Eat Your Heart Out (11 page)

And then when Hedge wasn't looking he whispered, “It's romantic, okay?”

As Bob Dylan once said, we started out on burgundy then soon hit the harder stuff. I shouldn't have let them do that because sometime around midnight Hedge threw a small rock at Seb. It was totally out of nowhere, like when George Bush just plum didn't help the black people in New Orleans.

“What the fuck?” Seb screamed, throwing another bigger rock.

“Stop, you guys!” I yelled.

Then before I knew it, they were punching each other, so hard. I'd seen them play-fight before, but this time they were truly going at each other, vicious. I started crying because I felt so helpless. God, being a girl is helpless sometimes and it really pisses me off. I kept screaming at them but they didn't even look at me. Then Seb's nose started bleeding and Hedge fell to the ground like he couldn't breathe. I had never felt so panicked in my whole life.

Then do you know what those assholes did? They started laughing! Laughing like maniacs. Then they picked up sand and rocks and driftwood and threw it around, yelling like lunatics released from the asylum.

“FUCK THIS!”

“FUCK YES!”

“THE LEGEND CREW!”

Then Hedge started crying, really hard, and I'd never seen him cry before. Seb walked up to him and they hugged each other. A few seconds later, they started wrecking shit again. It was like a scene out of that terrible book everybody has to read in Grade 10,
Lord of the Flies
. I was just waiting for one of them to eat the other.

I left five minutes later and they didn't even see me go.

It really is true that men deal with things totally differently than women.

Seb came and
found me the next morning.

“Sorry,” he said from my doorstep.

“You look like shit.”

“Can I come in?”

I moved aside. Now that he'd been inside me, I acted totally different around him. It is a universal girl law that you can never act normal when you want to. I felt like my mouth was chicken-wired shut. There were about eighty-five things I wanted to say to him, but they were lazy fucks and just refused to slide from my brain to my lips.

“So . . . I brought you your birthday gift.”

It was a mix
CD
.

“Should I listen to it now?”

“Yeah, if you want.”

I put it on, and we sat on my couch. The house felt cold, like fall decided to just show up that day, like when your aunt from out of town comes by for no reason and then you later realize it's because she's getting divorced. But with Seb next to me, I began to feel warmer. I had goosebumps, but I was sure I was also sweating.

“Why are all the songs in French?”

“Because I'm moving there.”

“What?”

“In six months, I'm moving to Paris.”

“You are?”

“Come with me.”

I started laughing, like I knew he was kidding.

“I hate it here. You do too.”

“You're serious?”

“Yes. Colin hated it here and he never got to leave. Remember how he'd talk about getting a passport and taking off to Europe and he'd have that obscenely hopeful look on his face?”

I did remember.

“Well, we get to leave. There's nothing keeping us here. I want to go and I want you to come with me.”

“But we don't speak French.”

“I think everyone speaks English there anyway.”

He kissed me, and once I started kissing him back I couldn't stop. We spent the rest of the day kissing and then talking about French things like cheese and wine and the Eiffel Tower and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s.

He ran his hands through my hair, and I fell asleep on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, dreaming about France and Europe and London and Big Ben, places I thought I'd never see.

I lay out
in my backyard the next morning. I was alone. My parents had gone to work. The sun felt nice on my skin, but I was still cold and I couldn't shake it.

I had my headphones on. I listened to the
CD
Francais, as I had taken to calling it. The music pushed the leaves from the trees, the clouds from the sky, the blue from heaven, and I could see all the planets. I could see silvery Pluto, beautiful red Jupiter, and then yellow Venus. I could see the infinite blackness and all the beautiful orbs of colours that populated it. I reached out and touched Neptune. It felt like cold water.

I think I even saw Colin waving at me.

“This town is so severe and silent. I wonder if a person can die from it, choking to death on things they always wanted to but were never able to say.” Colin told me that the week before he died. We'd just gone out for breakfast, the two of us, because everyone else had slept through their alarms.

It was a pretty insignificant thing, coming from him. He always said shit about life and death, waxed poetic about unanswerable bullshit. The boys called him Socracock.

It's only because he's gone that all those trivial things from the past echo on and on and on, but I wonder if maybe it was the silence that killed him. Maybe he had died, choking on the silence, seconds before the train hit him. So on his death certificate it should have said that the cause was “peace and quiet,” not railroad misadventure.

When I went inside, still shivering, I put the kettle on.

The water boiled while the day was on fire, and I watched it, patiently waiting like a bird on a wire.

I am a monster.

This is how I was born, a fault in my stars. I can do no more to change it than an old dog can trade his worn, dirty fur for the clean feathers of a baby bird just because he dreams of taking flight.

I can only really breathe when I am alone. Sometimes, in these moments, I think of James, the man who loves me, the man who will marry me next month, and I feel cruel. He does not know that I was born wearing the blue uniform of a prisoner inside myself. Everything else feels like a costume.

Especially that white dress.

I get on my knees and pray that I have a fighting chance.

I started killing
animals when I was five.

It was around then that I began the long, solitary walks around our property. My mother never seemed bothered by my absences. She was a woman preoccupied by herself only. She spent her days tanning her lithe body and having gentlemen other than my father over.

“Just friends.” I was jealous of her. I saw how men looked at her and I wanted that same attention myself. How does a five-year-old covet that specific and twisted breed of sex?

I saw a bird on the side of the road. It had a broken wing, and it was yelling. I didn't recognize that it was in pain, only that it was helpless. I lifted my shoe and I felt it's wing break beneath me. I remember feeling it move, how it wanted to fly, hearing it scream, the struggle and then the collapse.

Suddenly, I was not angry anymore. I was not happy. I was not anything. I was calm for the first time, and all I wanted was to recreate that feeling again and again.

I wasn't particular: mice I caught, any bug, any living creature I could get my hands on. Birds were always difficult. When I was eight, I killed a neighbourhood dog. Seeing the
MISSING
signs, I felt no guilt, only stupid for being so brazen. I considered myself lucky that I was never found out and was not so obvious again.

I knew there was something wrong with my behaviour, my compulsions. I cried once to my mother about it.

“Stop making up stories,” she said.

I learned to shave my legs when I was ten. I lost my virginity when I was eleven to a seventeen-year-old boy. I developed early, I could lie and pass for fifteen.

Suddenly, almost overnight, men had become my act of violence. I've had so many I've lost count. James is the first man I have fooled for a long time, the only man who has promised to take care of me.

I've grown old and my looks have faded, I wear my promiscuity like a memory, a stale perfume that I can't wash of my body.

How do you begin today with all of yesterday still inside you?

Sometimes, still, I'll catch a mouse and take great pleasure in crushing it with my fist. Bodily fluids do not move me; blood, semen, tears—none of these weigh heavy on me.

As the big day approaches, I find myself studying James when he is asleep. He looks so helpless. More helpless than I could ever be in the most dire of situations, and this helplessness radiates off him in his sleep. Looking at him, I feel like a monster in a fairy tale: hairy, yellow-eyed, and mute. I want to crush him like that bird, sit on him until he suffocates.

When I wake from these spells I am horrified because I thought I knew better than this.

I promise myself daily that I will be discreet and that I will only take other men when I feel like I'm drowning. I will be a good wife to James.

I repeat this to myself over and over, hoping, somehow to believe it.

Some nights, I feel so torn that I cannot share a bed with him and sleep alone on the wood floor beneath him.

He is taking me on a getaway this weekend; “some time alone before the wedding,” he told me.

“Isn't it beautiful?”
he asks, waking me from a sleep that until now I wasn't certain I had fallen into.

I look out the window of our red Ford truck that's covered in road dust. I lift my head and straighten my shoulders to get a better look at what's on the other side of the glass. The clear, hard sky stretches for miles. Mountains, presidential in the distance, dwarf every tree and farm around them. It is breathtaking. Being around so much space I feel myself wanting to wander like a lonely buffalo.

“Baby?” he asks.

I had forgotten James was in the car with me.

“Yes, beautiful,” I tell him. My accent is barbed with the softness only sharpshooters can imitate, sounds different in my own head, when I am alive in thought, than it does when I speak to him, dead in conversation. I don't understand where the pretense comes from, but I am being dishonest with my voice when I speak, except within the confines of my own skull. My real drawl is lower, has more gruffness, and a depth that I don't share with anyone, guarded like jewels.

He smiles at me, and then he puts his hand on mine, and I keep it there until the car stops. That is what normal people who are in love do.

If I can convince him, how far behind am I?

When the car
stops, James and I bring our luggage to the front door of the cabin. As I slam the trunk, I feel his hand graze my ass.

We are kissing on the doorstep now, and I feel his excitement, about us, about the future, about everything that life offers most people. His hands travel all over my body, with an increasing pressure, and for a moment I feel sad. I have never felt excited, not like that, about anything in my life. I can mimic excitement, as I am now, by mirroring his actions, putting my hands on his body where he puts his on mine.

But right now my body acts like an orchard of bones. James takes my hand and leads me through the cabin up the stairs to our bedroom. He lays me down and undresses me. His touch is soft and I am used to it.

“You feel so good,” I tell him.

I am not lying. He does feel good. He is different than the other men. We are gentle with each other where they used to bruise me, bite me, make me bleed. Usually, I hide my body from James until my map of scars, traces of the other men are gone.

When I look untouched, like now, our bodies fit together well, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It doesn't feel satisfying, only like kindness's sister. He cups my left breast in his hand. I wrap my legs around him. We begin.

As he thrusts himself inside me, I smile at him, trying to force myself into a dream—a state to silence the private voice in my head. That voice thinks it's writing my story as the narrator, as the double, secret-sharer of my existence. But in truth, there is no duality. I am that voice, and the person that I pretend to be only exists when there's a stage.

“You're so wet.” I run my hand along his back.

He is speeding up now. His rhythmic motion calms me, feels natural, like cylindrical parts of machinery finding their cogs. I know it will end soon, but I don't want it to, feeling like I could fall asleep and stay that way forever if only he could continue until his heart stopped.

It's working, I tell myself. This is working.

“I love you,” he tells me. My James has loved me, intimately, since the moment he laid eyes on me. No other man has ever loved me like that. I have long wondered if that was because somehow James knew, though not consciously thought, that I could never love him and, attracted to that calamity, threw himself against me.

“I love you too,” I say back but sound so hollow that I wonder how he can believe it.

When he rolls off me, I lean to the side, placing my back against his front. He holds me tightly. Too tightly. I'm suffocating.