Cut Here

Not an editorial direction. The title of the piece. Time to start telling the truth.

Of course none of this would have happened if I were better at math.

It’s summer and the dark, unfamiliar hallways of Lawrence High School intimidate me at age 13. But summer school is for dummies like me. And him.

I’ve loved this boy since the 6th grade.

That first autumn of junior high school, I arrived back in Kansas just a few days before classes started. My father’s sabbatical was ending and my school shopping that year was done last-minute in the secondhand stalls of the Paris flea market.

The clothes I buy are all wrong for Kansas. Comically all wrong.

The “Preppy Handbook” rules supreme in the Midwest: my peers wear izod shirts in primary colors paired with plaid Bermuda shorts and Sperry top-siders. My costume for the first day of 7th grade is a garish satin blouse in deep mauve that makes me look like a plump harlot-in-training. Even the nicer girls in my class giggle as I collect my lunch tray on the first day.

Just like my clothing, my body is different from those of my classmates. Mine is unrulier.

My period begins the first week of 7th grade. I bleed so hard and heavy I soak through one high-absorbency pad every 15 minutes. My mother reassures me it will only last a week, but she’s wrong: the blood flows out between my legs nonstop for two weeks, three weeks, four. My father places a brown towel beneath my sheets, but even that is no match for the blood, and soon it will be my entire mattress that needs to be changed. I wonder if the cramps that bend me double will be a new part of my everyday life and I feel myself falling into despair.

Someone takes me to the doctor. The cure: a regimen of five tiny yellow birth control pills. Each night before bed, my mother pushes each pill through its foil backing in a plastic card that has a dial she turns slowly. As each one drops into my hand–one, two, three, four, five–a ribbon of shame turns inside my stomach imagining what would happen if my classmates learned of my affliction. The medicine makes me sick. But it forces my bad body to behave.

Each day in 7th grade I stand next to my metal locker trying to be casual as I scan the bobbing heads in the hallway until I see him.

The boy I’ve loved since the 6th grade.

My body tenses with anticipation when he walks towards me, his friends trailing along behind.

“Fat ugly bitch,” he says as he passes.

Like always, my stomach flips in shock. How strange that I should be surprised every time! Each school day he says the exact same words to me. Sometimes twice.

Fat ugly bitch.

Even at 13, the nascent writer in me is forced to admire the economy of words. Never a deviation. Never a calming adjective.

And also this: I know it is true.

Well, not the last part. I might be turning into a woman, but all I want to do after school is coax our elderly cat into the handlebar basket of my bicycle and ride to the pond west of my house. Alone on the windswept prairie, the frayed hem of my weird flea market jeans collect prickly burrs while I catch frogs and fashion rough rock houses for the turtles sunning themselves on limestone fragments scattered in the clay soil.

Would a “bitch” really release all the frogs before she pedaled home?

June the year after 7th grade means summer school because I flunked math fall and spring semester.

I’m late when I open the classroom door; my heart seizes. He is here.

The boy I’ve loved since the 6th grade.

The only open seat in the crowded classroom is in front of him. A quick scan of the room assures me none of his usual friends share our summer gulag.

My best friend M loaned me her prized possession to wear today: a navy Ralph Lauren polo shirt with a crimson horseman she bought with her birthday money and wore only once. I have to dress better if we’re going to be cooler in 8th grade.

Scanning my reflection as I approached the unfamiliar doors, I’d realized the shirt was way too tight for me to wear in public.

Once I make it to the second hour of class, I feel myself starting to relax a little. Maybe I’m home-free? He still hasn’t said it.

Then I feel a sudden movement beneath me. Is it rocking? I pretend not to notice.

He has his feet laced into the metal undercarriage of my chair. Each time the teacher turns to chalk more hieroglyphs onto the board, he picks up more force. Soon he’s kicking my chair so hard I can’t write legibly in my notebook. All at once, I understand what’s happening.

My arms fly to my chest in a panic as my breasts bounce painfully.

For months I’ve begged my mother to take me bra shopping.

I am braless and shouldn’t be braless.

Each time the teacher turns around, the kicking starts up again, ramping up, getting harder every time. Even the boys I thought were nice have begun to crane their necks and laugh.

I summon the courage to excuse myself.

Alone in the darkened girls’ bathroom, I examine my face in the mirror—red, hot, blotchy—and splash cold water onto my cheeks. Everyone will know I’ve been crying.

The dispensers in high school hold old-fashioned powdered soap, and I push the metal lever until my hand is filled with dusty white pellets. I allow the powder to liquify slowly underneath the faucet’s soothing stream of water. I start to feel sleepy imagining myself at Potter’s pond as the water grows warmer on my palms. Sometimes M and I like to throw rocks into the shallows just to watch the little fish scuttle out of their muddy hiding places.

I jump in terror when I look up and see a face in the bathroom mirror behind me. I’m not alone at all.

It is the boy I’ve loved since the 6th grade.

_____________________________________

I am 35 and they’re doing one final mammogram before surgery to guide their work. The wide excision they did last week on my right breast has not yet healed.

I’ve gotten pretty cavalier about mammograms by this time so I’m relaxed when the young technician closes the metal plates down on my left breast–the good one. This breast is floppier now than it was before I nursed my children, but it’s intact.

Mammograms always remind me of the trash compactor scene in Star Wars when Harrison Ford, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia scramble to stop the walls from closing in to crush them.

Now the technician moves on to the right breast—the bad one. As she begins to squash it slowly, each fresh surgical stitch begins to burst, popping one after another, the pent-up pus inside the breast squeezing out from the incision-line to form a pink au jus stain across the front of my faded hospital gown.

I begin to cry, hiding my face behind the bars of the machine trying not to move. I know that moving means the technician will have to start all over at the beginning. There is nothing to do but keep pushing through.

“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” she whispers. By the time it is over, tears are streaming down her cheeks too.

The bad breast must come off. That’s what the famous doctor in Kansas City decides, and in my family, her word is law. She’s the doctor who saved the life of my mother a decade earlier.

I make it my job to be funny and charming when I see the famous doctor in Kansas City. I want her to save me, too. I tell her how inconvenient it would be if I died considering my children are only 2 and 6 and I beg her to take my good breast as well, in light of family history. She agrees without hesitation.

A week later, I arrive at the hospital at dawn to wait for the surgery. The double mastectomy. The waxy medical paper beneath my naked bottom crinkles when I slide off the exam room table. I stand in front of the mirror and fumble with the hospital gown ribbons to examine my naked breasts for the very last time.

It feels like hours since the surgeon popped in to draw lines across my chest with a purple marker to guide his scalpel. He renders my body a translucent Butterick pattern: laid out on a flat surface and pinned with care. Now I await the expert who will wield the pinking shears over me.

“Cut here,” I whisper aloud to myself as I trace my finger along one of those purple lines in the mirror.

I see that the re-opened wounds from the burst stitches are healing again nicely–needlessly, of course–and the pink incision line looks like a faded bite mark around my nipple. They tell me I’ll never feel sensation here again once both nipples are cut away, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t quite believe this could be true.

Standing in the cold little room, the echo of familiar words return to me through the foggy ether of time. Words not spoken aloud to me in decades that continue to haunt my subconscious nonetheless.

Fat ugly bitch.

I buzz the nurse’s station frantically.

Hey I think I’m probably gonna just go home. I sound so light-hearted the nurse chuckles at first like I’m joking. Now they’re moving quickly, though, and the weary woman with cigarette breath shoots a syringe into the fresh IV in my hand and I lay back. Calm spreads through my veins.

And so I stay.

__________________________________________

He wins the race to the bathroom door when I run and I’m caught off-guard by his strength. He’s so much smaller than me. The foot that kicked my chair is jammed in front of the door to stop me from escaping. Why would a school bathroom have an inside lock is what I’m thinking when he jerks my arm away from the latch so hard tears spring to my eyes.

Fucking bitch! he hisses.

I hear myself yelling LET ME GO which must shock him because his green irises flood black with anger and his skin is flushing maroon. One of his pupils is misshapen, something I’d never noticed until now. It strikes me that I’m too far from the classroom for anyone to hear me and come to my rescue. If I mention here the color of his hair my entire hometown will know who he is.

He shoves me against the wall, holding me with one arm, trapping me while his hand moves around the bottom of his white Ocean Pacific “Property Of” shorts to reveal a pink dangle of mozzarella emerging from one leg where he’s pulled them to the side. I fight hard when he tries forcing my hand closer to touch it but he’s so strong that I feel something hot and sticky and terrible brush my fingers. The sudden strength of my revulsion allows me to push free of him for a moment.

He catches me again in front of the sink. He pushes me so hard I lose my balance.

“Fucking bitch!” he’s angrier now, and I’m shaking because his face is close enough to me I can see the remnants of the corn flakes he ate for breakfast trapped in the braces-wires of his snarling teeth. For weeks to come, my arms will be bruised to the bone where he’s gripping me now.

And this is when he bites me.

The boy I’ve loved since the 6th grade bites my right breast so hard I scream in pain, and it’s my screaming that finally stops him cold.

He releases me suddenly. I clutch my searing breast, too scared to look down because I’m certain he’s bitten it clean off. When I risk a quick glance down, I see a circle of saliva blooming where he bit down on my best friend’s M’s favorite shirt.

Long after it has healed, the memory of that bite on my nipple is a sensation I’ll be able to call to mind for decades. In the first tender weeks after the attack, long after the brown and purple bruises begin to fade to a beigey-blue, what remains imprinted on my pale breast the longest is that telltale imprint of metal brackets, the ones that held the wire braces in place on his teeth.

Now I hear banging. I’m running past the empty stalls in the bathroom. I flip the deadbolt, weak with relief to see M standing in the doorway. I grab her arm and pull her behind me and we run and run and run down the stairs, our footsteps echoing down marble corridors. I cradle my breast as I throw my shoulder against the heavy door to release us, gasping for air in the too-bright noonday sun, blinking blindly for a moment but still running, and the trace of humidity I feel against my face signifies how hot this June day is going to be. Probably even hotter than usual.