How to Kill Yourself Like a Wrestler From North Jersey

by Cara Dempsey

The big joke is that since Coach moved Mazz and Joe down to 126 pounds this season, the overall beer consumption in the county has plummeted like someone cut the cord in an elevator shaft. Someone says this on the walk into the woods. Big laughs.

The can of Keystone that Mazz hands me as we trek behind the high school soccer field is full of 110 fizzing, bubbling calories. 

Is that a lot? 

Not for you, he tells me, his smile like a pocketknife to my throat. You’ll have to drink for me until March. He means when the season ends. It’s not just him. Gina won’t stay out past ten so she can wake up to run with the other cross-country girls. Joe’s twin sister won’t come out at all during soccer season. None of that is for me. I can’t catch a ball or set a record, but I can drink a feeling away in all four seasons. No problem. 

We plant ourselves between the cul-de-sac, the glow from the houses peeking through the fingers of the trees, and the black hole of the unlit soccer field. Freedom on a pizza place salary.

Everything that usually happens happens. First, Gina says she wants to try cartwheeling across the green with a cigarette in her mouth, but Joe says the cops might be hanging around the school parking lot. Then someone says boo to that, and someone has a speaker if we want to play the new Kanye, and someone else’s older brother could maybe get us some vodka, and someone else just filled up their tank with gas, and still all we do for hours is sit around on dead, damp nature. 

Mazz dumps half a Diet Snapple into the mud and then spits in the bottle. His long, always-thinner body, the Jack Skellington curve of him, makes a shadow that I like across the dead leaves. I have this thought then and it sticks: He is the only living thing there.

On the walk home, I’m already fading, eyelids heavy from the beer, retreating into my sweater, my thumbs hooking the sleeves. Gina and Mazz are a few sidewalk squares ahead. When she walks, I can’t help but watch her like reality TV. She struts. She skips. She dances. She is a lightning bolt in yoga pants, striking. 

The longer I stare at her, the less my body feels connected to my brain. With her and Mazz, athletes, it’s like every part of their body moves with purpose. They breathe, blink, and sneeze like choreography. Point of contrast, every part of me, from the stumpy legs to my stupid heart to my community college–bound brain, flails and wastes.

If Gina moves like a lightning bolt, then I move like a punch line.

Oh my god, Joe pops next to me, grabbing my shoulders, his voice and his Black and Mild breath in my ear. Are you gonna do the dance? I had been on another channel since we started leaving the woods, hadn’t even realized there was music playing from someone’s phone, but there is. Britney. Someone starts to chant my name, and Gina turns around to shoot them a look.

Somewhere on everyone’s phones there is a video of me from freshman year that someone took, some drinks in, thighs spilling out of an ill-fitting denim skirt, hair gel-curled and plastered like roadkill, second chin resting under crooked lips, tits hanging out like laundry, dancing to this song. In the video, I’m laughing hysterically, just begging everyone to join me. Exposed and, worse, ugly doing it. It had been one of the best nights of my life until someone played it back.

The first time I watched it, I wanted to die. The fiftieth time, I felt the same. I could watch it a million times and each go there’d be a new piece to hate. The body in the video, flailing, droopy-eyed drunk, pathetic, was one that I could no longer trust. Freshman year, I told myself that if I couldn’t be thin, I’d be funny. That was the old plan. New plan: bury me at my goal weight. 

On day one of my big plan, I take notes from the wrestlers. Everyone has tricks. Some are better than others. With Mazz, he spits and quits fluids twenty-four hours before a match. Dom Sawyer is never not asking a teacher if he can go take a shit. Joe eats half a can of chunk light tuna and two palms of almonds a day for three or four days before. His girlfriend runs around bitching about his rank-ass breath. 

I count Mazz’s spits and by algebra his cruddy spit bottle is two-thirds full. I like the way his legs jigger against the metal of his desk, how his sweatpants need a hand to stay. Spit. I like how he pulls at pieces of his hair and then they feather to the floor all delicate like a ballet.

Wrestling turns everyone into parts, and I like that about it. An arm grabs a leg and that leg bends back until another arm wraps around a freckled neck and drills it into the mat. Every second, a new way a body can grind itself down and twist into a new shape. Takedown. Reversal. Near fall. 

At the start of his match, I watch Mazz’s rumbling feet inch forward and back. Then, I watch his head pitch toward the other guy’s chest. I try to look away from the muscles on the back of his legs, hard, shifting, twitching, like a thin bedsheet with a crushing, perpetual machine just underneath.

On day three of my plan, I wake up feeling sunk and raw at around two in the morning. This is an accomplishment. As the thought passes through me, there is a short feeling, shining and victorious, like being the best girl picked in the season finale or like being in the middle of the mat like the boys, winning over the sound of everyone I know all at once in one gym. I am weightless and floating above my bed. I can’t fall back asleep. 

I count sheep. I count the number of guys Gina has hooked up with. I count the number of times that Gina has finished in the top five in a cross-country race. I count the number of cars in the senior lot that cost as much as Gina’s Mercedes. I count how many calories are in a turkey sandwich with cheese if you don’t eat the bread, then if you don’t eat the cheese. I stare at my popcorn ceiling and kick my feet to burn more calories.

Day fourteen, Mazz wins his match against that skinny ginger from Bogota who’s supposed to be some big deal even though he’s got a messed up ACL that he’s been hiding. Mazz’s three little brothers watch and wail from the bleachers, each like a plagiarized version of him, each waiting patiently for their inevitable turn to be the one in the middle of everything. 

After the match Mazz pounds his fist in the air, saying over and over how he’s got, like, no ACLs left and no fucking brain in his head, but that he’s still the fucking king. That night, the king cracks a beer, drinks a Budweiser, seventy-two whole calories, and climbs on top of Joe’s mom’s car and rockets the rest of the can into the night. I can’t help but watch the youngest brother watch Mazz from the pavement. His hair curls in the front like Mazz’s and his nostrils flare the same way. His smile has teeth but his eyes get narrow at his big brother. For just a second I wonder if his embarrassing cocktail of jealousy and absolute adoration feels even just a little like my own. 

Later in Joe’s mom’s basement, Reese eyes Mazz from across the room, turns to me and asks, Is he crying? This is a big no way, obviously, because crying is for pussies, just like torn ACLs and other bitch-ass excuses. He is perched on the arm of a futon in the corner, staring into the stains on the carpet, blotchy and fading from alcohol, but, no, never crying. He is missing some connecting pieces, sure, but he is still the king. 

At some point, he and Gina go off somewhere to make out. From my spot, I try to change the channel in my head and picture him right after the match, shouting something triumphant, slapping his headgear, the thunder of us all around him while he’s screaming about his no fucking brain. We love him, would do anything for him, with his stupid breaking body and his bad mouth.

That night, I run for the first time. It starts almost like a dream, the kind of dream that you have when you haven’t been able to sleep through the night in days. I try to count. I try to make the movie in my head of when someone will finally fall in love with me. I try to do push-ups. I try to read my mother’s book about manifesting joy. I try to tiptoe to my parents’ liquor cabinet without waking them. No one hears me when I crack the little wooden door open. No one hears when I shift the glass around. No one hears when I take the bottle of twist-off wine and creak across the floor to the back door or when I creep out onto the back porch. 

Once I put my feet onto the grass, I’m overwhelmed by the freedom in realizing that they won’t wake up, my family. The cars parked in the driveways won’t wake up. The neighbors in their blankets won’t wake up. The houses to my left and right are dark and closed. The only thing out here to listen to is my own breath and growling.

I twist off the top and walk the bottle down to the edge of my driveway. From the top of the hill, headlights roll over and at me before hanging left just before my house. I drink a mouthful of cheap, sweet red. I am invisible. 

I walk down to the stop sign at the end of the street. Maybe I’m waiting to wake up in my bed. I reach the stop sign and then tell myself that I will turn back once I get to the blue van in our neighbor’s driveway. When I pass it, I tell myself that I will walk to the Murphys’ house and back. It won’t be more than ten minutes. 

On the way there, I hear my knee crack awake. The wine is starting to sink into my stomach, so I twist the top back on. That feeling of something sitting heavy in my center stays away if I keep moving, so I do, first slowly plugging, and then faster and faster until I’m jogging. The little bit of wine leftover sloshes and makes waves around the bottle, but I try not to notice, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. My breath is the only noise in my head. All of the eyes that have ever looked at my body are asleep and I have never been freer.

On day twenty, Gina drives a bunch of us to the mall. We pile in, me offering to take bitch seat so that my denim can be knee-to-knee with Mazz’s sweatpants until we reach the parking lot. It’s a great plan except that he rides shotgun.

We’re barely past Dunkin’ Donuts before everything is a mess. Gina is complaining about some paper due in English at the end of the week, how she can’t get it done with all of her early morning runs, how the kid that she babysits is the antichrist, how our chemistry teacher has it out for her, how her Mercedes-buying mom won’t get off her back. All bullshit. At one point, I snort at her and I see her eyebrows raise at me in her rearview mirror, as if I could ever hurt her. Mazz must get it though because he starts drumming on the dashboard along with the radio, pounding louder and louder the longer she rattles off until, finally, she grabs his arm, asks, Can you quit it for a second? 

Something shifts. I remember Mazz’s connective pieces again, how he keeps bragging how pretty soon he’ll have none left.

Can you shut the fuck up?

Can you get out of my fucking car?

He doesn’t. He plucks her phone out of the middle cupholder, cracks the passenger window, the car still doing seventy-five down Route 17, and he spikes the little thing into the pavement. 

Things inside the car get slow and quiet while the cars outside continue weaving in and out. No one says a thing. Rihanna plays on the radio. Gina white-knuckles the ten and two with shaking hands. From the back, I see Mazz’s shoulders begin to move up and down. I realize he is sniveling, whispering an apology over and over like the fade-out of a pop song. 

On day thirty, I run three miles and sneak back in at four in the morning. 

My legs are still humming when I kick my shoes off, when I slide my socked feet along the kitchen tile. I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and my legs won’t be sore like they used to get. I can feel it. Then, I feel like dancing, so I do the Tom Cruise slide, give a twirl in front of the fridge without even opening it. I wonder if this new, constant awakeness is just what getting stronger feels like.

I still can’t sleep, so instead I practice outfits to make sure they’re ready when the rest of me finally is. Bike shorts and just a sports bra with an unbuttoned men’s shirt on top, my cleavage aggressive and demanding. An old camp shirt cut with kitchen scissors so that it hits just under my chest. I slip on my fishnets from two Halloweens ago and take my scissors to a Johnny Cash T-shirt to make the collar into a deep v shape like how cartoon characters’ eyebrows get when they’re angry. 

It’s like, there are so many exciting new lives for me to try on that I can hardly pick my favorite, but then suddenly, in the mirror, I find that little shadow under my belly and a little piece of me remembers: mini bagel. Then, I can’t help but be like, mini bagel, no cream cheese, threw half in the trash, only ate half of a half saved, so divide total calories by four. Can’t slip up again tomorrow and still can’t sleep, so I plan ahead menus. I plan the breakfast that I will eat on the best day of my life. I plan what I will wear on the best day of my life and what people will think when they look at me. I plan the people whom I will never speak to again once we graduate. I plan the places that I will go when my body is ready.

It’s almost five when I surrender to the cold blue light of my phone, thumbing through photos of skinny women in pants, recipes for salads named after goddesses, infographics for marathon training, shirts to wrap myself in, shame-free low-cal pasta dishes, backless dresses worn by women whose spines I can see, ten ways to turn half a banana into a meal, the best jeans for my body type, the best jeans for the type of body I want to have. 

At seven-thirty, my alarm fires off and I can feel how puffy and awful my eyes are, but it’s worth it.

On day thirty-six, Mazz gets kicked out of geometry for screaming during a test. He had been popping out of his seat and pacing every few minutes. I pictured that firing engine just beneath his tissue skin again. He wouldn’t stop. He would sit, cross his foot over his knee, jerking and twitching the toe of his sneaker against his desk, uncross, get up, walk up and down the rows of us, then sit back down without a word and pull at his hair and eyebrows again. One, two, three times Mrs. Little told him that he needed to stay seated while we were all testing. Finally, he got up one more time and she called across the room, If you get out of that seat one more time I will lose it. 

I’m fucking starving, he said except he didn’t say it. He screamed it, got up, then kicked his chair, the tin echo heavy on the whole room, and then he tried to sit back down and let his head drop back over the paper in front of him like nothing had ever happened. Radio silence.

That night, after my run, I take a photo of my reflection in the long mirror hooked onto the back of my bedroom door. At first, it’s just the one. I study it for a while and then decide to take another, from a better angle, and with one of the lampshades in my room tilted a different way. I zoom in, then back out. I pick another part of myself, zoom in, then back out. I take another of myself sitting on the carpet in that way that women always do when they’re in skirts, my knees glued together and curled under me to make my knees into little arrows. I take one of just my face. I take another with a smile, then another toothy one. I delete it and take another. There’s one of my legs, my gut stuck out like Thanksgiving when everyone goes home, my gut sucked in, my breasts from the side, all of the front. 

It’s like when we dissected frogs in Mr. Gibb’s class, examining each part of the complex system of one living thing’s squishing nightmare of a body.

I look at the photos, studying, combing through them until I pass out, unsure if I have finally left my old self behind and uncovered the rest of my life. If I’ve finally, finally started to recede and disappear, like the shadows we cast on the walk into the woods, long and thin, just before they’re eaten by the night. 

Published March 12th, 2023