And Then Things Fall Apart (15 page)

So when Matt pulled his big non-virginity reveal in the freezer, it added to the pile of everything else going wrong in my life, and his betrayal was more than I could bear. The oh-by-the-way-I'm-not-a-virgin thing should have broken us up then and there, but I didn't have the strength. I had the chicken pox.

Breaking up only a couple weeks later via text is no easier. It is horrible. But maybe I'm a little different now. I'm turning into a Teflon-coated version of the old Keek. It's not
like Matt has always been a paragon of steadfast loyalty and love. He has epically let me down before, and I let it slide.

Crap. Dinner. Gram's calling me from the kitchen.

This will have to be a story for another day.

Right. There was a piercing, okay? We were out—me, Matt, and Earl the Squirrel. We took the Metra train downtown and then the El to Clark and Belmont and tried to fit in with all the other people hanging around the tattoo shop who seemed much older, like they were in college.

I wasn't myself then. I was going through every motion more slowly, as if I had wet sand in my veins—brushing my teeth, writing papers for English, eating fries at the D&D. It was like I was standing still as the world whirled past me, blurry, while I stared into space.

And let me tell you, this shop was nothing if not a hullabaloo. We didn't plan it, really. Earlier that night we had just been hanging out. We drank coffee at Dunkin' Donuts and then went to that store the Alley and poked around, bought some stupid stickers for our nonexistent skateboards and book bags. Earl the Squirrel tried on some rings with glass eyes in them and put his fist in my face and said, “Here's
lookin' at you, kid,” which was actually kinda funny.

The store was enormous with high ceilings and just covered with your typical angsty subversive crap—biker wallets, skull and crossbones belt buckles, the aforementioned Manic Panic hair dye, outrageous hoodies with pinup girls on them. You know the stuff I'm talking about. In a word, amazing. Then we were looking at the fancy body jewelry in the case, and I said, “Matt, let's get our tongues pierced.”

What? Did I say that? What the hell was I thinking? First of all—I mean, ouch. It looks really cool on others, but on me? I was just feeling so “Up yours, World” that right then I thought putting a hole and metal barbell in my tongue made all kinds of sense. I had done research on it ages before, and it turns out that there is a place on your tongue that has no feeling in it. It's like a dead space between the two halves of muscle. When they pierce, this is where they are putting the hole. I know. Cool or what?

And then it became this big thing. Earl the Squirrel started chanting, “Pierce! Me! Pierce! Me! Pierce! Me!” and we were all on fire to do it, or at least to have one of us do it.

When we got to the tattoo shop, it was obvious—they thought we were children. My face was hot with embarrassment at Earl the Squirrel's braces and wrestling sweatshirt, and our wrinkle-free skins. Matt, who is not a big guy, still seemed like the most mature because he looked at me and
then waltzed right up to the counter and said to this woman with bright red hair in a 1940s hairdo and
horns implanted in her forehead
and arms like colored Sunday comics, “Good evening. I'd like to get my tongue pierced, please.” I don't know if he was showing off for me—his sad girlfriend he was trying to bed—or his wrestling teammate and local spaz about town, but it didn't matter. Are you seeing why I was so into him?

For a demon girl she was supernice and cheerful. “Hi, guys. Are you eighteen?” I wanted to just melt like the Wicked Witch of the West into a puddle on the floor because, duh, we were not eighteen. “Sorry, guys, but in the state of Illinois you need to be eighteen to get pierced without your parents' permission.”

We were so lame. We huddled in a corner to discuss. I wanted to run all the way to Union Station and get the first train back to the suburbs and my miserable house with my depressed parents, but I also wanted someone to get something pierced. The idea of metal sliding through skin seemed so elegant and beautiful. It seemed like the best way to feel better about things, another outward statement about how screwed-up things felt on the inside.

Matt understood, because he took my hand. He said, “I'm doing this, okay? For you, Keek.”

And I said, “For me?” And then he kissed me, hard, in front of everyone, his smooth unpierced tongue giving me a
quick lick on its way out, an electric zing running all the way down to my underwear.

Matt told the tattooed demon girl, “I'll be eighteen in, like, eight months.” He was exaggerating (he just turned seventeen this May, and the piercing was last November), but still. “Then I'll have to register at the post office so if they need to draft me, I can go off and kill people. If they don't kill me first.” And then he said this: “Is. That. Eighteen. Enough?” Hot or what?

She looked at me and Earl the Squirrel like we were pathetic orphans. Then she said to Matt, “I can do your eyebrow, fast and in the back. Your girlfriend can come with, but, dude, that friend of yours has to wait up front.”

Before I go on, let me just say that Chicago at night is especially beautiful. I've never been to New York but feel as if I have because of Esther Greenwood's internship in
The Bell Jar
, and it seems pretty and all, but I know for a fact how amazing Chicago is. Illinois is flat. As a pancake, as a plate. When we went to the Sears Tower (or the Willis Tower, though no true Chicagoan would be caught dead calling it that) in grade school and looked down at the city, I could see far and wide—streets and highways and shiny glass buildings and then suburbs and farther out grass and what looked like farms. The lake on the other side, as wide and deep as the ocean with water so fresh and blue it seemed to go out and out and out forever.

At night Chicago is a clear and glittering city with a great yawn of blackness where the lake is. It is the City, and anything is possible. It is not your parents' house. It is not their basement. It lies before you, offering itself like a black sequined dress on a bed before a school dance. All you have to do is go there and be you and live, because everything is yours for the taking. Out the window of the tattoo shop at Clark and Belmont, the El tracks rumbled overhead, and sushi restaurants' lanterns glowed red. Teenagers dressed in black from all over Chicagoland roamed the streets looking for love, for weed, for trouble, and the air crackled with danger and adulthood and possibilities.

So when I followed Matt and Demon Girl to the back room, I wasn't scared or even a little freaked out. I was ready. She leaned Matt back in a chair, like a barber's chair. She put on purple latex gloves. She disinfected Matt's eyebrow with an alcohol square. She took a skinny hollow needle from a wrapper like the kind string cheese comes in. Matt looked at the ceiling. She leaned over, and I'm sure he tried to see the dragons down her cleavage, but I didn't care.

Using a scissors clamp, she grabbed a part of his left eyebrow and swabbed it with numbing stuff. And one, two, three, the needle was through the thinnest part of his left eyebrow and then she expertly (she probably does this fifteen times a day) slipped a small silver hoop with a little ball on it through, swabbed more goo on with an extra
long Q-tip, and forty dollars later, we were done.

Watching wasn't as cool as I thought it would be. It was like seeing someone get a boil lanced. But he did it. That part was amazing. My boyfriend pierced his eyebrow. For me. And it looked sofa king hot. And I felt powerful and invincible and taller and totally like Lady Lazarus in Sylvia's poem—on fire and ready for whatever the night would bring.

As soon as we emerged into the front room, Earl the Squirrel jumped up and said, “That shit's hot, yo. But Coach isn't gonna let you keep it.” And as soon as he said it, we all knew it was true. But I felt that Matt and I had crossed a threshold that night and that we understood each other on a new deeper and fundamental level. That he understood, through the intensity of our love, what his eyebrow ring represented: us. He'd never get rid of it, for Coach Pernaki or anyone else. They would have to pry that eyebrow ring from his cold dead corpse before he'd remove it for anyone, for any reason, ever, because
that was how much he loved me
.

He didn't even wait one freaking week.

That Wednesday before practice Matt kissed me and then headed off to the locker room with his eyebrow ring intact. When he met me at the D&D after practice, he didn't even mention it. I had to be the one to say “Where is it? You're putting in back in, right? Right?” And then I said,
“RIGHT?” again like I had Tourette's syndrome. And then he said, “Come on, Keek. It was a goof. You know, for kicks. I can't keep that crap in my face. I mean, come on.”

See?
This
is where I should have broken up with him. Like, “That's it. We are so done. And to think that I was contemplating doing it with you, you selfish jock bastard.” But that was not how I felt. The wounds were fresh. He still had two holes on his eyebrow like a vampire bat had bitten him.

I just said, “Well. Tell Coach that Keek says, ‘Hey.'” And I left my own restaurant. Which was also pretty dramatic.

It still stings, a little, that Matt gave me up so easily. “Oh? This little eyebrow ring? It's nothing. Here, I'll remove it right now and toss it over my shoulder like a piece of used Kleenex. Who cares?”

I know, I know. He is a wrestler, and a good one. An eyebrow ring is dangerous, to him and his opponents. It is against Illinois High School Association rules and regulations to have any facial piercings in competitive sports, blah, blah, blah. But I was holding on to that eyebrow ring for dear life. Its very presence on his face let the world know that we were having an impact on each other, he was making changes for me. He was putting little holes in his face to prove his love, and as long as Matt wore it, we were okay, everything was okay, everything was going to be okay.

When that was not the case.

At all.

I know, I know, I know. Matt's non-virginity should have been obvious if I had been paying any attention whatsoever. At least Matt's as hot as all get-out. I think Esther's whole problem with Buddy is not only that he is not a virgin but also that he is a mama's boy doofus. She is smart and accomplished. Her vision of the world is multifaceted—nuanced and beautiful. She is ambitious. And then he goes and tells her about some old waitress that he did it with all summer long. And I think—no, I
know
because I have been there—her whole crisis over Buddy's revelation had to do with how she now saw herself. Suddenly she was infantilized. Her sexual longings and small experiments in nakedness were suddenly quaint, or some such crap, to Buddy. The total dipwad fathead.

Matt is no dipwad. Esther wasn't jealous. She was furious. I am furious and a little jealous. Of ring rats, of all things. They are the kinds of girls who beat up other girls in bathrooms to exert authority and pecking order upon pink-haired honors English girls like me. They are a bunch of gum-snapping, slutty Doreens. Matt. Honestly. How could you?

Esther says that Buddy always acted like she was so much more experienced than him. He acted as if she were inspiring new intense feelings he had never had before because of her inherent sexiness, which, for a poet, would be, like, important. Hell, it would be important to any artistic honors English virgin. She felt duped. As do I.

Buddy also, throughout the whole Bell Jar, acts like a complete buffoon. He's in freaking medical school but is a total rube when it comes to real feelings and real life. Matt is not like that at all. He has guts. He likes to make me feel good and has never tricked me into doing anything I didn't want to do. I know I shouldn't be as mad as I am. It's a pride thing. He should have told me, that's all. He should have told me and just put it out there, and I could have recovered earlier instead of later—meaning now, when I'm sick and alone and in the middle of this soul-destroying summer.

I'm sofa king sick of finding out all kinds of intense personal crap by total accident.

MOM:
Hi, Keekie. Oh, my darling. How are you feeling?

ME:
Hi, Mom!

MOM:
I e-mailed you some pictures of Aurora. Have you seen them?

ME:
No. Internet. Here. Remember? (Honestly.)

MOM:
Oh, right. Well, when I get back, you'll see.

ME:
When's that gonna be? Never?

MOM:
No, next week, like I said. Are you being nice to Gram? I hope you're not causing any trouble for her. That lady's been through a lot, you know.

ME:
Oh, I know. She's pretty cool. Mom?

MOM:
Yesss?

ME:
I think Matt and I broke up. I mean, it's not like you and Dad or anything, but. I dunno. It's so over. Dunzo, I think.

And then, dear reader, I started to cry.

AND THEN I SAID:
Everything is so screwed-up, and I feel like crap. I just feel like absolute crap about everything.

MOM:
Oh, Karina. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry about everything. I thought I was doing the right thing. I really had no choice. Being an adult is just as shitty as being fifteen.

ME:
What are you talking about?

MOM:
Haven't you talked to your father?

ME:
I haven't talked with Dad in, like, two and half weeks, Mom. He's always at the D&D, and
then home sleeping, and then back to work.

MOM:
I'll be home soon. We can talk then, Keek. I gotta go. It's peak usage time here. Love you.