Ballads of Suburbia (19 page)

I
KNEW THE FIRST
T
HANKSGIVING WITHOUT
D
AD
was going to be rough. Whenever we followed our usual traditions, his empty chair taunted us, conspicuous as a nasty lesion on someone's face. And then Dad tried to invite Liam and me for Thanksgiving at his apartment.

Before Thanksgiving, Dad called once a week, inviting us over. We always hung up on him, like Liam was about to one night in mid-November, but this time Dad managed to spit out a few sentences first.

Liam responded, “Fine. Do that. See if we care!” He clicked the cordless phone off and threw it across my bedroom into a pile of laundry.

“What was that about?” I asked as he slumped against my bed.

“Dad said if we weren't going to spend Thanksgiving with him, he was going to Wisconsin to be with his
family.”

Liam might have been summarizing. To be fair, Dad might have asked first, might have begged that we finally come to his place, but all I got was that succinct little sentence that ended with the word “family” and did not refer to us. And, meeting Liam's glare, I knew he was thinking the same thing I was:
Dad gave up.

Yes, we'd pushed him as far away as we possibly could for the past six months, but he was our dad and he'd broken up our family. He was supposed to let us be pissed for as long as we needed to be and welcome us back with open arms when we were ready. Instead, he'd decided that if we were going to snub him, he'd snub back.

When I told Mom, she decided, “Let's do something fun for Thanksgiving. We'll go for sushi. We never got to eat it enough because your dad hated it.”

Since I'd rather do anything besides stare at Dad's empty spot while choking down mashed potatoes, it seemed like a good idea. Perhaps it could've become a positive new tradition if Mom hadn't gotten a little too enthusiastic and drank way too much sake.

“This is fucked-up,” Liam grumbled as Mom used us like crutches to get to her bedroom. He helped her into bed, but when she started to whimper about how she hadn't wanted things to be like this, crying about “till death do us part” like she had during her worst moments following Dad's departure, Liam bailed, heading to Maya's.

I wished I could have gone with him. Reassuring the waiter that I was old enough to drive us home had been pathetic, but lying in Mom's bed, listening to her intoxicated, completely inappropriate ramblings while she suffocated me against her chest like a teddy bear?

Her worst revelation: “Your father isn't capable of love, I'm afraid he doesn't even really love you.”

Thanks for destroying what was left of my childhood there, Mom.

She took it back right away, patting my head and slurring, “No. He loves you. Just not me. He wasn't capable of loving me. Try to find a man capable of loving you, Kara, but don't be shocked if ya fail. A good man is hard to find. Most'a them are liars. They
convince ya to trust them, then
boom!
They leave. And what did your trust earn? Two kids and the bills for a house he remodeled in a way you didn't even like.”

I really tried to be patient with her. To Mom's credit, until this moment, she'd managed to survive the divorce without getting completely annihilated in front of her kids. I doubted I would've been as strong. But I also wasn't strong enough to handle her rant about love and trust.

After ten minutes, I slunk out of her bone-crushing embrace, placed a trash can beside her bed in case she needed to barf, and left her mumbling, “Men lie and they leave.”

I ran to my bedroom and flung myself on the bed, jamming my face into a pillow to smother the memories that Mom's diatribe had brought to the surface. Like the day Dad taught me to ride a bike without training wheels. I'd fallen and scraped my knee; not horribly, but at six the sight of blood made me scream.

“I'm hurt! I'm hurt!” I'd howled at Dad. “You let me go! You can't let go until I'm ready!”

“Shh, Kara,” he'd soothed while carefully bandaging my knee. After he'd fixed me up, he urged me to try again.

“You can't let go before I'm ready,” I insisted. “And you have to promise that I won't get hurt.”

He'd affectionately stroked my hair, fingers gently detangling it. “I promise not to let go before you say you're ready. I can't promise that you won't get hurt, but if that happens I'll be right here to make it all better.”

I pounded my fists against my mattress and screeched into the pillow, “I'm hurt! I'm hurt and you're not here, fucker!” I sobbed so hard I started to hyperventilate. Rolling over on my back so I could breathe, I whimpered, “Make it stop hurting.” I repeated those words over and over until I had the strength to sit up and strip off my sweater. I had to deal with the pain by myself and there was only one way I knew how.

Just glimpsing my arm eased the pressure in my chest and slowed my tears. It was mostly healed, the freshest cut three weeks old.

I pictured the gentle look in Christian's hazel eyes when he'd said “I'll listen.” But his eyes blurred into my father's. They were the same color, after all, and Dad had looked at me that way, too, and said similar things.

The words Mom had been muttering as I snuck out of her room echoed in my ears:
“Men lie and they leave.”
I saw a slideshow of moments of betrayal as I fumbled in my nightstand drawer for my knife. Adrian kissing me, then kissing Viv. Dad trying to tell me he loved me with the keys to his U-Haul truck in hand.

Christian will cheat or break promises, too,
I thought. Before I could visualize his lips locking with someone else's, I slashed blindly at my forearm.

Once.

Twice.

I sighed deeply.

Numbness.

Relief.

Then I looked down at the large gashes flanking the blue vein that ran from wrist to elbow. I'd never cut vertically before. That was suicidal and my cutting had never been about dying. Was it now? Should it be?

I touched the slash on the left. It had split some of my newest scars in two. I liked the fresh pink scars better than the white ones. The white ones reminded me how long I'd been cutting. The pink ones were reminiscent of unmarred newborn babies and made me think I had a chance to be innocent, to heal.

I almost had, but here I was bleeding again.

As the blood oozed between my fingertips, soundless sobs shook my body. My arm would never heal. The pain would never
stop. Everyone would always lie to me and leave. If that was life, why live it? I placed the tip of the blade to the center of my wrist, on the spot where all the veins that branched out into my hand came together and met the artery that traveled up my arm.

The phone rang, startling me so badly that I dropped the knife. I sat frozen through three rings, trying to decide if I should answer or kill myself.

Finally, I picked up, whispering hello. Christian's voice rushed into my ears. Normal, friendly words reminding me that someone out there cared. “Hey, what's up? Happy Thanksgiving! Done with sushi? How was it?”

I stared at my wrist and decided not to tell him I'd cut because he'd probably be really disappointed in me. I pulled a towel over my arm, blotting the blood and hiding the wounds because
I
was really disappointed in me. “Well, according to my drunk mother, my dad doesn't love me. So much for a new family tradition.”

“That sounds pretty bad. At least my dad doesn't try to cover up the fact that Thanksgiving is just a day he gets off from work to drink with his buddies.”

“You didn't even have dinner?” I asked, horrified.

“I ate pizza. Dad'll be back in a few hours, totally wasted, or maybe he'll end up at some chick's house. Holidays make people so lonely.”

I glanced around my empty bedroom, the rock stars on my posters the only thing keeping me company. “I'm lonely.”

“Wanna come over?”

So I went over.

And I lost my virginity.

I hadn't planned for it to be that way. I mean, virginity-losing is a pretty memorable thing and I didn't particularly want to remember it every year when I sat down with the family to celebrate genocide over turkey and mashed potatoes. But, as
has been made obvious by numerous TV shows and coming-of-age movies, plotting out your own deflowering rarely works. It tends to happen spontaneously when the circumstances present themselves.

Christian and I had come to the same place Adrian and I had been at a few months before. Sex was the next logical step in the path we were on.

Adrian was the main reason why losing my virginity wasn't a big deal to me. I'd mentally prepared for it to happen with him, and then it hadn't. By the time it happened with Christian it was-no pun intended-anticlimactic. Not to say that Christian was horrible or anything, but I think I had the standard teenage girl experience: a little bit of pain, a lot of wondering if
this
was how
it
was supposed to feel, and then it ended in approximately ten minutes.

The awkward exchange of “Do you want to?” and “Is this okay?” before sex and the even more humiliating finding of the condom is a blur in my mind. The actual physical feelings would be forgotten after more sexual experiences, and the emotions weren't nearly as strong as the ones about my family that I was trying to escape.

Certain things were memorable. Images flash through my mind, censoring out the sex like a PG-13 movie.

He had
Star Wars
sheets, super old ones from his childhood. They were so worn in some spots that they'd become translucent, like when greasy French fries soak through a white paper bag. But they were also extremely soft.

And of course I noticed the music. Mark Arm from Mudhoney crooned, “Sweet young thing ain't sweet no more” over fuzzed-out guitars. Kind of fitting, though it wasn't like sex suddenly made me more grown-up than I was forced to be earlier that day when I lugged my drunk mother out of the sushi place.

On a more romantic note, I'll never forget how Christian and
I both kept opening our eyes while we kissed. We did it at the same time, so our gazes met and then we laughed in this cute, embarrassed way. I got uncharacteristically caught up in the sweetness of it all, just wanting to cling to him. I became aware of the way parts of our bodies fit together like puzzle pieces. He was the right height so that my head fit snuggly beneath his chin; the right weight so that he didn't crush me, but his hip bones didn't jut out and bruise mine. Fingers interlocked. Toes curled and touched. Hair fanned out on the pillow, his bright red, mine pale blue, together purple. Even the satisfied sigh he emitted as he rolled off of me at the end almost matched my own.

But then, as my heart rate slowed, I started to feel insecure. I realized that I was naked, sweaty, and it couldn't possibly be pretty. Flat on my back, my arms and legs at crooked angles, I resembled a chalk outline of a dead body on the mattress. Christian's arm was splayed across my stomach, weighing me down. I snuck a peek to my right and saw his eyes were closed. At least he wasn't studying me, but then I wondered what would happen next. Would he fall asleep like guys always did on TV?

I wished he had, because when he opened his eyes, his face suddenly darkened. He lifted his hand from its sweaty place on my belly and pointed accusatorily at my left arm. “What the hell did you do?”

I'd forgotten all about the cuts and apparently he hadn't noticed them in the heat of the moment. I flipped my arm over, pressing my palm into the mattress. The blood pulsed beneath my new wounds, the confrontation triggering my urge to cut again.

“I had a bad day, you know that.”

“I thought you weren't going to do
that
anymore,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Do we have to talk about it? Adrian just ignored it, why can't you?” I sat up, wrapped myself in a sheet, and scooted toward the foot of the bed.

Christian viciously dug his fingers into my shoulder, forcing me to face him. “I'm not Adrian,” he growled.

I shrugged him off and rose to sort out my clothes. I shimmied into my underwear with my back to Christian. “I know you're not. But in this case I wish you were a little bit more like him.”

Christian punched the mattress and I spun around, startled. He'd put his boxers and T-shirt on and sat at the head of the bed, glowering at me. “Why can't you just forget that asshole and be with someone who actually cares about you? I don't know how he could just fuck you and ignore that you were obviously in pain!” He gestured at my arm, which I'd hidden beneath my cardigan. I was fully dressed and ready to walk out on him. But then…“I'm falling in love with you so I can't just pretend those cuts aren't there.”

“You're what?”

“I care…”

“But you also said…”

Christian extended his arms toward me. I rounded the bed tentatively and let him take my hands. “I'm falling in love with you. Does that surprise you? I wouldn't have slept with you if I wasn't.” His cheeks reddened and he added almost inaudibly, “That was my first time.”

Suddenly I understood how shocked Adrian had felt when I'd told him I loved him. I liked Christian a lot and he got my hormones raging, but love? Unable to respond to that part of his statement, I murmured, “That was my first time, too.”

My confession threw Christian for as big of a loop as his use of the L-word had thrown me. “But Adrian…didn't you…”

“Oh, did you believe what Mary said about me being a slut? Thanks!” I spat, dropping his hands and surveying the floor for my shoes.

“I never thought you were a slut!” Christian objected as he reached for me again. “I'm sorry. I guess we should have talked
about this before just…doing it. But it's a big deal. We can't let it end like this. We shouldn't fight. Here.” He scooted over to the side of the bed I'd been occupying and patted the space beside him. “Please lie down.”