The Cut Spirit

Once upon a time, she told us her story in the middle of the woods, four of us in a group of a two-hundred sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the detritus-laden ground, pine needles and leaves digging into our dusty legs, mosquito breeze tugging at the loose strands of our hair. We itched, slapping and scratching the growing white-red welts on our skin, but we did not move from our chosen circle-spots on the ground. We’d chosen them, circling around like cats before we planted ourselves, knowing the time we’d spend here, the life’s weight she held. For the next hour, she was our guru, our Dalai Lama, our Thoreau.

Tiredness burned behind our eyelids, struggling them with weight. There had been a rogue mouse last night, bug nibbles to itch, conversations to have under stars too quiet for city lights. Now, the sky had clouded, tiny drops of humidity brushed our skin with friction. My crossed arms stuck to themselves, but my neck remained free—I’d chopped my ponytail off last night when I reached into my bag for a toothbrush and found a pair of scissors instead. My hair actually looked a lot like Krystal’s. She stood in front of us, ready to speak. She’d been giving us a disclaimer all this time: she may cry, she may forget words. We’re to bear with her. I’ve got all day—I’m one of those pansies that fears public speaking more than death.

“There was a tsunami in Japan,” Krystal said. “People died.”

Beside me, I heard leaves rustle and turned out of habit. It was the other girl in our group, Brianna, swatting at the guy sitting next to her. His name is Ryan. He loves her. The dampness has flattened the hair on the back of her arms—she wouldn’t have felt him until they were skin-to-skin. He knew this—I see it on his face.

“Stop it!” she hisses, with the playful edge girls my age use when they talk to guy’s Ryan’s age. But quiet, too, for Krystal’s sake.

Krystal didn’t notice, or maybe she didn’t care. “People died,” she repeated, “and somehow, I’m supposed to talk to you about redemption.”

Brianna scooted away from Ryan and moved toward Matt. Matt loves her too. Brianna likes him a lot. He grinned and put his arm around her. I heard a familiar whine by my ear and swatted at the intruder. Too late—my neck itched.

“Here’s my question,” said Krystal. “Where’s the redemption? Where the fuck is it? How is there redemption in a world that suffocates its inhabitants in tons of seawater? How is there salvation in a world where I have to tell my three year-old brother that my mom’s coming back, when I know she won’t? How is there forgiveness in a world where my dad exists only in body and not in spirit?”

I stopped scratching. Brianna sat her pretty little ass still.

“It’s not a rhetorical question,” said Krystal, flinging her hands out to the sides, jerking them toward us. I saw the jagged edges of her nails. “I don’t have an answer, and I need one. Where is it?” Her eyes gleamed, but she checked herself, calmed, shuffled away then back to us. “Let me tell you a story,” she said.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, turn, and find Matt there, grinning a Matt grin. He’s thinking of the million times I’ve run up to him with those exact same words. After a while, I didn’t have to say it. “You light up when you have something to say,” he told me once. “There’s that run and that smile, and I’ve got to drop what I’m doing. Arielle’s got a story.” I smile back, but there was a difference between me and Krystal. Yes, I was a writer. But she was a poet. I could grab your attention and make you sit down and shut up until I was finished. Krystal sang beauty to you. You wanted to reach out and touch it, take it into your heart and make it your own. Krystal opened her spirit to us, encapsulated us, warmed us up, and she stood there, talking about the night her father told her that her mother had been running with a knife and couldn’t be with them anymore, the way she learned to use a knife to mark herself with the memories that were the real cause of her insomnia, how she’d sobbed about nonexistent perfections for hours in front of the mirror, until her tears stung her wounds and she had to shower with soap until her body evened into a dull ache.

Already, I felt myself floating away, but her verbal pain had already nested itself into my chest, and she was taking me with her.

I am twelve, and I love to run. Time and reality suspend itself, and I run for miles in loops and squares and triangles. I am the fastest of the girls, then of my grade, then in the school. Racing wasn’t that much of a problem, just more of the same. I didn’t mind spending a couple more hours a day doing it. My dad comes to my meets. He sits in the stands and cheers me on. Then my mother comes, and they sit together and cheer, and I feel wild, free, beautiful. I transcend.

I am fifteen and my life has settled into a routine. I go to school for eight hours, then practice for two. A nutritionist defines what I’m to eat and drink. My coach owns my time. I’m not the best. I must focus, always focus. Stop looking around, focus! I’m exhausted. I dream I watch myself sleep peacefully, without hearing the constant shouting that’s coming from downstairs. Mom and Dad have creative discussions, they tell my two younger sisters. I make up stories and act them out so they can sleep. Mommy and Daddy are writing a story for you, I say. And every night, there’s a new installment. There were two princesses, Hannah and Lauren. They shared a castle but not a room. They each own a puppy. And a kitten. And a fairy.

I hate protein shakes, and I have them for two out of three of my meals every day. I’m underweight. Every two weeks, every time I must be faster. There is no race with others anymore, there is no freedom. I race myself. There’s a fallacy in that statement—I learn this in school. I will never win. Still, I try. My dad hangs around us to cope. My mother goes away. But I want her to keep coming. I have anxiety jitters. I throw up before every race. It has nothing to do with my body—I get mistaken for a fucking sixth grader. I run, run away, run from myself.

I don’t stop to catch my breath when I’m done, just stumble over to the time board—two seconds off. I’m safe for another two weeks.

I’m sixteen and he’s eighteen. He doesn’t know my last name. I don’t know the real color of his hair. I know he runs sprints and I run long distance, so I don’t see him much. But my car breaks down and he drives me home for three weeks, and he’s cute. He finds me intriguing, and I’ve never even been kissed. I lose my virginity in my track uniform in the back of his car, spur-of-the-moment, but I’m not worried. I’m fifteen pounds too far away from even having to worry about a period. I never talk to him again.

At least he asked.

I’m still sixteen and I’m changing schools. Throwing up doesn’t calm my nerves anymore—I have to have a panic attack each time after I run. Everyone asks me what’s wrong, and I honestly don’t know. I sleep more than I’m awake now, and my sisters are too old for stories. Hannah plays volleyball. Lauren dances. I drive them to practice, nap in the back of the car until they’re done. Thank God homework’s not hard.

I’m relieved when I lose my sport scholarship at the old school—I knew it was coming. It was only a matter of days. My mother stops dealing with me at all—only calls when she needs to talk about two of my sisters. She’s divorced my father, but he can’t stay away. Moves in four houses down like a pussy. I drop off groceries for him some days. He barely goes to work, and I suppose he’s just waiting for the other shoe like I was. He won’t talk to me because I don’t try. I take to dying my hair a different color on the first of every month. I find that changing one feature like that stops people from associating you from the Hazel “Power Twins.” I could say that I care, but I don’t. I really just want people to stop talking.

Matt is in my English class, also a transfer, there on scholarship. We’re the only two people who haven’t known each other since the diaper days. At lunch, he tells me that he’s from Seattle and that he, his parents, and his three sisters moved because the two youngest girls didn’t like the rain. He invites me over to his house after school and his mom makes cookies—like real cookies—before she heads to her night shift as a nurse. I meet Ryan in the kitchen and soon find that he stays with Ryan more than he stays in his mom’s trailer. Matt’s dad comes home and says things like “Would you like to stay for dinner?” and “You’re welcome here any time you want.” We work on homework in Matt’s room, and I wonder why anyone wants to be extraordinary when ordinary feels so good.

Matt was actually sad to see me go. I told him I’d come back. More importantly, I told him that my last name was Hazel. His last name was Stone.

People at school called us the Three Musketeers. I was perfectly fine spending the majority of my time with a couple of guys. My previous high school experience had made me quite tired of girls, and with Matt and Ryan, I was one of the guys. Ryan went through girls like paper towels, so there were some rumors. None of these bothered me, though. Every girl wanted Matt, though. Together, Matt and Ryan made up a great Good Guy Bad Guy combination. A lot of girls tried to become friends with me before they realized they’d be better off doing something—anything—else.

Enter Brianna. She wasn’t supposed to be anything but one of Ryan’s flings. But she was smart and not terribly annoying. Somehow, she ended up being the fourth musketeer. But that didn’t have a mainstream reference. We became the Fantastic Four. Matt fell for Brianna immediately. I suppose I could see why. She was rich but humble, sophisticated but quirky. And she had a past. The way everyone clings to each other these days, that was important. You have to be attracted to looks and personality and all that, I guess. But your pain has to be attractive too. That’s the most important part. He was extremely attracted to her pain.

I’m seventeen and it’s three o’clock in the morning when I get the call. Eyes thick with sleep, I stumble around my room in the dark, holding the car keys to my hip to deaden the noise. By the time I get to the hospital, Ryan and Brianna are standing in the waiting room, all sweatshirts and pajamas like me. Brianna turns around when she hears me come in.

“It’s Mr. Stone,” she whispers. “There was an accident a few hours ago.” She collapsed into my arms, not crying, but numb from foot to head. It’s Ryan who’s crying. Then Matt appears somehow—I still don’t know where he came from, and pulls us all to the side.

“I wanted you here,” he said simply.

That was a lost week. None of us went to school. None of us went home. We just stayed in his room, listened to music, and rearranged furniture. Matt took the mattress off his bed and we made a fort and stayed in there, safe from the world.

Just as suddenly as it began, it stopped. Krystal took a particularly long pause, and I emerged from the cocoon of her words, a gasp for air. Suddenly, there was so much air, even though the humidity reading’s somewhere in the 80 percentile. Around me, the slow breeze picked up speed, and the trees rustled overhead. Louder, louder. Then leaves were coming our way so fast that all of the crowd closed its eyes.

Through the safety of my hands, looking through my finger-made slits, I peered at Krystal, back to the wind, looking fiercer and stronger than any storm on earth or sea. She was, indeed, crying—cathartic, victorious. She had taken a good look inside herself and decided it was time to heal. So she cut her soul open, cleanly, with good conscience, to show us something much more powerful than the scars on her arms and legs. She told us her story, and this, the fact that she stood in front of us now, answered her question well enough.