Then I could deny it, deny all knowledge. Plausible deniability.
They all loved to lord it over me, all of them with their boyfriends and their hookups and their active sex lives.
By St Sebastian, the number of times I had cringed with jealousy at the stories about Angel and Ravind and the guys whose names Marcus had already forgotten by now.
There were times when I had salivated at the talk of all the sex everyone was having, except me.
And it wasn’t fair.
It just wasn’t fair.
I stormed over to the door and ripped it open, and stood there on the threshold, breathing hard, staring at Machyl Mostroso Lyons standing on my front door step with one hand on his cocked hip, pursing his lips and looking me up and down with raised eyebrows.
“Why Mr. Banker, I do declare,” Machyl simpered, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “We’ve found the long-lost heir of the Rockefellers.”
I stared at him, crossing my arms over my chest. Machyl looked straight at me and opened his eyes wide, bent down with his hands on his knees and then raised one hand to peer at me through his opera glasses.
“He’s from the southern branch, and a little darker than we prefer but my sweet lord this is a relief!” Machyl straightened up and clapped his hands twice. “Come, servant! Bring the bleaching cream and get me one of those nice silky blond wigs,” Machyl cocked his head at me. “He already has the baby blues taken care of.”
I put my hands on my hips. “They’re not blue,” I said. “They’re Korean and they’re Prism Light Grey.”
Machyl rolled his eyes. “I’m not here to talk about contact lenses, Jesus.”
I was tempted to snap, I’m not Jesus but it was way too obvious a quip and Machyl would just mock me for saying it.
Not him, you’ve got the wrong deity.
But then what deity was I saying I was?
Oh god please stop it Anthony
I could feel my head going into the tailspin it always did when Machyl was directing his so-called wit at me.
He thought it was a laser-guided missile. I thought it more resembled a barrel bomb.
I needed to think. And think fast.
So Marcus had told Machyl where I lived, and Marcus had clearly told Machyl that he had just been here.
I tried to ignore the thousand bleeding cuts all over my body and focus on damage control. There was glass all over the floor, the ruins of the coffee table and if I didn’t clean it up, I was going to cut my bare feet when I walked.
There was no reason to change tack now. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to admit anything.
I needed a reason why Marcus had been here.
He needed something out of my wardrobe. I’d promised to lend him an item of clothing for Bone China.
Idiot. None of your clothes would go past his thighs.
Accessories. He wanted to borrow some jewelry. The enamel-cherry-blossom-encrusted collar with gold plating I got in the sale at Krumpdorf’s. That was something Bone China would wear.
Then I closed my mouth. I was just about to walk into a trap Machyl had set for me. I had no idea what Machyl knew or didn’t know. I was working on assumptions here.
At the moment, all I knew was that Marcus had told Machyl where I lived.
But Machyl was hoping I would start spontaneously explaining myself, thereby giving him information he didn’t actually have yet.
It was a similar trick to what he’d done earlier when he accused me of being sick. Both were ways to fish for information without appearing to do so. Without having to ask—of course.
He would rather crawl through the broken glass on my floor than actually come out and ask something openly.
Oh, no, that was far too transparent, too honest, for Machyl Mostroso Lyons.
“So what are you here to talk about?” I asked airily, resisting the temptation to square my shoulders and put my hands on my hips. “I’m just here waiting for—”
I had been going to say take out, but then remembered I was supposed to have food poisoning. Damnit.
Machyl smiled slowly. “A match to arrive? Did you manage to find someone who hadn’t checked that box, I don’t want tiny little femme girls to see my profile?”
I rolled my eyes and smoothed my hair down. “What do you want, Machyl?” I asked in a bored tone of voice.
“Ooh,” Machyl breathed, his eyes flashing. He sank to the floor in a brief languid vogue, then flowed back to a standing position, smoothing his hand across his own hair theatrically.
“She’s so smooth, so casj, baby,” he shortened the word casual like he'd bitten it off one of those long Italian marshmallows, the ones made of twisted pink, yellow and white strands, and it stretched out before breaking off and recoiling softly.
Then he whipped around, suddenly all sharp angles. “Who’s going to discipline this bitch?”
Now it was my turn to recoil. “St Sebastian,” I muttered. “What is your problem, Machyl? I’m sick at home and you come up in here with all of this—I don’t even know what you’re doing right now.”
I felt rage churning within me, making me strong, making me powerful, taking away my fears, making me right.
“We’re not backstage. This isn’t the green room. You don’t have to be a drag queen twenty-four hours a day, you know.”
Machyl straightened up and stared at me for a moment or two. Then he blinked once, twice, and he was still just as theatrical.
He reached out his hand toward my head and I slapped it away, anger rising in me, even as I feared the consequence of slapping his hand as I’d done.
“What is that, Miss Tata?” He narrowed his eyes at me, his eyes working over my weave, a shoulder-length long bob with just a suggestion of side swept bangs, jet black, smooth, shiny and straight.
His hand darted out again, quick as a cobra strike, and three of his fingers tugged hard on it, hard enough to hurt my scalp where the weave was sewn in.
I leapt backward, away from his grasp.
“You want to talk to me about wearing daytime drag?” He hissed, advancing on me.
I’d made a big mistake.
I’d backed up, back into the apartment, and as a result he’d come forwards and that meant he was now inside.
I felt an irrational panic sweep over me, and the urge to turn and run was so strong that I only managed to stop it by flattening myself against the wall.
“Just leave me alone!” I shouted before I even knew what I was saying. “Leave me the fuck alone, Machyl, I don’t want to play these games with you!”
I stared at him, my heart racing, adrenaline pumping though my system.
I pushed back against the wall as if it could give and envelop me, as if I could turn it into an Italian marshmallow and make it eat me up, be subsumed in spongy sweetness with that very slight coating of white dust all marshmallows had just covering my skin and filling my lungs and clogging up my eyes.
Machyl could rain down blows on it and I wouldn’t feel or see or hear a thing.
But the wall didn’t turn into a marshmallow. It remained hard, flat and solid behind my back.
I could feel the painted surface under my fingertips, smooth and yet every so slightly textured, and when they moved across it, I remembered the sound of nails scratching on a blackboard and a nauseous shudder when through me, through my lungs as I tried to breathe, through my stomach which was not happy about this, not happy at all, and then it almost heaved as if I was about to throw up.
Machyl stood there, staring at me, and then he said slowly, “Well they say that no good deed goes unpunished, and by the lord above I guess I should mete out that punishment to myself right now, is that right, Tata?” He crossed his arms. “What should I do?” He glanced around.
Inside the entrance hall there was an umbrella stand next to a coat rack, empty except for a pale sand trench raincoat my mother had left behind.
I didn't use a coat rack because I didn’t want my jackets to end up with a camel hump in t
he back of the neck.
The umbrella stand, though, had three tall umbrellas, one black, a dark green and burgundy, one with a silver German Shepherd head handle, the dark green was the silver mallard duck, and the black one just had a smooth, shiny tortoiseshell handle, no animal ornamentation at all.
Machyl seized the burgundy umbrella with the German Shepherd’s head handle and held it out to me.
“Thirty strokes,” he said, shaking the umbrella at me.
He dropped it, turned around and placed two hands on the recessed counter next to the door where there was another landline phone, a large, shallow ceramic bowl meant for keys but now just full of spare change and paperclips, and stuck his ass out toward me.
“I deserve to be punished,” he insisted, waggling his butt in my direction. “No?” He popped up, turning around and looking at me. “How about—” he plucked a paperclip from the bowl, unbent it slowly until it was almost straight—I had to resist the urge to cry, Hey! That’s my paperclip!—and, holding up one of his fingers, placed the paperclip in between his nail and the nail bed.
“Should I jam this paperclip into my nail bed?”
“No!” I protested, horrified.
He dropped it and turned toward the living room. “Where’s your kitchen?” He asked, walking toward the pit. “What’s the biggest knife you have?”
“Machyl, stop!” I said.
I felt as if I was going to lose my mind. I had never been so scared in my life. I had never been involved in anything like this before.
He did stop, turned around slowly, and looked at me. “You want me to stop?” He asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“But… don't you want me to be punished?” He stared at me.
I wanted to fade away until I was just a shadow on the wall.
Like when the atomic bomb went off in Japan and people burned shadows into the walls as they were incinerated.
That would be me. Atomic bomb Machyl landed here. Casualties: 1.
“N—no,” I managed to say.
“You don’t want me to be punished?” Machyl came toward me, looking confused, his voice all innocent all of a sudden.
“Um,” I said. “No.”
“But…” Machyl said, crouching down so he was on my eye level. “Haven’t I done terrible things?”
I couldn’t hold his gaze.
“Um,” I said.
He came closer, until his face was right by mine. “What did I do to you, princess, huh?”
I tried to inch away from him without completely falling apart and just running. I turned my face away. “Nothing,” I said. “N-nothing, Machyl.”
“I heard you were sick at home,” Machyl breathed, far too close to me for comfort. “I thought I’d bring you a care package.”
Whenever there was any kind of drama at Ellegrandé’s, I tried to stay out of it. Stay neutral. Stay in the background. Go sit with Brooklyn, because he never got involved in that stuff.
I decided not to talk any more. If I could just freeze him out, maybe he would leave.
Or at least it might force him to get to the point of why he came here, if he came here for any reason apart from terrorizing me.
Obviously he did.
When I didn’t reply, Machyl withdrew, studying his long acrylic nails. I could have teased him about those, just now.
He kept the nails because Giltie Conshens wore nails, and he said he wasn’t about to re-do a hundred dollars’ worth of acrylic nail art every single week.
I wasn’t sure what they made of it at his work. It was hard to imagine him in office attire with the nails. An accountant with neon talons.
That was Machyl, I supposed.
“Really, Anthony,” Machyl said in a wounded voice, pushing at one of his cuticles. “I was just trying to help you…”
“Help me?” I said, despite myself.
Shut. Up!
I could put my foot in it, any minute now.
Machyl.
Machyl Mostroso Lyons was a toxic spill.
It was like when a truck drove through the pristine wilderness of a national park, through a pine forest with misty tendrils of fog reaching through the branches early in the morning.
There was a road running through the forest, a ribbon of tarmac, and the truck drove down it, disappearing from view sometimes when the road dipped and it became obscured by trees.
The truck was covered in a poorly-secured tarp whose corner flapped in the breeze.
The truck hit a bump in the road, a dip that was just a little sharper than the others, and the back axel jolted and the tarp snapped off its moorings, now gaping halfway open.
And inside the truck were dozens of those barrels that looked like oil drums but carried a bright yellow three-speared biohazard sign.
One of them jittered on the edge, then toppled off, fell onto the road, and then rolled into the undergrowth of the pine forest.
The truck drove on, unknowing.
The barrel split and burst on impact and green goo started to leak out of it and be absorbed by the ground and into the plants and a squirrel even came down and tried to drink some.
And the green sludge poisoned the forest and burned away the plants all around it and killed the animals or deformed them and left them gasping, naked and without fur or feathers, on the dirty brown floor of the forest with no hope of a savior.
“Yes, help you,” Machyl said, meeting my eyes and then smiling kindly, a smile which did not make it to his eyes.
“Girl,” Machyl came over to me and, to my extreme discomfort, put his arm around my shoulder and started walking me to the door. “I think you’re going to need all the help you can get.”
I understood what Machyl was saying, very clearly. His meaning was as clear and obvious as a pulsing purple aubergine emoji or the twin globes of a ripe fuzzy peach.
He knew something very damaging about me. And now I needed his “help” in order for him to go on keeping it a secret.
Machyl knew that I had fraternized with Marcus, and now he was going to leverage that information against me for all it was worth.
Machyl looked at my designer loungewear. “Now, don’t you want to put on a jacket or something? You’re going to be a little chilly in just those thin rags.”
I looked up at him as if into the face of god. “Where are we going?”
“Well,” Machyl tapped one iridescent nail against his chin. “What’s that little phrase that Bone China always uses?”
I thought I was going to faint for real this time. I actually went light-headed and staggered. He tightened his grip on my shoulder. Machyl smirked at me.
“That’s it. I’m buggered if—isn’t that a good one, you know what it means in Britain, right?—” he leaned down and whispered in my ear. “It means butt fucking, Anthony.”
I closed my eyes tight. Machyl straightened up again.
“I’m buggered,” he declared, “if I couldn’t go for some Ethiopian right about now.” He looked down at me. “I just love how that big piece of bread gets all soggy with the juices.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding. I wasn’t sure if he was using that phrase correctly. “I—I’ll get my jacket then,” I whispered, and scampered out from under his arm and went to my bedroom.
I closed the door, leaning against it and forcing myself to take several deep breaths.
It was a relief to be in the fragrant quiet of my own room, away from the intrusive chaos of Machyl.
I went to the closet and put on the cropped flared jeans from earlier—I wasn’t going out in yoga pants, no matter how much they cost—but left the racerback and just put on my leather jacket over it.
I grabbed my wallet from my nightstand and stuffed it into the pocket of my jacket along with my phone.
I stopped and looked at my phone.
There seemed to be two sides to Marcus. There was the romantic Marcus who kissed me and said nice things.
And there was the hidden, betraying Marcus, w
ho kept spilling everything to Machyl and jeopardizing my position at Ellegrandé.
I breathed in slowly, and then out again.
If Marcus was really on Machyl’s side and, as my paranoid fantasies imagined, trying to get me kicked out of the club, then there was really nothing I could do to make my own situation worse.
By fraternizing with Marcus, I had already committed an offense bad enough to warrant firing. And I had nothing to offer to try to get DT to keep me. I was a failed drag queen.
But if Marcus wasn’t in league with Machyl, and there had been a misunderstanding of some kind, or there was some other explanation—however unlikely—for today’s events, then maybe Marcus really did mean everything he had said to me.
In other words, Marcus might actually be on my side after all.
I didn’t have anything to lose by trying to find out, did I?
I unlocked my phone and called Marcus. It rang three times, and, getting annoyed, I took my phone from my ear and looked at the screen.
It was nearly curtain. Marcus’ phone would be in the dressing room, in his bag or lying at his station among his make up brushes, and worse still, it would be on silent—as per house rules.
Shit.
I was about to hang up when the call picked up.
“Babes?” Marcus sounded breathless. “I’m on in two minutes. I forgot to put my phone on silent—”
“You lied to me,” I hissed. “You told Machyl.”
“Wha— no! I didn’t, I swear I didn’t!”
The deep shag of the carpet felt good on my toes, and I felt a strange resentment toward it for causing me the cognitive dissonance of having nice comfy toes while the inside of my head was screaming Yes you did you liar!
And all of those thousand cuts I’d sustained earlier when I realized Marcus had betrayed me started bleeding again.
The ancient Chinese torture method revived in twenty-first century Madhattan by a beautiful boy with bright brown eyes.
“You’re denying giving Machyl my address?” I blurted abruptly.
“Denying it? Sweetheart, I didn’t tell Machyl your address. Why would I do that, babes?” Marcus sounded bewildered.
“I can’t believe you’re lying!” I cried, and then shut my mouth.
I didn’t want Machyl to overhear. He definitely did not want me talking to anyone else right now.
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