Tell Me We’re Safe in the House
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Short Story, Fiction, Fiction Friday, Relationships, Writing

When I was 16 I fantasized about touching myself, of touching others, of being touched by others. Love will do you no good, all the songs said. I was the photo in the yearbook people forgot about, the girl who got high school reunion invites from my tormentors, all of whom misspelled my name. You should come to the Waffle House. We’ve got a three-hour buffet and a top-shelf happy hour! In response, I said, oh, that’s so tempting, but I’ve got a full evening ahead of wrist cutting and pain pill taking. You’d be surprised how long taking your life actually takes, I said, and the tormentors laughed as if they couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t tell which of their cruelties was worse: being taunted or ignored.

When I resembled something that could pass for human, they’d ask their perfunctory questions and I’d look at the clock and they at their watch and I’d say, I’m fine, just fine.

One day, a boy followed me in a red Rabbit convertible and told me to get in. That year, he was the guy voted most likely to… I could tell he didn’t want to be seen with me because he took the long way home, wandering through the back roads. Steadying his hands on the wheel, he said, “I know what it’s like when you feel like you don’t fit, when all you want is to be like everybody else but you’re not. And you know it, and they know it, but we all keep playing pretend like we’re five again. When do we stop playing pretend?”

Don’t fit? Play pretend? So says the guy dating a Pantene commercial. While he filed college applications, I was summoned to the guidance counselor’s office and asked, yet again, if there was something wrong at home, to which I’d respond, are you kidding me? Teachers and counselors asked about my life, but they didn’t want the details. They wanted my darkness in past tense because no one wanted to deal with present or future tense sadness. I contained my sadness, watched it play out in front of me like a car crash I couldn’t look away from, over and over, until it became too much to bear, and suddenly it became easy for me to live a life in my head, threaded to the hope that I’d wake as another person living an alternate life — one where love was abundant and uncompromising. When I resembled something that could pass for human, they’d ask their perfunctory questions and I’d look at the clock and they at their watch and I’d say, I’m fine, just fine.

When we arrived at my house, two girls were jumping rope on the street and they gasped when they saw us. I got a ride from a boy? I told the boy in the red Rabbit that movies get made about people like him while people like me served as the punchline. “We keep watching with the hope that we wouldn’t be laughed at, that somehow, some way, we’d end up like you. But we never do. Hope does that to you — blinds you. Everybody wants your life,” I said. Before he drove off, he paused and said quietly, “I suppose they do.” Ten years later, the boy became a married man who parked his red Rabbit in a mall garage. He lodged a gun inside of his mouth and pulled the trigger. In the passenger seat, a small child cried because her father and the car were indistinguishable.

I read an interview with his wife in the local paper. “We were happy,” she cried. “We had the right life.” The reporter talked about the wife’s hands and how they couldn’t stop shaking. “Who does this? Who blows their head off in front of their child? She’s too young to know, but still. The police came and… I can’t even look at the pictures — it’s better to not remember him that way, right? We’re keeping the casket closed for obvious reasons. But I tell you — that morning before he left, he was different. I can’t explain it. I asked if something was wrong, and he shook his head. I’m fine.”

All at once I understood the boy in the red Rabbit. I understood everything.