Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
“I didn’t touch a cockroach!” he protested. “My fingers never touched it, or the glue trap.” He wiggled his fingers in front of my face. “See, silly girl? I didn’t let it infect me.”
My tears stopped. My face fell. “You have to leave now.”
When I woke up the next day, I pulled on a pair of sunglasses I had bought for $199 and went across the street to buy a breakfast cupcake. Digging in my pockets, I scraped together my pennies to make the dollar-fifty price.
Cupcake in hand, I stormed back to my apartment to begin my cupcake ritual. It doesn’t taste good unless you tear at it the right way. If you just bite it, the cake tastes like what it is: eggs, sugar, flour, butter. But if you tear the cupcake apart at just the right angle, you unleash a culinary atom bomb with a pleasantly soothing effect. If you eat the cupcake by chomping right into it, you just feel fat. Eat it right and you get the Valium effect—you still feel fat but you also feel numb and sleepy. Cheaper than John, I laughed.
Of course I don’t actually laugh out loud, which I guess means it isn’t that funny. And if it isn’t that funny, it must be sad. So I start crying. Probably for the second time that morning. I lose track. It’s been so long since I’ve had a day without tears. Until recently, though, they mostly hit around five o’clock.
I looked in the mirror. I heard Cyrinda come in, but my eyes didn’t move from the mirror. I turned the medicine cabinet upside down trying to find a razor. There was only a dirty Bic and I couldn’t get the safety guard off. I had to cut the plastic with a pair of toenail scissors. The banality of self-hatred is perhaps the most alarming thing about it. This razor, I think, looking at it as intently as I had my own reflection, is supposed to make me prettier, more touchable, so that I will not disappoint or disgust a man who deigns to fuck me.
Bending a segment of razor at a right angle, I drew it across my throat. Not deep enough to die, but deep enough to bleed fast enough to match my tears. Then I lay back on my bed and listened to John Coltrane, trying to hear the pattern, falling into sleep as the answer came to me, leaving just as fast when my first snore showed it the door. The cut crusted over with blood and the stream stopped, trapped inside me.