Maggie discovered her pain threshold was inordinately high the time she walked around with a burst appendix for almost three days.
Her friends told her, "Have another shot of tequila--it's just a stomach cramp."
Her mother told her, "You really are a hypochondriac."
Her father was either golfing or out of town on business, so he didn't tell her anything.
Maggie wears her scar like a badge from some rite of passage. Calls it her bridge between then and now. But it's a shaky bridge. The kind made with ropes strung through skinny, wooden planks then suspended over the contaminated waters of Maggie's mind.
They called it a bikini scar. The nurses were amazed at the way the doctors kept all the stitches on the appropriate side of her tan lines. Alongside the scar there are tiny dots from where the sutures were tugged through and knotted. Maggie likes to pull down her jeans. Trace the marks with her finger.
"It's cool. Like I'm looking over my shoulder--"
Except when Maggie looks back the only thing she sees is tragedy.
"--but that's another story." The action version. Car crashes and fires.
Maggie used to color her hair purple, eat speed and go slam dancing for fun. When Iggy Pop spit on her she realized what it meant to find God. In the mornings her girlfriends would come over for coffee and cigarettes. Party autopsy.
"I only sleep with them to get the free T-shirt."
Maggie thinks maybe now she's ready to live a quiet life, alone near the water. Sand on her feet in the evenings.
A psychic read Maggie her Tarot over the phone. The cards told a history of bad habits and escapist men. Then again, the psychic said the cards showed a lot of things.
But she didn't seem to know about the time Maggie got arrested. That in her mugshots she was wearing a Jose Cuervo T-shirt awarded just hours before.
And the psychic didn't tell her that all those shots of tequila were disguising an appendicitis.
Or how once the exploded organ was removed from the tiny incision in her abdomen, Maggie would take the first step onto a wobbly bridge.
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