This Will Only Hurt a Little(12)

The night before the last day of seventh grade, I slit my left wrist open with the Swiss Army knife my grandfather had given me as a gift the year before. Deep. Lengthwise. By accident.

My parents and I had gotten into some huge fight about who knows what. My sister wasn’t involved, but there was screaming and name-calling and hitting. I had had it with my family. Leigh Ann and I shared a bathroom with a door that led to the backyard. I knew it would be unlocked, so for dramatic effect, I ran out our front door, slamming it behind me. I then stealthily crept around the side of the house, where I snuck into my bathroom, then quietly tiptoed into my bedroom. Through the closed door, I could hear my parents yelling for me, not knowing where I’d gone. After a while, I heard my mom go into the garage and start the car, and I sat back, so pleased with myself. She was gonna drive around our whole neighborhood looking for me! I imagined that just when they were about to call the police, I would emerge from my room triumphant and say, “DIDJA MISS ME??? I WAS HERE THE WHOLE TIME! SUCKERS!”

After a few minutes, though, I got bored and started to look around for something to do. I found a roll of clear packing tape that I had shoved a coin into—like in between the cardboard and the massive amount of tape—and for some reason thought, “Oh! It’d be a good idea to get that quarter out! That’s a good activity to kill some time!” So I grabbed the Swiss Army knife out of my little metal bank that had BUSY painted on top in bubble letters, and I opened it up. I started to cut the packing tape, toward me, of course, when the knife immediately slipped and sliced through my wrist.

You know when you’ve hurt yourself so badly you don’t even bleed for a few seconds? Or maybe you’ve seen that kind of thing in a movie? Like when Matt Damon smashes Jude Law’s face in The Talented Mr. Ripley? That injury delay? That’s what happened to my wrist. It didn’t even hurt, to be honest. But I knew I’d really done it. I screamed “FUCK!!!” and grabbed my wrist as blood started to pour out of it; then I ran into the living room, where my dad and my sister were watching a car race together.

When she saw the blood, Leigh Ann jumped up screaming, “OH MY GOD, BUSY, WHAT DID YOU DO???!!!” My dad got on the phone and called my mom (who had a giant cell phone, since she was a Realtor and needed it for her business). Leigh Ann tried to make me run my wrist under water, which seemed weird, but was also a good instinct. She wrapped a ton of paper towels around it and made me press it really hard, then put me in the car with my dad.

“KEEP IT OVER YOUR HEAD, BUSY. AND KEEP PRESSING REALLY HARD!!” she yelled as my dad peeled out for the hospital.

When we got to the ER, I was put in a room right away. My mom and sister showed up shortly thereafter. The ER doctor who had stitched me up was very kind, with a super soft, very soothing voice. I had to get two stitches internally and then around ten outside. There were a lot of questions from different doctors coming into my room, and I remember at one point a doctor shushing my mom and looking at me, like, This is a safe space, say what you need to. It literally didn’t occur to me that they thought I had done it on purpose. The doctors, I mean. My parents and sister just thought I was an idiot.

It didn’t help that I was so embarrassed by how I had injured myself that I initially lied and said the knife was open and fell off a shelf onto the inside of my wrist (COME ON, BUSY, I KNOW YOU’RE TWELVE BUT DO BETTER). After the truth came out, my parents were like, “Yeah. That’s a dumb thing that Busy would do.” Once the doctors were certain I was just stupid and not suicidal, they gave me some Tylenol and sent us on our way.

I ended the school year the next day, sitting in the final assembly with my hand all bandaged up and throbbing, too embarrassed to go to the school nurse to get more Tylenol. I was the girl who had dislocated her knee a few months earlier and now I had slit my own wrist open by accident.

So. Stupid.

I started eighth grade with a renewed sense of self. Over the summer, a couple weeks before school began, my parents finally let me get contact lenses. It was something I’d been begging for since I got glasses in the fourth grade (and had famously remarked, “Mom! The trees have leaves!”). I imagined that I would strut into eighth grade and that my classmates, most of whom I’d known since first grade, wouldn’t believe my transformation.

That can’t be Busy Philipps! She’s so beautiful and sophisticated without glasses!!!

I remember sitting in my new homeroom, just waiting for someone to recognize the new me, when Tyler Bloom, the kid I’d had a crush on since fourth grade, leaned over and said, “Did you get new shoes? You should have beat them up more.”

I had gotten new shoes over the summer. Brand-new kelly-green high-top Converse that my cool older cousin in Chicago had taken me to buy while we were visiting our family there. I loved them. I self-consciously rubbed one sole on top of the other shoe and said, “Oh yeah. I did. But also . . . I got rid of my glasses.”

He studied my face.

“You wore glasses?”

And that was it. It was probably the best response I got from anyone.

Eighth grade was the year that my group of friends began to expand and change. I started to hang out all the time with a girl named Lacey, who hadn’t gone to elementary school with us and whose parents had some unrealistic dream of their daughter being a cheerleader. Lacey introduced me to Kendra Cole, who was in Emily’s grade and therefore already in high school. The three of us became fast friends. On weekends, we would take the bus to Mill Avenue, where ASU is. We would wander around a bit before ending up in Trails, the local head shop. One of us would eventually get up the nerve to buy those bidi cigarettes, which weren’t even really cigarettes, and then we’d sit on a stoop and try to smoke them. Both Lacey and Kendra had parents who were very lax about things like rules and curfews. My mom was way tougher to fool, but this was before cell phones and the proliferation of being in CONSTANT CONTACT, and I think she just assumed we were generally not up to anything too terrible.