Black Sheep

by Rachel Harrison

Though Kerri had asked me to come, aside from a brief wave of acknowledgment, she pretty much ignored me. I sat next to her at the bar, but her back was to me.

Do I feel normal? I asked myself. Like a normal twenty-three-year-old? Like a normal person? The answer was no. I knew it always would be, and I was foolish to hope for anything different. Hope is like candy, I thought. It’s sweet in the moment, until it rots your teeth out. My past would always be my past.

Maybe I’d never be normal, but maybe I could be happy. He leaned over and kissed me, and I tasted the sweetness of hope. For once, I allowed myself to savor it, without worrying about what it might do to my teeth.

I was overcome with this urge to live. To stick up the diner, take all the cash in the register and get on a bus and another bus and a plane and a train and end up somewhere unexpected. To have random affairs with strangers, cover my entire body in tattoos. Drop acid in the desert, sun myself on the Amalfi Coast. To hike on a glacier, to see the northern lights. I wanted to live enough life to render everything in my past small and insignificant. But even still, I couldn’t make it go away. I couldn’t erase it.

Why did I always have to make things so hard for myself? Why did I gravitate toward chaos?

Just say what you need, what you mean. What is it with religion? Takes three hours to say one fucking thing. Now you’re telling me we’re tight on time. The audacity.”

“The heat is rising. The planet is melting. Right now there’s a skeletal polar bear taking its last gasping breaths.” He paused to wheeze, a menacing demonstration. “And as everyone argues over what to do about it, argues over whether or not it’s happening, and as those who do believe drink out of their paper straws or buy a pair of pants made out of recycled water bottles so they can feel good about themselves, so they can sleep at night thinking they’re part of the solution, and as those who don’t . . .”

“As all that happens”—he paused to do the wheezing again—“that polar bear starves and dies, bones swallowed by a growing sea. But wait, wait. Wait for inflation. Wait for corporations to line their pockets, to buy up all the houses and rent them back, a return to serfdom. I can’t stress enough how boring it is to watch history repeat itself over and over again. A rerun of the same episode every night. Greed, greed, greed, greed, greed. The wealth gap broadens. The rich eat. . . .”

I found it interesting that those who believed themselves righteous only ever cared about those who agreed with them, and were keen to let those who didn’t suffer whatever brutal fate. There seemed to me an inherent hypocrisy in faith itself. I wasn’t sure there was any way around it.

I had this immense guilt, this shame I didn’t know what to do with, how to live with. What do you do when you find out you’re evil incarnate?

I couldn’t decide if I should laugh at the insanity or cry at the tragedy, so I did neither.

I thought, Maybe that’s all life is. Wanting something until you get it.

I’d be dating somebody else. Not George, someone better, and we’d be in love. We’d kiss and play pinball and take shots, and he’d tell me how glad he was that I was born, and I’d know that he meant it. I’d believe him. In this universe, there would be no need to imagine other lives, other worlds, alternate dimensions, parallel cosmos, other versions of me leading vastly different existences. No need to fantasize. That’s how happy I’d be.

I felt like I’d dug a spoon tunnel out of my cell only to come up in the prison yard. I felt like I’d escaped the killer in the first movie only to be murdered in the opening ten minutes of the sequel.

I’d never had a real zest for life, but I lived. I set my alarm. I bought books that I intended to read. I bathed and ate and took vitamins. Now I wasn’t motivated to do any of that. Living didn’t seem like such a great idea. My whole existence was destructive.

All the clothes in my room belonged to some stupid girl I used to be. I was jealous of her obliviousness. I was angry at her and I felt sorry for her.

“Yeah, we were super-dumb kids.” “No,” she said. “We had big dreams!” It was what I loved most about Rosie. Her optimism. I always envisioned my heart as something hard and rough as a peach pit, an unyielding core. But Rosie could make it feel soft enough to cut clean through. I wanted to hug her. I wanted us to be dumb kids again.

Have to hand it to nature. For every beautiful thing it offers us, in the hand behind its back it holds something truly repulsive.

No point can be proven if no point will be taken.

How could I have known then? How can anyone know when ruin wears the disguise of love?