Goth Girl Rising (8 page)

"I don't understand how you can be in the hospital for so long, dealing with all those wackos and doctors, and not understand how goddamn serious this all is!"

"Eff off, Roger!" I spin around to him and he actually takes a step back, which is so. Damn. Cool. "I was in the hospital be cause
you
put me there. And guess what?
I
was one of the wackos. So get the hell off my back!"

He stares at me. Still Pissed Off. But bleeding back into Sad, Tired. Because the truth hurts, bitch.

"You gave up the right to ask me questions when you locked me up somewhere for
other
people to ask me questions."

Ooh, to the gut! He deflates. He goes all guilty-looking. Easiest thing in the world, making him feel guilty. I'm pretty good at it.

"You can't blame me for that," he says, but there's no strength behind the words. None at all. "You were out of control."

"You got a phone call. A goddamn phone call. And you committed me."

"You have a history—"

"Of slitting my wrists, not blowing my head off."

Now he's fully in Sad, Tired. He's guilty. He's wondering if he's a Bad Dad.

I could go on, but there's no point. Right now, nothing I say—absolutely
nothing
—could be one-tenth as bad as what he's got scrolling through his brain. So I just look back at the crack, staring at it until he leaves.

I
HAVE A DREAM SOMEONE IS
touching me.

Not just, like, touching me on the shoulder or something. I mean
touching
me. Hands from behind, cupping my breasts, and for the first time in my life, I don't mind them. For the first time in my life, I
like
that they're big. The weight of them—the heft—feels good in someone else's hands.

Lips touch the back of my neck. The side of my neck. My collarbone. Oh, God—I'm naked. I just realized it. I'm totally naked. And someone is behind me, arms wrapped around, lips on my skin, hands on my breasts and now moving down, down, and God oh God I didn't know. I didn't know—

It's Jecca. I know her lips. Oh. Jecca. I turn. Turn to see her. To kiss her.

But it's not Jecca.

It's not a
her
at all.

I
WAKE UP.
N
OT A HER
. Oh. Shit. Shit and goddamn. What the hell is
wrong
with me?

I lie there in bed, confused, messed up, effed up. My breath is coming too fast. I feel warm but I want to shiver at the same time.

I don't understand. What was I...?

No. Just stop it. Just stop it.

I am
not
going to think about this. It was just a dream. It doesn't mean anything.

I crawl out of bed. I can't shake it, no matter how much I want to. I keep thinking about ... I keep thinking about the way he looked at me there in his bedroom. When I was open to him.

At first—when I was just unbuttoning my shirt—it was just this shock. He just couldn't believe it was happening. And then, when I opened my bra...

God.

He just...

Ten million things all warring on his face, in his eyes: Surprise. Disbelief. Want. Need. Concern. Fear. Joy. Lust.

And I made it all happen. I
created
that moment for him, created those thoughts and feelings. Me.

And now...

And now, what the hell is he doing to me in return? Why am I dreaming...?

In the Sandman series, there's this bit ... It's early on. I think it's in
The Doll's House.
Where Morpheus goes into this woman's dream and he's flying with her and she says something about how when you dream about flying, you're really dreaming about sex.

And Morpheus says, "Well, then what are you dreaming about when you're dreaming
about
sex?"

God.

Shit.

There's a full-length mirror on the back of my door and I stand before it, staring at myself in my T-shirt and my sleep-messed hair and my puffy eyes.

And you know what? I'm sort of OK with what I see, minus the brown hair. I don't get these girls who go all schizo over their bodies. I mean, sure, my boobs are just out of control. I get that. But that's why God invented the minimizer bra.

It pisses me off when these bulimic and anorexic chicks go all spastic. Or the girls who, like, cut themselves and shit. I mean, give me an effin'break, OK? If you don't like your body, just fix it. Deal with it.

When you feel like things are out of control, you
take
control.

So, yeah.

I go into the bathroom and look at myself in the
that
mirror. Nothing has changed; no magic in this mirror. My pits are stubbly. My legs are rough. I wield the Lady Remington and glare at myself in the mirror from beneath my Bangs of Doom.

When you feel like things are out of control, you
take
control.

Yeah, that's what you do. Take control.

I thumb on the Lady Remington. She whispers to me in a buzz.

Oh, yeah.

I
T TAKES LONGER THAN
I thought it would take. I thought it would be like in the movies—zip, zip, zip and you're done.

But no. My hair's thick and when I try just plowing through it with the razor, the whole thing jams up and stops. So I take, like, five minutes cleaning the thing and getting it to work again.

I stand in the shower with a makeup mirror in one hand and a pair of cuticle scissors in the other. I found the cuticle scissors in the back of the medicine cabinet—it's the one sharp thing Roger forgot to hide. It takes a long time to cut my hair down enough that I can get the Lady Remington to go through it. At one point, Roger gets agitated and knocks on the door. "Kyra? Everything all right in there?"

"I have cramps!" I tell him, which usually shuts him up.

Back to my hair. Between the scissors and the razor, I manage to get most of it off my head. My body isn't so lucky—I'm covered in hair clippings. I look like the floor of a barbershop. This is a little more complicated than just dyeing it, it turns out.

I run the shower to wash it all off of me and the drain starts to clog up. Shit! This is supposed to be
easy.

I scoop up as much wet hair as I can. The drain starts, y know, draining again, like it's supposed to. The water feels strange on my semibald head. It's too cold, then too warm, while my skull skin gets used to it. My head's, like, supersensitive. I run the tips of my fingers over it, skipping the patchy, stubbly parts. Maybe this is what babies feel like? All new and just born?

Wow.

New.

Just born.

I wash off all the hair clippings on me, then scrape clear the drain and dump the hair into the trash can. When I'm clean, I turn off the shower and dry my head—the towel's scratchy and coarse against the new skin.

Roger knocks on the door again. "Kyra. I have to get going to work. You're gonna miss the bus."

"I'm almost done!" I tell him. I look at myself in the mirror. ugh. This didn't work the way I wanted it to: I'm all ... mangy. I have patches of stubble and patches of longer hair, broken up by swaths of naked head. I look like one of those topographic globes, with hair representing altitude or something.

"You need to get going," he says.

"Jesus Christ! I'm almost ready!" Which is a total lie, but whatever.

I can almost hear the gears turning in his head on the other side of the door. On the one hand, he totally doesn't trust me to get ready and go to school on my own. On the other hand, he's thinking,
Haven't I lost enough time at work already because of her?

So the other hand beats the one hand and Roger leaves. Excellent.

I scrounge around in his bathroom for his shaving stuff. But Roger now uses an electric razor. Damn! Doesn't he know I could just get a knife or something from Simone or Jecca or someone else at school? What does he really think he's accomplishing here?

So I have to do a little better. I have to think this through.

First of all, I have to get rid of school, so I use my favorite trick: I log on to Roger's e-mail account and send an e-mail to the Spermling:

Roland,

I've decided to keep Kyra home today. We had something of a breakthrough last night and I'll be staying home from work as well to work through it with her. Thanks for your understanding, and I'm sorry again about the incident at school.

Roger

Classic. The Spermling has never even noticed that I set the e-mail to respond to
my
account, not Roger's. So I'm the one who gets the "Roger, no problem, thanks for letting me know, hope everything works out" bullshit that the Spermling always sends back.

So now I'm free for the day. Excellent.

I can do a lot in a day.

First, I need a car.

I
T'S ACTUALLY NOT AS TOUGH
as you'd think. Most of the time, you can just rely on people's stupidity.

The first time I stole a car, it was a crime of opportunity. I was at the mall, waiting for my dad to pick me up, and I saw a car parked off all by its lonesome. I wandered by and saw that the keys were in the ignition. I figured that the owner must have locked his keys in the car, because who would be so effing stupid that they'd leave their car keys in the ignition and the door unlocked, right?

But for some reason I tried the door. And it opened right up.

And then it was like I couldn't help myself. I couldn't
stop
myself. I didn't even look around. I just slid into the driver's seat like I belonged there and started the car.

And for the first time ... For the first time in a long time, I felt great.

I felt
in control.

I drove that car all around the parking lot. I weaved in and out of spots, threading the other cars. Roger had been teaching me to drive with Mom's old car even though I was only fourteen at the time. He claimed he wanted to get me "ready early," but I knew the truth. He was trying to buy my love and my caring and my giving a shit by putting me behind the wheel. Tempting me with the promise of a learner's permit and eventually a license.

So I knew how to drive pretty well and I just hauled ass around that parking lot until it occurred to me that a mall cop might pull me over. I parked the car on the other side of the mall. I left the keys in the ignition, but I locked all the doors before I left.

Some people need to learn the hard way, you know?

The second car I stole was my mom's.

She was dead, but we still had the car and Roger promised me I could have it when I was old enough to drive. So I figured I wasn't really stealing it—I was borrowing it from my future self, which totally ought to be cool, in my book.

Roger was out somewhere, so I opened the garage door and just drove that sucker all over town. And again
—in control.

After that, it's like the effing universe was just
begging
me to steal cars.

Everywhere I went, it was like I was noticing people leaving their doors unlocked or their keys in the car or both. It happens
a lot.
It's just that most people don't notice it. But it also confirmed something I've always believed, which is this: Most people are idiots.

So, getting into cars is easy. Even if people don't leave a door unlocked, it's pretty easy to slim-jim a lock.

Getting them
started
is tougher. New cars are the worst because they're all protected and shit. Older cars, though, like ones from the eighties, they're pretty easy. You can hotwire them or you can actually rip out the whole ignition and put in your own. That's kind of cool, but it takes a while and it's tough. I've done it a couple of times and I always end up banging my knuckles with the slide hammer. I learned all of these cool tricks from this repo man on the Web.

When I'm really desperate, I sneak onto a used-car lot, find some old eighties piece of crap, and swipe it. I'm always real careful to wipe everything down when I leave, too, so that I don't leave any fingerprints. But here's the thing—I always return the cars. I drop them off in a parking lot or car sales place or something. So it's not like I'm stealing them
forever
or anything. I'm just borrowing them for a while.

That's all.

I guess technically I'm not
supposed
to do it. But if that's the case, then why the hell is it so damn
easy?

I
COVER MY HEAD WITH A SCARF
because right now if I go out in public the way I look, someone will probably try to cart me right back to the hospital.

I feel conspicuous looking for a car to jack in broad daylight. I can't take Mom's car because Roger caught me with it once and now he checks the odometer. So I have to steal one. There's a little shopping center about a half a mile up Route 54, so I head there. Even this early in the day, there are plenty of cars.