All My Scars You Know
Though you take my breath away
There’s one thing I have to say
I’ll never love again
To: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
From: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
Subject: hey there
Hey you. Haven’t talked to you for some amount of time that I don’t quite recall. Whatever, it’s been a while. And I’m holding true to my trying to keep in touch thing this time. So what’s new with you? I’m back at Cameron trying to get into the swing of another semester. This semester is actually shaping up to be pretty awesome. Of course, any semester I’m part of would pretty much have to rock. That’s just a given. But anyway, let me know how you’re doing and what’s up and all that.
Adelaide
To: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
From: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
Subject: Re: hey there
ay bay bay.
yeah, I’ve been busy with various promo things and doctors appointments. Things seem to be calming down, though.
I’m bored. At home. Sitting here naked because I sleep all day and wake up too late to make plans. I want to hurry up and find a non-boring routine that I can be a part of. I doubt it’s going to happen in this town.
I’m writing, breathing, thinking. Which have become three things that have merged, as I can’t do one without doing the other two.
I’m not having sex anymore. I have too much going on to do that. I am flirting, but that’s usual. Who knows… anything that may/may not startle me into thinking it could be worthwhile will inevitably be long distance, or I’ll end up being gone too much for it to be much else. Which isn’t something I want to do, as I’m just getting trusting enough to take myself seriously.
This was my penance. This was what I’d earned for the way I’d brushed Taylor aside for so long. I convinced myself of that, and that made it a little easier to deal with the fact that we weren’t together and weren’t going to be together. Maybe not ever. I didn’t believe that, though. I had to believe that eventually, he would realize the right girl for him was right in front of him. Eventually he would tire of the girls he met on tour and come home to me.
If I didn’t believe that, I would go insane. So I believed it, in spite of any evidence to the contrary.
When I went back to college for the fall, I had absolutely no interest in dating. Why bother? No one would measure up to Taylor. I would wait for him, for as long as it took. No questions asked.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to party, though. I had spent the remainder of the summer, after Taylor’s rejection, hiding in my bedroom. I devoured every book in the house and watched entire seasons of old syndicated tv shows, just to occupy my time. I rarely ate; I just had no appetite, and I knew I’d gained weight since starting college anyway. With Dad constantly drunk, I had to stay sober just to keep an eye on him. By the time school started back, I was thinner, but no happier, and ready to drink.
I still lived in the on campus apartments, but this time with a new set of girls. It was a good place to party, and I ignored the fact that none of the girls I lived with were as interested in partying as I was. None of them seemed all that impressed by the bottles of vodka I carried in on Saturday night, but I didn’t care. That just meant more for me.
At some point, a few of my roommate Callie’s friends wandered into the apartment. She was a bit of a tomboy, so all her friends were male. I didn’t mind that at all. One of them was kind of cute, with curly ginger hair and a sweet smile, but he didn’t even seem to notice that I existed. Instead, a redneck sort of boy named John seemed to be paying the most attention to me. His shaved head reminded me a little too much of Taylor fresh out of chemo. I had no interest in him at all, but I still challenged him to a drinking contest, and to his dismay, I won.
It was hot in the apartment—too hot. I’d stripped down to a tiny pair of shorts and a thin tank top that showed off my new, almost bony figure, but I was still burning up. I didn’t feel all that drunk, though. I’d smoked a bowl earlier with Marcus and our on campus dealer, and that seemed to be dulling the effects of the liquor. It wasn’t so bad, though. I was having a good time.
“Hey,” John said, leaning against my chair. “Can I sleep in your room?”
I stared at him. “What? No!”
“I don’t mean…” he trailed off, giggling. “I just wanna crash on your floor. I’ll be good, I promise.”
I didn’t trust him. I trusted myself, though. Still, I shook my head and told him he would have to crash with Callie if he was intent on staying. My room was off limits.
“Hey guys!” Abby called out, getting everyone’s attention. “Let’s play a drinking game. How about…. Never Have I Ever?”
That was a game I always won—or lost, depending on how you looked at it. But I couldn’t say no. I was starting to feel a little drunk, though. I poured myself a glass of vodka, rather than taking shot after shot, and took small sips every time I was forced to admit to something I’d done. We only made it a few rounds before the room really began to spin.
I pushed my glass of vodka away from me. “Okay. That’s enough for me, guys.”
“Aren’t you going to keep playing?” One of the boys asked.
“Sure, but how about John takes my drinks for me? I’ve had enough.”
John saw no problem with that, naturally, and the game resumed. That was the last thing I remembered.
I woke to a strange beeping sound. I wasn’t in my dorm bed and it took my eyes several minutes to adjust and process my surroundings.
I was in a hospital.
The door to my room was open, and I could see the nurses station. A few nurses milled around it, but no one seemed to notice me and I didn’t see anyone I recognized. How had I gotten there? Had they just dropped me off and left? I was connected to all kinds of tubes and it made me feel sick. A huge bubble of fear rose up inside me and I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. I didn’t see any sort of button around that might get the nurses’ attention, so I did the only thing I could think of. I banged my hands against the sides of my bed, trashing madly, not caring that I looked like a crazy person.
Seconds later, several nurses came rushing into the room, hovering over my bed and asking what I was wrong. I didn’t know. Nothing. Everything. I was scared, and my voice came out only in a harsh whisper. Not knowing what else to do, I asked for my cell phone and tried to dial the first number that came to mind—my mom’s.
The screen was blurry and my hands wouldn’t cooperate. My fingers felt like they had swollen to twice their size, and they wouldn’t do anything I wanted them to do. I started crying, and that only blurred my phone’s screen even more.
“What’s wrong?” Someone asked. I hadn’t even noticed that one of the nurses was still in the room.
“I can’t call my mom,” I managed to gasp out between sobs. “I just want to call my mom.”
“I am your mom.”
I blinked. Between the tears, the picture in front of me became clearer. My mom was standing over me, a look of judgment on her face. That only made me cry more; she might have known that I drank, but she didn’t need to ever see me like this. I didn’t even know how this had happened.
Through sobs, I tried to explain to her that I hadn’t meant to do this, that I was in control. I sounded like an addict and I knew it, but I didn’t know what else to say. I liked drinking. I’d only drank myself sick twice before, and both times I blamed it more on the greasy food I chose to wash down with liquor, not the amount of the liquor. I rarely got hangovers, and I never blacked out.
Except this time. I couldn’t remember anything after I pushed the glass away and stopped.
At some point, mom grew sick of my protests and I had no more words for her. I rolled over and went back to sleep or passed out. There wasn’t much difference, since even now, hours later, I was still technically drunk. I tossed and turned, and once I thought I even saw my mom and dad sitting on opposite sides of my room, talking quietly and peacefully. When a nurse came in to draw more blood — from my foot, as they’d apparently exhausted all the veins in my hands and arms — I woke completely and saw that both of my parents really were in the same room for the first time in two years.
Not knowing what else to say, I turned my head toward my mom and slurred, “You know, if you have to get blood drawn, this is definitely the way to do it. I can’t feel a thing.”
To my surprise, she did laugh at that. She knew how much I hated needles. I’d kicked a doctor once for daring to prick my thumb with a tiny needle, and then bitten him when he had the nerve to try to put a neon pink bandaid over the wound.
I drifted back out after the nurse was gone, only waking again when Mom insisted. There was a man from poison control who wanted to talk to me. I’d evidently answered the doctor’s questions before that, but I didn’t remember. It was just as well; his questions were all the same, I was sure, and I hated repeating myself.
“What did you drink?” He stared at his clipboard, his eyes never even leaving the paper to glance at me.
“Vodka.”
“How much?”
I did a quick tally in my head. I remembered seven shots and a few mixed drinks. I lied. “Not much. A few shots.”
“And that was all you drank?”
“Yes.”
“Did you pour the drinks yourself?”
A vision of that guy John pouring a shot for me flashed through my mind. “Yes.”
“And you didn’t drink anything else? Mouthwash, rubbing alcohol, anything like that?”
I stared blankly at the guy. What did he think, that I was trying to kill myself? With a growl, I replied, “No. Just vodka.”
That was, thankfully, his last question. After one last check of all my vitals, the doctors finally agreed to release me. Mom and Dad helped me into Mom’s car and we drove back to campus. Along the way, she explained that I was still technically drunk, even thought it was the following afternoon, and the doctors had contemplated putting me on dialysis before ultimately deciding that time alone would lower my alcohol levels back to normal. I had already vomited it all up, so they didn’t pump my stomach; the IVs I’d been hooked up to were pumping me full of fluids in an attempt to replace all the alcohol in my blood. All those tubes and needles had bothered me so much that I’d yanked most of them a few times; the nurses had wrapped my hands in gauze to stop me. That explained why my hands hadn’t done what I asked of them earlier, I realized.
I knew Mom was only giving me the facts because she couldn’t bare to be emotional about it. If she was, she would probably do a more efficient job of hurting me than all that vodka had.
Miraculously, I convinced them to let me stay on campus. I couldn’t afford to miss class so early in the semester, even though I was sure I would be excused if I told my professors I’d spent the weekend in the hospital. I just couldn’t handle the thought of leaving campus with either of them and their judgment. While Mom used the bathroom and prepared to leave, Dad helped me mop up the still damp spot of puke in my bedroom floor and toss my disgusting sheets and blankets in the washing machine.
Once that was done, he stood awkwardly in the door. He opened his mouth to say something, and I could see the judgment in his eyes.
“I really don’t need a lecture from the guy I’ve had to bail out,” I said, the words coming out even more harshly than I expected.
To my surprise, Dad just nodded and gave me a hug.
I made a point not to ask my roommates for all the details of that night. They’d filled in a few blanks for me, but that was all. I knew that they had dropped me off at the hospital and stayed for a few hours after calling my parents. I knew that my next door neighbor Tara’s boyfriend had been the one to hear me puking in the early hours of the morning and rushed into my room to find me face down on my bed. I knew they’d thrown the empty vodka bottle—had I finished it myself?—in a dumpster down the street before calling campus security and 911.
And I knew that I had slept with that John guy.
I had no memory of it at all. Callie talked to him for me and he promised her that he had no clue how drunk I was, but that we had used protection and he was clean. That really didn’t make me feel any better. I didn’t want him… at all. If I racked my memory, the only thing I could dredge up from that night was what I thought was a dream of being with Taylor. Had it been John? He had a similar enough build and his bald head had reminded me of Taylor. It still didn’t make sense, though. None of that night made sense.
One word kept swirling around in my mind: rape.
Had I been raped? Had I been sober enough, I wouldn’t have consented. That made it rape, then. But I didn’t remember it. How could I be traumatized by something I had no memory of? It was as if it didn’t happen, and that was how I decided to treat it. There had been no John, and I had stayed true to my desire to wait for Taylor.
“Ade?” Callie asked, pulling me from my daze.
I realized I was staring off into space, holding my highlighter at least an inch above the page I was supposed to be reading. We were working on a group project, but my focus wasn’t what it used to be. The words “lasting damage” danced around my mind, too, but I had to believe that eventually I’d be my old self again.
“Not to distract from this curriculum standards stuff, but…” she paused and bit her lip. “Umm, nevermind.”
“No, what is it?” I asked, letting the highlighter fall from my hand.
“Well, it’s probably nothing, but I was just looking at these pictures of Taylor and…”
I braced myself. Callie was the one person I’d shared the truth with about Taylor and I. She was something of a Hanson fan, but not in a way that made me think it was unsafe to tell her. At the moment, though, it only took a glance over her shoulder to see that her laptop was open to some Hanson gossip site. Taylor’s red beanie would have been visible from space.
“It’s just, umm,” Callie said. “I think this is his girlfriend…”
She passed the laptop to me and I stared at the screen in disbelief. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know he was going to date other girls. But here it was, right in front of me. She was short and blonde, not unlike myself, but her hair was stick straight and probably bleached. She had a very round face, and I couldn’t tell if it was that or the height making her look so young—or maybe she was young.
“The, umm, the comments said she’s only eighteen. She’s from somewhere around Tulsa. I mean, that’s what people are saying. They might be wrong, but they all seem to agree her name is Samantha. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have even shown you. I don’t know why I did.”
I shook my head and handed her the laptop. “It’s fine. I needed to know.”
It was anything but fine, though. But this was my penance. Of that I was sure. I could wait as long as it took, even if I had to watch him date a hundred little blondes who weren’t me.
Happy Thanksgiving
Posted by TaylorHanson
Well, if we were in the US right now, it would be Thanksgiving weekend. But we’re not. We’re in Japan, and it is fantastic to be here again. Although for me, it’s pretty good to be anywhere right now. I’m so thankful to all the fans who have stuck with us over the past three years and everything those years have put us all through. And I’m thankful to my friends, family and so on who’ve supported not just me but the whole band during every bit of it. I miss the turkey, but getting out on stage for you guys once again is a pretty good way to celebrate this holiday if you ask me.
To: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
From: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
Subject: hello
I may have checked your website, just out of curiosity to see where you were. Glad to see you’re surviving the tour and the holiday. I managed to make it through as well, and surprisingly without strangling anyone for saying stupid things.
It wasn’t easy.
So, how are you? I’m temporarily car-less but hopefully that will be remedied soon. Then I have to make it through finals… ugh. But perhaps we’ll hang out over the break? That’ll be the light at the end of finals week… or something like that.
With that mixed metaphor, I’ll end this.
Adelaide
To: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
From: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
Subject: Re: hello
we should. we shall. it’s a deal. I need to not hate everything. it’s all up to you to restore my faith!
To: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
From: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
Subject: Re: Re: hello
Two weeks from now, you, me and fantastic amounts of alcohol. Sound like a plan? I don’t know if I can restore your faith, but I can get you well and truly fucked up — and in good company, I hope.
Adelaide
To: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
From: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
Subject: Re: Re: Re: hello
sounds extremely worthwhile. I say we barhop. Especially if you’re still with someone (a little birdie told me you were), haha.
but, either way, we’ll end up crashing back at my place. I won’t drive us around, though… so I’ll have to find someone else to DD, haha.
To: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
From: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello
You know, I’ve never barhopped before. Sounds like fun.
For what it’s worth, I’m not really “with” anyone right now. It’s never been official, and I’m tiring of that fact.
And yes, having a DD is rather essential, if we’re going with the barhopping plan. I don’t drive drunk, and I won’t tolerate it from anyone I’m drinking with.
To: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
From: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello
I could probably manage it. I’ve driven while heavily medicated. I’m just extra careful and slower. But, I don’t want to make that my only option. I wish Zac would hurry up and get a decent, reliable car haha.
To: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
From: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello
Oh, I just take issue with drunk drivers in general, given that I lost an aunt and cousin to one. I’ve driven across campus with two Smirnoff Ices in me, and even that made me feel kinda shitty.
Driving stoned, however, is a totally different story. That, I take absolutely no issue with.
To: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
From: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello
Speaking of stoned… I need to drive to Oklahoma City at some point to get stoned for my first time, haha. I have a promise to someone there.
To: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
From: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello
Aww, you ruined my Christmas surprise. I was totally gonna bring a few joints with me, haha. Well, I can’t take your virginity, but perhaps we can still smoke together? If you enjoy it, that is.
To: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
From: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello
haha.. bring it anyways. the promise is with a girl whom I have a large amount of unspoken sexual tension with. the pot is just an excuse for that to be a fling and we both secretly know it.
at least ours is spoken, haha… so if by the time you come in, I haven’t visited her, I probably won’t ever. this can only mean that you should bring it anyways, haha
To: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
From: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello
If you hadn’t said the girl was in OKC, I’d think you were talking about me, haha. But it’s true, ours is spoken. Spoken fairly often, in fact.
I find, as I think I’ve mentioned before, pot can be very fun when shared with someone whose company you enjoy… if you know what I mean.
I also find that most people don’t get stoned the first time they smoke, so maybe I wouldn’t really mind being your second…
To: adelaide.quinn@cameron.edu
From: Taylorhanson@hanson.net
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: hello
que sera, sera.
“Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. Out here we is stoned. Immaculate.”
― Jim Morrison