A Bit More Nichole

So Nichole's mother had never hugged her. And at 13, she still lived in a sort of educated ingenue - knowing about the mixed-up moves of physically active people but never experiencing touches of any sort. She lived the sad life of a thirty year old larping bachelor - with the exception of the fact that even he (probably) had a quasi-attentive mother and (as a larper) hit and was hit by other people regularly. Nichole's knowledge, bereft of experience and action, led to revolving, rotationg periods of intense curiosity with relentless researching and then resultant disgust and the feeling that the entire human race and propagation thereof was soporific. Of course, Nichole hadn't consciously realized this - all she knew was that while she hated thinking about how she or her half-brother came about, she wanted hugs.

She released the locket with a long sigh, a long face, a long long pause. Shadows lambasted her lethargy and she felt small pinches of guilt in her side for staying in the door way for so long long long long long. It was as if her entire torso had fallen asleep and was consequently experiencing the prickling of awakening knives. She habitually observed her surroundings, lost in thought and embroiled in emotion - feelings induced by dust particles in sunlight or by peculiar patterns on tile or funny grafitti which she couldn't understand but made up absurd meanings for. This doorway pause had been different, however. It had not been the transcendent htherapy of meandering thought and scarcely-there conscious. It had been willful. It had been an attempt to master or control feelings that Nichole had never needed - or at least felt compelled to have needed - to supress. Why choke these bubblings anyway? Why have these feelings inthe first place? (Nichole was currently in the ascetic stage of her cyclic perspective on physicality - and now that she thought she had found someone she really could care for, she was taking an especially prophylactic approach.)

Her stepfather practiced his chiropradctic techniques a few times more after that first day. Nichole assumed it was because he just needed a body to punch, as it always occurred when her mother was out - ironing away the wrinkles in bank tellers' foreheads or spot-washing the demands of that mortgage company. But the practices always smarted so terribly. They always summoned tears. He would mutter between chiropractic blows, "Aloha to your poppa.... Quentin.... blue... blook... fold... visor... Aloha, nurse," and other enigmatic utterances Nichole assimilated and did not ever analyze - afraid of what their deciphered meaning might imply. And every time, the practicing became more potent. The "deep massages" left bruises and the "spinal realignments" made Nichole's back feel so brittle - like a leaf in Autumnl: stem strong but breakable and surrounding skin crumbly and crunchable. When she went into her nurse's office one afternoon, along with every girl in her junior high with a birthday in April, she was told that she had scoliosis. (Skull e-whatsis?)

She let the locket fall now. It was tepid - like a warm mouth on her collarbone.

Arbitrarily, the school nurse had gone through all of the school's girls by birth date - regardless of year. So Nichole was in there with seventh and eighth graders. She normally didn't let age intimidate her but, Hey, what was normal anymore? So with her undiagnosed, curled, buttered-shortbread-crumbly leaf of a back and her chest knotted with self-conscious trepidation, Nichole told the nurse her name and homeroom. Then she was told to strip off her shirt and to bend down. Nichole must have balked for the nurse then added: you can do it in this other room hun you don't have to out here.

The shadows berated her again, slapping her cold cheeks and creeping around and de-warming her locket. They pushed her around and ordered her to give more. "Come on - you were beautiful then. Just a few more minutes of that carefree creativity - just give me more of afore-you!!!" They were bellowing, billowing, black, groping and greedy. Nichole wanted to settle them. She wanted to give them more more but she was empty - a drunken, open and laid waste box of shot-glasses. Or maybe television tubes. "I have nothing left to give," she rasped, and strode into the house and gave her Father a hug this time.

The school nurse had opened a small door and ushered Nichole inside - a sweet woman, but rushed and ultimately, intimately impersonal. She told Nichole to remove her shirt and bend down, as if in the act of touching her toes. So Nichole did, thanking heaven that she had actually worn the grimy training bra her mom had tossed to her one afternoon with the words, "Budding might hurt sometimes." The nurse stepped back, examing Nichole from a distance - studying her silhouette. After some moments, when Nichole's leaf began to tremble, as if blown around on a branch barely attached to it, the nurse poked her hand along Nichole's spine. "You've got severe symptoms of scoliosis, punkin'." Nicyhole hated terms of endearment from professionals - especially when they were foodish nouns and adjectives. They always made the air rotten - overripe and overused and oft-times sickly sweet. This "punkin'" was putrid, out of context and grisly gangrene.

That hug rankled. He was standing at the kitchen counter, chopping something or other when Nichole's need to be refilled or refueled with whatever it was that she was now empty of - prompted her to the cumbersome act. Her hands stammered around his waist, stuttering with uncertainity and unfamiliarity, yet continuing around in that inarticulate need. He stiffened mid-chop, didn't say anything do anything move anything pray anything reassure a thing or respond. Nichole had no idea what to do, and her normal abnormality of action autopiloted: she blushed, stammered and stuttered verbally this time, and fleed to her bedroom. It rankled. The hug, as well as something else she could not name. And she was still empty, devoid and now rankling. Above all, she simply did not know.

Nichole's back disease was communicated to her with the appelation "punkin'" and she immediately sickened and retched and retched. She was told that her parents would be contacted and appointments for fittings would be made. She was going to have to be em-braced, her fluttering Fall leaf of a back supported and shaped by metal prong and steel branch - a lamentably pseudo em-brace of a brace. Her parents had been contacted, sympathetic but inert. No appointments for fittings were made and - while those painful chiropractic practice sessions in the isolated house ceased - Nichole now endured chiropractic practices of a different variety: a sort similar to what she imagined her mother experienced. These were always performed under the watchful eye of an ironing mother concerned for the first time in Nichole's life. But she didn't know which form of chiropractic techniques she preferred - the lonely painful ones preceding the diagnosis or the tears- and worry-inducing gentle ones after. Now she was under both the apprenticed hands of her stepfather and the red-rimmed eyes of her now concerned mother. Her stepfather couldn't afford the insurance to pay for the medical bills - whether the braces removal of his wife or the brace fitting for his step-daughter.

She remembered the little "butt book" her counselor had given her: a miniature composition book with speckled blue design. "Put it in the butt pocket of your pants along with a pen, and whenever your thoughts fill up that head of yours, let them spill over onto the pages of this book." Nichole didn't know what to write; she didn't know if her htoughts were overflowing or were simply absent. She didn't know. She grabbed her locket unconsciously - an impulse of security - and was suddenly aware of its weight in her hands. She didn't know anything anymore and was so tired of it. She didn't know herself, she didn't know her family, she didn't know how to let go of the locket (it was stuck fast to her hand like an icy pole to a wet tongue or maybe like a wet tongue to an icy pole - she didn't know.)

Nichole wasn't used to maternal affection of any kind. So she didn't quite know what to make of her mother's nascent concern. Of a sudden, she found brownbag lunches on the table before school, a new pair of socks on the bead, even - once - a note saying "Back pain might hurt more than budding. xo" And the more hidden affection her mother exhibited - serruptitious secret acts of aid or new socks and underwear - the less Nichole saw of her. It was as if with this non-viusal concern, there as a horrid mitigation - stipulated in her mother's unwritten law of conscious. In relationships her Mother really cared about she could not both communicate and demonstrate love. She could only do one or the other. So at this time when her mom actually began to care and Nichole began not to, her mom began to act, but it never escalated to in-person action.