I was sweet 16 and I had paper skin. I slit thin red lines across my skinny wrists with an eyebrow razor, so someone would see, mostly my boyfriend. Not my parents. I was in the big stall before and after lunch, weeping. I was spam posting on my finsta.

@PEYTARTRASHCAN:  “no one cares about me!!!” And then my new friends would get pissed off, so I’d have no friends again.

@PEYTARTRASHCAN: “my mom just yelled at me for keeping rotting dishes in my room for two weeks and not saying hello to her boyfriend when he walks in the house, i might as well just fucking kill myself!”

I told everyone I ate lunch in the school bathroom like the movies, but that wasn’t true, our arts magnet high school campus had an open seating lunch hour. Have you ever seen Fame? What about Victorious? I choose to wallow, to lurk in the dark corner stairwell between the 0 and first floor like an octopus. I was feeding, off the rush of chemicals and the rawness of everything, anguish, angst, lust, obsession. I was insatiable. By told everyone, I mean that I posted it on my finsta.

@PEYTARTRASHCAN:  “why does no one want to hang out with me???!”

The worst thing ever was always happening to me, like the time I threw up all over the sweet gentleman painting my toes at Casa Linda nail salon. That was when we lived in a white brick three-bedroom in far East Dallas. Casa Linda is an old world charming neighborhood of old redone houses with low square footage and high property value. We lived 5 minutes up the road, a rental in Casa View, close to the crown of White Rock Lake. We’re always the only renters. They’d find bodies in there, the lake. And I’d fuck rattish white boys in those woods.

We've had countless mother-daughter lunches at El Fenix, so the dialogue is not distinct in my memory but there was warm mood lighting, like we were on the inside of a fresh tortilla, and poinsettia-red vinyl tablecloths. The sizzle of fajitas. “Be careful, it’s hot.” They always say that when they bring the plates out. My mom is a beautiful white woman, with tanned freckled skin and long dark hair. She always orders unsweet tea with two Sweet ‘n lows. I’m always sipping Dr. Pepper, the first sugary addiction of many to come. If I tell you one thing, it’s that I know I had the chicken nacho platter- triple cheesy goodness upon a layer of the perfect tortilla chips, a mound of guacamole with lime and coarse salt. Juicy onions, tomatoes and fresh cilantro garnish like twinkling stars. I know I had it because it’s burned into my memory, because it’ll come up later.

 She’s calling this lunch a “girls' day,” as if my whole upbringing wasn’t a girl’s day. I remember that I hadn’t told her about Jon— that we broke up and we’ve been broken up and that we were never really together, so much as he was taking taking taking from me and I was giving giving giving and expecting, and so I was also taking in my own martyr Piscean type way. I didn’t know it yet. I only knew that he had something he wouldn’t give me, but maybe I could earn it. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even the boy.

Lonnie is a truck driver with chrome white teeth belted by a grand canyon sized gap. Mom met him through a friend of a friend in Mesquite. He shaves his head bald and goes to the gym every day, sometimes twice, and keeps a glock on the nightstand. He has warbled linework of Jesus Christ on his bicep, ink barely visible against his dark skin. On his abdomen are 6 block letters, unfilled, L. O. N. N. I. E. 

(Checking texts over lunch) Jon Jon Jon Jon Jon Jon Jon. That’s how my brain works. Before that it was Wolfgang Wolfgang Wolfgang. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even the boy. Jon took me out like a candy bag full of razor blades at the beginning of the summer. I was replaced by a cleaner girl with fewer mental health issues. She looks like me, one of the only other mixed girls in my school, but weighs less, and I’ve lost twenty pounds without trying. They're asking how I did it on my finsta!

It feels like nothing has happened to me since he left. My middle school cheerleading uniform hangs off my skeletal frame, a halloween white sheet with the eyes cut out. Boo. I miss him I miss him I miss him pressing my knees into the soil of the lake at night, invading me. The biggest houses in Dallas were only a few feet away. I wasn’t thinking about how it hurt. And a lot of the grand houses look vacant.

During a break in first period playwriting, a boy I was friends with freshman year–who I ended up fucking later for no reason the night before Valentine’s day senior year– pulled up my finsta page, @peytartrashcan, to read aloud in some kind of covert humiliation ritual. Boys are meanest to the girls they like. “1,914 posts,” he whistled.  He made his voice shrill and stupid when reading what I had typed out and uploaded, I scrunched my face and begged, “stoppppppp.”

Whispers and rumors about me swirled past our lockers and most of them were true. If you heard a rumor about someone hysterically crying in the big stall at lunch, and all of third period, some 15- year-old wearing Adore Me lingerie under her Garland Road Thrift store dresses to make her evil secret boyfriend love her, about someone who blackmailed her rapist into dating her, about someone drafting a petition to get her own rapist kicked out of school and passing it around campus, forming a coup against their principal as revenge, someone being all around “not normal,” then that was me, and the rumors are true.

I see the “school psychologist,” a man with a thick accent. Not sure why we had one, but he sucked at his job. He tells me nothing seems wrong with me, except I seem to have “battered wife syndrome.” I see a regular therapist and a psychiatrist and attend group therapy, where I treat sessions like my own stand-up comedy platform. Something is fucking wrong with me, and I am too young to understand how pressing that wrong could be. My single mom takes off work every week to drive to therapy or the psych an hour north in Plano, it’s not sustainable. My psychiatrist is an elegant woman with a thick accent– “mental health” is for people who aren’t praying hard enough, so we must outsource our professionals. She has me diagnosed officially with “depression” and “generalized anxiety,” her eyes dissecting me over the frames of her rectangle glasses. There’s been talk of having ADHD, but I was not disruptive enough in any of my classes, so my teachers weren’t motivated to fill out the questionnaire they were emailed. I am good at falling through cracks. We have tried Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, Trintelex, even Latuda, which is an antipsychotic, but I am still freaking out and cutting myself. Wellbutrin made me drop pounds I desperately needed, Latuda made me gain them back in excess.

“What we need,” she surmised, “is something to stabilize the mood.” And I was like, well yeah, I didn’t know we could do that. It was all the same to me, pills, pills, pills, I was 16. We had tried the traditional path of treatment for general depression, SSRI’s and then the untraditional non SSRI antidepressants– things that double as antipsychotics or heart medicine, not that anything had much effect. Another orange bottle from CVS joins the Marshalls organization bin we have full of other orange bottles. It is fucking crazy to put a 16-year-old girl on a mood stabilizer, it’s crazy on the body.

LAMICTAL XR POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS

DIZZINESS AND CLUMSINESS

HEADACHE, BLURRY VISION

RASH

SLEEPINESS

NAUSEA AND VOMITING

Lonnie used to work in the jails, so he doesn’t like that my mom doesn’t “discipline me.” I want to tell him, “She disciplines me in another kind of way,” but I know he wouldn’t understand. He boasts about studying “all religions” before deciding on Christianity, because he doesn't like the way Islam treats women. Women shouldn’t be preachers, though. His son lives with us, plays football, so, bumbling, a mean streak, a few years older. We’ve been a “family,” for a few years now, like three. It felt like a long time to me.

There are a lot of things Lonnie doesn’t like about me, he thinks my mother has handicapped me and turned me soft, and there are lots of things he doesn’t approve of with my mom, but he is proposing to her tomorrow night. She suspects. I don’t deny it, because she hates surprises. So, we’re going to the nail salon after lunch.  The surprise will be impressive, a friend from grade school will pick her up and drive her to a fancy restaurant for her 45th birthday, but there is no fancy restaurant– she will actually be driven to Lonnie’s brother’s house in Desoto, a newly constructed 5 bedroom, where all her friends and family will be waiting for him to propose. I told him she hates surprises and he pretended to take note.

She likes precision. She has a favorite nail lady that we always go to. She’s getting a nude pink. Ever since my moms been dating Lonnie she goes to get her nails done weekly. I’m getting some dark color. They soak my feet in a tub of hot water and lather my calves with mango butter and stack a path of warm rocks down both legs. The cheese is starting to bubble in my breadbasket, and I’m feeling hot suddenly. Sweat droplets dot my baby-smooth forehead. Now I’m cold. Now I’m cold and hot.

My mom is chatting to the nail lady. I’m realizing that I’m nauseous but I still have such a toddler mentality that as soon as I accept it, it’s already happening. I’d taken the mood stabilizer right before we left the house. Hot water bubbles, broiling my toes like hotdogs. I don’t want to take them out and put my shoes on to pad to the bathroom, collecting lint on my oiled up feet just to dip them back in the soak. I have no choice.  I open my mouth to tell my mommy I’m sick so she can tell the staff for me. It’s too late. My mom says, “She's gonna be sick!” As she’s saying that, my jaw unhinges to unleash what once was chicken nachos, what is now a red and brown thick crunchy mixture.  You can see the seasoning peppering the bile. You can smell the nachos and the tomato salsa. It’s all over the floor, in the foot bath, and on the man at my feet. He’s so nice to me every time. I hurl once and try to stop but end up heaving two or three times. I’m like  (hurl) “I’M sorry !!!!!!” (heave.)

The worst part is that they don’t make me feel bad about it. They send me to the bathroom to clean up, start cleaning the vom themselves even though I keep begging them to let me. I feel like crying, I’m not though. I can’t imagine what my mom was feeling. I begged her to tip them really good, but of course she already did. I can’t imagine the story I gave the staff, and to the unsuspecting pearl clutchers getting mani-pedis.

And then we left. And I blocked all that out. Until now.

The proposal went on, only my step-brother-to-be got high before driving us there, so we were late, and we missed it. We missed the whole thing.  Her friends from high school, her friends from work, my grandparents, my aunt and uncle. My mom was on edge because she hates surprises, because my grandma was there, and because I wasn’t there to see any of it. My stepbrother said it was my fault we were late.

I cried my makeup off in the bathroom and put on a brave face after, but it didn’t matter. She’d already started drinking. When my mom starts drinking, she doesn’t come back. When she came back home in the morning she wasn’t wearing a ring. How could he not make sure I was there? He called her a drunk. And many other things. I think he called her fat?  She threw the ring at him, it hit him square in the forehead. My mom used to be a softball player.

I remember standing frozen with her sobbing on the floor of my bedroom, twinkle lights reflecting off the wood. Was it my fault? The octopus in me said yes. I hate when my mom cries, not because I’m a good daughter.  I hate when she cries because I don't know what to say, to make it stop or to make it better. I didn’t know what mood I should be in. Sad for my mom, mad, relieved that we were away from Lonnie, sad that we would have small gatherings for Christmas again. Numb. Consider my mood stabilized.