Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands Read Online Free PDF

that was for money.) Andrea had left home by the time the two of them were busted. Like everyone else, she had no idea that my dad was one of the engineers at Cape Abenaki who the NRC blamed for fucking up and helping to cause the meltdown.
    That night when she showed me her kit, I said to her something kind of ridiculous like, “Do you know how bad for you that is?” Obviously, she knew how bad for her it was. That’s one of the main reasons why she did it. “Do you really want to go through life with all those scars?” I asked.
    She tried to hand me a razor blade in its little cardboard folder, but I wouldn’t take it. “Let me show you how,” she said.
    “No.”
    “Why? Because it will hurt?”
    “Yeah, for starters,” I told her. But she pulled the blade fromits packet and dropped it into my hand. I thought the metal was very pretty in an engineered sort of way. I’d never held one like it before. All my razors were plastic and pink. They all sounded like sex toys. Venus Vibrance. Close Curves. Bikini Trimmer.
    “It will only hurt for a second. And then you’ll feel great. Besides …”
    “Besides what?”
    “Even the pain is, I don’t know, cool. It’s out-of-body. You’ll get a rush, I promise.”
    “Not interested.”
    “Try it!”
    The fact was, I had already tried a lot of shit and nothing really worked. So why not try this, too?
    “Where?” I asked.
    “Take off your pajamas.”
    “No, I’m not wearing underwear.”
    “Since when did you get all modest on me?”
    I shrugged and pulled off my pajama pants. Maybe I was scuba diving for the bottom of the sea. Still, I scooted an extra foot away from her so I’d have a little privacy. I pressed the razor blade on the inside of my thigh, pretty high up—close to where my underpants would have been. I’d figured out that the point was to cut yourself where no one would see. But I only pushed it against my flesh, and I didn’t quite break the skin. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So, Andrea did it for me. Before I could stop her, she took my wrist and the back of my hand and in one almost instantaneous motion yanked my fingers down toward the mattress. She moved so fast, I couldn’t stop her. It stung—not a huge surprise, I know—and I yelped. I pushed her away, and then together we peered down at the pencil-thin line about two inches long. For a second I didn’t understand why it had hurt so much because I didn’t seem to be bleeding. Then, like a creek bed filling with water after a summer storm, the narrow little gash started to swell. As if we had never before seen a cut bleed, which of course we both had (though she a lot more often than me), we stared at it. We watched some bloodtrickle down my thigh onto the mattress. I wondered how long it would bleed if I did nothing. I wondered how big the stain would be on the mattress.
    Andrea spoke first. “You won’t need any hydrogen peroxide,” she said. “That was a brand-new blade.”
    “Just a Band-Aid?”
    “Yup.” Before she gave me a Band-Aid, however, she took the scissors and cut off a square of gauze. She pressed it very tenderly against the cut, and I was so stunned that I had let her do this whole thing in the first place that I didn’t stop her, despite how close she was to the edge of my pubic hair. After a minute she took her fingers away and handed me a Band-Aid. The pad wasn’t as long as my cut, but it would do.
    “Feel any better?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” I answered, which was the truth. I mean, I knew I felt ashamed. But that would pass. By then I did all kinds of crap that left me feeling ashamed. I just didn’t know if I felt—to use her word—better. Maybe I did. Maybe I hated myself a little bit less.
    When I was a little girl and we still lived just outside of New York City, my parents said I would punish myself. When I misbehaved as a toddler, they had a “time-out” chair for me. It was a little wooden ladder-back chair, meant for