Free Scar Girl by Len Vlahos

big deal, but for me, it was.
    When the band was gearing up for our first tour, during my senior year of high school, I lied to my parents and told them I’d been accepted at the University of Scranton, that I would be attending in the fall. I hadn’t even applied. It was a pretty elaborate lie—I forged all the admission documents and pretended to mail my dad’s check to the school—and I rode it all the way to the end, until I got caught. My parents did not take it well. The idea of college now was, for me, like a career criminal deciding to go straight.
    When I was leafing through the guide, I thought for a little while about applying to music colleges, like Berklee in Boston or Julliard in New York. But I wasn’t that kind of musician. I didn’t read music, didn’t really want to read music, and didn’t have any interest in a career playing wicked guitar solos on television commercials for deodorants and cat litter.
    And because I didn’t have a backup plan, I didn’t have a clue as to what colleges to target. So I applied to the only school that made sense: the University of Scranton, my fake alma mater. Maybe this time I could get in for real. I still had a clean copy of their admissions package—once you’re on a school’s mailing list, they send you lots of the same stuff over and over again—so I took it out and went to work.
    The application was pretty straightforward, and it only took an hour to complete, except for the essay. I can’t tell you how many times I started and stopped writing that stupid thing.
    Each time my pencil hit the paper, the essay came out as really dry, boring crap about what a great student I’d be. I read and reread the instructions and kept getting hung up on the word count. I was supposed to tell them something interesting about me in two hundred and fifty words or less. Two hundred and fifty words!
    I tried to take a fresh eye to the instructions and shifted my focus. This was what I landed on:
    YOUR PERSONAL ESSAY WILL
    HELP US BECOME
    ACQUAINTED WITH YOU BEYOND YOUR COURSES, GRADES, AND TEST SCORES.
    They wanted to know who I really was.
    So who am I? I thought. I’m the guitar player in a thrashing, smashing, ass-kicking punk rock band, but I’m also a disfigured monster with all kinds of crazy social anxiety, and I’m an almost-twenty-year-old virgin who has kissed exactly one girl, and that kiss lasted for all of five seconds. But when I really thought about who I was, about what I could tell them to help them know me beyond my dismal grades and test scores, I kept coming back to the same thing.
    I, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, am a coward.
    CHEYENNE BELLE
    The doctor’s room was cold, not just the temperature, but the aura, too. Sometimes, a place can just give off waves of coldness, you know? I was told to take off my clothes, put on a paper-thin gown, and lie down on the examination table. I noticed that the cushion on the table was graying with age and cracking at the seams.
    â€œI’m still bleeding,” I said, embarrassed that I was going to make a mess. The woman went into a closet and pulled out what looked like a giant maxipad, or maybe a maxipad for a giant. Almost like what you would use to house-train a puppy.
    â€œIt’s okay,” she said. “We’re a gynecological office. Lots of our patients bleed.”
    I nodded and did what I was told.
    The woman waited for Agnes to finish filling out the forms and took the clipboard back. “The doctor will be right in.” And she left.
    â€œAre you doing okay?” Agnes asked while we waited for the doctor.
    I wasn’t doing okay. I was still bleeding; my gut felt like someone was trying to wring it dry, like a washcloth after a shower; and I was suddenly hit with the thought that I had no idea how we were going to pay for any of this.
    Agnes, who, like I said, is the most mature one of us, must’ve read