Scabs (8 page)

Everywhere I went she would turn up. Lurking in the shadows. Staring. Flashing that weak nervous smile and turning away, blushing coyly whenever I would catch her looking at me. I was petrified that my friends would start to notice. That they’d tease me for hanging out with her. Say she was my girlfriend or something. Maybe say that I had AIDS too or that I was a junkie or a crackhead.

See, I was the new kid in school. I’d just transferred that semester and my popularity was something of a fluke. New kids were not supposed to be part of the in-crowd. The thought of being an outcast was the worse thing I could imagine.

“Dude, what’s up with you and the anorexia chick? You doin’ her or something? She’s always following you, man. What’s up with that?”

“She looks like a damned prisoner of war! Why don’t you tell your girlfriend to eat something for god’s sake!”

“You got a thing for crack whores now or what?”

It went on and on like that until I eventually started ignoring her, too. Just to make her go away. I didn’t want to get laughed at. I’d been teased before at other schools and it was not an experience I was eager to repeat. I mean, I was only trying to be nice to her. No need for us both to wind up as targets.

She broke down in tears the first day I walked by without speaking. All day I’d been avoiding her, ducking past and pretending I didn’t see her when I would spot her waiting for me between classes. Finally, after the last class of the day, she worked up the nerve to step right up to me and say “Hi!” All my friends were watching and I didn’t know what to do. I rolled my eyes, shook my head in exasperation, and walked right around her.

“Damnit, why does she keep following me?” I yelled, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Fuckin’ crack whore!”

Her strangled sobs were the only reply to my insensitivity. The agony of that heart, shattered, stomped, and immolated by my harsh words, echoed from deep within her. It was the sound of torture. The sound of utter hopelessness and despair. My own heart broke under the weight of that painful dirge but I still did not return to apologize or comfort her. I kept walking, silent in my shame and self-loathing.

What had I done?
 

It felt like I had just awaken from a dream to find that in my sleep I had drowned an infant or bashed open the head of a baby seal. But I had no such excuse. I had exercised my cruelty while fully conscious and awake.

“Who knows, maybe she is a crack whore? Maybe she did catch AIDS from a trick or something? I mean, she does look half dead.” I told myself, but it was no excuse. My cruelty, just like everyone else’s, was born of cowardice.

I wanted to run; flee from the human wreckage crying out in agony behind me. I felt wretched. Tears welled up in my eyes and I fought them back, steeled my expression and continued walking off down the hall. I could just barely hear my friends laughing beneath the sound of Sarah’s tears.  I sat in my next class, staring at but not truly seeing the blackboard ahead, with the hollow eyed expression of the forever damned.

I saw Sarah less and less after that. She would disappear for weeks on end and no one ever thought to ask for her or inquire about her health or well being. It was as if she had never existed.  After a particularly long absence it was announced in class that Sarah was in the hospital dying of cancer and that she’d been fighting it all year long. Enduring painful chemotherapy sessions and surgeries to attempt to excise the cancer from her uterus. She’d already suffered through one radical hysterectomy. There was nothing more the doctors could do.

I remember thinking how she’d been fine just weeks before. How she even appeared to be gaining weight and growing back some of her hair right before I had stopped talking to her.

“I just wanted her to leave me alone.”

And she did. Sarah died at the end of senior year, right before graduation. I never went to visit her in the hospital but I did go to her funeral. Her mother recognized me right away. She told me how much my friendship had meant to Sarah. How she’d considered me her best friend.

“She would always tell me how nice you were to her. How you were the only one who didn’t tease her. I think she had a bit of a crush on you. Thank you for being so kind. I know it meant a lot.”

I didn’t say a word. Sarah obviously hadn’t told her how horrible I’d been to her at the end. But I hardly knew the girl. She was just some weird chick who followed me around the school. But apparently the little attention I had given her was more than anyone else had. Enough to make me her closest friend. I held Mrs. Michelle’s hand and we wept together over Sarah’s grave.

Now Sarah’s following me again.

I first spotted her the morning after the funeral. I came down for breakfast and she was standing in my kitchen with the morning light shining right through her, encountering no resistance from her flesh. Sarah looked over at me when I entered the room then smiled and turned quickly away, blushing. I froze, my muscles and tendons locked in fear, staring at her with my jaw hanging slack and my tongue like a dead weight lolling stupidly in my open mouth.

Sarah looked terrible. She looked as if she’d just climbed off of the autopsy table. But then again she’d always looked like that. Her sunken cheeks and thin lips were drawn tight around a tremulous smile. Her eyes were sunken deep into her skull and seemed to be little more than holes cored into her face. I could almost smell the formaldehyde wafting from her pores. At first I thought she was some type of zombie until I saw that she was the only thing in the room not casting a shadow. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there staring at her with all my nerves jangling as if electrified. When I didn’t smile back, her face cracked with a wounded sadness. Sarah turned and bolted from the room, letting out a mournful wail like the sound she’d made the day I’d shunned her in the hallway at school.

She wrenched open the backdoor and slammed it with a loud bang. I was less than a second behind her when she ran out into the yard. Still, when I opened the door, the yard was empty. Sarah was gone.

I didn’t tell my mom about it or any of my friends at school. That would have meant admitting to my mother how cruel I’d been and admitting to my friends that I felt guilty about it. So I kept quiet. And Sarah kept following me.

Next I saw her at school. Waiting for me in the halls as she always had. She smiled that same tepid grin that looked now like a rictus of death and I quickly turned around and stalked off in the other direction, ignoring the questions from my friends who obviously couldn’t see her and could not understand why I was retreating from them. Of course they couldn’t see her. They hadn’t been able to see her when she was alive. Besides, I was the one she was haunting. I was the one who’d killed her.

I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Everywhere I looked Sarah would be there.

She was waiting for me in the bathrooms. I nearly killed myself one morning reaching for a towel as I spotted her staring at herself in the vanity mirror, picking the scabs on her bald head. She turned to me and flashed me that lip-less grin that made her look even more like a skeleton. Her arms and legs held no fat at all and very little muscle and every blue vein stood out prominently through her translucent skin. Sometimes she would be naked with her shriveled breasts partially concealed by one arm coyly draped across her chest. Her stomach completely concave and her ribs pressed tight against her skin. These weren’t the ravages of death I was seeing in her emaciated body. I knew that this was exactly how she had looked in life. I soon avoided taking showers.

I stared across the kitchen table at her every morning as I choked down oatmeal and stirred the runny eggs on my plate with a fork, swallowing hard and trying not to regurgitate. She would smile at me so that her red bleeding gums would show and her eyes would water up as if she really wanted to cry, but was only forcing that ghastly grin onto her face in an attempt to appear friendly, for my sake. Her cheeks were sunken so deep that it looked like she was trying to suck a lemon through a straw and her cheekbones appeared ready to rip through her skin. Her eyes were huge in her shrunken head and stared back at me looking wounded and expectant. I didn’t know what to say to her. I had no idea what she wanted. I wanted to implore her to eat something but then I would remember that it was far too late for that. She began showing up at every meal. I quickly lost my appetite.

The first night she appeared in my bedroom I had tried apologizing for not being nicer to her while she was alive. I told her I was sorry for not being a better friend. She smiled that same nervous unenthusiastic grimace and reached out and stroked my face with her fingertips. I leaped back about ten feet when those icy appendages raked my flesh. I kept forgetting she was dead. By then she had been following me for so many weeks that I had almost gotten used to her.

 It was my mother who first began to notice my weight-loss. She would beg me to eat and then look frightened and concerned when I would refuse or regurgitate the few morsels I managed to ingest. She would constantly ask me what was wrong because I had completely withdrawn from all my friends and would stare off into space for long minutes, occasionally bursting into tears. Nothing could comfort me. Sarah’s melancholy presence haunted me every hour of the day.

Pretty soon the kids at school started to remark on my increasing strangeness. Not just my daydreaming and emotional outbursts but my deteriorating appearance. My cheeks began to get that drawn and sunken look. The bones in my face grew more and more pronounced as if my skull was rising to the surface. I spent hours in the restroom vomiting up what little I was able to force myself to consume. My friends at school were the first to make the connection to Sarah, even before I did. They recognized the same stench of death.

“What, did you catch AIDS from that crack whore who died last year? I knew you were fucking her! Man, that’s nasty!”

In the end I lost all my friends anyway. None of them stuck by my side. Teenagers were supposed to be immortal and my obvious illness threatened that notion. I was a reminder that all things die. So they shunned me like the plague. My mother said that they had never been real friends anyway. I hated to hear that. I’d killed a girl out of fear of losing their friendship. Now she was the only one who still came around.

***

Sarah’s been with me now every night since I started chemotherapy. The feel of her cold dead flesh against me as I lay nauseous with radiation poisoning is the worst of it all. I know she thinks she’s doing me some kindness; being at my side in my hour of need. Trying to give me the comfort I’d never extended to her. But seeing her just reminds me of what I will soon become and how I hadn’t been there for her. Maybe that’s part of her plan as well; to save my soul by giving me a taste of true remorse. She no longer looks anything like the Sarah I knew. Her body is bloated with gasses and her skin looks loose and oily as if it’s ready to slip right off of her. Her eyes are gone and her hair and nails have grown long. I know that this is how she now looks lying in her coffin.

I turn to look into the empty pits where her eyes should be and feel her sorrow wafting toward me in waves. I’d had it wrong this whole time.

It wasn’t her own death or even my cruel betrayal that caused the terrible sadness within her. She wasn’t feeling sorry for herself, but for me. She knew all along that I was dying too. The tremors start and I wrap my arms around her frigid flesh as Sarah curls against me. And I’m grateful for the comfort she offers. The coolness of her bloodless flesh brings some relief from the fever raging through my dying body. I feel her cold tears drip from her cheeks onto my arms like drops of ice water and I warm them with my own. Sarah had not been so crazy after all. In the end, she
was
 my best friend.

Pressure

Vincento turned to look at her with those beautiful silvery gray eyes that had melted so many hearts, eyes like a timber wolf, predator’s eyes. His long raven-black hair spilled damp and limp with perspiration onto the hard metal table. His brow was knotted in concentration and every lean hard muscle in his body was tense and straining. Maria knew he wanted to scream. She watched as those gorgeous eyes trailed over to look at the solemn six-year-old who sat in the corner playing with the instruments she would soon be using to torture him. He closed his eyes and shook his head vehemently.

“No! No!”

She clamped the jumper cables back onto his nipples and fired up the generator. Vincento’s body convulsed and contorted in nerve-searing agony as flaming talons of electricity shredded through his nervous system. She watched impassively as he thrashed about on the table with saliva frothing and drooling from his mouth in long ropes. He tried his best not to scream, knowing it would do no good and that it would give Maria satisfaction to hear it. She removed the cables and looked at him expectantly. Vincento’s chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath. His body still vibrated with electricity, and his nerves still screamed in agony. He shook his head again.

Maria removed one of her six-inch stiletto pumps and punched the heel of it into his eye. She did it so fast he’d barely had time to react. There was a wet, sticky, pop as it gouged through the eyeball. Blood drooled down his cheek onto the table and Vincento cried out in horror and anguish.

“You sick cunt! You sick
fucking
 cunt! You ruined my face!”

Maria was a very patient woman. She had all the time in the world. She would get the answer she wanted.

Vincento stopped yelling and his one remaining eye refocused on Maria with an undisguised and utterly indescribable hatred. Maria smiled.

“Are you ready to tell me what I want to hear yet?”

“Fuck you! Fuck you, you crazy bitch!”

Maria shook her head. He would need further persuading, but he would talk. They always did. Her father had taught her well.

Michael Damiano, Maria’s father, had been an enforcer for the mafia in Vegas since the days of Bugsy Seigel. He’d become quite an accomplished hit-man and was greatly sought after for his skills at extracting information. He could make anyone talk. Even after his health had begun to fail, and he could no longer withstand the rigors of the job, he had continued to take on contracts, subbing out the work to his daughter whom he’d educated in the art of pain. She’d learned very well. Soon his buddies in the syndicate found out about his daughter and tried to put a stop to it. They could not stomach the thought of a woman in harm’s way. Some of them threatened her father. Maria threatened back. She left the bodies of her competition littering the front lawns of a few of her detractors. They left her alone after that. Some of them, even while denouncing her father and her in public, had continued to send contracts their way in private. Maria was good, and even those macho assholes had known it. One thing she had excelled at, even becoming more accomplished at its delicate intricacies and nuances than her father, was interrogation. For her father, it had been a science and he had it down cold, but for her, it was an art, and each canvas had different secrets to yield.