The Amazing Invisible Girl

It wasn't until the second grade that, that in coming out of the fog of unawareness most little kids reside in, you realized that you were different.
Not different as in you had three hands instead of two or wore a spacesuit when everybody else wore swim suits, but different.
Different as in you disappeared right in front of everybody without disappearing if you found something interesting to do, or think about – windows were the biggest cause of invisibility: if the teacher was talking about something boring, the window and what it showed, be it snow or some guy emptying a trash can, drew you out of yourself until she had to come up to your desk and call your name to get you to come back into sight, back into a room full of crayons and 1+2=3… and 20 other children all talking at once about things that didn't interest you.
It's all bullshit, anyway.
Disappearing got easier after you learned how to read, really read, as in books that you found laying around the house. Books without pictures, books about things like poetry, psychology, and trips to the moon. The books at school you tolerated, sometimes the pictures were interesting. Either way, books and later, music, blocked out the noise and motion of a room full of children the same way as concentrating on the worksheet in front of you did.

What I Wear is My Business!

Then there was the issue of clothes. If you wanted to wear your fake coonskin cap – something dad bought for you at Disney on a vacation to visit your aunt, so what?
And hair, and makeup, and glitter and… pink?
There's so many other colors to choose from – like purple, or cool, gray !
You'd rather wear a gown like Morticia Addams or maybe Wednesday –interesting clothes on interesting people, people who didn't rattle on about cartoon ponies and superheroes that weren't real.
And what was the big deal about wearing clothing that covered you up from head to toe? Wearing a skirt without leggings left you feeling naked and vulnerable with sleeveless shirts a rare and miserable experience – the feeling of looseness, of exposure was almost intolerable even in summer!
And if that's what you wanted to wear and not comb your hair 24-7 while fussing nonstop with that eyeliner and eyeshadow bullshit, why was it anybody's business but yours? Why did this make certain girls pour salt in your hair at lunch or certain boys come up and burp in your face and run away laughing?

Safety in the Tower

Still, it was good to go home where mom cooked and played the cello, and the three of you would watch stupid old monster movies with dad asking you what you thought about things, or reading, when you weren't off people watching by yourself at the Mall, the park, the bus stop – the aftermath of 3,000+ kids all talking at once in your head subsiding to a dull, background roar as you made up stories about the people who barely noticed the blank faced little girl and then teenager watching them as intently as Jane Goodall would a new chimp pull a twig off the ground and use it to harvest ants from a nearby anthill for its dinner- just like in the old National Geographic Magazines you'd sneak out of dad's office and read under the covers at night when the entire house was dark, quiet, and still.

Inside Out

Dolls were another relief. Your mom bought you your first one at an antique mall, a strange, exciting place piled high with the discarded detritus of other people's lives. She sat wide-eyed and porcelain-faced with arms extended towards you on a pile of shabby orange curtains nobody wanted.
Dad had stopped there because the bathrooms were clean and it was raining so the trip to the park got canceled on the way. You'd never been to such an amazingly unruly place that was both soothing and alarming all at once – having grown up in an orderly, antiseptic house with sterile modern art paintings and photos, the near-bedlam of this shadowy place excited you. This was where all the things nobody wanted or needed, landed- it told you this as you wandered fascinated up and down the narrow, cluttered aisles until a pair of unblinking dark brown eyes caught yours.
She was dusty, and shabby, but the shabby lace and faded silk of her dress fascinated you all the way home with her on your lap.
She looked out of place in the bright purple of your room, exactly the way you felt when out in the world.
So you got more, nagging your parents with the same firmness that got you that fake coonskin cap at Disney when you were six. Even broken bits the dealers gave you for free– you put them in jars, the little hands and feet, the wigless heads among the pictures of Dracula and Frankenstein somehow soothing; you were in among your own kind in the darkness that had always fascinated you and it was good, followed by a dollhouse, a Ferris wheel, books and other things, and sculptures that only held meaning for you.
Your eccentricities were tolerated, even encouraged: you were a brave, free spirit that didn't have to be like anybody else, and that was good.
Until mom got pregnant.

Expectations and Realities

Which was cool, a baby brother or sister would be fun, a doll, someone to talk to who didn't give you a blank look when you wanted to talk Sartre or Ibsen and not the latest hairstyles or boy band. And maybe the noise of a baby around the house wouldn't be a bad thing, it might be fun to put it in a black onesie and lug it around the mall and let people guess what gender it was, you know, messing with their heads or something.
This lasted until mom started bleeding - you and dad spent the night in the hospital, with him smoking one after the other in silence. This alarmed you almost as much as the blood – you'd never seen him smoke before.
He didn't stop smoking, standing in the front parking lot of the funeral parlor, smoking one after the other as the people filed past, people who would pause, saying shit like, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry." and "Call me if you need anything." in strange cut off voices, while mom stood alone inside a tacky bright room next to a tiny coffin that was closed, face blanker than yours.
So you took a cigarette from dad's pack. Wordlessly he lit it for you, and coughing, you stood beside him, inhaling unexpected peace in the falling snow.

Nicotine and Razor Blades

Later, as you walked through the now empty house, your parents like ghosts; all but walking through you and each other, you added razor blades to your new vice – nobody but you seemed to notice, especially the day you came home to see a cheap looking red-head little older than you, clutching a sheet around her talking to the cops as a paramedic stitched up your dad's arm and your mom cried into her new dog's fur in the upstairs bathroom.
You went through an entire pack and and six blades that night.
Nobody noticed.
Later you took the brown-eyed old doll off it's shelf and lay there in the dark, wrists plastered with Band-Aids, hugging it, a relic of a past that you thought you understood.

Somewhat Comfortably Numb

Anyway, pain and nicotine helped quiet the dull roar inside your head and your heart… (for a while.)
Until you moved; mom and dad telling you it was for everyone's good as the dog ran yapping in circles around the three of you as you argued.
They couldn't see that you didn't want to leave the irredeemably violated house. Despite that horrible afternoon, you were the princess and it was your tower in a world where you preferred books and invisibility to the bedlam called the outside world…

Into the Fire

…only to find yourself on the wrong coast, rattling around in a house that loomed over the neighborhood, an Addams Family relic, only cleaner, strange light, strange rooms, dark corners – nothing like your old, antiseptic tower…
…this house is like a maze, it changes when my back is turned…
At your old school, you were invisible as you studied the darkness within and without, but here where the sun never seemed to go down, you stood out, starting with nicotine, a brawl, and no adults in sight – just like home.
Out came the razor blades, with a side-order of smoke: relief is where relief is found, even when it's painful and bad for you.
That's when you looked into the mirror above the bloody sink and saw a pair of unblinking brown eyes staring at you.

Now you see me…

You turned, startled, angry, this was none of his damned business… he wasn't there, but…then… he… was?
… should have known something was wrong, I saw his reflection before I saw him, but I was too dazzled... too… hungry.
He was one of your dad's so-called patients, he wasn't supposed to be there, but he was beautiful, and he was looking straight at you.
He didn't bust me.
No…
…he "got" you – showing you his own mirrored scars. So what if he looked like one of the popular assholes who used to belch in your face, laughing back in grade school or later, trying to get a rise out of you by pretending to like you while his bros sniggered over by the drinking fountain, egging him on, because you were different?
He knew what it was like.
He has trouble with his tenses…
He didn't mind your filthy mouth.
His mouth is cold when we kiss…
He didn't care if you liked stuff nobody else liked – he "got" the lure of darkness, and of thin, blue steel.
His hands are cold…
In fact, he seemed to dig it – offering you light ups, free of judgment.
I've caught him not quite touching the left side of his chest…
He read, even if it sort of bothered you when he'd pick up one of your books at random, flop down on your bed like it was his and start reading, disappearing in front of you even as he stayed completely in sight the same way people complained about you doing.
("Violet, do you believe in ghosts?")
And you could never figure out where he came from…
He dances ever so slightly when I ask him about himself, his friends… does he have any?
…or where he went when he left.

Red Flags

Though he said he lived down the street – you never saw him on the sidewalk from the window of your new tower
That's bullshit, it's not like I watched for him!
You'd see him walk to a corner of the yard, by the hedge in back, where your yard met the weird lady who liked to bake's yard next door, the one with the stiff hair like out of some lame sitcom from the 1950s and an old face.
…I once looked for one when he wasn't around, so I could surprise him the way he did me, only I never found one…
Or how he got in… the house echoed, but you never heard a door open… he felt so good against you that it hurt, so you clung back… even after that horrible time in the basement with the rich bitch you brawled with at school that you'd lured down there to scare shitless at his behest… he understood you, he "got" you... always appearing when you needed him most, unlike mom and dad, lost in their own angry, pointless struggle, leaving you out in the cold, to walk the edge alone…
…I was so goddam hungry- I ate it all up all his bullshit, with him holding the spoon…
…brown-eyed girl doll high on a shelf, badly in need of a dusting – even after you did a little research on your own in the bright sunlit world after that weird night on the beach… where those creepy kids… did that even happen?
This is all bullshit, why does he feel so real beside me when we lie on the bed together?

She's Come Undone

You can't hide behind lies forever.
…I've survived other lies, right dad?
Even when the lies come from behind a beautiful mask – a mask that twists, turns, and dances in so many directions at once that the truth can't help but fall out, landing at your feet like a freshly-killed pig's heart on a slaughterhouse floor
You can't ignore the blood.
You can't ignore the twitching.
And in Tate's case, you can't ignore the bullet holes.
…I only saw what I wanted to see until I took too many pills after seeing too much before walking into the darkness with a monster to see the truth…
You, the invisible girl, still don't know if he was telling the truth when he showed you the truth, that he wanted to spare you…
("Hi, I'm Tate. I'm dead. Wanna hook up?")

The Devil, in the Flesh

…like he spared mom? Yeah, right!
He tried harder than ever to distract you, to keep you from seeing what was going on, the devil isn't a little dude in red underwear but has brown eyes and wears worn-out sneakers…
… for somebody who died no older than me that everybody hated, ummm, he's awfuly good at sex… what's going on here? (I'm so sorry mom, I'm so sorry, I didn't see it. I didn't want to see it… but you weren't anywhere I could reach you – I'm really some piece of slowly shriveling human jerky stinking up the space beneath the floorboards, remember?
…ending with your mother lying in her own blood in the living room, and that creepy old lady next door, Tate's mom, with her plastic hair and her useless medium with her press-on claws, scuttling off with your newborn little brother like some sort of evil witch (…of course she's a witch, look at what her son is!), and your other little brother- no telling where, with a ghost for an attending physician –Tate laying curled up like the aborted fetus he was on your bed overhead, aborted at 204 months by the cops in his own bedroom after taking out 15 people who barely knew him for a total of 3,264 barely started months abruptly ended– AND YOU SLEPT WITH HIM?
(Oh God, what have I done?)

The Devil, Cast Out

You confronted him with it, with it all. And he stood there stammering, trying to convince you he was innocent, that yeah, he did… all that, crying like he always does, BULLSHIT!
…like some little kid…
BULLSHIT!
…and that he loves you…
BULLSHIT!
…and that he needs you!
The Devil is a fallen Angel… Go away. Go Away! GO AWAY!
And then he's gone, and now it's your mother holding you, not him and the truth is harsh, the truth is barren, and the both of you are dead, and the both of you are trapped, but it's over.
It's over.
…I can never forgive you Tate… I can never forgive you… you are a monster… oh God, why does it hurt so much?