(Author's note: This is a revised version of a story I posted on here before under a different account name so those of you who think it looks awfully familiar, don't be alarmed I'm not a plagiarist. Read it and let me know what you think. It certainly was a lot of FUN writing it. lol)
Look: I can’t talk to you about all the bad hormones in my brain and all the stuff it made me do without telling you about Naomi. Naomi had some bad hormones swishing around in her brain too so she was the pretty much the only girl who could really appreciate what a problem it was. For example she was one of the only people who knew about my face-blindness. Every time I meet someone new I forget their face as soon as I stop looking at them. That is unless it’s something really ugly or unusual about them. It’s not that big a deal because I’ve learned to cope with it by drawing pictures of people. I draw pictures like photographs and it helps me hammer every detail of their faces into my brain. The face-blindness is an inconvenience, but it’s not nearly as bad as my thing with numbers.
Thanks to my bad hormones I don’t see numbers the way normal people do. In my mind all the integers have a picture to go with them. I’ve drawn pictures of all the natural numbers up to twenty thousand, but I could draw almost any integer if I focused on it hard enough. The number three thirty three for example is the type of number you’d wanna invite to a party, two eighty nine is offensive to look at and pi’s probably the most beautiful number in the universe. If there really is a god I’d imagine his face would look something like pi. With complex numbers or sometimes just integers that satisfy a certain property I’ll get these special feelings, tastes or even smells. Like if something is a prime number I get this feeling like someone’s pressing something cold against my forehead. Or if I think about a vampire number such as 246 x 510 = 125460 it makes my heart beat a little bit faster even if I haven’t proven it’s a true vampire number yet.
On the one hand it makes it so that I can do math problems in my head most people need a calculator and a bachelor’s degree to solve. But it also has its drawbacks, like when I was in kindergarten and my teacher asked me to write on the chalkboard what two plus two was. I knew the answer was four but I didn’t know it was “4”, that stupid little symbol. To me the number four looks like a tall tree with diamonds for fruit and a snake tangled up in the branches. I tried to draw a picture of that on the chalkboard and my teacher yelled at me and said I was wrong. All the other kids in the classroom laughed at me. I got held back a year in school because I couldn’t make the connection between the pictures in my head and those stupid symbols everyone else uses. Naomi understood that about me when few other people could.
Wait, I should probably tell you who Naomi is first. Nye was this Latina girl who lived in the same hood I lived in after I ran away from home. I met her when I was almost twelve and she was thirteen. Even though she was beautiful the only thing I could remember about her face was that staring at it felt like a vampire number. I forgot what she looked like a million times before I built up enough courage to ask permission to draw a picture of her. Actually, I didn’t even ask her up front. One day she had one of her buddies walk up to me and tell me she wanted to braid my afro into cornrows. I told her I’d be right over and I brought my sketchpad with me. It was just the two of us alone at her place. It took her forever to finish braiding my hair cuz I kept turning my head to look up at her. When I was finished I showed her my drawing and she kissed me for the first time. We did lotta things for the first time that night, but I don’t feel like talking about them right now.
The night I do wanna talk about happened a few years after we first met. Naomi lived in this old three story house that the owners converted into apartments a few years ago. She lived with this white lady who Social Services dumped her with but she was hardly ever home so we pretty much had the place to ourselves whenever we wanted. Even if her foster mom did walk in on us, which she did a couple of times, she’d just act like it wasn’t nothing and go straight to her room.
On this particular night it was just me and Nye sitting on the living room sofa. All she had on was a pink bra and these white cotton panties with Tweety Bird on the back of them. Me and Nye had been drinking this cheap joven tequila we found underneath the sink and when the bottle was half empty me and her started playing this little game of ours. What she’d do was take out this little glass pipe with the red stripes running along it to make it look like a candy cane, she’d take that pipe and put some weed into the bowl and ask me a math question like “what’s two eighty eight time two eighty eight.”
I’d tease her, acting like I didn’t know what it was, or that it was too big for me to count or something. She’d say in Spanish that she had a prize for me if I got it right. I loved the sound of her Spanish almost as much as her prizes so finally I said, “it’s a hundred fifty thousand five hundred forty four.”
She must’ve already known I was right, or else she didn’t care because she gave me my prize anyway. She put the pipe to her lips and sucked in as much smoke as her lungs could hold. Then she pressed her lips against mine and breathed out. I inhaled the smoke right from her lungs, tasting her as I did it. She tasted like the square root of three. I did the same to her and by the time the weed was all gone we’d forgotten about the game, the apartment and our whole lives. We curled up with each other on the sofa, feeling the smoke induced electric currents radiating from each other’s skin. It tingled like a thousand ants, just walking across us. I felt her heartbeat like a vampire number. It was the most relaxed I’d felt that whole week and she knew it too. That’s when she decided to tell me her stepdad raped her.
Now if it was one thing that annoyed me about Naomi it was the way she’d go off saying some random shit just to say it, especially when she was high. For instance I’d asked Nye about the little circle shaped scars on her back a couple times before but she’d always dodge my questions. But at that moment she just came right out and said it all plain and simple like she was telling me what the weather was like outside.
My answer was every bit as dull and simple as my whole body felt at that moment. “What?” I asked her. I’d heard what she said just fine, but it just seemed like the sort of thing you’re supposed to say when someone tells you they were raped.
She said, “When I was eight years old.”
I asked her if she ever told anybody and she said, “I’m telling you right now,” in this bratty tone she always used when she wanted me to feel stupid.
I looked out the window at the sun starting to go down behind the tenement rooftops. The rooftops was perfectly flat and they had this look to them like they was hammering the sunlight into golden foil sheets. It made me think about derivatives.
She said, “It went on til I was ten.”
“Why didn’t you tell yer mom?”
Nye laughed at that. “She wasn’t gonna do nothin’. She’d lose her fix if she broke up with him.”
What she meant by that was her mom was a dope fiend and her stepdad wasn’t really her stepdad at all, he was her mom’s dealer. You can always tell when you’re in a dope fiend’s house because it’s always real dark and it feels like an oven in there. Heat to me feels like an imaginary number, the higher the power of i is the warmer it makes my body feel even though all imaginary numbers can only equal one of four things. I thought about Nye when she was a little kid, curled up in a little ball inside a dark room, the air thick with imaginary numbers, the fresh circle shaped burns forming a trail from the base of her neck to the top of her butt. Nye’s whole family had some really bad hormones in their brains.
“I told him stop at first,” she said, “but then he slapped me across the face til I quit fighting.”
“That sucks.”
“He hated crying too. If I cried he’d burn me with his cigarette til I stopped.”
I squeezed her waist a little bit in hopes that she’d take the hint and stop talking. It didn’t work.
“Funny thing is when I was good, and I didn’t try to fight him, he’d be real sweet about it. He’d kiss me on the forehead, then on my lips,” she started talking all slow and sentimental like. “And then he’d kiss me on my neck…then down to my chest, and then…”
“I get the point.”
It bothered me because Nye used to kiss me like that all the time. She kissed me the same way the night she braided my hair for the first time. I was thinking about that night when Nye put her fingers on my arm and started moving them up to my shoulder like they was two little legs walking on me.
She asked me a question sounding all sweet and innocent. “Will you do something for me?”
I asked her what it was and she said it’d be really hot if I slapped across the face next time we had sex. I just laughed and said, “Yeah right.”
She got up and sat on my lap, facing me with her arms folded across her breasts. She had this adorable pouty look on her face.
She said, “I’m serious.”
I said, “Come on, man. I’m not into that shit.”
“It’s just for pretend. You don’t have to be mad about it or nothin’.”
I told her it was no way I was gonna hit her and she just groaned and got up from the sofa. She walked to her bedroom with her long black hair sweeping across her shoulders and Tweety Bird dancing across her ass with each step. When she came back she had on a white blouse and a pink skirt and her pink purse to match it. I asked her where she was going, but she didn’t answer me.
“Aw, come on,” I groaned, “don’t be like that.”
She left, slamming the door behind her. I knew she wanted me to chase after her, but I wasn’t about to play her little games. I put some more weed into the pipe and smoked while watching TV. I wanna say I was watching the Transformers cartoon when she came back, but it could’ve been ThunderCats for all I remember. It was just before the streetlights came on when she walked in the door. I noticed that there was some dry blood underneath her nose and her cheek was swollen a little bit. She walked next to the sofa and bent over to pick up the tequila bottle from off the floor. As she bent over I could see underneath her skirt that she wasn’t wearing the Tweety Bird panties no more. I knew she did it on purpose so I could see it.
I asked her what she had done and she said, “What do you care?” with her back still facing me, “You don’t give a fuck what happens to me.”
I grabbed her by the wrist and turned her around. The smell cigarette smoke was on her blouse. Nye hated cigarettes.
“What the fuck did you do?!”
Nye pulled her hand away from me, got up in my face and yelled, “I do whatever the fuck I want!”
She had the face of an angel and a look as cool and relaxed as a coiled snake. The way she was acting towards me I think she wanted me to hit her and I’m not gonna lie, I really wanted to. I wanted to break her angel face like I wanted to burn the Mona Lisa, like I wanted to smash the Pietà. I wanted to destroy something beautiful. I balled up my fist, but instead of doing what we both wanted me to do I stepped back and punched the wall above the sofa. I left a hole in the drywall and the little portrait of the Virgin Mary fell off its hook and shattered on the floor.
I said, “You’re a stupid bitch, you know that!”
She laughed and said, “Is that so?”
“You’re right. I don’t give a fuck what happens to you. I hope he kills you nex’ time.”
I snatched the tequila bottle from her hands and stormed out the apartment. The neighbors must’ve been pissed. The way me and Nye was acting we both must’ve been drunk. Not drunk from the liquor or the weed but drunk from our own bad hormones. They always came to a boil when we was around each other for too long. Nye’s brain was just as messed up as mine but in a different way. Each one of us was the other’s drug, each other’s poison. And we hated ourselves and each other for it.
Part 2: post768174.html#p768174
(If you guys think it's mind-numbingly long or if it's just unbelievably awful, then let me know so I can stop polluting the board with it.)
