Breathe Me || Completed

8.3

8.3 - Needle

I sit on the towel with Samantha in front of me and the others crowded around like we are a very small circus. She has the needle in between her lips as she washes her hands in the bucket of water Tabitha brought from upstairs.

"You know you don't have to do this, Sal," Summer says. She's biting her lip.

Rosie cackles. "What are you talking about? Of course she has to!"

I'm shaking a little, but I'm not going to leave. I'm not going to back out, this time. No more escaping to the bathroom, Sal, no more locking yourself in your room. This is happening. It is. Samantha dunks the needle in the soapy water and scrubs it with her fingers.

"Where are you gonna do it?" Gloria asks, looking at me over Samantha's shoulder.

Samantha stares at my face for a second, eyes jumping around at all the places she could choose to stab a hole in my skin. I flinch when she reaches out and touches my jaw, turning my head to the right. "I think Sally needs a nose piercing," she says. Our faces are very close together. I study the freckles on her nose, so light and so few that you would never even know about them if you never got right up in her face. They're a pale peachy pink against the ivory of her skin, blotchy instead of circular like the painter who made her face took a brush and splattered her with faded pink watercolor.

She follows my eyes, catching my gaze with the bayonets in her irises. Her eyes say, okay?

In that one moment, I love her more intensely and more wholly than I have ever loved anyone before. The way that she knows me, cares about me so quietly, so inconspicuously . . . her love feels like a secret note, the way we used to pass them to each other by one of us getting up to go to the pencil sharpener and slipping the bit of paper into the other's desk.

Her love. She loves me. She must.

Samantha turns my face the other direction. "I'm thinking left," she says.

"That's the gay side," Gloria remarks.

Tabby elbows her. "You're such a brat."

Samantha smirks at me, but the rest of them are sitting behind her to watch, so they don't see. "Which side, Sally?"

"I-I don't care. You choose."

She shrugs and grabs the bottle of rubbing alcohol in one hand, a cotton ball in the other. "Left it is," she says. She soaks the cotton in rubbing alcohol and uses it to disinfect the needle. Then she scoots even closer to me so that our knees are right against each other and leans in to wipe the cotton ball over my left nostril. We are breathing together in the same rhythm. She gives me a secret smile as her hair brushes against my cheek. She's chewing spearmint gum that fills my nose and makes my eyes water. Or maybe I'm just nervous. I'm nervous. I could cry.

Tabby crawls over to sit beside me and takes my hand. I squeeze her fingers. "It won't hurt that much," she says. "Right Samantha?"

Samantha shrugs. "Depends on your pain threshold."

"Does it hurt more than piercing your ears?" Rosie asks.

"Earlobes don't hurt. But yeah, nose piercings are in cartilage, so it hurts the same as ear cartilage, mostly."

Rosie pinches her own piercing, showing me the little hole that's closing up at the top of her ear. "Piercing my cartilage hurt like a motherfucker," she informs us.

Samantha cups my face in her hand and raises the sharpie up to my nose. "Don't breathe in," she says. "Fumes."

Well, maybe getting high on sharpie will help take the edge off of the "hurting like a motherfucker" that is about to happen to me. Samantha makes a dot on my nose. I can hear her chewing. She does this all with the calm and efficiency of a professional. "Do you do piercings for other people a lot?" I ask her.

"What, don't trust me?" She grins. Her smile is so scary.

I do, actually. Trust her. Her hands are steady and gentle and her eyes have a passionate intensity that sort of reminds me of my hairdresser when I watch her work in the mirror. "N-no, I do, you j-just seem to know what you're doing."

She shrugs. She's staring at my nose. "I do them sometimes for a little extra cash."

"Is that legal?" Gloria wonders.

"Kind of."

Hm. My heart is buzzing furiously like the engine of a car stuck in the mud. I can barely breathe.

Samantha lifts up the needle close to my face. It's a regular sewing needle with a loop in the top, but the thickest one Tabby could find in her mother's sewing kit. I imagine what my parents would say if they could see me now, sharp tip of the needle dancing between my eyes, wielded by Samantha's treacherous hand. Tabby strokes my palm with her thumb.

Samantha leans in so that our foreheads are touching. She places her left thumb over my nostril, blocking the flow of oxygen. Her other hand holds the needle steadily. She guides it to the dot of sharpie on my nose.

I feel like I'm hyperventilating. Everything is so close, so sharp. When Samantha speaks, the moisture of her breath condenses on my cheek. "Ready?" she says.

She doesn't wait for me to answer. The needle surges through the cartilage and my world falls away into starbursts of pain. Samantha holds my head to her shoulder and I scream into her just like I did all those years ago when my skin sizzled from the circular burn of her cigarette in Brownsville.