Elastic Heart

by Mary Catherine Gebhard

  I smiled, leaning back on my couch. “I’ve learned my lesson!” I saw three little dots appear in the text box which let me know the person on the other end of the computer was typing and I waited patiently for their response. For the first time in months I wasn’t wary, I was excited.

  Conversation with Scarred

  Scarred: “So, internet noob, what’s your favorite book?”

  RecklessDream: “Asking me to pick my favorite book is like asking me to pick my favorite child.”

  Scarred: “Parents do that all the time. Mine did. Look, I’ll go first. Huckleberry Finn.”

  RecklessDream: “Really? I liked Huck Finn but I’ve never heard anyone say it was their favorite.”

  Scarred: “What? An entire generation said it was their favorite and declared it was a classic.”

  RecklessDream: “Touché.”

  Scarred: “You’re not getting away that easily.”

  RecklessDream: “Who me?”

  Scarred: “What’s your favorite book?”

  RecklessDream: “Dandelion Wine.”

  Scarred: “And I’m the weirdo for liking Huck Finn.”

  RecklessDream: “It’s like distilled happiness. Family and summer and sunshine condensed into a couple hundred pages.”

  Scarred: “I’ll have to check it out.”

  RecklessDream: “You’re making fun of me and you’ve never read it?”

  Scarred: “If I promise to read Dandelion Wine, you have to promise to do something for me.”

  RecklessDream: “Depends…”

  Scarred: “Give me your name.”

  RecklessDream: “You can call me Dandelion.”

  Scarred: “Fine then, until I know your real name, you can call me Huck.”

  RecklessDream: “Deal.”

  We talked for a few more minutes about nothing; it was nice to talk about nothing. My months had been filled with drama and tragedy, so it was refreshing to talk about simple, silly things. Once we ended the conversation, I changed my alias on the website to Dandelion permanently. I noticed that Scarred also changed his handle, to Huck.

  It was times like these that I wished I still had my best friend. Sure, I wanted my best friend for the rough times. It would have been nice to have someone to hold me while I cried. Honestly, though, what I really wanted was someone to talk to about boys and to scream hysterically with over silly things.

  Effie Betancourt had been that person. I could tell her the most inane, silly thing and she would get just as excited as I did. Found a nail polish named “Rachel Green”? She would freak out too and demand we cancel everything to give each other pedicures, no matter how hideous the color.

  Now, after talking to Huck on Secrets, I wanted Effie back. I wanted someone to be excited with. For the first time in months I was excited about something, and the only person I had was Raskol.

  “And you’re a dog,” I said. He cocked his head slightly at my words. I smiled, picking him up. “You’re a great dog, Raskol, but sometimes I wonder if you even understand me.” Raskol jumped off and ran to pick up his toy, a look of triumph on his face.

  “See, Raskolnikov, this is what I’m talking about. There is a fundamental problem in our communication. We really need to see someone about this.” I grabbed the rope out of his mouth and threw it across the room. He ran so fast he tripped over his paws and face planted into the carpet. That didn’t stop him though; he quickly recovered and grabbed the rope, returning to his bed. Raskol wasn’t one for fetch. He liked me to throw it once, then he took it to his bed and proceeded to chew on it. This would last for hours.

  I sighed, leaning back into the couch. Effie was a horrid friend. She had left me when I needed her most. So why did I miss her? I should have been saying good riddance. Instead I held my phone and stared at her number. I still remembered it by heart and had dialed it into my keypad. If I pressed enter, what would she do?

  Would she apologize?

  Probably not.

  Would she ignore me?

  Probably.

  Why couldn’t I just ignore her like she ignored me? She had thrown away ten years of friendship. Why couldn’t I do the same? Sighing, I pulled out my computer. At least I was getting better at avoiding that ever-expanding pit of despair in my stomach.

  “You want it. Take it.” I fought him. I fought the sock in my mouth. I fought his big, slightly overweight frame. It was useless and futile, but I fought him. He had me tied down and gagged. I was like a stuck pig. “I saw the images you were looking at. Isn’t this what you want? To be fucked like some whore? I’ll fuck you.”

  The image of a naked woman tied up in ropes stared back at me from the computer screen. It was two thirty in the morning; “Huck” and I had long since stopped talking, and I wasn’t going to call Effie, but I couldn’t sleep. I eyed the woman on the screen, a tingle forming in my lower abdomen that now sat alongside the ever-present nausea.

  Sipping my tea, I clicked my trackpad and pulled up the next image. I’d always been interested BDSM—in bondage, to be more specific. People in ropes, gagged and bound, had me very interested.

  I thought if I had friends, they would say it was post-traumatic stress. You know, since I was held down and gagged with my own sock when I was raped. I mean, that’s a perfectly okay theory. From the outside, I see how it makes sense. From the inside, my insides, though, I knew it was wrong.

  I admired the girls who were tied up.

  I was absolutely fascinated by them.

  And I always had been.

  To me, they represented a place so far away from me it was like Narnia. The women that let themselves be tied up for these photos and videos had absolute trust in the one doing the tying. I couldn’t begin to imagine having that trust again.

  Taking another sip of tea, I clicked a different image. The woman was strung up, her legs and arms tied behind her back as she hung a few inches above a bed. She looked to enjoy it. Sure, the images could have been fake, but I didn’t think so. Unsurprisingly, there was a huge community that was big into bondage. Various forums and conventions confirmed what the tingling in my belly was saying: people not only liked it, they got off on it.

  I’d been looking into shibari, which was a type of Japanese rope binding. Sure there was a sort of grim beauty to duct tape, but the rope knots and style of the bind of shibari was just so beautiful, and apparently the knots were supposed to hit certain erotic pleasure points as well.

  I sighed, imagining myself tied up like the model on the screen. My fantasy was short-lived though. Even just imagining it made my throat constrict and my skin sweat.

  I slammed my laptop shut, anger now coursing through my veins. Huck and shibari had been nice, fleeting retreats from my daily life, but I had a mission. My life no longer belonged to me. It belonged to vengeance. Vengeance didn’t get to imagine a happier life. Vengeance only imagined its goal: Morris razed and ruined. Preferably bleeding.

  Grabbing my tea off the small nightstand I called a desk, I stood up and walked into the kitchen. Covering the various laminate counters were long scrawls of blue paper.

  Operation: Make Morris Pay was now in full swing. First order of business, get a better name for the operation. Second order of business, break into Becca Riley’s house. Becca Riley was Morris’s campaign manager and basically the black, festering heart of the Morris Entity. She was the one who had spun Morris’s rape away from him and onto me. She had made me an alcoholic in the eyes of the public. She had made me a whore.

  Becca Riley was a wretched, albeit brilliant, human being. She was bound to have information on Morris and the campaign. I wouldn’t be able to prove my rape or frame Morris without Riley’s files.

  While interning for Morris, word spread about Riley’s massive and ancient home. Rumor had it that there was an intricate tunnel system underneath that even Riley didn’t fully understand. For the past few months I’d been petitioning the state for blueprints. Slowly I’d received each puzzle piece and that nigh
t, tea in hand, it all came together.

  Under the dim kitchen light, I could clearly see the tunnels outlined on the royal blue paper. It was as if Riley had given me a personalized invitation to her home. It was time for step two. In one week I would enter Becca Riley’s home and steal her files, all while she slept in the other room.

  Feeling like shit, having not slept in days, I opened up Secrets. It was t-minus three days until I would infiltrate Becca Riley’s house and I couldn’t stop speaking like a B movie spy, saying shit like “t-minus” and “infiltrate.” Maybe it was the lack of sleep.

  Probably.

  I only got up off the couch to give Raskol food and let him go to the bathroom. I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink, unless whiskey counted as water now. Despite the intense fatigue I felt, I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept going over the plan in my head, over and over, looking for any loose rocks I might trip on.

  I thought about how I had gotten to this place. I thought about Morris. Then I thought further back. I thought about my family. I thought about the broken egg that had hatched me, going as far as to make a cryptic post on Secrets about it. Had I been doomed from the start? I was about to sign out and grab some more “water” when a text bubble popped up.

  Conversation with Huck

  Huck: “Dandelion, what’s your post about?”

  Dandelion: “I was just thinking about my childhood.”

  Huck: “Uh-oh.”

  Dandelion: “What? You don’t know a thing about my childhood. Maybe it was great and filled with smiley face stickers.”

  Huck: “Was it?”

  Dandelion: “Half of it was.”

  Huck: “That’s nice.”

  Dandelion: “Yep.”

  Huck: “You gonna tell me about the other half?”

  Dandelion: “My mom and dad were stereotypical high school sweethearts who loved each other. At least that’s what I thought. Then when I was about thirteen my dad cheated on my mom, and I mean really cheated on her. He obliterated my mom’s heart like shrapnel. Everyone got hit.”

  Huck: “Sounds rough.”

  Dandelion: “That’s not even the worst part.”

  Huck: “Of course not.”

  Dandelion: “We were waiting, at least I thought we were. Because they used to fight like that a lot. He would leave, she would cry, and then he would come back. So when they divorced, I kept waiting for him to come back, like he always did. When my mom showed up with a new guy I was like ‘woah, what the fuck are you doing here? My dad is going to be right back.’”

  Huck: “How did your mom react?”

  I paused at Huck’s question. I hadn’t told anyone about my mom and dad’s divorce, not even Effie. Of course Effie knew about the divorce in general. She’d been my rock during the whole ordeal and had helped me cope. She and I had rented movies and shopped, distracting ourselves like any good teenagers would, but we never talked.

  I never gave voice to the concerns in my head. I didn’t want to, because that would mean admitting my father had faults. It would mean admitting that my father wasn’t infallible like every daughter wants to believe. It would mean admitting that he was human like everyone else, and it would mean admitting that he was a pretty shitty human, too.

  Huck was a stranger behind the screen. He didn’t know Nami DeGrace and he definitely didn’t know my family. I could finally air my burdens without consequence. When I typed out my response, the catharsis I felt was palpable.

  Conversation with Huck

  Dandelion: “It wasn’t fair to her, which I realize now, because my dad was out gallivanting with his latest woman, while my mom was just trying to repair her shattered heart. It was at least three years after the divorce when my mom brought home Tony, too, so it wasn’t like he just showed up. I was the one still waiting.”

  Huck: “How are you and your mom now?”

  Dandelion: “Oh my mom got in a car accident with my dad the one time they were together after the divorce. They died instantly.”

  Huck: “Shit.”

  Dandelion: “Yeah. I laugh about it when I think how long I waited for him to come home and then when he came home, they both died. Kind of ridiculous.”

  Huck: “Dandelion?

  Dandelion: “Yes?”

  Huck: “My number is 555-0813. I think it’s time we move our relationship past Secrets.”

  The catharsis I had previously felt dried up and shriveled. My gut once again returned to its normal twisted state. I signed out without saying goodbye and stared at my screensaver for a good ten minutes. Huck was supposed to stay behind the screen. He was supposed to stay anonymous.

  A number changed that. A number was decidedly intimate. I knew all of this, but I still found myself punching the digits into my phone.

  Even though I didn’t see Tony, I still kept an eye on him. After the rape, I changed everything. My number was different, my address was different; I relocated and basically went off the grid. I had wanted Tony to have as little to do with me as possible, because at the time the media was flaming anyone who knew me. Sometimes I wondered if that was why Effie left me. Maybe the media made it too hard for her to be friends with me.

  Tony tried calling me and coming for me. I knew because my previous landlord complained.

  “You keep having people come see you,” she said, always sounding irritated. “You don’t live here. You tell him stop coming.” The one silver lining of the whole goddamn thing was that I didn’t have to deal with Linda any more. Linda, the worst landlady in the history of landladies. Linda, the slumlord of South Salt Lake.

  One time, my drain was clogged so I called Linda, as she was my landlady. In lieu of hiring a licensed plumber, Linda hired someone off the street. Naturally, this person made the problem worse. Linda the Slumlord tried to pin the problem on me and tried to make me pay for the now broken bath tub. That did not go over well.

  Despite my place being cleaner than when I moved in, I didn’t get the security deposit back. Whatever, it was worth it to be rid of her.

  Anyway, once a month I drove by Tony’s just to see how he was doing. I sat outside his house like the stalker I’d become and watched him. He lived in the same house he had bought with my mother just two months before she died in the car crash. He kept the garden nice, he took care of the lawn, and he’d never remarried.

  Every Sunday Tony tended to the garden. In the summertime I used to watch him water sunflowers. Sunflowers were my mom’s favorite plants. Every week Tony filled up a can and watered sunflowers, and every week I wondered what went through his head. If it had been me, if I had to view a giant flower reminder of my mom, I’d rip it out of the ground. I’d make sure anything remotely looking like a sunflower was destroyed. Yet Tony did the opposite. He watered so it grew bigger and bigger.

  Now it was December, and the pale snow had suffocated the sunflowers under its crisp blanket. When Tony came out there was nothing for him to water. Still, he walked around the garden, looking at the frozen ground as if a flower was going to burst through any moment.

  I exhaled and typed out a text. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Almost instantly my phone buzzed and I didn’t want to look. I had expected at least a five-minute window to prepare for a reply. Huck was supposed to exist in the ephemeral, swirly-world of Secrets. Now I had his number and he had mine. I felt as if the exchange of our numbers augured something I didn’t want to discover.

  “I think I’m getting to know you,” he replied.

  “Ha! You wish.” I sent it before I could think.

  “Why didn’t you call, Dandelion? Afraid of my voice?” I set the phone down at his reply, deciding to watch Tony instead of responding to Huck. When I glanced up, though, Tony was already inside. I took one last look at the message on my phone and deleted it. Maybe I was afraid.

  When I got home, Law was waiting outside my apartment.

  “What do you want?” I growled, not in the mood for pleasantries. After “visiting” To
ny, I had gotten stuck in traffic. I’d turned the radio on to listen to some mind-numbing pop music, but the stupid DJs were talking. They were doing some moronic segment and guess who was the star? Me.

  It was a “where are they now” type feature, and they were trying to speculate about where I was. It was little more than cheap jokes and gags at my expense. I didn’t think they ever mentioned what I might be doing. My finger was poised to change the channel, but I kept waiting for one of them to say something nice. It had happened months ago and yet people still thought badly of me. By the time I got home, my heart hurt.

  I shoved Law aside and plunged my key into the lock, ready to drown my sorrows in ice cream and alcohol.

  “I haven’t heard from you in nearly a week,” Law said to my back. “Is everything all right?”

  “We aren’t friends, Law. You don’t need to check on me and I don’t need to tell you how I’m doing.” I turned the key and entered my apartment. As Raskolnikov woke up from his daily hibernation to jump on my legs, I attempted to close the door. Law slammed his arm between the door and my wall, stopping me.

  I stepped back, arms folded, with Raskol jumping all over me. Law stepped inside and knocked my door back against the wall. I watched with slight concern as my doorknob made a dent in the wall. What’s another mark in my life? Raskol, upon seeing Law, changed direction and ran over to him. Traitor.

  Glaring at Law, I spat, “What the fuck do you want?”

  “You’re right, Nami, we aren’t friends,” Law said as he picked up a now enamored Raskol. “I think we moved past that when we nearly fucked.”

  A laugh twisted into a scoff in my throat. “Nearly fucked? Have you lost your mind?” When he didn’t respond, I leaned back against my wall, shaking my head. “Listen, Law, we didn’t almost do anything. I had a slight case of insanity that you were present for. That’s it.” Also you saved my life. And you made me feel like a human again. Yea, that had been nice, but I wasn’t about to give him any more ground.

  Law gently lowered Raskol, much to the dog’s dismay, before regarding me. “Really? Granted you did leave pretty fucking quick, but what was all that ‘Just kiss me, Law,’ shit?”