“Do it, just do it.”
“Okay well stop moving around all over the place then will you?”
“Jen, wait, maybe-”
“Uh, guys, is there going to be blood?”
“What the hell? No of course there won’t be blood, shut up Joe.”
“No I’m just asking ‘cause like, my ma got mad the last time youse were over when one of you spilled blue powerade on the carpet so…”
“I said there’ll be no blood, relax.”
“Well I’m just saying that I might faint if I see blood, because this time at school before some lad in my base class threw a whiteboard eraser and it hit my face and my nose bled and then I blacked out in the boy’s bathroom and nobody found me for like ten minutes, even though, like, to me, like it felt like no time at all was after-”
“Oh my God, Joe, if you don’t shut the fuck up I’m going to stick this thing crooked.”
“Um, try not to, please.”
She grabs my chin and holds me still, “Then don’t move, and Joe,” She jabs a finger in his direction, “Not a word from you, I’m dead serious. Right,” Her tongue pokes out the corner of her mouth as she eyes my ear with determination. The ice she’s holding melts a trail down my neck and into the collar of my t-shirt and I don’t dare react. “Has that gone numb?”
“I dunno yet.”
“Probably has,” She tosses the cube into Joe’s sink with a metallic thunk and positions the needle on my lobe.
Shane pipes up from the table, “any blue powerades going, by the way?”
“Shut up!” I can feel her hand trembling, and the sewing needle rasps against my soft virgin skin. She exhales slowly, “Okay, one, two…” she hesitates and my eyes follow her movements nervously as she pushes her hair behind her ears and then leans for a closer look. She’s so close that her shaky breath feathers against my cheek. Take two. “Okay, okay, seriously this time. One, two…” I feel it. I hear it. And a grunt of disgust comes from the back of her throat as the needle pieces through my earlobe. “Oh, God,” There’s silence. My eyes screw shut as I wait for the pain.
“Does it hurt, Jude?” Joe sounds queasy.
“Why? Does it look like it should hurt?”
“I told you it doesn’t hurt,” Jen dismisses, “...but it’s fine, right?”
“I think so. It just feels kinda… hot?” I peel my eyes open.
“Yeah, well, you’re grand, now,” she reaches to the counter behind her, “stud or hoop?”
“Stud.”
“Okay well too bad they only had very girly looking studs in Claire’s Accessories, so I got hoops.”
“Why’d you offer, then?”
She dangles the little purple shiny packaging in front of my face to distract me, “Look at that, hm? Very cool, manly hoops.”
“Yeah, very manly.” and she fumbles around my ear for several moments trying to get it through the new hole in me, and that’s when it hurts the worst, as she’s tugging and poking and digging her sharp thumbnails in, but I pretend that it doesn’t because Shane and Joe are in the room and sixteen year old boys aren’t supposed to show things like pain and discomfort in front of each other, it’d be weird and socially unacceptable. Vulnerability is illegal among us.
If it were Jen and I alone in this caravan I’d at least be whining at her, if not actually tearing up about the discomfort of it all.
She closes the clasp at the back of the hoop and presents me to the room, “What do ye think?”
“A bit red,” says Joe as he clutches the rim of the sink with milk white knuckles “Is it meant to be that red? That’s not bleeding, is it? Ah Jesus, I don’t think we should have done this…” Shane glances away from the olympic basketball game on the TV and huffs out a laugh. “Gay ear,” he says.
Jen pauses, “Gay ear?”
“Yep, ‘tis the gay ear.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Obviously, like, you’re after piercing the right lobe; the one that you pierce when you want all the other fellas to know that you fancy them or whatever, like, I dunno. I just heard that some place. Shoulda pierced the left.”
I tug on it self consciously though it’s tender. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Lads on the football team probably, look,” He crosses his arms with authority, “I go to an all boys school. I know what the Gay Ear is.”
I look up at Jen and tell her that I don’t mind that it’s the Gay Ear.
“That’s for life though,” Joe pipes up unhelpfully, “You’ll always have that hole in your ear now, so even if you take the earring out everyone is gonna see that you have your right ear pierced and they’re all gonna think-”
“I don’t care if they think I’m gay. What does it matter?”
“Yeah but you’re not gay, and it’s the Gay Ear,” Shane argues, “That’s the point. You’ll end up confusing everyone, and men won’t know what to do when they see you out and about and all that.”
“That feels like kind of a backwards, 90s thing to say, honestly.”
“Nobody’s being homophobic, fuck sake. It’s just the code.”
“Well it’s pierced for life now, isn’t it? What the fuck do you want me to do?”
“Christ sake,” Jen seizes my shoulder and yanks me back into the seat, “Pass me that ice, Joe, I’ll just do the other side then and you can all shut up annoying me about it, alright?”
“Fucking Gay Ear, who comes up with that shite?” she mutters to herself, and pushes the mostly melted cube to my left lobe so we can start all over again.
~.~.~.~.~
Afterwards I squeeze into the tiny caravan bathroom to look at myself in the mirror. My ears are furious red, but at least the hoops are even. I think. Jen has given me table salt from Joe’s kitchen cabinet to wash them with, and I do it, I fill one hand with limey water from the taps and pour a random amount of salt in with it. I don’t know what I’m doing, but it's fine because if they get infected I'll just take them out. I’ve never seen another boy with both ears pierced, but that’s fine too, because I’ll just pretend it’s a trend from America that nobody else has heard of yet.
When I come out Jen turns away from the television screen to look at me.
“Looks okay,” she says.
“Yeah,” I catch sight of the clock behind her and realise that our ear piercing activities sliced only thirty minutes out of this long, empty July afternoon. “So, um, what now?”
“Any more bright ideas?”
I shrug, “I dunno. We could go play tennis?”
“Kids club is at the boat club until six and my sister is always hanging out with those inbred looking fellas at the one in the caravan park,” Shane says, “So no.”
“Joe, do you think your brother could go buy us cigarettes again? We could smoke up by the-”
“Nah man he’s working today.”
“Well the olympics are on so I suppose we could-”
“I couldn’t be bothered with sports,” says Jen, “nor do I want to sit here pretending to care. And now we’ve done all we were meant to do today and there’s nowhere else to hang out…” She looks at me for help as though I’m supposed to know how to keep three bored teenagers entertained through another endless summer day smack bang in the middle of a recession.
I sigh and throw my hands up in defeat, “Well… I dunno. Will we shave my head?”
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because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.
you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.
you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.
don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.
if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.
you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:
how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!
aren't you happy yet?
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