Happy Halloween.

There was a strobe light in one corner of the basement; it was all we had to see down there amongst the Top 40 pop and the recently pubescent boys and girl dry humping in the corner where their parents couldn't come downstairs and see them. All I saw, between each consecutive flicker of the light, was that stupid fucking grin on his stupid fucking face. I contemplated slamming his head into a wall momentarily, only to remember how trapped I am in this stupid, weak little body. Catullus found me in a corner later that night and told me he hoped I'd be alone for the rest of my life.

Alone or not, I find myself in a basement every year, surrounded by people I don't know bent at familiar 90 degree angles, yelling song lyrics I wish I didn't know. It's not as bad as he hoped - or, at least, he wouldn't think so.

Never heard him lock the door, part 3.

That's not really what happened.

Dirty Hippy's boyfriend called; without asking for my approval, she said yes and her mother whisked us away to a Rite Aid on the other side of town. It was cold and dark and the unnatural buzzing fluorescence of the 24-hour store made me blink my eyes and rub my temples. We weren't far from my house - a five minute drive, at most - but I felt stranded, lost on some dark, paved island millions of miles from where I was comfortable.

The boyfriend appeared, his bumbling, ugly, lion-haired best friend in tow. Greasy-haired upper-middle class scum with a tan, mousy face. He hadn't hit puberty and his voice was anathema to me; I was more of a man than he was. I loved Dirty Hippy more than him - more than he ever would. But she had him, and I'd do anything - anything - to convince myself I didn't want her.

When the 21-year-old Army asshole welcomed me into his apartment and offered me booze, I drank. It was dark and sparsely decorated, with sandalwood incense burning in all of the corners. It was rank; it permeated and everything smelled like her. It drove me crazy. And I drank. Until all of the shadows and people and noise - that fucking Rage Against the Machine bullshit meddle of guitars and spoiled suburban punk-manifesto rap - blurred together into an uncomfortable, unfamiliar haze. I felt like I was wrapped in wool; nothing was comfortable and everything was warm and itchy and nothing made the feeling go away. I watched as the boyfriend slipped his tongue into Dirty Hippy's mouth. Put his hands in her pants, up her shirt. when the 21-year-old Army asshole offered my fag and I a tour of his oh-so-20-year-old apartment, I accepted so as to quell the heat in my eyes and the dry, sandpapery, golf ball-sized lump that was rolling between my throat and my mouth. To this day, I'm not sure if that ball was vomit or some primordial, angry scream.

The bathroom. The hallway. My darling bisexual soon-to-be-gay faggot making idle, excited comments about the Super Nintendo out in the living room, about the burn mark I'd put in the carpet when I'd ashed a cigarette without paying attention.

The bedroom.

I wasn't paying attention. Too busy admiring the orange glow of the room, the way it hit the canopy and looked purple and blue from certain angles. Too busy complimenting the sheets, the dresser, the handcuffs beneath it - military grade; hard steel with swiveling closures.

Too busy to hear him lock the door.

I don't know what happened, what progression of awkward, unwilling action occurred. I remember his grin - smug, sleazy. Too-white teeth and eyes that crinkled and creased a the corners. Stubble that itched and scratched and irritated the sides of my face, my body, the place that was too high to be my cunt and too low to be my stomach. But, suddenly, I was naked and he was on me and I was saying no. No, no, no. Over and over again and he kept moving. I saw Dirty Hippy, saw her calling me a pussy, her baby Christian girl who needed to be corrupted, telling me I should shut up and get laid. I stopped loving her, but it was at the cost of forgetting I was worth loving.

Hands I didn't want on me, fingers around my wrist, my neck - "all girls like this, right?" That fucking stubble against my side, at the place where there's no fat and my ribs show through. It felt like it was burning, like he was striking flint against my bones over and over, desperately trying to start some fucking campfire at boot camp. Everything was orange for some reason; the dim lights and the vodka, rum, and tequila and God knows what else sloshing around in my head just made it hazy and bright and brownish orange; our skin blended into the light. Rough, long fingers inside of me, nails too long. Begging. "You have the cutest clit." Tongue. His cock in my mouth, telling me to let him fuck me. Over and over again, I said no.

And, suddenly, like that, he stopped. Took his dick out of my mouth, shoved it back in his pants and fastened his belt. My underwear looked dark and foreign on the floor, the blue of my shirt too bright. Awkward. Sickly.

I pulled my clothes on and Dirty Hippy cheered as I walked out of the room and towards the restroom. I vomited before I could close the door and a large, black boy stumbled in, told me to lock the fucking door, and stumbled back out as I flushed and gagged and flushed and gagged and identified the carrots and watermelon and assorted breads that came out with each heave. Lettuce here, tomato there. Seeds. Bile. More flushing. Listerine.

I stumbled outside and back to the party, where Dirty Hippy lifelessly put her tongue in my mouth and my fag put his arms around me and kissed me and wiped away the few tears that managed to escape when the Army asshole wasn't looking.

And a month later, I went back.

He ushered everyone out of the room upon my arrival and unbuckled his belt, told me to "finish what I'd started." His hands tangled in my hair. I felt dirty and burned holes in his carpet until he kicked us out.

I felt dirty for two years, until he stopped calling and moved away.

Sometimes, in the dark recesses of my dreams, I can still see his stupid fucking grin.

Was it a dream?

Dirty Hippy's hand finds mine the moment my parents' car pulls out of sight and we join the kinds we pretend not to know outside the food court, lighting up Turkish Golds and cigarillos, popping tiny yellow pills into our mouths and waiting for the caffeine to kick in. 

We enter the mall and her hand leaves mine, instead sliding around my back and resting at my waist where she digs her nails in until the tiny indentations they leave turn spotty and red with blood. She tugs me into Hot Topic and puts me in pleather pants that make my ass disappear; she calls me her dyke and hits me with a poorly-made imitation bullwhip while we wait in line for me to purchase the pants. 

At home that night her hands tug my shirt over my head, leaving me in my bra and the pants she picked out for me as she tugs me onto my waterbed. I bury my face in the place where her neck and shoulder meet and am overwhelmed by Red Jean No. 5 and the faint remaining scent of nicotine and pot from our earlier excursion to the mall. 

My room is insanely hot and I don't know if it's us or the ineffective space heater on my bedroom floor. My hand traces the barely-there muscles of her stomach and as I try to kiss her, she turns away from me, telling me she can't do that because she's not gay. 

I can still taste the margarita on her lips from last weekend as I fall asleep staring at her shoulders.

The spiral.

Dirty Hippy begins dating a boy with greasy black hair and I begin to scream. 

I drag a utility knife across my wrist, my arm, the places where my ribs are closest to kissing the air (I have stopped eating and they look as though they are trying to escape the stretched white skin holding them prisoner) and I am screaming "LOVE ME LIKE YOU LOVE HIM!" My mother sees the crusty, scabbed lines and does not say a word; her eyes are filled with wet denial and I smile at her as I get on the bus to drive to the zoo, the white fishnet on my arms creating peppermint swirls on my wrists. Nothing is wrong, I tell her. Nothing is wrong.

I hold her when we go to sleep in spite of him and I am screaming "I AM SO MUCH BETTER FOR YOU!" The girl with the Egyptian eye tattoo who I have come to love (for being cool) and hate (for replacing me in the Hippy's hierarchy of friends) calls me an emo cunt when I am not around and Dirty Hippy tells me we can't do that anymore.

I take ten, eleven, twelve caffeine pills at night before heading to the mall for the ritualistic drug-addled Friday night escapades and and vomit in sterile whiteness of a downstairs Macy's restroom and I am screaming "I DO NOT WANT THIS!" That night, when I am puking and sobbing and shaking and pulling out my hair in clumps, is the first  night Dirty Hippy will understand what she has done to me, what she has reduced me to. What I have allowed myself to become.

I drink two bottles of Robitussin and I am screaming "I AM TRYING TO FORGET YOU!" Technicolor swirls and fuzzy edges allow me to be happy in spite of myself in twelve hour spans where nothing hurts and I no longer want to die. The next day, I realize I can live without her, without the coma her fickleness has put me in. I throw away my stash of drugs, alcohol, and the utility knife. I begin to shake without the chemicals that have sustained me. I panic for days, stretching into one, two weeks. I hurt. I begin eating again - not much, but anything is a step up - and the dark circles under my eyes begin to fade, ever so slightly.

A year later, I cut off all my hair and take off my braces. I begin listening to angry punk bands with names like "Discharge," and "Crass," as well as bands with electronic bass beats with names like "Combichrist" and "VNV Nation," (Victory! Not Vengeance!).  My jeans get tighter, my belts get pointier, and I have food fights with new people like Egg and Thom York and Myra and a boy we call "Patches" for the patches sewed onto his pants at lunch as we mock the hirsute boy ("Wolf Man,") and the boy we think has leprosy ("Patch Adams"). I am screaming "I HAVE FORGOTTEN YOU. I AM FINE."

Killed over Avignon.

I'm drunk and surrounded by Michael Cera circa Juno clones and barely-dressed girls. My cowboy boots are just slightly too big and I trip over myself and opposing scantily-clad traffic as I walk up the steep, unstable stairs from the apartment basement to the ground floor in search of a seedy bathroom, the floor of which is covered in piss and vomit and - oh Christ, is that blood? is that a fucking tampon?- Lord knows what else. I wait in a line behind the Pope and roast in the Hellish humidity generated by hundreds of bodies rubbing up against each other.

I consider the number of people who are probably unknowingly contracting a disease or infection as yet another Michael Cera clone eases up behind me in the line. He attempts to Make Small Talk, which I can tell from the hesitation seeping out of his eyes like so many embarrassed tears that this is a feat requiring great effort on his part. I gratify him with response until the bathroom door opens and I realize I'm next as the Pope glides past me. 

As I leave the restroom, I nod to Michael Cera and scurry back into the basement to find myself alone in a sea of bunnies and ironic New Jersey kids dressed as guidos. The people I came with are gone.

Outside it is cool and smells of exhaust and vomit. It's better than the heat and sweat of the party house and I take a moment to feel some semblance of cleanliness in the crisp October air. I find a group of kids I don't know and ask if they are headed in the direction of Broad Street; they nod in the affirmative and I join their group, accepting gum from a boy I don't know dressed as Harry Potter. 

And suddenly, they are gone and I am on Broad Street with no one else in sight. The parties have not ended yet and this portion of the street is eerily devoid of life, save for the cars ad busses whizzing past, their lights blinding and dizzying in my drunken stupor. I get my bearings on campus, though I am barely hanging on to them, and stumble in the direction of the end of campus, to the two towers I've come to call home. 

Inside and safe on my floor, I encounter the people who abandoned me and fling questions only to be told it's my own fault. I return to my room and find the tiny, plastic case filled with guitar picks and two tabs of acid wrapped carefully in tin foil - I consider my ability to make this night better or, potentially, worse as I hear screaming outside my door. 

I throw open the door and a boy I have come to hate is standing with a boy I have learned not to trust are screaming lyrics at each other, the latter slumped against the wall across from me. I do not have any grasp of the situation until I realize I've suddenly cleared the three-foot gap between us and am yelling at the top of my voice, shoving him with a palm closer to the wall. Before I know what's happened, one of the boys from the floor is throwing me back in my room and dragging the other two away.

I sit on the floor and cry until five in the morning. The next day, I am a shell and hushed whispers succeed my every move. I become a ghost, remembered passively. I become the Dead Man in Yossarian's tent, gone before I'd ever been given the chance be there.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...

When I was three years old, I tied a blanket around my neck and sat at the top of the stairs for two hours, contemplating the drop. It didn't look too terribly bad, and I knew very little - if not nothing - about momentum and physics at the time.

All I knew was that Superman and Batman could do it. I hadn't discovered the distinction between their worlds and mine yet; I hadn't discovered that they possessed gifts that no one else did. I hadn't discovered that their worlds contained possibilities ours didn't.

I hadn't realized that they were more special than I.

The carpet on the stairs was not-quite sky blue; it was a little darker than that, a little more grey. I thought about Superman, flying through stormy, dense clouds, dodging lightning bolts . I thought about Batman, leering over a building at some faceless villain, his shoulders and cowl blending into the night sky behind him. At the bottom of the stairs lay an expanse of hard, neat white tile, sterile and uncracked and uniform like a cotton ball cloud on a summer's day.

I stood up and puffed out my chest, tightening the blanket around my neck and standing at the very edge of the top step, so close to wobbling off that I curled my toes around its lip as a bat would in order to to cling to a tree branch. I grasped the rail nailed so neatly into the wall and jumped.

When I woke up, I was still lying on the tile, my mother hovering over me with a look of panic. All I could remember was the way that first, blue stair looked when it made contact with my face. Its softness seemed magnified - ironically, of course, because in actuality it was almost as hard as the tile.

Somehow, I had always imagined the sky to be softer. 

Not quite like the wind.

It smelled like rain the day I stopped running.

It's been years since then - getting close to ten, actually - but, sometimes, when it's overcast and humid and everything smells just a little earthier, just a little more like the worms are waking up and poking their heads out of the ground, I remember it.

The Seamstress and I were staying at a resort with her parents during one of their extravagant yearly psychology conventions; the kind where we ate from a barbeque buffet each meal and smuggled desserts back to our room, where we read manga and played handheld games and watched too many direct-to-order movies. We'd grown tired of the swimming pool and the television and the poorly-furnished arcade and were quickly growing restless in our suite. One of us - I can't remember who - suggested a day trip to Hershey Park in order to get away from the muted, meticulously decorated room; near-obscene garishness was the break we craved, and we begged for it for days.

Her parents caved towards the end of the week. We loaded into the car with cash for food and plugged our ears with music while the Gameboys that shook in our hands emitted tiny, digitized blip-bink-bop tunes. It was sunny when we left, but the day had turned grey and moist by the time we arrived; we pulled umbrellas from the trunk and carried them under our arms and spoke in faux-British accents while we twisted fake mustaches. 

We stood before the giant, swinging pirate ship as it swung from one extreme to another. 

"This one is my favorite," I told the Seamstress, craning my neck and following the ride's ebbing motion with an outstretched finger. "It gives you that funny 'woosh!' feeling in your stomach." We elbowed each other as it came to a stop and quickly piled into the farthest left seat, so as to reach the maximum possible height the ride would allow. 

My hair was long then, pulled back with a little elastic band. I remember two, maybe three drops of rain hit me in the face as we rocked back and forth; I worried they would stop the ride, worried they would close the park, but no such decision was made. Ecstatic, I hopped off the boat and we made a dash to get back in line. The Seamstress, always a few steps ahead of me, leaped off of the ride's steel platform to the pavement beneath us; I followed suit.

I didn't realize what had happened until I stood to walk again; my right foot gave out beneath me, and I was back on the pavement where I'd started, and, behind me, a small divot in the pavement marked where I had landed unevenly the first time. I tried again, and suddenly it felt like a million little pins had wiggled their way under my skin, under the muscle, to a terrifying place where nothing could get them out. I tried again and again; I tried until the Seamstress plucked me off the ground and carried me to a bench where her parents gave me suspicious-yet-sympathetic looks and urged me to try walking again.

The medical transportation vehicle made annoying whirring-wooping noises as it bounced around on the gravel and cement below; the car on the way to the hospital did the same - sans the siren - and every jolt and jar agitated me more. By the time I was x-rayed, my ankle was black and swollen to seven times its normal size.

Nothing was broken, but no one ever figured out what exactly was wrong; I was placed on crutches for two days and in a walking splint for two weeks, after which the doctors told me I was fine. 

Only, I couldn't run anymore.