Notes on Hickeys

This afternoon when I was doing my hair I burned myself with the curling iron. There is now a bright red square singed into the skin of my neck. I tried to cover it with carefully placed curls, but then realized that if someone looked quickly they'd think I was taking pains to hide a hickey.
When I was younger I was obsessed with hickeys--or, more precisely, the idea of hickeys, since I was in no position to be getting any of my own. At twelve, I was still caged with braces and hidden under a crackly lump of permed hair. This meant none of the boys were paying attention to me, and I was just a spectator of the popular kids' lives. I watched all their strange drama play out in homeroom and lunch and gym and on the bus ride home. I listened to the gossip and took as many notes as I could, confident that someday soon I would need to know the valuable information they were getting from first-hand experience.

Like information on hickeys. In eighth grade, girls my age started talking about, obsessing over, and getting hickeys. These purple-yellow marks materialized mostly during middle school dances--dances that took place in the sock-smelling gymnasium or, like one Valentine's Day dance, the elementary school cafeteria, which was decorated with rope lights twisted into hearts that looked like they were slowly melting down the wall and ready to ooze onto the floor.

If someone had plans on giving a hickey, if someone had gotten a hickey, or if a hickey was currently in progress, everyone knew about it. The news was passed through a sophisticated chain of gossiping twelve and thirteen year olds.

Did you hear? Carl is giving Megan a hickey. They're over there by the bleachers.

Did you see that mark on Michelle's neck? How is she going to hide that from her mother?

Well, that was the question on everyone's mind. How did you hide these things? I remember one dance in particular where my best friend Tammy's neck bloomed purple and green and yellow after her boyfriend had danced her around during "Stairway to Heaven." He'd been insistent. He'd been thorough. He'd been territorial. He'd left his mark from her collarbone all the way up the right side of her neck.

When he went off to the bathroom she dashed over to me. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and revealed the bruise. It looked almost like a flower. Like a tattoo of a something from a spring garden.

"Just what do I do with this?" she hissed.

Like I knew. The only man I would let anywhere near my neck to do such a thing was Ryan McLean, and the our social interaction was limited to conversation in Home Economics. He liked to call me a whore in Spanish. He liked to ask me to help him sew his sweatshirt. That's it. He would never have kissed me on the lips, neck, or anywhere else.

I shrugged. "Wear a turtleneck?" I asked. It seemed like a safe thing. It was winter, after all. Turtlenecks seemed reasonable. But how many days could a girl get away with wearing a turtleneck before she stirred her parents' suspicion?

But Tammy was panicked. She was spending the night at my house and she hadn't packed a turtleneck. How was she going to sneak in past her mother the next day? How was she going to get rid of it before we had to go back to school on Monday?

Later that night when my mother picked us up from the dance, I slid into the backseat of the station wagon first so I could monitor the way Tammy's hair moved, so I could rearrange her long curls in a way that left the bruised skin buried under layers of perm.

Before we'd left the dance, girls who'd had hickeys before had come up to Tammy and dispensed advice. A comb. Green eyeshadow. Sleeping on flannel. Aloe. I tucked all these things into the back of my head, in case I'd ever need them.

It would be years. Years.

The hickeys I've gotten have been mistakes. Accidental hickeys, not purposeful, not the kind middle schoolers are intent on giving when they're hiding from the chaperones in the dark corners at a dance.

I'm a bruiser. I can brush against something and get a welt. It doesn't take much. And it must not have taken much the summer before I moved to Minnesota. This was the first mark that ever got me in trouble, and I didn't even know it was there. I was waiting tables during a Saturday lunch shift. My first customers of the day were two roadies--rough and dirty truckers--who were rolling through town towing equipment for a circus. Their manners were few, and their approach was less than subtle. They whistled when I walked away. They called me cutie and sweetie and sugar-pie. They said, "Want to come with us? Want to ride to the next town with us?"

I smiled and poured them some more water. They'd wanted Bloody Marys, but it was before noon and we couldn't serve alcohol before noon. "As much as I'd love that, I just can't," I said.

"Why not?" one asked.

"I'm just not the type of girl who unties her apron and follows strange men out to their trucks so she can ride to the next small town with them," I said. "You have to be a certain kind of girl to do that."

"Yeah?" the other asked. "And what type is that?"

"A little wild," I said. "I'm just not."

"Well," one of the truckers said, sipping his water, "that hickey on your neck begs to differ."

I thought he was joking. I thought he was teasing. I laughed. "Right," I said. "That hickey."

"Oh no," the trucker said. "I think someone needs to go to the bathroom and have a look."

I shrugged it off, grinned, and turned to leave. I told them to enjoy their meals and to let me know if they needed anything. But on my walk back to the kitchen I thought back to the night before, to the sweltering heat and the upstairs bedroom and the boy whose bed was just a mattress on the floor. I thought back to the candles and the piles of clothes on his bedroom floor. I thought about the music playing in the background. I thought about the snake he owned and kept in a giant Tupperware container on his dresser. I thought about the wooden floor creaking when I left at three AM.

It was possible there was something there. It was possible I didn't see it when I came back home for a few hours of sleep before work. It was possible I didn't see it as I squinted my way through getting ready in the morning. And when I got into the restaurant's kitchen and reached for the small compact one of the older waitresses kept under a stack of miniature doilies, I saw that it was more than just possible. It was true. It wasn't much of a hickey, but it was something. A little ring of yellow bruise, a few small pinpricks of broken blood vessels. I wondered if my father had seen it that morning. The thought made me want to die.

After the truckers paid their bill and left a ten dollar tip, I went to the bathroom and shook my hair out of its ponytail. I let it fall down to my shoulders so it could cover the small mark. I prayed the rest of my customers wouldn't catch a glimpse of it, frown into their French onion soups, think their waitresses was loose and wild. No one except roadies towing carnival equipment rewarded a waitress with a hickey.

But that was one of the last times a hickey was a problem for me, until recently. I thought I was past the age where hickeys would be a problem. I thought I was immune to them.

I thought wrong.

It was November. I was in Minnesota. I was visiting all my favorite people, and I was staying at Katy and Matt's, in their spare bedroom. I had an air mattress and a big mess of blankets, and one night that air mattress and that big mess of blankets went unused because I spent the night at New Boy's house. The next morning I woke up and rolled over and said good morning to New Boy. He sort of just stared at me.

"What's wrong?" I asked, because he looked vaguely terrified.

"You're going to hate me," he said.

When I went into the bathroom and leaned in close to the mirror I saw what he was talking about. A hickey. A surprisingly large hickey that stretched across the right side of my neck.

"Oh my God," I said to the mirror. This was it. This was real. This was something I had to worry about. I pictured my father picking me up from the airport, seeing the mark and frowning, giving me a lecture about morals and standards and about being a good girl. I pictured my students catching the slightest glimpse and gossiping about it. Our English teacher is quite the ho, the girls would say. Their eyebrows would raise. Yeah, the boys would agree, and they'd elbow each other in the ribs. She sure is.

For the rest of the afternoon--including lunch at Chipotle--I zipped myself into my coat and flipped the neck up, even though it was too warm for such measures. When we got back to Katy and Matt's, they handed me a laptop and told me to start googling hickey remedies.

What I found was a goldmine of information spread across the web. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen year old girls (and some boys, too) had built giant discussion boards on the subject. There were millions upon millions of posts. People wrote mini-essays on the proper application of treatments. They wrote humorous paragraphs about fooling their parents. They wrote about remedies that hadn't worked, that had made their hickeys worse.

I decided the best course of action would be intense. I needed to layer treatments. I needed to try everything I could. After all, in less than forty-eight hours I would be back in New York, and I would be conferencing with students and teaching them about all things English.

First, I combed the hickey. Then I rolled a frozen spoon over the mark. Over and over and over. Then I combed again. Then I did what one girl who signed her post as sugarnspice16 suggested: I lathered the hickey with deodorant. She didn't supply a medical reasoning behind the remedy, but I didn't care. I was willing to do anything.

The next morning I woke up and the hickey was almost completely gone. It was a miracle. It was amazing. I wished I could go back in time to that one Valentine's Day dance where my best friend got her giant hickey and tell her it was okay, that we'd take care of it, that I knew exactly what to do. But I couldn't do that, of course. I gathered that knowledge over ten years too late to help her, but at least I could help myself. And at least I was spared embarrassment (except for that which I suffered at the hands of Katy and Matt and Rachel and Dan and Megan and Diana, who all saw me in the hours after it happened). I still think it was one of the funniest things that ever happened to me--I never would've thought to account for that as I was packing my suitcase for the trip to Minnesota--and even though I had to worry about it eons later than everyone else, I'm glad it happened. Maybe someday I'll have a daughter who comes home from a dance with her head hanging at an odd angle, with her hair arranged just so. Maybe I'll put my arm around her shoulders and take her into the bathroom. I will draw back her hair and see the raw flush of blood and bite that's been etched into her neck, and I will know what to do. It's okay, I'll say as I stroke her forehead and reach for the comb, for the deodorant. Let's take care of this before your father sees.