When he sat back down, she smiled apologetically. “I’m really sorry. He’s just protective. He cares about me, so he gets worried.”
Mr. Clifton nodded but appeared not to be listening. Instead, he stared at the surface of the desk. He looked up at her.
“Tina, I’m going to tell you this one thing, and then you can go. I heard something distressing, but perhaps it was not from a source that would prove very reliable. All I will say is that when you’re dating anyone—but especially with Todd—you need to make sure he’s respecting you. Understand?”
“Of course. I do. And he does.” She smiled to show that she meant it. “He’s just protective.”
Mr. Clifton grilled her awhile longer, increasingly desperate to hear her disparage 56, but he finally let her leave. A few weeks later, with the awful year of 2001 having flipped forward, 56 told her, “We’re done.” One day they were fine—she ate dinner at his house, they played with a dog named Winnow in his backyard, he drove her home—and then the weekend passed and he never called her. When she finally got him on the phone, he only had those two evil words to say. After her stunned silence, tears, and protestations, he realized her secret fear. He said it right out loud: “It’s like, how can I marry you after all that shit I’ve seen you do?”
Nearly a dozen years later, it still made her breath catch in her throat. His cruelty. He barely looked at her in the halls when they got back from break.
A year of her life cut off like a guillotine came down and severed her neck.
He began seeing that awful skank Jess Bealey, who, every time Tina laid eyes on her, made her want to scream. Tina spent weeks holed up in her bedroom struck dumb with grief, a constant panic coiled in her chest, unable to comprehend how he could drop her so casually and instantaneously. Had Mr. Clifton told Principal MacMillan or Coach Bonheim something? Had he threatened 56? Had 56 seen Mr. Clifton prying into their love life and decided she was more trouble than she was worth? She asked these questions endlessly and in circles, obsessed with finding an answer but afraid to leave her room, to talk to anyone at school, to accept her mother’s reassurances that this too shall pass, to approach the love of her life and ask for an explanation, though in her dreams they still sat together in his truck and looked out over the Cattawa, the water like scrolls of gold in the autumn sun.
Pulling alongside him, the window rolled down, she tried to call out. Her breath caught and hitched in the back of her throat. The residual terror due to the Cobalt’s faulty engine still rippled through her nerves, and the words became a choked cough. Fifty-six turned around on his own when he heard the car stop at his back. He still held his phone, index finger poised to dial. He’d crouched to examine the tire, and he turned to her with one knee on the ground, his boot scraping at the grit. He wore a short-sleeve plaid shirt, the top three or four buttons open over a white tank top, and when headlights washed over them, she could see a meat-yellow sweat tint at the collar.
“Hey,” she said, pushing her voice to as bright and jaunty a note as she could manage. “I thought that was you, Five-Six. Whatcha doing?”
It was hard to read his face because the eyes were a bit bleary and his expression was so neutral. Still, there was none of the joy or surprise she’d hoped for.
“Hey, you.” He snorted a laugh. “Of all people. Fucking tire’s flat,” he muttered, looking back at it. “Think some grab-ass prankster let the air out.”
“That sucks.” She glanced around the street, still empty in all directions. “Need a ride somewhere? Thought I’d do a nightcap.”
“You got booze?”
“Course.”
He laughed softly and shook his head. Then she caught him glancing at her chest. Just a flit of his eyes, an assessment. One thing about her weight gain was that a portion of it had gone to her breasts. She’d worn a tight black shirt and a bra that pushed them to his eye.
“Yeesh. Why the hell not.” He pocketed his phone and reached for the passenger door. He crashed into the seat, which protested his girth. He grabbed hold of the handle above the door and skipped his seat belt. She pulled into the street, amazed at how easy that had been, thinking ahead to what she would say now, how this might possibly go. When she checked the rearview, she saw a tall woman in a pretty summer dress come slinking from the alley to the street. She wore high black boots and had a cute purse slung over her shoulder. Her gait looked familiar, the way she carried herself. To Tina’s dismay, the woman watched them drive away.
She let the air out of his tire only because she saw no other way to be alone with him. He wouldn’t have gone with her if she just walked up to him and said she wanted to talk. He didn’t work like that. She’d tried many, many times in high school. Grow up, he’d hissed by his locker. Mine ain’t the last dick you’re ever gonna have in you. Words that made her panicked and ill.
At some point crying wasn’t quite enough. That’s when her eating troubles began. When she looked in the mirror she saw a fat, ugly, slutty little child that a man bound for the NFL could never be attracted to, let alone love. “Shorter women have trouble keeping the weight off their hips,” her mother explained, herself a squat, rotund woman, once pretty in old pictures but now suited in middle-age flab. She could already see the advent of her mother’s figure in her shape. This got better only when she mostly stopped eating.
It wasn’t until 56 graduated, though, and it became very real that he was going away and would not be coming back to her, that she really started with the pricks. “Pricking herself” was how she thought of it, but her instrument was not a needle. A box cutter from her dad’s tool kit, rather. A few months after it disappeared her dad finally noticed and ransacked the house looking for it.
“Just go buy a new one,” her mother suggested.
“Why? I have a perfectly good one. It didn’t damn well dematerialize. It’s around. Unless you put it somewhere.”
“That’s right, I hid your box cutter to gaslight you.”
It had a bright orange grip. The blade was about an inch wide and could extend four inches from the handle. You pushed the black button with your thumb to pop it out, and then the button pulled apart to lock the blade into place at your preferred length. It was the only weapon the men had used to take over those planes and fly them into the towers, and this seemed to lend it a certain power it otherwise could never have possessed. This was a tool that changed history overnight. A little blade like this had toppled those two incredible buildings with perfect Hollywood symmetry, rained ash and fire and gray dust across the capital of the world. She liked holding it in her hand and marveling at this. Eventually, her dad bought a replacement and forgot about it.
She began on the back of her thigh. First, she’d clean the blade with cotton balls soaked in isopropyl alcohol and stand naked with her back to the mirror in her room. Watching over her shoulder she’d press gently at first, then more firmly, and draw the blade over the back of her thigh until blood trickled down. She liked doing it there because in class the next day she’d have to sit on the hot, secret filaments.
Then the backs of her thighs began to get too messy and she moved to the inside, cutting right up to the V near her groin. This was okay for a while. Then she needed more and moved the pricks to her torso. Drawing the blade along her rib cage, she explored the contours of the bone. Her body became a map, a serpentine sketch of scars in different stages of healing. Old pricks faded to thin pink and white lines while newer flesh, raw and red, could still bleed through the bandages she applied. She collected the used ones in a plastic bag in her closet and only threw them away at school.