By Bridget Brewer

I’ve stopped sleeping and I wear a lot of sweater vests and I piss myself in class now and everyone laughs at me and won’t give me their Warheads because I am Not Normal Anymore! I’ve started having panic attacks in the handicapped stall and the medicine pink walls fold in on me until I am buried in slabs of Pepto-Bismol while everyone tells me to Calm Down! I slam my hands in doors on purpose and I say the Hail Mary 200 times a day and I pretend my wall is a lover from a book I read who asks me over and over again Are You Alright Are You Alright How Are You, and I never have an answer but I get off on the question so I make the wall-lover ask me again and this is Not Normal. My best friend used to be a 50-year old man in our parish with pancreatic cancer who I met through a letter-writing campaign and I told him all kinds of stuff and he said You Sound Like A Very Normal Girl and for some reason I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone my best friend was a man so old, but then recently I went to see him and he was hooked up to all these machines and he smelled sick and I hated him for smelling sick and I hated him for being sick in the first place and I hated him for having a wife, and then he died and my mom made me be the altar girl at his funeral service where his wife cried on me and then I threw up in the bathroom and threw a rock into a sewer and I haven’t said his name since and that is Not Normal At All. I’ve started eating all the skin off my hands until my fingers bleed and puff up and I scratch at my scalp until I’m seeping and scabbing all the time and I bite all the skin on the inside of my mouth, and at sleepovers now my best friend pretends she’s my doctor and I’m having a baby and the pregnancy is difficult so she’s gotta go inside me to get the baby out and we never manage to get the baby out but we do manage to fall asleep, rare sleep, and then in the morning we don’t look at each other and when I go home we don’t talk for a whole day and if we do it’s to bicker about whether we should dig for potato bugs in the abandoned lot across the street or go hang out with the weird boy in the cul-de-sac with the divorced parents and I don’t like him because he made me touch his dick once like it was a big deal and I didn’t care at all, it wasn’t a big deal, I told him my dad shows me his dick all the time and he said That’s Not Normal! I don’t eat cheese anymore which is Not Normal because everyone loves cheese and I don’t invite people to my house anymore which is Not Normal because now everyone tells me they think I live in Narnia but at least I’m not as poor as Emily but only just barely which makes me Normal Enough To Afford Jellies but not Normal Enough To Eat Out At Applebee’s All The Time Like Everyone Else. When I break my arm I show it to my grandma who says It Looks Normal To Me and for 3 weeks it HURTS but I think it’s normal for an arm to hurt and then my mom gets home and looks at my crooked bone and she screams THAT IS NOT NORMAL and rush rush off we go to the hospital and What A Tough Girl You Are! say all the doctors, and then they give me gas. I go to church 3 times a week where my dad makes me be an altar girl even when it’s not my turn and when I tell him I don’t want to go up there he says I Need You To Act Normal Right Now so I go up to the altar in the middle of Mass wearing clothes I hate so everyone can stare at me and hate me in public for a whole hour. I draw all the time on everything including my jeans and my parents like that so they make me sell my paintings at the farmer’s market and it’s raining that day and expensive to get the permit and when I don’t sell very many paintings they yell at me in front of everyone and my uncle says Some People Just Have A Different Way Of Showing They Love You and I try to run through a glass door and it breaks on my face and my first sentence to my mom is I’m Okay I’m Fine! because maybe she won’t freak out even though there’s blood everywhere and half my nose is missing and this doesn’t kill me why doesn’t it kill me, and it’s off to the hospital and What A Tough Girl You Are! say all the doctors, and then they give me gas. My dad digs through my desk and reads my diaries and leaves me notes about the grammar and the believability, This Is Such a Funny Story he says when he reads an entry about him and his eyes turn into laser beams and they fire at me and my bones melt until I say It Is Funny I Made It Up Because You’re Such A Great Dad and I don’t think he hits me anymore but I can’t remember because my memory doesn’t work very well and anyway getting hit is Normal It’s Just Discipline and I make a lamp fall on my head and there's blood everywhere and so it’s back to the hospital and What A Tough Girl You Are! say all the doctors, and then they give me gas. I’ve stopped eating anything and now I live on Tums and wadded-up Wonder Bread and my mom takes me to Weight Watchers where she cries when she gains a pound and she says It Isn’t Normal to Be Unable To Control My Eating What’s Wrong With Me and I don’t say anything and she just stares down at her calculator and figures out how many points she’s allowed to eat that week and that is Normal Because Women Have To Hate Their Bodies and if I want people to think I’m a woman I need to hate my body, too. I read about saints who cut parts of their bodies off and starve themselves and I dig wounds in my hands with a protractor to get a stigmata going because maybe God just needs encouragement to love me back, who knows, but it doesn’t work and then I’m just wiping my hands on my carpet and the rain comes down until water is up to the windows and it looks like we’re living in an aquarium and someone says You Should Be A Writer Someday and some of me starts to make sense and feel Normal. An earthquake comes and something else happens and I sleep on my side now so I can’t get stabbed or attacked in the heart, and then when my dad goes away I take his place and I put ointment on my mom’s back after her cancer surgery and I take care of the kids and I clean up the house and my mom falls asleep on me while we watch the movies she wants to watch and I am a Good Husband and that is Not Normal to think about and then he comes back so now I hit myself in the forehead with heavy books until the bruises on my face make it look like Ash Wednesday came early but it doesn’t show anyway because no one can see an ugly girl and hating your body when you’re an ugly girl is Totally Normal! I try to make boys love me and I try to make girls love me and I try to make God love me and Sometimes You Make Me Sad, my mom says. What Do You Mean, I say. You Seem Unhappy, my mom says. I Do? I say, and then I hear the sound again Snap Snap of my brother getting hit which is Normal and Just Discipline and my mom’s eyes go glassy and I Made Myself Forget What Happens In The Rest Of That Sentence Memory Loss Is Normal! I run outside where I can smell the dirt being wet and I look at the stack of wood and I look at the mountains beyond the stack of wood and I know the ocean is just over the tip of the fog beating the rocks into a bloody pulp and all around me the ghosts of aunts and dead friends and teachers and doctors and neighbors gather and the great grandmother who taught me to cheat at Hearts form a ring around me chanting This Is Normal Stop Crying You’re So Melodramatic! And God breaks through a raincloud and looks down and says You’ll Never Be Beautiful You Damned Crazy Faggot! Finally someone said it!

After that, nothing changes, nothing at all, I never sleep and I live in terror on Tums and Wonder Bread and I am my mother’s husband and my father’s subjugate and I bleed without reprieve until the year I turn 18 and finally get out of there. But wouldn’t it be great, wouldn’t it make for a better story, if instead of trying so hard to pass as Normal, if I just laughed in God’s face, and drove my bloody protractor into His heart, and how funny would it be if God said OW THAT HURT, and wouldn’t it be great if I said I WILL KILL YOU MY GOD and my mom came out in her blue robe, a garden snake twisting below her foot, and asked What’s Going On and I said I’m Showing You My Inside! and she screamed There’s Blood Everywhere! And wouldn’t it be incredible if, when she tried to take me away to the hospital, where the doctors could tell me What A Tough Girl I Am, I was suddenly covered with feathers, and though the sun tried to kill me and the clouds tried to thunderbolt me and Jesus rolled away the stone to yell Stop Making So Much Goddamned Racket I’m Trying To Resurrect, still all the saints came out of heaven with their flesh peeling off and their amputated limbs held up by their jagged teeth, shaking hankies at me and blowing me kisses, and wouldn’t it be grand if I took off into the air, away from my family and away from that house. Over the mountains and over the fog to land like a penitent at the foot of the sea, where a wave could finally fuck me like the Aberrant Faggot God knew me to be this whole time!

Bio: Bridget Brewer is a writer, musician, and educator based in Austin, TX. Their work has appeared in The Best American Experimental Writing of 2020, McSweeney’s, Puerto del Sol, and The Fanzine, among others. S/he also makes “homespun blasphemer queergrass,” talks to spiders, and is at work on a novel about a trans person in 19th century Nebraska who eats rocks.