You were just a boy with the keys to a Cadillac then, your breath tasted like an ashtray and I thought it made me infinitely cooler to have kissed you. Your shoes were black and the laces had anarchy symbols printed in a rather orderly line. I didn’t mention this to you because they looked pretty rebellious, and I liked that. You wore bracelets and chains and you were a drug addict, even then. You’re worse now, I think, but the track marks were obvious on your arms at the age of seventeen and that’s why you wore long sleeve shirts under our Catholic school uniforms.
Everyday after the bell rang, you’d smile and ask me if I wanted to go down the block until we were the required fifty yards from campus. I always said yes because that was the thing to do, and you lit my cigarettes for me because I didn’t know how to. I didn’t even know how to smoke them properly but the menthol ones made my mouth tingly and I guessed that was a good thing. I think I was probably sort of pretty then, with plastic barrettes in my wavy gold hair and safety pins through my ears. I didn’t think so, not really, but looking back, anything’s better then where I am now. My arms were covered in scars then, some open and some closed and some faded, but they were mine. These were somewhat obscured near the wrist with about fifty plastic ringlets of varying colors. I hated taking them off at night, so I’d wear them all the time, even during the shower, but after that they’d irritate my skin and I’d just have to ignore it.
I was taking a lot of pills then. Every Wednesday I went to the psychiatrist down the road and she gave me prescriptions which she called “scripts” and I would just agree to it all. My dad came in and would read magazines in the waiting room in the beginning, but later he started staying in his truck with his wireless internet and laptop computer. I was taking Topomax for mood stabilization and Wellbutrin XL because I was depressed. I didn’t understand the point of trying to treat the bipolar disordered with drugs meant to both calm my mood swings and induce them, but I didn’t care. They made me skinny. Everyday I ate less and everyday I watched the numbers drop on the scale. My pants were so baggy and I was in love with the feeling. I lost thirty pounds and then forty, really, and that’s where it all started.
I used to carry a compact mirror in my purse so that I could look at myself and see how terrible I was breaking out, how bad my eyebrows were growing in, and how frizzy my hair was. Anyway, you, the Cadillac bad boy, you broke my compact mirror one day. We were sitting on a balcony at a rich person’s mall at night and the concrete was cold on my ass through my skirt. You took it from me and you smashed the mirror, and I laughed a little, and you took the pieces of glass and pushed them into your skin. You dug them across and I just looked at you and told you that you were a wimp, there wasn’t even a mark. You looked me in the eye and said, “Just wait.” Thirty seconds later there were rivulets of blood running down your arms and I, I was impressed.
Your girlfriend or something like that was there, and I don’t think she ever liked me, but it wasn’t as if I’d kissed you then. No, I kissed you a lot later, and I listened to her talk for hours about you. It wasn’t as if I loved you or even really liked you like that, no. I just wanted to feel something, so I kissed you in the parking lot next to your Cadillac, and you put your arms around me, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you again.
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