She looked through the refrigerator, the freezer, the pantry, and back again in case anything decided to come out of hiding and surrender itself. She wanted something sweet but not sugar, solid but not thick, meaty but not…meat.
She wanted to stop thinking about Lucia. Yeah, fat chance.
Christ, but that was a weird dream. What’d it even mean? She’d been Lucia—and she knew a lot of lesbians had trouble deciding if a pretty girl was a life goal or a wife goal, but that’d never been a problem between them. Then there’d been a shark attack or something. Okay, that was explainable, sharks were scary, even if you were a girl who liked girls. But then that boat, and the mist that turned into rats that turned into a wolf that turned into a bat? What was that, six different Syfy Original Movies at once?
Maybe it was supposed to be how Lucia saw her. That made sense. She’d gotten high, so her subconscious had been high as well. It’d been trying to tell her that Lucia saw her as a—shark that turned into mist that turned into rats? This was fucking ridiculous.
Okay, Lucia probably thought sharks were cool, who didn’t? And mist was nice. No one was crazy about it, but it wasn’t bad. She’d been Lucia’s friend, then Lucia’s uncool friend, then… Rats. Wolf. Bat.
Lucia liked bats, right?
She could feel herself getting a headache, trying to fit this one random nightmare into a message from God regarding her lesbian crush, so she fiddled with her laptop and found an e-mail from Lucia that had gotten caught in her spam folder. Just seeing her e-mail address was enough to give Mindy a lesbian ’Nam flashback.
God, how could she have fallen in love with a straight girl? Especially when she herself was like, half a straight girl? She had straight girl ancestry! Really, Lucia was way out of line letting Mindy crush on her when they were both in the straight girl faction.
“I’m not thinking about Lucia,” Mindy said out loud, hoping that her brain would listen. She kept narrating as she went. “I am opening an e-mail from a friend. I am seeing that she sent me a video while I was at work with no information other than subject line ‘Hey, slut, look at this.’” It was a set video from the new Frankenstein movie they were filming, Frankenstein: Evolution. “I am wondering why my friend is obsessed with Frankenstein. Is it just since she learned MMA fighting, or did she have a thing for Boris Karloff too?” Even Boris Karloff had more pull than her. “Shut up, Mindy. Look at the blurry people fighting in Vancouver.”
Was she in the friend zone? Shit, she was in the friend zone. She was the kind of person who complained about the friend zone. She was being totally unfair to Lucia…though that was after Lucia had been unfair to her and generally unreliable, insulting, straight, calling her that word… “Which, coincidentally, maybe makes her not dating material, Mindy?” she said aloud, to herself.
In shaky detail she watched a black-clad villain confront ol’ Frank. “You won’t kill me, Frankenstein—you’re no killer!”
Frank replied, “No…I’m not…but I have the arms of one…” Several snapping noises followed. Why did people keep saying he wasn’t a killer? He clearly was.
She’d gone to the damn party just wanting to know how Lucia felt. Well, now she knew. She knew what Lucia had said, and that was all that mattered. Who gave a shit if deep down, Lucia had some boner for her, because up on the surface, out loud, she had said what she’d said and done what she’d done, and it wasn’t all sweet and caring—Lucia wasn’t her girlfriend and didn’t want to be. She saw Mindy as a shark, or a mist, or a bat—anything but a lover.
The screen of Mindy’s phone blinked Lucia’s name at her, flashing—Call her. Call her—like Morse code. It was just impossible not to hit the call button. The screen cleared, filled instead with a selfie Lucia had made of the two of them together. It shook in her hand ringing Lucia’s number.
Lucia’s phone rang.
On the porch.
Right outside the front door.
Mindy looked at that door like it was about to break down. She cancelled the call on her cell phone. The ringing stopped. The house was silent. Mindy’s thoughts were speeding up, pulling her along at a hundred miles an hour. Probably just Lucia. Probably just wanted to apologize for once in her life. So why was she thinking of going to her parents’ room, crawling into bed with them like she was a child who’d had a nightmare? No. Couldn’t. They were off visiting relatives. She had the house to herself. Par-tay, she heard Lucia say.
She called Lucia’s number again.
The phone rang on the other side of the door almost before she pressed call, and it was louder and closer, right in her ear. A ghost standing right in front of her, heard but not seen. Mindy jabbed disconnect with her thumb, hit it until her phone went dead and dark, then set the phone down on the floor like a dead cockroach. She looked through the door’s spyhole and saw Lucia. Well, she thought it was Lucia. Her back was turned.
Lucia probably wanted to patch things up, stop this all before it festered, and Mindy didn’t want to be the pigheaded one, the one wanting Lucia to grovel and suffer and love her. She wanted to be fair. She wanted to be evenhanded. She wanted to forgive Lucia so much she could’ve thanked her for apologizing. She threw the door open and saw Lucia in the glare of the porch light.
It wasn’t her. Mindy thought that, over and over, more than anything else. Lucia wouldn’t be caught dead in tattered, stained clothes like that—though she had been wearing those shorts and that tank top earlier. Was that a chain winding down her leg?
And what could Lucia possibly have spilled on herself to turn so much of her clothes, so much of her skin that dark, brackish color…like some kind of sludge? And the makeup smeared like melted wax, the bruises making a camouflage pattern of her skin—her skin that was bleached white, but somehow dim, somehow sallow. Her hair was a shade of yellow that was nearly white, reaching down her shoulders like pallid fingers. The brightest things on her were the bits of seaweed that tangled with the muck dripping off her. And all of it wrapped in plastic that Lucia clutched to her like a child’s blankie.
Greek ruins. You saw what was left, and it was enough to make you wish you had been there in their heyday, seeing them as they were meant to be. There was just enough of Lucia left for Mindy to wish that. She couldn’t remember what Lucia had looked like just a few hours ago. All she could see was the damage.
Her mind ran a marathon to find something to say. Anything. “Lucia,” she said, hacking the words up like phlegm, “is this a grunge thing?”
Mindy’s brain kept clawing at memories, trying to throw them in front of this walking corpse, blot it out. So when Lucia fell, Mindy remembered how cheerleader stunts went wrong, adolescents fell from the top of a pyramid of girl and broke their necks, and Mindy lunged forward to catch her, snaking her arms into layers of plastic and skin and clothes.
Lucia was slippery, one huge mass of slime, but Mindy wouldn’t let her fall. She grasped at her over and over again as the plastic sheeting fell away and the chain unwound, coiling onto Mindy’s mom’s begonias. The end had a fist-sized chunk of cement attached. Mindy grazed it with her eyes, thought cinder block, and finally got a firm hold on Lucia.
She forced her up—how was Lucia so heavy, how could she be at the top of all those human pyramids, how could a bunch of anorexics lift her that high? She was a messy, ungainly weight, seemingly boneless; her head flopped forward, mouth open, and down came a slap of water, then a steady trickle like the flow from a water cooler. Water that hit the pavement in fits and hacks, coming down red, splatting like a lanced boil on the floor of the porch.
The last strings of it swung from out of Lucia’s throat like a pendulum. Mindy fought the urge to wipe it away for her. Instead, she got Lucia up, got her head under Lucia’s arm like she was a wounded soldier in a war movie, and together they took one big step into the house.
Only Lucia didn’t go through the door. Straining under her weight, Mindy looked around to see that Lucia’s other arm had somehow gotten snagged on
the doorway. Putting more of Lucia’s weight on herself, Mindy reached across Lucia’s body and pulled her arm tight to the side of her body.
Again, Mindy tried to shoot them through the front door. They ground to a halt like a ship running ashore, no coordination at all. Mindy looked back and saw that Lucia’s foot was clawing at the side of the door. She pulled, trying to dislodge it, but it was like Lucia’s fucking leg had been nailed to the wall.
“Come on, get in here!” Mindy hissed, and Lucia came loose with her next great heave. They toppled into the house all at once, Lucia landing on top of Mindy. Mindy felt all of her body, and there wasn’t a spark of warmth in any of it. Just wet, leaden stuff.
She could’ve been a corpse. Dead weight. Except Lucia stood there with her head erect, chin up, eyes aimed at Mindy the same way NASA pointed telescopes at distant galaxies. There was something in those eyes. Mindy didn’t know what it was.
Then Lucia’s head dropped. For a moment of hell, Mindy thought she’d died. But she was just bowing her head to vomit, another liter of red-tinged water rushing out of her mouth and pushing down on Mindy’s chest. It was so cold and there was so much of it; the chill gripped Mindy’s torso like she was inside a block of ice. Summoning all her strength, she pushed at Lucia and managed to shove her off so they were lying side by side on their backs.
Above them the chandelier that the Murphys had inherited from Grandma’s house tinkled in the breeze from the open door.
Deep breath. Count to five. One-two-three-four-five. Now recap. She’d gone to a party on Lake Travis, had a break-up-without-the-relationship with Lucia, total bullshit, and now Lucia was on her landing, soaked to the bone and looking like a virgin at the end of a slasher movie. And throwing up enough water to keep SeaWorld in business. It was just like that dream. That fucking dream. It wouldn’t let her go.
Just go to bed! The thought was so loud and sudden that Mindy almost held her hands over her ears. She could just go back to bed. Pull the covers over herself and go back to sleep and in the morning—what could possibly happen in the morning? In the light of day?
Call 911? Yeah, and explain to the authorities that a high school student had taken drugs right before college applications went out. That’d go over well. Only call 911 if absolutely necessary. Mindy wrote that down on a mental checklist, underlined it, put a star next to it. First she’d check Lucia’s pulse. If it was fucked—excuse the medical jargon—then Mindy would call an ambulance. She turned to Lucia and didn’t see her. Just her bare feet on the linoleum tiles, green with muck.
Mindy scrambled to her feet. Something about being prone before this version of Lucia made her feel she was tempting fate. Like lying on the train tracks while you heard the whistle. But standing before her, Lucia still seemed so much taller than her. Looking down at her from on high—from the top of a microscope with Mindy on the slide.
Mindy didn’t know where she got the courage, but she grabbed Lucia’s hand. Limp and wet and so pliant it seemed it would run through Mindy’s fingers if she squeezed just a fraction too hard. “Lucia? We have to get you out of those wet clothes, okay? Come on. Come with me. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She pulled, ignoring the mad picture behind her eyelids when she blinked—the skin of Lucia’s hand coming off in hers, like an oversized glove. That didn’t happen, but Lucia didn’t move either. She was putting up resistance. Limp as she was, she moved only reluctantly with Mindy’s efforts, like she was still in the water. At her pace, they went up the stairs, leaving muddy footprints on each step. In the dark, they could’ve been blood.
In the bathroom, Lucia almost blended into the white tiles, the plaster walls, the linen towels. The light washed her out, made her almost translucent. Only the trail of muck she left behind her on the upstairs carpet marked her. The afterbirth of being born from the darkness. Mindy’s English teacher would love that one. She should work it into a poem. Wouldn’t even have to rhyme.
“Okay, let’s just…let’s get you…” Mindy barely knew what she was saying. Like some sort of rictus, Lucia’s lips had pulled back into a lascivious smile. Like Mindy was a cute boy or something. Mindy turned on the shower, still at a loss. “It takes a minute to heat up. Do you want to take your clothes off?”
It seemed impossible, but Lucia’s smile widened. She raked off her tank top, dropping it in the hamper behind Mindy. The motion pressed them together, but all Mindy felt was the nervous sweat under her arms and below her bangs. When Lucia backed away, Mindy could see her cute bra lined with scum and the marking on her belly.
It was right below her belly button like a C-section scar, almost covered by her shorts. Rings of purpling, reddening, blackening flesh—the discoloration of a spider or snake bite, as wide as a dinner plate and centered around two puncture marks.
Almost unnoticeable except for the bruised corona that surrounded them. Mindy thought it might’ve been left there by the chain that’d been wrapped around her. What the chain had been doing there, Mindy would not think about.
Beside them, the shower hissed and drizzled all the way to the drain. Mindy felt momentarily guilty over how much water she was wasting. And during a drought too. “El, you have to take off all your clothes to take a shower.”
Lucia giggled coyly, as if Mindy had just said some very naughty euphemism. Mindy realized she’d have to do it herself.
“Okay, okay, I’ll do it. You just stop me if you start…whatever.”
Mindy undid Lucia’s belt—it was on tighter than a vise—and unbuttoned her shorts. Lucia kept giggling, staccato now, in fresh little bursts. Mindy got down on her knees and hauled the denim down. Breathed a sigh of relief; Lucia still had her panties on. The bloody muck, mucky blood had soaked into them as well. Mindy thought about getting a Ziploc bag to put them in but was too worried Lucia would bolt or hurt herself.
So Mindy tried to remember everything she knew about handling blood-stuff: she relocated all of Lucia’s clothes to the sink, then washed her hands with soap in the shower spray. All while Lucia stood there, still smiling. Her teeth were brown; she was chewing something. When Mindy noticed, she spat it out like a child caught chewing gum in church.
Was that a flap of skin?
Mindy couldn’t think about it for long. Lucia was running her hands over her body like she’d noticed it for the first time. She brushed a finger over her bloody nipple. Raised it to her lips with a keen interest.
“No! Bad! No!” Mindy stopped, realizing she was yelling at Lucia like a dog. And Lucia was growling, also like a dog. Mindy took Lucia’s hands, unfortunately smearing her palm with what felt like cold snot. “Listen, Sweet Tarts, I can’t see a wound, so I don’t think this is your blood, which is awesome, but it also makes me worried that maybe it has something gross in it? Like about that time you told me Pete Wentz had halitosis? Something like that. So we need to wash it off, ’kay? Just, you know…”
She embraced Lucia, and together, they stepped under the shower spray. Lucia stiffened like it’d taken her by surprise, but Mindy stayed with her, petting her face and sides, soothing her.
“It’s okay, baby. You’re okay. You’re safe. Just take some deep breaths and…keep breathing, I guess.”
Lucia looked down, watching the muck fall off her and swirl down the drain. It was so black. Mindy wondered if that was normal. Then Lucia was sobbing, loud banshee wails that echoed inhumanly in the shower stall. Mindy wrapped her up tight in her arms, the water soaking them both. Warm now. Almost warm enough to distract Mindy from the hunk of ice in her arms.
CHAPTER 9
Mindy held her until she went totally still, then a little longer, then gently broke away. Lucia was again petrified inside her eerie silence.
Pulling the showerhead off on its extendable hose, Mindy efficiently scrubbed Lucia of all the blood and dirt she could find. Leaves and blades of grass tumbled from her hair. Mindy was careful with her bruise; with all of her lower belly. But it seemed to have faded a little sinc
e Mindy had last noticed it. Washing the dirt away had to help.
“I think I have some clothes that would fit you—” Mindy’s eyes briefly flitted over Lucia’s slender body. “Yeah, I think I have all clothes that would fit you, so I’ll just go grab them…”
Lucia grabbed her wrist before she could even turn to leave. “Mindy.”
Mindy blinked. “That’s right, I’m…Mindy.” She brushed some of the hair out of Lucia’s face. Her friend was smiling again. “I’ll be right back, I have…”
Lucia shook her head slowly, her toothy smile catching new light at every angle.
“Okay.” Mindy took off her water-logged glasses and looked around. It took her a second to look under her own damn feet. The bathtub! From what she’d read of her mom’s old pregnancy handbooks, taking a warm bath was great with stress.
Mindy turned the shower on again to wash out the bottom of the tub before it could ring, then put in the stopper and turned on the faucet. Steaming hot water. She stepped out of the bath as it rose, crawling up the soles of Lucia’s fish-belly white feet. They should be pink. They should be tan. It was like Lucia had frostbite and Mindy just couldn’t warm her, no matter what she did.
When she shut off the faucet, the only sound was the water dripping off Lucia. Mindy gulped down a sudden need to look at Lucia. She was the only girl in town who went into Austin for a tanning salon, and it paid off. And now the blood was off her and the bruises had faded, all but the one over her womb. Mindy could barely look, even to find out if the rumors were true about Lucia’s pierced clit.
“Okay-doke, artichoke, lie down…just lie…down.”
Lucia didn’t move.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 11