soft serve
The girl on the screen hasn’t been touched yet by the man who is filming her. I feel safe, one moment, crawling into her skin and touching myself. Then I feel wretched. I shoplift razor blades and Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral. I babysit for our neighbors and binge on their snack pack junk food, then throw it up while the little boys watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Recently, their dad swung through their house in a drunken rage, chasing their mother. She showed up at our door with a black eye, and when I babysit their boys during their court hearings the oldest, 5 years old, regresses into baby babble when he’s upset: “When daddy’s mad at mommy. Daddy mad at mommy.” The parents go out for a date and return home happily buzzed and the daddy tells me I look so hot in my leopard print shorts. “You should party with us sometime,” he says, while the mommy crosses her arms to hug herself, looking at the floor and smiling.
It’s late summer, but instead of preparing for my junior year of high school, I am in constant negotiations with my mom and stepdad over what is to be done with me. I am suicidal, and they are throwing everything at me to see what might stick, save for the one thing I want: freedom. My days are regimented with morning shifts at a drive-thru barista stand, chores, exercise, Quality Family Time, church events. I’m not allowed to see most of my friends; they’re bad influences, or I am. Wilderness treatment programs in Utah or Montana are floated like threats - my hands are still too idle for their liking and besides, time in nature would do me good. They sign me up for our church’s youth mission trip to Mexico, where the boys will build a small church while the girls play with the children at an orphanage. I spend the entire bus ride to Tijuana trading burned CDs with my friend, one of the only guys I’ve known for decades who hasn’t tried to fuck me. Earlier that year I called him, distraught from a break up, and he picked me up in his vintage VW bug to drive around for a while. When he dropped me off back home I turned to him and blurted, “You’re a nice guy, maybe we should date.” He cocked his head, stalled. “Maybe another time,” he said.
Many years later, I’ll drunkenly tell this story at his wedding as a toast to his steadfast character, but my cheeks grow hot with embarrassment as I speak. I’m too drunk, the smiles in the audience look wary, uncertain of my point. Am I professing some long-harbored crush in front of his beautiful new bride? I’m not, but it’s only in that moment that I can feel how insulting the offer had been. Who wants to be the good guy, the backup plan? He’ll come up to me after the speeches, smiling awkwardly. “Thanks for sharing that,” he says. “I don’t remember that at all.”
As the summer drags on, I’m sent to various mental health professionals and amateur mentors.
There is the elderly woman, who sits with me in her living room and prays over my soul and encourages me to develop better hobbies than hurting my mother.
There is the psychiatrist, who does the SSRI shuffle. I flare into rages, shadowboxing a dead man, then settle into zombie-eyed binging and purging.
There is the youth group leader, who paces in front of me while I sit on his couch. He tries, with manic energy, to screw my head on straight - I have it so good, can’t I see that? Yes, my father died, but everyone goes through hard things. I still have two parents who love me. A roof over my head, food to eat. So many people would do anything to be so blessed.
This global-evangelical framing is my native perspective. Even when I was younger and dreamed up ways to escape my dad, it was a hard limit to my magical thinking. I’d imagine a button that, if pressed, would cause me to trade places with some other child in the world. But I could not choose the circumstances into which I would be thrown. Maybe I’d end up in a loving home with both-alive parents who only touched me in the safe way and lavished their attention and resources upon me. But it was far more likely, I knew, that I would wake to an existence irrevocably fucked. Stomach bloated with starvation, or limbs bruised and burned with abuse, or eyes blind from acid.
It strikes me now that I can’t remember ever considering the child on the other end of this exchange, whether she would find my life a comparative heaven or hell.
I try, in my groomed good girl way, to show the youth group leader that I get it, I really do. I nod along and smile, embarrassed, because what he says is true: in the grand scheme of the world’s horrors, I do have it good. I laugh with him at my petty, self-centered nature to try and get him on my side. I know I should be grateful for my life, I attempt to reason with him. But.
But everything hurts, you see, and I don’t know how to make it stop hurting so much, and my mind won’t stop conjuring these bloody, ghastly exits from the pain. I don’t want to kill myself but it feels inevitable to me that I will, and that scares me but comforts me, too, because every day feels increasingly unbearable and I need it to end. Can’t you understand?
I don’t say all of this to him, of course. I am a sullen teenager breaking into fawning, garish grins on his couch to interrupt the flow of his judgment. I know I should be grateful for my life, but. My words falter and fall flat, landing on clinical, impotent shorthand: But I’m still depressed.
He stands in front of the couch, a little to my right, and shakes his head.
“You’re not depressed,” he says. “You smile too much to be truly depressed.”
Adults are idiots, all of them. Not least my mom and stepdad, whose efforts to save me make everything worse. For a time, my nights are spent on a twin mattress at the foot of their bed. Eventually, they let me move it into my youngest brothers’ room. When everyone is asleep, I sneak back into theirs to take my stepdad’s phone.
A business man handing out copies of his suicide letter in manila envelopes to his colleagues before blowing off his head in front of them. Golden Gate Bridge jumpers. I get obsessed with Christine Chubbok, the American news reporter who announced, on a July morning in 1974, “In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide,” before pressing a Smith & Wesson revolver against her head and shooting herself on air.
The footage, which I cannot find for all my searching, is said to quickly cut to black. I clear the history on my stepdad’s phone and return it to his dresser.
Cut to black, cut to black: the only way to annihilate my own history.
I go to my usual therapist, a middle-aged man who goes fishing with my stepdad and probes about my relationship with my father. My dear dead dad. This is, I know, the one point of despair adults will allow me. But I won’t cater to it.
When I deflect and tell him I’m just still depressed about my breakup from a year prior, he asks if I’m being honest that I didn’t lose my virginity to him. I am being honest, of course; my virginity was raped away years ago. I didn’t even have sex with this boyfriend, who lived across the country. I did, however, “lose my virginity” to a different boyfriend, in his bedroom in his parents’ basement, a few days before turning 16.
“And you wanted to?” my therapist asks when I give him this palatable version of events. “He didn’t pressure you?”
I’d wanted to. I’d snuck out of my bedroom in the middle of the night and walked down the rural road, wearing a long, fur-trimmed coat over fishnets and a handmade Bikini Kill t-shirt, my Doc Martens crunching the gravel to where his car was idling under the solitary street lamp that was our meetup spot.
In his bedroom, we spray-painted the anarchy symbol onto the American flag hanging above his bed. When he stuck his dick in me, it felt like nothing. It was almost nothing - his near-micropenis a punchline he often made about himself as a form of armor. Leading up to the first time we had sex, when I would give him head in his car or handjobs under blankets while pretending to watch a movie, I felt some relief at its size: I would never have to fear his desire. But once he was finally inside of me, the breach was so anticlimactic I wanted to die. How could this boy, how could any boy, possibly fill my emptiness?
It was absurd, but like all absurd lies we wish desperately to believe, I clung to the story. Virginity was a construct, after all, and I was a hellbent architect. We’d staked our flag - this was our land and our rules, invented as we fumbled with each other’s clothes. The chaos inside of me was just part of the territory.
I confess to my boyfriend, sort of, eventually. Not that night, but another one when I can’t stop crying. I make it sound like it had been a one time thing, a drunken, awful mistake my dad had made and regretted terribly. He never touched me again. He spent the rest of his days trying to make it up to me. As if he could! Look, here’s the purity ring he bought for me. We could laugh at it now, our naked teenage bodies entwined in spent, sleepy arousal. You are the first to me, I tell him, kissing his clavicle, his chest, trailing my kisses of assurance down his abdomen. You’re my first choice. I take his small cock into my warm, wet mouth, all of it at once, licking and sucking it hard again, unworried as to whether he might wonder how I’m so good at it. He had no point of reference beyond porn. I was his first choice, too, for everything.
It was almost beautiful, this lie. It was reason enough for my tears, my cutting, my inability to thrive, but it also rendered me tragic and brave in my boyfriend’s eyes. He was in awe of my strength, and he wanted to protect me. His rage swelled on my behalf. He urged me to tell somebody what had happened, said that he would if I didn’t, and I freaked out so completely that he rescinded the threat, smothering my face and body with tender kisses.
I could go to pieces with him, and all I wanted was to go to pieces.
The lie allowed me my favorite fantasy: my dad, wretched with remorse, on his hands and knees begging for my forgiveness. Calling me an angel, his special girl. Crying that he didn’t deserve to live for what he’d done to me. It wasn’t purely fantasy - he had done and said such things - but where I’d been weak before, desperate in the face of his self-loathing outbursts to make him feel better, in this fantasy I was cold and impervious. I stood before him, a goddess in the shape of a nymph, and looked at his mortal, anguished face. I imagined the words coming out of me, detached but firm: You will never touch me again.
The reality of this statement would hit me sometimes, thrusting me out of the illusion and into spells of weeping exquisite for their singleminded grief. You will never touch me again. You will never touch me again. Oh, my God, in this life or any other you will never touch me again.
Above all, the lie sheltered us from a truth too horrific to speak.
I was raped by my father over and over as a child.
On the twin mattress in my brothers’ room, I listen to music on my headphones and slash at my shins with one of the shoplifted razor blades.
You were a song that I couldn’t sing. You were a story I couldn’t tell, belts the man in my ears. I gain momentum with the blade when he starts screaming. I was once alive. I was once alive, when you held me.
The next morning at the barista stand, I can feel the wounds reopen and trickle blood beneath the fabric of my pants. I have to run to the bathroom between customers to clean it up. “Heavy period,” I explain to my coworker.
I have an appointment with the middle-aged therapist after my shift. I sit across from him calm and smug and tell him I’m doing better today. He gives me a serious look.
“Do you have a plan?” he asks.
I shake my head. Months ago, my boyfriend wrote and recorded a song about my mother finding me, a suicide fantasy made lyrical over sad boy acoustic guitar, and the words and melody run through my mind: Blood-stained cocoon. Inside, a butterfly.
(You can laugh. I have plenty of times over the years, remembering that maudlin, premature elegy. But haven’t we all been teenagers wishing for someone to memorialize us?)
But I’ve traded fantasies. Now I want to be a jumper so that there will be, as the old hymn goes, no turning back, but I live in a town devoid of tall buildings or bridges so I shake my head no, I do not have a plan.
“Have you cut?” my therapist asks next. I find myself smiling at him, the way earnestly depressed and suicidal people supposedly would not. I can’t help the smile. It takes over my face as adrenaline courses through my body, the wild thrill of coming clean. The sensation is so foreign to my system, near-schizoid as it is with all its practiced secrets and signals and self-policing, that I experience it as almost a shock, expanding the moment. I slowly roll up my jeans and look up to catch his eyes widening at the sight of the fresh gashes on my shins, still weeping.
I cannot remember what I thought would happen next, if the adrenaline translated to any projected future. Did I know this admission would change everything? Many, many times over the following six months, trapped inside a residential treatment program, I would bargain with myself and my parents and God that I would do anything to have it back: this puny, haunted life I was so eager to shed or else splatter onto any happenstance bystander.
My therapist calls my parents and tells them he’s hospitalized patients for less. They arrive at his office, shaken, barely looking at me as I am sent to sit in the waiting room while the grown ups discuss next steps.
Hope is a thing with feathers; regret is a thing with teeth. And behind its fangs is the hot, humid breath of a living beast who betrayed its wants and needs.
The pressure was mounting, you see. All of my lies, my double and triple and quadruple selves - severed and buried, severed and buried. All this turned soil, the groaning underneath. I was a 16-year-old grave keeper and I couldn’t keep the peace.
It’s not enough! I want to scream. This confession, this tiny truth, it’s not enough. These are mere cuts - show them your wound! You think you can hide it forever, or that you will be strong enough to tell them later, but you are wrong. It will snake through your life like ivy, crumbling everything you try to build. It will become only more unnameable, and the rare times you try you will mince your words, choke on them, take them back. Wherever you are broken now will fracture further and spread, and you will make yourself sick trying to keep it all together, will orphan yourself from your family and from the world to keep secrets for the dead. Oh, you fucking voodoo doll, stuffed with splinters. Your voices will whimper and cry out from the underworld whenever you are tossed around and impaled on cock, you will seek out abuse just to hear their echoes. You will convince yourself that this is what you are, what you have always been, just a plaything, just a whore, and you will cum away whatever freedom is still possible to you, cum your hopes into submission, cum your dream songs into a cage. You will hold still while man after man after man after man clips your angel wings, and you will thank them for it. Thank you, Daddy, you’ll parrot, and all the while your shattered insides will sand away to sawdust, and you will consider this good, because you will be able to live with it, will have to live with it, because you will no longer have the luxury of being a teenager ready to fly or else lose everything in freefall.
She can’t hear me, of course. She flips through a magazine, bored and nervous, maybe vaguely guessing at her fate, unconscious to the fact that it was already determined, had always been determined. Even if some starving kid in Africa smashed the magic button and traded lives, her fate lived inside her body. Just look at it - her dick-sucking lips, her doe-eyed fear, her needy wet cunt. Her stupid, stupid, love-me smile.
On the two-hour car ride to the psychiatric hospital, my mother can’t stop crying. We stop midway at a McDonald’s for dinner, and I allow myself to ask for ice cream. I can feel how my request riles my stepdad - how selfish I must be to ask for a treat at a time like this, while my mom sniffles and blows her nose in the passenger seat. But I don’t care. I want this one small comfort, smooth and cool and sickly sweet, and he hands it to me.