Crosses
Chapter 1
“We cut ourselves. Not by accident, we do it purposely—and regularly—because physical pain is comforting, and because now it has become a habit. Like the drugs. These are, in fact, the two main things Katie and I have in common. They are how we met.” This was my diary entry on November fourth, 1985.
When I met Katie I was fifteen. It was September of 1985, and I’d just started ninth grade. Before school I fought with my mother about the bologna I wasn’t taking with me for lunch. I almost gave in and agreed to make a sandwich, knowing I would only throw it in the wire basket outside the school. But when I opened the plastic meat-keeper the smell made me want to puke. It didn’t help that I’d sucked nearly a pint of vodka through a straw and straight up to my brain the night before. I clutched my stomach and scrunched my nose.
“It’s bad,” I said, “just smell it.”
My mother reopened the plastic container. “Only because you’ve let it sit there for two weeks.” She pushed my nose down near the pink, fat-covered, gross lunch-meat and I held my breath. When I couldn’t keep from breathing anymore, I bolted from under Mom’s grasp and escaped out the back door. At the end of the street, I vomited and felt better.
I was already sweating by the time I reached the end of the next block. It was only the second week of school, and the weather was sultry. At least I’d managed to slip out of the house in my battered black sandals, instead of the socks and loafers my mother had bought and expected me to wear to school, no matter what the weather. It would be at least two weeks before it was cool enough to wear socks, and even then I wasn’t thrilled about wearing loafers. Thank God they were black and would match my newly dyed hair.
I stopped in town to buy a diet Coke at the donut shop. Then, at seven forty-five, I shuffled into the brick school building and right away went to the bathroom to change from my parent-imposed conservative dress into a ripped fatigue T-shirt, jeans—on inside-out—and a long black vest. I knew the jeans would stick to my skin from the heat, but we weren’t allowed to wear shorts at Babylon High.
I stuck safety pins everywhere and dangled paper clips from my ears. Finally, I spiked my hair, making it shiny with gel. Another girl came into the bathroom as I inspected myself in the mirror and I almost gagged. She also had gel in her hair, but the result for her was a big, poofy, feathered up-and-back lion’s mane. My blue-black hair was short with bald spots where I’d cut too much. Spikes stuck straight up like pieces of broken glass. My shirt was green and black and dirty, the other girl’s was pink with “Ocean Pacific” printed across the front. Her high heels made it difficult for her to stand securely, whereas my unevenness was caused by my hangover. I went into one of the toilet stalls so I could giggle without her seeing me.
When I first started dressing punk my mother freaked. I was barely fourteen, and I went shopping one afternoon with money I made baby-sitting. It was October and there was a Homecoming dance at school that night. I wanted to look good. Hand-me-down jeans with stovepipe bottoms and pink flowers embroidered on the back pocket wouldn’t cut it. I couldn’t afford real leather, but I saw a fake leather miniskirt. I bought it, along with a bright red T-shirt. “Screaming Hussy Red,” Katie would call it a year later.
I got the effect I wanted. Everyone was shocked, even though my outfit was pretty bland in my eyes—the skirt, after all, came to mid-knee. It made me feel special, and I thought I looked pretty.
My mother wasn’t home when I left for the dance, but she waited up for me later. She was watching TV in the living room, so when I came through the kitchen door, my father saw me first.
“Do you know how many naugas they must have killed to get the hide for that skirt?” he said, putting a jar of mayonnaise back into the refrigerator. I laughed and went into the living room to kiss my mother good night. She raised her eyes from the TV Guide and slowly took off her reading glasses. I’d suspected she’d be angry. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the outburst I got.
“Do you know what you look like?” she said quietly, then yelled, “Look in the mirror! Go look in the mirror, then come back and tell me what you saw!” I didn’t move. The TV’s blue shimmer made her look older than her thirty-three years, and I thought, freakin’ old bag—fuck you. I’m old enough to wear what I want, and there’s nothing wrong with what I’m wearing.
“You look like a slut!” she screamed. I saw my father sneak past to the liquor cabinet, and hoped he would butt in and tell her to shut the hell up, but of course, he didn’t.
“There’s nothing wrong with what I’m wearing!” I said, “Amy Brown wore a denim miniskirt. Why don’t you say something about her?” It didn’t matter that Amy had actually worn jeans, I needed someone on my side and my sometimes-friend Amy was my mother’s idea of a model child.
“There’s a world of difference between leather and denim. And where’d you get the money?”
“From baby-sitting.”
“Do I have to start hiding my wallet now, too?”
“The skirt isn’t even that short, I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”
“Don’t ever let me catch you wearing that again.”
I stood glaring at her, tears welling in my eyes. As I stomped up the stairs, I angrily refused to acknowledge my father when I brushed past him. Freakin’ traitor. Wimp. I guess that’s what happens when you spend forty hours a week sitting in a little cubicle looking at ledgers and a computer screen. You lose your backbone.
Slowly, my wardrobe hardened. I cut my hair short and started spiking it, started attaching safety pins and paper clips to everything, started wearing dark eye liner and heavy black mascara to make my bright blue eyes stand out like fishbowls. When I was drinking or high, the glassiness added to that illusion. My mother and I fought constantly about the way I dressed, so, rather than drive her to poking my eyes out with one of my own safety pins, I started carrying my clothes to school with me, and changing in the bathroom when I got there.
Now, a year later, I was still toting my wardrobe to a blue-green stall so I wouldn’t look like a geek. Sometimes I thought that was my best subject: Warding off Geekness 101. I had to work harder than anyone else because instead of being blessed with beauty or wealth, I’d managed to be born with intelligence. Not enough to make me a blithering genius, but enough to make me sometimes act stupid and blurt out the right answer to a supposedly tough question. I tried to avoid doing that, but it could get real dull listening to some mop-headed teacher with sagging stockings whine, “Doesn’t anybody know how Captain Ahab got his peg leg?”
The sound of thirty people riffling through their notes was so unnerving, I’d finally raise my hand and mumble the answer, pulling on a safety pin and trying to look like I hadn’t really done the reading, but somehow this one answer had just come to me. If it weren’t for my clothes and my attitude, I never could’ve gotten away with it. As it was, I still wasn’t sure it was working. Fourteen years of being a geek is hard to fix.
Still, I could try. After changing my clothes in the bathroom, I colored my lips with soft black eyeliner and lit a cigarette in the stall. I kept the door open a crack, so I could see if anyone came in. Unfortunately, when a hallway aide did slip in, my sneakiness didn’t help me any. I was the only one in the bathroom, and Miss Clairol swore she smelled smoke, so I was snagged. Protest was useless—it didn’t matter that she hadn’t seen a cigarette, I was written up, and would probably get detention.
The day got worse. I went to math class first period, and got back the first test of the year. Scrawled in red ink across the top of the ditto was, “85%—Good!” Good? I pressed my fingers hard against my desk. Good? This was the lowest grade I’d ever gotten in math. I mean, my father was an accountant for Christ’s sake. It was in my blood to know numbers and shit. I crumpled the test, and without asking permission I took the bathroom pass and left the classroom, my army bag slung over my shoulder and my fingers clenched hard on its strap as I tried not to cry.
I sat in the corner, behind the last toilet stall and near the window. It was open, and the smoke from my cigarette floated outside so there was less chance of me getting caught if a teacher came in. I downed a shampoo sample bottle filled with my parents’ vodka and started to feel better. Wiping ashes from my jeans, I reached into my bag and after pawing through scraps of paper, empty cigarette boxes, and old butts from when my carry-along ashtray broke, I finally found a small, sharp piece of glass. I always kept sharp things in my bag for emergencies. Sometimes I carved designs—mostly crosses—but the way the day was going, I really felt like I might cry. I needed relief fast and this was how I was brought up. When I was little, my mother used to slap me across my face when I cried, “to give me a good reason,” but once I got older, I found that wasn’t enough. I began to use glass when I needed a reason to break down.
Puffing hard on my cigarette, I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the glass up my arm again and again. Suddenly I felt like I wasn’t alone anymore, and opened my eyes. In front of me stood a girl with funky clothes, a ton of jingling bracelets, and incredible long blond hair with little spikes on top—Katie. I blushed almost as red as the blood which was beginning to surface on my arm. For a few seconds, we only stared at each other. I’d seen her around, but never spoke to her much. She hung out with a different crowd, the so-called “dirt-bags.” I’d always wanted to be a part of her group, but like I said, despite my clothes I was stuck with a “good girl” image.
Finally, I said, “Hi.”
“Hey, do you have an extra cigarette?” she asked.
I gave her one, and my lighter, too, and she sat down next to me on the tiled floor already littered with butts and ashes. I was still nervous because of the blossoming cuts on my arm. I think she read my mind because she smiled and showed me her shoulder, which had a scabby cross about an inch long carved into it.
Chapter 2
At lunch I went outside to smoke a cigarette. Our school had junior and senior highs combined in one building. Out at the designated smoking island across the street from the cafeteria exit, I got to hang out with a lot of seniors, which was cool. It was especially cool because only ninth graders and up were allowed to leave the school building for lunch. This was only my second week at the smoking island. Even so, today I didn’t bother trying to socialize with any of the older girls because I saw Katie off to the side. I joined her, and she smiled.
“What’s up?” I said, throwing my hip out to the side and slipping a finger into the waist of my jeans. I almost wished I could fling my hair back like she did, but decided running my fingers through my black spikes was sophisticated enough.
“Not much,” she answered. “Do you smoke?”
At first I looked at her a little confused—I had a cigarette in my hand. What did she mean, “Do I smoke?” Then I noticed she’d made a ring shape with her forefinger and thumb and was holding it to her red-frosted lips. I realized she meant, “Do I smoke weed.” I grinned, trying to look cool.
“Fuck yes,” I said. “Do you have any?” Meanwhile I was thinking to myself, oh shit, now you’ve done it. You don’t even know how to hold a joint. She’s going to spot your ignorance in a second. Stupid.
Katie pulled me by my arm around the back of the tennis courts, her many-colored bracelets jangling on her wrist. When we got there, she took out a baggie of weed and some paper. She began rolling a joint.
I took a deep breath and said, “Actually, I lied. I’ve never smoked before. I would of, but I never had the opportunity. Sorry. I can go and leave you alone now, if you want.” I was redder than Katie’s lipstick.
Katie didn’t say anything. She licked the joint shut, handed it to me, and took a brush from her black leather purse. She stroked the long blond back of her hair, leaving the shiny, spiked top alone. Then she put the brush away, looked at me with muddy-brown eyes rimmed in green liner and mascara, and said, “So. There’s a first time for everything, right? If you want to try it, now’s the best time, ’cause I’m the best teacher. Here, gimme. I’ll take the first drag, and you just watch me. You suck really hard, like this.” She talked while she was holding the smoke down, then handed the joint to me. “But don’t close your mouth too tight on the end, or you won’t get anything through.” she said.
Watching her reaction to see how I was doing, I inhaled deeply.
“When you start choking, you’ve got enough smoke,” said Katie. “That’s it! Good! Hold it in, hold it in! Cover your mouth when you cough, it makes the smoke go back in.”
After three hits, I had to sit down. It was like my first cigarette head-rush, only worse. All my limbs were like Jell-O, but I didn’t feel high, not that I knew what high should feel like. I wasn’t laughing like Katie was, and I still felt pretty much in control of my senses. The tennis courts still looked green, and the sky was still blue.
“You never get high your first time,” said Katie. “You just feel funny. Next time it’ll be in your blood. Then after one hit you’ll be flying like me. Or else you’ll just float. That happens sometimes too. That’s when you know you’re really stoned—when you feel like you’re just going to float away like a big hot-air balloon.”
Katie laughed so hard then, she started to choke. Swat! I hit her on the back as hard as I could. She laughed even harder, but stopped choking at least.
Still giggling, she reached a fingerless studded glove into her big, black purse and flipped out a Heineken bottle cap. She started making a small cross on the back of her hand. I watched, fascinated. She’s just like me! I thought. We both started giggling at the same time. Maybe I am high! I thought. I couldn’t stop laughing. Somehow the pin-sized droplets of blood bubbling from Katie’s hand were the funniest thing I ever saw. The little hairs on the back of her hand stood out like tall blond grasses in a tiny red sea. Katie, sputtering with laughter, fell onto her back and pulled up her shirt to expose her belly and show me a K-shaped scar next to her navel.
“That’s so my boyfriend, when I get one, always knows who it is he’s sleeping with,” she explained, laughing. “So he doesn’t yell out any other girls’ names!”
I pushed my green-and-brown short sleeves up to my shoulders. My arms were covered with many different shapes and designs.
“So my boyfriend doesn’t know who he’s sleeping with,” I said. “He doesn’t understand it. He thinks all he has to do is say so and I’ll stop. He thinks he can take care of me.”
Katie nodded. Then we start showing each other all our various scars—some still fresh and scabby, some red and some glaring white against our barely tan skins. As fellow cutters, we didn’t have to explain why we made most of the scars.
I told Katie about the time in seventh grade when my friend Tom and I sat at a lab table in science, way in the back of the room. I forget what the lab was—something using Bunsen burners, I think. I wasn’t into the punk scene yet, I was just an ordinary, geeky newcomer to junior high. In the cafeteria the day before, I’d noticed two older girls at the table behind me scratching their arms and competing for who could scratch the longest. One girl got two hundred scratches. I was sitting all by myself and feeling kind of lonely and bored, so I tried scratching my own arm, but stopped after only twenty scratches because it didn’t seem right, doing it without a reason.
As I sat at the lab table in the back of the science classroom, it dawned on me that because Tom and I had finished our lab early and had nothing to do, there was a reason to make the scratches. Since Tom was even geekier than I was, and I knew he had a crush on me, it was easy to convince him to play the game. First it was my turn. Tom scratched back and forth across my forearm with his fingernail, and I looked away because it’s harder if you see the cutting happen. Even though it was only my first time cutting, I knew the rules. When Tom got to one hundred and sixty-three scratches, I told him to stop, and it was his turn. As I scratched him, I looked at my own arm, which burned now, and was glazed with blood and pus. Tom quit at one hundred and sixty-four. Not wanting to be beaten, I made him scratch me twice more. Although the first hundred sixty-three times hadn’t hurt much while they were being done, the last two were very painful. Tom made me scratch him twice more, putting him back in the lead. I hated to give up, but the game was getting too painful. It wasn’t fair that he got to go first, but next time I would. Besides, it was only a game.
Tom and I didn’t want to pull our sleeves down over the cuts because we thought the fabric might stick to the pus and would hurt to rip free later. But we should’ve been careful then. Tom passed our teacher’s desk on his way to the bathroom, where he was going to wash his arm, and Mrs. Schwartz noticed the red streak of blood.
“Can I see your arm?” she asked, and Tom, not thinking, lifted it for her. An instant later, he yanked it back to his side, but it was too late. I cringed, and so did Mrs. Schwartz.
“What’s that?” she demanded.
Tom shrugged.
“Thomas, I asked you what that was on your arm. Show it to me again. Thomas, I want to see it. Thomas, what is that? Did you do that? Who did that?”
I prayed he wouldn’t gesture to me. Oh God, I thought, it was only a game, please don’t let me get in trouble. I won’t do it again, I promise.
Tom looked at the floor and mumbled, “It was only a game, I won’t do it again, I promise.”
“It’s not a very funny game!” she yelled. “Who else is involved in this?”
He refused to answer. Good friends are like that—they’ll die before they rat on you. Even after Mrs. Schwartz telephoned his parents, he didn’t tell on me.
Back in the world of ninth grade and Katie, I wasn’t laughing anymore. I was almost crying, remembering two years ago when cutting really was only for fun. I didn’t seem to need it then, but all of a sudden I thought, I can’t stop! Then I thought, I don’t even want to.
“What are you so worried about?” said Katie, pushing thick fingers into her bangs and squirting them with hair spray. “You can stop cutting whenever you want, just like me. It’s just that you don’t want to, because it’s good for you. It keeps you from being overwhelmed by all the shit around you.”
Chapter 3
Part of the reason Katie and I became best friends so soon was that we were so honest with each other. By the end of our first week hanging out together, I felt like I knew her completely. On the third day after I’d met her we went outside, behind the tennis courts for lunch, got stoned, and told each other everything we could think of to tell in the half hour before lunch ended.
It was another hot day, like the day we met, so Katie rolled up her tank top and tucked it into her bra. I did too. As she bent over to get her lighter out of her purse, I noticed rolls of fat gather around her belly, but when she sat up again they mostly disappeared. She was a little chunky, but overall had an amazingly good figure, considering her life-style.
“Mostly at home I sit and watch TV, or sit outside in the backyard smoking pot,” she said, handing me the joint. “My mom’s not home much, she mostly comes in from school—she’s a teacher—changes her clothes into something slinky, and goes out on dates.”
I exhaled smoke and handed back the joint. The weed must’ve been really strong because already my senses and powers of observation seemed heightened. I hadn’t noticed how much bigger Katie was than me before, but suddenly her hand looked almost twice the size of mine. “How tall are you?” I asked.
“Five ten,” Katie answered, her hand over her mouth to keep the smoke in.
“I’m only five two,” I said. “I get my size from my mother.”
Katie pulled out a brush from her purse and stroked her hair absently with it. “I get my height from my father, I think. Well, my mother’s kind of tall, but she’s a lot thinner than me. My father’s more my size overall, or at least he was last time I saw him. It’s been two years.”
“Do you miss him?” I asked.
Katie laughed. “No way. He was a mess. He worked in the city for an engineering firm and he used to get so drunk after work he’d fall asleep on the train coming home. Lots of times he’d slip off the seat to the floor and the conductors wouldn’t notice him lying there when the train stopped in Babylon. The train would go to the yard, and my father would still be passed out under the seat. He’d wake up and call at like three in the morning. After a while my mother refused to go pick him up so he’d have to walk home. He’d fall asleep on the couch and I’d wake him when I got up for school.”
I picked at a scab on my ankle for a few minutes and didn’t say anything. My head was cloudy from the pot, and it took a while to formulate a sentence. “God,” I said finally, “I thought my parents were bad! I mean, they drink a lot and can really be assholes sometimes, but at least they drink at home!”
Katie giggled and made a funny face at me.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You are! Here, have a cigarette and lighten up.” Katie handed me a Marlboro and her green Bic. “Chill out and don’t take everything so seriously or I’ll never tell you anything about my family again!”
I stuck my tongue out at Katie and she tickled me under my arms. I kneed her in the stomach to get her off of me, and we both rolled around on the grass wrestling for a while, until it dawned on us that lunch was almost over and we both had cravings for sour cream and onion potato chips.
In only a month, Katie had completely accepted me for what I was, which was amazing to me. In fifteen years, my parents had yet to accept anything about me. But, I thought as I walked to school, I didn’t really need my parents’ acceptance anyway. Brrr! Even though it was only early October, it was cold out! Hard to believe that only a month ago I’d been lying out on the grass with Katie, soaking in the sun. That’s the problem with the Northeast—it gets way too cold, too fast. For God’s sake, there were still leaves on the trees! And the problem with suburbia, I thought, looking at the quaint little houses, is that it’s so dull. And people still wonder why their kids do so much dope!