Sax (short for Saxon)

Sax, short for Saxon, is an older OG, in her twenties.  Sax writes these short blurbs about things she’s noticed or seen or felt…

Sax:  He had a six tattooed in plain blue ink on his wrist.  If we hadn’t been naked together and oh so close, I wouldn’t have seen it.  When I asked him what it meant, he told me that his best friend Selena gave him that tattoo because he’d broken six women’s hearts.  But what was really important was that Selena was dead now, murdered by a jealous boyfriend, and the number six on his wrist was all he had left of her.

Miranda

Miranda is in her early twenties, newly married to an abusive husband.  This is an excerpt from a short story I wrote called, Love is a Battlefield.

“Don’t be disgusting,” Patrick said, pinching the cigarette I’d just lit between his two fingers and taking it from me, pressing it out in the ashtray I was holding.  Patrick hated cigarette smoke.

“I was just... I mean...” Shutting up because he wouldn’t hear me anyway... I watched him do a bong hit.  The insides of the bong were brown with accumulated resin, and as Pat sucked, the water bubbled thickly, making me think of sucking up phlegm.  The image, the sound, made my already pained and empty stomach clench.  

Why couldn’t I smoke in the living room just this once?  All I wanted was to relax after unpacking for two days.  My fingers stung with tiny paper cuts from boxes on boxes and my thighs and back screaming from bending and lifting and straightening and... Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried to breathe, not to freak out.  This was our first week in San Francisco.  We’d just spent six long days in a truck together.  We were trying to start fresh, renew our relationship, make it all okay again.  It had so been falling apart, what happened?  I remembered loving Patrick so much in college, going into his closet when he’d left for class and pulling his favorite sweater around my face, breathing him in.  I remembered brushing my teeth after having a cigarette so he wouldn’t have to smell it on me.  I remembered the first time I said, “I think I love you,” and he said, “Me too,” before passing out on my lap.  

I remembered holding my breath and not crying while he screwed me against a wall in a deserted corner outside of the Cloisters in New York, because he said he loved me and if I loved him I’d do it even though I didn’t want to and I was so ashamed because anyone could’ve come by and anyway I really didn’t want to.  

We were married now.  Three days already.  Pat had wanted to stop in Reno and play blackjack.  I got drunk.  He hugged me close and said, “Let’s go, let’s do it babe,” and off we went to Cupid’s Chapel of Love.  Ninety-five dollar wedding.  My eyes bleary, no makeup, hair gnarled and roots showing through the bleached blond, wearing a fatigue tee shirt with black sequined neckline and longish gauzy skirt Patrick hated, called fugly.  Now it was on our wall for anyone to see, forever, fugly me, our wedding picture, with Patrick next to me grinning and light reflecting off his big forehead, receding hairline at twenty-three.  

The wedding picture was one of only three things hanging in our new apartment, new city, new life so far -- there was also the dartboard, and another wedding picture, Patrick’s little treasure, which I hadn’t remembered him taking.  The one where I was naked, positioned spread-eagled on the hotel bed, eyes hooded, mostly shut, hardly conscious... our honeymoon.  Had he fucked me, or only taken a picture to hang over our new bed in our new home, new life?

“I need a cigarette.  I’ll be in my studio,” I said, opening my eyes, trying not to feel the constriction in my chest or the throbbing behind my eyes or the edginess of my heart beating a little too fast, and fear creeping behind me like a shadow of a tiger falling over me and the faint sound of toothy breath so near all the time, it seemed, waiting to pounce.  I kept my eyes straight forward, afraid to look behind me.

Stephanie

Stephanie is a young writer-to-be with a domineering mother and a hurting heart.

Stephanie:

I feel … ick.  Icky.  Blah.  Motionless.  Immobile.

Depressed.

Because of Christmas coming up?

Because I’m done shopping, and now it’s just a waiting time, and I hate to wait?

Because I want – no, I expect – to write everyday, and today I just don’t want to

Don’t want to don’t want to don’t want to

Do

Maybe by feeling this way, I’ll learn something about myself, or about other people,

Maybe I’ll grow in my understanding of why my mother comes home and yells because my sneakers are not lined up by the door, one is askew and the other is touching the wall and sneakers are supposed to be lined up with their toes one inch from the wall and why don’t I do anything right?

Cassie

Cassie is my youngest outsider girl, just seven and three-quarters years old.  She is to be the main character in a picture book I’m working on called, “I Like Her That Way”

Cassie: Sometimes Mommy is very busy writing all day, and she doesn’t have time to get dressed, she just stays in her sweats all day, dressing it up with a sequined scarf when she comes to pick me up from school.   She hasn’t even bothered to twist her dreads, she just has them pushed back with a headband, and they’re all sticking out this way and that way, and I like her that way.

Eva

Eva is thirteen, stuck between being a little girl and a teenager.  It feels like her mother doesn’t care about her anymore…

Eva:  “You’re the worst mother ever!”  I shout, basically throwing myself up the stairs – I hit the wall with my body, bounce off, fling myself up another step, crash, thrump stomp stomp.

I want to throw my laptop against the wall, just to show her, but I can’t even throw it on the bed.  Aaagh!  I can’t believe she made me take my homework upstairs just because precious little John, her precious baby who’s not even a baby anymore, just because he’s using the computer downstairs, and my laptop lost its charge and now I’m putting it gently on my desk and plugging it in because even though I want to show my mother how little she means to me, I need my laptop. 

After it’s plugged in, I throw myself across the bed.  I stop crying, because she hasn’t come up the stairs after me, and she won’t hear me.  She doesn’t care.  She doesn’t care about me anymore. 

Before she had John, shit, even earlier this week…

I remember, sometimes she’d scream at me if I screamed at her.  I remember how much that scared me.

But this time she just calmly told me to go to my room now, and she didn’t yell, and she didn’t come after me.  It’s been like ten minutes, and she’s just downstairs watching TV with Daddy or playing a game on the computer with John, and she just left me up here.

I start doing my homework, but not on the floor, like she said, or my bed, where I could be comfortable, but standing up next to my desk.  My chair is covered with clothes I haven’t put away when she told me to. 

She used to put my clothes away for me.

She used to read me three stories a night.

She used to cry how sorry she was if I had a tantrum.

Now it’s like I don’t exist, it’s like…

“Eva!” she shouts up the stairs.

“What?” I say, and I don’t even sound mad, like, “what!”, instead, I sound relieved.

“When you’re done with your homework, come down, I want to read the Nutcracker to you and John.”

She always does this, she always tries to make me part of the family.  It’s like she doesn’t even acknowledge that I’m mad at her, and plus I’m thirteen and not a kid anymore…

“I’ll be right down!”  I say, and hurry up to finish my math homework.

I’m not saying she’s right.  But I feel a lot better, and I can’t wait to snuggle up next to her and anyway, she needs me to cuddle with her because she’s always cold, and she’s says I’m her heater, and I can go back to being mad later.  

Karen

Karen, 19, remembers when she was twelve, and she and best friend Rose weren’t really trying to hurt themselves… right?  Karen isn’t so sure about Rose’s intentions, even back then.

Karen: When we were twelve, Rose and I decided to become blood sisters.  Okay, it was Rose’s idea, and Rose’s razor blade, but I was willing.  I was usually willing to do what Rose wanted, at least back then, before we grew up, and things changed -- our needs changed, our desires intensified and morphed, and well… things were different then, they just were.

     We – or I, anyway -- had no idea the damage a new razor blade could do.  One swipe didn’t only elicit the few drops of blood we needed for our ceremony -- it opened a deep gash in my wrist, that flowed a red river and wouldn’t be stopped even when I clamped my hand over it.

     Of course, Rose wouldn’t let me bleed-out alone, and anyway the ritual was already begun, so she slashed her wrist as well, and we pressed the wide wounds -- gaping like mouths -- together, said a quick, “Sisters forever, ‘til death do us part,” and then ran home to my house before we bled out for real.

     My mother screamed when she saw us.  She dropped the roasting pan, and chicken fat that would’ve become gravy splattered the walls and floor and then all of us screamed, from the hot fat speckling our faces and arms.  I remember thinking, as my mother wrapped our wrists in towels and made us apply pressure -- thinking not that Rose and I were idiots for what we did, but rather that my mother was a crazy witch who should stop screaming at us, and my father wouldn’t have freaked out like that, but he was sure going to go nuts with worry when he came home and saw all the blood and chicken on the kitchen floor, and no one home.

     “We should wait for Dad,” I said.

     “Get in the car fools,” was all she said to that.  “You idiotic... what were you thinking?  Get in the car!  Was this one of those suicide pacts I’ve heard about?  What did I do to deserve this?  Get in the car now!”

     Soon, we were speeding down New Haven Avenue at about five times the speed limit.  My mother continued, “Haven’t I loved you enough?”  Then she was on her cell, trying to reach Rose’s mother, but we could’ve told her it was no use.  It was four o’clock, and Mrs. Ramos would be at Last Stop Bar by now, on her third Bay Breeze, chatting it up with some fat guy or fireman or carpenter or out-of-work Karate instructor or divorced biker or someone... it didn’t really matter, so long as they bought her drinks and later took her home for a quickie, or sometimes even longer -- sometimes they stayed for a week or a month -- and generally they didn’t bother Rose, but anyway...

     It was a big deal, our becoming blood sisters.  We got stitches but no lollipops, and had to talk to three different social workers.  No one got what we were trying to do, or that we didn’t mean to hurt ourselves.

     At least I didn’t.  As time went on, I wondered about Rose.  I wondered how much she was willing to do to try and get her mother’s attention.

Sonny

New Outsider Girl, Sonny, is only thirteen.  She’s beginning to get her teenaged personality, is beginning to get annoyed with her mother’s interference in her life, but… in some ways, she’s still a kid, and wants her mother to continue to take charge.

Sunny:  My mother makes schedules:

     Tells me “it’s 7:45, time to get dressed.” (seriously!), “it’s 5:00, time for homework”, “it’s 5:45, time to put on your karate uniform”, “it’s 6:15, time for dinner,” and worst of all, “It’s 10:00, time for bed,” like I can’t tell when I’m tired!  She says if I don’t go to bed by ten I’ll be a bitch in the morning and she has to work and she doesn’t have time to deal with that so “Lights out now Molly!”

My mother hates messes:

     Comes into my room to watch iCarly with me, looks around and grimaces and I have to say, “Why do you always do this, you always say you’re coming in to hang out with me and then you look around and think about how messy I am!”  She says, “I didn’t say anything,” which to be fair, is true, but I know what she’s thinking.  

My mother hates messes and makes schedules and it drives me crazy, but sometimes, it’s not so bad.  Sometimes I’m so glad she does these things for me:

     After Justin Hollister whispered in my ear, “Could you find out if Hannah likes me,” when I liked him, my mother stepped over mismatched shoes and scraps of fashion, around a giant stuffed dog, and squished between books and clothes and dolls to get to me, bawling on my bed, to hold me tight, and it was like she was never going to let go, and she cried with me, and she said, “What a mess we are.  It’ll be okay,” until it was.

My mother has probably scheduled when it’ll be time for me to grow up, but she’s not in a hurry for that.  Sometimes I think, I’m not either.