The Falconer

by Dana Czapnik

  Brent has known me since I was four, yet claims he doesn’t recognize me. There are several possible explanations for this. It could be that he remembers my name but he likes making other people feel small. It could be that he genuinely doesn’t recognize me because I’ve grown a couple inches since the last time he saw me, two years ago, when he had to come home from college to “dry out.” It could be that he’s done so many drugs his memory has been permanently singed. Or maybe it’s because if Brent’s dick doesn’t get hard when he looks at you, you must not exist.

  Percy’s got nearly a foot on Brent. The Napoleon complex is strong with this one. That’s why Brent’s always been terrible to Percy, ever since they were kids. Despite the fact that the boys were raised by a pill-popping mom straight out of a Jacqueline Susann novel and a dad who cared more about his money than his kids, Brent never took Percy under his wing. I always figured it for jealousy. Percy is everything Brent isn’t—tall, intelligent, athletic, beautiful. And unlike Percy, Brent is not afraid to wield his wallet to his advantage, which is why he’s always surrounded by friends and girls. People who enjoy taking money for nothing.

  “Brent, Jesus Christ. This is my best friend, Lucy. You remember Lucy.”

  “Oh, right, right. Lucy, if you’re coming with us, you can’t wear that outfit. We won’t get in.”

  I’m wearing what I always wear: a T-shirt and jeans and Docs.

  Brent yells, “Kim!” at a girl across the room and signals for her to come over. “Help her please.”

  I gather Kim is Brent’s new girlfriend. She gets up from the couch, sizing me up as she approaches and takes my hand. I give my pool cue to Percy and look at him like, Kill me now.

  “You’re a little bigger than me,” she goes as we walk up the stairs, “but I’ll squeeze you into something.” I’m not fat. But she’s the kind of girl who is so skinny and so aware of her skinniness that the only way to make herself feel more skinny is by making someone not fat feel fat. I’d like to crush her between my thumb and forefinger. This is why I have so few female friends. All girls want to do is talk about their diets. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Pizza. Pizza does. I want to say to her, Eating disorders are boring. But I follow her silently, because this chick is my ticket to a fun night out and feeling like I have a life.

  * * *

  Brent’s bedroom is all pine-green carpeting, plaid walls, rumpled plaid bedspreads, and campaign posters of politicians ranging from Harry Truman to Ross Perot. The room smells slightly of rancid hockey equipment. Kim sits on Brent’s bed and rifles through a crimson duffel bag that says “Harvard.” She pulls out a long-sleeved maroon crushed velvet dress with an empire waist and throws it at me.

  “Put that on. You can wear your Docs with that.”

  I hold the stretchy velvet dress up to my body and notice the tag says “Betsey Johnson” and the size says “Small.” The dress is going to land at my upper thigh.

  “This won’t fit me.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got some bike shorts you can wear underneath.”

  “Where are we going, anyway, that I have to wear that?”

  “Halo—duh. I’ve never been. Brent promised me he’d take me.”

  Rumors have circulated about Halo. That it has two entrances, one with a regular stamp and one with a stamp laced with acid, and no one knows which entrance is which, so you might go there one night just looking to dance and instead end up on a crazy trip that ends facedown in a gutter. I’ve heard that people OD there on the regular. And that they have a designated rape room.

  There’s a part of me that wants to run in the other direction. Go home. Spend Saturday night with my parents in the kitchen and watch old Humphrey Bogart movies with them, which I’m sure they’d love. But I don’t want to be a loser. Maybe I should squeeze myself into this slutty outfit Kim is offering me and just relax and let myself go a little. Because what if this is my night? What if this is the night when Percy will see me? Isn’t that the way it goes in movies? Take the ugly chick who dresses like a dork, pluck her eyebrows and blow-dry her hair, and voilà: a knockout the quarterback falls in love with as he tenderly brushes her newly straightened hair away from her eyes. Her hair has to be straight, of course. Quarterbacks never fall in love with girls with curly hair. Fact.

  I strip down to my bra and underwear.

  “Good god, girl, you’re so much thinner in real life when you take off all those baggy clothes. Why are you hiding that body of yours?”

  “It’s hard to find vintage clothes that fit.”

  “Well, yes, if you’re only buying men’s clothes. Those are men’s jeans!” Kim picks up my jeans from the pile on Brent’s floor.

  “Are they? I didn’t realize.”

  “Yeah, women’s jeans go by overall size—like two, four, six. Men’s jeans are by inches around the waist. Those are Levi’s button-flies, waist size twenty-eight. See, it says it right there on the back pocket.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.”

  Kim exhales and crosses her arms under her chest and squints her eyes at me. “I don’t know about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shakes her head. “I just don’t know about you. Should I be nervous to get undressed in front of you?”

  “No. Jesus. I wear men’s jeans because that’s what you buy at Cheap Jack’s. Just gimme the dress. I’ll wear it, okay?”

  I snatch the dress from her and stuff myself into her tiny bike shorts. My thighs are thick with honestly earned muscles, so the shorts are tight on my legs. I know they’ll leave an indelible seam on my skin. Kim changes on the opposite side of the room. I turn my back so she doesn’t feel uncomfortable. I start making my way to the bedroom door to make my escape, but she stops me.

  “Wait—put these on.” She throws two tan, jellyfish-like objects at me.

  “What are these?” I hold them out in front of me, pinched between my thumb and forefinger.

  “Chicken cutlets—a girl’s best friend. You are so clueless, by the way. Have you, like, been alive? In the world?”

  Kim grabs the chicken cutlets and sticks her hands under the dress and into my bra and smashes them against my skin. She turns me to face the mirror and, holy shit, I have breasts. And a hint of cleavage.

  “Isn’t this false advertising?”

  “Is there such a thing as true advertising? Besides, what’s the point of advertising?”

  I hesitate. “To get you to buy a product?”

  “Ding ding ding.” She taps her nose three times. “Don’t worry, once a boy gets your shirt off, it won’t matter if these fall out. They’ll just be happy to see boobies.”

  I take a deep breath, shrug my shoulders, and submit to the force that is Kim and her treasure trove of beautification products. “Okay, I’m at your mercy. What else?”

  “Oh, goody,” she says sarcastically. “Come with me.”

  Kim drags me into Brent’s en suite bathroom, wraps a towel around my shoulders, takes my bun out, and dumps half a bottle of red Manic Panic into the front of my hair. It all happens so quickly, I have no time to protest. “Oh, god, please tell me that’s not permanent.”

  “Don’t worry your little face off.” She smushes my cheeks in her hands. “Tonight you are going to fit in. Enjoy it.”

  While the temporary dye is setting, she sits me down on the toilet and starts doing my makeup.

  “Not too much,” I say.

  “Shh. You have too many rules.” I roll my eyes and sigh, but I go with it because Kim seems like she knows what she’s doing. She’s very pretty, in an edgy way, like a dancer in the background of some music video on MTV. She’s got thick, wavy pitch-black hair and olive skin and green eyes, which look like they’re not natural, like they’re colored contacts. Her skin is flawless and her teeth are perfect and straight. She’s tall and curvy, but very thin. Nothing like the kind of girl I ever expected Brent to go for, with his perfect preppy haircut and his Young Republican calling card.
For him, I expected a flat-chested blondie in a cardigan and pearls, you know? Not some downtown sex kitten.

  Kim instructs me to bend over the sink and cover my face so none of the makeup washes off. She runs the water over my hair and rinses out the dye. I open my eyes for a second and watch as the deep red liquid circles the drain. It looks like diluted blood. She dries my hair off with a white towel, which absorbs the Manic Panic, and sits me back on the toilet. She puts some sort of coagulant in my hair, which must serve a purpose, but I don’t know what. Then she pulls out a blow-dryer that has what looks like a medieval torture device attached to it and she places it over my head, right against my scalp, and blasts hot air at me while moving it in a circular motion. The whole process takes about twenty minutes, and I wonder who has the time and energy for this every single day. I mean, you could read all of Proust and Shakespeare and Joyce in the time women spend every day doing their hair and putting on makeup. I’ll take my bun and makeupless face in order not to lay waste to precious living moments.

  After my hair is dry, she turns me around to face the mirror. The front of my hair is incongruously maroonish-red, not blended at all with the brown of the rest of it. I have so much foundation on my skin that my whole face is coated in a matte layer of makeup, which doesn’t vary at all in color, and I’ve got on black eyeliner around my eyes and creamy maroon lipstick. Morticia: the teen years.

  “I’m a maroon explosion.”

  “You look hot. Your body is bangin’ in that dress. And with your hair down, you can pass for at least nineteen.”

  I swallow. I have no idea what person Kim is looking at in the mirror, but it’s not the same one I see. I desperately want to take all of it off—the makeup, the Manic Panic, the falsies, the dress, the choke collar she tied around my neck—and slip back into my old vintage men’s clothes and be able to recognize my own face.

  I sit back on the toilet and watch as Kim starts the process all over again on herself.

  “You already have makeup on,” I go.

  “You can’t wear your day face out at night.” She looks at me as though I’ve just said the world is flat. As though not wearing makeup at all is more absurd than having rules about a day face and a night face when both faces are not actually your own.

  A clear glue applied to synthetic eyelashes. Hot-pink lipstick. Black powder around the eyes. Green cream spread on the skin around her forehead and temples. Lavender under the eyes. Both colors neutralized by even more foundation placed on top. Bronzer. Skin highlighter. A slight hint of blush. All applied with such a deftness of hand one would think she could do it with her eyes closed. Or in the dark. Or in the vacuum of space.

  “Do you ever think makeup is a signifier of our inferiority?” I ask her. “Like, we have to put all this shit on our faces to get noticed and guys don’t. Maybe this whole process devalues us as human beings.”

  Kim snorts and goes, “No. You’re overthinking this.”

  Story of my life.

  “But don’t you think it’s a dangerous thing? Erasing yourself?”

  We stand side by side and look in the mirror. She’s created me in her image. I have lighter skin than her, a larger, longer nose, and bigger eyes, but she’s deleted all our differences, our uniquenesses, and replaced them with special effects so that we look like variations on a theme of young woman.

  “It’s not erasure. It’s enhancement.” She stretches her face using only her jaw and the muscles around her mouth and applies the finishing touch: thick, goopy mascara. She wipes away the excess lacquer with the tips of her forefingers and bats her eyes twice in the mirror and blows a kiss to herself. “Besides, pretty is more fun than principled. And what’s wrong with feeling good about yourself?”

  * * *

  I leave my clothes and former self behind in Brent’s room and descend the staircase. I run my hand down the banister. It feels sturdy and safe, as though I belong somewhere—in a way you can never have growing up in an apartment, which always feels ephemeral. Just a box in the air. The scoop neck of the Betsey Johnson dress exposes my upper chest and clavicle, which I know can look elegant in the right getup, and I feel something close to power as I make my way down to the crowd waiting to leave for Halo at the bottom of the staircase.

  “You look like a clown. I liked you better before.” That’s the only thing Percy says to me when I reach him.

  * * *

  Inside Halo, the music pounds through me in a strange organic way. The bass so loud, so relentless, it feels like what I imagine a mother’s heartbeat must sound like to a fetus inside the amniotic sac. It radiates through skin, muscle tissue, the part of me that’s water. My internal organs tremble.

  Brent follows a bouncer, and we follow Brent and snake our way through the massive converted cathedral to a table in the back, where some kind of shots are waiting for us. Brent sticks one in my hand.

  “It’s a slippery nipple,” he goes and smiles at me devilishly, as though he thinks he’s corrupting me and taking great pleasure in doing so. Like I’ve never done a shot before.

  A girl comes over to the table. She’s got green hair and she’s wearing a white cut-off T-shirt that says “slut,” all lowercase. She’s got on tiny sparkling wings and she leans over to Brent and I can make out the words “How many” on her lips and Brent points around the table and counts all of us up and I can see his lips move and he says “Eleven” and he passes her some cash, which she sticks in her red leather fanny pack and she slips him a baggie with some pills.

  I’ve never done E before. Only weed. And shrooms, twice. Percy’s standing next to me and he sees the hesitation in my face. Even under my clown makeup, I can’t hide who I am. “I’ve done it. It’s fun. You’ll be fine,” he says to me. F-U-N. Such a small word. Why is it always so loaded? And I say, “I’ll try anything once,” which is a total lie, because I will not try anything once. There are some things in the world that I will never, ever try, like venison and base jumping. But I like the way that statement makes me sound, and also, I will try E once. Acid I will never try. Heroin, no. Whip-its, definitely not. Ecstasy, yes. So I take the little pill and I down it with another slippery nipple. Fun.

  * * *

  The bar is located underneath a huge stained-glass window with Jesus on the cross, his face twisted in a state of pure anguish. The owners of Halo must think they’re so rebellious and cool for creating the dirtiest, druggiest club in the dirtiest, druggiest city in the country inside an abandoned church. What must it feel like for lapsed Catholics to come in here and rub their flesh against each other and pound back whatever drugs they can get their hands on? Former confessional booths now dens of iniquity. Sins out the yin yang. I’m no believer, never have been. But something feels strange about all this. Like the whole club is shouting to God, “Smite us! We dare you!”

  A guy comes up to me. He’s about my height, has the scruff of a teenage boy but the face of a guy who’s been around. His T-shirt is soaking wet. His hair in that awkward stage between his last haircut and growing it out. It hangs over his face and he brushes it back with his fingers, but it keeps flopping forward over his eyes. I think he has some rank BO, but the whole club smells of it, so it’s hard to tell whose smell is whose.

  “Hi,” he says. I run my hands over his chest. It feels like his body is made of water and he’s stuffed in some silicone mold. Like he’s Aquaman.

  “Hi.” I smile. He’s cute. I think. I can’t be sure. It’s dark. And the MDMA has kicked in and, because I am who I am, I’m wholly aware of the effects it’s having on me, because I can’t just let go and enjoy it, I have to analyze it. Now, this is what the drug is doing to you right now, I hear my brain say to itself. The drug is making you think this guy is cute and made out of water.

  He mouths something to me, but I can’t hear him over the music.

  “What?” I yell into his face.

  He pushes my hair away from my ear with the back of his hand and leans into me, holding the back o
f my neck. His breath hot on my cheek.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lucy,” I yell back. “What’s yours?”

  “Eric. So, Lucy, can I buy you a drink?”

  “Sure,” I go, breaking Violet’s rule about never letting a man buy you a drink, because, she says, the secret to freedom is to never owe anyone a thing.

  And then I stand there for what feels like the entire time Jesus was on the cross. And I’m bumped into and jostled, and people’s hands are on me, though I don’t know whose or why they’re touching me, but it feels like I can’t move from that one spot, as though my feet have melted into the pavement of the floor. The DJ has mixed “Under Pressure” with some house music I’ve never heard. The words repeat and repeat and repeat over the thump thump thumps of beats coordinated in time with syncopated pink laser beams that slice through the cathedral. P-p-p-p-people on streets Work this pussy People on streets Work this pussy Love’s such an old-fashioned Work this pussy. Right above me is a woman in a steel cage suspended from the ceiling. She’s wearing a black leather bra with holes where her nipples are, black leather hot pants, lace-up stilettos, iridescent thigh-highs. She’s dancing with another girl, slightly less exposed. They keep pretending to lick each other, but tongues never actually touch skin. It’s all fake. Finally, this guy Eric finds me and hands me a glass filled with something that tastes like a Long Island iced tea, and I cringe.

  “So Lucy, what do you do?” His body pressed against mine. His lips right outside the edge of my ear.

  I start laughing. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s kind of a simple question—like, what do you do for a living?”

  I laugh again. “Are you high?” I go. Which he probably is. “I’m in high school. Right now I’m, like, applying to college.” And I can’t stop laughing. This is the funniest question I’ve ever heard. What do you do? Who says that?

  “You’re in high school?” he asks, shocked. “Nice.” And he high-fives me for some reason.