This is an excerpt from my memoir, Swing Sets. In the piece, I share many of my truths for the first time. In this particular section, I’m fourteen, struggling to accept myself and my situation.
High school is a welcome change. Here, dressing like you’re poor is cool and my long hair is beautifully feminine, though the reality is that I’m just too broke for a haircut. It’s not long before someone notices my glow sophomore year, and it all goes downhill. He is long, like a string bean, and pale as a sheet of paper. His Adam’s apple bobs awkwardly and his dark bangs contrast so greatly with his complexion that he looks ill. From the way he eyes me, I know he thinks I’m beautiful. Sexy. I sop up his attention like a sponge would water. Glance back at him, shy, the way I think I’m supposed to glance at him. It’s only a number of days before we are dating. By dating, I mean hooking up in his apartment after he gets me high.
The joint and his mouth taste bitter. Blacken the inside of my lungs, but I don’t care. My euphoria with freedom is becoming tiresome, and I wish I had a mother who didn’t vomit first thing in the morning, and ate meals at regular hours of the day. His parents, an art dealer and a music producer, have three well-balanced meals a day around a table. Whenever I kiss him, I think about how charming I’d be if I were to meet them, how I’d pass a porcelain bowl of snap peas to his dad and heartily laugh at his mother’s jokes. Like every ingénue on every show I’ve ever watched.
I take up drinking with him and his friends by the Gowanus and unknowingly tag along on trips to steal Triple C at Rite Aid. One boy with a triangle face and piercing blue eyes becomes a friend. I share with him how my boyfriend treats me, and he shares with me how my eyebrows are too dark. He tells me I’m fucking dumb, but only because he cares.
By March, I’m cutting myself with butter knives and razors. In my mind, I see myself going too deep, being too absorbed in the process, and slicing through my jugular veins, so tiny Bic blades and ribbed knives are all I use. Another cutter and I become friends, and we spend hours in her bed, counting scars and crossing each other’s wounds. My journal at that time, a fifty-cent marble with pages loose at the binding, soon fills with poetry about her. This is when I realize there may be more to the jittery feeling I get around girls.
On Easter Sunday, my mom cannot cheer me up. There is a small, momentary reversal in the roles we share. She applies blush haughtily in our toothpaste-flecked bathroom mirror, while I stare expressionless at my reflection. I do not put on makeup. I do not speak. I do not change.
“What’s wrong, Gina?” she asks. The holiday has rejuvenated her Catholic spirit and brought to life her favorite memories.
I say nothing. Pull down my pants to reveal where my thighs are marked and bleeding. The expression on her face falters, but her lips quickly resume their previous position. Her eyes take on a stony look.
“Go get dressed.”
So I do, but the next day, I ask my friend for her therapist’s number, because it’s clear no one is there to take care of me but myself.
Rebecca is a holistic Wiccan. In her drawer, there are salves and serums and lemon-scented lotions she makes herself. She’s on the skinny side, with a sunny face. In her office, I mourn the life I have always wanted. The one with the father who carries me on his shoulders and threatens to “take the bat out” on boys my age. The one who held my left hand while my mother held my right, and lifted me across the street. The one where my mother is an art dealer, or a kindergarten teacher, or a veterinarian who asks me how I’m doing every day after school, and always makes sure there’s food in the house. The one where we all sit in the library talking about the books we’ve read and the grades I’m getting and how I’m liking the drama classes they’ve enrolled me in.
In her office, I’ve killed the dreams of being beautiful, owning stylish clothing. The dreams where boys fawn over me, lust over me. Where I own jeans that fit my heart-shaped bottom perfectly. Where I wear PINK sweaters and have perfectly straight hair, perfectly straight nails, and perfectly straight sexuality.
I’ve put flowers on the grave of being everything I’m not. Set up a lovely ceremony; hired a priest to bury my Catholic upbringing; and invited the pew of old, wrinkly leather-ladies who made me feel I wasn’t light enough, skinny enough, woman enough to be beautiful. I’ve done my alms, burned my palms, got my last rites read, all under the concerned, squinting eyes of my kind, hippie therapist.