by Ryan Schow
“So why did she lie to me knowing it would hurt me?” Christian asked. “And when did she go under again? Did you pay for this?”
“No, she didn’t go under. She died. That’s why she’s mad at you, and maybe why I’m having a hard time here. You did this to her. You tricked her when you sent her to Astor Academy. You tricked us both, and so now she’s mad at you.”
“I gave her everything she wanted!”
“Good Christ, you’re so dense sometimes,” Orianna said as if the truth was exhausting and she was tired of saying it.
“I’m dense?”
“Oh, my God!” she laughed. “Yes you, dummy!” There was a moment of baffled silence that she eventually broke by saying, “I’m sorry for snapping. And laughing. It’s just…I don’t know…why don’t you come over and I’ll explain it to you. I’m cooking dinner and my date flaked. Said something about…whatever. Basically, if you don’t come over, I’m cooking for two and eating for one. Which is depressing as shit, so come over for dinner already.”
He didn’t say anything. He basically gave her the over-the-phone silent treatment. Like he was trying to decide if he had something better to do.
“Earth to Christian? Hello?” she said. “Are you coming or what?”
“It’s refreshing getting your leftover affections.”
“Well let’s not make a thing of it,” she said, relieved he was coming over, but still playing coy.
“Yeah?” he said. “How’s this for not making a thing of it?”
And then he hung up. Um…WTF? Seriously?
A few minutes later, she text him: SO ARE WE EATING TOGETHER OR AM I EATING ALONE?
He text her back: SHOWERING. BE OVER IN 1 HR.
She text him again: AN HOUR? GOD YOU’RE SUCH A GIRL!
She waited for a return text, but when she got none, she uncorked a bottle of Levy and McClellan Cabernet Sauvignon. The 2008 red was bright ruby red and just what she needed to take the edge off.
She let the bottle breathe, then poured the sweet smelling wine into her favorite glass. Swirling the contents, subconsciously studying the tears, she let herself unwind into the moment. A sniff of the wine filled her nose with the scents of crushed blackberry, licorice pastille and violet. Beneath that were hints of wood spices. She took her first sip, swished it around in her mouth and savored first the obvious flavors, then the more subtle hints of black raspberry and espresso.
Leaning back into the kitchen island, she felt herself relaxing, then she dreamt of Christian in the shower, and how once, in New York, the two of them had the most amazing sex ever.
She checked the time, then opened her laptop to the internet browser where she clicked on her favorites section titled “Take Out.” After a minute, she went to Su Hong’s website, then called in her order: steamed vegetarian dumplings, Szechwan-style beef in hand-shaved noodle soup, one order of General Chicken and beef with Shitake mushroom & bamboo shoots. After that, she corked the wine then got ready for what would either be an amazing night with Christian, or another Christian Swann disappointment.
In the bathroom, she pulled her skirt up and pulled her panties aside, checking her lady business in the mirror. She should shave. Just in case. Then again, Christian didn’t like her shaved. At least, he admitted he didn’t like her shaved when she was Margaret. He said that shaved vaginas were for twenty year olds. Which was absurd, but whatever. It wouldn’t matter anyway. Not with him losing interest in her by the day now that she made a habit of pushing him away. He had sex with her in New York, she reminded herself, which felt good.
We had sex.
Back then, that had been enough. Then again, she’d been feeling awfully vulnerable. And now? Now she was just tired of being alone. She thought, what is wrong with me? Moving her panties back over her peach, she dropped her skirt and blew out an exhausted sigh.
She knew exactly what was wrong with her.
“You were a lying, cheating, manipulative, abusive coke whore who wanted nothing more than the perfect paparazzi picture and all the attention it brought,” she said to her reflection. “You hurt him. You devastated him. And now he’s rejecting you like you rejected him, and you totally deserve it.”
Or maybe she was reading things wrong. She did that sometimes.
That said, she touched up her eye shadow and her lipstick, puckered her perfect lips, marveled once again at her reflection. She was perfect. Which was startlingly uncomfortable at first. Now she was getting used to looking in the mirror. She wasn’t feeling like such a stranger.
“I’m devastated, Christian,” she whispered.
But she didn’t believe it anymore. That was an old song, old programming that no longer had such a deep, emotional hold on her. Abby was alive as Raven, and she loved Orianna. They were no longer enemies; they were now mother and daughter. Good things were happening, not with her and Christian, but with her and her daughter. Could that be enough for now?
It could.
“My daughter,” she said, proud. Then quietly, satisfied, she whispered with amazement, “My daughter.”
2
Before heading into town to pick up dinner, she went to the bathroom, stripped from the waist down, then got in the shower and shaved herself clean. She checked her vagina in the mirror when she was all done. Orianna pulled herself this way and that; not a stubbled hair in sight. There was something about having a bare-to-the-skin peach that made her feel sexy, young and ready. When she was dressed again, and on her way to Su Hong’s to pick up dinner, the thrilling sensations moving in low currents inside her gently subsided.
She felt her lovely mouth stagger into a frown. Shaved or not, she pushed Christian away, right into the arms of Rebecca’s tutor. Bethany. It wasn’t his fault. He wanted Orianna. He begged for her. That he had become someone else’s in the wake of her rejection wasn’t on him. It was on her.
Located on El Camino Real in Palo Alto, Su Hong’s was a single story restaurant made of faux rock siding, glass and old wood. She parked in the small lot and headed inside. Waiting for her food, she gazed outside, eyes staring at two sidewalk trees, a metal light pole, eight newspaper dispensaries with both American and Chinese newspapers and a restaurant strangely called The Sea by Alexander’s Steakhouse across six lanes of asphalt. Like it was a book and not someplace to eat. But for a second she saw none of this. All she could think about was her family.
Invariably, her mind went back to Rebecca’s tutor.
Bethany.
If Christian was seeing her, she didn’t blame him. The girl was attractive and light hearted, and she had an ease about herself Orianna never had as Margaret. She was jealous. Filled with gobs and gobs of it.
“Ma’am?” a short Chinese waitress with a stained apron said. Smiling, returning to the moment, Orianna paid for her meal, tipped the woman generously, then took her food and drove back home.
For the thousandth time since getting out of rehab and swearing off drugs, she wondered if too much water had gone under the bridge. She began suspecting the worst. Could her relationship with Christian be damaged beyond repair? Perhaps. There was something authentic in the way Christian had stopped pursuing her.
I rejected him first, she reminded herself.
Now he was standing on principle. Like his subtle rejections stood as punishment for every emotional atrocity she’d ever committed. If she weren’t so damn stupid in matters of love and self-indulgence, she’d just admit she wanted him back. Was that so hard? It was.
God, why was it so hard?!
Back home, Christian arrived looking scrumptious. He leaned in and kissed her dispassionately on the cheek, then breezed by her, heading back to the kitchen with a bottle of wine in hand. Orianna touched her face where Christian kissed her, not surprised that she wanted more. She shut the door and followed him into the kitchen where she’d set the table for two.
The entire place smelled like Chinese.
She was famished.
“Your cooking smells am
azing,” he said, sarcastically.
“Su Hong’s,” she said.
“I figured.”
Over Su Hong’s delicious and most certainly fattening meal, they shared a mildly intoxicating discussion about Raven, tried not to dwell too much on their massive failures as parents, and before she knew it, they had polished off a 2010 Gaja Barbarecso, a juicy Italian red wine made from Nebbolio grapes grown in the Langhe area of Piedmont. With enough drinks in them, something forgettable was said that struck them both as funny, then Christian decided to call it night.
As she feared, she shaved for nothing. She was half-drunk with a gorgeous dinner date and in the end, she’d go to bed alone, unlaid, and wake up with a headache and this perfectly bald, perfectly neglected pussy.
Christian kissed her good-bye on the cheek, thanked her for her hospitality, and walked to his car having no idea how clean and smooth her flower was. Because that was who he was becoming: immune to her charms, subtle as they were.
She almost chased after him and asked if he was still seeing Bethany, but she didn’t. To get on with her own life, it was time for her to start seeing other people. Just not Christian, and not the writer.
God, most definitely not the writer.
Terrorist, Mercenary, Mass Murderer
1
It’s not safe to transport the badly dressed corpse across campus, even with school in session. So that night—so late it’s early in the morning—I carry Tavares across campus. Upstairs, in his dorm, I open his door with my mind, refusing to leave any trace evidence of myself behind. Gently, I lay him on his bed.
Leaving him like this, dead, no evidence to say where he died, or why, I just stare at him and mourn his passing. Sadness is a withering rose inside me. The rose is my soul. When am I going to stop doing things that make me so sad? Things that make me so bad?
A vision of my future self stabs into my brain and the answer that hits me first is: apparently never. Oh, what have I done? I ask for the hundredth time. What have I become?
With my mind, I ease him on his side, facing away from me, so he looks asleep rather than bled dry and dead. My imagination soars. Someone from his family is going to find him like this. Sabrina. She’s going to find him and she will forever suffer because of it.
Death has a way of ruining a person. People. Entire families.
For a second, I can’t help thinking about Maggie and all the grief her suicide brought me, and I know this will feel the same to the Baldridge’s. I don’t know Tavares’s mother, or much of Sabrina, but their lives will be forever tainted by what I have done. By what Delgado and Senator Wexford did to us all.
I told Tavares’s father who I was and what I did. He knows this isn’t my fault. I’m a pawn. Someone’s weapon. Not in my own control.
That I can be manipulated is no longer a question. It’s a fact. Am I still vulnerable? Was this a one-off kill? Have I been programmed to kill only Tavares and be done? Or am I now someone else’s weapon, passed from Delgado and that righteous scab Senator Wexford to someone else? I sense I am now no one’s weapon but my own. Yet how can I be sure?
I suppose only time will tell.
I have to know the truth, though, but I won’t know anything because this programming in my mind, who knows how deeply ingrained it is? My only hope is it ended with Delgado. That Tavares was my one and only target.
Then again, I can’t help fearing I’ll find another lover, or a best friend, or even be sitting at home one day only to wake up with someone’s arterial blood hosed all over me. Sprayed all over the room the same way Tavares’s blood had soaked everything in sight.
My thoughts skip back to that moment.
We’d been making love. It was beautiful, sensual, utterly perfect. Then some force inside of me dragged me down so deep into myself I couldn’t stop my body from killing him. Who, or what, took me over? And how am I supposed to recover from that?
Looking at Tavares in bed, how he could be alive right now, just asleep, I know I won’t be able to live with this. I can’t go through life not being enraged by the injustice that perpetually defines this life of mine. This was done to me. This loathsome act of horror…it was done to me against my will.
My God, I want to lose my shit on a massive scale right now! “Breathe,” I tell myself. But I’m not breathing. Not with everything I know.
Breathe.
The list of names responsible tick off in my mind. I see every single miserable asshole who had a hand in making me who I am, tracing all the way back to my father. He was responsible. He dirtied his hands, too. Indirectly, and not on purpose, but he was responsible never-the-less. To think he did all this just to make me not fat and not ugly.
How stupid does that sound?! The world is and will forever be changed because one woman abhorred her beastly child and that child hated her piggy-fat and unfortunate looks.
Misguided brilliance is what this was.
Regardless of the circumstance, justified or not, I know revenge to be a road wrought with peril. A road I’ve traveled far too often. Where has all this anger and justice gotten me? Who am I as a result of this rage? The answer sits in my brain like a drink of rotten milk; the answer is lying on a gurney in Dr. Holland’s lab. Who I am as a result of my father, Gerhard/Holland, Delgado and the creepy doctor from Dulce is a hundreds-of-years-old-slab-of-ruined-meat thrust back in time.
I am a terrorist. A mercenary. A mass murderer of prominent, formidable people according to future Alice.
That’s who I become, in the future, and it’s still not good enough to pacify me. I can change my future, though, can’t I? If there’s a way to stop me from doing…what I do in the future, then shouldn’t I try? Maybe this is why future me wanted future Alice to take her/me back here, to show me what I have become, so that I may change the course of our lives.
So that I may never become her.
2
Sleeping sometimes sucks. When your dreams are reduced to a surreal compilation of all the bad shit happening in your life, the last thing a girl wants is sleep. Oh how I used to love sleeping! It was the best escape from life ever! Now there is no escape from life. No way to cull the craziness unfolding inside me.
After smuggling Tavares back to his room, I lay in my bed in the dark thinking about Maggie and how twisted her thoughts must have become to kill herself. Can I kill myself the same way Maggie did? Simply make the decision and have all traces of me gone, save for the memories I left behind for others?
Can I do it? I mean, is it physically possible?
The doctor from Dulce says everyone like me kills themselves, so it is possible. Then again, I have to find a way to tear out my own heart, hack off my own head, dismember myself, burn myself and then scatter all of me in various bodies of water all over the world. Unless I take these precautions, I’m pretty sure I’d just come back again and again.
Oh, Maggie. You’re so lucky.
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, I think, I wish you hadn’t gone and suicided yourself. So much hurt for what you’ve done corrupts me, wounds me, riles me. I hate you, you selfish bitch.
I love you.
Sleep sneaks in, steals me unaware, then it thrusts me into a nightmare starring the monstrous Dr. Heim, the Nazi soldier with Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum who cut my chest open, poured gasoline into my heart, then lit me on fire. In the dream, he’s coming out of the ground, clawing his way out of Kaitlyn Whitaker’s grave, his teeth full of dirt, maggots and worms slithering around in his empty eye sockets, bugs falling out of his nostrils. That rotting piece of Nazi garbage, I can’t stop dreaming of him coming out of the ground for me—
—and then my eyes shoot open to the break of dawn and a body damp with sweat. The sheets are stuck to my legs, to the sweat soaked curve of my lower back. Even my pillow holds small shapes of wetness.
Dragging myself out of bed, my eyes hollow and crusted with evidence of my slumber, my body weary with the kind of emotional exhaustion that makes you feel slow,
old and desperate for reprieve, I start a pot of coffee then warm the shower. Shorts and underwear come off together; t-shirt and then my hairband are dropped to the floor. I turn and face the mirror, imagine my eye as destroyed the same way her eye was destroyed, imagine a leg and arm…gone. Just hacked the f*ck off. My naked body shivers with goosebumps.
Inside the shower, the hot water and steam relax me. I wash my hair, soap my body, shave my legs and underarms, and then I turn the water hotter and sit down in the shower, letting the scalding hot streams drill my flesh. Why do I feel so weak? I can barely function.
So much for being superhuman.
I wonder, did Superman ever get a violence hangover? Did Wonder Woman ever look at her costume and a crappy situation and choose ice cream and a movie instead? Did she ever think she’d rather be at the day spa getting a facial and a brow wax than saving…whomever?
I would totally leave a damsel in distress right now. Serious. As cowardly as this sounds, I’d let cats stay stuck in trees if it meant me getting back to, well…me.
The coffee does me good, and of course, I peruse Facebook and SocioSphere looking for bits of gossip to fuel and entertain me. Anything to keep my mind off my life. I study Netty’s page. It hasn’t changed in awhile and this makes me want to call her. But not now. My face and body are still waking up, and it’s likely I might spit fire on the first person who rubs me the wrong way. A quick stroll to the cafeteria gets me there in time for the rest of the bacon, a few scoops of scrambled eggs and another cup of coffee. I eat late so I can eat alone. And I don’t look at anyone, even though there are a handful of kids still here. Class will be starting soon.
Not that I care.
I decide my education is a past-tense thing. Sometimes I don’t even know why I’m here. For the comfort of my friends?—friends who think I’m someone else? Or because of the familiarity of the school? I already blackmailed myself into a veritable fortune, so I don’t need Astor for financial gain. But there is something dysfunctional and comforting in being close to Holland. I’m feeling duplicitous, even a bit hypocritical admitting this, but there you have it. I’m insane. The man is my creator. He is, by definition, my God. My freaking nemesis.