Losers

by Isaac Byrne

  Her cries were now completely muffled by Brandy’s pussy in her face. Her friend was wet , she couldn’t help but notice, just as Krystal had been the day before. Whether or not her new persona Eve shared Brandy’s homophobia, she’d been told to fuck Chanda like a lesbian porn star, and so she was. Chanda had dropped off the volleyball team after sophomore season, but Brandy was a three-sport athlete. A good one. With the power in the thighs squeezing around her face, it showed.

  Her leggings were coming off. She couldn’t stop it. Nobody could even hear her pleas – not that they’d believe them anyway. Her struggles were roleplay to them. Maybe she could enjoy it. She’d fantasized about this, after all. Or something like it. Maybe that was what she’d have to do now, to close her eyes and pretend this was all like it had been in her bedroom, when her vibrator had been where Brandy’s tongue was thirstily licking now.

  It did feel kind of good, she admitted to herself, and Chanda at last relaxed her legs and let Brandy splay them wide and dive in with relish. “I love the taste of you, bitch,” moaned her friend, as if she knew exactly what she was supposed to say from playing this role in her fantasies.

  Then she was gone, and Chanda could breathe free, unpussied air.

  There was some confusion. She was lightheaded and had more than a little adrenaline pumping, thus had a hard time making sense of things. People were yelling nearby. Other people were cheering, booing, whistling, applauding, but farther away. Not far though. Someone was pulling Brandy off of her again, then more yelling. The man, the one who’d pulled Brandy off of her, was looming right over her, so Chanda couldn’t see his face from down there. But he handed her his jacket, and when she didn’t reach out to take it, he draped it over her lower half.

  Oh. Because Brandy had pulled my leggings down, and my underwear , she realized numbly . Chanda remedied that beneath the proffered cover. Ezekiel seemed to be gaining cognizance of how out of hand he’d let things get, and was himself frantically searching for Brandy’s clothes. They were already somebody’s trophy, however, so with a barked command, she meekly trotted after him into the parking lot, issuing not so much as an apologetic glance over her shoulder at her erstwhile best friend.

  Her rescuer said something to her. She wasn’t entirely sure what, there were so many people talking around her. His voice was thick with concern, whoever he was. People were still lingering, and he raised his voice to yell for them to piss off. “And don’t let me catch you in here again!” he bellowed. With the show over, the holdouts seemed ready to shrug and move on. It had been a better show than whatever movie they might have taken in. Money well spent.

  Then her benefactor turned back to Chanda and knelt beside her.

  “Aaron?” Chanda studied his gently rounded face as if unsure, but it was definitely him. She accepted his hand and let him pull her into a sitting position, then scooted over to lean against the wall for support.

  “We have to stop bumping into each other like this,” he said with a little smile.

  “Like… oh. Right. Friday.” She shook her head, but it felt like her brain was bouncing around the interior of her skull, and she felt so dizzy she was nearly sick. All the anxiety of Drawing Day had certainly taken a toll on her health. Yet when Chanda opened her eyes again, Aaron was still there.

  “Hi. You’re OK now. Understand? You’re safe.”

  “I know I am. Why would you say that?” She felt a pressure, and suddenly realized that she was still gripping his hand like so hard it would have hurt if she were a little stronger. “Oh. Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. It felt like a stupid question, which she only realized after the words were out. There had to be going on two hundred people from CHS there.

  “I work here, actually,” he answered.

  That had not been what she had expected to hear. “You do?”

  “Sure do.” He pointed to the jacket still draped over her legs, and sure enough there was the Grand River insignia. “I was working the ticket receipt booth when I saw the crowd forming. I thought there was a fight.”

  “And you decided to dive in and intervene?”

  “Ashamed to say it, but… honestly, I sort of came over to watch. Our manager’s policy is basically to ignore whatever happens Drawing Day weekend. Kids go nuts, but they pay money so we don’t get involved. We can threaten to call the cops if anybody gets too wild, like Brandy and Ezekiel did there, but I’d be out of a job if I actually carried through on it. That whole horrible scene is unfortunately the kind of thing that brings in customers. Really, I thought if a couple of these jerks mess one another up, hey, no skin off my back.”

  “Yeah.” Chanda closed her eyes for a moment and the room began to slow. It was still sinking in that she’d moments ago been sexually assaulted by her childhood best friend in the middle of the Grand River lobby. Chanda had been braced for the possibility of a lot of her peers seeing her naked after Drawing Day, but she’d expected to have her new personality there to buffer the embarrassment of it. A detail came back to her. “Oh god! People were recording that!”

  Aaron winced. “Yeah. I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they could see much. Of you, anyway. Brandy has a lot of hair. I think it covered–”

  “I get it.” It was a comfort, though. A little. “You’re lucky they didn’t beat your ass for breaking up the show.”

  “Probably. But people are pretty respectful to winners. Especially the PowerBall winners.” He said the term with some disdain, which she appreciated. It referred to guys who won the really desirable women, the cream of the crop. She must have heard guys use it a thousand times over the years in regards to their hopes to win her.

  Wait.

  “What do you mean, respectful to winners? I thought you didn’t… what?”

  “Did you not…” But whatever he was about to ask about, he could see she didn’t. “All right. First… you’re still squeezing my hand.”

  “Oh! Sorry!” She released it in a flash.

  “You still don’t have to apologize. I, ah, only wanted to make sure you didn’t break my fingers.”

  “Why would I…?” Her eyes narrowed. “What did you do, Aaron.”

  He stood up, taking a defensive step back. She followed him on both counts. She was still dizzy, but fuck it if she was going to let another boy get away with more bullshit at her expense. “I didn’t know what else to do! They were surrounding you, and she was… it was like she was possessed or something! So I thought maybe they’d back off if they thought…”

  It finally came back to her, all that shouting. It hadn’t made sense at the time, and she’d been suffocating, and confused, and kinda weirdly turned on, and… “If they thought I was your property.” Chanda planted her hands on her hips.

  “I know, I know – believe me, I know. But it was getting out of hand – more out of hand – really fast, and I panicked!”

  “ That was your panic response?! To tell the whole school that you won me?!”

  “OK, I get that you’re upset, and you have every right to be with everything that happened, but… I have to get back to my station or I’ll get fired. The only reason they let me work the ticket booth is because they trust me not to let people in without paying, and I think like twenty people just snuck in while we were talking.”

  Aaron could see she wasn’t mollified, though. “Hey, you can still yell at me. Just follow me to the ticket receipt booth and yell at me. OK?” He held up his hands defensively as he backed away, as if she might try to tackle him. As if he wasn’t time and a half her size.

  As if he hadn’t just saved her from being violated and humiliated – well, more so – in front of a crowd of lookers-on who might have torn him apart for wrecking their show.

  She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, so Chanda simply walked past him and headed for the theater her dad’s movie was playing in. The trailers were already rolling, but after a m
inute she found her dad in their usual spot in the back row.

  He smiled at her, but it faded once he saw her empty hands. “No popcorn?”

  “Sorry. I dropped it.”

  If someone had put a gun to her head, Chanda couldn’t have told them what the movie had been about. Was this what life was like for survivors? Being surrounded all the time by entitled assholes and totally insane women? She’d always felt sympathy for losers, but there was nothing like having one pin you to the ground with her crotch and flash yours to the senior class to lessen your sense of compassion. She’d told her dad she was going to the restroom but stopped right outside the theater to check social media, and sure enough, those pictures (and videos) had already made the rounds. Aaron had been right about the cover, and the sheer chaos of the crowd had played an equal role in nothing truly damning getting out. As she scrolled down, Chanda realized she was likewise fortunate that so many other such images were now in circulation, and much better quality. Nothing that Brandy’s new account (yech, “Eve Boecher <3”) was tagged in had more than forty or fifty reacts; the thread of the Dobson sisters modeling string bikinis for their winners were already in the thousands.

  She returned to her seat no more ready to watch explosions and fist fights. More than worrying about the exposure, Chanda started thinking about this new world she was living in, and how she could truly endure it. The term survivor, she was learning, didn’t apply solely to Drawing Day.

  It had started raining somewhere during the movie. As the credits began to roll, she could hear it pounding on the theater’s roof. Her dad seemed to have enjoyed the movie, and she did her best to make vague conversation with him on it. He was happy to do the bulk of the talking.

  “Dad, do you think you could pull the car up front and pick me up?”

  He looked surprised at the sudden shift in topic. “Sure, sweetheart. Not feeling great still?”

  “No, just with the rain, and I didn’t bring a jacket.”

  But he pointed to the one folded up in her lap. “Then what’s that?”

  The answer was that it was Aaron’s jacket, which she hadn’t realized she’d kept until that moment. If there was an easy way to explain what she was doing with it though, she didn’t know, so she simply deflected. “I just used this new product in my hair, and it’s not good to get it too wet. And I read that the movie doesn’t have one of those end credit sequences, but I figure I can chill here and make sure.”

  He eyed her for a moment, Dad senses tingling, but let it go with a peck on the forehead. “All right. I’ll see you out front.”

  She waited for him to exit the theater to stand up, but followed at the same pace he’d been moving at. The pervert who’d sold her popcorn was waiting at the theater door to sweep up. Chanda could feel his eyes on her butt as she walked away. The lobby was empty now. It seemed most of the people there earlier hadn’t stuck around for a movie; they’d had their fun with the losers in the poolhall and gone home. Up ahead, she could see a silhouette that she was pretty sure was her dad trekking out into the drizzly parking lot. Ordinarily Chanda loved the rain, especially after all those months of snow; no wonder he’d been suspicious. But she had to do something before she left the theater, deal with the other thing she’d been thinking about over those two hours and forty-two minutes.

  “I’m not mad,” she told Aaron as she thrust his jacket back into his hands. She’d found him sweeping up in the poolhall. It was a sty in there. She couldn’t help but notice the presence of a hot pink satin bra in his wastebin, and tried not to think about which one of her classmates had been forced to strip out of it, or by whom.

  “That’s… good. I think? Unless there’s something worse than mad.” He stopped what he was doing, giving her his full attention.

  But she only smiled. “No. You stepped in to help me, and you did. I was a little crazy earlier, because of the… everything.”

  “Yeah. That was a lot of everything, all right. She was a friend of yours, right? Before?”

  She flashed back to when they’d seen Kelsey in the hall by the gym after school Friday. “You stalking me or something? You seem to know who all my friends are.”

  “Stalking…?!” Her shook his head vigorously. “No, just… I mean, you’re all popular. I think most people know who your friends are. That’s all.”

  Chanda silently rebuked herself for jumping to conclusions. “Right. Maybe still a little crazy.”

  “It’s OK. Do you need a ride home? Not that I’m hitting on you or anything!” he said a little too defensively. “But it might not be safe to drive if you’re still emotional like that. Which would be totally understandable.”

  “I have a ride. In fact…” She darted out to where she could see out the Grand River’s front windows, and there was her dad’s car, waiting. When she turned, she almost jumped, surprised to find Aaron had followed.

  “You know,” she said, poking him in the chest. He was a little hefty, but she was surprised to find his chest was still pretty firm. “Everybody in school is going to think you won me now.”

  “Somebody had started rumor that you’d survived, but I don’t think anyone believed it. Guess there’s that old saying about how a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can pull on its pants. Anyway, yeah, my phone’s sort of already been blowing up while you were in there. ”

  She grinned. “Oh yeah? So you’re popular now too, huh?”

  “I’m popular adjacent. At least until we tell everybody that you really did survive.”

  She ventured another poke. “Sooo… maybe we don’t tell them.”

  Aaron’s head snapped back like she’d slapped him. “What? Chanda, we have to tell them. I can’t have everybody thinking the secretary of the WAL actually took part in the Lottery. I’d lose the respect of all of my friends!”

  “First off, do not talk to me about losing friends right now, OK?” Aaron grimaced as he took her meaning. “Look, I’m not saying we trash anybody’s reputation. But I was thinking… maybe, for a little while… we let them think I’m… yours.” Wow was that hard for her to say. “Only until things calm down again and people aren’t going crazy.”

  “But why? Why would you want people to think you’re a loser?”

  “I know it sounds weird, but… trust me, I have been violated twice in the past two days. Both times, it happened because people thought they could push me around because nobody takes women like me seriously, and because I didn’t have a winner to stick up for me. The second you stepped in, I was safe. Before that… well, you saw before that.”

  “So, what, I’d be your… post-Lottery security blanket?”

  “Security guard is more like it. Don’t worry, I won’t get in any more predicaments like tonight’s!” she added quickly. “But people don’t mess with winners. If I’m won by somebody, then that means whatever I’m doing, it’s what my winner wants me to do. So if people want to get anything out of me, which it seems like everybody and their brother does, they can’t risk getting on my winner’s bad side by interfering. See?”

  “Sort of? But really, Chanda, I don’t think I can–”

  Chanda put a finger to Aaron’s lips, and he fell silent in an instant. “After, I’ll make it my mission to make sure anyone, everyone, knows you were only doing me a favor and you got nothing out of it but the karmic satisfaction of helping a maiden in distress. Hand to god.”

  He made a face. “I wouldn’t bring god into this after you pissed off his chosen one earlier.”

  “If I were god and Ezekiel Boecher was the best chosen one I could muster, I’d smite myself on the spot. Hell, maybe she did.”

  Aaron laughed, but still didn’t look convinced. “Yeah, I don’t know about this…”

  “Come on, Aaron. You rescued me Friday, you rescued me tonight… one more and I think you’re guaranteed sainthood.” It wasn’t fair, but Chanda even clasped her hands pleadingly, batting eyelashes at him and everything. The works. Ordinarily she didn’t
like to exploit her feminine wiles or masculines inclinations of chivalry for advantage, but considering what she’d been put through lately, she didn’t feel too guilty.

  The poor guy was helpless. “All right, so if I agreed to this… what exactly would this look like?”

  “Gimme your phone.”

  Aaron was smart enough not to ask questions and quickly forked it over. He wasn’t kidding about his surge in popularity; he had more notifications than would show up on the screen, and while Chanda wasn’t trying to invade his privacy, from the abbreviated notifications alone it was clear they were all in regards to his winnings. She swiped past them and opened his contacts, quickly adding herself, then sending a quick text to herself so she’d have his number too. She handed it back as her purse buzzed with a notification of her own.

  “We’ll talk. For tonight, just finish your sweeping, and luxuriate in all your new fans. I’ll text you tomorrow, OK winner?” On impulse, Chanda leaned in and gave him a hug. She had meant it to be one-sided, but before she pulled back, his arms closed in around her. It was more intimate of a hug than she’d meant to allow, but once he started rubbing her back while he held her, all she could do was try not to give away her pleasure by smile too big at him when she let go. Chanda had never had a boyfriend, but every time she’d come close, it had begun with a hug from a guy who rubbed her back.

  “Get some sleep, and trust me when I say I’ll have no hard feelings if you change your mind. But… I guess I’ll do my best if you don’t. Talk to you tomorrow, Chanda.”