by Mona Awad
“Elizabeth. But most people call me Lizzie.”
“Right. You get it.”
The fat girl, your fat girl, is blushing. “Oh my god, anytime, seriously.”
You watch this fucker help himself to Banana-Rama bread. He doesn’t even use a napkin.
“Would you like to hear this poem I wrote?” she asks him. “I think it goes with your music pretty well.” You see her reach toward her faery journal, which is sitting on the armrest of the couch, at the ready.
“Sure. But hey, can I play you some new stuff I’ve been tinkering with first?”
“Of course,” she says. She leans back, closes her eyes once more. And the man resumes playing. Terrible broken chords that ring in your ears long after you’ve stumbled out of her mother’s flowers and found your way home.
Full Body
We’re skipping Individual and Society so China can show me how to do her smoky eyes. We should be sitting kitty-corner from one another, watching sweat stains darken Batstone’s armpits as he explains to us The Difference Between Charity and Grass Roots Change. Instead, we’re in the stoner girls’ bathroom, the farthest stall from the door. I’m sitting on the lid of a nonworking toilet, and China’s pushed the curtain of hair from my face. My eyes are closed and my head’s tilted up toward her like she’s the sun as she stabs onto my closed lids—clenched tight and fluttery like a wishing child’s—her own personal mixture of agate, slate, and bone. There’s the cigarette and pot stink of the girls’ bathroom, my back pressed hard against the cold silver flush. There’s China hunched over me, smelling like some musk from a Wicca shop on Queen West that isn’t even open anymore.
China’s like, “Relax your lids a little, Lizzie,” but it’s hard because this is China, and the fact of her straddling me on the toilet giving me her smoky eyes is for me a cosmic event. Two minutes ago, I was standing outside Batstone’s class, looking at her like she was on the opposite side of the world even though we’ve been hanging out more lately. How do you get your eyes like that? is something I didn’t know I’d said out loud until she looked up and said, I’ll show you.
“How’s that, better?” I ask her and I’m telling my eyelids, Relax, just fucking relax. I tell them, She’s giving you this, her secret to a smoky eye, her secret.
“Yeah, not really.” She pulls her Drink Me flask from her Matrix-y coat pocket and hands it to me. I drink whatever it is and whatever it is burns and she pulls the wand away until I finish coughing.
“Look up?” she says. I look up at the cracks in the ceiling, the dark water stains, as she begins to jab at my lash line. I feel my lids quiver under each stroke and worry she’s going to get pissed at me for this. Instead she goes back to telling me how this guy who’s been psycho over her lately is still being psycho. His name is Warren, but we call him Alaska because China likes to name the guys who stalk her after states.
“He’s still being psycho?”
“Way psycho,” she says, poking at my lids with a rough-haired brush.
“Psycho how?” I ask her, my eyes leaking in their effort to relax. I’m always eager to know how. There was Utah, who kept writing her name in the condensation on the windshield of her dad’s Honda whenever it rained. New Hampshire, who, when he found out that she had Steppenwolf tattooed down her back, sat out on her front lawn all day reading Hesse in the original German. China said by the time she noticed him shivering out there in the snow, he’d gotten frostbite on his left ear. But my favorite was Maine, the medical artist who drew corpses for a living, who kept telling her she was the perfect woman. China kept telling him she wasn’t, she really wasn’t, and he said she was too and so finally she said, Okay, fine, draw me since you’re a medical artist. But show me every flaw, she told him. Like, be precise. So he drew her and when he did China said he had an erection for four hours straight because it turned out she really was the perfect woman.
But all China says this time when I ask her, “Psycho how?” is: “You know when they watch you sleep, it’s like the beginning of the end.”
I nod like I totally know. Like I’ve been there a thousand times.
“Don’t move, you’re fucking it up,” China says, so I stop nodding. I totally freeze.
“That is psycho,” I say softly.
“Yeah, I told him it was over,” she says, pressing a pencil deep into the inner corner of each of my eyes, one and then the other, like I’m being anointed. China’s always telling boys it’s over, and that’s when they go super psycho. That’s the part I love most. That’s what happened with Vermont. The last time she dumped him, he burned all these photos of her and left them smoking in a shoe box at her door. Not the whole photo, China said. Just her face. Her face in every picture. Burned out. Wow, I said. That’s sort of beautiful. And she said, Beautiful? Try insane. And I said, Yeah, that too.
“What did he do when you told him it was over?”
“Cried,” she says. “But what I can’t believe is how much. It was so intense to watch, you know?”
I start to nod, but I catch myself just in time.
“It sounds intense,” I say. I think of how last night Blake cried about how he can’t believe we found each other through an AOL member profile search. He cries about that most nights we talk. That and the beauty of my mind-body-spirit, which, even though I’ve yet to send him a full-body pic, he says he can see clearly with his third eye. I don’t see him cry, of course, but I hear it through the static of his speakerphone.
“I’m seeing this guy on the Internet,” I tell China now. “It’s been pretty intense with him too.”
“Hold still,” she says.
“He really wants a full-body shot of me. He keeps asking and asking for one. Like, every night when we talk. I don’t know what to tell him.”
I watch her grab black liquid liner from her cosmetic bag patterned all over with pinup girls. You wouldn’t believe this liner. It’s blacker than black. No color is black enough for China except for this one kind she says she gets at Target that I can never find. I feel it now as a cold stabby stream across my waterline. Sharp feathery strokes like little knife swipes that make me flinch each time.
“A full-body shot’s no big deal,” she says.
“I guess. Just I haven’t really told him about me, you know?”
“Don’t move.”
“Like, about my weight or anything,” I add, the word weight falling from my mouth like a stone.
“Shut up,” she says.
I shift on the toilet seat, become aware of the taped lid beneath me, the underlying funk of the bathroom, that I’m still flinching even though there is no reason to. When I open one eye, I see China has already drifted away from me and is checking herself out in one of the cracked mirrors above the overflowing sink.
“We’re done?” I ask.
“Yup.”
“How does it look? Does it look okay?”
“Go see,” she says, gesturing toward the mirror beside her, but I don’t want to go see. I want to hang on to my idea of what I look like, which is like China. Even though we only started hanging out recently, China tells me all the time that she sees me as like a sister to her and I tell her some people say we even look like sisters. “What people?” China says. I think of the woman who ripped our tickets at the Warhol exhibit. This coat check girl at Death who doesn’t work there anymore. That one waitress in the old lady tearoom we sometimes go to when we skip Lit or Government. That waitress is always asking us, “Are you two sisters?” And China tells her, “No. We’re not. We’re definitely not.” Then she looks at me and says, “You’re beautiful all on your own.” I smile whenever she says this, even though I feel like she’s marooned me on some desert island, taking away with her the only boat. I want to tell her, I don’t want to be beautiful all on my own, I don’t. But I just say nothing. Sometimes I say thanks.
I stare at Ch
ina from the toilet where I’m still sitting.
“Does it look bad?”
“Oh my god, here,” she says, handing me a small lipstick compact of red silk patterned with dragons.
I look at the one eye I can see in her smudged little rectangular mirror. “Oh my god,” I whisper.
“What?”
“It looks amazing.”
“Oh, good,” she says, continuing to apply lipstick with the pad of her index finger. “I actually fucked it up a lot because you wouldn’t stop moving.”
I move the mirror around so I can see the other eye, then the other again.
“I can’t believe it.” I look over at her. “Thanks so much for this. Seriously.”
She shrugs, shoves the kit in her black canvas satchel covered with Wite-Out skulls. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Seriously, it’s just eyes.”
• • •
Now we’re lying here in my bedroom because after the smoky eyes and the Drink Me, we didn’t feel like English. We’re staring up at my Bettie Page poster, the one where Bettie is all tied up in a chair wearing super-super high heels. I’m thinking about my eyes and how I’m wearing my tights as a top. China showed me how to do this. You just rip a hole in the crotch of your fishnets and stick your head through it, then you slide your arms where the legs are supposed to be. She says you can do this with any pair of tights, but it’s best with fishnets because you can poke your fingers through the mesh.
With my smoky eyes and my fishnet tight top, I must say I’m feeling pretty hot, almost.
I turn to her lying on the bed beside me. “How does it look?”
“Hot,” she says, frowning at a cuticle. “Go see.”
“I’ll wait,” I say. “I’ll wait till later. I don’t look fat, do I?”
And China says, “Stop it,” like she’s genuinely pissed. She says she wishes she had my hair, what a head of it I have, so good smelling for a smoker. Also my ankles. Look at those ankles. She’d cut them off right now. My hair and my ankles. Right now. Give her a knife. China has hair like Annie Lennox’s. We weren’t on speaking terms when she wore it like Joey Ramone. We were never friends at Holy Trinity, but I’d see her in the halls, before she dropped out. Spiders dangling from her ears. Mel called her a poseur, said she wasn’t really into the music, she just had the look. Tall and rail thin and pale as death. The kind of girl who looks like she should be walking down a dirt road in a music video, one where the sky is gray and the earth is gray and there’s nothing for miles but this girl walking in a torn dress toward you, dark lips curving into a smile, her hands splayed open at her sides like Christ’s. It was only after I dropped out of Holy Trinity and switched to this alternative school that we became friends. Locked eyes in Literature, which is taught by this guy who looks like Eraserhead and lets you do projects on things like just reading Hesse.
“Do you think Batstone’s mad at us for skipping?” I ask her.
“He doesn’t care. Anyway, I hardly ever skip these days. I need to finish and get the hell out of here.” She really does. China was two years ahead of me at Holy Trinity, so she must be, like, twenty. “So long as we don’t miss next week,” she says.
We have a presentation on Haiti next week.
“You can’t shaft me next week,” she says.
“I won’t.” It’s true, I skip a lot. There are stretches of days when I just can’t bring myself to leave my room, to be seen.
She grabs a Matinée 100 from my purse. She’s in no hurry to go home, she says, because she’s trying to avoid Montana. She asks me to show her the trick I have of lighting a match with one hand. It’s easy—you just fold it over the edge of the matchbook and press it down with your thumb just below the strike pad. But I’m happy to have something she wants me to show her.
Then she says, “So tell me about this Internet guy. What’s his name?”
I tell her a bit about Blake. How I met him on AOL a few weeks ago. How his handle is The Cosmic Dancer, which is a reference to Shiva, the Hindu deity. I don’t tell her that he’s forty-seven and a quadriplegic but I do tell her that he lives near L.A. and that he’s a fan of Goth/industrial/dark wave and the films of Lynch and von Trier. I tell her how we talk about what movies we would be in if we could live in any movie (for me Prospero’s Books or Exotica; for him Naked or Nowhere), and what would be the soundtrack for the movie of our lives, and what it would be like to live in Duras’s Vietnam. I don’t tell her that lately we’ve been talking more and more about how I’m going to be the miracle for getting him hard again. Or how he’ll get stoned and tell me all about his elaborate lucid dreams of us fucking in India. Where the mere sight of me in a sari or sometimes it’s just a necklace of bones and teeth gets him so hard that he gets up out of his wheelchair and just walks toward me and we fuck on a flower-strewn altar with all these little Indian women watching. I tell her again that he’s been asking for a full-body shot and that I’ve been putting him off. But I know from past experience that I won’t be able to put him off forever, that it’s only a matter of time.
“Is he cute?” she asks.
I think of the pictures he sent me the other day. One before the accident and one after. I looked at them once and never again.
“He looks like Morrissey, I guess.” It’s not that much of a stretch. Morrissey is balding, sort of.
“Morrissey’s not looking so good these days,” she says. “So you’re sending him one back?”
“I’m still trying to decide,” I tell her. I show her the pictures taken thus far. The one my mother’s boyfriend took of me in the forest leaning against a dead oak, gazing wistfully to the left. The one I took of myself in the bathtub full of strategically petaled water. The ones Mel took of me in the living room under my mother’s print of Monet’s Water Lilies, my upper half eclipsed by my mother’s cat seated on the armrest, my lower half artfully padded with Indian cushions. “I don’t understand what’s wrong with any of these,” Mel said after we were done. “You look beautiful in all of them.”
China flips through the photos now, frowning. “You’re a little blurry in these. Also you look sort of mad.”
“Do I look fat though?”
“You look mad.”
“How mad?”
“Like, pissed. Seriously pissed.” She flicks through the pictures again. “In this one, you look scared.”
She drops the photos, and flops onto her back next to me. “You know, my dad has a pretty good camera,” she says.
“Really?” I turn to look at her—eyes nose lips chin so cutting and sharp, her bones in an elegant origami configuration on my bed. If she took the photo. Did my eyes. Helped me choose my clothes. She’s really into art, so she probably knows all about angles. I feel a surge of something like hope.
She nods at the ceiling. “We wouldn’t even have to use flash, I don’t think.”
We. My heart lifts. “We wouldn’t?”
“What are you, an echo chamber?”
“Sorry. It’s just I’ve really been stressing about this.”
She frowns. “Why?”
“I haven’t really told him about me, exactly.”
She picks up the photos and starts flipping through them again. “What do you mean about you?”
“Well, like, my weight.”
She looks at me a long time with a raised eyebrow. She hands me back the photos and rests on her back. “I’m starving. I wish we had zucchini blossoms. I’d fry the hell out of them. They’re my thing right now.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Or Chinese. I could really go for some Chinese.”
“When?” I ask her.
“When what?” she repeats.
“Should we take them? The pictures, I mean.”
“Whenever,” she says, yawning.
Now, I think. With my eyes like this. Except I really ne
ed to think about location. Wardrobe. “What about Saturday?”
“Saturday should work,” she says, her eyes fluttering closed.
“Like, around one?”
“One,” she repeats, closing her eyes definitively. I watch her until I realize she’s sleeping. I do not want to be someone who watches her sleep. So I go into the living room and just sit there until I hear her rustle awake.
• • •
All evening, I avoid mirrors even though I’m dead curious. I smell like China, who boys burn pictures of, they’re so mad at her for not loving them back. I’m full of Drink Me and with my eyes all smoky, I’m totally not hungry at all. I feel almost like I could be China, like I could fold all my limbs into a chair with grace, grow faint from the smell of mushrooms like she told me she did once—they had to call an ambulance and everything. I go to my room and play the CD I’m in the process of making for China until it’s time to talk to The Cosmic Dancer, and then I tell him all about how I wore PVC to lit class. And I describe the outfit in every particular.
And he’s like, “Man, I wish I could see that,” and, “Wow, Bettie, I’ll bet every boy at your college is totally in love with you.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say. And he’s like, “I do. Every time I hear you describe yourself, I get hard. I seriously do.”
And even though we both know that this is anatomically impossible given his paralysis, I say that’s so sweet of him.
He says he doesn’t know if it’s sweet, but it’s true.
And then I tell him I have this friend, China, who’s going to be taking my full-body pic on Saturday. Some people say we look like sisters, I tell him. Like we’re doppelgängers or something. I tell him about the time she took me to Death and I tell him about the time she smacked a cigarette out of my mouth. And I tell him how today she dragged me into a bathroom stall and did my eyes all smoky like film stars from the thirties and forties. And he says, “Oh, Bettie, I wish I could see you.”
And I say, “I wish you could too.”