D-Ni-Al was her mother’s middle name. Seriously.
Rain couldn’t wait until she was old enough to leave this house for good, although sometimes she would see her mother standing in the kitchen or her father walking in from the garage and a memory from her childhood would surface—something as simple as her mother letting her eat a spoonful of raw chocolate-chip or peanut-butter dough while they readied a batch of cookies for the oven or her father hoisting her up on his shoulders so she would have a clear view of the Fourth of July fireworks over the harbor—and a swift tenderness would wash over her. And then something would happen—her mother would criticize her for something stupid or her father would fart right there in the room—and the unexpected surge of softness would evaporate, gone as if it never existed, and be replaced by disgust.
It was her father who first noticed the scars. It had been a Sunday and they were having dinner. She’d grown careless and had worn a short-sleeved sweater instead of her usual long sleeves. She’d been staring at her plate, pushing the mound of potato around with her fork, wondering how she’d get through the meal, how soon her mother would let her be excused, when she heard her father say her name.
He was staring at her arms. “What in the name of Pete happened to you?”
“Nothing.” She’d hugged herself tightly, concealing her arms with their faint crosshatching of lines.
“What do you mean nothing?” He reached for her arm, turned it over. “You’re all scratched up.”
She had pulled her arm free, thought fast. “Oh, that. Dee’s cat. I was trying to pet her.”
Predictably, her mother chimed in. “A cat? Did you wash with soap after? Cats carry diseases, you know. I don’t even want to think of what their claws have been in.”
“Don’t worry. I washed and put on antiseptic cream.”
When she dared look up, her eyes met Duane’s, and instantly she saw that he knew. Freak, he’d mouthed. She’d held her breath, afraid he’d say something, but for once he hadn’t. Once caught, twice sly, she had been careful not to slip up again. She let her arm heal, started cutting places concealed by clothes, places her parents wouldn’t see unless they demanded she strip. And for months she’d been successful, fooling everyone. Until one evening last week when her mother had walked into the bathroom just as she was getting out of the shower. Rain had whipped a towel around her body. “Pleeeze,” she’d said. “Can I have a little privacy here?” Too late. Her mother had stared at her thighs, the scars and scabs and fresh cuts, and for once was yanked out of the la-la land of happy thoughts and into a total freak-out.
“Oh my God. Who did this to you?”
“No one did it to me, Mo-ther.”
“Don’t lie to me. Was it that boy? What’s his name? The one who keeps calling the house?”
By “that boy” her mother meant Chuck Meadows from biology class who had phoned exactly twice in the past three months, each time to check up on a homework assignment.
“My God, what have you got yourself into?”
“Nothing. Just get out. Get out and let me get dressed.”
Her mother left, but Rain heard her outside the door, waiting.
It had begun in October—in European history class. They were studying the chapter on the period leading up to World War I, and Mr. Marshall was droning on and on in his pale, limp voice about the shooting of some prince or duke or something. Rain had felt so jumpy she didn’t know if she would make it through even one more minute. After Lucy was murdered, she hadn’t wanted to go to school, but when a week had gone by, her parents had said, Enough. It will be better if you get back to the normal routine. Like they had a clue what she needed. Like it was even possible to return to normal. Sometimes her skin felt too tight on her body; other times she felt as if she had no body at all, as if she might rise up off the chair and float right out of the room and no one would even notice that she was gone. Just like, after the first few weeks of circling a wide swath around Lucy’s vacant desk and chair in homeroom, classmates walked right by it as if they were invisible. Now she felt as if the chair she occupied was as empty as Lucy’s, as if she had evaporated or nothing more dramatic had happened than Lucy had transferred to another school or something. She’d shut out the teacher’s voice and picked up the biology report due for her next class and pried the staple off that had been affixed at a forty-five-degree angle as Mr. Neuben demanded or you got five points deducted from your grade. Idly, she unbent it until it was straight as a wire, tested the point of one end with her thumb, and then, with no more thought than if she were doodling in the margin of her textbook, she drew the point across the smooth inner skin of her forearm. A scratch appeared, a white line against her faded summer tan. She traced the line with the end of the staple, and then again, harder now, breaking the skin. She was amazed to see blood bead on the surface in a row of tiny red pearls. For the first time in weeks, it seemed that she could breathe, as if she were no longer invisible. She drew a second line. And a third. “Hey, spaz. Whatcha doing?” Ferret-faced, syruphead Danny Weston was watching her. She pulled her sleeve down to cover the marks, shoved the staple between the pages of her text, lifted her face to Mr. Marshall. But she couldn’t forget what it had felt like, couldn’t forget how for a moment she had been able to breathe.
She thought about it for several days, ran her finger over the scrapes as they healed. Then, one night, while getting ready for bed, she could no longer ignore the claustrophobic tightness of her own skin, the growing panic, and so, as if in some part of her brain she had been planning this all along, she unearthed the green leather manicure case her grandmother had given her for Christmas and slid the tiny scissors from the silk loop that held them in place. Slowly she drew the smaller of the two blades across her arm, shocked to see it made not a scratch but a cut. The pain—and the relief—was immediate. She pressed the blade against her skin, made another cut. And no one knew. Until last week when her father had noticed. So her mother had done the total freak-out scene, threatening to call the police, so sure she was that someone had done this to her daughter.
“Who did this?” she kept asking. “And don’t hand me any nonsense about cat scratches.”
And so Rain had told her the truth, which set off a different kind of hysteria. The manicure set was confiscated. Lectures began. Whispered conferences between her parents at night while Rain eavesdropped from outside their door. “Well, I’ve had it,” her mother said. “It was bad enough with all the locks and that ridiculous security system that’s costing us an arm and a leg, but I’m done humoring her. I mean it. Now she’s gone too far.”