AWorldAway

I had always thought of myself as strong. Not strong as in physically, of course, but mentally. I come from a long line of fierce Italian women, and thought of that as my shield against the world. I came from a childhood of my great grandmothers taking the slippers off their gnarled feet and beating you with them.

The first time I met Mike was in seventh grade. I took to calling him Michael just because I thought it sounded more sophisticated and he hated it. There was nothing attractive or likeable or even good about him. His stomach distended over the waistband of his pants and his face was, even then, permanently marked with acne scars. I was sure, and thought I didn’t know at the time would eventually happen, a girl would find his humor and ways endearing but to me, it was painful. Everything he said and everything he did made me instantly angry. Perhaps that’s why I did it. Because a challenge to me was like a great burning in my chest, one I couldn’t ignore, and the image of what he could be, what I could make him into, settled in my mind and wouldn’t leave. I was the kind of girl who could see through what he was, and make him something different. So I tried.

It started off slow. I introduced him to literature and art, begging him to have some semblance of culture. I shook my head whenever he pulled out his card games and looked away whenever improper grammar spilled from his crooked teeth. I sucked on my teeth watching him eat with his mouth pressed into the food, shoulders hunched above his ears like a wild dog.

On a school field trip, I ignored him and sat in a tree for hours, watching birds flit past the sky and stayed until the cool air brought goosebumps to my skin. He found me, as I knew he would, and I beckoned him closer into the trees. I was something to show him, and I saw the almost predatory glint in his eyes. Leading him through the grass, I suddenly stopped short and let him catch up with me. On the ground beside my shoes lay a dead bird, maggots rolling their way through its flesh. It’s decomposition had made the life around it, the grass and the dirt grow dry, and flies warmed in a cloud around its wings. It’s neck was broken, its beak spread wide, insects curled besides its tongue. Michael looked at me then, and understood that I wasn’t like the other girls. I was fearless and abrasive and unapologetically myself. He saw that, and at the time, he welcomed it.

The first several times he asked me to be his girlfriend, I refused. When I finally did agree, it wasn’t because he had done anything different or because I had changed my mind. I had made my point that I was unpredictable. He took to following me around, joining the art club and moving his way into my favor.

Her painted nails are chipped red,

And the flakes are stuck on her lips

She looks at you with all the fear of the baby bird you rescued when you were 8

That you kept in a shoebox under your bed

And tried to feed but it just wouldn’t eat

And you watched it starve until one day you came home

And your room smelled like death.

Small bones poke beneath large sweaters

Like a bird her feathers

To hide the ribs and the

Rips in her jeans

Are high on her thighs

That promise to bleed

Heavy is her chest that aches with all the things

She cannot say

To you

To the world that wouldn’t want to hear her anyway.

But you beg her to speak

Because the sound of her voice is the only thing that keeps you sane

The girls she sees on television

And in the locker room

Are small and sharp and

All the beauty she sees in her dreams

Of a future she can’t remember wanting.

There is dried blood in her sleeves. And the rips in her jeans.

And she waits in the bathroom stall

For silence

To stifle her sobs.

You walk her home

Besides the railroad tracks

And you imagine a future where she can allow you to see her laugh

And driving in fall with the top down and her hair hitting your cheeks

And her breathe catching in your lungs

When you kiss her

And she imagines not coming home to a house filled with the taste of spit and ash

Of musk thick and dark and the sound of music through the paper walls

In her paper house

In a paper town that cannot withstand