Read Online The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy - Free Book Online

suspected something was wrong. On a clear cold night before much snow had gathered, we put on costumes and ran beneath sharp autumn stars between my house and hers. And because it was Halloween, and my mother had thrown a party for the few kids of Swall Meadows, this time we weren’t strange.
    We sang while we ran from house to house, down Mountain View Drive, on the scavenger hunt my mother had planned. We searched for items she printed on lists—toenail clippings from the neighbors, hair from my black cat Helena, an apple from the orchard. And from Elizabeth’s house, the last stop on the hunt, a piece of kibble from Sara’s bowl.
    Elizabeth and I shouted, out of tune, running ahead of the other kids. We sang songs by our favorite band, My Chemical Romance—we were in love with the singer, white makeup spread over his face, who screamed and trembled in music videos, glowering at the camera beneath a lop of black hair—and finished the chorus of the best song together.
    So long, and goodnight; so long and goodnight!
    When the hunt was over, my mother gathered everyone in the living room and pulled out her camera. In the photographs Elizabeth and I are surrounded by neighbor kids, mostly Tiggers and fairies. There is pride in my face, for the completeness of the costume, the long black veil stitched together from scraps. We stand apart from the group slightly, leaning into each other, smiling.
    We spent the year with books, taking turns reading aloud while the other sewed or painted with the oils we saved up for. Our pictures were misshapen and artless. Her favorite, a distorted woman sitting at a piano, hung over her bedroom window. The woman was naked except for her hair, which was long and black like Elizabeth’s.
    One of our books was
Dracula.
    â€œDenn die Toten reiten schnell,”
she read one afternoon while I sewed stringy black hairs onto the head of a doll I was making. The doll’s name was Victoria and she had a scar of a seam running vertically through her face, mismatched buttons for eyes. Her limbs were long and her mouth was wide and jagged. I tattooed her name onto her back and gave her dress a black satin bow.
    â€œWhat does it mean?”
    â€œFor the dead travel fast.”
    We pierced our ears until they prickled with metal, punching new holes after school, dipping the needle in rubbing alcohol and holding each other’s hair out of the way—a stinging, a
pop-pop
as the point broke the skin. We filled the holes with fake diamonds, red and black.
    In front of the bathroom mirror, we painted our faces with white makeup, eyeliner, lipstick the color of old blood. At sixteen, we decayed. Our skin gathered in the asthmatic carpet of the bathroom. We left pieces of our bodies in the dark corners of my house on the afternoons we ventured there, eyelashes drifting in the shadows between rafters on the redwood ceiling, floating away from us, only to grow back. We crumbled under a light snow on Mountain View Drive, when the sky was huge and gray above Wheeler Crest. We fell apart in the halls of our tiny high school, where our lockers were pocked with bullet-hole stickers and the roof caved in every winter from the weight of snow.
    I went around in a black Hello Kitty T-shirt that read
Lost in Wonderland.
My belt shed metal spikes the janitor found under desks after class, empty pyramids with barbs that dug into the plastic. Teachers with intuition let me sit in the back and deconstruct my mechanical pencil.
    In school we were a half-presence. We didn’t do homework. We memorized Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” filled notebooks with sketches, drew on our bodies and clothing with Sharpie—lyrics, complex roses, women with wings. We jabbed pencils through denim and ripped holes in our jeans. Elizabeth, who had to conceal even pierced ears from Russell, shredded her pants in two-inch increments, exposing strips of pale flesh from ankle to thigh. I