It didn’t matter that she didn’t look all that much like Lisa. That wasn’t important. All that mattered was that she could convey her essence because in reality sexiness is not a physical image, she thought, but rather, something ethereal that comes from within. She heard that once on a television talk show.
After Barbey put the cheese crescents and wine in her tote bag that she slung over her shoulder, she met Rave who was waiting for her outside of the tent leaning against a tree drinking a beer. She stood squarely with her long legs spread apart, feet firmly on the ground, looking Rave in the eyes. “I’m ready to go,” her voice was so husky and sensual, she nearly moaned the words. Then she brushed her fingers through her wet hair, tilted her head back and slid her nails slowly down her neck, softly as a feather. Though she held him tightly, confidently with her violet eyes, shortly thereafter, she couldn’t help but release an awkward giggle and turn away blushing. “I was just kidding!” she giggled some more, her voice high pitched and graceless. I am such a total geek! He probably thinks I’m so pathetic! Trying to reconnect to the character, she realized she was entirely too self-conscious now and she simply kept nervously laughing. Now covering her face with her hands, she squealed red in the face, “I’m so stupid!”
“You’re not stupid, Barbey. You’re…” He gently pealed her hands from her face. “…you’re beautiful.” Chuckling slightly, he endearingly gazed at her and continued with an ironic lilt in his voice, “You’re funny—like Lucille Ball.”
To say the least, she was quite disappointed with his perception of her; consequently, she retorted in a slightly annoyed tone, “I’m ready to walk!” This was an attempt to avoid any further attention to her embarrassment and to move into something new and more exalted. Her mind began to race in a maze of thoughts with all sorts of silly ideas of how to elevate herself to her perception of the ideal woman in his mind. As the thoughts desperately searched for the destination at the end of the maze to no avail, she felt her nose growing, her mind twisting and turning frantically. She hardly noticed that she and Rave were walking away from the camp now on a dirt path leading up a mountain side, when she blurted out, “I was voted Winter Dance Queen at my school and won the Janet Jackson dance contest. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I saw the tiara on your bedroom shelf with all the trophies.”
“Oh.” She smiled, feeling happy that he noticed.
“Yes.” He was walking beside her, holding her hand. “Can…can I carry your bag for you?”
“That’s so sweet of you, but no, I’ve got it just fine. Thank you.” She felt embarrassed again, but she wasn’t sure why. He gently released his hand and walked in front of her up the hill. This caused her to wonder anxiously if he had let go of her hand because it was sweating.
“Be careful—there’s some…some rocks up ahead.”
The sun was beating down on them bright overhead. The hot dry air had already dried Barbey’s hair. She wondered if it looked frizzy. So to distract from any possible frizz, she yanked some bright yellow Arizona poppies from alongside the trail which she shoved in her hair behind her ears. Now, her mind slowing from the heat, anxiety falling from her skull in dry powder like cremation ashes, she wondered why the mountain wasn’t smooth and sandy like those swooping white desert mountains she’d seen in the movies. Instead, this mountain consisted of dry, hard, brown dirt and rocks interspersed with dull green brush and cacti. She decided it was pretty anyway, but nothing like those rolling sand deserts with the camels.
At the top, on the plateau of the mountain, Rave led Barbey into a tunnel of trees and grasses that were twined together, bent over from the wind, creating a small cave. Inside the cave, Barbey felt slightly cooler and more alive from the shade of the leaves. She liked how the sunlight breaking through the leaves emitted light patches on their skin and clothing forming shapes and patterns in the splotchy shadows.
To an onlooker, Barbey might have resembled the light and Rave, the shadows—both seemingly overlapping and vibrating in varying patterns and divergent textures creating a temporary fluctuating abstract mural of art. The darkness was thick, calm and steadfast, while the light appeared to glitter around nervously zapping its way through the darkness like a giddy silly dancer. Though it appeared as if the darkness was the canvas and the light, the intruder, nervously jittering around, breaking through the darkness, it was the opposite. The light was the canvas—the reality—and the darkness the veil that covered and distorted the radiant light. Illusions are deceiving, but not reality or truth. Darkness is the illusion, while light is the steadfast truth and reality of all existence. Rave was a shadow—an illusion in time and space.
Rave eased his hand around Barbey’s waist pulling her to him. She could feel the perspiration from his chest against hers as he slid his hand over her satin mini-skirt and under it onto her buttocks and down her thigh. She looked at him longingly with the clear eyes of an innocent child. His fingers brushed the yellow poppies from her hair, letting them fall to the ground. He smiled at her and kissed her softly on the lips. As his tongue entered her mouth, she quivered, goose bumps forming over her body. The passion became sharp in Barbey’s mind, igniting her further into the light, but the darkness ominously enshrouded her when he stopped, pulling away from her, shaking his head, staring at her as if she was too pure to touch. She looked at the flickering lights seemingly moving through the shadows and wondered if life could get any brighter. This is heaven! She thought she might just die from bliss.
But then an impulsive thought came to her mind as she blurted out, “What did the person who kidnapped you do to you?”
Rave looked at her as if appalled by her imploration. “I…I wasn’t kidnapped. When you said you loved the boy from the milk carton, I just let you believe that it was me. It…it wasn’t. I was never kidnapped.”
“Yes you were. Why are you saying that?”
“Everybody just believes what they want to believe. You wanted to believe I was a victim, so I let you believe it. That’s all.”
She closed her eyes for a minute, putting her head down with her hands over her face, shocked by what he was saying. “I don’t understand…” Yet, when she looked up, he was gone. She saw some pink fairy dust—residue from a fairy godmother’s wand or sparkling gasses from a smashed pumpkin. Desperately, she wondered where he could have disappeared to in such a short period of time. And then she wondered, What is reality?
Her vision shifted to the ground where she saw shards of glass, which appeared to be gathered into the form of a slipper. It’s the glass slipper! It’s the American symbol of true love and romance. She reached for it. The shard she held was much sharper than she had anticipated. It cut her hand open. Blood gushed forth. Never before had she seen such blood, aside from the time she snuck into the TV room late at night against Mama’s permission and watched on HBO Jason from Friday the Thirteenth slash open his victims.
The glass slipper mesmerized her and she didn’t know to let go of it. It was all she understood. It was what she had been conditioned to believe was reality. She didn’t know that it would hurt her, that it was a lie.
She screamed and she couldn’t stop screaming until she felt a sharp strike from behind in her lower back. A snake? The shock and the force of the strike was powerful causing her to lose her balance and fall to the ground where she passed out in the cave with the flickering lights.
28
The next morning she woke up in a motel room with John Prince standing at her bedside. “What happened?” Disoriented and confused, Barbey looked around the small dingy room, wincing at the odor of ammonia that seemed to be coming from the bathroom. “Where am I?” Her eyes widened in terror.
John Prince smiled calmly, pleased that Barbey had awoke. In his deep masculine voice he responded, “Don’t be afraid. You’ve been unconscious.”
She tried to rise from the bed, but felt dizzy and unable to stand up.
“You lost a lot of blood. As fate would have
it—I happened to be hiking on the same mountain as you when you passed out. Lucky for you, I found you before you died from too much blood loss. I brought you to my motel room and called a doctor to look after you.”
John Prince’s hair was back to his original blonde and his eyes were also back to that neon blue paint by numbers ocean design. He was dressed in blue swimming trunks, tennis shoes without socks, and a t-shirt displaying a surfer riding a huge wave. His skin had a very rich golden tan which glistened under the ceiling lights, highlighting the smooth texture of his shaven legs.
“Why didn’t you take me to a hospital?” she demanded.
“I hate hospitals. Ever since my mother died, I’ve been afraid to set foot in a hospital.” He placed his hand on her shoulder as he whispered gently, “The doctor said you’d be just fine and should wake up soon, but I’ve been worried nonetheless.”
Barbey pushed his hand off her shoulder weakly. “Where is Rave?”
“Oh, uh…” He shifted his weight to one hip, jutting it out with his head to the side and then shifted his weight to the other hip, jutting it out and tilting his head to the other side.
Barbey looked at him half dazed and half perplexed. “Why are you doing that? Do you have to go to the bathroom or something?”
“Uh…” He stood up straight and crossed his arms over his chest stiffly. “No. I don’t know where Rave is. I don’t actually know any Rave.”
“This is all very weird.” She was feeling very uncomfortable and nervous. Again, she tried to stand up, but the dizziness was still too overwhelming. So she had to sit back down. “The last thing I remember was hiking up a mountain at the river and uh, oh!” She remembered kissing Rave in the tunnel formed by the trees and grass. “I feel like I’ve been asleep for days.”
“I called your parents, but nobody answered the phone. I left messages, but haven’t heard back from them.”
“They’re traveling Ireland,” she said, tears coming to her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” He appeared genuinely concerned.
“Oh, it’s just that they don’t care about me at all, but I don’t care.” She tried to hide her emotions, feeling confused as if she could not discern the difference between reality and her imagination. Her mind seemed mixed up like a milkshake in a blender.
“I should…” his voice cracked like a teenage boy coming into manhood, but then he cleared his throat, took in a deep breath and resumed speaking in his forced deep masculine voice. “…I should probably let the doctor know you’re awake. He just left a couple minutes ago. I can probably catch him in the parking lot if I hurry.”
“No, please don’t! I don’t want to be around anyone I don’t know.” She was sobbing now. “Please don’t leave me alone.”
“I won’t leave you, Barbey Bardot.” He pulled a chair to her bedside and sat in it, crossing his legs and furrowing his eyebrows. Anxiously he looked around the room. “You’d think they’d have tissues in a motel room. Oh, well.” He pulled his shirt off and handed it to Barbey. “Here use this to wipe the tears and to blow your nose if you need to.”
Barbey laughed, “I’m not going to blow my nose on your shirt!” She noticed that his chest was tan and muscular. “Why do you shave the hair off your chest?” She wiped her eyes on the t-shirt.
“Oh, you noticed some stubble?”
“No. It looks as smooth as plastic.”
He seemed disappointed, but then covered by further deepening his voice, sounding to Barbey much like Darth Vader from the movie, Star Wars, as he took a macho posture pushing his shoulders back and raising his chin. “I was a swimmer in high school and the coach made us shave our body hair to increase our speed. They say hair slows you down. I…uh got used to the sleek feeling of having no hair and just kept up with the shaving. I thought maybe it might help with my surfing somehow.” His voice softened, “It’s stupid of me now that I think about it.”
“So, when you found me, did you see anyone else around?” She touched the bandages on her hand.
“No.”
“I was with this guy and then…” She drifted off into thought. “…he was gone. It was as if he just vanished for no reason at all. It was like a magic trick.”
“I didn’t see a guy with you. You were just lying face down on the ground with blood pouring from your hand and midsection. You were holding a sharp piece of glass. You must have fallen on more than one shard because one shard was stuck in your hand and another had sliced into your abdominal section. The doctor said the wounds aren’t too serious and that you didn’t lose too much blood, though it looked like a lot to me. He used dissolving stitches, so you don’t need to worry about going to a doctor to get them taken out.” He paused for a moment and looked at her curiously. “Your nose looks longer. It’s just a little longer, but longer nonetheless. Most unusual.”
Barbey was very embarrassed. “Well, you look like your wearing a wig!”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He appeared embarrassed as well and regretful for putting her on the defensive. “I simply notice every detail about you because I’m kind of obsessed with you—I guess. Obsessed people notice everything about the object of their obsession,” he laughed. “It’s the way of obsession—it is. Your nose is sexy, hot, wildly arousing—your most unpredictable feature. Very curious it is. Lovely! I’d say. It’s an object of my fixation.”
“Oh.” Her eyes widened and then blinked several times. “I’m feeling less dizzy now.” She held her stomach. “Maybe you could call me a cab?”
“Oh, no. I won’t have that. I most definitely will drive you to your car. I’m not going to send you off all alone in the condition you’re in.”
“It’s ok—really. I don’t want to put you out anymore than I already have. I’d like to take a taxi.” Intuitively, she felt afraid of him, but didn’t know why. She didn’t trust her judgment though and reasoned that she was being paranoid.
“I am certainly not letting you take a cab, so just forget about it.” Shaking his head side to side, he stared at her for a moment, and then exclaimed in a raspy voice, “Wow!” He lifted one nostril and laughed, “I sure am glad you’re alive!”
****
The campground was empty except for her Jeep and a huge tumble weed that rolled with the hot wind across the parking lot. After John Prince had convinced Barbey to eat some breakfast at the motel, he further convinced her to let him drive her back to the river to retrieve her Jeep. Yet, to her dismay, as she stood upon the hot asphalt beside him, she felt disappointed and void, like a used discarded bottle thrown into the wind, to see that Rave and the others had already returned home. Her mind, now slightly feint and her forehead now slightly perspiring, she figured she must have worried them, considering she never returned back to the camp from her hike. “I should call Rave and Gretchen and let them know I’m ok,” her voice was wispy and distant as an echo.
“Oh?” He looked at her curiously as he helped her into her Jeep. “I suppose we could stop at a pay phone.” His voice wasn’t as deep as before and he had a more casual way about him.
“I actually don’t know Rave’s phone number now that I think about it. Maybe I could call information and get it? I can’t believe I didn’t think of calling them from the motel.” She put her hand over her forehead as her head wobbled slightly side to side. “I’m feeling kind of dizzy again.”
“The doctor said the pain killers could cause drowsiness. As I said before, I really don’t think you should drive. I’ll just drive you home and we can come back another day when you’re feeling better to pick up your Jeep.”
Chageet's Electric Dance Page 26
