Portrait of a Small-Town American Girl
It’s funny how you can never see the whole picture until you step outside the frame. Well, that’s what my English teacher, Dr. Baer, would always say. She would always stress the importance of not just reading a story, but also seeing what’s not on the page. Transcendent connections are what she called it. To be perfectly honest, I still don’t know what it means, but I loved English and Dr. Baer. If only she could’ve been my mother. She would’ve understood me. Got what I was going through. Maybe I would’ve made different choices. You see, the thing is, it’s not about the big words or big ideas. The only thing that matters is that you tell your story. I don’t know why, but I do know my name is… My name is not important. My name is not my story.
I guess it’s sad to say that up until recently, I felt invisible most of my life. Just another ghost in this refinery town of walking-dead shift workers who blame everybody else for their problems. Both of my parents worked in the refinery because they knew they would be able to get good paying jobs without the burden of college. Today, college is just shoved down your throat twenty-four-seven like weight loss. It’s so confusing, and too much pressure. Sometimes, I just wanted to be a kid, and I don’t think anybody has gotten any smarter with all this college business. Dr. Baer says texting alone has destroyed the English language, but who doesn’t love to “lol?” With all that said, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and school can be just as confusing as your parents or TV.
I just wanted to be noticed. Feel normal. Fit in. I wanted to have the most friends on Facebook, as well as during lunchtime in the cafeteria. I wanted people to not only like me, but also listen to me, not just hear. I guess we’re all fighting to be heard. I thought a good way of getting my mother’s attention would be to do what I saw another girl do to her mother when she was getting dropped off to school. Her name was Lacey, and I don’t know what her and her mom were arguing about, but Lacey started cussing and swearing at her mom until she finally pulled a twenty dollar bill out of her purse to get her out of the car. I took note, and knew that I could get away with this with my own parents because they once gave me a lecture about how they wanted to be my friend. They said they wouldn’t beat me, or punish me the way their parents had. I kind of feel bad for how I talked to them because I know they loved me. I just wish they would’ve listened that’s all. Maybe cussing wasn’t the way, but it was the first of many changes.
Then, my body started to change, and that’s when everything would never be the same again. It was the middle of the night when I was indoctrinated (I think I heard the sexy detective on Law & Order: SVU say that word before) into a cult of blood that would last about a week out of every month for the next thirty years of my life. I didn’t tell my mom, and when I mentioned it to Dr. Baer, she felt it best if the nurse explained it all to me. The nurse was cold, and made me feel like I was just another girl. She gave me directions, a pamphlet, a couple of tampons, and sent me on my way as if my body was a car and all I would need was the manual to figure out which holes to plug up. The nurse called home, but nobody talked about it. I didn’t think anything of the change until I was in third period Math and caught the teacher, Mr. Loving, staring at my shirt. I thought I had a stain from breakfast, and it wasn’t out of the ordinary for nobody to tell me. When the boys started staring at my shirt, I began to think maybe I wasn’t invisible anymore.
Boys looked at me and even talked to me, but not because I had a stain on my shirt or because they cared to hear what I had to say, which was mostly nervous chatter. They longed to baptize me with their penis—first, in my hand, then, mouth and then, deeper and further until I was even more confused. Was this love? Was this what every song, TV show, and movie was telling me to do? The other girls would prepare their stones, if they weren’t trying to kiss me (disgusting) to get the boys to talk to them. It’s funny how the boys would always say that it only hurts the first time, but that’s a lie. It hurts every time, and for different reasons. It’s also funny how the women can tell, but the girls can’t. The women—from my mother to my aunts and even Dr. Baer—would look at my face and just know. I didn’t know how. Maybe my eyes betrayed me. Maybe they saw the cracks, which were the only part of me that was now invisible. Maybe these cracks were theirs too. It was a lot of maybes, and once again mom didn’t want to talk about them. Dr. Baer would emphasize the idea of love when we began reading “The Great Gatsby” around this time. She would look straight at me when we talked about Gatsby, Daisy, and the green light.
I was too numb from being noticed that I couldn’t feel the stones at first, but they eventually began to sting and leave a mark. The first stones weren’t that obvious. Ninety pounds soaking wet, my dad would say, but the girls still called me fat. I wish that was why I started skipping lunch. Then, the words got mean (“bitch,” “whore” and “slut”) and then, the words turned violent (“I’ll kill you”), and then, there were no words at all. Digital cameras and phones recorded the ambush, but YouTube allowed me to re-live the worst moment of my life forever, as well as any students not in attendance. A black eye and busted lip for what? You would’ve thought I stole their boyfriend, but I didn’t. The punches and the kicks made me think about how I started hitting my mom. The girls never said sorry, but I wish I had.
I wish this was the part of the story where things got better, but everything continued to get worse. The refinery closed, and my parents were no longer living the American dream they had preached to me about. When they weren’t around, working long hours, they would tell me it was all for me because they wanted to give me everything. As if the pressure of school wasn’t enough. I was never a rich girl, but it looked like I had it all on the outside. The big house, in-ground swimming pool, two-car garage. Gone. My dad blamed the president. My mom blamed everyone else. Typical zombies. I really didn’t notice until I had to start buying my clothes from Wal-Mart, and the girls started calling me “white trash.” I longed to be invisible again. Then, He came along, and after it all I wish I had disappeared.
Boys were one thing, but men who acted like boys were a completely new animal. There was no warning. I was fifteen, he was twenty-nine and I thought I was something special to get noticed by an older guy. We met at the local diner, and at first, I thought it was just random. Then, it became more frequent. Soon after, he was giving me rides in his black Honda Civic. He lived in his brother’s basement, which I thought was cool. He said he was in the carpenter’s union, and only worked half the year, but his phone never stopped ringing. He once took me for a ride in the city, and although I acted blinded by the bright lights, the Law & Order: SVU girl in me knew better. I didn’t care. He told me all the things the boys had yet to learn. He told me everything I wanted to hear. He told me I was “beautiful.” He told me he was a man, but my parents were too wrapped in their American dream becoming a nightmare to notice. Like the women, he too saw the cracks.
After he took what he wanted, the beautiful words stopped, and the black Honda Civic didn’t, which was worse than the cracks, or the bruises from the ambush. This was a completely new scar. Dinosaurs had more privacy, then the people who lived in the age of the Internet. Eventually, the Heathers (a name my dad gave the girls who tormented me but never bothered to explain it) found out, then the school, and then everyone that wasn’t living under a rock. Entire blog posts, Facebook notes and YouTube videos were dedicated to me. No space, not even MySpace, was safe. Was this how celebrities felt? Lindsey? Paris? None of the Heathers could really talk. By graduation, they would be wearing the same Scarlet Letter they branded me with. I longed to be told I was beautiful. Why didn’t my parents ever say it?
Everything gets really fuzzy at this point. The girls started punching and kicking me in my stomach more than ever. My parents didn’t have the money to send me to another school or to even be homeschooled. I knew how to make them all listen, and I knew how to become invisible again, as well as disappear. I wish I had learned about female empowerment. Once I asked my parents. Mom grew silent, and dad said that stuff was for lesbians. He then asked me if I wanted to be an Indigo Girl, and laughed. I thought but would never dare say out loud, “What’s an Indigo Girl?”
Then, there was a leap, a splash. Darkness. Then, silence. Nothing.
