What About Beppy?

Actual conversation with my husband:

“Baby, will you still love me when my hair falls out?  This Rogaine’s not gonna work forever, you know.”

“Of course, baby. <pause> Will you wear a hat when we have sex?”

“I will have an assortment of sex hats.  In fact, I want a trucker hat that says ‘Great Lover.’”

“Well if it’s a trucker hat you’re gonna have to turn it backwards to go down on me.”

“Well sure.  That’ll be the signal.  When I turn my hat around you know what’s about to happen.”

Rachel hated coming home from vacations to find a messy house.  It had to be spotless before they left.  She was dusting a shelf full of knick knacks when she noticed an empty space in the dust, a clean little square where something had been and was now missing.  What had been there?  She thought for a moment, and then realized, horrified, that Patches’ ashes had disappeared.  They had put him down a few weeks ago.  Kidney failure.  It’s what kills the majority of elderly cats.  Patches was just short of 19.  Not wanting their beloved pet to end up in the wretched mass graveyard she pictured in her head, she had paid the extra fee for cremation.  The vet called her two days later to come pick up his remains.  They were in a pretty little ceramic box, just about 6 inches on all sides.  Taped to the box was a cheesy poem about leaving paw prints on your heart, which she had tossed in the trash as soon as she got home.  The box she had placed on the knick knack shelf, next to vacation souvenirs and quirky antiques.  And now it had vanished.  Where could it have gone off to?  A box of cat ashes doesn’t just sprout legs and . . . Layla.

She went up to her 7 year old daughter’s room.  Layla was packing for the trip - she had insisted on packing everything herself, and Rachel had indulged her somewhat.  She had given Layla a big suitcase for the things a 7 year old would find important, and packed a separate bag with the essentials she knew Layla would forget.  When Rachel got upstairs, Layla was trying to fit half a dozen stuffed animals in the suitcase.  She had that determined look of concentration on her face that she had when she was practicing her handwriting.

She approached her daughter, trying to be as gentle as possible.  ”Layla, sweetie?”

“Oh hi, Mommy!” she said with a proud smile on her face.  ”Look, I’m almost finished packing!”

“That’s great, honey.  Can I see what you packed?”

Layla hesitated.  ”Yeah, okay, I guess.”

Rachel sifted through the suitcase, and when she picked up a plush octopus, her fears were confirmed.  She picked up the little ceramic box and saw the look on Layla’s face change from pride to panic.

“Mommy, put Patches back!  I want him to come with us.”

“Honey, we can’t . . . that’s not . . .” she paused as a lump formed in her throat.  ”Patches needs to stay here.  He never came with us on vacations before.  Grandma just came over to feed him.  He liked having the house to himself.  I think he would have wanted to stay here.  Can we put him back on the shelf?”  Layla gave her a reluctant nod, looking at her feet.  ”You finish packing, okay?  I’m going to put Patches back and finish dusting.”  She kissed her daughter on the forehead and turned to leave.

“Mommy?”

Rachel turned around.  ”Yes, sweetie?”

“Is there cat heaven?”

She smiled and knelt down so she could look Layla in the eye.  ”Of course there is.  It’s full of yarn and birds and they all get to eat the expensive kind of cat food because everything is free in heaven.”

“Is Patches there?  He was bad sometimes like when he peed on the floor or ate the plants.  Mommy, did he go to cat hell?”

Where did children get these ideas?

“No, baby, Patches was a good boy.  We all do things we shouldn’t sometimes, but God knew that Patches was a very good cat and I’m sure he’s having the best time right now in cat heaven.”

Layla smiled a huge smile.  ”Okay, good!  I just want him to be happy.  I’m gonna finish packing now.”  She half-walked, half-skipped back to her suitcase and set about trying to cram in as many stuffed animals as possible while humming a tune of her own invention.  For better or for worse, the child’s moods shifted with a speed Rachel couldn’t understand.

Rachel went downstairs and put Patches back on the shelf.  Then she got the dirt devil out and started vacuuming the furniture.  It still had some cat hair on it.  She was allergic to cats, and had stopped taking her allergy medication after Patches died.  Now, vacuuming his hair was getting her allergies going again.  At least, she told herself that’s why she was getting teary-eyed.

In Memory of Beatrix Thomasina Braud-Huls, 1992-2011

Three years ago today, I was at breathtaking Magen’s Bay on the island of St. Thomas.  It’s a U.S. Virgin island, so we could get legally married there without jumping through any hoops.  I got a mani pedi that morning before we docked.  Once we were there and everyone was getting off the ship, we somehow ended up at the back of a huge line.  We were supposed to meet the van at 10:00.  9:00 came.  9:30.  Line still wasn’t moving.  I called the officiant to tell her we were stuck on the ship and I was afraid the van would leave, and she said not to stress on my big day.  We made it off the ship on time, of course, and met the van driver, who was such a sweetheart.  He took us to the courthouse and we signed some papers, and then he took us along the windy coastal road to the bay.

The view the whole way was stunning.  We met the officiant and the photographer and then went down to the beach, almost to the shoreline.  I honestly don’t remember what our vows were; the lady’s website had three different options for people like us who are too lazy to write our own.  We picked the most secular one.  I very distinctly remember putting the rings on each other’s fingers.  And we drank champagne and took pictures.

On the drive back, the driver stopped at a scenic overlook so we could get a few shots with that view.  Then he asked if it would be okay if he stopped to get something to eat on the way back to the ship.  I was thinking, “seriously?” but he had been so nice we went along with it.  Then he asked if we were hungry, and I said I could stand to eat.    I said I was a vegetarian and he said they had fish pies.   He went into this little shack of a restaurant and came back with three pies.  I tried to pay him, but he refused.  He told us it was his wedding gift to us.  I don’t remember his name and now I feel bad.  I gave him a massive tip that I think covered the pies.  Then, just now, 3 years later, I wondered if the pies were actually part of the wedding package and he stopped and got everyone pies.

We ate dinner at the ship’s fancy restaurant.  I think I had duck a l’orange.  I know I’ve had duck a l’orange on a cruise ship before.  I’m pretty sure it was that night.  We didn’t have sex on our wedding night.  We were tired.  Trust me, we had amazing sex other times during the cruise, but not on our wedding night.  lol I used to fantasize about losing my virginity on my wedding night.  Because premarital sex was a no-no.  Anyway, we had three more days of cruising as a married couple.  I think of that trip often and wish I could go back.  It was so wonderful to be away from work in a fancy, floating hotel.  We came home and almost immediately moved to Denver.  I think we had started packing before the cruise.

I’m rambling about stupid stuff.  The point is when I looked into his eyes on that beach, I knew how much I loved him and how much I wanted us to be together forever.  Three years later we’re still going strong.  I mean, we don’t have the perfect marriage, but it’s close.  He takes care of me when I’m sick and I look the other way when he leaves his dirty clothes all over the floor on his side of the bed.  I just don’t look at his side of the bed; I pretend it’s not there.  It’s little concessions like that that keep a marriage together.  You gotta choose your battles.  I think I’m probably the most annoying, neurotic, hypersensitive, irrational person in the world, and he puts up with it.  And I do the budget and he cooks.  He does the majority of the cleaning, too.  When I tell other women this, they drool with envy.  I sure landed me a good one.  Mother had her misgivings and first.  ”Didn’t go to college?  Smoker?  ATHEIST?!?!”  But they all love him now (and he quit smoking).  It’s been a great 3 years of marriage and 7 great years of overall companionship.  It’s been a hard year with us so far with losing Beatrix and having a seizure, but Steve is my rock.  He helps me keep things in perspective.  I said jokingly on facebook status that I married the luckiest man alive 3 years ago today, but it’s the other way around.  I’m the luckiest girl in the world to have nabbed this one at just the right time.  Here’s to another 7 years, and many more to come.

I love you so much, baby.  Let’s be together forever, ok?

This is full of gaps, but here’s my basic story.

I grew up in an affluent suburb in middle America. I didn’t know we were well off because all the other kids were even richer. Not like we were millionaires or anything, but now that I’m living on my own, I see how comfortable we were and I know that if I spawned right now I could never provide that quality of life for a child. My brother was born when I was 4 1/2. For most of my childhood, I despised him for being “the good one.” We’re friends now, but I’m still jealous of him for being good looking and talented and getting good grades and having a shit ton of friends. He barely has time for me when he comes home to visit.

My childhood and adolescence were about being bullied in school, jumping through hoops for my parents’ approval, getting in trouble for “giving attitude” to authority figures, and always being “in love” with some boy. When I was 10 years old I was diagnosed with ADD and put on Ritalin. I hated my parents for it. I thought ADD was something dumb kids had and was furious that my parents would accuse me of having it. They told me we were going to the psychiatrist because I was having so much trouble sleeping, but then he kept saying the words “attention deficit” and I played a computer game where letters come up on the screen and you push the space bar for all of them except X. It’s harder than it sounds, especially if you have ADD. Dr. Wyckoff, I can’t believe I still remember his name, told me I have six highways in my brain and I’m only supposed to have two. Even then I knew how much bullshit that was. The fuck is wrong with extra highways? That should be a good thing. I did have an incredibly active imagination. I had a whole world I would escape to. I can still picture it. I was the benevolent ruler of all its citizens. My castle was fucking amazing. And I had all kinds of friends, and a boyfriend.

The other kids in school were just brutal to me. To this day I think of children as horrible little people. They singled me out for my quirks and preyed on my vulnerability. Once they saw it was easy to make me cry, it became a game. When I switched from Catholic to public school in 5th grade, I thought I could start fresh. You know, reinvent myself. I decided to change my name from “Katie” to “Kitty.” I thought it was cool. Instead it became a source of endless ridicule. I was constantly being meowed at. When I was thirteen I got caught writing “I wish I was dead” over and over again in algebra class. I remember it with such clarity - Scott O., one of my worst bullies, yelling “she’s writing a suicide note, Ms. B!” But he didn’t say it with any sort of concern in his voice. He said it like it was funny. I was sent to a therapist and put on Paxil, then Prozac. I would stay on Prozac for another twelve years before just last week when I switched to Celexa. I used to make little surface cuts on my wrists. Such a white girl thing to do. I still have a few scars.

In high school I switched out of public school and back to Catholic - all girls, no less. At this point I started going by a shortened version of my middle name, the name I still go by now. I don’t know why I thought changing my name would suddenly grace me with the social skills I so sorely lacked. I managed to make a few friends, and got involved in the choir and the theatre program at the all boys school down the street - our school had a shitty underfunded program and the one at the boys school was amazing. I met a boy doing a play sophomore year and we were inseparable until he broke up with me senior year. I was devastated. I mean, just a sniveling mass of overinflated self pity. I graduated with a 3.6 and was barely in the top half of my class. Luckily I didn’t need UT’s “top 10%” scholarship to get my out of state fees waived. I got the National Merit scholarship, mostly by being good at standardized tests.

I arrived in Austin not knowing a soul except for three boys I had been talking to on makeoutclub - think of it as a low-rent Facebook for hipsters. Two of them are still close friends of mine. One of them fucked up my entire freshman year. If I go off on a tangent about him, this will be a fucking novel. In March, I met another boy on makeoutclub. He was 24 and a high school dropout. He worked nights at a specimen processing lab. He smoked a pack and a half a day. I fell in love with him anyway, lost my virginity and everything. Eventually he got his shit together, got his GED and whatnot. Not that that’s what’s important. He makes me happy. Next Thursday, we’ll have been together for 7 years, and next Saturday we’ll have been married for 3.

Sophomore year I changed my major from marine biology to English - what my advisor in high school had recommended from the beginning. Well nobody told me I had to take so much fucking chemistry to major in biology! I realized if I stayed in science I would continue to have no life outside of studying. By this point I had abandoned Catholicism in favor of Zen Buddhism. I stuck with that for several years before gradually getting lazier and lazier about it, and now I call myself an atheist. When I was 20 I started getting terrible headaches on a regular basis. They still haven’t gone away. I have been on every headache medication under the sun. The only things that help the pain are pot and Vicodin, which my doctor just finally prescribed to me last month. It was like he said, “fuck it, I give up.” I’m fine with that, as long as he keeps them coming. I had my first seizure when I was 21. They thought it was a bad reaction to one of the medications, but then I had more. When I was 22 I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I had been seizure free for 2 1/2 years until just last week when I had one at my father-in-law’s house in BFE Texas. We had to drive 2 hours to Dallas to get me a cat scan and morphine.

Sometimes I fancy myself a writer, but I’ve never gotten anything published further than independent literary “zines.” I pay my bills working as an administrative assistant (if you call me a secretary I will punch you in the fucking throat) at a place of higher education in the town where I grew up. I do this for a living because when I was 14, my dad said “how fast can you type?” I started working summers at his law firm and admin work became my bona fide occupational skill. I pretty much run this place and everybody knows it. Some people respect me and others treat me like “the help.” Maybe someday I’ll go back to school, get an M.A. in creative writing or something. Right now I don’t feel like I’m healthy enough to take that on. My plans for joining the Peace Corps after college were thwarted when I didn’t pass the medical exam. We didn’t even get to the epilepsy part. I was rejected for having depression and anxiety disorder. After hearing multiple Peace Corps horror stories, I’m glad I didn’t go.

Over the past year or so, my headaches have become more painful and frequent, and I’ve developed IBS and lost probably 10 pounds. I also have interstitial cystitis. That’s ulcers on your bladder. If I don’t take my meds or if I eat anything acidic, I pee fire. My doctors can’t find an underlying reason for all of my symptoms, except “stress.” I don’t know what else I can do to make my life less stressful. I have enough Xanax, Vicodin, and pot in my system to put a rhinoceros to sleep. I just started a gluten free diet to see if it helps anything. I’m giving it a month.

That’s about it. We just chill in our little townhouse with our two kitties and our dachshund. Not much of a social life. It’s hard when you can’t drive. I am going to a Reddit meetup next month, though. So we’ll see if that starts a new chapter in my life. I won’t be going by a new name.

Yesterday was Steve’s and my 7th anniversary. On 4/4/04 we had arranged to meet at the Dobie at 6:00. It was Palm Sunday. I was at Anthony’s and he was getting angry and jealous about the texts I was getting from Steve. He had NO place to be jealous. He had just finally broken up with the girl who “if it wasn’t for her we’d be together,” and then proceeded to outright reject me. Not just “oh I need some time.” He had a date planned with some girl from work and was relentlessly hitting on some bitch when I took him (paid for the tickets) to Rufus Wainwright. So for him to freak out that I’m going on a date with a boy and he’s texting me while we’re hanging out (not even really texting, it was just AIM that I had set to turn into text - there were no iPhones, you see) was just fucking ludicrous.

I had planned on going to Palm Sunday mass at 5:00. St. Austin’s was just across from the Dobie. I was going to walk the 6 blocks from Anthony’s to St. Austin’s, but time got away from me and I realized I’d need to catch a bus. Anthony came and waited with me, and I got another text from Steve. When I tried to reply to it, Anthony wrenched the phone from my hands, took out the battery, and smacked me on the head. I was in utter shock. He had never used physical violence on me (outside the context of consensual S&M activities). I stormed away from the bus stop, thinking I’d rather be late to Mass than sit next to him anymore. I was about 3 blocks away when he caught up with me and gave me those stupid hurt puppy dog eyes and said something along the lines of “ok I might have overreacted, but it’s not fair for you to be talking to other guys while you’re with me.” FUCK. YOU. Honestly I don’t remember if I ended up sitting through Mass or not. I was so pissed. But I tried to get it together because I was about to go on a date with a boy I really liked.

I remember going into the Dobie on the bottom floor and checking my hair and makeup in the reflective surface of the side of the escalator. I took it upstairs and scanned the food court for Steve, whom I had only seen in pictures. Finally I saw a guy that looked like it could be him, but with a lot blonder hair. I approached him gingerly and introduced myself. We moved from small talk to laughing pretty quickly. Then we went in to see the movie - the Coen brothers’ remake of “The Ladykillers.” Anthony had said he would go to that with me, but then decided to take another girl. We got into the theater and Steve put on his glasses, which I had never seen before. Classic thick, black, hipster glasses. Just my type.

The movie was okay, I guess. Afterwards we went to Metro and had some coffee and smoked INSIDE! I don’t remember how long we had been there when I saw a familiar giant figure climbing the stairs. It was my psycho ex, Hawaiian Bob. 6′2″, shoe size 16. And here I was with a new guy after I had told him I was taking a break from guys for a while. Was I any worse than Anthony? OK, fuck that whole idea. Yes, I told Bob I wanted a break from the whole dating scene, and those were my sincere intentions, but then I started talking to Steve online and started to really like him. It had been a month since I had said that to Bob about taking a break.  So yeah, Anthony is a way worse person than me.  Anyway, here was Bob coming up the stairs and I knew if he saw Steve and me, it was going to be ugly. So I looked Steve right in the eye and said, “that huge Hawaiian coming up the stairs is my ex. Once he sits down, we have to get out of here. Just walk straight ahead. DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT. Okay, on 3…” so many guys would have said “baggage, fuck that” and never called me again. Steve was a champ. He followed my instructions exactly and we got out safely. Then we wandered over to his bus stop and goofed around there till his bus came. The date ended with a hug. It was a good hug. And I remember he had a big smile on his face when he hugged me.

The next day, his blog post, titled [Badow], simply said, “I had a date last night and it was really cool. :D” I was over the moon. He said he wanted to see me again as soon as we were both free. He was still working nights at CPL, so the next time we were both free was 4:00 Thursday morning. Good thing Austin is known for its many 24/7 establishments. We went to Kerbey Lane. I got the French toast. We walked around for a while after that, and ended up smoking on the Dobie roof while he told me about his humble beginnings and his gay mom.  Then the whole bit I tell over and over again with taking pics in the photo booth and having our first kiss in the creek and him riding all the way to the airport with me.

While I was home for the weekend, we kept talking on AIM and he said he had been thinking and all, and what with me going home all summer…and I braced myself…and then he said, “I really wanna be your boyfriend.” I was so happy. Breaking the news to Anthony wasn’t a pleasant experience, but he can go fuck himself. Steve and I planned to spend Sunday evening together when I got back. On Sunday I was getting ready to go home and tried to call him to let him know I was getting on the plane. It was Easter weekend and we were both visiting family. No answer. Again. No answer. No answer no answer no answer. WTF I thought we just became boyfriend and girlfriend! Now you’re not answering my calls? I started to freak out, in classic Beppy fashion. I was so nervous the whole plane ride that I made paper cranes the entire time. I didn’t even know anyone who was sick. On the cab ride to my dorm, I was on the phone with my mom telling her what had happened. I remember telling her, “I liked this one, you know? And I wanted it to be real this time. But I guess it’s not.” When I hung up, the cab driver asked why I was so sad and I regaled him with my tale of woe. As we were pulling up in front of my dorm, he said “that guy’s crazy. You’re beautiful.” I gave him a nice tip. That’s probably all he was going for.

I went up to my room and tried to get him on AIM. Still nothing. Slumpo came by unannounced, in classic Slumpo fashion. I took my roommate’s melatonin and told him to go away. Then I got an IM from Steve. He had left his phone in Kemp and had no other way to reach me while he was there or en route to Austin. Yes, he still wanted to come over, and the shuttles didn’t run on Sundays but he hopped in a cab. As I shooed Slumpo out of my room, he said “just promise me you won’t lose your virginity in Jester.” Yeah, that would have been gross. I made him hold out for 3 more months.

Okay, this is by far the longest story I’ve ever written, so don’t feel bad if you get bored and bail.  I don’t know if it’s good or not, and I can’t get some of the formatting to do right on this damn thing.  Anyway, here you go.

Brain-Blood Volume

Kim lay down across three seats in the back of the bus.  It wasn’t crowded at 10:00 am and she didn’t care if people looked at her funny.  All she could think about was the escalating pain in her head and the words of her now former boss ringing in her ears.  “We need someone reliable and it’s not you.” She undid the messy bun she had used to keep up her frizzy auburn hair and let it fall down her back and into her face.  With her small frame and youthful freckles, she could have passed for eighteen, but she was all too aware that she was being hurled toward her twenty-sixth birthday like it was the end of an amusement park ride.  The migraines started with loss of vision in her left eye, and then the pain spread from there all the way back through her skull.  A voice came through the speakers, announcing the next stops and transfers, first in English, then again in Spanish.  It then reminded its patrons not to cross in front of the bus, again in both languages.  She usually saw it as one of the nice little charms of living in Texas, but today it seemed unnecessarily loud.

“I can’t have a temp who never comes in to work, and I certainly can’t have a full time employee who blows off her job.” Kim had thought she was doing alright at her job, but apparently going home when she was in excruciating pain was unacceptable.  She worked through most of her migraines, but when she was throwing up and couldn’t see, it was impossible to work.  “Well why aren’t you on some kind of medication?” She had tried everything.  She took some pills that kept them at bay at least some of the time, but once she turned twenty-six, she would no longer be allowed on her parents’ insurance plan, and the pills and doctor visits would become unaffordable.  Her boss had told her that if she kept up the good work, she might get to go full time before her birthday and get health insurance through the corporation.  No such luck.

With every pothole the bus went over (and the #3 through North Austin had its fair share), Kim’s head bounced up and then hit the seat again.  When she had a migraine, she enjoyed the feeling of getting hit in the head.  The pain from an outside force was a distraction from the pain caused by misfiring neurons or muscle tension or whatever it was that made her so miserable.  “You can leave on your own or I can call security.  I’ll give you a minute to compose yourself and then I want you out of the building.” The bus screeched to a halt and the godlike voice announced that Kim had reached her destination.

She spent a good thirty seconds trying to get her key in the door before Ryan opened it from inside.  His massive teddy bear body filled the doorway.  ”Hey, I thought I heard you out there. What are you doing home early? You sick?”

She let herself fall face down on the couch and pointed at the refrigerator. “Fired. Ice.”

Ryan understood from those two words that Kim had been fired from her job and wanted an ice pack for her head.  They had been roommates for five years, and best friends since middle school.  She wanted out of her parents’ house the second she had a job, and Ryan had been quick to offer to share rent with her. She had first had to convince her parents that there was nothing romantic at all about the arrangement.
He lumbered over to the freezer and grabbed one of the three ice packs she kept there, and was on the way back to the couch with it when she nearly knocked him over sprinting to the bathroom.  Projectile vomiting was just part of the package.  When she had finished, she staggered out of the bathroom, snatched the ice pack from Ryan’s hand, and flopped back on the couch.
“Why’d you get fired?”

“Why do you think?” she said more to the couch cushion than to Ryan.

“But you only took one sick day this month, besides two days you just came home early.”

“That’s what I said!”

“Well what are you gonna do about insurance?”

Kim burst into tears.  ”I don’t know!”  The pain was now crashing into her head like waves.  The world around her was becoming secondary – the smell of the cushion against her face, Ryan’s hand on her shoulder, his voice telling her it was going to be alright – nothing seemed real except for the waves.  And they just kept coming.  She could tell this one wasn’t going to let up.  It was a level ten.

“Lie down,” he said.  “You’re going to stress yourself into a worse and worse headache.  Here, I think there’s a House marathon on USA.”  He handed her the remote control.
“Hey, give me a Vicodin, would you?” she sniffled.

“Is it that bad?    You only have three left.”  Ryan had thrown out his back a few months ago, and they gave him more pills than he needed.  The rest he gave to Kim.

She lifted her head and looked at him with disdain.  ”I know damn well there’s only three left!  That’s how bad it is!”  She sighed.  ”You know I don’t mean to snap at you.  It just hurts so bad.”

“I know, Kimmy.  It’s okay.”  He reached up into a cabinet above the kitchen sink and pulled out a bottle.  The pain in Kim’s head kept intensifying.  She had completely lost her vision in her left eye and now her right eye was getting fuzzy.

“You know what?  Screw it.  Give me two.

“You sure?”

“Positive.  If I’m gonna lie here and watch the House marathon, I might as well imitate him.”  Dr. House was addicted to Vicodin, but he was still the best at solving medical mysteries.  Kim wished he was real.  He could fix her.

She peeked at Ryan from underneath her ice pack.  He was a wonderful friend, doing all this for her and not asking anything in return.   He hadn’t asked lately, anyway.  Several years back he had made a move and she had given him the standard “I love you like a brother, I don’t want to ruin the friendship” speech.  He seemed to have taken it well and things went on as they always had.  If he was still holding a candle for her, she didn’t want to know about it.  She had made herself clear.

He plopped down next to her.  ”Just wait for it to kick in.  You’ll be in La La Land in no time.”  Kim mustered a smile.  She was certain her brain was expanding and pressing against her skull.  If she had a release valve, she thought, the pressure would go down and she would feel better.

“Oh my God, I wish I could just drill a hole in my skull,” she moaned.

Ryan smirked.  ”People do that, you know.”

“What, like in the Dark Ages to get rid of evil spirits?”

“Well, that too.  But I saw on the Internet there’s this whole psycho cult that still does it today.  Trepanners.  They say people were meant to have holes in their heads and it brings them closer to God or something.  I mean, how messed up do you have to be to think you were meant to have a hole in your skull?”

Kim looked up, her eyes wide.  ”Where are these people?  How do they do it?  Does your skin grow back over the hole?  What was the website?”

Ryan laughed.  “You poor thing.  You’re delirious.”  He turned on House for her.  It was the one with the schizophrenic woman whose teenage son took care of her.  She watched a few minutes of it and drifted off to sleep, thinking about drills.

Kim woke up with two very clear goals: she had to pee and she had to find the trepanners.  Of course she didn’t buy into that closer to God nonsense.  She wasn’t crazy.  But if she could have a hole in her skull, just a tiny one, the pressure would go away and so would the pain.  When she woke up, the first words out of her mouth were, “Where are those people?  I need to get a hole!”

Ryan patted her on the head.  “Okay, loopy.  Let’s get you water.”

“Trepanners!  I gotta find the trepanners!”

He giggled.  “You sound like Luke Skywalker on Hoth!  ‘Yoda . . .Dagobah . . .,” he laughed. “I’m gonna call work and tell them I can’t make it tonight so I can keep an eye on you.  I can do that because my boss has a soul.”  Ryan was a bartender at a hole in the wall operation that had karaoke 7 nights a week.  When there were no customers in queue, he would get up and sing a few songs, mostly show tunes and Meatloaf.  He thought it was the best job ever.

Kim got back from the bathroom, reached under the couch and pulled out her laptop.  Even from his bedroom, Ryan could hear her clicking away at the keyboard.  “No Internets!  I’m getting in the shower and when I get out you some better be lying back down!”  She ignored him.  Google had already pulled up over 7,000 hits for “trepanners.”   The first few links were for a death metal band, but she quickly found trepanners.org: the North American Trepanation Society.  The website played weird new age music and she couldn’t find an off button for it.  The homepage had a huge banner that read “FREE RANDY COLE” and a painting of a man in white, his arms outstretched, with a third eye on his forehead.  She decided she would investigate that later.  She clicked the tab labeled “success stories” and saw pictures of euphoric faces.  She couldn’t immediately see holes in any of their heads.  She clicked on a picture of a 30-something hipster looking fellow and it led her to a video of him talking to the camera.

“My name is David and I was trepanned on January 22, 2006.”  Kim’s eyes fixed on the indentation in the middle of his forehead, a few inches above his eyes.  The skin did grow back; that was good.  She hadn’t been sure if maybe the brain needed direct contact with the air or something.  It was just about the size of a hole you would drill in a wall to hang up a picture.  Its position on his forehead made it look like a third eye.  He had curly brown hair, thick rimmed glasses, and a small tuft of hair on his chin.  He was Kim’s type.

“Before I found out about trepanation, my life was empty,” he said to the camera.  “I felt like I was drifting through life with no purpose.  I was addicted to drugs and alcohol.  In 2004 I hit rock bottom and tried to commit suicide.”  The video cut to a black and white photo of a thinner David with a shaved head, looking out a hospital window.  “It was actually my roommate in the psych ward who told me about Dr. Cole and NATS.  God put me in that room in that psych ward so I would find my way here.”  Kim bristled at that last sentence.  She was an agnostic herself, and lately she had been listing towards the atheist end of the spectrum.  If there was a god, she thought, why would he put her in so much pain when she did everything she could to be a good person?  David kept talking.

“As soon as I got discharged, I went to a meeting of the Austin chapter of NATS.” Kim sat up.  There was an Austin chapter!  And this handsome tortured soul was an Austinite.  “The members there explained how once your skull hardens and closes up in the first years of your life, pressure builds up around your brain.  Your brain-blood volume levels are all wrong and you’re unable to attain a higher level of consciousness.  Trepanation gives you back that consciousness.”  Pressure building up around the brain – that was exactly what Kim’s migraines felt like.  She wasn’t sure what to make of the “higher level of consciousness” talk.  She remembered the trippy music and the painting of Randy.  Maybe she could just go and tell them she wanted a hole in her head for strictly medical reasons and they would do the procedure without all the metaphysical bells and whistles. She went back to the main page and clicked “locations.”

Ryan stepped out of his bedroom wearing nothing but a towel.  It wasn’t a pretty sight, but Kim had gotten used to it.  “Hey, you were supposed to be lying down.  You definitely shouldn’t be reading.  What are you looking at, anyway?”

Kim rolled her eyes. “You don’t get to order me around until you put some clothes on.  I found the trepanners.  They have a chapter here in town.”

He snorted.  “Of course they do.  This town is a magnet for wackos.”  He went back into his bedroom, but left the door ajar so he could yell into the living room.  “So hey, I got an idea for what to do about your health insurance.”  Kim had forgotten all about the health insurance in her sedated state and her search for the trepanners.  “Don’t say yes or no to this right away; just think about it.”  If the trepanation worked, she wouldn’t need health insurance.   “Think about what?”

“Well, the bar’s getting a new coverage plan where I can list someone as a domestic partner.  I could put you down.  It’s not as good as your parents’ insurance, but it’s something.”

Kim shrunk back in her seat.  ”Isn’t that for couples who are living together?”

Ryan came out in a Marvel Comics t-shirt and the same cargo pants he had been wearing before.  ”Well I know we’re not a couple, but we are living together.  I’m sure we could get away with it.”

“Don’t you think that’s something they check on?  Isn’t it, like, insurance fraud?”

“I don’t think it is.  I mean, for all intents and purposes, you are my domestic partner.  You know what else?”  Kim didn’t want to know what else.  She didn’t like where this conversation was going.  ”You shouldn’t have to work.  Work stresses you out and stress gives you migraines.  If we moved into a one bedroom and cut some unnecessary expenses, you could at least just work part time.”

She sat up straight.  ”A what?  A one bedroom?”

“I’d sleep on the couch, of course.  I mean, unless you wanted . . . no, of course I’d sleep on the couch.  I just want you to get better.  You’re my friend and I care about you.”

She smiled.  ”That’s really sweet of you.  But I want to try this thing first.  I mean, these people are having a meeting at the Spider House.  I can catch the campus shuttle!”

“Try what thing?  Who’s having a meeting?”  His eyes bulged out as he realized what she was talking about.  “Hey, whoa, no way.  I was joking, for Christ’s sake.  I thought you were delirious!  I can’t believe you even looked them up!  Do you know how I found out about them?  It was on a blog called ‘Can You Believe This Shit?’!  No way are you going to any kind of meeting with those people.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.  You’re not my dad.  What if it fixes my headaches?”

“What if it kills you?” He sat down next to her.  “Do you know who Randy Cole is?  Why their homepage says ‘free Randy Cole’?”

“Enlighten me.”

Ryan looked her dead in the eye.  “Because he killed a girl, Kim.  One of his trepanations got infected and it spread through her brain and she died.  He’s in prison for manslaughter and these kooks think he should have walked.  And that guy was an actual doctor at one time.  If he’s locked up, who knows who they’ve got doing them now?  They don’t care about your headaches.  They’re a cult.”

She looked away so he wouldn’t see the fear in her eyes.  He killed a girl?  “I have to at least look into it.  I’ve tried everything else.  I’ve taken every pill under the sun, I’ve tried chiropractics, acupuncture, I even smoked pot that one time but it just made me freak out.”  She turned to face him again.  “My life is pain.  You’re more understanding of it than anyone else, but you still don’t know what it’s like.  I’ll just go to this one meeting and I’ll tell them all I want is to get rid of the headaches and I don’t want to join their ‘cult’ as you call it.”

Ryan sighed.  “I know I can’t change your mind when you’re set on something.  Will you please let me come with you, though?  That way I can defuse things if they try to talk you into anything crazy.”

“Yeah, okay.  Oh, by the way, I called the staffing agency.  I have a meeting with them on Wednesday morning.  I don’t know if they’ll even put me on another assignment, but I might as well try.”

On Wednesday morning, Kim took the shuttle to the edge of the UT campus.  There was no staffing agency meeting.  She just didn’t want Ryan accompanying her on her first visit with the trepanners, especially if there was a chance that David would be there.  Walking across campus was something she had avoided doing since she dropped out, but was the only sensible way of getting to the coffeehouse and she wanted to be on time.  At least she didn’t have to walk past the music building.  Kim had been a vocal music major at UT, albeit briefly.  It was her first semester after transferring from community college that the migraines had started.  After she had missed several classes, her favorite teacher sat her down and told her that if her condition kept up like it was, she could never hope for a career in performance.  She went to the registrar’s office the next day.  What Kim found strange now was that the class she missed most wasn’t a music class.  It was Early Romantic Poetry.  She had fallen in love with William Blake that semester.  She had almost gotten a tattoo of one of his etchings of Oothoon from Visions of the Daughters of Albion, but she was too nervous about the pain.  But now, she thought, if she was going to get a hole drilled in her head, she might have to reconsider that.

She got to the coffeehouse and scanned the room for what looked like a NATS meeting.  She was about to approach some hippies in the corner when she saw David through the window, sitting on the patio with two women and an older man.  He was even better looking in person.  She checked her face and hair in a mirror hanging on the wall, took a deep breath, and walked out onto the patio.

“Excuse me,” she said in a tiny voice, “is this –”

“the North American Trepanation Society?” responded a woman with buzz cut hair and a tell-tale indentation on her forehead.  “It absolutely is!  Welcome, friend.  Please, have a seat.”  Her huge, warm smile seemed sincere, and it put Kim at ease.  She sat down in an empty chair.  “What brings you here, sister?”

“Well, I saw your website,” she said, trying to catch David’s eye, “and I get these terrible headaches all the time.  And I thought maybe if I the . . . the . . .” she pointed awkwardly at her forehead, baffled that she had somehow forgotten the word. “. . . the trepanation!  I thought they would go away.  Has anyone ever done a trepanation for headaches?”

A skinny young woman across the table scoffed.  “Trepanation is done to reach a higher plane of existence.  It’s not like taking Advil.”

Kim looked at her feet. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean–”

“Besides, you can’t ‘do’ a trepanation anymore.  They lock you up and throw away the key.”  The way her hair fell in her face, Kim couldn’t tell if she had been trepanned or not.  “Do you even know anything about Randy Cole or what we stand for?”

Kim started to panic.  This was turning into another one of those social situations that made her avoid social situations in the first place.  Her eyes darted around, looking for an exit.  She nearly screamed when she felt a hand on her shoulder, but she held it in once she saw whose hand it was.

“Eleanor,” David said to the skinny woman, “can’t you see that our sister has come to us in pain?”  He turned to face Kim.  “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t meant to be here.  What’s your name, sister?”

“Kim,” she said, blushing and looking at her feet again.

“Kimberly.  Now that is a beautiful name.”  Kim got chills.  He looked out to the buzz cut woman and the old man.  “My friends, Kimberly has found us in her time of need, just as I did.  We should welcome her to our family.”

The buzz cut woman leaped from her seat and wrapped her arms around Kim, almost knocking her over.  “Welcome, Kimberly!”  The woman had a childlike quality to her that Kim found both disarming and comforting at the same time.  “I’m Lucy,” she said, releasing her, “and this is Eleanor, and David, and that’s Rusty.”  She pointed to the old man.  Kim hadn’t seen him move or speak since she had arrived.

“Nice to meet you all.”  She looked back at David.  “I saw your video online.  You said something about pressure and brain-blood volume.”

“Right.  That’s what gets out of balance when your skull closes up.”

“Well when I get these headaches, it feels like I have too much pressure between my brain and my skull, and maybe if I got, you know, trepanned, the pressure would go down.  Is that stupid?”

Eleanor scowled.  She obviously thought so.  But David smiled.  “Kimberly, that’s not stupid at all!  In fact, it makes perfect sense.  You know, I never put two and two together, but I used to get headaches sometimes, and I haven’t had a single one since I was trepanned.  Have you, Lucy?”

“No, not a single one.  What about you, Rusty?”  He let out a grunt.  “That means no.  You spend enough time with Rusty, you learn his ‘language.’”

“I think,” David said, standing behind Kim and putting his hands on her head, “that our new sister is really on to something here.”

Kim could sense Eleanor getting increasingly agitated.  She didn’t have the same sedate air that the rest of the group did.  “This is all a moot point without Randy, you know.  Only he can perform trepanations, and they threw him in jail because that stupid bitch didn’t take her antibiotics.  Besides, who put you in charge, David?  I’m not listening to another word of this shit.”  She pushed back her chair with more force than necessary, and stormed off.  Lucy ran after her, leaving David and Kim mostly alone.

“Don’t worry about her; she’s been like that ever since Dr. Cole’s trial.  She was going to be trepanned right before he got arrested.  It’s really a tragedy what happened to Emma.  It was nobody’s fault.”  Kim hadn’t wanted to know the dead girl’s name.  “I think Eleanor and Dr. Cole were actually an item.  They might still be.  The point is, don’t let her get to you.  And she’s wrong about it being a moot point.  I videotaped Rusty’s procedure and I’ve been watching it over and over again.  And I’ve been practicing.”

Kim shrunk back.  “Practicing?”

“On guinea pigs.  I’ve done three successful trepanations.  They’re at my apartment if you want to come see them.”

She could hear her mother in her head asking what in God’s name she was doing going into a strange man’s apartment alone to look at his guinea pigs.  It sounded crazy when put like that, but when she had accepted David’s invitation, it had seemed perfectly reasonable.  She wanted to see his successful trepanations.  She hoped that when she saw them, he would say on his own that there had been no unsuccessful trepanations.  She couldn’t ask, but those potential dead guinea pigs had already burned an image in her head.

“Sorry for the mess.  It’s sort of organized chaos in here right now,” he said as he opened the door to what was indeed a messy apartment.  Kim smiled, shook her head, and muttered something about it being no big deal.  “Anyway, the girls are over here.  My figurative and literal guinea pigs.”  He led her to the other side of the living room where three guinea pigs idled in a large hutch that looked like it had been built by hand.  “This is Molly, and here’s Misty,” he said, pointing out a tan one and a black and white one, “and back here,” he motioned to a jet black guinea pig with a bandage on its forehead, huddled in a plastic tube, “is Oothoon.”

“Like from –

they said it at the same time.  “Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Kim had to catch her breath.

David shook his head and smiled.  “And she’s well versed too.  There is definitely something special about you, Kimberly.”  She blushed and tried to decide if he was flirting with her.  She wasn’t used to being flirted with.  Ever since the migraines got bad she had mostly ceased her efforts to meet someone.  She walked over to the hutch.  The guinea pigs were all lying comfortably on their bed of cedar chips.  They looked at ease.  David picked up Molly and cradled her in his arms.  She barely reacted to being taken out of her house.  Where Kim was used to seeing guinea pigs step forwards and sniff around, Molly barely opened her eyes.  “Molly was trepanned in March.  She used to be one of the most jumpy animals I’ve ever seen, but ever since the procedure she’s been much more calm and relaxed.  Here, do you want to hold her?”

He stood very close to her as he handed the creature over to her.  She automatically braced herself for scratches, but Molly didn’t even try to dig her claws in for footing.  Kim tried to think of something to say that didn’t sound stupid.   “She’s so soft” stumbled out of her mouth right when she decided that that was the stupidest thing she could possibly say.  She waited for David to say something.

“Here, come have a seat,” he said, sitting down on the couch and motioning for her to join him.  She put Molly back in her hutch and sat down next to him.  Had he sat down in the middle deliberately so that she couldn’t sit on an opposite end from him?  “Tell me about these headaches.  How do they feel?”

No one besides a doctor had asked her that before.  “Well, first I go blind in my left eye.  Then this pain starts there and then moves through the whole rest of my head, and it just starts throbbing.  It’s like my brain is trying to break out of my skull.”  She didn’t tell him about the vomiting.  She didn’t want David to picture her throwing up.

David stroked the little patch of hair on his chin.  “So if you had a sort of pressure release valve, you might not feel that pressure anymore.”

Kim nodded.  “That’s what I thought might happen.”

As if out of excitement, David scooted in closer to her.  “I think that’s exactly what would happen.  We could get you completely pain free!”  He suddenly turned very serious and looked deep into her eyes.  “Kimberly, I want you to be my first human patient.”  He put his hand on her face with his thumb on her forehead.  “Would you like that?”  She felt herself nod.  He didn’t move his hand.  “You know, I really do think you’re special.  I think we found each other for a reason.”  She blushed and looked down, and he tilted up her chin with one hand and moved his other hand back into her hair.  He made every move in perfect sequence, with perfect timing, like he had done it a thousand times before.  Kim felt their lips touch, but she didn’t believe that they were touching.  This wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to her.  She didn’t kiss boys she had just met.  She hadn’t kissed any boy in years.  She couldn’t remember if she was doing it right.  His hands moved across her body and soon she felt one tugging at her shirt.  She started to hear her mother’s voice again, but she quickly silenced it.  She hadn’t realized how badly she had wanted this.  And after all, she was almost twenty-six.  She had earned it.

On the bus ride home, she could feel herself grinning from ear to ear.  It was the last bus of the day and she had barely caught it.  She and David had spent the rest of the day together, planning her trepanation and mingling limbs. He showed her the video of Rusty’s procedure, which was hard to watch but not unbearably so.  He was right about it being simple; drill goes in, drill goes out, no more headaches ever.  He had a friend that worked for a veterinarian who was going to get them the anesthesia.  Kim was apprehensive about this plan at first, but David assured her it would be perfectly safe.  The way he spoke was so certain and so sincere that she couldn’t help but believe everything he said.  He was also good at kissing her whenever he saw a look of doubt come across her face.  Only when she got off the bus and started walking to the apartment did she start to worry about how she would explain all this to Ryan.  She pulled her phone out of her purse.  She had missed five calls from him.  When she opened the door he was sitting at the kitchen table like her father used to when she missed curfew.

“I called you five times.  No answer.  I even called the staffing agency.  There was no meeting.  And now you skip in here grinning like an idiot?  Where the hell have you been?”

She was too giddy to take him seriously.  “Oh my God, Dad, so sorry, Dad!” she giggled.

Ryan stared at her.  “This isn’t funny, Kim!  You have no idea how worried I was about you!”

She sighed.  “Okay, I’m sorry I lied about the staffing agency.  I went to the trepanners meeting.”

Ryan looked betrayed.  “You said we would go together!”

“I know, I just . . .” she searched for an excuse.  “I just wanted to do something on my own for once, okay?  And I met this really awesome guy and we spent the rest of the day together.  He knows how to do trepanations and he’s going to give me one.”  She fell on the couch like she was swooning.  “And he’s amazing and smart and beautiful.  I’m so happy right now, so I wish you wouldn’t be mad.”

He sat there with a blank stare until a look of realization washed over his face.  “Kim.  You didn’t.”

Still smiling, she covered her face with her hands so he wouldn’t see her face turning red, and nodded.  After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, she looked up at him.  He had his hands on his head and a terrifying look on his face.  He stood up and paced back and forth. When he finally spoke, he sounded angrier than she had ever heard him before.  “What the fuck is wrong with you?  After everything I’ve done for you, you just go off and screw some . . . some interim cult leader you just met?”

So there it was.  He was jealous.  She knew he would be.  In the back of her aching head, she knew he loved her and she had been playing dumb to avoid addressing it.  Now was no time to stop. “What do you mean after all you’ve done for me? What does this have to do with you?”

He fumed. “I have waited on you hand and foot for five years.  Every time you have a headache, I bring you whatever you want.  I stay home from work.  And my back still hurt for a while, you know, but I let you have those pills anyway.  I put all my energy into taking care of you. You know why? Because I love you.  I love you, and I always have, and there’s no way that you don’t know that.  And now, out of nowhere, you just throw it in my face.”

She stood up.  “We had that conversation a long time ago.  I told you I don’t feel that way about you, and if you think you can change that by fetching my ice packs and giving me pills, then you’re just plain stupid because it doesn’t work that way, Ryan.”

His face turned red.  “Well it never stopped you from accepting all those favors, did it?  Someone to give you drugs and do your laundry and fluff your fucking pillows?  Why would you give that up?  You’ve been using me, plain and simple.  I don’t know how you sleep at night.”

Kim’s eyes brimmed with tears.  She couldn’t decide if he was right or not.  If he was, she was a horrible person, so she decided to keep talking like he wasn’t.  “I thought you were just being a good friend.  I’m in pain all the time.  You have no idea what that’s like.  And David’s going to fix it.  He knows how to do trepanation and we’re going to –

Ryan cut her off.  “Wait.  He got you in bed within hours of meeting you and then he convinced you to let him drill a hole in your skull?  I knew you were never the sharpest crayon in the box when it came to men, but this goes above and beyond stupid, not to mention slutty.”

As hot tears fell down her cheeks, she felt rage building up in her body.  Her left eye started to twitch.  “So I’m a slut now?  I’m a stupid slut?  Think whatever you want, but you don’t get to talk to me like that!”  She grabbed her purse and swung open the front door.  “Find yourself a new roommate!”

Ryan caught the door before she could slam it shut behind her.  “Where are you even going?”  It was a valid question.  She hadn’t thought that through yet.  The campus shuttle had stopped running, but she was pretty sure the #3 stopped close enough to David’s apartment that the walk wouldn’t be terrible.  She was sure he would be more than happy to let her stay the night there, and the next day she could figure out a new living situation.  Ryan had some nerve calling her stupid and slutty.  She heard him yell something right before she crossed the street.  The vision in her left eye had started to go.  This, plus her heightened emotional state, made it easy to miss the car ignoring the crosswalk.

“She’s awake!  Hey, nurse, she’s awake!”  The world around her came slowly into focus.  She felt her right leg hanging in midair.  The voice she had just heard was her mother’s.  She lifted her left hand and saw tubes coming out of it like tentacles.  As her vision became sharper, she began to process her situation.  That car had come out of nowhere.  There was no way it could have been going the speed limit, and she didn’t even remember it stopping - just Ryan running over to her, bits and pieces of sirens and lights, and then what seemed like a scene out of an alien abduction re-enactment on the Discovery Channel.  And now she was in the hospital with her leg in traction and her head . . . what was different about her head?  She was afraid to even touch it.

Her mother came in with the nurse.  She had been crying.  “Oh, my baby, we’ve been so scared!”  She wrapped her arms around Kim and squeezed her until the nurse pulled her off.  “Dad just went to pick up breakfast.”  Breakfast?  How long had she been out of it?  “I’ll wake up Ryan.  He’ll be so happy!”  Kim looked over in the corner.  Ryan was asleep in a chair, wearing the same clothes he had been wearing when she told him to find himself a new roommate.  Dried blood stained the bottom of his shirt. Her mother shook his shoulder.  “Ryan, sweetie, wake up!  Kim’s awake!”

Ryan jerked into consciousness.  “What?  Who?”  He looked over at Kim and a huge smile spread across his face.  He darted to her side like a puppy, tripping over his own feet.  “Kim!  Oh my God, Kim!  You’re awake!”

Kim was confused by how excited everyone was by the fact that she was awake.  “How long was I asleep?”

Ryan laughed.  “You’ve been unconscious for three days!  I thought you were gonna die!”  She looked at his eyes.  He had been crying, too.  “Kim, I’m so sorry for everything I said.  If you want to be with this David guy, that’s great, and I should be happy for you.  I tried calling him, by the way.  I found his number in your phone and left a couple of voice mails.”  She stared at a spot on the wall.  Why wouldn’t he call back someone telling him she was in the hospital?  Ryan practically read her thoughts.  “I don’t know, maybe he thought I was crazy or pranking him or something.  You can call him, though, now that you’re up.”  He offered her her phone, and she waved it away.  She finally put her hands on her head, and felt layers and layers of bandages.

Her mother patted her on the cheek.  “I’m sorry, sweetie.  They had to shave your head.  It’ll grow back.  In the meantime we’ll get you some nice scarves.”

Kim let out a laugh.  “I don’t really care about my hair right now, Mom.  What happened to my head?”

“You had a severe subdural hematoma,” said a voice coming from the other side of the room.  “In layman’s terms, your brain was bleeding.”  Kim looked over at the short, balding doctor who had entered with such impeccable timing.  “We performed an emergency craniotomy to remove the excess blood.  Now that you’re conscious, we’ll just have to wait and see if there’s any lingering brain damage.  You recognize these people?”

“Sure, that’s my mom and that’s my best friend, Ryan.”  Ryan smiled.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Um, getting hit by a car, I guess.  What’s a craniotomy?”

“We removed a bone flap from your skull to access the brain.  Who’s the president?”

“Barack Obama.  Are you saying I have a hole in my skull?” she asked excitedly.

“Well, we put the bone flap back, of course.  You’ve got five screws in your head now.  You’ll have a fun time at airports from now on.  Why do you look happy about having a hole in your skull?”

Ryan piped up from his chair.  “She was all set to get a trepanation.  Thought it would fix her headaches.”

The doctor looked at Kim with a raised eyebrow.  “You realize there are no published studies supporting trepanation as an elective procedure with any positive outcome whatsoever.”

“That’s only because the mainstream medical community never gave it a chance.”

The doctor looked at Ryan.  “And you say she was like this before the head injury?”  Ryan nodded.  He turned back to Kim.  “And are you familiar with the case of Texas V. Randall Cole regarding the death of Emma Ward?”  Kim nodded a tiny nod.  “Well then, it sounds like you were lucky that car hit you before you did something really stupid.”

Her mother looked bewildered.  “What are you all even talking about?”  Ryan couldn’t contain his laughter.

Kim rounded a sharp curve with calculated skill, her eyes focused on the finish line.  She had already left Ryan nearly a lap behind by knocking him off a bridge with a turtle shell.  Mario Kart had been a favorite pastime of theirs since its first release in the 90s, when music was good, the country wasn’t at war, and Kim didn’t know what a migraine was.  As she cleared the finish line, she threw her arms up in the air and did a modified broken leg version of her patented victory dance.  “Kim!” her mother shouted.  “You’re supposed to be resting!”

“Yeah, but remember what the doctor said?” she protested. “Video games are good for my neurons or something.”

“Yeah, and I don’t think she’s brain damaged or anything,” Ryan added, patting the fuzzy little hairs on her head, “cuz she’s kicking my ass.”

She had been released into her parents’ care after a week of observation at the hospital.  Ryan came over to visit her every day.  She was fine except for occasional tiny seizures that lasted for a few seconds. The neurologist assured her that they would become less and less frequent and eventually go away.  He even said her headaches might lessen, but of course she would have to wait until she stopped taking pain pills for her broken leg and fractured ribs to see if that happened.

A 16-year-old girl, wracked with guilt, had turned herself in to the APD and was awaiting trial for vehicular assault.  David never called, and Kim didn’t try to call him.  She surmised that he had wanted her for sex and a science experiment, and now that she was too risky to trepan after a traumatic brain injury, she was literally damaged goods.  She wasn’t going to pretend it didn’t hurt, but almost dying made it seem trivial.  The neurologist had asked her if she was in school.  She always hated getting that question.  When she told him she had dropped out because of the headaches, he informed her that UT recognized chronic migraines as a disability and would work with her on absences and flexible deadlines.  She was re-enrolling next fall.

Ryan flipped through the different race tracks absent-mindedly. They sat together, silent for a long time. Finally he said, “I don’t think we should be roommates anymore.

Kim heaved a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad you said it first. We still friends?”

“Of course. BFFs.” He gave her a hug and she knew he was telling the truth.

…but sometimes she’s a real Debbie Downer.

Here’s one of those facebook screencaps that everyone insists is fake.  I promise this one is real.  It’s an exchange between myself and my aunt, whom I love to pieces and who is a wonderful human being.

So it’s been another month of neglect.  You know what, I have shit to do, okay?  And I used to write a lot of tipsy posts and now I can’t drink with the meds I’m on (well, I can, I’ll just throw up), so I’ve lost my muse.  But a long time ago, I said I would post my “fun with MS paint” shenanigans.  So here you go.  Let’s start out with my first ffffffuuuu comic.  It got me more reddit karma than anything I’ve made since.

More to come…