Girl in Pieces

In the cafeteria, it’s Isis who speaks first, her little mouth opening, macaroni and cheese sliding back onto her plate. “Holy fucking Christ, Chuck, check you out.”

Blue begins to laugh, a deep, infectious sound that startles Francie, who sits next to her and never eats. Francie smiles, too. Blue says, “I hate you, Silent Sue, but you look a shit-ton better. Almost human.”

Even Vinnie whistled as he ran the electric shaver across my scalp, my hair falling in heavy clumps to the floor. “A face! The girl has a face,” he said.

I peered at myself in the Care room mirror, a real mirror, a long one on the back of the door. I kept my eyes above my shoulders, just looking at my face, but not for too long, because I started to feel sad again, seeing me.

The girls get quiet as I start eating. You wouldn’t think it would feel strange to show your scars to a group of girls who are nothing but scars, but it is. I keep my eyes on my plate.

I’m going to rifle the lost and found for a long-sleeved shirt after dinner. I feel exposed and cold. I miss my ratty mustard-yellow cardigan that I used to wear before I left home. It kept me hidden and safe. I miss all my clothes. Not my street clothes, but my long-ago clothes, my band T-shirts and checkered pants and wool caps.

Isis swallows. “Christ, Chuck, what’d you use? You really went to fuckin’ town.”

Isis has a terrier’s thin, nervous face. She twists the shaggy loops of her braids through her fingers. The others wait. From the end of the table, Louisa gives me a faint smile.

I loved the breaking of the mason jar. You had to strike it hard, because it was thick. Unlike other glass, mason jars broke in hunks of curved, gleaming sharpness. They left wide, deep cuts. The thick pieces of glass were easily washable, savable, slipped into the velvet pouch and hidden in my tender kit for the next time.

Thinking about it fills me with anticipatory shivers, like how I felt in the Care room, which is unacceptable, Casper says, a trigger, and I can see some of the others now, like pale Sasha with her sea-blue eyes, beginning to frown. Blue and Jen S. wait, faces blank, sporks in the air.

I think I want to tell them, I think I want to talk. I feel a humming in my chest and I think I might have some words, maybe, though I’m not sure how to order them, or what they would mean, but I open my mouth—

From down the table, Louisa speaks. Her voice is throaty and lush; the band she sang for was called Loveless.

“Glass.” Louisa gathers her dinner things. She is a peckish eater; just a little bit of this and that, and she never stays for long. “She used glass. Breakfast of desperate champions.” She shrugs at us, wafting to the trash can with her cardboard cup and plastic plate and spork.

The air around the table stiffens at first, as each girl thinks, and remembers her favorite implements. And then the air loosens.

Isis resumes eating. “Hard-core, Chuck.”

I fix my eyes on my glistening mound of macaroni, the single row of green beans, the brownish pool of applesauce.

“It’s not Chuck, Isis. It’s Charlie. Charlie Davis.” My voice isn’t hoarse now. It’s clear as a bell.

Jen S. says, “Whoa. Somebody’s got a voice.”

Blue nods, gazing at me. “Things,” she says, sipping her coffee thoughtfully, “are about to get interesting around here.”