Rickie

I have this thing with skin.  I want to peel it off.  All of it.  At first, it was just the easy skin; you know, the skin over your lips, around your nails, on top of your knuckles.  After a while, I started peeling at, well--everything.  I thought that maybe, if I grew new skin, I'd be a different person.  Back then, I didn't know bruises stained all the way to the bone.  I thought it was just your skin that bore the hurt--the shame.  So I tried to peel them off, the bruises.  I'd take the kitchen knife and run the edge up and down my skin, telling myself that once it was over, I'd be pure; the bruises would disappear, and my secrets would be gone.  It was kind of like skinning an apple, except instead of being red on the outside and white on the inside, it was the other way around.  And how beautiful the inside of an apple looked.

But, it didn't work that way.  Beneath the red, my bones still ached, and my heart still fumbled a beat every time my dad came through the door with hungry eyes and powder below his nose.  Under my skin, I was the same--all that peeling had been for nothing.  If anything, it'd only made the blows more painful.  Turns out my dad likes the color red.

Years passed, and slowly, my compulsion went away.  It was hard in the summer months, where the sun was loud and angry, sticking dirty little secrets to my bones with its heat.  It was useless, though, the peeling and cutting.  My skin never grew back the clear marble I'd wanted--wished--it to be.  Instead, it grew back coarse; rugged; dying.  It was harder to cut through each time I did it.  Then one day, it hit me:  my skin, it was no marble, but it was also nothing like how it'd looked before I started with the mutilation.  It was uglier, greyer--but also thicker.  Harder to see through.  There was my answer.  I couldn't make myself into a different person, so I had to become one.  See everything differently; find humor in it.  And that's how Rickie was born.  

In a sense, Rickie was still me.  After all, it was just my middle name I was getting everyone at school to call me by.  And I still knew, behind Rickie's vulgar jokes and wide smiles, that he wasn't real.  None of this was real.  As much as I'd wanted to be him, I couldn't.  

But Rickie, he was useful.  Most of the time, Rickie came in when I couldn't take the stares--the shame.  Rickie was a good liar.  But, sometimes, Rickie would also come and take over when my dad's fists on my ribs started hurting too much or when the school councilor took me into his office and asked if everything was alright at home.  I couldn't take the punches, or lie, but Rickie could.  And to Rickie, it wasn't even lying, because he was whoever I wanted him to be.  And if Rickie didn't have a cocaine addict dad who beat the shit out of him, then he didn't and could look Mr. Andrews in the eye and say so.  Rickie would rescue me.  For once, I had someone else besides myself to count on; to be there for me.  It didn't matter that it was an illusion.

I was thirteen when I stopped being able to tell the difference.  I came home to my dad and Victor sitting at the kitchen table, exchanging envelopes.  When they saw me, they just stared--kept on staring and staring and staring.  I wanted to disappear--and I did, melting into the crooked tiles and cracking cupboards; the tired walls and sink bleeding copper.  But then, everything stopped, and things started rewinding themselves.  I was back in my body, and Victor, he stopped being the man in my memories who'd given me candy on Valentine's Day and presents on Christmas--the man who told me I was a good kid--and started being the man with his fingers inside my shirt; the man who was going to make me empty.  And my dad, he wouldn't even look at me.   

If you don't want to do this, I can, said Rickie.  I pushed him away, because somewhere inside, I still believed in heroes; believed Victor to be one.  But that was an illusion, too.

Victor didn't take me out of the apartment and away from the crooked tiles, cracking cupboards and tired walls that was my life.  He didn't save me from my dad, despite all my years of thinking he would be the one to do so.  Instead, he led me deeper inside--into my dad's room--and started taking me apart.  Suddenly, I wanted rougher skin--more scars, more bruises, more calluses--because right then, I was marble.  Frozen.  And Victor, he was just like my dad.  He liked breaking things, except unlike my dad, he liked to break things slowly.  Slowly.  That's how he did it.  Slowly, his finger polluted every inch of my flesh.  Slowly, he bent me down.  And slowly, he lifted my chin.
Let me do this.  



The carpet was warm around my knees.  The blinds and the sun drew lines on my collarbones.  I disappeared.        
   
                 


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