When Nervous Blood Has Been Undone
downward spiral of emotional anarchy, watching as my life fell apart and people whom I once
trusted betrayed me for reasons that never seemed real enough for my tastes (“You’re just not
popular enough,” she’d said, blonde hair shining beneath the bright lights of the cafeteria, lights
which made her seem fairer but turned me to bleach and sand.
That was the first time I realized that friends can (you call them that?) look and act and
feel real, beaming with perfect teeth and bright-lit eyes (lovely, dolled, and beautiful, with high
sweet voices full of dulcet worry) and not care, not even a wit, that you’d rather die than lose this.
“You’re just crap.” She was my first friend in this new school and I thought that mattered
(because I had been there for her, defending her against the very girls she now sought to leave
me for time and time again (“But what do you expect from outcasts?” I could hear my mother
(or maybe my brother) say to a little girl perched on the edge of her bed. “Loyalty is for the
rich.”)), but watching her leave was like tearing ribbons from a well-loved box and listening to the fabric as
it ripped, not a part of the box but close enough to flinch).
To make up for the loss I threw myself into fiction (that ancient friend of mine), hoping
that in so doing I might be able to recreate a sense of company, forgetting her just as she forgot
me (though trying is not doing so maybe I never succeeded). I had been friendless before, and I
would be friendless again, and I would do it with grace.
There was no thought in this; only the acceptance of realities outside of my control. The
books took her place, discussions of characters taking priority over discussions of people; places;
things.
One afternoon in late May I burst from the school gym with twenty classmates in tow,
rushing through the tennis courts and down the hill to the track, worn sneakers slapping the
ground as I took in the sight of the distant foothills, dark against the bright blue of the
sky. It was too hot to think, sweat already running down my face as I hit the blue plastic mat
near the field goals, settling against the burning tarp with a tired whoosh of air. I don’t think I’d
slept the night before.
The girl I’d been running with (freshly met, with whom I’d shared few conversations thus
far) was laughing as we reached our goal, burning with energy as she turned to wait for our
teacher’s arrival.
“Tell me more about that thing,” I said, drawing my knee up to untie and retie my shoe.
“What’s it called?” It took more effort than perhaps it should have, bitten-down nails fumbling
for purchase in the thick knots I’d left in the lacing.
“Golden pelt’s den,” she replied, spreading out across the tarp as more kids clambered up
around us. I scooted back to allow them room to sit and grimaced as day-old rainwater
(lukewarm bilge) slid down from a higher vantage to coat the seat of my pants. “I’ll write
the address down for you later.”
We were all exhausted by the time we were finished, twenty bodies stuffed into the
sweltering sardine can of the locker room we didn’t want to be in. I listened closely to the
girl’s instructions, taking a pen and writing the URL on the white rubber of my shoe.
Roleplay consumed my summer. I started with the one website, taking my time to puzzle
out two or three characters I enjoyed, then more and more and more, until I found that there other
sites and learned that that first was really only for beginners, rudimentarily constructed, poorly
admined, and peppered with children who barely knew how to string sentences together and
had little interest in playing nice with others. I found links to other similar sites and went
elsewhere, the number increasing as I sped through the process of application to site upon site,
staying only briefly as I found each one to be, ultimately, unsatisfactory. Some were too
inactive, others had too much traffic, and all of them failed a test I didn’t know I was handing
out--on a level of interpersonal connection, there were no successes, no one to whom I could be
pinned.
I found the link to FNC on the advertisements page of a website that was
well-maintained but seldom touched, the remaining patrons only checking in when it suited
them. I was curious, as I always was, and though I held no higher expectations for this than I did
the others, It seemed like a nice place; the homepage was inviting, the backdrop a full moon
shining down on a distant river valley, and I took pleasure in signing up, listing my character’s
name, occupation, personality.
I didn’t show up again for several days after, already having mentally marked the website
as “too young,” unlikely to see many patrons, and maybe it was because the site administrators
were clearly already best friends, but there was a part of me—what little of me understood what I
was looking for—that assumed that all attempts at befriending them were futile. Cliques were
dense and thickly walled, after all, and my experiences with them had never been pleasant.
Yet I was pleasantly surprised.
“Firestar,” Songwing (who I’d come to know as Beckie) had typed by the time I came
back, “why don't you change your name? That way you don't copy the books.”
“Okay,” I said, completely unaware that in this decision lay the seeds of a new era of
self-address and personal identity, that I would keep this decision with me for five years and then
some. “I’ll go as Moonstar.”
skills and pretend we weren’t alone in our obsession with a book series about very human,
prophecy-driven cats.
As I said, Mary, Beckie, and a few others were friends long before I met them, a clique
halfway finished that I wanted badly to belong to. In life it had always seemed to me that there
was a manual given to children upon their birth, an ancient transcript meant to guide them
through the intricacies of interpersonal interactions and the pillars of social constructs. It was a
book I--and my mother before me and her mother before her, a long line of confusion stretching
back either to the day these manuals were given out or the day our line’s was stolen--never
received. These girls were smart, funny, and, despite their occasional awkwardness, had all very
clearly read that book. I liked them but I was, like a caged animal, wary. It had been my
experience that girls only accepted you when they knew that they could use you.
I don’t remember the first time they called me their friend, or the first time they seemed
to express a kind of exasperation at my awkward, fumbling attempts at joining in their games
(which, like reindeer games, were at first elusive in their aim and impenetrable in nature). I
don’t even remember the first time I joined them in the silly side-roleplays they enacted,
pointless, communally-drafted stories where things happened from the blue; one minute you
were a cat and the next a dragon and still the next a chocolate bar, and it was all for no purpose
except to make the others laugh.
Ivorypelt and Beckie as Songwing; Windy’s first name, and Twisty’s, I never learned. They had
a habit of dropping half a name and adding a “y” to create diminutive endearments, and it was on
the 24th of July that I received mine. When Mary asked about the date of a group discussion I
replied, “What about the first?”
Beckie said, “All in favor of a discussion on the first, say ‘Songwing rocks!’”
“Well now no one is going to vote for a discussion on the first, Songwing,” Mary had
said. “We aren't liars, after all.”
“ROFL,” Windy supplied, “how about ‘Windy rocks?’”
Twisty, ever the diplomat, added, “How about BEEEEP! That way no one has to lie
about any of us!”
“You are mean, Ivory. *sobs*” Beckie fired back. [Sic]
“Well,” Mary would say just two comments later, “I'm not the only one, Songy. How
about we do this the old-fashioned way? All in favor, say ‘AYE!’”
But before she had the chance, Windy would ask, “How about, ‘Windy, Songy, ivory,
Twist, Moon(y?) all rock!!’ Is that one better?” [Sic]
I don’t remember what I did afterward—time has this horrible habit of stealing away the
transitional phrases we deem so necessary in English classes; no longer is it “I X, then I Y before
Z, and finally I A,” but “Y, but before that Q, and after it B, and some years later L-M-N-O-P,”
the interstitial links stripping away molecule by molecule until all that’s left are the facts—but I
remember stopping to think for a moment (or maybe an hour), and staring at the screen, reading
those words (that word) over and over again, breaking down the meanings and the sub-meanings
and trying to believe, above all else, that they shared my understanding, because in my life I was
never one to give or receive nicknames lightly, and it had always been my habit to over-analyze.
I sat in the midst of that hot, dark night, the waning half-moon shining almost as brightly
on the midnight grass as the image on the FNC homepage, staring at bright colored text on a
darkened screen, my fingers twisting in my lap. I listened as a breeze carded through the leaves
of the many trees outside, the cicadas buzzing, the crickets chirping, suddenly all too aware that I
was the only human awake, maybe for miles. I remember it being too hot to sleep, but maybe I’d
only been hoping for something like this, something to go to bed on, to feel good about.
And I remember how my gut twisted and my heart bled, the hollow ache in my chest
becoming sharp and physical as I turned my mind to it and realized, for the first time, how
madly, horribly, unequivocally lonely I was, understanding a hulking monster that had crept
under my skin to lay eggs, the young now hatching and screaming (voiceless) that I had never
belonged to anyone, anything before, except in the most transient and marginal of ways.
And I cried for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes—alone in the dark, thinking, accurately or
not, that someone who was not my mother or brother or father cared about me, cared enough, at
least, to mark me as one of them, to shorten the name I’d given them, and, perhaps most (or
least) touching of all, to have, in a way, asked my permission.
In the days to come I retained my insecurities and continued to type with care, this
fledgling friendship still seeming shaky and probationary, the fear of being cast out (that they
might mistake my excitement for fanaticism) a real and proper threat when only recently a belief
in the supernatural and extraterrestrial had cost me several friends, parts of my reputation, and a
certain degree of self-respect (how can you respect yourself, after all, when children far older
than you laugh at the things you hold close to your heart?).
In the formative years of our relationship, fear was as much my companion as they were,
but I allowed myself to let go, bit by bit and piece by piece, speaking more freely, sharing more
openly, doing my best to communicate to them the incommunicable. To their credit, though they
didn’t always understand, they always seemed to listen.
And eventually we’d fall apart, misunderstandings, stress, and self-righteous attitudes to
blame. The words I wanted to give to them would be discovered all too late, and for a long time
we’d keep coming back, forcing life back into the friendship we’d so cautiously set to breathing
the first time around, though of course it couldn’t last. But I’d never regret them, no matter how
much they might regret me, because for a while they took away the edge loneliness had pressed
against my throat, and they were the ones who would bring me to the two friends I hold most
dear even now, setting off a domino effect of websites and ideas that steamrolled one into the
next until they shoved me to the ground and beat me into the girl I am today.
And maybe most importantly, they taught me what friendship was (the surges of
affection, dumb smiles at odd hours as I remembered things they’d said, a feeling of fullness in
my chest that warmed me on the worst of nights and sometimes burned when the days had been
kind), and showed me that, before them, I’d never known it.
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