Girl in Pieces Read Online Free PDF Page B

hurting you?” he asks. “I’m doing the best I can, girlfriend.”
    There’s the sound of trickling water. Vinnie is washing his hands. I lift my arms up.
    They’re pale and puckered from being wrapped up for so long. Turning them over, I look at the red, ropy scars rivering from my wrists to my elbows. I touch them gingerly. Vinnie hums. It’s an upbeat tune, with a lilt.
    I’m only another day to him, another hideous girl.
    “Okay?” He rubs cream between his palms and holds them up.
    Underneath these new scars, I can see the old ones. My scars are like a dam or something. The beaver just keeps pushing new branches and sticks over the old ones.
    I nod at Vinnie. The cream has warmed in his hands and feels good against my skin.
    The first time I ever cut myself, the best part was after: swabbing the wound with a cotton ball, carefully drying it, inspecting it, this way and that, cradling my arm protectively against my stomach.
There, there.
    I cut because I can’t deal. It’s as simple as that. The world becomes an ocean, the ocean washes over me, the sound of water is deafening, the water drowns my heart, my panic becomes as large as planets. I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.
    There, there.
    Casper told us, “It’s counterintuitive, yes? That hurting yourself makes you feel better. That somehow you can rid yourself of pain by causing yourself pain.”
    The problem is:
after.
    Like now, what is happening now. More scars, more damage. A vicious circle: more scars = more shame = more pain.
    The sound of Vinnie washing his hands in the sink brings me back.
    Looking at my skin makes my stomach flip.
    He turns. “Round two. You sure you don’t want someone else here?”
    I shake my head and he throws me a sheet, tells me to scoot back on the examining table, motions for me to pull down my shorts. I do it quick under the sheet, without breathing, keeping the sheet tight over my plain underwear. My thighs prickle up, goose-pimply from the chilly room.
    I don’t think I’m afraid of Vinnie, but I track the movements of his hands carefully, bring my street feeling to the surface, just in case. When I was little and couldn’t sleep, I used to rub the bedsheet between my forefinger and thumb. I do this now with the underwear, the soft pink underwear, brand-new, left on my narrow bed with a little card. There were seven pairs, one for each day of the week. They had no holes, no stains, and they smelled like the plastic wrap they came in, not like funk and piss or period blood. Thinking of the underwear, feeling the clean cotton in my fingers, makes something shift inside me, like the loosening of stones after one is plucked from the pile, a groan, a settling, an exhalation of air—
    “Nurse. Ava. Bought. Me. This. Underwear.”
    I don’t know why I whisper it. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why words have formed now, I don’t know why
these
words. My voice is scratchy from not being used. I sound like a croaky frog. It’s a long sentence, my first in I don’t know how many days, and I know that he will dutifully log this:
C. Davis spoke in a complete sentence while bandages being removed. C. Davis spoke about not having underwear. Patient does not usually volunteer to speak; Selective Mutism.
    “That was mighty nice of her. Did you say thank you?”
    I shake my head.
    When I cut myself in the attic, I was wearing a T-shirt, underwear, and socks and boots. There was so much blood, Evan and Dump didn’t know what to do. They wrapped me in a bedsheet.
    “You should thank her.”
    I came to Creeley in hospital scrubs and slippers. Nurse Ava found clothes for me. Nurse Ava bought me brand-new underwear.
    I should thank her.
    The gauze and pads from my thighs look like stained streamers as Vinnie holds them up and lobs them into the bin. He pulls and clips with the tweezers.
    It’s the same as my arms: it doesn’t hurt as he