In My Father's Shadow-Chapter Nine

Leaning my head back against the bathroom door, my mind spins out of control as droplets of blood flow down my arm. The cuts… there’s probably twenty of them by now, all deep and screaming out my weaknesses and pain, my guilt and anger… my self hatred. Every time I look at my arm, that’s what I see. But with my head spinning and the room going dim around me, I can’t focus on a single thought buzzing through my mind. The pain in my arm brings all the pain inside to the surface and pretty soon… I’ve got tunnel vision. It’s like I’m looking through the lens of a telescope… one blink and I’m limp on the floor.

When I wake up, I’m still lying on the bathroom floor in front of the door; my arm is sticky with dried blood. I haul myself to my feet and shuffle over to the sink, turning the faucet on and shoving my arm underneath. The water stings and I close my eyes hissing through my teeth. Soap is applied and I’m whimpering softly, silently berating myself for being so weak and unable to stand the pain. Suds form over the gashes and after several minutes of scrubbing and scratching at the searing hot cuts along my arm. I make sure that my arm is well washed and then turn the faucet off, using my shirt to dry it off. I can’t have blood on the towels.

Quickly and quietly, I escort myself into my room and dig through my drawers pulling out all of my equipment. Gauze bandages, beta dine, butterfly stitches, triple antibiotic ointment, medical tape and scar reducers all clutched in my arms, my left sleeve rolled up to my elbow and I dump the stash onto my bed. I have to apply the things carefully. First, the beta dine is on, and then comes the antibiotic ointment and scar reducers… then the butterfly stitches. I used nearly the entire box on that single arm. Gently, I wrap a gauze bandage around my arm and secure it with the medical tape. I roll my sleeve down and make my way back into the bathroom to clean up the rest of the blood… it’s all over the floor.

Instead of using my shirt this time, I use toilet paper and have to flush the toilet every two minutes. The red liquid soaks into the toilet paper so quickly that I go through one entire roll and almost half of another one by the time it’s all cleaned up. The sink is fine, the water had cleared it all out and I stash the tape dispenser blade back into my pocket sneaking back into my room. I honestly don’t know why I need to sneak around, The Hypocrite isn’t home. He’s still in court… he’s still perfectly unaware of the fact that I’m hurting myself like this.

And that’s when it hits me… Aislin… she hates me now. She was sick of all of my lying and flipped out on me. She was so angry with me that she actually walked away. Aislin never gets angry like that. She doesn’t lose her temper; she doesn’t get upset with me. I’ve put her through some pretty intense shit… but this time…

This time, I’ve really fucked up.

I want to call her and apologize, but she’s going to need more than a few hours to calm down. Staring blankly on my bed and fighting back tears again, I pick at my nails anxiously. That bitter taste never leaves my mouth. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and I blink once… twice… three, four times and the tears have somehow disappeared.

With shaking hands, I quickly hide all of my stuff back into my dresser, folding my clothes over every single thing that I had previously taken out. Not one article of clothing had to be exactly where it was before. Not one thing could be visible because it would let the entire thing out. The entire thing would be blown if they saw so much as one bandage.

Swallowing my guilt, I withdraw the tape dispenser blade from my pocket and grab my ring case. It’s one of those cherry wood ones with the glass top and the emerald green fake velvet folds inside that hold the rings secure. I lift up the lid and spread open two of the folds carefully slipping the blade in between the two pieces of fabric, letting them close right after. I roll my sleeve down, concealing the bandage around my arm and put the ring case back onto my dresser.

Every noise is precise. Every noise embeds itself firmly into my ears and makes them sting with pain. Just like every second of physical contact hurts. Just like I’m sure that every time someone touches me, they can feel the uneven skin of the cuts, now nearly two weeks old and they still haven’t scabbed because of my interference. Just like I know that everyone knows and can’t admit it to themselves.

My clock ticks away slowly, my heard thuds inside my chest and my ears ring from the silence. I can’t watch TV anymore. I can’t just sit there and watch every skinny person on the screen walk around and pretend that I’m not jealous.

This isn’t about self destruction. This is about redemption.

I can make myself a martyr. This isn’t just for me and my selfish needs. This is to prove to everyone that it’s possible to go from being this huge blob of fat to something skinny. The only problem is that I can’t see myself getting any skinnier. The Hypocrite can see how skinny he is. I know it. When he looks in the mirror, he sees bone and all of the beauty that they behold.

He doesn’t see what I see when I look at my reflection. What I see is something horrible and grotesque. Something fat and unhealthy with dull eyes and fucked up white hairs growing on my skin. My urine has a strong smell, so I just up my intake of water. My hair turns even more brittle, so I just use more conditioner. When it starts falling out… then I just stick to wearing mostly pony tails and buns, combing it back so that no one can see the patch that’s opening up. I take half of an iron vitamin every day, because the whole ones are too hard to swallow. Sometimes, I have to crush them up and mix them in with my water… just because the one half of the pill is too big.

The door downstairs opens and closes and I can hear The Hypocrite walking around downstairs. The TV turns on and I glance back down at my watch, biting my lip. He’s home early. He shouldn’t be home for another three and a half hours. It’s only two-thirty and he should be at lunch or something.

It’s not that hard to drive from my dad’s firm to our house while all of his colleagues are out sitting around the table, complaining about whatever cases they have. Even though lawyers aren’t allowed to talk about their cases, even though they have all of that attorney-client confidence, there’s nothing that a Bud Light and some loaded potatoes from the Ponderosa all you can eat buffet that can’t get them to start the hour long bitch session.

After a moment or two of hesitation, I leave my room and walk down the stairs mumbling a greeting to my dad. He looks up at me and smiles softly. “Have you eaten today?”

“Yeah, Aislin and I went shopping and then got something to eat at McDonalds.” I answer with a brief nod.

“How is Aislin anyway? I haven’t seen her in a while.” He asks as I sit down next to him on the couch curling my legs underneath me.

I bite my lip gently and sigh, “We got in a fight.”

The Hypocrite eyes me carefully “What happened?” He asks quietly.

I shrug, “She’s just over dramatizing everything. So we just got into this huge argument… she’ll be fine in a couple of days. I just wanna let her cool off, I guess.”

He nods and sits back, “What did you eat?”

“Cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake,” such a straight forward answer… such a dirty little lie. Damn I’m good. “How come you’re home so early?”

“I wasn’t feeling good, and I didn’t have anything to do, so I came home.” He answers simply.

Our attentions are dragged toward the TV screen… anything to end the awkward silence that has surfaced between the two of us. Anything to allow us to pretend that we’re not hiding anything from one another, anything that will allow us to act like we’re just a normal father and daughter, even though we aren’t.

There’s some talk show on… some woman is complaining about how her daughter is out of control and how she doesn’t know what to do anymore. She shouldn’t be on TV. She should be home, checking her druggie daughter into some sort of rehab, keeping her mouth shut. It’s one thing if you have a genuine problem and you want to make people aware of it. It’s a completely different thing when you’re just on the screen bitching about your kids. Hell, you don’t need a camera to do that. Parents do it well enough already. Trust me on this one… even if it’s not the only thing that parents are good at… they could make a living just from complaining about their kids.

“How is work, anyway?” I ask after a good twenty minutes has passed.

Dad shrugs, “Okay I suppose, kind of hectic.”

I nod and bite some of the skin off of my lower lip, kind of a habit of mine in awkward situations. “That’s life though… you know? Life itself is really hectic. At least for some people it is anyway.”

The Hypocrite laughs, “Wait until you’re an adult, kid.”

How can he say something like that? From most of the other adults that I know… your teenage years are the worst of your life. How can he say that the adult years are worse? I mean sure, they’re stressful, I get that. You’ve got kids to raise, you’ve got pills to pay, and work to go to and stuff like that. But the teenage years are full of so much more shit. Catty girls spreading rumors, bad body image, pressure from the opposite sex, grades, douche bag parents and peer pressure.

I don’t say any of this of course. He’ll get pissed off if I do and then make me eat something for lunch. It’s bad enough that I couldn’t puke up that chocolate milkshake from earlier because the back of my throat hurt so badly that it made me dizzy. So it’s still there… I was too tired and too upset to run it off. But if I hadn’t been… the chances are that I’d still be doing lap after numerous lap downstairs on the cold basement floor with only my mp3 player and belittling mind to keep my company.

The show changes and it’s some rerun of Jerry Springer. Immediately, The Hypocrite changes the channel. There’s nothing on. There’s never anything good on TV until around eight o’clock. That’s why I just lock myself up in my room and listen to music.

Some commercial for a diet pill comes on and both The Hypocrite and I are practically salivating. Neither saying what’s on both of our minds…

I need that…

The narrator tells us that the pill speeds up your metabolism to the point where you can lose up to five pounds a week. One of the people giving their testimony says that she lost twenty-six pounds in a month and that she’s never been so happy. She was once a size twenty four, and now she’s a size thirteen.

I need that…