I wish I had time to shower in the gym. I want to let hot water run all over me. I want to spread out my fingers and hold my palms up and feel the water pelt my skin. I feel like I could tip my head to the side, let the water stream into one ear and out the other, cleaning out my brain, and then I could think new thoughts.
But there’s no time for that.
I need to wash up quickly and check in at the main office so I don’t get marked absent.
I pull the plastic shopping bag of gym clothes from my locker and bring it with me to the girls’ bathroom.
I should call Mom. But if I call Mom, things are going to break open and spill out and she might not like what she sees when she studies the entrails. She’s going to want me to answer the question that I don’t even want to ask.
What happened to me last night?
I take off the MTA jacket, hang it up on the hook on the back of the stall door, and start digging through the shopping bag. I first put on the black yoga pants I wear for gym, and then reach back in to get my T-shirt and sports bra, but neither is there.
“Oh man,” I groan, remembering I brought them home last week to wash. I’ll have to stick with the pink dress. At least I have a pair of sneakers. I put them on, gather the shopping bag and the jacket over my arm, and walk out to the row of sinks and mirrors.
And then I drop everything onto the floor and lurch toward the mirror because I see now there is something scrawled in black marker across my chest.
HELP ME
The letters are uneven and messy, sloping down at the end, like they were scribbled in a hurry. I run my fingers over the words, and the skin feels bruised, like whoever wrote them was trying to carve them into my skin.
The tile floor starts to tip and sway, and I grip the edge of the sink and squat down, resting my forehead against the cool porcelain until the world steadies itself again. “Why is this happening to me?” I whisper, staring at the pipe that curves under the sink and into the wall. “Why is this happening?”
I don’t want to stand back up; I don’t want time to start again. I want to stay here, under the sink, until my own inertia seeps into the rest of the universe and nothing ever moves forward again.
But then my thighs are starting to cramp and my fingers are starting to hurt from holding on so tightly to the sink, and so I pull myself back up and there I am again, in the mirror.
A second later I’m tearing off a sheet of paper towel, soaking it in the sink, and wiping it across my chest. The letters stay. I wipe again, harder this time, but all that happens is the skin around the letters gets red and raw.
HELP ME, the words say. “I’m trying!” I hiss, pumping soap from the dispenser onto my hands and soaping up my chest, wiping again, groaning when I see it’s not coming off. The fact is I wrote on myself. Even if I don’t remember it, I can guess why I did it. I can guess that last night, alone for the first time in months in our empty apartment, I freaked out and cut open the futon in my room, which Seemy and I covered in duct tape last summer. Before we covered it, we stuck a fifth of whiskey in the cushion “for emergencies.” I could say I forgot about it after the Nanapocalypse, but that’d be a lie. I knew it was there, and even if I never planned on drinking it, I liked having at least one secret from Mom left. Last night I cut the futon open, pulled out the bottle, drank myself sick, and then went out on the town. Found a costume. Some face paint. And then when I stumbled home, I bet I went into the bathroom and screamed at myself in the mirror for being so pathetically weak and then scrawled these words across my chest before drinking some more and going back out.
“Congratulations,” I say to myself in the mirror. “You’ve ruined everything.”
Dr. Friedman said sometimes when you find yourself in a mess, you have to clean up what you can and leave the rest as a lesson learned.
I pry open the paper towel dispenser so I can take out the whole roll, then climb up onto the left-hand sink, stick my feet into the sink on the right, and set my sneakers on the shelf below the mirror. I pull the yoga-pant legs as high up as they can go, and crank as much soap as I can out of the dispenser and go to work washing the filth off my legs and feet. I get the water as hot as I can stand it; block the drain with my heel so the sink fills up. I let the water drain just before it reaches the rim, and start to scrub. The water swirls black in the sink. I scrub and scrub and scrub, scrub it all away until the skin on my feet and legs is pink and tingling.
I try to give my face the same scrubbing treatment, but it doesn’t work as well. Some of the white comes off, but it leaves a sort of glowing shadow on my skin, and the black stays stuck to my lips and eyes. There was a time I would have been flat-out thrilled to look like this, but I never had the guts to push it this far. Seemy used to roll her eyes at me, leaning in to block my view of myself in the mirror in the bathroom at Duke’s or wherever we’d gone to put my makeup on. “Just leave it,” she’d say as I wiped at my face with toilet paper, “it looks good. Fierce. You’ll ruin it!” Sometimes she’d call me a coward. She’d say, “I thought you were this badass, but you’re totally not. You’re, like, the least scary person I know.” And she’d say this to me while wearing glitter on her cheeks and a kid’s superhero cape. To her I became like an uncooperative Barbie doll.
I wish she would get out of my head.
I hold out my arm and rinse off the four cuts and flinch at the pain as the water runs over them. I can’t stop staring at the way they curve from my inner elbow to my wrist. Four rivers on a map to my memories. I pat them dry with a paper towel and put on the MTA jacket, covering them up.