Care Package

I’d been at boarding school for a month when my mother sent me a boyfriend in a box. His name was All-American Alex, and he hailed from a novelty kiosk in the mall. Alex was ten inches tall and made of carcinogens, with silky brown hair that felt human and blue eyes that blinked when I tilted him. In the Alex box: a 4×6 glossy of a teen model who could have been in Tiger Beat, a handwritten love letter, and a stat sheet containing all the information one would know about their boyfriend if they had one. There was an instruction manual. I didn’t read it. I shoved Alex and his trappings into the storage bin under my bed and devoured my mother’s note on a loop until my eyes dripped with strain.

Ha Ha! – XOXO, Mom.

Her next gift arrived a week later: a pair of size-zero jeans and an index card.

For inspiration! – XOXO, Mom.

I couldn’t fit a calf into those pants, but there were girls on my hall who could. Their boyfriends didn’t come with instructions. I imagined their mothers sending varicolored macarons and long letters as I folded the jeans the way I’d seen them do it at The Gap. I placed the mother jeans in my bottom drawer and affixed Alex’s picture to my cinderblock wall with putty—next to my bed, for company.

The apex predator in my dorm was a girl called Tall Rachel, so as not to be confused with her best friends, Short Rachel and Jock Rachel. Since freshman orientation, I’d been watching the Rachels from a distance. They were always touching each other. Chainlinked arms. Cheek kisses. Fingers entwined or tangled in each other’s hair for braiding. Proprietary motions that say, “I am yours, and you are mine.” Every time I gazed at Alex, I wondered what it would feel like to be touched like that—to be claimed.

I was always starved for something. In lieu of fifth-period lunch, I’d check my mail, awaiting my mother’s next care package: a new piece of the vision board that would pressure me from lump of coal to diamond. My stomach growled each time I found my box empty. Everything smelled of snack bar in the student center. Upstairs, people would laugh at in-jokes and consume forbidden treasures: burgers and fries, nuggets and milkshakes, wings. When temptation struck, I’d flee the scene and, ensconced in my room with the door locked and bolted, I’d gnaw on the waistband of my mother jeans until hunger was a memory.

 

 

#

 

 

I was sitting cross-legged on my bed during study hours one evening, flipping through French vocab flash cards and waiting for a phone call I knew wouldn’t come, when the reek of the Rachels crept up the hallway. They traveled in a cloud of CK One and cigarettes that was always several steps ahead of them. It entered my room without knocking. Flanked by her counterparts, Tall Rachel’s eyes darted between me and the picture of Alex.

“Your brother’s really hot,” she said. “I’d fuck him.”

Teenage girls are feral creatures. It’s as if the onset of menstruation gives them a taste for blood. A predatory instinct develops: sniff out the weak, rip them to shreds, cull the herd. Some of them grow out of it. Some of them have daughters. I looked at my phone, willed it to ring, but in its silence: a metamorphosis. Something furtive. Something with teeth. I could do it now—live full on ice chips and raw almond slivers, stomach the emptiness—because I had a boyfriend: a Pisces from Milwaukee whose father was a patent attorney and whose dislikes included spinach and girls who smoke.

“Actually,” I said, “he’s my boyfriend.”

Short Rachel laughed manic, a Tickle Me Elmo after two Red Bulls. Jock Rachel looked through me. Tall Rachel arched an overplucked eyebrow and said, “He looks a little old for you.”

“He’s seventeen,” I said.

Short asked, “How’d you guys meet?”

The stat sheet did not include this information, but I was an accomplished liar. Anytime someone asked me, “How are you?” I’d always say, “I’m fine.”

“Tennis camp.”

Jock perked up. “You play tennis?”

“Not very well.”

“Well,” Jock said, looking more like a Horse Girl than a tennis pro, “if you ever want to practice, I’ve been playing since I was a kid.”

Short shot Jock a sly grin. “We all know how familiar you are with the tennis courts.”

I’d walked by the courts, heard the grunting and slurping in the dark. One time, I stopped and peered into the darkness, drawn to the debauchery unfolding like a nature documentary on pubescent mating rituals, but there were only shapes in the night. Now I was part of something. With one invitation from Jock, a new world took form. It was amazing, really, the difference having a boyfriend could make.

Tall’s impatience was showing. “So, you’re, like, really good at math, right?”

I was a whiz. “I’m ok.”

“Because this dumbass”—she tugged Short’s French braid—“is failing algebra, and she’s about to get kicked off the field hockey team. It’d be really cool of you to help her out.”

Short turned a shade of red I’d only seen in cartoons, but I’d always been a giver, so I said, “Sure. When did you want—”

A textbook materialized in Tall’s hands. She tossed it on my bed. “Chapter 6. Problems 1–20. You rock!”

The Rachels dissolved in a miasma of drugstore perfume, the lingering odor and math book the only evidence they’d been there at all. I started tout de suite. The problems were so basic I could have done them comatose, but now I was awake. The version of me who had qualms about breaking the honor code had alchemized in the Rachels’ proximity, and I was blessed with an arcane knowledge: tuition was high, but the price of desolation was higher. Expulsion was something that happened to untethered girls. I had a lifeline.

My mother would be pleased. She sent me away thinking her absence would shape me into something palatable. “It’ll be good for you,” she’d said. “A girl your age needs friends.” The friends from my middle-school Math Club did not meet her definition. The implication was clear: get skinny, befriend cool girls, date rich boys who expect blowjobs on tennis courts. My mother liked men with money. She always said, “A man should be able to take care of you.” I thought that was what mothers were for.

There was a man once. He didn’t have much, but he taught me how to make pasta from scratch. The red sauce, too. He called it gravy, but he was gone before we got to the meatballs. I couldn’t remember his name.

 

 

#

 

 

I’d been doing Short’s homework for two weeks when Alex appeared on my desk. He stood atop my copy of The Odyssey with plastic judgment in his eyes. My stomach cramped around my dinner of green apple slices. The wind outside my window whispered like spiteful girls, and the air grew pregnant with Marlboros. I scrambled to put Alex back in his hidey-hole. When I picked him up, only one eye blinked. He was forgotten as soon as I shut the lid on my Rubbermaid because selective blindness is a superpower. Perception is controlled hallucination. Tall knocked on the air in my open doorway, Short and Jock behind her.

“Meet us at Sal’s tomorrow morning,” they said.

They didn’t wait for an answer. The greasy spoon down by the train tracks was the most coveted invite around, but there were rules. You couldn’t just sashay on into Sal’s; you had to be vouched for. The Rachels had been deemed cool enough by whoever deems things cool. I closed the door to my room, sniffing at the air, trying to breathe them in and keep them there. A voice, deep and masculine, came from everywhere and nowhere.

“You’re worth more than the three of them put together.”

I turned my head to find Alex on my bookshelf, nestled between my boombox and a framed photograph of Lolly, my chocolate Labrador, who’d died the week after I left for school. I squeezed my eyes closed to banish Alex. “Please go away.”

He was undeterred. “Remember that time we went hiking and Lolly found the bird?”

A home-movie filmstrip played on the back of my eyelids: the two of us walking Lolly along a sun-dappled path, Lolly nearly pulling me off my feet as she raced toward the base of an elm tree, the little brown sparrow on the ground breathing heavily, its left wing bent at a cruel angle.

“I remember,” I said.

“You made me give you my t-shirt so you could wrap the bird up and take it to a vet. Do you think any of those girls would have done that?”

“What is it that you want?” I asked him.

“I want you to open your eyes.”

I did, and Alex was gone. My phone screamed a double ring signaling an off-campus call. I let it go to voicemail.

 

 

#

 

 

I made the trek to Sal’s alone in the darkness before dawn. Ani DiFranco in my Discman, hands in the pockets of my Patagonia, I contemplated my first cigarette. Everyone smoked at Sal’s. Would the Rachels expect me to partake? Was this some test—a trial by cancer stick to decide my intrinsic worth as a friend? My mother smoked while she was pregnant with me. I was born underweight. I wondered if she did it on purpose or if it was just a happy accident. She once told me, Virginia Slim between French-tipped fingers, that smoking was a filthy habit. In the next breath, she extolled its appetite-suppression benefits. Part of me thought she wouldn’t mind if I took it up. Alex wouldn’t like it, though. His stat sheet made that clear.

On the sidewalk outside Sal’s stood a five-foot-tall, animatronic coffee cup. Slender legs extended from the saucer. One of the arms pointed at the entrance. The other waved at would-be customers, either hello or goodbye. The jingle of the bell over the door announced me, and I was struck by a thundercloud of bacon, cigarettes, and burnt drip coffee. The place was small and swamp-hot from the griddle in the open kitchen. I spotted the Rachels in one of the booths lining the right-hand wall and hurried toward them, the stares of the upperclassmen on the counter stools ranging from curious to hostile as I passed. Jock greeted me with a mouthful of egg sandwich. Tall and Short had a breakfast of black coffee and Marlboro Lights spread in front of them. The ashtray overflowed at the center of the Formica table.

“Come,” Tall said. “Sit.”

She patted the red vinyl, and I complied like a well-trained dog. I slid in next to Tall and breathed through my nose, cilia bristling at the onslaught. I was no stranger to secondhand smoke, but this was a lot for even my seasoned lungs. No one offered me a cigarette. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended. Tall blew ring after ring of smoke until they formed a bullseye over our heads. “We have questions,” she said.

I tried to smile like I wasn’t about to lose bowel control. “Ask away.”

After the initial softballs—Where are you from? (Boston.) Any siblings? (Nope.) Dog person or a cat person? (Animal person.)—focus shifted to my boyfriend. I wasn’t surprised that their questions swung X-rated, but I wasn’t prepared. Physical intimacy was an as-yet-unexplored area for me. I’d thought I was normal for my age. Then I got to boarding school, and I was a girl-child among women. My mother always said girls who had sex in high school were shameful; she called them baby prostitutes. In reality, it was far more embarrassing to be a virgin. But maybe that was Alex’s gift to me: he could shepherd me through the landmines of adolescence without defilement. No grubby hands on my skin. Nothing poking or prodding me. Alex was smooth down there and had very clean hands. I made sure to wipe them down with his favorite flannel each time he visited in the night.

I wasn’t completely in the dark. I understood the mechanics of sex, but when Short asked me to describe my first time, I blanked. There was nothing on the stat sheet to guide me. I was lost in the woods with three half-starved wolves, hungry for the details of my lost virtue.

“Friends tell each other everything,” Short said.

This was the real test. Tall handed me the last Marlboro in her pack. I tried the lighter on the table, but it was dead, so I gave the cigarette back to her. Sal’s gruff voice boomed, “Sausage, egg, and cheese!” and my eyes jerked to the kitchen. Alex stood on the griddle, his high-top basketball sneakers melting into a noxious puddle beneath him.

“Go on. Tell them.” Tendrils of smoke drifted up and swirled around Alex like he was a shadow demon from the ninth circle of Hell. “Tell them what a good little slut you are for me.”

I snapped at him, cheeks blazing, “I’m not a slut.”

I only realized I’d said it out loud when Tall responded, “No one said you were.”

“Leave her alone,” Jock said. “She’s uncomfortable.”

“You’re losing them,” Alex said. He’d melted up to his crotch. “All you have to do is picture it, and it’s true.”

I was dizzy, so fucking hungry. My stomach roared as a bacon cloud tried to ooze through my pores and provide sustenance through osmosis. But when Alex winked, I could see it all in technicolor. I told the Rachels about the long summer weekend spent in Milwaukee. How Alex made careful love to me in his parents’ bed while they were at a breast cancer awareness fundraiser at the Harley-Davidson Museum. That we went to a diner afterward, and I ate a short stack of chocolate-chip pancakes with freshly whipped cream. Bacon crispy. Toast golden and buttered. Orange juice squeezed on demand. I told them how hard long-distance relationships are, that yearning is a chronic pain, how lonely it is to love someone out of reach.

“That’s so sad,” Jock said.

“Doesn’t seem worth it,” Short added.

Tall lit a cigarette and shrugged.

The thought of losing Alex was devastating. My eyes sought him out, but he was just a forehead now. No mouth to guide me. No eyes to see me. “We’ll make it work,” I said. “My mom always says that nothing worthwhile is easy.”

She’d plucked that gem from a fortune cookie and taped it to our fridge next to a picture of an obese woman eating ribs, pendulous breasts slathered in barbecue sauce, smiling. Silence hung heavier than the smoke in the air. Sal scraped Alex off the flat top and put him in the drip tray with the grease. The Rachels were still hungry, so I said, “I don’t feel whole without him.”

The truth was ash on my tongue.

Jock looked at her Swatch. “We’ve gotta start walking back.”

“I can’t be late for first period,” Short said. “I’ve got algebra with The Puppet.”

That was not her teacher’s name, so I asked her, “Why do you call him that?”

“Because he’s got a stick up his ass.”

The Rachels reached into their backpacks in unison and brought out three bottles of perfume. Tall pointed hers at my chest. “To cover up the ciggies,” she said, and doused me in it. That musky, citrusy, unisex nightmare smelled like belonging now. I’d been baptized. Cleansed.

 

 

#

 

 

I skipped lunch again. A bubblegum-pink package slip greeted me when I peeked inside my mailbox. The nice old lady at the window traded it for a box addressed in looping cursive. My mother had excellent penmanship, believed sloppy handwriting was uncouth. I carried the package to my room, holding it away from my body like it might contain a pipe bomb. Her latest offering: a Harvard sweatshirt, size small, and a note.

Eyes on the prize! – XOXO, Mom.

Eyes on the prize! – XOXO, Mom.

Eyes on the prize! – XOXO, Mom.

Eyes—

I couldn’t read it anymore. My mother believed the lie admissions officers force-fed prospective parents—that boarding school was a fast track to the Ivy League. My life was predetermined: get straight As, attend the most prestigious university in the country, become a brain doctor. She knew I was needle-phobic and grew faint at the sight of blood. She’d asked me once if I fainted every time I got my period. I did the first time, but acclimated as all girls do. It’s different when the gore is your own. I stripped down to my bra to squeeze into the sweatshirt. A struggle ensued, but I managed to cram my arms through the sleeves and pull the crimson cotton over my belly. I’d need to cut myself out of it, but getting it on felt like victory.

“You look like a blood sausage,” Alex said, hair tousled, lounging in my unmade bed. “And you need to eat something.”

I was so relieved to see him back in solid form. “I’ll eat dinner tonight. I promise.”

“A banana is not dinner. Let me take you out. We could go to that bistro in town.”

“I’d love to, but I’ve got too much homework.”

“Your own or someone else’s?”

When I turned to scowl at him, the bed was empty. I grabbed the scissors and sliced myself free. Short entered my room without knocking and laughed at my half-naked body. “Is that a training bra?”

“No,” I lied.

“Do you have the problems from Chapter 10?”

“Yeah, hold on.”

I opened my desk drawer. Blue eyes bored into me. “Tell her to fuck off.” 

I slammed the drawer shut and stumbled backward, clutching at a phantom pain in my chest.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

Short didn’t believe me and crossed the room with preternatural speed. I tried to grab her, but my hand was a petrified claw on my left breast, which was slightly bigger than my right: a reminder that I was a grotesquerie, malformed and destined for surgical augmentation. Short opened the drawer, and my mother’s voice boomed, “We have got to do something about that nose.”

I stared out my window at the turning leaves, waiting for the reveal of my secret shame. Short’s cackle ate the air in the room. “Oh. My. God.”

“Please,” I said.

I didn’t even know what I was begging for. A sheet of notebook paper appeared, held so close to my face it was blurry, but when I focused in on it, like one of those Magic Eye autostereograms, it snapped into focus. One equation was completed, but the rest of the page was filled with “I <3 Alex,” line after line in a hand not my own.

“You told me you finished,” Short said. “I need these for first period. The Puppet’s just waiting for a reason to fuck me over.” She crumpled the sheet of paper and tossed it over her shoulder; it hit my Lolly picture and knocked her down. “Did I tell you what he said the other day? I was, like, thirty seconds late, and The Puppet was all—”

I couldn’t hear anything but sparrow wings pummeling my chest cavity, beak hammering bone as it tried to peck its way to freedom through my sternum. My vision shimmered at its edges. My hands were a cadaverous blue. Short snapped her fingers in my face. “Are you even listening? God, you’re not sick, are you?”

Her face puckered like a bleached asshole at the thought of my pestilence, and she backed away. I sipped the air, waiting for heat to return to my body and assure me I was a living thing. I was about to tell Short I’d get right on the problems when my phone shrieked the double ring of an outsider. 

“Answer it,” she said. “Wouldn’t want you to miss out on phone sex with your boy toy.”

She made a lewd gesture with her fist, tongue, and cheek.

“I’ll call him back.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

She answered the phone. My mother’s voice was in the machine, tinny and miles away. Short pulled the receiver away from her ear. “Your mom sounds like a bitch.”

When I touched the cordless, I was alone again. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, Piglet! Are you making friends?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, so I said, “Yes.”

“Oh, I’m so glad! Anyway, Saturday afternoon. I figured you could show me around campus, and then I’ll take you to dinner.”

I don’t know how I’d forgotten Parents’ Weekend. It had seemed like something inevitable but distant, like marriage or a terminal illness.

“Dinner date with Mommy?” Alex was smoking a cigarette out my window, wearing a beret. “I thought she subsisted on virgin blood and rosé.”

I whisper-shouted, “Put that out! I’ll get Sunday detention.”

“Oh, now you follow the rules?”

Alex extinguished the cigarette on his forearm. The smell of burning synthetics made my eyes water. I cried out to him, “Stop! You’re hurting yourself!” but he blew a kiss-shaped smoke ring and jumped out my window.

“Piglet? Are you there?”

I sucked Alex’s burning adieu into my lungs, wishing he’d let me tend to his wound, then exhaled the vestige of him. “I’m here.”

“You should invite your new friends to dinner. I’d love to meet them.”

From the tower of the campus church that was now a non-denominational reflection space, a recording of a bell chimed six o’clock. My body hummed with it: some lizard-brain, self-preservation reflex warning me of unseen dangers. A starving saber-tooth in the dark outside my cave. Something humanoid crossing the uncanny valley.

“I want to go out just us.”

It took the words to recognize the need. I’d been so preoccupied with pouring myself into a mother-approved mold, I’d completely forgotten to miss her.

“I love you,” I said, but she was a dial tone.

 

 

#

 

 

Saturday morning poked through my blinds and found me alone in my bed. I hadn’t seen Alex since Wednesday. He’d shown up on my desk in biology class, right in the middle of a pop quiz. I’d been struggling to read the questions. Couldn’t keep a grip on my pen. Alex mistook this for unpreparedness and fed me wrong answers. True was false; false was true. He had no aptitude for natural science. Alex was a philosopher, a Camus devotee. For weeks, he’d been working on a translation of The Myth of Sisyphus, but kept it in his hiding spot. I’d begged him to share it with me, but he’d refused. “It’s not done yet, and your French is abysmal.”

“I’m still learning,” I’d said.

The distance between us was my fault. I’d been curt when I told him to leave my classroom; he’d just done what was asked of him. How could I fault him for obedience? The not-knowing of his absence was a hollow pit, but the wall clock told me my mother was en route. I tossed my covers off and reminded myself that it’s human nature for couples to fight on occasion. C’est la vie. I needed to focus. It would take all my concentration to properly showcase the new me. I was no longer the mewling thing ripped featherlight and jaundiced from my mother’s womb; I’d been forged anew. Mind clear, body slender. I had enviable friends and a boyfriend who loved me, even though we fought sometimes.

I slipped into the mother jeans and walked behind my dorm to meet her in the parking lot abutting the tennis courts. She glowed victorious when she saw me and spread her arms at a hug’s width. The sun turned her diamond studs to starlight. She smelled like Chanel and Virginia Slims, and I might have cried had I still been a lachrymose girl. My mother took me in: prominent cheekbones, jawline with new angles, a solitary chin. Her gaze panned down over the fashionable jut of my collarbones, the wafer-flat stomach, and the graceful concavity of my waist. I lifted my shirt and watched her count my ribs, searching for missing flesh. When she couldn’t find it, she blessed me with a smile. No words of praise were offered, but I’d learned to read her face before books.

It was safe. The Rachels were at the mall buying thongs at Victoria’s Secret. I knew if my mother set eyes on those girls, I’d be wallpaper. She’d be captivated by the animal magnetism they possessed, that je ne sais quoi, and like would call to like.

“Let me show you my room.”

As we entered my dorm, I heard music: the earworm “Barbie Girl” song that was everywhere that year. There was laughter underneath. Other sounds, too—things I’d only ever heard in the night. They got louder as we neared my door, which was cracked though I’d locked it. I told my mother to stay in the common room. “So I can make my bed.”

My door creaked on the hinges as I pushed it open to behold the bacchanalia on my throw rug. There were candles everywhere. Alex was naked and thrusting atop an American Girl doll who orgasmed with Tall’s voice. Short’s laugh spilled from the mouth of a Troll with electric-blue hair. “Me next,” said the My Little Pony with Jock’s eyes. Alex mounted her from behind. Nobody looked at me. I melted into the wall, a cinderblock bas-relief, and watched them without words. But I was a patient girl. Surely they would ask me to join. I had experience now. I was open to new things, but I had to lose my mother first.

The scent of home lingered in the empty common room as I called out for her. A ring-ring sounded from my room, and I doubled back as the lead singer of Aqua said I could brush her hair and undress her. I had to step over the ménage à quatre to get to the phone. “So sorry,” I said. “Excuse me.” I turned the music down and grabbed the cordless from the cradle. “Hello?”

“Piglet?”

“Mom? Where’d you go?”

“I’m at the hospital. There was an accident. Little fender bender. I’m okay, though. A bit banged up, but I’ll live. I’m so sorry, but I’m not going to make it today.”

“What do you mean? You were just—”

Alex screamed, “Hang up the fucking phone!” He had a handful of Jock’s mane as she fellated him. “And you,” he said to Jock, “watch the teeth.”

She neighed.

“You there, Piglet?”

Tall and Short were Frenching with a hollow intensity I’d only seen on Skinemax. “I’m here.”

“I sent you something. Did you get it?”

A new box blinked onto my pillow. I knew its handwriting well. “I just got it.”

“Well, open it, silly!” In her background, the hospital people started shouting color codes over a frenzied, arrhythmic beeping. “I’ll call you later, Piglet. I think my roommate is dying.”

She made a kissy noise and hung up just as Alex came.

Their foursome lit cigarettes, sprawled post-coital on my rug as I opened my latest mother box. It was a box inside a box: a cherrywood urn with an elegant grain. The inlaid photograph mirrored the framed one on my bookshelf—the one the pasta-and-gravy man took with a disposable Kodak. What the hell was his name? I stared down at myself: seven years young, criss-cross-applesauce on the backyard grass of the house we lived in two houses ago, squinting with the kind of glee little girls leave on playgrounds as puppy Lolly licks my face; one of my front teeth is missing, my tongue poking through the hole.

“That’s so sad,” Jock said.

“Kind of a weird gift,” said Short.

“Want a cig?” Tall asked.

“No, thank you.”

I ran my fingers over the engraving of her name and too-brief lifespan: Princess Lollypop, 1990–1997. Even through the mushroom cloud of smoke, I smelled the sweet mint of her doggy breath. I’d brushed her teeth regularly since puppyhood. I was a responsible owner, and proper dental hygiene can increase a dog’s lifespan if they don’t get alimentary lymphoma. A note was tucked beneath the urn.

Lolly belongs with you. She loved you more than her liver treats!

She loved you

She loved you

She—

“Young lady, what on God’s green Earth?” The dorm mother, The Puppet’s wife, stood in my doorway. We called her Mrs. Puppet, but not to her face. She was always so nice. Rumor had it she was barren. “Are you smoking?!?”

Alone in my room with four cigarettes on my rug, burning down to their filters, leaving millipedes of ash and searing holes into the braided cotton, I told Mrs. Puppet, “I don’t smoke. It’s a filthy habit.” From the wall, Alex’s picture stared through me. The air smelled of singed hair—the kind that haunts a person before a stroke—and somewhere, someone was beaming.