On nights like this, other girls rise to the occasion. The other girl in my arm, A, never even pretended to have an interest in me. Instead, she maintained an association with me that spoke strictly of friendship. And it was a friendship determined only through the reality that my friend had known her for a while. Infatuation is a hell of a thing, I know how played out that sounds. But today, as I compare it to feelings I had for R, I knew one was infatuation and the other was something entirely different. Like I said, I was a vulnerable kid, I was fucked up in the head which led to me overeating and getting a fucked up body. I hid my body in baggy clothes. I couldn’t really hide my mind so people were often startled. I met her on my first day of school in 7th grade where we made eye contact while copying notes. We raced. She won. And as things got bad, as infatuation made it hard to have dreams that didn’t involve her, I hid behind the guise of a friend, the best friend of her best friend which made us friends? I don’t know. I do know that I tried hard. Tried really hard to impress her. I guess that on nights like this, I’m ok with my failure when I think of this, I remind myself that I don’t ever really need to impress anyone. Misery led me to ask her if she felt the same way about me. And she laughed. I don’t know what a lot of painful things feel like, I don’t go around and seek to put myself in harm’s way. I do know that forever, as long as I can ever think about it, I remember her blonde head thrown back, her eyes squeezed shut up at the ceiling as her mouth formed a grotesque laugh. A laugh that told me everything I wasn’t. A laugh that let me know how fucked up I was. A laugh that was poisonous. And through all my life of being a fuckhead, a source of comic relief, I never thought I’d meet a laugh that would haunt me, make me never want to see a person again. One that would make you want to disappear, one that boils your conscious, replays itself over and over again relentlessly. Still, I’d rather experience that laugh again than have a girl put up with me because they were afraid for their sanity. And with that laugh, something in me snapped. A lead pencil found its way to my left hand wrist and jagged, flesh ripping pressure carved an A into my arm. Fingernails bled from the anxiety I felt afterwards, a result of helpless nail biting. I thought I could change eventually so I’d didn’t give up that year or the next. More painful than anything was the transformation that I undertook. Cold and callous, I emulated another boy she liked instead his name was Eric. He might have sold drugs, more his pants loose, didn’t give two fucks about anything and I sought to be just like that. Sitting on a lunch table, headphones blaring, underwear poking out from the back, a plea to be heard or seen. Instead, she told me to stop acting like Eric, I became an object of scorn only to be noticed and hated for trying to be something I wasn’t. And she changed too. She stopped being the girl who raced with me to finish copying notes into the girl who led guys up her dress in the back of movie theaters. Her thongs always showed out of her jeans. She put on too much makeup and started smoking. She was always bending over in front of me with other people, an attempt to let me know I could never keep up with her and let my friends know that she was attractive and should be chased. I wanted to pull her aside, scream at her, tell her that I noticed her, that I miss how she used to be, missed those note copying challenges. I wanted to carry her away from the hole she fell down but I kept my mouth shut and let her do as she pleased. I saw her recently, the year before I went off to college. She was on the bus heading home I guess and I asked her if she remembered me. She looked at my wrist and said she did and then asked me how I got that A there. And as coldness ran down my back by her holding my hand to inspect it closer, I got off the bus to get on the next one. But not before saying, “It’s a birthmark.” On nights like this, if you look up her pictures on Facebook, you’ll see a Staten Island bronzed girl who lets her boyfriends grope at her, who walks around in her bra, who smokes and drinks and parties. But you won’t see the note copying girl who used to race me. She’s gone, permanently I think. And I think by me telling her she was attractive, I sparked her transformation.
