39
“Blood head!” the fat kid who was already older than me shouted, right before hurling a massive rock straight at my forehead. I ducked the first one, but the second came flying from another boy.
My mom kept switching schools until my dad finally suggested homeschooling.
But that also didn’t help with the people picking on me at the school I was at.
In art class, the teacher asked us to draw something that expressed our deepest emotions. I poured everything I had into a detailed scene: me standing proudly in my favorite yellow dress, my wild, bushy red hair flying around me like flames.
With my magical powers, I grew blood-red roses from the ground while cute but ferocious dinosaurs with red manes that ran really fast on too-long red legs tore apart every single one of those boys and girls that made fun of me for having red hair.
Yeah , my art teacher didn’t like that so much, and it became a whole big thing. They thought I was going to become a school shooter. Instead of sitting down and talking with me and asking if everything was okay, they decided to call my mother and expel me.
My dad tried to comfort me, always saying, “Well, you’re daddy’s twin,” and it felt good.
Until I had to be around other kids.
Even though I was homeschooled, going out and having to face the world really put reality into focus.
I’ve had grown women that were part of my church call me a demon to my face. My mom left that church, and when we went to another one, an elder pulled me aside.
“Your mom lets you wear contacts?” she asked me. “Oh dear God, and she put dye in your hair? You’re only a little girl. You’re not even a teenager yet. This new generation just keeps over-sexualizing their children.”
I stood there at the time because I had no idea what to even say to this woman.
Why wasn’t she telling my mom all of that?
We ended up moving away from that church too, probably because of something or some argument that my mom had with another church member.
The next one we went to had the same issue, and as I got older it became less annoying.
People assumed that I was making a fashion statement.
I loved God with everything I had, or at least so I thought. While I was in the middle of praising God at one of our churches that we had attended for a while, the pastor decided to preach a sermon about worldliness.
“We try too much to be like the world, and we have women trying to dye their hair to look like prostitutes or to make their faces or their eyes or their makeup make them look like demons or secular people of the world, but we are not of the world.”
He was talking about me. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.
There I was just trying to praise the Lord and listen to the sermon, and this man straight up insulted me without knowing anything about me.
He didn’t know that I couldn’t help what the color of my eyes were and I couldn’t help that I came out a redhead. The ignorance was crazy.
There were times I would lie awake wondering why God created me the way he created me.
Finding a group of people in high school, I felt like I fit in.
Girls with blue, purple, the entire rainbow of hair colors and contact lens colors.
Artsy people like me. There was one girl, a Jewish girl with freckles that had converted to Christianity.
She smoked like a sailor but she was the nicest person ever. Jessica.
She was always positive. Even when I wanted to smoke and she caught me smoking with the boys, she grabbed the cigarette out of my hand and slapped me in the back of the head.
“Don’t let me ever catch you smoking again Erica! How could you do something like that!”
“But you smoke,” I yelled back at her.
“That’s me. If I could quit right now I would.
Look at these pits in my face. You want to look like that?
My gums are receding and shit. You want to look like that?
Don’t let me catch you with this again or I’m going to fuck you up,” she had said to me.
And boy did she mean it. Honestly in that moment the sweet and kind Jessica that I had always known just went out the window. She loved me.
I never considered us best friends. It’s not like she ever hung out at my house, and the one time she walked me home from school my mother pulled me aside after she left and told me, “Don’t let me see you hanging out with that girl again.
” So I had to keep my friendship with her and the others a secret.
But we’d skip school sometimes, just hanging out by Sweeney’s Beach way into the evening when I lied and told my mom I was hanging out with friends to study.
This girl would talk about God and the cosmos and shit while we smoked marijuana. One time she brought mushrooms and that was my first time trying it.
“God is real Erica. He’s so real,” Jessica said.
Then, while she was high, I was too, she told me about the clouds and the stratosphere and how the clouds form. She picked up a rock from the shore of Sweeney’s Beach where we were sitting on our jackets and showed it to me.
“Imagine how you have all these droplets…” she started, holding the smooth stone between her thumb and forefinger like it was a tiny planet. Her eyes were glassy, reflecting the gray sky and the choppy lake water. “No, wait—really imagine it, Erica. Close your eyes for a second.”
I did, mostly because her voice got that soft, excited hush it always did when she was about to go deep on something weird.
“Okay,” she continued, “up there, way up in the clouds, it’s not just fluffy water vapor like they teach us in school.
It’s this whole battlefield of tiny droplets and ice crystals floating around in super cold air.
They’re so light they just drift, bumping into each other.
But then… the temperature drops even more, or they get tossed higher by the wind up there, and one of those little droplets freezes.
Just click and then; solid. A tiny ice embryo. ”
She laughed quietly, almost reverently, prompting me to open my eyes, and tapped the rock against her palm.
“Now that little ice baby starts falling, but it’s not done.
Oh no. It’s like the cloud is this giant hail factory that keeps feeding it.
As it drops, it slams into more supercooled droplets, which is like water that’s still liquid even though it’s cold as shit.
They hit the ice and the second they do; BOOM.
Freeze on contact,” she claps her hands lightly together.
“… layer after layer. But here’s the badass part: sometimes the wind kicks it back up, higher into the cloud where it’s even colder, and it collects more.
Up and down like it’s on some cosmic rollercoaster.
And it gets bigger and bigger with every trip.
Clear ice, milky ice, all these… rings inside like tree rings telling the story of its wild ride. ”
Jessica’s hands moved as she talked, tracing invisible layers in the air between us. The rock had become a prop for the hailstone itself.
“And when it finally gets too heavy for the updrafts to hold it anymore? It falls. Wooo! Straight down, and fast, like a bullet from the sky. It can be the size of a pea or a golf ball or even bigger, like a… like a fucking baseball if the storm is angry enough. Imagine that: a solid object born from…” she takes a breath of awe.
“… nothing but vapor and cold and chaos, all forged in the belly of a thundercloud. It’s not melted snow, or rain that froze on the ground.
It’s built piece by piece in the fucking air !
Haha, while it’s falling and rising and falling again.
That’s metal as hell, Erica. Hail is literally like the cloud’s way of saying ‘Yeah bitches! Check my shit! I can make weapons outta mist.’”
I laughed.
She opened her eyes wider, grinning that crooked, stoned smile that always made me feel like we were the only two people who got how strange and beautiful the world was.
“And the beauty of it? When it hits the ground… it’s like the sky is throwing diamonds at us.
They… shit’s just bouncing and they roll and sparkle for a second before they start to melt back into what they were.
Temporary little miracles. Proof that something as soft and invisible like vapor can…
can become hard enough to dent a car or crack a windshield, or shit, kill someone if it wants to.
It’s like… violent and delicate at the same time. ”
She set the rock down gently between us on the jacket, as if it had suddenly become sacred.
“I don’t know, man. People say you gotta go to church and whatever but when I think about hail forming like that.
Solid from just… vapor, while it’s falling, I’m convinced there’s gotta be a God.
Something has to be laughing or crying or just showing off to make the sky do shit like that. Don’t you feel it too?”
I nodded, the high making her words feel profound. “Yeah… I do.”
We became close.
And then she stopped coming to school.
I knew that Jessica used to cut. She said she did it sometimes to get the evil out. Then she said when things outside hurt so much, the cutting is a way to take the edge off because it helps her refocus on the pain right here and now.
Something else to focus on; a smaller pain than the deeper ones that were hurting her. I don’t know if she told anyone else this, but I figured it was only a matter of time before she moved away and got help, so I understood.
Until I realized that it wasn’t because she moved away that I stopped seeing her.
Her parents had walked into her room and she wasn’t there. Jessica had just… disappeared.
They couldn’t find her.
Until they started smelling something horrible in their house.