Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You (5 page)

She was in her bathroom, her hair wrapped in a towel. She'd just had a shower, and the room was fragrant with steam.

And maybe she'd been thinking about Shaun Ryan—or maybe she'd been thinking about her father.

Her father and her mother. Who seemed to have little in common any longer except
her
.

As if a devil had nudged her, Merissa did a strange—unexpected—thing: She drew the inside of her wrist against the sharp edge of the medicine cabinet.

As if she'd wanted to cut her wrist, and to cut into the little blue artery. But the edge of the cabinet wasn't sharp enough and made only a red mark in her skin.

Pulses were beating in Merissa's head, in her ears—a terrible pressure was building up. In a drawer she rummaged for the little scissors she used to cut her finger- and toenails, and before she could think what she was doing, she drew the sharp points of the scissors along the tender inside of her left arm. At once a thin vein of blood emerged, delicate as a cobweb.

“Oh!”—the shock of it, the sensation of
relief
.

The cuts were not deep, just scratches. But fascinating to Merissa, how rapidly she could alter her physical state.

She'd been nervous, and she'd been fretful, and she'd been frustrated, and she'd been bored. But suddenly all that had vanished—now she felt
pain
.

The strange sensation called
pain
. Since Merissa had caused it, and controlled it, and since it was secret, and no one could know—it made her very happy, in that instant.

I can do this any time I want. And no one can stop me.

 

Merissa, my God! What have you done to yourself?

Merissa! How could you?

Merissa smiled, imagining her parents' shock.

“But you'll never know. No one will ever know.”

10.

“PERFECT ONE”

“Merissa? Can you help us out?”

Help out
—who? Fourth-period science, and Mr. Kessler was smiling at Merissa in his quizzical-teasing way, for evidently he'd asked a question that another student had failed to answer adequately—and so Mr. Kessler was calling on Merissa Carmichael, who could usually be relied on to supply correct answers.

Merissa's face pounded with blood. This was embarrassing!

Guiltily Merissa confessed. She could see that Adrian Kessler was trying not to be disappointed in her.

“I—I didn't hear the question, Mr. Kessler.”

(Was this happening more often lately? Since Merissa's fantastic week, since so much Good News had happened at almost the same time, she was aware of things not going so well: going
down
.)

(Her first rehearsal of
Pride and Prejudice
, for instance. Though Merissa had stayed up late several nights in a row to memorize the role of Elizabeth Bennet, she'd stumbled reading her dialogue, and at one point, after an embarrassed pause, Mr. Trocchi said, “Merissa! Elizabeth Bennet is one of the great witty females of English literature—she wouldn't put us to sleep, you know.”)

Mr. Kessler repeated the question, which was related to the homework assignment of the previous night—
What is the distinction between planets and dwarf planets? Give examples
. The question wasn't difficult, really, and Merissa gave a reasonable answer.

“Thank you, Merissa! That's exactly—almost exactly—perfect.”

Perfect!
Merissa was troubled to think that her teacher might be mocking her.

(But how would Mr. Kessler have known? “The Perfect One” was just a joke of Tink's—no one called Merissa that any longer; at least, not to her face.)

With adults, you never knew if they were speaking sincerely or sardonically. Adult men, especially.

But Mr. Kessler was speaking sincerely, it seemed. Merissa tried to concentrate.

“Until just recently, Pluto was a planet—the ninth planet—but in 2006 more powerful telescopes revealed that Pluto is just an object, nothing more than rock and ice, and very small—no more than one-fifth the size of our Earth's moon—like the state of Rhode Island, comparatively. So ‘dwarf planet' is the new classification.” Mr. Kessler paused. A sly look came into his face, you could see him preparing to
be funny
. “Like being dropped from varsity to JV status. Like being a
dork
when you thought you'd been a
jock
.”

The class laughed. Heartless, heedless.

As if, Merissa thought, most of them weren't
dwarf planets
.

Mr. Kessler persisted: “A
loser
, when you'd thought you were a
winner
. And you'd gotten away with it so long, you almost believed it yourself.”

More laughter. Even Merissa smiled.

Why is it so funny, being a
loser
? Is it a law of nature?

Is it—fate?

Like a death sentence?

Adrian Kessler was one of the younger teachers at Quaker Heights Day School. It was known that he had all but a PhD degree from Columbia University in ecological studies—plus a master's degree in education. You had to wonder if he thought of himself as a
winner
, in fact. Or was he a
loser
hoping to be mistaken for a
winner
?

He wasn't conventionally attractive—his face was narrow, his eyes set too close together. He was lanky and long-limbed and often restless, moving about the classroom as he taught. He liked to toss chalk into the air and catch it; he liked to scrawl on the blackboard in sudden swoops of inspiration. Like all male teachers at the school, he wore a dress shirt and tie, but with these Mr. Kessler was likely to wear a corduroy jacket, khakis, and running shoes. He oversaw his students' lab work closely and was usually patient—or patient-seeming. He had a way of turning criticism into a joke—usually. His hair was often disheveled from his habit of drawing his fingers through it in a gesture of comical exasperation.

Once, Mr. Kessler had surprised Merissa's class by saying, as he'd handed back a test in which many had performed poorly, “Because you're at Quaker Heights, you believe you are ‘entitled.' But don't be deceived.”

So Kessler could be hard-edged—when he chose.

Mr. Nice Guy, packing heat.

And he wasn't an easy grader, though he wanted you to like him.

Many of Merissa's classmates resented such remarks of Mr. Kessler's—which they didn't quite understand but knew to be judgmental. As they resented receiving grades lower than A-minus.

Secretly, Merissa thought that Mr. Kessler was absolutely right. Even those classmates whom she liked, in many cases, imagined themselves
entitled
—to get high grades, to get into the best colleges, to take their places in their parents' worlds, in upscale towns like Quaker Heights, New Jersey. They would work—to a degree. But they expected to be rewarded, and could be mean and spiteful when they were not.

The fact was that Quaker Heights Day School, though it had been founded in the late 1960s, in an era of idealism, as a place in which “high-quality education” was administered in “egalitarian surroundings,” was dominated by a hierarchical social structure that most teachers pretended to know nothing about, even as, in the classroom, they deferred to its rankings. For here was a social pyramid firmly in place, as in any suburban public school: popular kids at the top; misfits and losers at the base; in the middle the majority of the student population, anxious not to sink further, ever-hopeful of rising by a notch or two.

Merissa and her friends—the girls of Tink, Inc.—were somewhere near the top. While Tink had been their friend, and Tink had had an outsider reputation—famous (in another lifetime, as a child actress) even as she was controversial (that's to say, Tink had numerous detractors)—Merissa and the others had been envied for their nearness to Tink; now that Tink had departed, some residue of her reputation lingered, like a slow-fading ghost.

And now that Merissa was going to a “top Ivy” school, her status remained high.

And she was good-looking: pale blond hair worn straight past her shoulders, delicate features, large gray-blue eyes, and—when she could force herself—a “sweet” smile.

Merissa
looked
like perfection. She
looked
as if she must be very, very happy.

She'd been told there were guys who were afraid to approach her. Without knowing what she did, Merissa sent a disdainful signal that seemed to say,
Don't come near. If you like me, I can't possibly like you.

Still, Merissa Carmichael was what you'd call a “top” senior.

Though how easy it would be to sink—as it would be easy to sink in quicksand.
Just let go.

How had Tink
let go
? The rumor was, she'd drunk half a bottle of her mother's most expensive French wine, taken an overdose of her mother's barbiturates, and just gone to bed, in her usual grungy black leggings, her long-sleeved
GUERRILLA GIRL
T-shirt, barefoot and her freckled face scrubbed clean, her teeth freshly brushed and flossed.

Tink had a thing about
flossing
. Tink cheerfully described herself as OCD—(obsessive-compulsive disorder)—in minor, weird ways.

Tink must have known about
cutting
. For she had had several little tattoos on her shoulders and upper arms, and you could say that
cutting
was a form of self-tattooing.

Tink, I miss you so!

Why did you leave us, Tink?

We loved you. Why wasn't that enough?

“Hey. Merissa?”

It was Shelby Freedman, who sat just behind Merissa. Poking Merissa's shoulder, as if to wake her—but she hadn't been asleep, had she?

Shelby was an old friend from middle school. Never a close friend, but Merissa liked Shelby, and would have liked to be a closer friend—except there wasn't room for Shelby in Merissa's life.

She was not a girl in Tink, Inc.

(Did Shelby know this? If she did, she didn't seem to hold it against Merissa.)

“You okay, Merissa? What're you doing?”

What had Merissa been doing? In the midst of Mr. Kessler's science class—trying to talk to Tink?

Trying to hear Tink's faint, teasing voice?

Sure I love you, M'ris.

But first, love yourself.

Shelby had nudged Merissa, alarmed at what Merissa was doing: She'd seized a strand of her hair between her fingers, at the back of her head, and was tugging at it, without seeming to know what she was doing, as if she'd have liked to tear it from her scalp.

“M'riss? Doesn't that hurt, for God's sake?”

Merissa, embarrassed, relaxed her fingers.

Now her scalp hurt—hurt like hell—but a moment before, she hadn't seemed to feel a thing.

11.

“MAKING THINGS RIGHT”

Kiss and make well. Kissie-kiss!

Which was what Daddy had said. The last time Daddy had really taken notice of his daughter.

Because she'd fallen and struck her head. Because her “perfect” face had been injured, and Daddy had been shocked and concerned.

Exactly the way the owner of a beautiful Thoroughbred filly would feel if she'd fallen and injured herself on the track.

Each night in the secrecy of her room before she went to bed—at about eleven p.m.—Merissa took up the little nail scissors and drew the sharp points along her skin, which was sensitive and seemed to come alive at the touch of the scissors' tips, alive with a kind of anticipatory excitement.

The cuts were made carefully—not deep, but shallow—like handwriting in her flesh. She admired her handiwork. Took pictures on her cell phone.

On her computer, the pictures shimmered with a fantastical sort of beauty.

No one to send them to except Tink.

Tink, I want to be with you. Tink, please give a sign.

But there was just silence from Tink now. For quite a while now—silence.

Tink! Help me.

There is no one but you to help me.

Quickly then Merissa soaked up the blood in tissues, to be flushed down the toilet; she covered the secret wounds with Band-Aids so that her pajamas wouldn't get stained.

Sometimes, in the night, one of the cuts would begin to throb with a stinging pain, and Merissa would scratch at it and pull off the Band-Aid—“Oh! Damn.” She had a dread of bloodstains on her sheets, which her mother might notice.

Soon she'd exchanged the little scissors for a small but razor-sharp paring knife from the kitchen. This was a stainless-steel knife with a chic wooden handle, one of a dozen matched knives, clearly expensive.

Essential to cut carefully, like a kind of kiss. As if a creature with a rough mouth but sharp teeth were kissing her.
Kiss and make well. Kiss-kiss.

She was tattooing a secret language in her flesh. An elaborate pattern of cuts on her small, hard, waxen-pale breasts, midriff, stomach, lower belly where fuzzy hairs were sprouting. And on the soft insides of her thighs.

A complicated code, executed over a period of weeks.

“Oh!
Oh.
”

In the mirror, a dozen thin little curving cuts, some of which could be induced to bleed again, if Merissa scratched at them.

Such a strange—unexpected—sensation of relief. As soon as the blood appeared in tiny droplets, Merissa shivered, and smiled.

This is punishment. You deserve it.

This makes things right.

It was the first time in her life that something made sense, Merissa thought. And no one could tell her—she'd figured it out for herself.