by SM Johnson
When he was out of sight, she felt his fingers between her ass cheeks, bumping against the switch handle, grasping it. He gave it a little tug that sent shocks up her spine and down her legs. "Come on, Sunshine, let it go."
It took almost as much concentrated effort to release the thing as it had to accept it, and again there was that rush of humiliation, that here she was unbound, obedient to his hurt. The next time he tugged with purpose, and she managed to relax the muscle enough to let it go. After he put it wherever he put it, he touched her lips again, placed the sweet chocolate on her tongue, and said, "That's a good girl."
She savored the sweet explosion, the chocolate melting in her mouth, and it almost made her cry again.
He patted her cheek, then coaxed her off the table, and dressed her, piece by piece, back into her clothes. Even socks. Everything but jacket and shoes.
Then he walked her to the bed with one arm around her shoulders, holding her half-turned with her face against his chest. He smelled good. He smelled like Jeremiah, a faint strain of the familiar, the Jeremiah she'd known, of the nervous fingers and quick, economical, spike-filled hugs. There was also a heavier and darker weight to his scent – not his pain, but removed from his pain, newer. Something like his purpose. It jolted her nerves, activated her adrenaline, and not in a bad way. It felt primal, as if this coupling was planned, far, far in advance of their recent meeting.
Unfinished business.
There were cuff restraints with straps waiting on a table near the bed. "Find a position you can sleep in, and I'll arrange the cuffs."
Fucker.
She laid on her side, and he enclosed her wrists and ankles in the cuffs, and fastened them to the bed.
He dropped a blanket over her, then moved the cage to clean up her mess. When he was done, he left her in the dark.
Chapter 8
She.
She was exactly as I expected she would be.
Still sweet, still lost, still easy to shock into silence.
When had I ever been shocked into silence?
Never, that's when. I had often been silent because I knew better than to say what I was thinking, but I'd never, ever been struck dumb because someone told me not to speak.
The differences between Sunshine and I are still enormous. Probably too enormous to overcome, but I have to try. She's the last of the Three, and that has to count for something.
I wonder if she's crying, alone out there in the dungeon, and have a little argument with myself about leaving her alone, or not leaving her alone.
Perhaps we both need quiet time in the Dark.
I close my eyes and a memory comes.
It's not a memory I want, but that doesn't seem to matter. Magick does what it does.
I am... maybe six years old, knowing mostly that everything in the world is much bigger than I am, but still not very savvy, when I first notice people are like ants; tiny and focused and zigzagging this way and that, but all going in basically the same direction, busy, busy, busy appeasing the Queen, never question, never fail, and if the one in front of you does happen to fail, well, just climb over the corpse and get on with the program.
Adults are drones scavenging the earth of everything useful, blinders on, ignoring the grass and the sky and art and anything else that was aesthetically pleasing.
Every so often a gleaming beetle, one of those with the shining iridescent shell, captures the attention of a drone, and the drone will follow for a while, then lose the route, get turned around, and die trying to find its way back. Maybe even trying to find its way forward. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
I know that I feel sorry for the ants, all working so hard to please a queen who doesn't care about them, who's incapable of seeing them as individuals. Who will eat them if resources run low, eat them to maintain her ability to reproduce and make more of them.
Would the world suffer without the ants? I don't know, really, but somehow I doubt it.
I tell myself that my mother is gone because she followed an impressive beetle, one so glittery-shiny-pretty to look at that it was like the music of the pied piper, and she was so captured by its beauty she couldn’t force herself to escape. She knew she ought to resume her role among the drones, but she couldn't. She'd die if she did. That's the story I tell myself, and I try hard not to listen when my dad waxes angry-poetic about his miserable life raising this freak boy without any help, and if my mother had one bloody fingernail's worth of love for me, she'd be here right now, right now, RIGHT NOW. Or she'd come and take me away. Or, at the very least, send a check once in a while.
No. This ridiculous existence of servitude is not a thing for a person like her. She had to leave, she had to, or she would have died of the monotony.
She's an artist, my mother. I know that; skilled with paint, pen and ink, with pastels, with oils and brushes, and sticks and stones and oh, how they break my bones, the precious two brushes hidden under my dresser that had been hers, hidden next to the rolled sketch of herself looking into a mirror and seeing horror looking back.
My father liked to rail about that too, all the fucking mirrors in her work, always mirrors, reflecting back something other than the person standing there, reflecting fantasy, when what the fuck was a mirror good for other than seeing oneself? Mirrors reflect reality, dad said, and my mother's obsession with mirrors had everything to do with her leaving, off to whore around in the name of searching for a goddamned fairy tale, and she'd find out one day that those just didn't exist, did they?
But he's wrong about that.
I'm still little and standing on the toilet seat watching my father shave, and smooth back his hair, getting ready for another date with another stupid ant woman. Already I know them all, I think, and am never surprised when they laugh too loudly at his jokes, when they smile at me and say "Oh, my, you must be a bright little thing," because they never want to notice that I'm rail-thin and pale and ugly. They never find anything to compliment about that, do they? And yet they smile incessantly; fake smiles with fake-white teeth and pats on the head that hurt my teeth and make me want to bite the smiles right off their faces.
There's always one or another of them around, stupid simpering broads, my father calls them.
I watch my dad in the mirror, and wonder at his insistence that mirrors reflect back reality, because… the mirror doesn't show his clenched fist, or the snarl-twist of his lips that comes seconds before a blow, doesn't show the deep red rage resentment that lives inside the man who is my father, the rage that boils out of him unexpectedly in cracks to the back of my head, cupped-palm cuffs over my ears, a shove here, and a kick there. An invitation to eat, or a decree that there won't be any food today.
No. The mirror reflects a brown-haired, blue-eyed man, more handsome than not, with bushy eyebrows and creases around his eyes because he scowls so much, but that everyone says are laugh lines.
I like my mother's reflections better. They might not be pretty, but at least they're honest. Even the one that I keep tucked way, way in the back of my closet, the one I pretend dear old dad never saw, in which my mother stands half-turned in front of the mirror, cradling a baby, a baby drawn to every perfect detail of pure newness, an utterly precious newborn I know is me, and the rendition is amazing, how the baby almost glows with purity and beauty, and the kind of dewy freshness that babies have… and I can see she loves that baby, that she spent hours drawing him, after all, his eyes still squinting from the bright of the world…
And the mirror, the mirror shows –
No. I can't think of it, have never been able to look at it after that first time, when my father flung the thick, creased paper into my room after a beating, disgusted that I'd been crying for hours for her to come back.
"Oh, yeah, cry for your mama, you ungrateful piece of shit. You think she loves you? She never loved you, and she's never coming back."
I'd stopped crying and unfolded the paper, the unfolding somehow exposing first the child, the beaut
iful, beautiful child, so carefully drawn. So perfect.
The rest, the mirror, I wish I'd never seen.
Chapter 9
She woke up in the dark, confused and paralyzed, her body hurting in twelve different places.
For a second she thought she couldn't move because of the effect of dreaming, some hormone that prevents thrashing. It happened often enough that even if she was terrified in her sleep, she managed to wake without panic.
She waited the requisite two seconds, but still couldn't pull her arms in to her body, and only then remembered that she'd ridden away from her life with Jeremiah Quick.
Fuck.
Roaring panic and crushing guilt, and what have I done what have I done what the fuck have I done? She fought the bonds, pulling against them, sobbing a little against clenched teeth when movement caused silver shiver-lines of burn along her back. That made her stop, made her be still.
One deep breath. Two deep breaths. Three. Muscle by muscle, relax.
Quiet. Dark.
And he – Jeremiah Quick and all of this – forced open a floodgate of memory.
Things come back in the dark. Silence left room for all the thoughts and memories that she worked hard for years to avoid.
So many of them were unpretty.
Jeremiah thought her life was frivolous and easy. He was doing all of this because he was angry, because he thought she needed to feel pain.
Pretty had survived plenty of pain, but how could he ever know that, walking back into her life after twenty years of gone? He had no idea. He saw her shopping at Walmart, okay, and he saw her driving a typical car and living in a typical house, raising, as he said, two-point-five children and a dog. And for that she'd earned his scorn? For that, she deserved all of this?
His judgment wasn't fair.
Forbidding her speech made it seem like he didn't even want to know, like he wasn't interested in her experience at all.
Her life wasn't frivolous or easy. She'd had loves and losses the same as everyone did. They'd made her happy sometimes and sad sometimes, euphoric and devastated. But because she'd gone into the Walmart store, every other aspect of her life experience was, what, discounted? Discounted by Jeremiah. Well, fuck him.
He had no idea the demands of parenting, how sometimes the very essence of her being was crushed beneath all the endless NEED. Breakfasts and snacks and dinner on the table at a reasonable time. Karate and chorus and rides to the mall and school dances. Clean laundry and clean dishes and clean bathrooms. A minute to have sex now and then, for fuck's sake, whether there was time to relax and enjoy it or not.
Yeah, it was mundane.
And so much of the time she felt like the mundane claimed her very identity, like she was nothing more than this, and maybe the last thing she can handle is worrying about the state of the country or the world or the earth, and she just wanted to get in and out and buy the shit she needed with a minimum of fuss and nonsense.
He would… ruin her because of that? Really?
No. She wouldn't allow it. She would get her voice back and tell him her stories, make him see that sometimes what she needed was a moment of rest, that's all. That she wasn't the careless apathetic woman he thought she'd become.
She'd make him see that he was wrong.
As much as she pretended to be perfect, she had longings, too. She had that hollow space, the same center of nothing that everyone carries around, empty, aching. Starving. And she made the same mistakes trying to fill it, falling in love with the wrong people, expecting too much, getting hurt over and over again.
And yet… even though Jeremiah was wrong about her apathy, he was also more right than she liked to admit.
And Pretty hated that possibility, that she had become apathetic, lazy, following the path of least resistance. She could do better than that. She could be more.
She could open her eyes and be awake.
Damn him.
Damn him for coming back, and damn him for leaving her here like this with nothing to do but think.
Here was the thing: she'd always understood well the power of her cuteness, and the fact that she could easily get boys to want to sleep with her. She had no reservation about her ability to seduce, to capture.
It was her power to keep that was lacking.
This created such a profound sense of insecurity that Pretty's happiness was frantic. Hold and cling and say anything. Give and give and give some more, until she felt herself disappear. Once she had, she didn't allow herself to want. She had no needs. She expressed no strong opinion, because she had no convictions of her own, and because she used all her strength to catch. And then, in the end and always, she pouted that she wanted to be loved for being HERSELF, but even Pretty didn't know who the hell that was.
She was a chameleon, changing to suit, and it never worked.
Jeremiah left at the end of her tenth grade year. He left before graduation. He left without goodbye. He was just... gone.
The summer was survived. School started again, but there was no point to it. Eleventh grade, her seventeenth year, the Year That Drew Died.
A time of existing, not living. A time of trading sex for marijuana, of pursuing boys she didn't even want, of fucking them and sucking them and not caring about them at all. Just activity to break the monotony of not feeling anything, for anyone.
She could name them, for the most part, but did it matter?
They weren't relationships.
She was giving Jesse a blow job in the wooded area across the street from the school when everyone else found out Drew was dead. She emerged from the woods to see several of her friends hovering at the edges of the sidewalk, sobbing.
Drew shot himself. Drew did. He said he'd kill himself if he had to go back home, and he did. He did.
No. She can't think about that right now, here in the dark, the silence. It hurt too much.
Think about Jesse instead, or Andy, who stood her up for her senior prom.
Oh, that fateful prom. She'd gone anyway, in jeans and leather and boots, because some angel at the Burger King told her Jeremiah was there. It was the last time she'd seen Jeremiah, until yesterday. She'd always been grateful for Andy's failure.
But before that, before that...
Jeremiah was gone. Drew was dead. Pretty was completely fucked-up in love with an ex-boyfriend who wasn't taking her back, ever. She'd begged, pleaded, and debased herself. Yeah, he'd fuck her – who wouldn't? They were teenage boys, after all – but that boy and Pretty never did get back together as a couple, not for real.
Truth was… he was gone, too. He just hadn't left yet. And she knew it.
She was a slut. So fucking what?
Who was anyone to judge her about it? She'd always done the best she could with what she had, and for a girl without a boyfriend and no real interest in the heaviness of love, sex wasn't a bad way to pass the time.
Her attention span was about three weeks.
She worried about AIDS, marginally. She knew more about it than a lot of people, because she'd found Shilts' gigantic tome of a book at the library shortly after it was published, and read it out of horror, out of fear, out of trying to make sense of how this disease could target certain of segments of the population. She didn't believe in the conservative middle-class version of God, so she knew it wasn't justice being meted out from some mystical invisible being.
One of the boys she slept with was Native, and poor, and Pretty's parents were appalled. They sneered about him when he wasn't around, but put on achingly nice, non-prejudiced faces when Pretty invited him to dinner.
This amused her.
She wrote poetry about his silky black hair entwined with her white-blonde strands, making comparisons of the night to the moon. But she didn't love him.
She didn't love any of them.
More than one of them wanted to trade marijuana for sex.
She understood boys would do just about anything to get sex, and didn't have a problem with it, but t
he getting high part seemed so underhanded that she gave it up. She didn't like the feeling that she owed them her body in exchange for their weed.
One of them pretended he was only sleeping with her, but she caught him with his dick inside another girl. Pretty wasn't even all that pissed off, but she was done. She had after all, read the primer on AIDS. This, in nineteen eighty-nine.
The utter truth of it was that no one could fill the empty space in her heart that spanned between Jeremiah and Drew.
She caught Them laughing about Drew once – the loser who took his own life thinking anyone would care.
It left her frozen in mid-step. She cared. She missed him. He'd been her sole reason to get out of bed, come here, and do this again, day after day after day, without Jeremiah.
And she didn't think he thought about being missed or remembered or forgotten. Whether anyone would miss him or care wasn't in his head at all. If Pretty had a chasm of unbelonging, Drew had a chasm of pain. All that mattered to her was to get through this stupid school thing, footstep by footstep, day by day.
All that mattered to Drew was to stop the pain.
She wondered sometimes what it was like for him, those final moments, brains smattered against the wall, blood pouring out of the wound. Was he terrified? Satisfied?
Who could even guess?
She'd had sex with Drew two weeks before he killed himself, which ruined everything there'd been between them. She thought she could have loved him. But when it came to sex, he was so… oh, it was hard to explain… raw and rough, contrary to the compassionate, sweet, and loving boy she'd come to know. She was almost startled out of love with him. Like his liquid-sympathetic brown eyes were a lie, had always been a lie, a mask that slipped from his face as his fingers bruised, and his slim, delicate body assaulted hers without care, as if her body was nothing more than a vehicle for masturbation.
She wasn't even speaking to him when he died.
And that might have had more to do with all of the other boys than Pretty cared to examine.
