Skin (44 Chapters #1)

by B. B. Easton

  August’s older sister, named—you guessed it—April, lived there too. She had gotten knocked up with twins as soon as she finished beauty school. With no money for childcare, April left the kids at home with her mama all day while she worked, and from the looks of things, it wasn’t going well.

  As soon as August and I stepped off the bus we could hear the smoke detector blaring from inside the trailer. As soon as we got the door open we could hear the sound of babies screaming too. Beverly, August’s mom, was in the kitchen fanning the blaring, blinking alarm above her head with a magazine, when she should have been fanning the pan on the stove that was in the process of making the kitchen look like an Alice Cooper concert.

  The place was so small that in four strides I was able to wriggle around her, dump the pan into the sink, and douse it with water. Two black bricks—which I assumed had once been grilled cheese sandwiches—appeared to be the culprit.

  I opened the tiny window above the sink and within a few seconds the smoke detector stopped shrieking. The babies, who were standing in a playpen in the living area, however, did not.

  Beverly collapsed onto a maroon faux-leather loveseat—which fit her like an armchair—in the living room area just next to the kitchen. She clutched her chest, hyperventilating, and reached for a leather pouch on the end table that looked like a long coin purse. Opening it, she pulled out a lighter and a long cigarette, which she lit with shaking fingers.

  “Thanks, honey,” she said to me, between gasps of air. “I got so caught up in my stories that I forgot I was makin’ the little ‘uns lunch.”

  The babies were still crying. Was I the only one who cared that the babies were still crying? Even August was just standing there—one eye wide in shock, one eye hidden, like always.

  “You okay, Bev?” I asked, genuinely concerned. She looked like she might have an actual heart attack. “You want me to bring you some water or something.”

  Waaaaaaaa!

  “Oh no, sweetheart. I’m fine.” Bev blew out a big puff of smoke, still clutching her chest with the other hand.

  Waaaaaaaa!

  “Do you, um, mind if I take the babies outside for some fresh air?” I asked. “It’s kinda…smoky in here.”

  Beverly just nodded and waved her long, skinny cigarette in the direction of the door, then began fishing around in the couch for the remote control.

  “August,” I said. “Will you grab a blanket or something to put them on?”

  I didn’t know what the fuck babies needed, but I knew it wasn’t to be sitting in a bed of ants and chiggers.

  August disappeared down the hall while I scooped up one of the kids. They were identical, at least to me. Both boys with fuzzy reddish hair and a strong set of lungs. Poor fucking Bev. She really had her hands full.

  Once we got the boys outside I discovered, much to my horror, that the little fuckers could walk already. Luckily, August’s yard was a graveyard for old rusty lawn chairs, so I laid a bunch of them down on their sides and August helped me arrange them to make a little tetanus-infested playpen.

  When we were done and the babies were happily picking apart the shredded, woven nylon on one particularly weathered specimen of outdoor seating, I lit a cigarette and admired my work.

  Evidently, August had been admiring my work too, because he cleared his throat and said, “You’re going to be a great mom, BB.”

  “Pssh.” I rolled my eyes and made sure to blow my smoke downwind from the boys. “Not if I wind up with twins. If I have two of these little bastards at once I’m giving one of them to you.”

  August looked down and kicked at the gravel under his feet. “Maybe I can give them to you.”

  The fuck?

  August didn’t look up, and his cheek was turning bright pink, so I knew he meant what I thought he meant. What was I supposed to say to that? I didn’t want to have babies with August. What in the hell gave him that idea?

  My mind raced—desperately trying to come up with something sensitive to say—until I finally gave up and settled on nothing. We simply stood there, in an awkward silence, in the knee-high grass, in the brutal summer sun, next to a miserable excuse for a mobile home, supervising a couple of half-naked babies in a cage we’d made out of rusty lawn chairs, while smoking cigarettes we weren’t old enough to buy yet. And in that moment I realized something. Something that made me sad.

  I wouldn’t be riding the bus home with August Embry ever again.

  With both August and Colton crossed off my list of potential after school rides (and Lance always coming up with some lame excuse as to why I couldn’t come home with him), that made Tony my only source of after school transportation. Which was fine. He gave me the creeps, but most of the time he just dropped Juliet and me off at her house while he ran around town doing drug dealer stuff, so I didn’t have to interact with him too much.

  On Fridays I usually spent the night at Juliet’s house, unless I was working. I had a part-time job at Pier 1 Imports, a housewares store that left me reeking of patchouli and eucalyptus at the end of every shift. I liked it though. (The job, not the smell.) They accepted early on that I was just going to show up wearing whatever garish, inappropriate outfit I’d worn to school, rearrange all of the candles, glassware, and pillows to my liking (regardless of what the example pictures looked like that corporate had sent), ring people up when I felt like it, and go home. We had an understanding, Pier 1 Imports and I. And the money I made went straight into a savings account that I was trying to pad enough to buy a car when I turned sixteen.

  Juliet stayed at my house occasionally, but we both preferred her place. She liked it there because her mom let Tony spend the night too, which kind of blew my mind. And I liked it because her mom didn’t care how late we stayed out or what the fuck we were doing. Her dad might have cared, if he’d been around.

  Juliet’s parents were technically still married. Her mom was a beautiful African-American woman with hair like Diana Ross. She always had her nails done and her false eyelashes on, which seemed silly to me because she worked in a doctor’s office and wore scrubs all day. Her dad was a small Japanese man with a drinking problem and a temper from hell. They were the oddest odd couple I’d ever seen. I’d met her dad a few times when we first started hanging out, but by tenth grade he was just…gone. Not dead. Not in jail. Not divorced. Just not…there.

  The Friday after August dropped the baby bomb on me, I rode home with Juliet and Tony, all geared up for our usual Friday night activities. We’d order pizza, drink some of Mrs. Iha’s vodka, and maybe go to a pool hall where Juliet and I would sit in the corner smoking cigarettes while Tony networked with all the gangbangers and druggies who hung out there. It was a nice little routine. But on that particular Friday Tony announced that we were going out. Like out out, and we needed to get ready.

  Juliet caked a fresh layer of kohl on top of her already blacked out eyes, and sat me down for a full-on makeover. She swooped my bangs over to the side and pinned them in place with a barrette, mussed my pixie cut with some gel she found in her little brother’s bathroom, drew an even more dramatic cat eye on me, and swiped sparkly silver eyeshadow practically from my eyebrows to my cheekbones.

  Juliet vetoed my Black Flag T-shirt and made me change into a silvery tube top. Of course, I refused to take my padded bra off, so to offset the color of my red bra straps Juliet tried to get me to wear her mom’s shiny red patent leather heels. I hated them, and thankfully they were so big that my foot just slid right out whenever I tried to take a step. Juliet finally agreed to just let me keep my boots and ripped up jeans on. Knowing Tony, we weren’t going anywhere fancy anyway.

  Tony pulled up around nine p.m. wearing the same baggy jeans, Nike T-shirt, and sneakers that he’d been wearing earlier. I suddenly felt super overdressed. I tossed my purse into the backseat and climbed in after it. Juliet slipped into the front seat looking sexy as hell with her waist-length black hair and actual boobs filling out her much classier black tube to
p.

  “Hey baby,” she cooed, giving Tony a peck on the cheek. “Where are we going?”

  Tony put his hand on Juliet’s thigh as he pulled out of her driveway and toward the entrance of her modest, aging neighborhood. “We’re going to a club, baby. I got some business with the owner of this place downtown. It’s in Lil’ Five, so I thought you and B might wanna come. I know you guys like all that freaky punk shit.”

  A club?! In Little Five Points?! No fucking way!

  “Tony!” I screamed and wrapped my arms around the driver’s seat, giving him the best hug I could manage from where I was sitting. Juliet leaned over from the passenger seat and piled on. We both squealed and kicked our feet like…well…like fifteen-year-old girls who were about to go to their first dance club.

  Then something occurred to me. “Wait. Tony, I don’t have a fake ID. How am I going to get in?”

  “Pssh. I got you girl. Don’t even worry about it.” Tony looked at me in the rearview mirror and smirked through his goatee. He may have been kind of creepy, and a total fucking loser compared to other grown-ups, but that night, to a couple of high school sophomores, Tony was a goddamn rock star.

  And he knew it.

  Downtown Atlanta was about fifteen miles due west from our sprawling suburban hellhole, and Little Five Points was a neighborhood right on the outskirts of it. A funky little cluster of bars and shops nestled in front of, next to, and behind the ghetto.

  I’d been to Little Five Points plenty of times to go shopping with my mom. There was a store we loved called Trash that sold every kind of counterculture clothing you could imagine. While I perused the racks for animal print stretch pants and boots and obscure band T-shirts my mom would sneak off behind the beaded curtain in back to peruse the goods in the head shop. Then we’d grab lunch at a dive bar around the corner that let people carve their initials into the table. There are so many goddamn BBs in that place now.

  My mom and I never parked in the parking lot Tony pulled into though. It was poorly lit and sat behind a couple of squat, square brick buildings. They were separated by a skinny alleyway that was so long and dark I could barely see the light from the street on the other side. The building on the left was smaller and flanked by an undeveloped patch of woods. The building on the right was bigger and sat right on the corner of the main five-way intersection that gave Little Five Points its name.

  Juliet helped extract me from Tony’s cramped backseat, and we followed him toward the building on the right. With every step I became more and more nervous. We were six years younger than the legal age to get into a nightclub. There was no way in hell they were going to let us in.

  Tony walked up to the back door and knocked on the metal surface three times. It opened and was immediately filled with a burly dude wearing a shiny black vinyl mask that covered his whole head, a mesh shirt, and what looked like a black Speedo with a metal crotch.

  The fuck?

  The mouth hole on the behemoth’s mask was unzipped, allowing his deep voice to boom out of it. “Name?” he asked. The word echoed across the parking lot.

  “Tony. I got business with Mitch.” Tony sounded surprisingly calm to be talking to a giant sadomasochist.

  “These two with you?” The giant turned his shiny black head in our direction.

  Tony stayed cool while my hands shook in my pockets. “Yeah. Mitch wanted to meet them. Couple a hotties, huh?”

  The giant eyed us for a second, then stepped aside and let us through. “Mitch’s office is upstairs. Knock three times.”

  Tony nodded as he passed. Juliet and I held hands and scooted in right behind him before the giant had an opportunity to change his mind.

  The inside of the club was nothing like I expected. For starters, it was darker. Much darker. And louder. And instead of having one big dance floor with a deejay spinning top forty hits, the building had been divided into a million tiny little rooms—each blaring a different, yet similar kind of techno music. Each dripping in red and black crushed velvet. Each adorned with Victorian era chaise lounges. And each filled with undulating bodies swathed in rubber and vinyl, stopping and starting with every flash of the strobes. The effect made me feel like I was watching a Charlie Chaplain-era porno.

  We followed Tony into the bowels of the building where a circular wrought iron staircase sat in the corner of the largest room. On his way over to it Tony had to hop over a man on all fours to avoid stepping on him. He was being walked on a leash like a dog by a woman in a fishnet body suit. I tried so hard not to stare at her, but she was glorious. In her spiked heel thigh-high boots she was at least a foot taller than me, and under her body suit—instead of a bra—her enviously full breasts bore two black Xs where her nipples should have been.

  I was in fucking Wonderland. No, Fetishland. That should have been the name of the club. Fetishland, where nothing is as it seems.

  At the bottom of the staircase Tony turned around and mouthed to us, “Stay down here. I’ll be back,” before hiking up his baggy jeans and taking the metal platforms two at a time to the top.

  Um, okay. What now?

  Juliet was able to blend in just fine with her black outfit, black hair, and black eye makeup to hide behind. She could have been twenty-two for all anyone knew. I, on the other hand, was seriously regretting my disco ball look. Especially considering that my top literally cast sparkles on the wall every time the light hit it. I might as well have been wearing a neon sign that read Please Call Child Protective Services Immediately. But as I looked around, no one seemed to notice. Everyone had turned to face a raised platform on the opposite side of the room.

  Just then the doorman who’d let us in appeared on the stage with a microphone in his hand. Through his zippered mouth he growled something undecipherable, and the crowd, which began flooding into the back room upon his announcement, went wild.

  I pressed my mouth to Juliet’s ear and yelled, “What did he say?”

  Juliet shrugged and yelled back, “I don’t know. It sounded like Grinder Girl.”

  A second wave of cheers erupted as a heavy metal song began pumping through the speakers and a woman in lingerie, chunky knee-high platform boots, and a metal breast plate stomped onto the platform. She was holding what looked like a spinning electric sander in a rock fist above her head, and when the first chorus of the song kicked in she held the implement to her steel covered tits and showered the audience in hot orange sparks. They loved it, holding their hands out to catch the embers like children playing in the snow. Grinder Girl danced like a stripper to the music, doing back bends and hip thrusts, casting sparks everywhere she went.

  My glittery tube top suddenly felt a lot less ostentatious.

  For the grand finale, Grinder Girl pulled the doorman back on stage, chained him to the wall, zipped the mouth hole on his mask shut, blasted him with searing hot embers at pointblank range, then sparked the crowd one last time off the metal plate covering the poor bastard’s naughty bits.

  It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The whole place was brimming with sexy, dangerous, creative energy. It felt like anything was possible. Juliet and I just walked around and gawked for what felt like hours. There were people suspended by hooks through their skin in one room, people swallowing fire in another. The best part was that everyone there was so wrapped up in the show, or the music (that they were dancing to hippies with heads full of acid), or defiling one another, that they never stopped to wonder where their half-empty cocktails had gone.

  When the pulsing electronica and blinking strobe lights started to make my brain throb and the floor tilt, Juliet and I plopped onto an elegant chaise in yet another room. We giggled and watched in amazement as a skinny man in a studded G-string was vacuumed into what looked like a black rubber sleeping bag on the other side of the room. He was completely blind and immobilized in that thing, and only had one hole to breath out of.

  “What the fuck is that?” I yelled into Juliet’s ear between drunken hiccups. “How i
s that sexy?”

  Just then no fewer than six bondage enthusiasts swarmed the shrink-wrapped human and began fondling and tonguing his erogenous zones through the thin rubber.

  Juliet threw her head back in laughter and squeezed me closer. “You are such a virgin!”

  “What? It’s not like you and Tony are doing this shit in your bedroom!” I thrust my thumb in the direction of the almost-orgy across from us.

  “How do you know?” She flashed me a challenging look that lasted all of two seconds before she erupted into a fit of laughter again.

  Smiling, I put my head on Juliet’s shoulder and yawned. I almost rubbed my eyes before I remembered how much makeup I was wearing.

  Just then Tony peeked his head into the room and looked around, recognition registering on his face as his eyes landed on the two giggling school girls in the corner.

  He stumbled toward us and slurred loudly, “Whasss so funny?”

  Even in the dark I could see that his eyes were red as hell. Somebody had been having a good time upstairs.

  “Your sex life,” I said, gesturing with my chin to the human petting zoo.

  Tony laughed and pulled Juliet up by the hand. I closed my heavy eyelids and snuggled into the plush, velvety chair—that I finally had all to myself—while they groped each other.

  Before I even realized I’d fallen asleep I was jarred awake by someone tugging on my arm.

  “C’mon, BB!” Juliet whined. “Let’s go dance! Get up!”

  I waved her off and curled up tighter. Pretending to still be asleep while they discussed what to do with me.

  “Tony, we better go. Look at her.”

  “Nah, fuck that. I wanna party with these kinky fuckers! You think I’d fit in that thing, baby?”