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"Hey, chicken pox,” Rich hollers, and Jeremy is yanked violently out of a daze, finding his left hand obsessive at the side of his face while his right is conjugating. The worksheet is not enough to keep the whole class occupied, and picking on Jeremy’s picking is low-hanging fruit. “Having fun over there?”
Rich Goranski, local bully with nothing better to do, mimes clawing down the side of his face, slow and light, first wincing and then twisting his face into a faux pleasured moan that earns squeals and laughs of discomfort and amusement alike, though Jeremy gives neither. His face, already stinging from the abuse, floods with unbearable warmth. The decapitated acne begins to bleed, and someone throws a crumpled worksheet at him, and Jeremy just hunches over his own harder. His throat stings, too.
-
See, it’s always been a thing; a habit of Jeremy Heere. When he was younger, he peeled scabs, and when he started getting acne, he popped them open, or he picked them off; when he had no wounds, he would scratch at the inside of his elbows until they grew bright red dots. He doesn’t realize until years later that it had been blood.
It feels good to scratch. It makes him feel clean. Jeremy doesn’t have a word for it, but his mom chooses gross and his dad chooses unhealthy and sometimes self-mutilation when he’s angry, but that one just makes him dig his nails in harder. It’s easier to focus on how much it hurts to rip up his skin than the dirty sound of that word. Mutilation. Self-mutilation. That’s like cutting your fingers off or your arms open-- Jeremy gags at the thought. No. He’s just scratching. He’s just satisfying an itch. It’s not that bad.
“Why do you do that?” His mom asks, frustrated, and Jeremy is frustrated, too. She doesn’t know how to help, and won’t listen to his protests. Neosporin doesn’t help scabs close (like she says). It keeps them soft and open (like he knows). His skin crawls where she touches and he wants to scrub it all off.
“I don’t know! I just do, I don’t know!"
Jeremy is twelve years old and he doesn’t know why he refuses to let his scabs heal. Jeremy is fourteen years old and he doesn’t know why his mom refuses to let her marriage heal.
He knows it’s stupid, he knows it’s not going to help, but he takes a shower so hot it burns and leans into the steamed up mirror and spends a full hour pinching his face. It feels like getting clean. It feels like he’s fixing something. He squeezes, the world narrowing to one blackhead at a time, one whitehead at a time, one pore at a time, each spitting satisfactorily or else being pinched until it was angry and red. When his back starts to ache from leaning he pulls away and looks at himself, his face looks like it’s been peppered with bee stings. His nails leave crescent marks indents and around those his skin is red under the pressure of anxious twiggy fingers.
All the fear he normally keeps wrapped around his ribs is coming undone and snaking through his arms and back and making his palms shake, so he leaves the bathroom and he looks at his messy room and feels worse so he heads downstairs, and he sits down, and he calls Michael for help.
Jeremy remembers learning the words panic attack after a bad day in the sixth grade. This day is worse.
Dad isn’t downstairs, and Jeremy doesn’t know where he is. But eventually Michael comes. He walks in to find Jeremy sitting and waiting and bleeding a little, and he doesn’t mention it, yet. He just takes him home.
-
Jeremy is sixteen, and sitting in the basement, watching TV, melted into the couch. His eyes are fixed on the History Channel, but his hands are busy. One is balled into a fist and the other is trying to peel a soft yellow scab off what used to be a bugbite.
Michael doesn’t scare or startle Jeremy out of his trance. He nudges him with a knee first, and that gets Jeremy to look up.
“You okay, dude?”
“Huh?” Now that’s something. Jeremy just looks confused for a minute before he blinks and the pain must register, because he winces and looks down at once, and then winces again. It’s ugly. “Sorry. Sorry. I-”
But Michael doesn’t press. He shakes his head, and passes Jeremy a can of soda, and Jeremy holds onto it with both hands.
-
Jeremy thinks maybe deep down he already knew self-mutilation bothered him because it wasn’t that far off.
It was gross. Normal people didn’t rely on squeezing pus out of their face to cope.
It’s hard for a sweaty, anxious, teenage boy to feel clean. His thoughts certainly aren’t, and everyone has days where they get a little grimey, but Jeremy isn’t the type to skip a shower.
Jeremy looks in the mirror. Jeremy avoids mirrors. Jeremy sits up, till half-past midnight, just picking his shoulders with his fingernails.
No sirree, even on his worst days, even on his shakiest, you can find him dragging himself into that stall and scouring the dead skin away. He just wants to feel clean .
Sometimes, once in a blue moon, he would squeeze out a whitehead and it would fade, calmly, just like the first one.
Mostly, he just ended up with people staring, and scabs.
-
Michael doesn’t stare. Michael just helps. Michael, with his own gross habits, with his missed showers and his constant fidgets and his obsessions and rants, would still have every right to judge Jeremy for his bad habits, because his are gross . But he doesn’t.
“It’s cool,” he waves it off, over and over, and one day when they’re learning to communicate asks outright how he can help, and Jeremy’s throat is full of a lump that he can’t talk around for a solid minute.
Michael taps on his leg when he’s picking, or across the table from Jeremy taps his own to remind him not to, or passes him a fidget, and only sometimes makes fun of him for keeping a spinner before, during, and after them being cool.
Jeremy’s trying. He’s trying , and no one can see it. It can’t just go away.
It did for a while, but that was different, that was when he had help, although that help was no help at all. He has plenty of scars on his back without electrocution ones to run down his spine. They feel different, not the round pox littering his shoulders. But he’s starting to be more skin tissue than boy and he wonders if someday he’ll run out of skin to ruin.
He laughs at that, a little, and ignores the way it makes people look at him, because it’s not a joke for them.
-
He wishes the trauma of it could give him that one gift. Maybe he could trade bad habits for electrical burns and call it a day!
Masturbating comes back first, after a whopping two days. And shaking his leg under the desk after four.
The first time he catches himself leaning toward the mirror, he yanks himself back before the Squip can so much as sigh and heads straight into the shower, and when he gets dressed he chooses soft, soft clothing that covered up as much as he could.
It got him into the habit of better skincare, but there’s only so far Neutrogena can go (that expensive stuff had to run out sometime, and how different can the six dollar version be) and he still gets breakouts, especially on bad weeks. How fair is that. Panic and sweat and get punished for it with pimples.
The first time he passes a mirror and pauses, and leans, and there’s no electric shock to accompany the voice in his head, he places two fingers on either side of a boil and exhales as he hammers it with pressure and it bursts like a geyser and it fucking splatters on the mirror , and Jeremy feels a sick sort of better. Not normal, just better.
-
“I’m sorry,” Rich says one day, out of the blue. “For all the shit I said about your face, alright?” He rushes to get out, before Jeremy can embarrass them both with a hesitant stammer for clarification. The words hang in the air, and Jeremy bounces his leg, rolls his thumb around the controller in his hand.
Rich’s got one hand on the controller and one hand on his arm, the pads of his fingers brushing over formerly smooth skin.
He doesn’t hide the burns, in school or around friends.
“It feels like shit,” he says, eyes glued to the pause menu, “having to explain them over and over.”
Under his shirt, Jeremy feels the sting of a million pinched whiteheads, sore from this morning.
“Yeah,” Jeremy says, and he unpauses the game. They clear the level in record time.
No, they don’t. They lost their groove and have to start over. But the next try goes a lot smoother.
-
Jeremy’s standing in the kitchen, not paying attention as he looks for a snack, and his Dad says,”Get your hand out of your shirt,” his tone a little too firm and familiar-- and almost before the words are over Jeremy’s shoulders are squared and his chest moved forward, his hands dangling casually at his sides. His skin is buzzing, ready for a phantom pain that isn’t coming, although the source of it chooses to whisper. He ignores it, he ignores it, he ignores it.
Dad gives him a onceover at this complete change in posture. He visibly doesn’t know how to react, but he tries a half-smile, a two fingered salute. “At ease, soldier.”
Jeremy just stands, feeling his pulse, eyes set on granola. His heart is nervous, anticipating what comes next. But no shock comes.
-
They go to a theme park, the whole group does, and he wears a tank top. Because it’s hot out, because he’s tired, because his cardigans and hoodies feel wrong today. And his shoulders are a mess, of boils and blackheads and bright pink scars, and nobody is staring because nobody gives a shit, but he wants to dig his hands in and shriek.
Around sunset, Brooke drapes her favorite sweater around him, when it starts to get cool, waving him off with an excuse that makes it about her feeling too hot and not the ulterior motive, of protecting his shoulders from further harm with soft yellow wool that smells like perfume.
Jeremy notices her shoulders are spotted, too, and it feels like a lifeline. On her, the pink just looks like bubbles.
“Yeah,” she says when he points it out, excited to match, and she shrugs, uncomfortable. “Nervous habit.”
He doesn’t push.
But he tells her he might bleed on the cardigan, and she dismisses it with a sleepy, limp-wristed wave.
“Don’t worry so much, Jeremy. Nobody else does.”