Camgirl

by Isa Mazzei

  I gagged.

  Suddenly, the smell hit me. I had puked on his dick.

  “Oh fuck.” I pulled back, horrified. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t care, I don’t care.” He moved toward me but I was already jumping up to go get a towel. Aaron caught my arm.

  “Hey, hey,” he murmured. “Here. Look at me.” He touched my chin and looked in my eyes. Tears were running down my face. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. It’s fine, I’m fine.”

  “You said you were having a panic attack.”

  “All good.” I got up, went to the bathroom, and grabbed a towel. I brought it to him, but he ignored it.

  “Come here.” He held his arms open. I sat next to him on the bed and leaned against his warm body.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I said I was fine. You didn’t even come. Do you want to, should we do it again?”

  “Shhh.” Aaron stroked my face. “I don’t care about coming.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

  I held back a sob. I didn’t feel grounded or whole. I didn’t feel anything. My tears tasted like makeup and sweat.

  “I don’t want to be this person anymore,” I whispered to him, barely audibly.

  “What person?”

  I shuddered against him in a deep, heaving sob. He held me while I cried, offering me the towel as a tissue. I quieted down.

  “Hey, Aaron?”

  “Yeah?”

  “My real name is Isa.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Isa,” Aaron whispered softly, squeezing my shoulder.

  The next morning, I woke up and found the bed next to me empty. A full glass of water sat on my bedside table, perched neatly on a coaster.

  “Did you bring me water?” I asked Aaron as I entered my living room. He was sitting on my couch, reading a book and drinking a coffee from the cafe across the street. I saw another one sitting next to it. Mine, presumably.

  “In case you were thirsty when you woke up.” To him it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  I leapt onto the couch next to him and nuzzled underneath his arm, nearly spilling his coffee. “You’re sweet.”

  “Yeah?”

  I looked up at him and kissed his chin. “Yeah.”

  The next few days were slow and sweet. We listened to music. We went on walks and read books in the park in the sunshine. Aaron bought me a mug shaped like an elephant and brought me a full glass of water every night. When Aaron left, I apologized. I apologized that he had traveled so far to just have me sob on him and throw up on his dick. I apologized that I didn’t have sex with him anymore after that night.

  “It was good,” he assured me. “I had a good time.”

  Finally, as I watched him carry his bag down my stairs and into his cab, I apologized for using him to try to fix myself, just like all the other boys. But I only said that part to myself.

  ×××

  “I need to stop hurting people,” I said, biting my sleeve and staring at the ground. I was sitting in my new therapist Hope’s office. I had been to therapy before on and off, but I needed help. And maybe some part of me felt ready, finally. Like the other times had just been practice, preparation. Plus, this one’s name was Hope. That must be worth something.

  “And what do you mean by that?” Hope smiled at me, warmly.

  I couldn’t stand it. I looked away. “I hurt people.”

  “What does that look like, hurting people?”

  “I use them. I manipulate them to get things I want. I lead them on, I dunno.”

  “And you don’t feel like you can stop these behaviors?”

  I felt myself beginning to cry. “No. I can’t. I can’t stop them. It’s all I do. It’s who I am. This is Isa. She seduces boys. She fucks boys over. She breaks their hearts. Only now, I do it for money. But it’s the same thing. Seducing them. Making them like me. Manipulating them into thinking I’m somehow perfect for them. The perfect fucking girl. That’s me, that’s Isa.” I blinked rapidly at the wall.

  The night Bomb had left, I didn’t cam. I sat on my balcony and smoked, letting each cigarette burn down to the filter before setting it neatly in the row of butts in front of me. I had been so sure sex with Bomb would be okay. I thought it would be different. I thought I was different now.

  “I think you’re being very hard on yourself,” Hope said gently. “Perhaps a little unfairly.”

  Hope’s office had a sandbox in one corner. It was full of small toys: dinosaurs, glass dragon tears, a small plastic shovel.

  “Look, I’ve been to eight different therapists,” I told her, looking up finally. “They all tell me the same shit. I’m bipolar, I need medication. My dad’s bipolar. I get it. Everyone in my family tries to kill themselves. But I’m not bipolar. I just have this need for attention. I thought it was only when I drank, so I stopped drinking. But it’s still there. It’s like this impulse. I’m not manic. It’s not bipolar. I don’t know what it is. But I want it to go away. Please…” My voice dropped to a whisper again.

  Hope wrote something down in her notepad, but she remained silent. She was middle-aged, with graying hair and sharp eyes. She wore expensive shoes.

  “I thought it would go away. Like, when I met my sugar daddy, I was good at dating him, but it wasn’t enough. And it didn’t make anything better. But now it’s just like, it’s not fixing anything. I’m still doing all the same things, only now I’m also doing them for a job.”

  “Well, if this job is so demanding, why do you do it?” Hope asked. “Why keep it up?”

  “Because…I’m good at it. I like it. I mean, I love it. Well, I love parts of it.” I chewed on my sleeve again.

  “What parts do you love?”

  “The parts that like, I dunno. I’m good at it. It’s fun.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well…” I thought about it. “I love my guys. Like, some of them are my real actual friends. And they’re all friends with each other. I built a community. And performing. Being creative. I get to do these crazy and wild things and find people that will connect with them. I have power. It’s pretty amazing, actually.” I smiled for a moment before I remembered why I was in her office.

  “It’s just… It’s really hard to do now. I’ve started dreading signing on. I don’t know what happened. I was passionate about it. I never understood before what it meant when people said that.” I watched her face. I couldn’t read her expression. I continued. “And I mean I quit everything I ever do. Every job, every club, every instrument I’ve ever tried to play. I’ve walked out of so many jobs. I am so bad at being a person. I can’t just quit this too.”

  “Is that what’s keeping you in it, then? Is it the fear of quitting?”

  “No. Well yes. I guess. I like it too, like I said.”

  Hope took a note. I waited for her to answer. She stopped writing and looked at me intently.

  “Maybe I should quit?” I said, tentatively, testing out the words.

  “How does it feel, when you say that?” Hope asked, ready to write again.

  “When I say what?”

  “When you say you should quit.”

  “Oh I dunno.”

  “Well, say it again. Notice how it feels. In your body.”

  “Okay. I should quit. I should quit.” I took my sleeve out of my mouth. “I’m going to quit.”

  “What do you feel?”

  I squeezed my lips together, tears coming up again. Hope smiled at me. She was too freaking nice.

  “Relief. I guess.” I started to cry. “I guess I feel relief. I feel in control.”

  Hope made a note. I watched her write. There was something else I needed to tell her. Something bigger. I couldn’t make my
self do it.

  ×××

  I’ve always been a control freak. When I was little, I believed if I breathed in whenever anything bad was happening on TV, that bad thing would happen to me. To protect myself, I developed a habit of blowing out really hard during drug commercials, car accident infomercials, and episodes of Law & Order.

  “You look like a smoker,” my mom scolded. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing!” I explained, blowing air through my lips toward the open window. Just breathing out the cancer, duh.

  At night, I needed to say goodnight a specific number of times and in a very specific way. I’d count twelve heartbeats and then call out, “Goodnight, Mom. Goodnight, Dad. See you in the morning of tomorrow.” I had to phrase it that way, because it protected me from dying in my sleep. If I messed it up, I had to repeat it. Over and over and over. I never finished a chapter of a book and then set it aside; I had to be in the middle of one before I stopped reading for the day, because there was no way God would let me die if I was in the middle of a chapter.

  Control, I felt, was the only way to keep myself safe. Controlling my words. The number of circles I walked around cars. How many times I touched a door knob before opening the door. I was terrified of dying, and eventually in that terror I found a solution. The solution was suicide. Suicide was control––in some ways, the ultimate control. Suicide was a way to feel like my life was entirely mine for just a second: my own to end, if I so desired.

  Suicide had always been there, in my peripheral vision. The idea that one day I’d find my mom dead in the bathtub, or I’d get the call that my dad had finally managed to keep the pills down. Suicide had become a refuge for me, too—mostly from the panic and the fear of dying. I comforted myself with that thought: I could always kill myself. I could always end this.

  The first time I decided to kill myself, I was fifteen years old. My anxiety and depression had reached a breaking point. I had decided that my friend Taylor was the love of my life. She had decided, unfortunately, that the love of her life was our friend Emilie. I was heartbroken. I decided death was the only option.

  In the great tradition of my family half-assing suicide, I did absolutely no research and decided that the best way to kill myself would be with sleeping pills. They were romantic, sexy. Sleeping pills made me feel like a Disney princess. I didn’t realize there was a giant difference between prescription sleeping pills and the sleeping pills that are actually just Benadryl. So of course, that’s what I bought, one full, XL bottle of Simply Sleep diphenhydramine tablets.

  “Will this be all for you?” The checkout girl at the neighborhood grocery store could not have been more bored.

  “Yep, thanks.” I passed over cash, feeling clever for not leaving a paper trail. I wondered if she considered why I was buying the sleeping pills. I wondered if she suspected me.

  She tossed the box in an oversized paper bag and passed it to me. “Have a nice day.”

  Walking home, my pills in one hand and my dog Steinbeck’s leash in the other, I felt noble and grand. I was going to do the thing that my parents had failed so often at: I was going to die. Steinbeck pranced along next to me, barking at toddlers and chewing on his own feet any time we stopped.

  I locked myself in my bedroom and waited for dark. I pushed my bookcase in front of my door to make sure my parents wouldn’t be able to find me until I was good and dead, and then I turned on a mix of my favorite European Gothic metal bands. Epica and Apocalyptica featured prominently.

  Okay, Isa. Time to feel tragic.

  “Dear World,” I began writing my suicide note, in purple gel pen. No. Not tragic enough. I threw it out.

  “Dear Taylor,” I began again. Better. I was going to make her feel terrible about herself. “I cannot imagine going on without you. Don’t be sad, I’m just another drop in the sea, another one of billions of people that don’t matter.”

  Hmmm. No, that wasn’t really specific enough, was it?

  “Dear Taylor,” I wrote. “My life fucking sucks. I know you don’t know a lot about it, but it does. No one even likes me. And you are my soul mate. I am absolutely sure of it. But it’s fine, you found someone else who’s prettier and better and less crazy than me, I’m sure, and I hope you guys are happy together. Love forever, Isa.”

  I stared down at my letter. I began to cry. I really was pathetic, wasn’t I? I sat on my carpet and opened the box of pills. They were individually sealed with foil backing. I began popping them out, one by one by one, lining them in a neat row on the carpet in front of me.

  I had filled a glass of water earlier and now it sat right next to my knee, ready. I glanced at the clock: 9:00 p.m. felt a little early to die. I swallowed a single pill with a sip of water. It wouldn’t hurt to get started. Oh. What if I fell asleep before I took enough? I stared down at the pile. I picked up another pill and put it in my mouth.

  Suddenly, there was a knock on my door.

  “What?” I snarled over the blasting gothic metal.

  “Isa, can you come out here and talk to us, please?” It was my dad. His voice was strained.

  “No,” I replied, punching up the volume on my boom box.

  “Isa, you need to talk to us.”

  “Go away!” I turned the volume up three more notches.

  “Isa, if you don’t come out and talk to us, we’re going to have to call the police and you’ll go to the hospital.”

  I froze. How did he know? Sure, I had dropped some serious hints to Taylor the past week to make sure she felt sufficiently guilty once I actually died. But I hadn’t explicitly said anything.

  “Is this because you’re gay?” My dad softened his voice, trying another tactic. “It’s okay if you are.”

  “I’m not gay!” I screamed through the door, over the swelling music. “I’m not coming out!”

  “Just open the door at least.” My dad pushed against it. “If you don’t, then we will call the police, and they will break in, and you’ll be locked up in the hospital.”

  “No!” The fucking hypocrisy. They got to attempt to kill themselves all they pleased but when I wanted to, nooooo—it’s police this and hospital that.

  “Fuck you!” I screamed, wallowing in self-pity and snot. I couldn’t even kill myself right. I rushed over to the pile of pills and swallowed three more. That’ll show them. My dad fell silent, and I reorganized the pills, letting my tears and snot fall down my face.

  “Isa?” My friend Simone’s voice floated gently over the music. I froze. “Isa? Your dad called me and asked me to come over. Are you okay?” I didn’t say anything. All of a sudden I was paralyzingly embarrassed.

  “Go away,” I said calmly, collecting myself.

  “I just want to talk to you,” she said haltingly, unsure of herself.

  “If you make Simone leave, I’ll open the door—okay, Dad?”

  A few minutes passed. My dad returned. “Okay, Simone is gone. Open the door now, please?”

  “Fine, but go downstairs first.”

  “Isa…”

  “Go downstairs and I’ll open the door.”

  I heard my dad walk downstairs and pause right at the base of the staircase. I left my music blasting and pushed the bookshelf away from the door, leaving it crookedly jammed against the opposite wall.

  “Fine. It’s open, you assholes!” I screamed down the stairs before diving into my bed and burrowing under the covers. I hid my entire face. It was hard to breathe. I heard my dad come into my room. He shut off the music. I remained still. I heard his footsteps pause at my tiny pile of what was essentially Benadryl. I heard him pick up the box, read it, and then obviously decide however many I had ingested was not a threat.

  “Okay, I’m going to leave you alone now. I love you very much.” He turned and left.

  The afternoon after my therapy session with Hope, I sat in front of
my apartment, clutching a joint in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Around me, people in button-ups and khakis came home for lunch or rode past on their bikes. Normal people. Normal lives. Boring lives, I reminded myself. But maybe better lives? I took a drag on the cigarette. I had thought camming would solve all my problems. But I just took them with me. I had lost control over Una. I had lost control over myself.

  I couldn’t quit camming, could I? I never thought I would be able to feel okay with masturbating, let alone doing it in front of hundreds of people. Camming had educated me. It had fed me, raised me. It had given me Una. But, I realized, Una didn’t belong to me anymore. She belonged to so many different men. She belonged to MFC. She belonged to the Internet.

  I pushed the end of the joint into a crack in the sidewalk, watching the last bits of smoke unfurl in the cold air. I knew what I had to do. I had to regain power over Una. If I was going to quit camming, I first had to regain control.

  And the only way to regain control over Una was to kill her.

  Prom Queen

  Okay, I want something epic,” I explained to Jonah a few days later. We had talked a lot about my BDSM shows, but I didn’t let him watch them. They felt too personal. Now, I needed him to help me plan my grand finale. “If I’m going to quit camming, it’s going to be something huge.”

  We were out to sushi at my favorite restaurant, sitting in the sun near the windows.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need, like, the climactic show. The big one.”

  “Well, what were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking, I’ve brought pain play to pretty much the pinnacle of what I can do by myself. And I need to push it further.”

  Jonah nodded, not really listening. I was irritated. This was important.

  “I want it to be artistic, though. And beautiful. Not just dangerous.” I knew what would get his attention. I sipped my water thoughtfully. “You know people have died on cam before?” I offered, savoring how Jonah’s eyes finally lit up with morbid curiosity.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, there was this girl once apparently, she was super drunk, dancing on a table or something.” Jonah bit into a piece of salmon. “Anyway, she fell and hit her head and just didn’t get up.”