To Love What Draws Your Blood-3 (Prt.2)

Angli sat in her bedroom closet, a dingy light bulb flickering above her head like a schizo strobe light. Yes, a schizo trobelight. She held a hand mirror to her face as she pushed thick chunks of eye shadow to her eyelids and forced the lipstick to a pulp on her lips. Churchtime equaled playtime for her and this was dress up. All around her feet were black markers, fake body piercings and spray on hair dye.1

“Angli, get your fat ass out here!” her mother called from somewhere in the house. “If you’re not out here by five minutes, you won’t be going anywhere for the next three and a half years, missy!”2

“I might have to take you to the library where you can read about proper grammar,” Angli said quietly as she added the final touches to her arms and neck with the sharpies. “I have my house keys,” she yelled back, only emerging from the closet when she heard the final door slam shut. She pulled on her hand-me-down gray wool coat with thick red stains from the time Judie had thrown up on herself on a date. The red wine that she was too young to be drinking disagreed with her stomach and taste buds both, spilling out onto her coat that Angli was now supposed to wear proudly. It was never able to wash out. She knew they could have taken the stains out if they wanted—as if Oxyclean didn’t exist. Judie knew Angli would be getting it, their mother new and the more stains the merrier. It taught her character, apparently. That’s ... lucid.3

Back in the sad present reality, Angli pulled on the hood of the coat of wine and pushed on her thick, black sunglasses, staring at her dark reflection in the wooden full-length mirror that stood squarely in the middle of her octagonal room for some reason only Judie knew of. It was so covered with pictures of Judie’s former boyfriends that it hardly looked like a full-length mirror anymore but rather a compact mirror that was super-glued onto a boyfriend collage. The room smelled of Judie, it looked like everything Judie and you’d swear Judie’s spirit was present 24-7 by the cold, superficial chill it had. It was all swallowing her up—Angli was disappearing like water down the drain; the mother bird that was life was holding her, the feed, over the baby birds’ gaping beaks that were everything and everyone around her. And her family, boyfriend and church couldn’t care less. She didn’t mock religion, religion mocked her and she could swear she was wearing a sign around her neck, a tattoo on her forehead and shaved area on her head, all reading: Please, Fuck Me Over. Please, Treat Me Like Shit. Please, Don’t Be Unique.4

She walked off through the small house, her black boots clonking down hard on the hardwood floor that sounded so hallow, everyone figured it was going to cave in—preferably when Angli was the only one on it. Outside the door, she searched to and fro for her house key, even went back inside but she had absolutely no luck. She would have kept looking if it weren’t for the insistent honking of the van outside, her mother’s patience ranging around –80. She stood close to the front door and acted like she was locking it and pushed her hand back into her pocket as if she was putting her keys back while she walked down the walkway, staring down at the ground. She knew exactly how many steps it took to get to the curb where her family was waiting—twenty-three, not including the small booby trap hole called the Mother Hole her mom had dug in the lawn for her kids in case they came home drunk one night and tripped in it, falling on the grass that always seemed to be muddy. Angli’s oldest brother Drake had tripped so many times and so hard after his late-night carousing that he said mud was so far up his nose, he’d dreamed of valleys of bubbling, gooey mud for weeks. Judie even attested to it. From then on, when she knew her mother was watching, Angli acted like she tripped, just to make her mother think she’d always forgotten about the trap so it was still affective.5

She hopped in the back of the van with all the bikes and strollers—it was easy not to be noticed so all she had to do was sit there quietly with her mother screaming about Angli’s abundant flaws while the bike petal dug deep into her hip for the entire duration of the trip.6

Angli’s smile appeared within when she unmasked her masterpiece and got over a dozen gasps, not including the near-screams of her family. Once the sunglasses, coat and hood were removed, it was all out there—all the Satan that was in that child. Everyone stared at the 666’s and upturned crosses Angli had drawn all over her neck and arms, the black lipstick, the black eye shadow, the black hair with red streaks, the black nail polish, the black clothes, the piercings and OH MY GAWD ... not the ... SPIKE BRACELETS!! The Antichrist has come, people—there’s absolutely no hope for us now!! Could this be Satan? No, just a misfit. Same thing, right? If you don’t fit in with society and religion’s tight-knit standards, you must be some sort of evil.7

“OOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!”8

That was the loudest response that came from one unmistakable voice that had perfected yelling so well she’d be the #1 Screaming Olympics champion.9

“Shit,” Angli said under her breath, heading toward the door as soon as she heard her mother’s scream. She walked out to stand by the car, hearing the yelling and seeing the flailing of her mother’s arms. And through it all, that flailing eventually turned into two grossly violent slaps to her daughter’s face.10

“What did I do to deserve this, Angli?!” she screamed, staring hard at her daughter with her hand on her bashed cheek. “Answer me that! Just tell me why you would do this? How could you pull a stunt like this—this is so ... this is so like you. You know that, I know that—everyone else doesn’t have to witness your absolute profane insanity!!”11

Angli stood there silently with only one emotion, only one ruler—Sadness. And even that was disappearing. She’d nearly completely tuned out from her mother’s yelling, replaying those slaps she’d received in anger, in hate, in her mother’s lust for her pain. She wasn’t even mad, which would be a pretty damn reasonable feeling if you ask me.12

After the stinging, the whole right side of her face went numb—the numbing spread from her face down her neck, around her shoulders and to everything beyond. The feelings of death suddenly wrapped around her like that coat that proved how much her family respected her—she wasn’t even worth a shit, she was only worth puke. All that ache that was on her skin caved in, all into her soul and that lively, sarcastic, creative, mess that was her soul melted and out emerged a nothingness until she was inside out and a screaming, crying inside and nothing outside. 13

One second—that’s all it took for it all to come crashing. It was over—there was nothing left for her mother, her father, her boyfriend, her schoolmates or her church to devour. It had all gone outside in and it didn’t even hurt. And that’s why it was so addictive—there wasn’t pain. It all flipped into dream mode, nothing really felt like anything, every incident was like a ball bouncing off a wall, unaffected and just standing there. She wasn’t even a wallflower—just an ugly, blue wall.14

She stood there and let her numbed hand slip from her numbed cheek, down to her numbed side. She stared at her mother with hallow eyes and a paler face. She saw her mother’s realization of the difference, the zombie in front of her and Angli wasn’t even happy the woman could finally see—see who she was on the inside, just a pale, hallow zombie; a walking, not living, mess of air. This is what everyone had induced her to.15

Her mother knew then that there would be no mud up that one’s nose—no fun nights, no booby trap tripping, no dreams of mud valleys and she didn’t know how to deal with it. The attitude that had been her daughter had vanished—had gone somewhere and she was staring at something new, something that was nothing, not realizing she was staring at what her daughter had slowly been evolving into with every second of every day. It was all too sudden. It was all too real. It was all too odd. And it was all too wanted.16