xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: yeah?
simsimsimoaning: yeah right k?
Promethea387: Whatever. What are you talking about?
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: come on kyra!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!! brad lewis. from the summer
Promethea387: I don't know. I never pay attention to Brad Lewis.
simsimsimoaning: what?!?!?!?!?!
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: hes only teh HOTTEST junior @ sb!!!!
Promethea387: Why do you care if he's into you or not?
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: duh hottness ^^
Promethea387: So what?
simsimsimoaning: prometheas a VIRGIN
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: she can stil thik a guys hot
Promethea387: Get off my case.
simsimsimoaning: get it overwith
simsimsimoaning: its no boig deal
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: leav hera lone
simsimsimoaning: just havin fun
simsimsimoaning: i don't mean anything
simsimsimoaning: does promethea still love me?
simsimsimoaning: :-)
Promethea387: Yes, you dumb bitch.
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: lol
simsimsimoaning: i knew it :) :) :) :)
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: how can i make brad lik me?
Promethea387: LICK you?
simsimsimoaning: LOL!!!!!!!
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: LIKE me!
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: shit
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: help me out
simsimsimoaning: jecca needs to get her groove back lol
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: don't make fun - i really LIKE him
simsimsimoaning: u need new clothes
simsimsimoaning: god i know he cheks out shari cause she wears that designr slut shit
simsimsimoaning: fea rnot slutgoth is here!!!!!
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: is kyura stil on???
Promethea387: Yeah.
simsimsimoaning: shes no help w/this stuff
simsimsimoaning: hav u talked 2 him since last week?
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: no :( hes ignoring me ALL MONTH!!!!
simsimsimoaning: we hafta chang that!
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: ill do whatev u say sim
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: so hell like me AND lick me lol
simsimsimoaning: thats my girl :)
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: don't want 2 go another month
Promethea387: I have to go.
Promethea387: Jolly Roger is knocking.
simsimsimoaning: avast!
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: walk the plank
Promethea387: See you tomorrow.
Twenty-nine
I LOG OFF TO THE SOUND of Roger pounding on the door.
"Now, Kyra! Or I knock it down."
I think about letting him do that. That would be cool, actually, just to see if he could. Would it be like in the movies? Would the door go flying into pieces, Roger coming through it like some monster or something? or would it just drop off the hinges and fall in one big slab to the floor?
But he won't knock it down. He'll just go get a screwdriver and pop the lock. And that's boring.
So I unlock the door and throw myself on my bed as he comes in.
"We need to talk." He's got Pissed Off going, but he's moving into sad, Tired.
Whenever Roger says "We need to talk," what he really means is that he needs to talk and I'm supposed to listen. Ideally, I'm supposed to pay attention and something he says is supposed to magically make me all better (as if there's something wrong with me) and I turn into this ideal, perfect daughter.
But he keeps saying the same thing every time. And it's never worked before, so what the hell does he expect?
When I was in the hospital—when I was DCHH—Dr. Kennedy said to me, "Do you know the definition of insanity, Kyra? It's doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time."
By that definition, Roger is a total effing lunatic.
"Why did you do this?" he asks, his voice very, very hoarse.
"You always bitch that I only wear black, and now I'm—"
"Not that. Not that." His face is all tight and angry and hurt. "That." He points to my naked dome. "Your hair."
"What the hell do you care? You hated the black dye and the spikes anyway."
"You look..." He sinks into my desk chair and puts his face in his hands and takes a deep breath. I think if I push it just a little bit more, he might actually start crying.
"Jesus, Kyra! Why are you doing this? Why?"
I've never made my dad cry before. I always figured it would feel pretty good to nail him like that, but now that I'm right there, I just feel cold instead. I start shivering. It's just gross and weird and wrong somehow to think of him sitting there bawling his eyes out like a little boy.
"You look like her." He looks up at me. "Christ, you look just. Like. Her."
And now I'm not shivering anymore because I'm totally paralyzed. Just frozen on the bed.
"After all the chemo. And the radiation? Jesus Christ..."
I close my eyes, which is a mistake, because when I do that, I can do more than remember—I can see. I see her. All skinny and smooth-headed.
"Why?" he whispers. "Why would you do that to me?"
I clench my jaw. I wasn't doing anything to him. I was doing something for me. I wasn't even thinking about Mom.
"Why are you punishing me, Kyra? Why? I just want to help you. I just want you to let me in. I just want—"
"Oh, yeah, Roger? Well I don't effing care what you want! I hate you and I want you out of my life forever!"
He jerks like I punched him and he goes instantly to Pissed Off, rising from the chair.
"You think I don't know that? Do you think I don't know that, Kyra? Huh? I would bring her back in a second, in less than a second, if I could. But I can't. I can't! so I'm what you're stuck with, OK? I'm sorry you got such a shitty deal, but that's how it is. That's how it is!"
Before I can say anything, he storms out of my room, slamming the door so hard that the whole room vibrates and my mirror falls off the door and the Sandman posters on the wall slip.
Wow.
OK, wow.
The Last Time I Saw Her
the room the room the room is rosevomit because
roger left roses and
mom threw up before i came in
perfect timing
("Honey?" she said
In that clouded, confused way.)
cancer had eaten a path to her brain
yum-yum cancer loves brains
like zombies
eat her memory
she has trouble remembering me
remembering the year
(When I was eight years old, I
Had the stomach flu
And threw up in the kitchen
And then in the hallway
And then twice in the bathroom
—Only hitting the sink once)
i should understand
but I can't
fluvomit does not equal rosevomit
dead already, to me
dead and gone
seventeen months of slow death
of hospitals and
hospices and
doctors and
radiation and chemotherapy (latin for "poison")
("Honey, come close and let me see you.")
smell of death above the rosevomit
twelve and i had never smelled death before—
—but i knew
(I knew)
I know
this is what death smells like
Thirty
SO NOW I'M, LIKE, SERIOUSLY messed up.
I mean, I can't think. I can't focus. I just sit in my room for a while, staring at myself in the mirror.
Like her.
Yeah. I look like her. I really do.
I don't know how to feel about that. I don't know how to feel about...
Dear Neil,
OK, I have to admit it: I miss my mom.
My shrink says I hate my mom because she died, but that's stupid because I hated her before she died, too.
When I was a little girl, we got along great. I mean, we were like best friends.
And then ... I don't know. It all changed. She changed. Or maybe ... maybe it was me. That's all.
Or maybe it was both of us.
But, see, it's like everything went wrong when I stopped being a girl and started growing up—cramps, boobs, etc.
I got my first period the same week—the same day—that Mom got really sick.
It's like, she wasn't feeling well. And I wasn't feeling well. My stomach was all cramped up, like when you have really bad diarrhea, but it wasn't diarrhea and it wasn't in my stomach—it was lower. I didn't understand.
Mom had prepared me. She sat me down one day when I was nine and she told me all about The Vagina and The Penis and The Uterus and Your Period. She warned me that it would hurt—"like a tummyache," she said.
But this wasn't a tummyache. This was ... something clenching its fist inside me, over and over again. This couldn't be what she was talking about, right? It was too bad. It was too much. There was just no way—no way in hell—that I could tolerate this every month until I was an old lady.
She wasn't feeling well and I wasn't feeling well and I was eleven, so of course I went to her and said "I don't feel well" and she just blew me off—my own mother!—so I was on my own, curled up on my bed in a fetal position for hours at a time.
I had tried to be tough because Mom was coughing all the time and losing weight and didn't know why.
And then on that day, everything happened.
I was watching TV, curled up on the sofa, and it was like I suddenly thought, Oh, God! I just peed in my pants!
But that wasn't it. I went to the bathroom and closed the door and bang, there you go.
And here's the thing—the pain was so bad that I couldn't imagine that this is what Mom had been talking about when she told me about getting my period. A tummyache, she had said! A tummyache! This was no tummyache. There was something massively wrong with me. I thought I was bleeding to death.
Simone had already had her first period a couple of months earlier. So had a couple of other girls we knew. And it was nothing like this, according to them. It wasn't anything like this at all.
I screamed, "Mom!" Sitting there on the toilet, panicking. Screamed it again. And again.
Nothing.
I padded my underwear with toilet paper and went out into the house looking for her. I didn't even bother putting my pants back on—I just went out there with my underwear on, now all bulky and lumpy with toilet paper.
I found her in her own bathroom, leaning over the sink. "Mom! Didn't you hear me? God, Mom, I'm—"
She looked over at me. Her face was gray. It was actually gray. Mom had this dirty blond hair and it was tied back in a ponytail and her eyebrows practically glowed against that gray skin.
"Kyra." Her voice was weak. "Not now."
"Mom, I'm bleeding. And my stomach feels like—"
She swallowed. I remember that part—it was like it took forever for her throat to make the motion. Like she had sharp rocks caught in there.
"Not now. OK? Put a Band-Aid on it."
A Band-Aid? "But, Mom!"
Then she seemed to realize what I was talking about. I guess she noticed the state of my underwear.
"Oh, for God's sake..." And then she started to cough. Really hard. The kind of cough I'd been getting used to hearing for a little while now. A bad chest cold, she'd been saying. The flu, she'd been saying.
"Mom! I'm—"
"Jesus!" She rasped it out, strings of saliva webbing between her lips. "It's just your period, Kyra. Every other woman on the planet has had to deal with it, OK? Use the pads like I showed you and get some Advil and lie down, OK?"
"But—"
And she coughed again.
Only this time it was different.
This time, blood came out.
I don't know why I'm telling you all this, Neil. Maybe because in your comics, you do such a good job writing about women. It's like you get it, sort of. So maybe you understand. Maybe you can understand how it all went to hell that day. Next thing you know, I've got these gigantic boobs and I'm suddenly having trouble in school and I'm tired all the time and pissed off and once a month I feel like someone has dropped a load of concrete in my Fallopian tubes.
And oh, yeah—my mom is dying, too.
Then that part ended and the pain got manageable all of a sudden.
But on that day, there we were, the Sellers women, in the bathroom together, both of us bleeding and not understanding why.
Thirty-one
I LIE ON MY BED FOR A while, trying not to think about it, about her, about anything.
I try to think about anything other than my effed-up family and my effed-up life, and that makes me think of Fanboy. God, I've been so freaking worked up about shaving my head and pissing off Roger that I totally forgot about Fanboy.
I go to turn off my computer after writing the letter to Neil and there's an IM from Jecca waiting for me:
xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx: kyra u there?????
I sit with my fingers over the keyboard and I think about kissing her and I think about Brad and I think Effher and I turn off the computer.
Back to the mirror. You in there, Despair? You don't have your hook in me yet. See, I figured out how to avoid you a while ago. It's pretty easy, actually. I didn't tell Dr. Kennedy, but I learned how to get around you.
It's all about anger, see?
When you're angry, you can't despair.
Hell, you don't even feel like killing yourself when you're angry. Because there's so much to do to people when you're angry.
Like I'm angry at Jecca. And I hardly know why because it's not like we're in love or anything and it's not like I'm a lesbian or anything, but why does she have to talk about Brad to me? So she's in love with some guy. Or in lust. So what? Don't rub it in my face. It's like she has this convenient amnesia or something. And I can't figure out what any of it means, mainly because she won't even talk to me about it. Like, this one time? This one time we had been making out and I said to her, "Why are you doing this with me?" and she was all like "Shut up" and tried to stick her tongue down my throat again and I didn't let her but then I did.
Anyway.
I don't want to think of that.
So I won't.
That's my ability: I can totally make myself not think about things.
I think about Fanboy instead. I forgot about him for a little while today because I was so caught up in other stuff, but I'm ten times as pissed at him as I am at anyone else. Even Roger. Why? Oh, so many reasons!
The Many Sins of Fanboy
He reads really shitty comic books about superjerks.
He kissed Dina Jurgens.
He saw me cry.
I was in the hospital for six effing months and how many e-mails or phone calls or letters or IMs or texts did I get from him? None, none, none, none, and none.
He based his main character on Dina Jurgens. (I don't care that he went back and changed it—I know the truth.)
He's got this great graphic novel, but he's publishing it in Literary Paws.
He kissed Dina Jurgens ... and then told me about it.
He thinks I don't know how to kill myself.