Shameless

by Nina Lemay

  I don’t know who came up with that rule. Probably Maryse.

  There’s five of us, but I’m the only one who gets carded. Well, I’m also the only one to show up at a nightclub in running shoes. I show my ID and the door guy glances from the mousy-haired girl in the picture to me and back. Other than my hair, my features are suitably generic so I could be almost anyone. But it seems to convince him, because he lets me through.

  The inside of the club is pitch black, roaring with the beat of techno music that makes my bones vibrate. Blue lights line the ceiling and walls, and strobes fill the space with photo-flash light in rhythm with the music.

  It’s the perfect place to lose yourself.

  For now, though, I only seem to lose my friends. I turn around and they’re gone, melded into the crowd that thrashes and jumps like an amorphous mass, a living sea of hands and hair and sweat.

  I need at least three drinks in me before this place starts to become appealing.

  So I break Maryse’s cardinal rule, go to the bar, and ask for a vodka on the rocks. Only to be told they don’t serve alcohol at this hour, would I like a bottle of water?

  I wouldn’t like a goddamn bottle of water. I’m jittery, shaky, annoyed, and way too sober for my own good. I storm to the bathroom, where I gulp cold tap water free of the $5 charge until my teeth hurt. Then I pretend to fix up my makeup in the mirror and wait for the solution to present itself.

  And it does, not two minutes later. The girl is wearing one of those baggy hipster dresses that show off not just her black bra straps but her entire bra, and the slight overflow of back fat above the strap. She squints at me with her fraying false lashes.

  “You holding?” I ask. I feel foolish and part of me is ready to be laughed at, but she gives a curt nod followed by a hand gesture that transcends all languages. I fish twenty bucks out of my purse. She snatches it out of my hand and squirrels it away in her cleavage, from where, a second later, a tiny plastic bag emerges. It’s hot and sweaty when she presses it into my hand. Ew.

  Then, as quickly as she appeared, she’s gone. I dump out the lone pill and hold it up to the light, as if I could somehow tell if it was legit. Then I hear voices, someone in one of the stalls flushes, and I know I need to think fast. So I gulp the pill, wash it down with another blast of chlorine-flavored free water, and that’s that.

  No going back.

  Out in the main room, I collide with Maryse, who must have found something of her own to take the edge off because her eyeballs are like pools of motor oil. She and the others drag me along with them into the center of the dance floor.

  The crowd sways and thrashes and jumps. I don’t even need to move, the dozens of bodies pull me along like a tide. I wait for the drug to start seeping into my limbs, to smooth out the edges of the world, but all I feel is the same weird, giddy hollowness. When I stop to look at my hands, they’re shaking—or maybe it’s just the strobe.

  When I look up, the strobe flashes again, but this time, it’s like one of those horror movies. You know the ones. Lightning flashes and—dun dun dunnn!—there’s a silhouette in the window, raising a machete. Those movies where the slut always dies first.

  Except there’s no thunderstorm and no machete. But the face that I see in the crowd is imprinted upon my retinas as if seared in with a photo flash. I squeeze my eyelids shut and it’s still there.

  My eyes fly open just in time to see him turn away and vanish in the crowd.

  I breathe in till my lungs are about to burst. My head is a balloon straining toward the ceiling and my spine the fragile thread keeping it grounded.

  I push past two drunk girls in miniskirts and go after him. It’s hard to see a damn thing, and I don’t even make it off the dance floor before I lose him. Panting, I stop and look around, shielding my eyes from the merciless strobe light.

  I can’t see him anywhere.

  Fuck, maybe it was just my imagination. Maybe that pill was shit and it’s making me hallucinate, and before the night is out I’ll be in the bathroom trying to peel my face with a razor to get out the bugs crawling underneath my skin.

  A shudder courses up my spine. Everything is becoming more fluid, the music thrums in my bone marrow and my heart rate falls into rhythm. When I step forward, I realize I can’t feel my feet, like I’m floating a few inches above ground.

  Not good.

  Someone yells my name. The sound is fuzzy, faraway and distorted; confused, I spin around. Even in my flat-soled Converse, I’m wobbling.

  He’s there. And it’s him, the dark hair, the dark eyes. It’s not a trick of the imagination, it’s Emmanuel—his face zooms into focus so fast it’s dizzying. He grasps my shoulders and I don’t even have the strength to raise my arms to throw him off. I just stand there and stare at him dumbly.

  His lips move. Hannah, I read. It’s like he isn’t even surprised to see me.

  That thought snaps me out of it, at least a little bit. I push him away, even though I’m the one who stumbles back. “What the hell?” I yell over the music. “Are you following me? God, you’re such a creep.”

  “Hannah.” He holds out his hands. His expression is hard to read because of the strobe.

  “Leave me alone!”

  “I think we need to talk. Come on.” He reaches out to take my arm, but stops himself, and his hand hovers awkwardly over my shoulder. Good, ‘cause if he touches me I think I might break it. Well, at least I’d try.

  Instead, he motions for me to follow him and starts toward the back of the club, hesitantly glancing over his shoulder every couple of seconds.

  I don’t move. He can force me to follow him if he wants, but I sure as hell won’t go after him like an obedient little lamb. Who does he think he is? A part of me is boiling with rage, the other is scared shitless. He followed me here. He followed me. Where else has he followed me?

  My heart starts to hammer and my palms get sweaty. Except it’s not like the normal fight or flight thing. My heart is a fist pummeling the inside of my sternum, like it’s trying to bust through. And sweat runs down the groove of my spine, collects in beads on my forehead and upper lip. It’s cold and clammy even though the place is like an oven. My ears start to ring until it drowns out everything but the pounding bass.

  My fight or flight reflex—in this case flight, it seems—finally kicks in. I turn around and elbow my way toward the red light reading SORTIE behind me, to the coat check, to the exit.

  No one looks at me twice. Some people are making their way up the stairs, overdressed girls and guys with spiked douchebag hairdos. The girls curl their lips in disgust and press themselves into the wall as I pass by.

  I read it in their glitter-fringed eyes: strung out junkie trash.

  I wonder how many of them puke their guts out on the sidewalk at three-thirty AM four nights a week.

  The air outside turns every single drop of sweat on my skin into an ice crystal. My teeth clatter like crazy, completely out of my control. I wrap my arms around myself and rub my forearms, which seem to be going numb too.

  Nice going, Hannah. Or was it Alicia? Which one of you bitches was dumb enough to pull something like this?

  The street is empty except for some of the after-hours club’s patrons smoking outside the entrance. I look around for a cab, but there isn’t a car in sight. The post-club rush on a Thursday night ended a long time ago.

  “Hannah!”

  I swing at him blindly and he catches my arm. I spin around, trying to free my wrist from his grasp, but he’s holding on. He’s hurting me. I think. He would be, if I could feel a damn thing.

  “Are you okay? You don’t look good.”

  “Y-you,” I manage. I finally get my teeth to stop clattering, but it’s still not quite enough to speak. “Wh-why are you f-following me?”

  He curses in French. “I wasn’t following you.”

  “Like hell.”

  “There’s one after-hours in this city open on a Thursday. So what were the odds.” He
looks angry, like he has any right to be angry. “I’m human too, Hannah. I go out. I drink sometimes. Sometimes I even take questionable substances.” I decidedly don’t like the way he’s looking at me.

  “What did you take, Hannah? Are you alone?”

  “My f-friends are inside.” I dig my fingernails into my elbows. Skin yields to the sharp edges of nails, but it’s the only thing I can feel, like sinking my fingers into modeling clay.

  He glances over his shoulder. The breeze messes up his dark hair. He’s wearing a simple black shirt that’s unbuttoned at the top and I can see his collarbone. For some reason, my mind latches on to it, to the spot just below his throat. A tendon in his neck pops when he turns back to me.

  “Inside?”

  I manage a nod.

  “Well, if I go get them, are you going to bolt?”

  I glower at him.

  “Who am I kidding,” he mutters.

  I try to say something, but not a sound comes out. The street ripples and sways. Lanterns that line the street bleed multicolored light as they swing back and forth.

  My knees hit the pavement. That, I can feel. Oh boy, and how.

  Far, far overhead, I hear Emmanuel let out an alarmed exclamation, followed by every unrepeatable word in the French language. Then a dark shape blocks the bleeding lights. He kneels next to me. It takes me a beat to realize he’s patting my back.

  “Hannah,” he murmurs. “Hey. Hey, look at me. I said look at me.”

  He takes hold of my chin and tilts my head up, but instead of seeing his face like I expected, I just see a blur like a screwed-up photo.

  “Whoa, whoa.” He mutters something else, again in French, but it can’t be very nice. “Focus. Look at me.”

  I blink in confusion, swept up in a sudden wave of dizziness. I have to close my eyes. Why am I here? I want to sleep.

  I want him to leave me alone.

  He’s shaking me. My head lolls and I see the sky and the lights again. And then the earth falls away and I’m floating, floating. My neck hurts so I try to raise my head; my temple rests against something solid, solid but warm. I hear a rhythm of a heartbeat, fast and steady.

  I feel like a baby in a womb, weightless, senseless. But safe.

  Like it’s okay to sleep.

  My nightmares are sweaty and vivid, the kind where you don’t know what’s real anymore until you slam back into your body, the bed sheets clinging to your clammy skin. Except I can’t seem to escape. Just when I think I begin to surface, something pulls me back. As much as I strain to open my eyes, I can only see a feeble stripe of light that fades away, vanishes out of my reach.

  I dream of a long time ago, of someone on top of me, weight pinning me, squeezing my ribcage till I can barely draw a breath. I grit my teeth because I’m going through with this, I said I would and I’m going to, no discussion, no going back. You don’t want him to think you’re a tease, do you? Or a prude?

  Someone else’s sticky skin on mine, my sweat mingling with his, and for a moment it makes me nauseous. I try not to think how deep inside me his thing is right now. I feel the scrape of his pubic hair on the spots where my own used to be only a few hours earlier, until I shaved it all off with a dull Bic. We were making out two nights ago when he stuck his hand in my pants and told me to shave. I knew he was right, because guys like him don’t like hairy girls. Guys like him can have anyone, but it’s me he wants and the least I can do is—

  Then I’m stretched in bed, and I still can’t get my eyes to open but I feel tears stubbornly escaping from underneath my eyelids, running a short trail down my temples till they sink in my hair. I roll over and somehow, without opening my eyes, I see the condom on the floor, a sticky mess, with white stuff in the tip, and I think I’m going to be sick.

  I have absolutely no reason to be mad. No reason to hate him deep down the way I hate him now. I said yes, he asked are you sure and I still said yes because I wanted him to stay with me, to like me, to love me. I was ready do anything.

  I glimpse red rings on that condom, like those lines on a tree, wavy red rings.

  I lean over the side of the bed and start to retch. Hands hold me up, and I’m dimly aware that someone is holding back my hair, then stroking my back. A voice murmurs something soothing, but I’m too far away, too far in the past, to make out the words.

  The more I surface, the more a fresh wave of panic rises, replacing the old one with a new, much more vivid terror: where am I? What did he do to me? Did he—oh God, did he?

  This is what happens to stupid whores like that, says a voice. It’s my mother’s voice—her smug voice like when she says, I told you nothing would come from those art school applications, Hannah. Maybe you should apply to Finance, if they’ll have you, with those grades.

  Stupid drunk whores pass out and get raped. And then no one believes them.

  Am I going to have to report my teacher? The thought alone is enough to send me over the side of the bed again. I struggle and push away his hands.

  The dream sucks me back in.

  It’s clearer now, brighter, but somehow less real—I have a very good inkling that it’s a dream, which is not to say I can find a way to escape it. I’m at work, at the club, except all the lights are on like at three AM at the end of the shift. And my mother is there. She’s standing right in front of me, her mouth in a scowl. I spin around, but I’m slowed down like I’m trying to move through a vat of molasses. She won’t recognize me, I have a wig on, I think. Even my thoughts are slow.

  She grabs my wig from behind and pulls it off my head. The bobby pins that hold it in place come out, dragging alarmingly thick pieces of hair from my scalp along with them. I see them clearly in front of my eyes as they fall to the floor in slow motion.

  She drags me out of the club by my hair. I’m screaming my head off, but everyone we pass by just stands there, keeps doing whatever they were doing. Like they see right through me, and her. And then everything goes dark and I’m huddled in a corner somewhere. I can’t see anything except her silhouette looming over me, and she has something in her hand, something shiny. She reaches out to grab and handful of my pastel hair and starts to snip it off in huge chunks, right at the roots.

  I want to scream, but I have no voice.

  I’ll show you how to whore around. “Alicia.” Who do you think you are?

  Everything goes dark and I’m suspended in emptiness. My body is still paralyzed, numb, but slowly my fingers and toes start to tingle and come back to life. Then I realize I’m lying on something soft. I raise my hand, which is asleep below the wrist, a limp puppet-hand, and clumsily try to feel my head. Sweat pools in the hollow between my collarbones. A small river of it between my breasts. The sheets under and over me are literally drenched. They cling to my arm, making it even harder to move.

  I manage to extricate my hand; sensation comes back with pins and needles. I feel around my hair: it’s all there, in sweaty, matted strands flat against my head and stuck to my forehead.

  But it’s all there.

  It was a dream. Of course it was a dream.

  Thank God. Thank God thank God thank God….

  And then the rest of it comes back. I wonder if I’m going to throw up again.

  “Hannah.” The voice is familiar and soothing, but I jump up like someone jolted me with a defibrillator. I clench my teeth against the tide of nausea.

  “Hannah. God, you scared the hell out of me. I was about to call an ambulance.”

  My vision swims with a swarm of black motes, more motes than actual vision, but I can see his silhouette. The room is dark except for a soft orange light in the corner.

  “How are you feeling? Are you okay?”

  I’m panting. My mouth is so dry my tongue is stuck to my palate. But the first thing I do is stick my hand into my underwear—God, at least I still have underwear on. I feel between my legs. I’m dry, not sore.

  Then I realize what I’m doing, and pull my hand away. I bring it to my face: n
o smell of latex.

  I can’t look at him.

  “You’re okay,” he says, answering his own question. “You’re safe. I took you straight to my place.”

  I gape at him in numb horror. In the soft light his face looks oddly serene.

  “I didn’t do anything to you,” he adds. His gaze doesn’t leave mine, doesn’t even flicker—he’s not lying, but I already knew that. Something about his expression cracks for just a fraction of a second, and I glimpse sadness—crushing, heartbreaking. Sadness—and pity. For me.

  For me.

  I sink my hands in my matted hair. The sound that comes from me isn’t quite human, a hoarse half-groan-half-sob. My vision explodes with black spots again and I double over, pressing the heels of my hands into my aching eyes.

  This is a nightmare. Please let me wake up, for real this time, in my own bed at home without him here, without his soothing voice and his hands and the pitying look in his eyes.

  “Hannah, it’s going to be okay,” he says. He rubs my back in circles, and I let him. Mostly because I have no energy left to fight or resist. “I’d never hurt you. Don’t ever even think I’d do something like that.”

  “What…” I finally manage to make a human-like-sound. “What happened?”

  “What do you remember?”

  What do I remember? The after-hours, the sidewalk, my senses turning themselves off one by one.

  The pill. I took a pill I bought from a stranger.

  Too stupid to live.

  I sink my fingernails into my scalp. I want to howl.

  “You took something,” he reminds. Thank you, Captain Obvious. “A tranquilizer of some kind?”

  I try to shake my head, but only manage a weird, jerky motion. I want to tell him it was supposed to be X.

  “Look, I’m not here to give you the drugs-are-bad lecture,” he says. I listen for notes of judgment in his voice, but there’s nothing of the sort. He sounds kind of hoarse himself, I realize. Tired.