Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

Adam and a bunch of his friends have been playing beer pong for what feels like hours. No one has asked Maddy if she wants a turn. She hasn’t asked to play. They’re in Adam’s dorm but in some other guy’s room. She wants to sit down, but there aren’t any chairs, and the floor is a puddle of spilled beer. She’s leaning against a wall, watching with feigned interest, drinking her sixth red Solo cup of Bud Light, fantasizing about cutting herself.

Adam sinks his shot. A pretty girl with cascading blonde hair and tight black leather pants that Maddy covets but would never have the guts to wear squeals, jumping up and down. She high-fives Adam and laughs. He looks over at Maddy, and she tosses him a big smile as if she’s happy for him, like this pretty girl is and a good girlfriend would be.

But behind her smile, it’s not Adam she sees. She’s back in her dorm, sitting on the toilet in her locked bathroom, clearing her bracelets, a swath of virgin skin revealed amid her veins and crisscrossed scarring, the steel point pressed into her flesh. She stopped using her nail scissors, preferring the razor-sharp, surgical precision of an X-Acto blade instead. She imagines the opening, the sweet flash of physical pain, the rush of relief, her only fresh air. Then the thick, cottony fog rolls in, and she’s enveloped, embalmed. Numb.

Once she starts thinking about cutting herself, she can think of little else until the deed is done. The heady desire, the anticipation, the obsessive longing for the next cut holds court in her consciousness, like being in love. She’s told no one about this, and the secrecy adds a sparkly embellishment to the act. It’s an illicit affair, a motorcycle-riding boyfriend her mother has forbidden her to see. And she hasn’t felt the touch of her lover in two whole days.

While she savors the deliciousness of her secret, there’s also that not-so-subtle, ugly aftertaste of shame. She knows cutting herself isn’t normal. The etchings on her arms aren’t badass tattoos. They’re self-inflicted mutilations. She must be some kind of monster for doing this to herself, for enjoying it. Her mother would freak out if she knew. Adam would break up with her.

To cover up the scarring, she’s added a half dozen more bracelets—some silver, some beaded, some woven—to her left arm, ten on her right. She wears long-sleeve shirts and has developed a habit of pulling at the cuffs with her fingers, stretching the fabric to her palms. But her shame is only strong enough to hide the evidence. Like the youngest child in a house of siblings, it doesn’t possess the status or authority to stop her from creating it.

Staying at Adam’s dorm for the weekend is challenging, as she doesn’t dare cut herself here. He shares a bathroom down the hall with five other guys, not enough privacy. When the numbness begins to fade before she can cut herself again, she drinks. And since drinking herself into a boozy stupor is a perfectly normal, socially acceptable means of self-annihilation, she can pound six beers right in front of Adam and his entire dorm without a raised eyebrow or hint of shame. No bracelets or locked bathroom doors needed.

She tells Adam she has to pee. She staggers down the hall, finds the bathroom, and darts into the first stall. The seat is down but splattered with piss. She hesitates for half a second. She’d like to back out and check the next stall, hopeful for better conditions, but her bladder is too bloated, the dam about to give way. She plops her bare ass down onto the disgusting seat, holds her head in her hands, and pees. If she were sober, she’d be squatting in chair pose, hovering her booty over the seat without touching it for fear of contracting whatever diseases might be lurking in those gross puddles of urine, but she’s too obliterated to care.

When she’s done, she wipes, flushes, and makes her way to the sink to wash her hands. There’s no soap. She wets her hands under cold water for a second. There are no paper towels. She wipes her hands on her jeans.

She looks in the mirror. The girl she sees has sunken, drunk eyes, greasy hair plastered to her big head, and a hollow face. The girl is joyless. Lifeless. She thinks back to summer, especially near the end, only a little over a month ago, when she was an energetic girl who rode her bike to and from work every day, so happy to be back together with her boyfriend. End-of-Summer Maddy had her shit together. Now look at her. Fall Maddy is a total mess. She’s like an overchewed piece of gum—what was once supple, enjoyable, and minty fresh is now hard and flavorless. She wants to spit herself out.

How could she be both of those people? Which is the real her? She examines the face she sees in the mirror.

Am I real?

She stumbles out of the bathroom. Adam is standing there, waiting for her.

“You okay?” asks Adam.

“Yeah.”

“You wanna get out of here?”

She nods.

Back in his room, as she lies on his twin bed, he takes off her clothes and gets on top of her. He’s inside her, and it doesn’t feel good or bad. It’s fine. It’ll be over soon. Never a marathoner to begin with, he comes a lot quicker since she got the arm bar and they stopped using condoms.

He starts pumping faster. She throws in some noise and heavy breathing, dramatizing what she’s supposed to feel. Having sex with Adam used to feel so good. They’d do it on the couch in the basement, her mother and Phil oblivious upstairs; standing in a bathroom at a friend’s house party; in the driver’s seat of Adam’s car; wherever and whenever they could. She wanted him all the time, desperate and insatiable. These days, the only thing she wants with that kind of passion is the sexy blade of her X-Acto knife.

He collapses on top of her, lies there for a minute or so, then rolls off.

“Did you come?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

Boys are so stupid.

“Listen, I can’t hang tomorrow. I have a big econ test on Monday and I have to study.”

“Okay.”

That reminds her. She has to write a paper for Political Theory that she hasn’t started yet due on Tuesday. She’ll work on that tomorrow. Maybe she’ll go to the library. But first, she’ll luxuriate in the privacy of her bathroom. Through the blurry haze of six beers, she imagines the penetration of steel into her skin, and her face blooms with joy for the briefest moment before she passes out.

It’s late afternoon, and Maddy is sitting at a desk on the ninth floor of the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, plodding her way through the jungle of reading she has to do before she can write her Political Theory paper. She’s been here for a couple of hours and has made discouragingly little progress. Her eyes are on the page, but her brain is still in bed. Procrastinating, she checks her phone. She has an email from the school sent last week that she hadn’t noticed.

Dear Ms. Banks,

This is an official letter from the office of Dean Williams to inform you that your current GPA in Political Theory has fallen below a 2.0, and you are no longer in good academic standing. As a student in the College of Arts and Science, you are required to make satisfactory progress toward graduation by earning a minimum grade of 70 percent in the courses in which you are enrolled.

You will be given the rest of first semester to improve your grade. If you fail to meet the terms of this academic probation, you will then be dismissed from the university. Please acknowledge that you’ve received this probation warning in the attached form.

Fuck . Participation counts for 25 percent of her grade in Political Theory. She’s missed at least four classes. Her professor deducts five points per absence. These rules are all spelled out in her class syllabus, but she was hoping that maybe he didn’t really mean it.

Her paper is worth 20 percent of her grade. She looks down at her book, at the page she just read but didn’t comprehend. She hasn’t written a word yet.

What does she need to get on this paper to bring her grade up above a 2.0? She opens the Calculator app on her phone and tries to do the math, but her feeble brain immediately quits, out of its league. If she doesn’t turn this paper in, she’ll get a zero and will definitely get kicked out of school. If she hands in this paper and doesn’t get an A, she’s probably also going to get kicked out of school.

Her mother will kill her.

Her thoughts run too fast, falling all over themselves, searching for an escape route. Her heart feels like a fish out of water, thrashing on dry land, gasping for survival. She’s totally fucked. There’s no way out of this.

Unless she was dead.

She turns to look at the aluminum barrier sealing off the balcony next to her. If this were only a few years ago, she could jump the balcony and fall ninety feet to her death in the atrium. But three other NYU students beat her to the punch, and the school responded by commissioning an architect to enclose the balconies and staircases. To the architect’s credit, his suicide-prevention creation is a work of art. The barriers look like gauzy, sunlit curtains of golden lace.

She wonders how many hundreds of thousands of dollars the school spent on its design and installation. She also wonders if the school realizes that in constructing this admittedly pretty solution to suicide in the library, they did nothing to prevent their students from trying to kill themselves elsewhere. But hey, at least they won’t die here in the atrium.

She thinks. Since the university has taken great pains to prevent her from jumping off the balcony, she could instead throw herself down a flight of stairs. She’d probably break her neck but survive, alive but permanently handicapped, a quadriplegic.

How did it happen? strangers would ask in pity.

Did it to herself .

Oh , they’d respond in disgust.

She could press down harder with her X-Acto blade, diving deeper into the sea of her flesh, slicing across the blue vein that snakes near the surface by the crease of her wrist, that vital tributary she has until now intentionally avoided. This option appeals to her, in part because it is familiar. This is not the first time she’s flirted with the idea.

How else could she do it? As if tasked with pulling up all recently opened files containing the word death , her brain lands on the unexpected destination of her roommate’s dog, Popcorn. Manoush’s beloved Maltese died last month. Distraught, she went home to New Jersey for a couple of days. When she first returned, still weepy and distracted with grief, she didn’t get up and go to the library in the mornings. She fell behind and found herself totally unprepared for an upcoming chem exam. Instead of bombing it, she called the Student Health Center and was given a written excuse that allowed her to take the test the following week. She got an A.

Perfect. That’s what she’ll do, but she won’t use Manoush’s example. Maddy’s goldendoodle, Daisy, is ten years old, and she doesn’t want to stick her tongue out at karma like that. Without offering any specifics, she’ll tell Student Health that she’s been really stressed and overwhelmed, and she’ll beg for an extension on the paper. Maybe she could even get some of her absences excused. She’ll cry if she has to.

She just needs a little more time. A week. She’ll buckle down, do the reading, write the paper, get an A, and not get kicked out of school.

She races to pack up her things and leaves the library. Out on the sidewalk, she finds the Student Health Center hotline on her phone. Her fingers shake and tingle, flooded with too much adrenaline. Breathing hard, a thin thread of hope holding all her shit together, she calls the number.