by Sara Wolf
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Blanche tries to change the subject.
“No. Does my intelligence concern you?”
She sighs. “Yes. It concerns me. Every personality of a working member of the Rose Club concerns me. I have not gotten this far—I have not become the best simply by ignoring the strengths and weaknesses of those I hire. I use them appropriately.”
There’s a long pause. The waiters bustle about and bring Blanche a lobster pasta. She thanks them in French and begins picking at it delicately.
“I’m sure you already know what I’m going to say, Jack. In fact, we both know what I’m about to say. And you also know I’m going to say this thing only because I know what you’re going to ask. That’s why you set up a meeting with me, is it not? To ask me something.”
I nod. She smiles and folds her hands.
“Then ask.”
“But I already know the answer.”
“Ask anyway.”
It’s a command, not a request. My eyes dart around the room. Blanche doesn’t have bodyguards, but her manservant Frasier is constantly at her side, and in his own quiet way he is every bit as protective as a bodyguard. I spot him eating at a table to our left by himself. His dark tailored suit hides his slight yet powerful frame. I’ve seen Frasier deal with the more unsavory clients of the Rose Club when Blanche feels the need to send a message to the escort community at large. It isn’t pretty. I don’t know Blanche and Frasier’s story. No one does. All we know is Frasier handles the business Blanche is too ladylike to touch.
I turn back to Blanche. I’m not afraid of Frasier, but now that I know his eyes are on me, I feel less brave.
“I only need two more weeks of payment. Then I want out.”
Blanche looks down into her dish and smiles. “This is what I was afraid of. The smart ones always know when to leave. Usually they are not as handsome as you, my dear, and thus earn less. So I feel more inclined to let them go.”
“You aren’t ‘letting’ me go. I am leaving of my own volition in two weeks.”
Blanche’s expression turns steely, a frown carving her face. I see Frasier straighten in his seat out of the corner of my eye.
“You seem to have forgotten our agreement, Jack,” she says.
“Our agreement was you get me the clients to earn myself sixty thousand dollars. And I did. I earned more than double that, considering you take sixty percent.”
“And you’d earn a lot more, if you stayed. You turned eighteen recently, right? You could start making enough for yourself. Real money.”
“I don’t need the money.” I can barely contain my sneer.
“Oh, I know. Full scholarship to Harvard. Read all about it in the local newspaper. You certainly are going places. With or without me.”
I’m quiet. Blanche flicks some hair away from her face, expectant.
“Thank you,” I say finally. “For working with me. I learned a lot.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“On the fourteenth, our agreement is over. I’m hoping you’ll be amicable about this.”
“Of course I will, Jack. I’m a businesswoman. I’m simply lamenting the fact that you and I won’t be able to build more together.”
She looks down at her phone as it buzzes. A shadow crosses her face for a moment, but a faint smile replaces it as she looks back up at me.
“You know, you’re right. It is time you left. You’re much too good to be stuck in little old Ohio forever. You’ll do well at Harvard, I’m sure.”
She extends a hand to me. Everything in me screams not to trust it. It’s too sudden. The shift in her mood was instantaneous—that text message must have said something about me. Or maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe it wasn’t about me at all. Maybe it was another Rose Club business deal going smoothly and netting her a lot of money. That’s much more likely.
“Why the sudden pleasantries?” I ask.
Blanche laughs. “Oh, Jack. Always so suspicious. Don’t worry. Honestly, don’t. I knew you wouldn’t be an escort for much longer with me. That’s bittersweet, assuredly. But I did mention, didn’t I? When we first met? What did I say again? You have that stellar memory, surely you can tell me my exact words.”
The moment comes flooding back. I’d just turned seventeen. We were sitting in Blanche’s car, a silver Rolls-Royce or something else stupidly showy. I’d just gotten off shift at De l’Ange when Blanche stopped me in the alley as I was throwing away the day’s trash and asked to give me a ride home. I don’t know why I went with her, but she reeked of money, and money was all that was on my mind since I’d found out just a few days before how much Sophia’s surgery would cost. I went hoping some of her wealth would rub off on me, maybe. I was desperate. And she could smell that like a fox downwind of a rabbit’s den.
We talked. She proposed I join her Rose Club. She told me what it meant and what I’d have to do. There was no trickery or secrets. She was very honest and up-front, and I was prepared to do whatever it took to get the money for Sophia. And when we were done, when I’d agreed to it and signed the contract, she’d snapped her Louis Vuitton handbag closed and smiled at me.
“This club isn’t just a way to provide people with luxury experiences, Jack. You benefit from it with more than just money. You meet politicians. Their daughters. Their wives. You meet stockbrokers and dot-com billionaires who have daughters. You meet the movers and the shakers of the world. You become connected. It’s a web that spreads far and wide, and you’ve just become a single string of it.”
Coming back to the present, I recite the words to Blanche. She claps her hands softly.
“Very good. A single string. That’s what you are. Even if you leave the web, the web will never truly leave you.”
I narrow my eyes. “What does that mean?”
“You’re smart enough to know what it means.”
She makes a motion for Frasier, and he gets up and pulls out her chair. She stands, and he smoothly puts her coat over her shoulders. Blanche pulls her gloves on one finger at a time.
“In two weeks, our contract is over,” she says. “The payments will proceed as usual until that time.”
“I suppose this is good-bye, then?” I ask. Blanche flashes one last smile at me.
“No, Jack. I’m certain you and I will meet again.”
I watch her go. My phone buzzing tears my attention away from her figure. It’s a call from a blocked number. I answer.
“Jack? It’s Naomi—”
She doesn’t have to say anything more.
“I’ll be there in ten,” I say and then hang up.
Chapter Four
3 Years, 25 Weeks, 6 Days
One time I had this really sweet dream where I had wings made of crystal feathers and I was slender and beautiful like an elf queen made of light and purity and also maybe I barfed rainbows but that isn’t the point—the point is it was a wonderful dream, probably the best of my life. Most importantly I am not having it right now, because right now I’m having a dream about a giant spider.
It’s chasing me through a forest of some kind, and I’m sort of peeing myself while hoping I’m not actually peeing myself in real life. It’s a weird mix of lucid dreaming and lucid terror, so I can’t get scared enough to wake myself up, but I’m awake enough to be scared.
And then all of a sudden, the dream changes.
The spider disappears, the forest disappears, and I’m suddenly in the shower of my old house at Aunt Beth’s in Florida. The tiny one, with green tiles and mold in the cracks and the wind chime hung over the bathroom window. I’m three years younger and naked and my fat is obvious to the world, hanging in great chunks off my belly, my thighs, my chin. I’m crouched in the shower, curled up in a not-so-little ball, my flesh pressing against the enamel and the water trickling down from the showerhead. It’s cold water. I don’t know how I remember that, but I do. Aunt Beth had a solar heater. I stayed in the shower that day until the water got cold.
And
I’m crying.
That isn’t anything new, really. But seeing myself like this, in a third-person bizarro out-of-body experience, is a first. I know this moment. I’d know it anywhere.
The girl in the shower clutches herself—her stomach, her face. But her hand keeps wandering back to one place: her right wrist. I know what she’s feeling. That wrist burns. No amount of cold water can douse the pain coming from it. She’ll put a bandage on it later. But it takes her four hours to sit up. Five hours to stop crying with no sound. Six hours to dry off and get dressed. Seven hours to stop staring at herself in the mirror as she makes a decision.
It takes eight hours for the girl to decide to change herself.
It takes three years for his voice to stop ringing in her ears every time she walks out the door. And even then, it doesn’t fade. It still hasn’t.
Two weeks from the day in the shower, she stops eating so much. The girl loses five pounds. Then three more. A month later she’s ten pounds lighter. She puts on layers of sweatpants and sweatshirts and runs in the eighty-degree Florida summer for hours. Aunt Beth thinks she’s at Gina’s house sleeping over when in reality she’s on the side of the road behind a hibiscus bush, passed out from heat exhaustion. When the sun sets and it cools down, she wakes up and starts running again. She runs because she can’t stand the thought of who she was a step behind. One step. A new Isis. Another step. A newer Isis. She leaves herselves behind over and over because she can’t stand any of them—because she can’t stand the girl who thought the boy who destroyed her could be her everything. He was the only one in the world who looked at her like she was human, treated her like she was more than a sack of too-much skin.
She rarely eats, and if she does it’s only in front of Aunt Beth, to convince her she’s all right. But Aunt Beth is smarter than she lets on. One day, she and Isis talk, and it’s the sort of talk aunts are supposed to give—boy talk. I remember her every word as clear as day, and that reflects straight into the dream.
“You haven’t been eating much, Isis.” Aunt Beth, with her gentle smile and bright red hair held back by a head scarf, treats me every bit like her daughter. I was the kid she could never have.
“I’m not hungry,” I say lamely. And then my stomach gurgles and my charade is thrown headfirst over a cliff.
Aunt Beth sighs. “It’s about that Will kid, isn’t it?”
My stomach goes from gurgly to vomity. I flinch. But that flinch is important. It’s the first flinch I made when I heard his name. The first of hundreds.
“Did you two break up?” she asks softly. I shrug like it doesn’t matter but it does, it does, it’s the only thing that matters.
“I didn’t break up with him. He broke up with me. I sort of just broke down. You know how it goes.”
“Oh.” She puts her arm around my shoulder. “I do know how it goes.”
There’s a massive silence. The ocean laps just a half mile away from our tiny, kitschy beach shack. The sun slants through the window, throwing turquoise and emerald shadows around the kitchen as it passes through a collection of sea glass on the sill.
“Whenever someone would break up with me,” she starts, “I’d sit myself down and make a list.”
“Of what? Ways to blast yourself to another planet?”
“No. I’d make a list of traits my dream man would have. And by the end of it, I’d always feel better.”
“That sounds stupid.”
“Of course it’s stupid. That’s the point. It’s supposed to make you laugh with all its stupidity!”
I knit my lips together. Aunt Beth nudges me.
“Well? Go on. Describe your dream man.”
I mull it over for an agonizing few seconds.
“I want him to know the alphabet backward, and fast. He’ll make perfect cinnamon sugar doughnuts. He can jump rope a million times in a row. He’ll have bright green eyes and be left-handed and be a master of the obscure lost art of ocarina playing.”
“He sounds impossible.”
“That’s the point!” I insist. “He’s my dream man, right? So, if my dream man is someone who can never really exist, then he can’t hurt me. He can’t come up and make me fall in love and smash my heart.”
“Oh, Isis.” Aunt Beth pats my knee. “You don’t have to think like that. Not everyone is out to hurt you.”
“He’ll be really kind.” I smile down at my hands. “He’ll call me the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. Those things are even more impossible. So. So there. That’s him. And he doesn’t exist and he never will. So I’m safe.”
The dream shifts. The kitchen table disappears. Aunt Beth disappears. And then it’s suddenly four months later. Four months of passing out and stumbling through classes on nothing more than a piece of bread and celery. I didn’t need food. The word “ugly” reverberating through my head sustained me better than any calorie could.
I was punishing myself.
I know that now, far too late for it to help.
By the time Aunt Beth notices, everyone else is noticing.
Jealous, Gina disappears to Costa Rica for one weekend and comes back fifteen pounds lighter. But no one notices. Not when Isis Blake goes from two hundred pounds to one-twenty in the span of six months. Nameless notices. And now, instead of ignoring me, he laughs with his friends whenever I walk by. Smirks. Scoffs. He thinks I did it for him.
I didn’t.
I never get the chance to work up the courage to get angry at him. I feel it brewing in my stomach, like still-warm embers of resentment. But then my mother arrives. I walk in the house one day to see Aunt Beth and Mom drinking tea and discussing my future. I get a say, of course. And I say I want to leave. Ohio is the perfect place to start over. Anywhere no one knows me is the perfect place to start over. Anywhere that isn’t where Nameless is.
It’s my dream, but it’s more like my life. It’s not quite true to life—the colors are too bright and the faces wobble. But it’s exactly what happened.
I wake up to the whitewashed hospital room. I wake up realizing I ran away like a little coward.
I haven’t changed at all.
I’m safe. My counter is safe. Three years, twenty-five weeks, six days. I am still safe.
But I haven’t changed at all.
Isis Blake of Northplains, Ohio, is the same cowardly fourteen-year-old girl curled up in the shower. Just a little older, a little lighter, and a little stupider.
It’s dark—probably the middle of the night. I get out of the hospital bed and pull some clothes out of the bag Mom brought. Stepping outside in Ohio in the winter is like suicide without all the flashy brain bits, but I’m doing it anyway. I can’t stand this tiny room. It’s trying to suffocate me with all the beeps and smiling posters of kids getting shot up with flu vaccines. Who smiles when they see a five-inch needle? Sociopaths, that’s who.
I promised Naomi I wouldn’t use the window to sneak into the kids’ ward. But last time I checked, a hall is not a window and there is a hall that goes right by the kids’ ward. I just never use it because it’s near Sophia’s room, and that’s the one place Naomi would think to look for me if she found me missing from my bed. I pile pillows under the blankets of my cot, reach under it and grab four leftover Jell-O cups I’d been hoarding, and ease out the door. The hallways are quiet. I readjust the Jell-O cups by stuffing them into my bra. I take a moment to admire my considerable multicolored breasts and feel a single tear spring to my eye. Beautiful.
But back to business. I’ve got some gelatin to deliver to several grubs. I just need to make it around the corner, and I’ll—
I hiss and flatten myself against the wall. A group of interns passes, all carrying coffees. I quell the urge to become fleetingly radical. I want to slide across the floor behind them on my shoes like James Bond, silent and suave, but I also want to see the kids no matter what. Too much is riding on this. So like a lame normal spy I tiptoe behind them. And pirouette.
And that’s when I hear it. It
sounds like a dying cat far off, but as I get closer and closer to the kids’ ward, I realize it’s a person. Someone is screaming like they’re being ripped apart. In the empty hallway it’s eerie, and I start to consider maybe my life has turned into a horror movie and a girl with long black hair will be hiking up my phone bill as she calls to tell me I’ll die in seven days, but then there’s the shuffling of feet behind me, and I duck behind a gurney. Naomi, with a few other nurses, charge toward the scream with winded urgency.
“Who forgot to up Sophia’s cc’s?” one of the nurses asks.
“No one forgot. Fenwall said to ignore the change entirely,” Naomi pants. “But someone was supposed to give her Paxtal. Trisha?”
“It wasn’t me!” Trisha insists.
The first nurse sighs. “Jesus, Trisha, not again—”
“Do you know how hard it is to get her to take them? When she’s like that?” Trisha hisses.
“Did you call him at least?”
“Of course! He’s the only one who can calm her down—”
They run past, out of my earshot. They must be talking about another Sophia. The Soapy I know always listens to nurses. She’d definitely never refuse to take her pills.
I inch closer to the door the screaming is coming from. The nurses closed it, but I can hear it through the walls.
“Why does she get to go?” the scream reverberates. “Why does she get to go and I don’t? I want to leave! Let me go! Let me go! Get your hands off me, you filthy bitch!”
I recognize that voice. Sophia. But that can’t be right. Sophia wouldn’t sound so harsh, so feral.
“I hate her, I hate you all! I fucking hate you! Get away from me! Leave me alone!”
The words are all wrong. I slowly peer around the corner and into a tiny slit of window unprotected by the curtain. I can’t see much, but I see Sophia’s legs flailing on the bed as the nurses try to restrain her. I see Naomi walk by with a syringe in her hand. Sophia fights, the bed shuddering as she beats her legs harder. And then her feet move slower. Her screaming becomes softer, hoarse shouts I can barely hear anymore through the glass.