by Leah Raeder
I don’t know where it came from. The knowingness in her eyes unlatched a kindred knowing in me. I’d never actually spoken to anyone like this. I stood naked from the waist up in front of a gorgeous stranger and felt—powerful.
“Touch yourself,” Frankie said quietly. Her eyes were wet and dark as ink.
I cupped my hands beneath my breasts, never breaking eye contact. Imagined our limbs tangling, our skin juxtaposed, umber against bronze.
“Do you want to fuck me?” I said.
She touched my cheek again. “Put your clothes back on.”
Instantly, the enchantment dissolved. I glanced at my bra across the room.
“What was this, a job interview?”
She just smiled, enigmatic.
Her guy friend reentered the room as if Frankie had silently summoned him. He pulled a wallet out and pressed a hundred-dollar bill into my hand while I was still straightening my blouse.
“Wait,” I said.
The guy headed for the door. Frankie asked for my number.
I gave it to her, saying, “What just happened?”
“Go to this link. Use the code . . .” She paused, typing something on her phone. Her eyes flashed up at me. “Use the code ‘morganiscute.’ ”
I stared at her text, bewildered.
“Hey.” Frankie snapped her fingers. “Got it?”
“Yeah, got it.”
“Have a lovely evening.”
Then she was gone and I stood there rereading her text.
camwhorez.com/tiana
Oh, damn.
* * *
I flung a rock at the second-story window and listened for the whistle and crack, the rattle of glass. Nothing for a good long minute. In the distance the ocean murmured against the shore.
I flung another rock.
Turned out one hundred dollars would buy a fifth of Cîroc and a cab ride to the East End of Portland, Maine, where million-dollar houses gazed over the water with a thousand blind eyes, blank and undreaming. I texted Curt to tell him I’d gone home with someone and turned off my phone. Couldn’t throw for shit lefty so it took me a good dozen rocks before I hit the window again. But when a light finally came on, it wasn’t on the second floor. It was the first. A silhouette eclipsed the golden glow.
“Come fucking talk to me,” I yelled, slurring.
The silhouette remained still. The light flicked off.
I dug a new stone from the gravel path but before I could throw it, the second-story window flew open.
“What on earth are you doing?”
The rock slipped from my hand, the vodka bottle dangling from the other. “Ellis.”
I couldn’t see her face but I knew that tousled rake of hair. I’d run my hands through it so many times.
After a pause she said, softer, “Are you drunk again?”
I lifted the vodka. “It’s my birthday.”
“I know.” In the ocean-brushed quiet I could hear her breathe, each exhale a small sigh. “Why did you come here?”
“Aren’t you going to wish me a happy birthday?”
The window slammed shut.
I tumbled onto the lawn. It wasn’t exactly my decision—my legs had gone on strike.
The front door opened and Ellis appeared, wrapped in a fleece blanket. She glided toward me, seeming to float over the lawn like some sea spirit. This all felt half-real: taking my clothes off for Frankie, showing up at Elle’s drunk as fuck.
“Hi,” I said sweetly.
“Oh god. You’re wasted.”
There was something wistful in her voice. It made me warm. Take care of me, I thought. “I’m twenty-three.”
“Okay.” Ellis rubbed her temple. “I’ll call a cab.”
“I can’t go home. Don’t have one.”
“What?”
The bottle was uncapped but I rolled it carelessly, letting liquid crystal leak into the grass. “Got evicted.”
She snatched the vodka and stood it upright. So like her. Proper, precise Ellis. Everything in its right place.
“What do you want, Vada?” Her voice was brittle. “You ignore my texts, then show up drunk and pick fights. What is this?”
“Technically, it’s emotional abuse.”
This is how much of an asshole I am:
Elle had been texting me. Every day.
I hadn’t actually blocked her number. I couldn’t do it. But I let her plead, and beg, and tell me over and over how much I meant to her, how sorry she was, how she wanted to change.
Then the texts turned angry. It wasn’t fair, she said. We’d both made mistakes.
Then sweet again. Poignant. They came days apart. Weeks.
I’m sorry.
I wish you were here.
I just miss you.
When the texts got sparser I came to her house, drunk, to reboot the cycle. To keep her hooked.
“Is this funny?” Elle said. “Is hurting me a joke to you?”
“Everything is a joke. Especially pain.” I curled my bad hand in the grass. It felt like grabbing a fistful of hypodermic needles. “Pain is fucking hilarious.”
“I think you should leave.”
“I don’t know where else to go.”
“Go anywhere else. Please.”
I was so used to being hurt I barely felt it. A finger on a deep bruise, pressing a little harder.
“You don’t want me anymore,” I said, and laughed. “Nobody wants me.”
Elle’s phone emerged from the blanket. “I’ll get you a hotel.”
“Who’s in your house?”
She turned her back and said, “Do you have any vacancies?”
“Who’s in the house with you, Elle?”
“I’d like to rent a room, please.”
Throwing money at the problem to make it go away. Just like her mother.
I scooped up the bottle and rose shakily to my feet.
“Vada,” she said.
“Fuck your money. And fuck you.”
Ellis followed me as I stumbled toward the street. She stopped at the edge of her lawn.
“Happy fucking birthday,” I said, and took a swig off the bottle, and then, on impulse, smashed it on the concrete. It burst spectacularly, glass and clear liquor flowering into the freezing air. A perfect encapsulation of how I’d felt these past months, jagged and see-through and a complete fucking waste.
I bent to pick a shard from the sidewalk and she rushed to my side. “Do not.”
“Do not what?” It felt so good, being childish. Making her care about me. Making her feel actual concern.
Her hand clamped onto my wrist. I dropped the shard.
And shoved her onto the grass, tackling her.
We’d fought before. Gone at each other savagely with nails and edged words. It was all so familiar: my hands fitting around the grooves of her throat, and hers under my shirt, raking my skin.
“Fuck,” I said, my breath a cloud connecting us. “More.”
Nails ripped down my spine. I was too drunk to really feel it but my grip tightened on her neck and she scratched mercilessly and then it was a real fight. We rolled through the grass, clawing, choking. At one point I bolted her wrists to the ground but somehow she ended up on top, holding me down. I writhed and she stayed on me, viciously agile.
“God,” I panted. “Don’t stop. Please.”
I wrapped my arms around her waist. Pulled her body hard against mine.
Ellis wrenched away. I tried to drag her back but she was limp now and my bad hand twinged, fire lacing up my nerves. I slammed my palms into the grass. My hair hung in my eyes, a dark scrawl across this night, this ugliness.
“What do you want?” she rasped.
“You. Touch me. Hold me.”
“No. You just want us to hurt each other.”
I sat back on my heels, exhausted. Sad, stupid, ugly. All of this. My shoulder blades burned, the skin shredded as if someone had torn off wings. Vodka churned in my gut like a jumble of razor blades.
You’re right, I thought. I want to be hurt. Because this is the closest I feel to you anymore, when you hurt me.
“Go home,” Ellis said.
“You are my home.”
She kept her face averted but I saw the hiccup before a sob.
“Don’t cry,” I whispered.
“You need to leave.” She refused to look at me. I saw the effort it took, the tense lines of her shoulders. “Please leave, Vada. And don’t come back.”
“What?”
“I can’t do this anymore. I need a clean break.”
“There’s no break. Nothing’s breaking.”
“We need to. We’ve been dragging it out for months. All we do is hurt each other. Please, just let me go.”
I stood up, teetering. “What are you saying?”
Elle didn’t move and didn’t go back to the house. She simply waited, letting me rage and burn out. Like always.
“Look at me, Ellis. Fuck you. Say it to my face.”
Nothing.
I went to my knees beside her, touched her shoulder. “Don’t do this. I’m fucked-up, okay? I’m sorry. I’ll be better.” I gripped harder. “Everything fucking hurts. I feel raw, everywhere. I’m sorry for taking it out on you. It’s depression or something. I’ll get help. But don’t do this, okay? Don’t cut me off. I need you.”
Nothing.
“Elle, please. You’re all I have.”
Tears ran down her face. She remained silent.
I let go.
My teeth gritted till it felt like they’d snap, every bone in me poised on the brink of pulverizing into white powder. There was a pain inside that I could no longer express. I couldn’t draw it anymore. I couldn’t share it with her. It lay buried, trapped, echoing off its own walls and growing louder and louder, a scream I could never voice.
How do people go through their entire life with something like this inside?
But they don’t. That’s why Ryan got behind the wheel with a 0.20 BAC.
A pain like this must become violence. Toward another, or yourself.
She was right. I needed to go, before I hurt her more.
I staggered to my feet and ran through halo after halo of streetlight.
* * *
It was a long way back, and after crying and puking myself into dehydration I collapsed on a bench near the shore. I felt like some creature out of an Ernst painting, a patchwork monster, a furious unraveling of color, grotesque and absurd. Staining everything I touched.
I curled into a ball and tried to stop shivering.
It used to be us versus the world. Fast friends from the day we met, always guarding each other’s backs. When I let my anger take control Ellis was there to soothe me, to gently pull at my reins. When someone took advantage of her naivete, her faith in the goodness of people, I shut them down without her even knowing. I’d sheltered her a little, but she deserved a little sheltering. Her heart was pure, open. Not shadowy and labyrinthine like mine.
But sometimes when you absorb all the hate and cruelty meant for someone else, it gets inside you. Feeds on your fears, your insecurities. Speaks in the voices of people you know, like your mother, and says, Two grown women should not share one bedroom, mija, and, Vada, you’ll never find a man if you keep living like this. Sometimes you end up resenting the person you’re protecting.
Somewhere along the way, it became me versus her.
The rest of the walk flickered in my head like a dream. Salt wind stung my face, white grains collecting like barnacles on my shoes. Exposing your open wounds to an ocean is pure masochism. Then the alcohol rose in me like the tide, drowning all the bad parts, and it felt so good to drown a little.
Someone was sitting on my porch steps.
My idiot heart soared and I thought, Ellis, but Max raised his head, and for a second I was so crushed it wasn’t her that I was glad he knew how this felt. The stomach plunge of never seeing the person you’re hoping to see.
“I finally did it,” I said, leaning on the fence. “Bottom of the barrel. I’m officially homeless next week.”
Max sat silently, backlit by the porch lantern.
My body kept growing heavier. I slid down to the frozen dirt. “Probably lost my job today, too. And I’m dropping out of school. And it’s my birthday and Ellis said she never wants to see me again.” My voice cracked on that last part. “Know how suicides give away all their stuff before they kill themselves? The universe did it for me. Now all I’ve got to do is find a razor.”
Max got up. A bolt of morbid excitement shot through me.
Come on, I thought. Hurt me. I deserve it.
Air trembled in his throat, like a death rattle.
He was crying.
My arms rose and we more or less fell into each other. Rigid, resistant, limbs entwining even as our faces angled away. But the contact thawed us and he stroked my hair, and I clung to him and let his sobs rock me, toss me, like waves. Fuel and woodsmoke. Fatherly smells.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered in his ear. “It was a stupid joke. I’m drunk.”
Still he didn’t speak.
“I’m a jerk. I’m seriously an asshole, Max.” I pressed my cheek to his shoulder. “I was an asshole even before the accident. A bully. Too scared to be myself, and now it’s too late. Everything’s fucked-up. I’m fucked-up.”
Because God rolled the dice and let the wrong person live.
“It should’ve been me,” I said. “I should have died instead of Ryan.”
His body went taut. Blunt fingernails dug into the back of my skull. I didn’t flinch.
“Don’t say that. Don’t you ever say that.”
“It’s true. He was better than me. Everyone’s better than me.”
Max pulled back to look into my face. The air fogged, thick with my vodka breath. “You’re a good person, Vada. You took care of me when I needed it.”
“I killed your son.”
“Not you. You didn’t do it.”
“Huh?”
He helped me stand. He wasn’t even drunk. “No more suicide talk, okay?”
“Okay.”
“That’s not you. You’re strong.”
“Okay.”
“Do I need to stay here tonight?”
“I’m fine, really. Why are you here?”
He took an envelope from his coat. “Happy birthday.”
“What is this?”
“I know you’re struggling.”
We both stared at the envelope, avoiding each other’s eyes. “Max, I can’t. I can’t take your money.”
“No strings. You don’t owe me anything. Please.”
You don’t get it, I thought. I owe you everything. I took the most precious thing from you.
“I appreciate it, but I’m okay. My mom will help me out.”
“Your mother’s struggling, too.”
“Let me worry about that.”
Max shook his head. “Stubborn girl.”
It took a while to convince him to go. Tonight I was the jumper and he was the lifeline. I smiled, lied, flirted till he felt awkward. Promised I’d text if I felt like hurting myself.
What a joke. If I felt like hurting myself.
That’s what got us all into this mess in the first place.
A bar of moonlight split my room in two. I sat at my desk and flattened my hands to stop their shaking.
“Ellis, have you ever thought about killing yourself?”
I turned on the banker’s lamp. Pulled a sketchpad from beneath a pile of art history books, a drawing pencil from the cup. Dull tip. It took a minute to find a razor blade and another to shave a point.
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“But I mean, have you fantasized about how you’d do it?”
The last time I’d drawn was three months ago. I flipped past my final sketches, studies of hands, wrists, delicate birdlike bones. Blank page. The pencil looked like someone had massacred it with a hatchet, but there was enough graphite to work with.
I switched it to my drawing hand.
At physical therapy, they said my nerve damage was healing well except near the elbow, where bone had broken through skin. When you hit your “funny bone,” what you’re really feeling is the tingle of the exposed ulnar nerve being struck. Mine felt like that permanently. They test ulnar damage by having the patient grip a piece of paper between thumb and forefinger, then they pull the paper away. An uninjured person holds on easily. Someone like me crooks their thumb into a claw, desperately trying to hold on with the surrounding muscles.
I failed the test every week. It wasn’t healing.
“You’re lucky you’re young,” the physical therapist had said. “You have time to retrain.”
“What the fuck is lucky about this?”
The medical questionnaire had asked what I’d done for a living before the injury. Did I expect this injury to negatively impact my career? Would I like assistance transitioning into a new job field?
I’d crumpled it (with my trainable hand) and flung it in the trash.
The PT had ticked a box on his clipboard that I assumed read DENIAL.
Now I propped the sketchpad in my lap, held the pencil in a loose paintbrush grip. Much of drawing comes from the shoulder, not the hand. The hand is for fine detail; bold, smooth lines come from the whole arm. Even though my ulnar was toast I could compensate with other nerves and muscles—with vastly diminished control and progressively increasing pain.
When I pressed the onyx tip to the paper my arm drooped and a thick black scar tore across the sheet.
I had as much grip strength as a toddler.
I gritted my teeth. Try again. This time I managed to draw steadily for an inch before my hand weakened and the line zigzagged.
Try again.
“If I really wanted to die,” Ellis said, “I’d build in redundancy. Opiates and alcohol in a warm bath.”
“Wow. You’re even nerdy about suicide.”
“Anything can fail. Always have a fallback.”
The page filled with a schizoid flurry of dark wires. Lines that could not connect to each other, out of sync, out of touch. An accidental self-portrait.
Desperately, I took the pencil in my left hand and tried again. Same result: childish scribbling.
