots of girls wear their hair like that. In the morning she gets to work, furiously braiding to disguise the monstrosity. I stare at her in the mirror, trying not to think about the unbearable: What happens next year when she’s gone? Even when I’m not thinking about it, my body holds the information for me, always knocking and trying to get me to look. Kara is thrilled, but I dread her graduation. What’s to celebrate? I’m losing my sister, my second mother. She keeps reminding me that she’ll be home for holidays, but holidays happen only twice a year. I’ve been sobbing every night, going through all the color stages of countdown. Always ending up in Empty Countdown. I need Kara here. I don’t want to be left behind with just Eddie and Holly; Eddie is always in the East Village and never around enough, and even though Holly is less scary than she used to be, I still keep a safe distance, even at school. Everyone likes the french braid, though, so that’s one good thing I can hang my hat on.
Holly is getting in trouble at school, too, and so there are fights now about that. Daniel keeps to himself, and David is at college. Kara never gets into trouble or does anything wrong. She’s so good, in fact, that she’s our mom’s favorite and gets special treatment. Mom even bought tickets for Kara and her friends to see a play on Broadway. I never got that. When Kara is sick in the middle of the night, if she has asthma or is throwing up, my mom gets up and sits with her, but when I’m sick in the middle of the night, she doesn’t do that with me, or with anyone else. She has more in common with Kara than with me. It’s a realization I don’t like, but I know it’s true.
My mom and I get in fights now, too. When she tells me I have to do something I don’t want to do—like call a friend of hers to say sorry about their husband getting sick, or go to a funeral, or some other “right thing,” something that feels terrifying instead of “right”—I say I don’t want to, and this makes her lose her patience with me. She says I’m selfish or a brat and that I never think of anyone but myself. Then I cry on my bed and she comes in and apologizes and takes it all back, but all those words stick inside and never go away.
I can’t get anything right. Everything I do is wrong, and it’s always being pointed out. When it’s not my grades, or my inability to understand how to read a map or take tests, it’s my hair, or my clothes, or my attitude. Why can’t my mom see the things about me that do work, like she does with Kara? I want her to fix me, but she keeps trying to change the parts of me that make me who I am, and not the parts of me that are broken.
* * *
CBGB, Scrap Bar, Mudd Club—these are just a few of Eddie’s favorite places. He hangs out primarily in the East Village now, where purse snatchers toss stolen bags onto tar rooftops. Small piles create a new hilly landscape. Something about his new persona both frightens me and appeals to me. I wouldn’t want to come across him in a dark alley, but I also know he would never hurt anyone. Deep down he’s very gentle, but you’d never guess that by looking at him, and I like that a person can keep themselves a secret in this way. I thought my blazer and uniform would do that for me, but they didn’t. It wasn’t the right disguise. I’d hoped that external aids would express to the world what was broken in me that needed fixing, but I didn’t do it right because what they’re trying to fix is different from the thing that’s broken. Like I’ve gone to get a tonsillectomy, but they gave me a neck brace. Now I feel like I need to protect the part of me I’ve always wanted fixed because it’s getting injured every time it’s neglected. Although I do feel pulled toward being like everyone else, to look and act and get good grades like my friends, I know that deep down I couldn’t, even if I tried, because I’m not smart. It might be time to resign myself to that fact.
One day Eddie comes home with a Mohawk and a nose ring, and Mom is furious. A skid mark of long red spikes tracks down his otherwise bald head. I run my hand down my french braid. I’m growing my hair out. Maybe if it’s longer it will get straighter.
“You cannot go to school looking like that,” she yells at him. “What will people think of you? What will people think of me?” she asks, getting more and more agitated.
“Great,” Eddie says. “No school.”
Eddie doesn’t care what people think of him, or if he does, he’s good at hiding it. I care what people think of me too much, which is why I give people what they want, even if it’s not true, which gets me in over my head—like telling Amelia I bought Eddie Hunky Dory when I didn’t—and then I become a bad person.
Some days my brother compromises and goes to school wearing the Mohawk down so his hair is long, but other days he sprays it straight up, molding sections into spikes. He wears army green sweaters and black skinny jeans with holes and safety pins all over them. Someone gave him a job working as a bouncer at a bar called Beulahland on Avenue A between Tenth and Eleventh. No one cares that he’s not eighteen. Eddie is the coolest person I’ve ever met. He’s a real, live punk living in my own house. I’ve seen some of his friends from the East Village and they all look generally the same, although one guy has a tattoo on his face of stripes, like a zebra. They all grabbed at something from the world and made it their very own thing. I don’t know how to do that, but I want to. Part of me feels ready to branch out and away from my mom, to be separate and independent, but part of me is panicked by the very idea. Worse, I sense that she doesn’t even want me to be separate and independent, as if I’m not allowed.
Eddie is moody and sullen and he barely talks to anyone anymore. It feels like a privilege when he pays attention to you now, like when the Italian women call down for Loosies.
One night I’m playing Nerf basketball in my room when Eddie knocks on my door.
“You wanna help me dye my hair green?” he asks.
“Sure!” I say, dropping the ball and following him into the bathroom. He shows me what to do. The whole time, though, I can’t help checking if he’s sure. Green is not the most flattering color for my pale, redheaded brother. But he’s sure. When we’re done, and he looks in the mirror, he looks so ugly I’m scared he’s going to murder my face off, or worse, dye my hair green.
“It’s fucking awesome,” he says.
“But…it’s sort of…ugly,” I tell him, nervous.
“That’s the point, dumbass,” he says and walks out of the bathroom.
I’m confused. Doesn’t he want to be good-looking? Doesn’t everyone?
When I hear my mom screaming at him later, I know she thinks it’s ugly, too. I know she doesn’t get it either. I worry Eddie might be the only one who does. But what if he’s right? If ugly is the point, then pretty isn’t the point, and if being pretty isn’t the point, then maybe I actually have a chance. No matter how many things I try to do to make myself look better, I’ll never actually be pretty, but maybe there is another avenue to reach for. Maybe Eddie is showing me the way. Changing how you look might be the answer after all, just not the way I thought. My mom probably never imagined we’d grow up to look and act the way we do. Sometimes I think about Etan’s parents, and his siblings, and I feel stabs of sadness that they don’t get to see him change the way they’re changing. It makes me feel guilty for wanting to be different from how I was, because he’ll never get that chance, and because it means we’re all moving farther and farther away from him.
* * *
Spring sprints toward us, and soon it’s June. Everyone else in my family is sitting together in the church, but I’m with my class. I know I’m going to cry hysterically when I hear the first notes of Pachelbel’s “Canon” and see my sister walking down the aisle, like we’re giving her away. Mrs. Baldwin gives me permission to stand behind the column, where I can see my sister better. How will I survive this? I’m so homesick for my sister. At home it’s all I’ve been able to talk and think about for weeks. Kara says she’ll come home in a few months and I’ll see her then, but that’s too far in the future to feel real. Jimmy says we can visit her, but I know we won’t. Eddie says I’m a fucking idiot, and my mom says she wishes Kara didn’t have to go either. I am too old to feel the way I do, I know. But somehow, while I’m no longer in grade school, I’ve yet to outgrow my fears. Maybe I got stuck, like a clock that broke at noon; I can’t move forward until someone restores me, takes me apart and rewires my interior, which I know they won’t do and never will because all anyone’s done is focus on my exterior: resanding and repainting the outside, never going farther than my stuckness, never finding out the why of me.
My sister is the smartest person I know, and of course she wins a lot of awards at the graduation ceremony, which makes me feel proud, but also inferior. When her name is called for her diploma, I’m practically hyperventilating, but I clap because I know people will notice if I don’t, and then they’ll see for themselves that I’m a fucking idiot. Everyone is happy except me.
Although she’s not leaving for two more months, the air already feels buckled and warped. Who will I be without Kara? When Mom is mad at me, Kara talks to her and makes things better. I don’t want Kara to leave me. I don’t know why she even wants to go to college. The invisible wrongs inside my body feel embossed onto the atmosphere. Maybe every error or mistake I’ve made in my life stained the world, and each dent and divot I try not to fall into is a piece of old me, a pockmarked reminder of my difference and abnormality. Is this how I’ll leave my mark?
* * *
Even as I’m trying to wrestle down my future, the past and I can’t let each other go. A photo of Etan is found in Massachusetts, and a New York City cabdriver comes forward to say he’d picked up an older man and Etan the day he disappeared. The photo appeared in a calendar and led the police to NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. The cabdriver’s story doesn’t pan out, but now the police think Etan was pulled into a sex ring. I don’t want to think about whatever that might mean. It’s May 25, 1984, five years to the day since Etan went missing, and the second year of National Missing Children’s Day, created in Etan’s honor. Enough kids disappear for there to be a commemoration day. Why do people lie about what happens when reality always knows where to find you and tell you the truth? He’s eleven now, and he wouldn’t look like his picture. We might pass by him all the time, never even knowing. Just like us teenagers, we’re unrecognizable. I don’t know what he’d look like anymore; no one does.
As the summer arrives, my countdowns get worse in preparation for Kara’s departure. I’m desperate to stop this all-encompassing dread. I have to toughen myself up somehow, but how? I see Madison over the summer and we practice smoking, which is awful and doesn’t work at all. Then I try drinking, which is even more revolting and makes me throw up. And then Eddie puts a bunch of his clothes in a box to toss out, and I go through it and take every last piece. As I’m trying on his army green sweater and rolling up the too-long holey black jeans, I look in the mirror and see a different me. A cooler, tougher, jaded-looking me. For the first time in my life, I see something I haven’t before—the outside of me is telling a story about the inside of me, and even though the stories don’t entirely match, I like what the outside story suggests better than the truth, much better than any dumb blazer.
Then I spot the buzzer that Eddie used for his Mohawk, and I clip one side of my hair short, keeping the other asymmetrically long. When I stand back and look at my uneven, crazy haircut, I see myself out of someone else’s eyes. WOW! Look at that girl! She’s tough and scary, not at all fragile and scared or feeling like she’s dying because her sister is going to college and she still can’t leave her mommy. My new look tells the world to back the fuck up and not hurt me because I’ll hurt you first.