Goth Girl Rising (11 page)

I got my first period the same week—the same
day
—that Mom got really sick.

It's like, she wasn't feeling well. And
I
wasn't feeling well. My stomach was all cramped up, like when you have really bad diarrhea, but it wasn't diarrhea and it wasn't in my stomach—it was lower. I didn't understand.

Mom had prepared me. She sat me down one day when I was nine and she told me all about The Vagina and The Penis and The Uterus and Your Period. She warned me that it would hurt—"like a tummyache," she said.

But this wasn't a tummyache. This was ... something clenching its fist inside me, over and over again. This
couldn't
be what she was talking about, right? It was
too bad.
It was
too much.
There was just no way—no way in
hell
—that I could tolerate this
every month
until I was an old lady.

She wasn't feeling well and
I
wasn't feeling well and I was eleven, so of course I went to her and said "I don't feel well" and she just blew me off—my own mother!—so I was on my own, curled up on my bed in a fetal position for hours at a time.

I had tried to be tough because Mom was coughing all the time and losing weight and didn't know why.

And then on that day, everything
happened.

I was watching TV, curled up on the sofa, and it was like I suddenly thought,
Oh, God! I just peed in my pants!

But that wasn't it. I went to the bathroom and closed the door and bang, there you go.

And here's the thing—the pain was so bad that I couldn't imagine that
this
is what Mom had been talking about when she told me about getting my period. A
tummyache,
she had said! A tummyache! This was no tummyache. There was something massively wrong with me. I thought I was bleeding to death.

Simone had already had her first period a couple of months earlier. So had a couple of other girls we knew. And it was nothing like this, according to them. It wasn't anything like this at all.

I screamed, "Mom!" Sitting there on the toilet, panicking. Screamed it again. And again.

Nothing.

I padded my underwear with toilet paper and went out into the house looking for her. I didn't even bother putting my pants back on—I just went out there with my underwear on, now all bulky and lumpy with toilet paper.

I found her in her own bathroom, leaning over the sink. "Mom! Didn't you hear me? God, Mom, I'm—"

She looked over at me. Her face was gray. It was actually gray. Mom had this dirty blond hair and it was tied back in a ponytail and her eyebrows practically glowed against that gray skin.

"Kyra." Her voice was weak. "Not now."

"Mom, I'm bleeding. And my stomach feels like—"

She swallowed. I remember that part—it was like it took forever for her throat to make the motion. Like she had sharp rocks caught in there.

"Not now. OK? Put a Band-Aid on it."

A Band-Aid?
"But,
Mom!
"

Then she seemed to realize what I was talking about. I guess she noticed the state of my underwear.

"Oh, for God's sake..." And then she started to cough. Really hard. The kind of cough I'd been getting used to hearing for a little while now. A bad chest cold, she'd been saying. The flu, she'd been saying.

"Mom! I'm—"

"Jesus!" She rasped it out, strings of saliva webbing between her lips. "It's just your period, Kyra. Every other woman on the planet has had to deal with it, OK? Use the pads like I showed you and get some Advil and lie down, OK?"

"But—"

And she coughed again.

Only this time it was different.

This time, blood came out.

I don't know why I'm telling you all this, Neil. Maybe because in your comics, you do such a good job writing about women. It's like you get it, sort of. So maybe you understand. Maybe you can understand how it all went to hell that day. Next thing you know, I've got these gigantic boobs and I'm suddenly having trouble in school and I'm tired all the time and pissed off and once a month I feel like someone has dropped a load of concrete in my Fallopian tubes.

And oh, yeah—my mom is dying, too.

Then that part ended and the pain got manageable all of a sudden.

But on that day, there we were, the Sellers women, in the bathroom together, both of us bleeding and not understanding why.

I
LIE ON MY BED FOR A
while, trying not to think about
it,
about
her,
about anything.

I try to think about anything other than my effed-up family and my effed-up life, and that makes me think of Fanboy. God, I've been so freaking worked up about shaving my head and pissing off Roger that I totally forgot about Fanboy.

I go to turn off my computer after writing the letter to Neil and there's an IM from Jecca waiting for me:

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
kyra u there?????

I sit with my fingers over the keyboard and I think about kissing her and I think about
Brad
and I think
Effher
and I turn off the computer.

Back to the mirror. You in there, Despair? You don't have your hook in me yet. See, I figured out how to avoid you a while ago. It's pretty easy, actually. I didn't tell Dr. Kennedy, but I learned how to get around you.

It's all about anger, see?

When you're angry, you can't despair.

Hell, you don't even feel like killing yourself when you're angry. Because there's so much to
do
to people when you're angry.

Like I'm angry at Jecca. And I hardly know why because it's not like we're in
love
or anything and it's not like I'm a
lesbian
or anything, but why does she have to talk about Brad to
me
? So she's in love with some guy. Or in lust. So what? Don't rub it in
my
face. It's like she has this convenient amnesia or something. And I can't figure out what any of it means, mainly because she won't even talk to me about it. Like, this one time? This one time we had been making out and I said to her, "Why are you doing this with me?" and she was all like "Shut up" and tried to stick her tongue down my throat again and I didn't let her but then I did.

Anyway.

I don't want to think of that.

So I won't.

That's my ability: I can totally make myself
not
think about things.

I think about Fanboy instead. I forgot about him for a little while today because I was so caught up in other stuff, but I'm ten times as pissed at him as I am at anyone else. Even
Roger.
Why? Oh, so
many
reasons!

1. He reads really shitty comic books about superjerks.
   
2. He kissed Dina Jurgens.
   
3. He saw me cry.
   
4. I was in the hospital for
   six effing months
   and how many e-mails or phone calls or letters or IMs or texts did I get from him? None, none, none, none, and none.
   
5. He based his main character on Dina Jurgens. (I don't care that he went back and changed it—I know the truth.)
   
6. He's got this great graphic novel, but he's publishing it in
   Literary Paws.
   
7. He kissed Dina Jurgens ... and then
   told me about it.
   
8. He thinks I don't know how to kill myself.
   
9. He told me I'm a suicide wannabe.
   
10. He told me to
    try harder next time.
    
11. He wanted to kiss me.
    
12. He didn't kiss me.
    
13. He never told me his third thing.
    

There.
For all of those sins, he deserves pain.

I
GET DRESSED IN BLACK AGAIN
and sneak out of the house. It's late. Roger's dead to the world.

It's friggin'
freezing
outside. It feels like someone just dumped a bucket of ice water over my newly naked head. I wrap my scarf around it and then put on a hat, but it's like I can still feel the cold. Maybe this wasn't such a bright idea. Oh, well. Too late now.

I need another car, but this one's easy. This late at night, I can always—and I mean always—rely on Mrs. Yingling, who lives up the street. She left her car out on the curb one time, with the keys still in the ignition. It was like that all night! It's like she was begging me to take it, like she'd left a note on it:
Dear Kyra, Please steal my car for me. I have left the keys for you, with the door unlocked and a full tank of gas. Thanks! Mrs. Yingling.

So not only did I take it that one time—I also had a copy of the key made. So now when I need to get away, I swipe her car and it's easy. I don't do it
all
the time because she would start to notice, and the more you do it the better the chances that she'll wake up at three in the morning with a craving for Ben & Jerry's or something and decide to go to 7-Eleven and oops, where's my car?

But for now, I risk it. I slide right into the driver's seat like I belong there—and I do, I really do—and I start up the engine.

This is the most dangerous time. I always figure someone will hear the car starting deep in the ass-end of the night/morning and bang! Busted. But no one has ever come running out of the house screaming, "What the hell are you doing?"

And no one does tonight, either.

My heartbeat goes back to normal. I pull away from the curb and out of the neighborhood.

B
ECAUSE
I
CAN
.

Duh.

W
HEN
I
DRIVE
, I
DON'T THINK
. It's nice.

It's good. Because I don't want to think about Roger or Mom or Jecca or any of it.

I find myself driving somewhere without thinking about where I'm going. Before I realize it, I'm in Fanboy's neighborhood.

I park a couple of houses away and kill the engine and the lights.

That bastard.

That little
bastard!

I helped him with
Schemata!
I helped him make it better, and does he even
thank
me? Does he put a little blurb in the effing magazine that says, "Special thanks to Kyra Sellers" or something like that?

No.

Nothing.

I sit here and I stew and I get angrier and angrier, and I think of something my mother told me once, which is that you get angriest at the ones you love. And thinking
that
just makes me even angrier! She told me that when she was dying. It was early on and the doctors were still all like, "We caught this late, but not too late," and "With the new treatments, you have decent odds, Mrs. Sellers," and shit like that.

(They were wrong. They were all, literally,
dead
wrong. Assholes.)

And I was angry at her all the time because ... Because ...

Because...

Because she deserved it.

Right?

She must have.

God, I can't believe I'm sitting here in a freezing car in the middle of the night, thinking about this shit! She must have deserved it, otherwise I wouldn't have been angry at her, right? And anyway, I don't love Fanboy. That's just ... That's stupid, OK? Love is stupid. It doesn't solve anything. It makes things worse.