As Sadie says, “And then there were four.” Again.
Today in group Cat Poop announced that it was Bone’s last day in the program. When he said it, Juliet’s face kind of fell, but she didn’t say anything. I don’t think she’s been quite so excited about him since he made fun of Alice.
Good for Bone that he’s getting out, I guess. I know he’s a little scared about it, because he said so in group. I was really surprised that he said anything. I mean, we’ve talked some, but it’s not like he’s ever said very much about himself. But today he did.
It turns out his parents don’t want him to come home. They don’t think they can trust him not to get into trouble. As usual, he didn’t explain what kind of trouble he meant. But by now I’m used to not knowing anything about Bone, and I didn’t ask. Nobody did. I think we like that he’s our Mystery Man. It means we can make up whatever story we want about him.
Anyway, he’s going to stay with his older brother and his brother’s wife. They live in a little town somewhere in Arizona and own a gas station. Bone’s going to work at the gas station until he figures out what he wants to be when he grows up. That’s not what he’s afraid of, though. He’s afraid that people will find out about him being in a psychiatric hospital and think he’s some kind of criminal or something. He’s afraid they’ll tell their kids to stay away from him and cross the street when they see him. “Don’t talk to the crazy man, honey. He might bite you.”
Coming from someone covered in tattoos, this seemed a little strange. I mean, you can see tattoos. You can’t see crazy. If I was him, I’d be more worried about people thinking he was in a gang or something.
Later, after my session with Cat Poop, I went into the lounge. Bone was in there watching a talk show, one of those with a host so perky you want to slap her. The topic was people who wanted to make over their friends who they thought looked too weird.
One of the girls on the show wanted her sister to stop dressing like what she called a punk. She said people made fun of her when she went outside, and that people thought she was a Satan worshipper and stomped on kittens or something. The host kept frowning and shaking her head. Then they brought the girl out. She was totally Goth. Her hair was all black, and she had on pancake makeup and blood red lipstick. She was a little overweight, and she looked like Robert Smith from the Cure. I thought she was kind of cute.
As soon as she came out, the audience started booing, like she’d murdered her best friend or slept with her dad’s new wife. Then the host asked her why she dressed like she did, and she said, “Because I like to.” The audience booed again, and her sister screamed, “People think she’s a lesbian!” The Goth girl covered her face with her hands like she was all embarrassed.
Then they went to a commercial, and when they came back from telling us about how fresh we’d all feel if we used panty shields with wings, they’d done the makeovers. They hauled out all of these people whose friends thought they looked too strange, and now they all looked like they’d been trapped inside a J.Crew store for a night and come out different people.
They saved the Goth girl for last, and when they brought her out she was wearing this flowered dress and big dangly earrings and Mary Jane shoes. When her sister saw her, she started crying, and the audience gave her this standing ovation because she didn’t look freaky anymore. When she sat down, the host flashed this series of pictures of her, starting with her baby picture and going on up until high school. The audience oohed and aahed at how pretty she was as a little girl—all blonde curls and wide eyes. Then the last photo was of her all Gothed-out, and the audience hissed.
The Goth girl looked really unhappy, and the host asked her if she liked her new look. She said she hated it, and everyone got really angry, like they’d paid for the makeover themselves. Then this guy stood up and said, “I’d never ask you out looking the way you looked before.”
The girl looked at the guy for a minute, and then she said, “What makes you think I’d ever want someone like you to ask me out.” Then she turned to her sister and said, “So, now that I look like this, I’m okay? I’m not a freak because I look like you do? Well, you can go fuck yourself.” Only of course they bleeped out the good part because it’s daytime TV, and we all know that no one in America swears.
The guy she’d talked back to just stared at her like she’d kicked him in the balls, and her sister was crying her eyes out. The girl looked at them both and said, “What a bunch of losers.” Then she walked off the set. The host started smiling again, and they cut to a commercial for pork, the other white meat.
It was great. Bone and I were dying. Then Bone said, “Jesus Christ, people still think what you look like is who you are.”
I looked at the tattoos up and down his arms. I’d seen them before—you can’t miss them—but I’d never really looked at them. When I did, I saw that between the flaming skulls and hearts were the characters from Alice in Wonderland. He has the Red Queen and the Dormouse on one arm and the Mad Hatter and March Hare on the other one. One forearm has that picture of Alice with her neck all stretched out from eating the magic mushroom.
“Is that who you are?” I asked Bone, pointing to Alice.
He laughed. “No,” he said, “This is who I am.” He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back, was another White Rabbit wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and boots and smoking a cigar.
“That’s me,” said Bone. “Always running. Always late. I had it put on my back because no one can see it unless I show it to them. The ones on the outside are for people to stare at. But I keep the one I really love hidden.”
“Why two of them?” I asked him.
“Yin and Yang,” he said. “Dark and light. One’s the good rabbit and one’s the naughty rabbit.”
“Which one is which?” I asked.
He laughed again. “Both,” he said. “It’s kind of a bipolar thing. Like me.” Then he got up and left before I could ask him anything else, just like the Rabbit does to Alice.
I sat there for a while thinking about the Goth girl. Actually, I was thinking about the opposite of her—how people think that if you look “normal,” then you are.
One time Allie and I skipped school and went to see this foreign film called Los Diablos, where these villagers found a glowing blue ball and peeled pieces off of it to see what was inside. Only the ball was really radioactive, and they all died from the poison. I think that’s what happens when you look too deep inside for the truth. The poison comes out, and you die, even though you have beautiful glowing pieces of blue truth in your fingers.
And anyway, the truth isn’t all that great. I mean, what’s the truth? Planes falling out of the sky. Buses blowing up and ripping little kids into millions of pieces. Twelve-year-olds raping people and then shooting them in the head so they can’t tell. I can’t watch the news anymore or look at the papers. It’s like whoever sits up there in Heaven has this big bag of really crappy stuff, and once or twice a day she or he reaches in and sprinkles a little bit of it over the world and it makes everything go crazy, like fairy dust that’s past its expiration date.