Sign Here(64)

There was no denying it: she was my favorite.

I found her in her bedroom. Clothes were strewn everywhere, abandoned like the nonbiological remnants of a catastrophe— human shapes stretched across bedspreads and crumpled, empty, in corners. The room was an explosion of color and synthetic bass beat, shower humidity, and vanilla perfume.

“Oh shit, I left my stuff out on the beach,” Ruth said as she laid a magazine open on the bed.

“Don’t worry about it; we can get it later.”

“I don’t want that suit to get mildewy,” Ruth said. “I’ll be right back, and then I’ll do your hair.”

Mickey listened to her friend’s footsteps down the stairs as she looked in the bathroom mirror. She looked different, and she had yet to attempt the look promised by Cosmo to make all the boys stare. I thought about the cut on her arm, the bandage that she played with constantly. Opting to keep it on longer than the cut warranted, even as it grayed at the corners and became ratty. She was growing up.

As far as I can tell from my observations, growing up seems to involve a lot of false starts, a lot of broken promises. The realization of the world as something neither for you nor against you, but rather uninterested in you entirely. No matter how special you are, how many gold stars you receive, the world itself is incapable of loving you. When you’re a kid, you don’t care. You love what you love: your parents, your neighbor’s angry cat, your favorite TV characters and their plastic replicas on your shelf, regardless of what you get in return. But growing up seems to be a lesson in loving only those who will love you back, and forsaking the rest.

Mickey’s hands were deep in Ruth’s makeup bag before I realized what she sought. I could almost feel the pulse in her arm, itching under the bandage. I could see it glowing on her skin like a heat target. It was all hers, this minor disturbance of her surface. And she wanted to do it again.

Mickey spent more time outside of her body than the average teenager. Nothing certifiable—she didn’t need an institution or the guiding hand of an underground superhero academy. She wasn’t even traumatized, at least not more so than anyone else who realizes the part of life they’re rushing through to get to the good part is, in fact, the whole thing. She was simply, on the inside, less sticky than the average person. She didn’t cling to the trappings of her daily existence with the same kind of fervor, and therefore she could become more easily dislodged from herself.

I had seen the same thing in Silas all his life. As if by loosening from himself, he became one with the world. Not with other people—no, quite the opposite. The world itself: the cold, hard rock of it. To her credit, Mickey was better at recovering than Silas was. She bounced back faster, found her footing among the living once again. I’ve wondered how, if Silas could find the right words, he would talk to her about it. But the nature of the thing is cruel in its design: it can be described only when it’s happening, during which time one loses all interest in deepening the bonds with the fiction around them.

All of this is to say that Mickey had always been fascinated by the restrictions of her own edges.

She took out all the objects from the Altoids tin one at a time, lining them along the side of the sink just like Ruth had. The alcohol swab, the cloth with the razor inside. I could practically see her heart beating, as if her blood smelled the metal and had started banging from within.

There is no high like making the dangerous choice.

Mickey glanced out the window and saw Ruth climbing the hill back to the house. Her hand shook, and the tin slipped into the sink. She gasped and pressed her fingers into the drain. If any of the pills went missing, Ruth would know she had gone through her stuff. She would know that Mickey wanted more of that razor’s feeling, and, even worse than that, she wanted it alone.

Mickey watched Ruth shake out her towel and hang it over the porch railing as she swept her other hand along the basin, but there was nothing but sink. She pulled her hand up slowly and checked again. Nothing. There was no way all the pills could’ve gone down the drain; she caught the tin too quickly. Where were they? She couldn’t remember seeing them in the tin when she opened it, but she wasn’t sure. And anyway, why would they all be gone? They had to be there. Mickey turned over the tin and brought it up to her face, examining the corners. She unfolded the cloth, smoothing it along the creases.

But then she heard the screen door open as Ruth came back into the house, and she was out of time.

I watched Mickey gather the contents back up, putting each item back as she had found it. She ran the sharp edge of the razor along her thumb for just an instant before snapping the tin shut.





MICKEY





“HAVE YOU NEVER BRUSHED this?” Ruth asked as she pulled on Mickey’s scalp.

“I can do it,” Mickey said, but Ruth swatted her hand away.

“Just hold still.”

Ruth’s nails parted Mickey’s hair like a tractor, and Mickey kept her breath shallow, scared she might spook Ruth’s touch away. She thought about people who tame wild animals, but she knew she wasn’t in that category. She had no interest in taming. Quite the opposite. She was the one there to learn.

She was still shaking from the closeness of getting caught with Ruth’s Altoids tin, still a little ashamed that she wanted so badly to do it again—alone, this time—and a little buzzed on the secret itself.