Melanoma

I wrote this for my Intro to Creative Writing class about 4 years ago. I've been meaning to revisit is because the end probably needs a lot of work. It's actually probably better than the stuff I did a year later for the Writing Fiction workshop because I think I'm better at quirky first-person narrators and really character-driven stories than I am at third-person plot-driven stories. 

My name is Melanoma.  I swear that is my real, God-given name. That is the name that my mother gave me.  I have no last name.  I have no middle name.  It’s just Melanoma. Yeah, it’s what’s written on my birth certificate.   And no, I don’t know what she was thinking when she put it there.  It was probably something along the lines of, “What a beautiful word, ‘Melanoma!’ Too bad it means a hideous fucking tumor!  I know, I’ll name my kid that, and this kid will be so goddamn amazing that she will change the connotation of the word forever!”

I prefer thinking that those were her thoughts, as compared to, “Oh God, this thing inside me is just like a gigantic tumor!  Being a parent is just like being a cancer patient.  I know, I’ll name my daughter Melanoma to show the world that she’s really just a malignant burden on my life.”

The latter is probably more correct. Either way, that’s the only thing my mother ever called me when I was a kid.  Now she does not call me at all.  Actually, I prefer it this way. “Melanoma,” obviously wasn’t the easiest name to grow up with, and my mother was always less than sympathetic to my situation.  The psychopath.  Her name is Carol. Carol Marie fucking Lovelace.  You couldn’t ask for a better name than that, and yet this demented woman in all her hilarity could not manage to bless with a benign name.  She could have named me Little Carol Marie Lovelace Jr.! She could have named me Baby Spice! Or Lula Does the Hula! Or Millie Millie McMillieson! She could have named me anything, but out of all of the stupid, fucked up names that she could have come up with, she had to brand me with the one synonymous with a horrifying fatale disease.

I can remember back in preschool, the teacher would always hesitate to say my name.  I could never figure out why.  A lot of teachers would let me pick out a new name.  They’d let me be called whatever I wanted just because my mother was a cold-blooded bitch, and they were against her belief that a child’s name should have something to do with medical terms relating to cancer.  So, of course, I was called “Princess” and “Beautiful” and “Queen Snowglobe Cutie Pie Kitten.”  I had a ridiculous self-image back then; I had no idea why I was getting this special treatment. It went on like this until second grade when I overheard two teachers talking.  I remember it was during recess, and I was sitting under the slide with a bunch of girls, making them pick through the gravel to find the clear, shiny rocks, the ones that I thought resembled diamonds.  I’m sure that the teachers had no idea that I could hear them.  I remember that I wasn’t fully sure that I understood that they were talking about my real name, even though it cleared up a lot of unanswered questions. Everything they said was completely fitting.  I was really curious, though, so I snuck in from recess early and looked up my name in the dictionary. It was a children’s dictionary, so it’s surprising that it was there at all, but I remember it saying something about a dangerous growth having to do with a sickness called cancer.  This was all very confusing to me, but I knew it was bad news.  I asked my mom about it when I got home.  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Melanoma,” she attested, sounding horridly unconvincing. “Your name means ‘She Who Dances With Gypsies.’ Now go to bed.”  It was roughly three o’clock in the afternoon.

Oh, and when the other kids figured out what my name meant — Christ, I never heard the end of it.

***

It didn’t get really bad until fourth grade.  That’s when I remember having a whole table to myself at lunch.  All of the other kids were convinced that my name was a warning that they would get some kind of deadly disease if they hung out with me.  I was the kid that no one wanted to be paired up with for projects.  I was the one that no one wanted to stand next to in line.  I was the little girl that no little boy wanted to be matched up with for square dancing in gym class for fear of something much worse than cooties. 

I remember this redheaded girl in my class named Allison Morgan.  She had roughly a million freckles, and I was jealous of each one of them.  She had her ears pierced, too, and I had always wanted my ears pierced.  Anyway, sometime after Christmas that year, Allison Morgan’s dad died of skin cancer.   Allison fucking hated me after that.  I don’t even know if she fully understood what skin cancer was or how her dad died or anything because we were only in fourth grade, but I swear she held me fully responsible.  It was like she thought I was the cancer fairy because of my godforsaken name, like I just snuck into her house at night and sprinkled my magical melanoma fairy dust all over her dad’s pillow. 

Regardless of what she thought, she made sure my elementary school life was hell after that. 

I first realized she hated me on Valentine’s Day.  I kinda figured it was going to be a shitty day after spending the entire morning crying because my mother had earlier refused to buy me the Dalmatian Valentine cards I’d had my eye on and had instead sent me to school with a pad of pink sticky notes and the loving words, “I don’t know. Be creative.” The entire fourth grade, myself included, spent the day decorating shoeboxes with pretty paper, glitter, stickers, and whatever else, so that the other kids could fill them up with candy and cards. I returned to my obnoxiously sparkly box to find it empty except for one little Valentine card with the words “I HATE U” scrawled across it in big capital letters. Allison Morgan was never mean to anyone, and she had deliberately taken all of my Valentine’s Day treats and happy little cards and replaced them with one very clear message.  I mean, I was already in for the nastiest candy and ugliest cards, anyway.  I did not have a single friend in all of fourth grade.  I’m pretty sure I cried, looking back on it. 

She didn’t stop there, though.  Everyday in the cafeteria she threw shit at me.  Her whole table did.  Pretzels.  Tuna salad on wheat bread.  Milk cartons.  Wadded up napkins dipped in ketchup.  Anything they could throw without getting caught, they threw.  And I never did a fucking thing.  I never threw anything back at them.  I never ran to the teacher to tattle on them.  I never even looked up.  We’d get back to class, and the teacher would wonder how I got so much shit all over my sweater.  “Oh, I’m just a messy eater, I guess.”

Oh god, and then one day, the worst thing she ever did to me: we were at recess towards the beginning of fifth grade.  I’m sitting under the slide by myself picking through the gravel, just like I used to make the other girls do when my name was still “Princess,” and Allison calls me over by the swings where she hangs out.  I’m half curious, half terrified.  She starts telling me how sorry she is for being so mean to me all the time and how she really wants to make it up to me and be friends.  The whole time, she has her hands behind her back.  I’m very suspicious, but I want so badly for the bullying to be over that I want to believe every word she’s saying.  Her friends are sitting on swings all around us.  She’s looking at them and smiling.  Something isn’t right, but I keep going along with what Allison is telling me.  Suddenly she turns and looks to me, “I just really think that we could be best friends.  Will you give me a hug?”

I’m incredibly skeptical at this point, and she sees that.

“Well, if you don’t want to give me a hug, that’s fine.  We can just keep things the way that they are if you like them this way.” Her green eyes narrow as they lock on mine. 

I realize that there’s no way around it, and I step towards her.  She immediately grabs onto me.  Her embrace is kind at first, but I feel the betrayal immediately.  The bitch had smuggled scissors out of the classroom, and she had been hiding them behind her back.  All four of her friends dive on top of me at once to make sure that I am completely immobile as Allison hacks away at my long blonde hair.  She cuts my hair so short in places that you can see my scalp. 

I’m sure you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Weren’t there any teachers around? Wasn’t anyone watching these kids?  Wasn’t there even one adult there that would have mercy on this girl’s misfortune?”  And sadly, the answer to all of these questions is no.  Not one adult even bothered to look at me twice when I bawled over hate mail on Valentine’s Day or so much as batted an eyelash when I came back from lunch day after day wearing whatever was on the menu due to my alleged incompetence with eating.  And really, why would they?  At the time, I thought they the adults were freaked out by my name, just like everyone else was, but now I realize that it wasn’t my name that they were all so afraid of, it was all of the foreign, seemingly unfixable problems that came with it.  These teachers and recess monitors and cafeteria workers all knew my name, they knew the horror of it, and they knew that there wasn’t a fucking thing that they could do about it. It’s scary when something bothers you like that, and you know that it’s completely out of your hands.  Because all of these people hating my name and hating my mother for naming me “Melanoma” wasn’t going to magically make my name “Megan” or “Melissa” or anything remotely normal. Even if they did start calling me a normal name, that wouldn’t make my classmates forget my real one. So, what were they supposed to do with this sad little girl getting picked on everyday for having a name that was never meant to be a name? Well, I don’t know what they were supposed to do, but all they ever did was bury their heads in the sand. I was the discolored mole on the small of everyone’s back, the one that that no one bothered to go to the dermatologist about. I was the lump in every woman’s breast that she pushed to the back of her mind rather than have a doctor take a look at. I was the reoccurring headache plaguing the brain of every adult in my life, the one that caused memory loss, confusion, and communication problems, the one that no one dared bring up to a neurologist.

Back then I was worse off than the retards or the kids in wheelchairs. People were cruel to them, too, but at least they had each other. Those kids were born with oddities that adults knew how to deal with, so they had special classes and helpers and things like that, but I was different. It was my mother’s decision to curse me with this name. There was no one else like me. I was one of a kind, and I was completely alone. An outcast.  

My mom had no choice but to take me to get my hair cut after the incident on the playground.  I could tell that she really would have rather me kept the style that Allison and her cronies gave me, as the whole thing was terribly amusing to her. She burst into a fit of inexorable laughter every time she laid eyes on me, which got so tiring that I decided to run away from home one day.  I spent six hours walking down the side of the road with my teddy bear and a knapsack full of assorted things I thought that I would need to survive before a corpulent policeman with a moustache dragged me back to my mother’s house.  My mother knew that I was gone. I told her to her giggling face that I was leaving, and she preceded to laugh even harder. Yet, when Officer Whatever brought me back to my house, my mother put on a show like you wouldn’t believe.  She erupted into a seizure of sobs immediately after opening the door, threw her arms around me, and wailed “My baby! Officer! Thank you so much for bringing my baby home!”

To which the officer grumbled, “Yeah, just get that kid a haircut, lady. I’ve seen dryer lint cuter than this kid. A little girl’s hair shouldn’t look like that. You can’t even tell she’s a girl.”  Though this was slightly offensive, I was glad that he had said something because my mom’s strange eagerness to please the policeman led to her putting me in the car immediately afterwards and taking me to the Great Clips down the street.

The haircut situation didn’t go exactly as I had dreamed it would. The hairdresser had to use an electric razor, the thing that they use on boys’ hair, on parts of my already mangled mane, and it still didn’t look right.  It wasn’t even a haircut that any self-respecting boy would get.  It was patchy and entirely too short, no matter how I looked at it or what kind of little bows or ribbons I tried to dress it up with.  I looked like a kid who had gone through chemotherapy, as if there wasn’t enough about me already that screamed “cancer”…

And while my mom found some way to contain her merriment over my hairstyle, back at school, Allison and her friends were pretty open about their opinion that my haircut was pretty goddamn hilarious. I’m sure that most kids thought it was. Teachers probably did, too.  Honestly, I did look pretty ridiculous. However, the point is not how stupid I looked; the point is how much of a cunt Allison Morgan is.  Hey, that’s okay, though.  I forgive her for that because I got her to back off my second day at school with my cancer-patient haircut.  We were in the cafeteria again, and she was throwing shit at me, as usual, with the rest of her table.  For some reason, I got up with my whole tray of food and walked over to Allison. 

I leaned into her, and I said, “Allison, I know your dad died of cancer, and that’s really sad.  I’m sorry that you had to deal with that, but you can’t blame me for it.” She looked like I had just slapped her in the face. I seized the opportunity to get even closer to her and whispered, “But you can blame me when you wake up in a few weeks, and your mom is dead, too.” Then I dumped my whole tray of food over her head.  I remember the whole event perfectly.  I even remember everything on that tray: taco salad with a lot of sour cream and salsa, a cup of vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce, a carton of chocolate milk, a spork, and a napkin.  And nothing in the world could make me forget the look of shock and terror that swept over Allison’s face as an avalanche of ground beef and shredded lettuce began to drip down her forehead.  She smelled like Taco Bell and Dairy Queen’s hideous love child.  When she got up to go wash herself off in the bathroom, the napkin was stuck to her shoe.  It was fucking glorious. 

And I swear, as I went to sit back down at my table, I caught the eye of one of the lunchroom janitors, and she winked at me from over against the wall like she didn’t even care that I had just thrown taco salad everywhere because the important thing was that I wasn’t putting up with that little red-headed bitch’s shit anymore.  I’m pretty sure Allison was terrified of me after that because she never did anything else.  I’m sure she said horrible things about me behind my back, but that’s fine.  She was pleasant enough to my face, or, well, she ignored me at least.  That’s all I ever wanted. 

Once we got to middle school things weren’t so horrible anymore.  Since I lived on the east side of town, most of the kids I went to elementary school with wouldn’t be going to middle school with me, so it would be kind of like a fresh start.  Also, thanks to some amazing movie that I watched on Lifetime with my mother during the summer between fifth and sixth grade I found a fantastic solution to the issue with my name.  The movie was really less-than-mediocre, as all movies on Lifetime are, and yet, Mommy Dearest has been obsessed with them for as long as I can remember.  This one was about a teenage girl getting molested and then stalked by her band director or maybe her gym teacher, but the protagonist’s name was Mel.  In the movie, this was short for Melody or Melanie or something like that, but that’s when it occurred to me that Mel could also be short for Melanoma, meaning that I could have a normal name! Then, I could just tell all my teachers before school started to call me Mel, and I would have no problems.  Most people wouldn’t even know my real name.  My mother was less than thrilled with this realization.  Whenever I complained about my name, she would say, “Honestly, Melanoma, can’t you bitch about something else? It’s always the same story with you,” or “I think you have a perfectly lovely name. It could be worse. I could have named you Chlamydia. You know that was my second choice,” or my favorite, “Melanoma! There are nameless children in Africa that would die to have a name like yours! Why can’t you just be thankful that you have a name?”  That woman relished in my suffering, though I could never get her to admit it. But whatever, what did I care? My hair had grown out so that it was almost to my chin.  I think I looked like a pixie, or at least something more adorable than a kid dying of leukemia.

So, I went to sixth grade orientation, and I introduced myself to all of my teachers as Mel.  For the most part, they seemed relieved that they wouldn’t have to consistently refer to a student as “Melanoma” for an entire year.  All of my teachers even managed to keep a straight face throughout the whole conversation, except my Science teacher, but she was kind of an asshole.  I think she thought the whole thing was some sort of joke being played on her by another teacher.

The only time that my name would come to be a problem would be when there were substitute teachers.  Usually, I tried to get to class early when I knew that there would be a sub, or I would ask my teacher to leave a note or something to make sure that no one mentioned the name that was on my birth certificate.  There were occasional slip-ups, but I learned to handle them by acting casually.  Mostly, I just pretended like the sub was picking on me for whatever reason. The sub would get confused and stumble over my name, “Mel-a-no-ma? Is there a Melanoma in the classroom?”

I’d say something like, “Um, I’m Mel.  What?  Do you think I’ve never heard that before? You could be more original,” or other times I would just blatantly ignore the fucker. 

Finally, I had a real name. I went by Mel all through middle school and high school.  My mom never took me to get my learner’s permit or my license or anything, which was sort of a relief because that would mean walking around with a little piece of plastic in my wallet that would forever brand me as “Melanoma.”  I just had friends drive me around until I was eighteen, and I could legally have my name changed.

When my eighteenth birthday finally came, I was probably the happiest girl on Earth. I had a name all picked out for myself, “Melanie Elizabeth Anderson.”  You couldn’t ask for a more ordinary name than that.  It was beautiful.  I should say, though, changing your name is not an easy task.  It requires about a million trips to a courthouse and filling out somewhere around a zillion official court documents.  I was so happy to officially have a real name that this made no difference to me. Plus, the old woman at the courthouse who helped me get through the process was extremely understanding after she laid eyes on my birth certificate. 

“What were your parents thinking?” she gasped, “This is about the worst name I’ve ever seen.”

            “That’s the question I’ve been wondering my entire life,” I sighed.

            She smiled knowingly, “You poor thing. We’ll get you started with a new name right away.”

            A few weeks and a nominal fee later, I had my new I.D. with my new name, and my carcinogen of a birth name could no longer plague me. After that, I was ready to start living happily ever after, or well, normally ever after would have been fine with me. The only thing standing in my way was my mother.  I wasn’t going to tell her about changing my name because I knew that she would throw some sort of psychotic tantrum if she found out. I was just going to get my license, get a job, and move in with my friend Liza right after I made the change.  It didn’t quite work like that, though.  Mail started coming to our house for “Melanie Elizabeth Anderson,” and my mom started to get suspicious.  She would randomly call me “Ms. Anderson” in this strange, accusing voice, just to see how I would react.  I just ignored her until my high school called my house to ask which name I wanted on my diploma, and my mom answered the phone.  She knew after that. Right after she put down the phone, she stormed over to where I was sitting, used both hands to grab me by the shirt, and shouted in my face for answers. 

            I told her that there were no answers. I told her that she already knew everything that she needed to know. I said that it was obvious.  She let go of my shirt so that she could backhand me, and I could taste the warm salt of my own blood in my mouth.  She laughed when she saw the red show up against my teeth.

            “Melanoma! I gave you that name! I gave you that fucking name! Melanoma!” she bellowed, wildly.

            “That’s not a name, Carol. That’s a goddamn curse, and you know it. That’s why you loved it. You loved watching everyone else torture me. You loved laughing at me yourself. But I don’t have to deal with any of your sadistic bullshit anymore because that’s not even my fucking name, anymore. And this time when I leave, there isn’t going to be a policeman bringing me back to this shithole. You’re stuck here all by yourself. I hope you can manage to find something else to entertain you as much as I did,” I bitterly spat back at her.

She looked at me for a second, as if she was going to tear out my throat with her teeth, but instead decided on letting loose the loudest, most agonizing scream that I have ever had the misfortune of hearing.  The scream seemed to last longer than your average daytime television sitcom, and I was completely paralyzed by it.  All I could do was stare at my mother’s fierce, reddening face as the unbearable sound pouring from her mouth continued to pierce my eardrums. Then, all of the sudden, she lunged at me, pinning me to the ground.  She stopped screaming to ask, hoarse but still crazed, “Do you even know why I named you Melanoma?”

“I have no idea,” I answered.

“I named you after your father.”

“Mom, that doesn’t even make sense. I never knew Dad, but I know that his name was not—”

“SHUT UP! I named you after your father. He died when I was pregnant with you. It was the best thing that ever happened to us. It was like a big joke all on me. Here, I thought I was stuck in this horrible marriage and about to be stuck with his kid, and the next thing you know, I’m at his funeral. It was brilliant!”

“What? What the fuck! You never told me that. You told me that dad left when you got pregnant.”

“He did leave. He bought a one-way ticket to Hell.”

“Okay. That still doesn’t explain my name.”

“He died of skin cancer. He loved the sun, but the sun didn’t love him back. He had dreams of being tan and living in Florida, but really he was just always sunburned. I saw it coming.”

“What the fuck! Why couldn’t you name me Sunshine or Tanner or something like that then?”

“I dunno. I didn’t think of that at the time.”

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? You are insane! I am leaving right now and never fucking looking back, you got that? Get the fuck off of me!”

I shoved her off of me and just started running. I ran out of the living room, then out of the house, then out of our neighborhood. I made it all the way to the outskirts of our New Jersey town, where an old trucker named Bill picked me up.  He was very nice, and he didn’t ask me a lot of questions. He did ask my name, though, to which all I could manage to say was, “I don’t know right now. I’m trying to figure that out myself.”

For some reason I couldn’t bear any of my old names anymore, so I figured it was best just to start over. After being Melanoma for my entire childhood (except for my brief stint as Princess Adorable Snowglobe Whatever), Mel for my adolescence, Melanie Elizabeth Anderson for just a few weeks, it was hard to know who I really was when all was said and done. I had learned what’s in a name—sometimes it’s agony, sometimes it’s security—and that a rose by any other name definitely does not smell as sweet if that other name is cancer. But I really hadn’t learned much about myself. I had spent my entire life just listening to what other people said about me and trying to fake normalcy as best as I could instead of just doing what I wanted to do.

When I got into Bill’s truck, all I had with me was the clothes on my back. I had no identification, and that was perfect. Getting out of my mother’s house and away from that life was the best thing that I could have ever done. It was a completely fresh start. Bill and I parted ways at a truck stop in Virginia, and I rode with a female trucker by the name of Kim all the way down the eastern coast and into Florida.  I’ve been in Florida for over a year now, and mostly I’ve just been spending time getting to know me. I found out how much I love the oranges here and finding hermit crabs on the beach. I love my job selling swimsuits in a tourist shop, even though I have to work a lot. I can go by whatever name I want here, and I am finally figuring out what it’s like to be myself, whoever that may be.