Talk Vomit

By E.F. Flynn

The hickey Levi gave me was baseball-sized, and wrapped around the side of my neck. It was an ugly brown splotch, speckled around with greenish flecks, like he had toddler-painted a picture; my cream-colored neck his crappy canvas.

I’d never gotten a hickey before. Once, in high school, I sucked on my forearm until a bruise formed. In my mind, I approached this task with scientific curiosity, eager to see how much time and pressure it’d take to leave a mark on whoever. I’d had a couple of flings—a fellow actor from my youth theater group, who would touch me through my dance shorts during rehearsal; a guy the summer after twelfth grade who would invite me over to make out, under the guise of watching My Strange Addiction or Tosh 2.0 (his choices).

I completed this experiment, not admitting to myself I’d never implement such variables. This was because I was the kind of seventeen-year-old girl who let things happen to her. I didn’t know if my SAT scores were good or bad, after buying the workbooks, sitting in courses, and taking the test multiple times. I chose to go to SUNY, a mere half-hour drive from my parents’ house. Because it was over the Tappan Zee Bridge, off one of the scary six lanes of 287, and past Sleepy Hollow—a touristy place—it felt far away. It was all far, far enough.

This horrid hickey happened within the first weeks of freshman year. Levi was a jazz drumming major. We would make out in his practice room, lying on top of each other in the narrow space between his drum kit and the wall.

Levi’s student ID dangled on a lanyard around his neck. He wore pajama pants all day. The top of his head was always fuzzy, as if he had just rolled out of his twin XL. His mouth, inexplicably, had the texture and a slight sour taste of yogurt.

He was homeschooled, and I used this to excuse his lame dress and his weird behavior, like the fact he told me he didn’t have Facebook (I found it) and that he always hurried away when he saw me coming. Still, I reblogged on Tumblr: save the drums, bang a drummer!

I began wearing my hair in a braid over my shoulder, trying and failing to mask my shame. In ballet class, I stared at the mark on my neck in the mirror. There was nowhere to hide; there were thousands of me in thousands of reflections, all frizzy-haired, all thin but not waifish, bruised but not beautiful. Stupid. Unwanted.

Growing up, I thought every pretty girl around me had mythic powers I was too lame to possess. The girls of the internet offered me the same self-inflicted torment; I reblogged their pictures over and over again. Pitiful. Self-flagellating.

In ballet class, there was a classmate who looked just like the Tumblr girls I longed to be. Her shiny, wavy hair fell down to the waist of her leotard; her big, blue eyes stared at the floor under dark, arched brows. She wasn’t good at ballet, but she didn’t have to be graceful. She probably had a boyfriend. She probably didn’t peer through the window blinds of her dorm room, on the lookout for her crush, to stage a run-in on the Quad should he appear.

My roommate from Vermont, who had a boy back home, told me brushing the hickey with a comb would make it disappear.

“Oh, wow, okay. But that sounds like it hurts?” I probably responded. My lacking confidence permeated everything about me.

A fellow writer from my workshop volunteered to fix me. She set me down in her desk chair and, with makeup, covered the spot like a painter, her brushstrokes artistic. She knew about color theory—enough to implement it. She also knew much more about sex. I’d learned this in the short period we’d known each other. She waved the bruise away under layers of concealer.

By next ballet class, the tumblr girl’s hair was dyed aqua and seafoam. I would never be so cool, I could’ve screamed at the skylights of the studio. I tried to picture her outside of class, maybe in the Quad, surrounded by suitors—artists and hipsters that would sing of her beauty. The image conjured was her reclining on a rock, siren sexy. Irresistible.

In class, her hands, held in front of her in a clunky second position, were stained blue, like she had reached into an algae pool. On this rock, the admirers have surrounded her, strumming lyres, reciting poems, presenting gifts; her aqua-stained hand on the jaw of an enraptured suitor—some guy.