Tiffany Scandal - Jigsaw Youth

Just before dinner, I walked through the living room toward the crate that held my coloring supplies. My aunt ran in and turned on the TV.

“Ella, look.”

The news was on. The words KURT COBAIN DEAD AT TWENTY-SEVEN on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. Footage of police tape, a window, a gray blanket over someone’s feet. Flowers, a sea of people crying, holding candles. Pictures of Kurt. It was suicide. I didn’t even know what that was yet. My aunt explained it to me like I wasn’t a child. He was only twenty-seven. I was transfixed by the broadcast, to the point where the hand on my shoulder made me jump. My aunt crouching down to ask if I was okay.

I blurted out, “I hate you,” and ran to my room.

I found my Walkman and slid the foam-covered headphones on. I’d just gotten In Utero on cassette and it lived in my head. I turned the volume up all the way. On the nightstand beside my bed was a music magazine with a gatefolded poster of Cobain. I tore it out and leaned with it against the wall, imagining I was resting my head on his shoulder. When Nirvana’s “Dumb” came on, I started to cry. It felt like my future was slipping away.

See, when I grew up, I was going to meet Kurt Cobain. I would be an adult, and he would be the still be the same age. I was going to have a ton of tattoos and crazy blue hair, and he was going to fall in love with me. We’d talk about music. He’d teach me to play guitar. We’d write songs about how much people sucked. We’d travel the world, happy. And now none of that was ever going to happen. The poster got soggy from my tears and stuck to my face. I kept repeating that I was sorry, like it was somehow my fault.

At school the next day, everyone seemed normal. Like nothing was wrong. They ran, played, acted up. I sat on a bench with my back to the school, staring at the chain link fence and the bike path that ran along the other side of it. I thought about climbing the fence and running along the path. Running until my legs turned to jelly and I couldn’t anymore. I kept staring at the fence, daring myself to ditch school.

My best friend, Mensa, saw me out there and came to sit next to me. “Did you hear about Kurt?” She had also been certain she would marry him when she was old enough. Not a day went by where she didn’t start a conversation with When I grow up, me and Kurt . .

Sometimes we laid on the grass and stared at the clouds and daydreamed about being with him.

“Yeah.” I looked down to my beat up Sketchers.

“Sucks.” Mensa staring at her shoes, too. “Did you wear your Teen Spirit today?”

“Did you?”

Mensa nodded and showed me the deodorant stick in her jacket pocket. Though it was 75° outside, Mensa always wore a light coat. She would tell people that she wore one because she always felt cold, but I knew she wore one to hide that she would cut herself.

I wondered if she’d been doing that today.

“Who are you going to marry now?” I asked.

“I still love Nirvana, so maybe someone else in the band. Dave is kind of cute.”

I nodded.

“Kurt’s dead, there’s no more Nirvana!” Anthony had snuck up on us. He was a kid in our class, and he thought he was being funny. He started laughing. “You dummies.”

“Take that back,” Mensa said. She stood from the bench, balling her fists. I don’t think I’d ever seen her so angry. The way he’d said it, and seeing her reaction, I ran over and kicked him in the shin as hard as I could. Anthony fell and started crying. Said he was going to tell, like that meant something. I didn’t care. I spit on the blacktop beside him. There was no punishment they could give me that was worse than this, that’s how it felt.

Mensa tugged on my arm and pointed at the teacher that was running toward us. She said that we should go, because I was going to be in trouble for what I’d done. But I didn’t move. I waited. There was no use in running; the teacher knew which class I was in.

The teacher yanked my arm and walked me back to the building. The bell rang, ending recess. I glanced toward the blacktop and saw Mensa standing by herself, watching me get taken away. Before the door shut, I saw her put her thumb and her pinky to the side of her face. Even though we were neighbors, we still liked to talk on the phone. She started to walk to her class.

The principle asked if I kicked Anthony and I said yes. He asked why. I said it was because he was mean. Then he asked if I spit on Anthony and I said no. He said that the teacher saw me spit on Anthony. I said I spit on the ground next him but not on Anthony and that the teacher was a liar. He called my family and sent me back to class, where I had to stand in the back and face the wall until school was over. When the bell rang, my teacher had me sit down at my desk to write Standards. “I will not kick or spit on other people” fifty times. Having to write a false confession made me hate Anthony more, made me hate the school.

Later, I asked my aunt what would happen to the band now that Kurt was dead. She told me they would either find a new singer or stop making music.

“If they get a new singer, it won’t be them anymore.”

“That’s not necessarily true.” Then she told me about other bands that changed singers throughout their runs, but I stopped listening because I didn’t care.

The following two weeks, I kept to myself, not really feeling hungry. Forcing myself to eat. I didn’t want to play during recess anymore, so I’d sit and write in my journal about futures I’d never have. I was convinced I would kill myself one day so that I could join him. I would go to sleep thinking about dying. I thought that if I died, Kurt and I would hold hands and scream as loud as we could because we were in pain. Until we couldn’t. We’d live in the clouds and slowly sink in and sleep there, never letting go of each other.

Days kept passing and I was still alive.

Eventually I stopped thinking about death so much.

Nothing felt permanent anymore.

I started to find other music I liked. I heard about this thing called Riot Grrrl. Women screaming into microphones and playing instruments. Their music sounded like my pain. It felt like I had found home.

So I moved to Portland and it’s really quiet here. Not enough violence and sadness, not like Southgate. But I miss it enough I put on Heat and the sounds and images of it help me fall asleep.

I got a job at a diner called JOE’S near Chinatown. It was the only place I could find work without any qualifications. They didn’t even mind my inexperience. They didn’t care if I stuck around. It was seedy as hell, one of the few older parts of the city resisting change. The owner seemed like he’d be an asshole, but I could handle them. At least it was money.

For the longest time, she thought her name was Mensa. It wasn’t until she got older that she found out mensa meant Idiot Girl. But Mensa wasn’t an idiot, she was my best friend.

I went to her house after school one day. We were going to play Destroy Everything. It was a game where we built cities out of toys, books, and anything else we could use, then pretended to be giant monsters and knock it all down.

When we started working on the city we planned to destroy, I asked Mensa why they called her that.

“I don’t know,” she said. “My family’s called me that since I was a baby.”

“But why?”

We looked over to where her grandmother sat at the kitchen table, staring at the television, shelling beans.