Vagablonde

by Anna Dorn

  Soon we’re behind the shoji panes and Jax is playing us a bunch of beats, and rhymes start swirling through my head.

  The next morning I wake up with a cat lying on my chest. I push her off and she paws my face. I push her again and she obeys. I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that one of my cats is missing. I wonder if Missy misses Ennui. Probably not. God knows I don’t. Cats are selfish, and that’s why I respect them.

  I’m so tired. The light in my room is bright as hell. I normally wake up early, around seven. But this light suggests it’s much later.

  I grab my phone. 10:00 A.M. Damn. I feel an anxious pang about work emails I may have missed. But then I remember I’m an artist now.

  I have a bunch of texts on my phone.

  From Jax: Flames, Vaga. Gotta keep up this momentum. Almost Famous. Then a crying-laughing sideways-face emoji.

  The night floods back to me. Last night I wrote a song making fun of that dumb “it’s all happening” line. Making fun but also embracing it, just like Nina said. That’s our vibe. I think about how critics can shape artists, whether that’s okay, and if I even trust Nina. The cat jumps on me again and I know I have to feed her, but I’m too tired to get up.

  From Jake Perez: Just saw your ex at Gelson’s. He cornered me in the produce aisle. Your Venus conjunct Pluto issues are now impacting me and this is not okay. Call me.

  From Nina: I heard you still got it. I get a little flicker of excitement, then paranoia. I wonder who told her that. Does she like me as a person or just as a musician to write about? These are very celebrity issues, I think, and start to feel better. These are the types of issues I’ve wanted since I moved to LA.

  Missy is now screaming bloody murder. I sit up and my head pounds. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. I wonder if it’s the alcohol and the drugs or the creative expression or the new crush or all of the above. I lie back down and fall asleep to the sound of Missy’s screams.

  When I wake up again, it’s around twelve. I can’t remember the last time I’ve slept until twelve. Probably college. I call Jake Perez and we decide to get lunch. Well, breakfast for me. We go to this weird diner I’ve never been to, for good reason. Jake is obsessed with terrible diners because they remind him of Pulp Fiction and his taste is very obvious. I’m not really a diner person. They never seem to have alcohol and the lighting is always unflattering and I never know what to order. I go mostly because whenever Jake Perez accuses me of being a bad friend I can say, “But I go to all those terrible diners you love.”

  “You need a restraining order” is the first thing Jake says when we sit down. He always took Thomas’s obsession with me a little too seriously. Sure, it was annoying the way he continued to insert himself in my life after our breakup, but ultimately harmless and slightly flattering. Not that his opinion means anything.

  Jake orders something called “Southern Decadence” that looks revolting.

  I order a spinach omelet and Jake says, “You always have to make me look bad with your healthy-ass orders, don’t you?”

  “Nothing in this restaurant is healthy,” I say. “I can assure you.”

  We both order black coffee, which cannot come soon enough.

  “So what did he say?” I ask.

  “He said he’s worried about you.”

  My stomach sinks a bit, but I say nothing. I don’t like when people worry about me, but I’m also flattered my lame ex is still paying attention. He must be watching my Instagram Stories. When I wake up and see that little red circle around my Insta-gram avatar, I immediately start deleting. I’m forced to see the first frame, which is typically me with droopy eyes singing the wrong words to a song, my arm around someone I don’t know.

  The coffee comes and I gulp so quickly it burns my tongue. I sip some water to soothe it.

  “I mean, you’ve def been on one,” Jake says. “But the point is that’s none of his business.”

  “True,” I say. Should I be worried about myself? Anxiety rises in my chest and wraps its grip around my throat. I swallow with difficulty.

  “But get this,” Jake Perez says. He wipes a droplet of coffee off his lip. “He told me he saw the nudies of you on le Tumb-dizzle.”

  “Nudies?” is all I can manage. What year is this?

  Jake lowers his volume to a whisper, but it still feels like he’s screaming: “Your naked photos!”

  “I got that,” I say. “I was just surprised by your phrasing.” I take another sip of coffee. My gaze floats toward the window and it’s too bright so I look away.

  “Jesus, Prue,” Jake says. “The things you choose to dwell on are always so bizarre.” Our food comes and both plates look disgusting, unidentifiable food substances drowned in oil. Jake looks thrilled and begins to dig in. I focus on poking my omelet with my fork. It’s bouncy, like rubber.

  “I mean,” Jake says when he comes up for air. “Aren’t you freaked out?”

  “Can we talk about something else?” I ask. “Like… how are you?”

  “Wow,” says Jake Perez. “Prudence Van Teesen wants to discuss something other than Prudence Van Teesen. The moment I’ve been waiting for my entire life.”

  I stick out my tongue at him. Jake Perez smiles and begins to tell me, in excruciating detail, about the blow job he received the previous night in the McDonald’s parking lot behind Akbar.

  I quickly fall into a nice little artist routine. I start waking up at around noon. Feed the cat, make coffee, go for a walk. I normally listen to whatever we’ve recorded the night before. Sometimes I listen to Missy or Nicki Minaj or M.I.A. for inspiration. Sometimes I listen to MF Doom beats and make notes on my phone.

  Afterward I’ll eat something. I’ll go to brunch with Jake Perez and we’ll stare at our laptops, or I’ll got to brunch with Nina and I won’t be able to tell whether she’s flirting with me or neg-ging me or using me, and the mystery keeps me enticed.

  I start arriving at the Kingdom at around five or six. (There are only so many French braids I can do.) Once there, Pilar will hand me an Adderall and I’ll start writing ideas on my iPhone to the beat of Yumiko’s crazy Philly noise punk. I’ll go out every half hour and smoke a cigarette with Yumiko at her shrine. Jax emerges around 6:30 in a different kimono every day. I wonder how many he has.

  We get behind the shoji panes at around seven or eight, crack open PBRs, and Jax plays me some beats. He scrolls through them until I hear something that excites me, and then I hop in the “booth,” which is just three mattresses shoved in the corner. Jax swears he does this out of artistic preference rather than necessity. “The sound is more raw,” he says.

  I like it in there, alone and surrounded by cushions. Safe and not afraid at all. This is where I belong.

  I spit verses about the following topics: Wyatt Walcott’s hair, swallowing B vitamins with beer, killing tech bros at Burning Man, Clarissa Explains It All as a necessary antidote to mansplain-ing, and the grotesque noises men make while exercising. I know this from the notes on my phone, not from my memory.

  On day four, Beau greets me at the door with a massive DSLR in my face. I’m filled with fear, then a flicker of excitement. What the fuck is wrong with me?

  Jax appears behind Beau, arm around his shoulders. The hallway is illuminated with the hints of natural light. I’m confused. Why is Jax awake during the day?

  “Good news, Vaga,” Jax says.

  Beau snaps a photo and the click seems unnaturally loud. I jump a little. The flash burns my eyes.

  “We’re gonna be in FADER,” he says. “Print.”

  I unleash a little squeal.

  In the main room, Beau is pouring shots. I’m surprised to see Nina, who hasn’t joined any of our artist sessions. That’s what I’m calling them now. I said that to Jake Perez and he did a full-body eye roll, so I knew it was good. I prefer laughter, but I’ll take disgust. Any emotional reaction is good. Mimi Carey makes people cry every time she performs.

  Beau pours Nina a shot, a
big one. “Drink up, writer girl,” Jax says. This makes me giggle pretty hard for some reason. Nina looks at me like I’m insane. I just realize at this point that she’s probably writing the FADER story.

  Beau thrusts a shot glass in my hand. Then a massive puffy arm is around me. Yumiko. This sneaky bitch.

  Beau fills my shot glass with whiskey and I sip it.

  “Did you just sip your shot?” Yumiko yells in my ear. Then she grabs my shot glass out of my hand, throws it back. “No dead soldiers,” she says.

  Soon it feels much later and I’m on the edge of Jax’s bed in between Nina and Beau. I guess we’re not getting behind the panes tonight. Beau stands up and starts snapping pictures of us. He’s been taking photos all night, mostly of me and Jax. Some of Pilar and Yumiko. I wonder why he’s getting photos of Nina. She’s just the writer. I instinctively shift away from her. She grabs my waist, pulls me back toward her, laughs in my face. I want to be angry, but she looks cute, her freckles all scrunched. I tap her nose with my index finger, and she jabs me in the ribs.

  Pilar appears in the doorframe, her feathered jacket silhouetted by baby-blue light. She floats over and pulls my hand, twirls me in a circle. Mariah Carey’s “Honey” pours in from the other room.

  “The sexiest song of all time,” I mutter under my breath. Pilar doesn’t seem to hear me. No one notices me. Everyone is in their own fucked-up world.

  Pilar is looking over at the bed, giggling. I follow her gaze and am shocked by what I see.

  Nina and Beau are making out.

  Anger bubbles up inside me. I want to go over there and rip them apart. I thought Nina was in love with me. Isn’t this the whole point, why we’re blowing up on the internet, because I seduced the right person?

  I’m furious, but I don’t want it to show. No one will notice anyway. Nina and Beau are deep in French. Pilar is dancing around like a fairy. I take her hand and pull her into the other room. On the dance floor, Jax dances alone. He holds up a gold tray covered in white residue like Simba in The Lion King.

  “Yasss,” he says when he spots Pilar and me. “My queens.”

  This is good, I think. I’ll just dance it off. I’ll dance myself clean.

  The song switches to M.I.A.’s “Bamboo Banga.” I can do this. I chant the lyrics.

  Yumiko shimmies onto the dance floor and her parka shakes on the beat. She probably thinks this song is about her. Jax’s kimono quivers. Pilar’s feathered coat moves like a wave. I curse myself for not wearing a statement jacket.

  The image of Beau and Nina pops back into my head and my stomach churns. Why is it so upsetting to me? It’s not like we’re married. I didn’t even think I liked the girl. But I’m angry. So I leave.

  “I gotta go,” I say. I air-kiss everyone on the cheek and leave. No one seems to care.

  Outside the sky is a lighter blue than I expected. Four thirty A.M., I guess. I call a Lyft. While I wait for it to arrive, I smoke a cigarette and stare at the faint hint of the moon.

  The next day at around noon I go to Jake’s. I have no texts from Nina and that crushes me.

  “You look sad,” he says when he opens the front door. He’s wearing a ratty bathrobe and his facial hair is wild. “And skeletal.”

  I can’t help but feel good about this. I’ve always been thin, except for that two-year period when my metabolism slowed down at the end of high school without my realizing it and I was still eating Chipotle burritos as a snack. My mom snapped out of her depression enough to let me know my appearance was unacceptable. She shamed me skinny, just like she shamed me into law school: “You’re terrified of blood, Prue, and you still don’t understand the stock market. Law seems like the only viable option.”

  “Thank you,” I say, then kick off my Sambas.

  “It’s not a compliment,” he says. “You look sick.”

  “It’s probably the stress,” I say, then pause for dramatic effect, “of recording.” I know very well it’s the Adderall. I’ve been diagnosed with eating disorders a few times in my life, but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I’ve never been hospitalized or anything.

  “I’m making us popcorn,” Jake says. “With butter.”

  “Great,” I say. I lick my lips to show him I still have an appetite. But in reality I don’t. This always happens when my weight drops. It’ll be fine.

  We decide to watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which I kind of hate. I don’t care for voice-over. I hate Vicky and Cristina. If I wanted to see two frumpy, uptight white girls with too much money gallivant around Europe, I’d go back to high school. But María Elena. When she arrives at Juan Antonio’s straight from the mental hospital everything changes. The woman is my dream. Disheveled and unstable, angrily chain-smoking while screaming about being a “genius.”

  We lie in his bed and eat popcorn and he pets my hair, which feels nice. Jake Perez is one of the few people I allow to touch me. I guess Jax also falls into that category now.

  I feel weird when María Elena comes onto Cristina in the darkroom. This is normally my favorite scene, but this time it makes my skin crawl. Because I know they’re all going to have sex with that overrated man later. Throuples sicken me. They’re unnatural.

  I pull out my phone. And Jake rolls his eyes at me.

  I have no texts from Nina, only one from Jax.

  We’re taking today off. See you Saturday. Xx.

  I have no idea what day it is, but I assume Saturday is tomorrow. I’m glad we’re taking the day off. I need it. I’ve been working too hard.

  “I need to go home and take a nap,” I tell Jake.

  “Now?” Jake has a serious thing about finishing movies.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I grab my purse and head toward the door, then blow him a kiss. He responds by narrowing his eyes at me.

  As I start my Saab, I decide my next song will be called “Genius.”

  When I get home, I turn off my phone, eat a massive bowl of cereal, and then sleep for fifteen hours.

  TWELVE

  When I’m not dreaming about a surreal continuation of the night, I tend to be stuck on an airplane or in a faraway, nonexistent country without my benzos. But this time my dream is just a slight variation on an actual memory.

  It’s Christmas Eve and I’m twenty-one, home from my senior year of college. It’s after midnight and can’t find my phone. The house is quiet and snow falls under the streetlights outside. I slink into the kitchen, which I assume is empty. I jump when I see my mom, quietly buttering her sprouted toast in dim lighting.

  “You forgot your pants,” my mom says, eyeing my outfit, which is just a T-shirt. Light from the streetlamp bounces off her buttered knife, which terrifies me in dreamland.

  A buzzing sound suddenly echoes through the kitchen and I jump again, but my mom remains still. She eyes my phone on the marble counter and says, “Some girl keeps texting you.”

  My face reddens—my shame is intense and exaggerated in the dream. I snatch the phone and read my texts. It’s this girl Lara, a bisexual, my first experience with a woman.

  “Is there anything you need to tell me?” my mom asks.

  I start to panic. “I got into Berkeley Law,” I say. It’s true, but I wasn’t going to tell my mom or anyone else. I was going to move to Los Angeles and pursue music. But I froze, and I told her. And she was so happy. And snow was falling. And she hugged me and cried. And for the first time I felt like I had a mother.

  When I wake up I still feel horrible, like I’m lying under a pile of bricks. My room is filled with bright white light that dizzies me. Jake Perez put up these blackout curtains when I moved in four years ago that are clearly not doing their job. LA is too bright. That’s my one complaint. Shiny AF. I chuckle to myself a little, and phlegm loosens in my throat. I cough, which seems to lure the cat. Missy, whom I’m now calling Ennui because she seems depressed as hell, slinks in. Just as she meows, my stomach rumbles. It’s time to feed us. First I check Twitter. I now have 1,745 followers. Not
exactly a celebrity yet, but I’m getting there. I decide to fire off a fresh one:

  as a queer icon with academic aspirations,, i feel like,, i should at least pretend to have watched buffy

  As it loads, I become insecure that my new fan base is too young to know what Buffy is. I delete it, out of sight out of mind.

  I pour some food in Ennui’s bowl and then I pour some cereal in mine. I’m happy that we’re both eating. I like when someone tells me I look skeletal because I know it means I can start eating. My body may feel like shit but at least I have carbs to soothe me. When I finish the cereal, I chug the sweet milk. When I put it down, Ennui is staring at me. Judgmental bitch.

  “Jake Perez said I was skeletal,” I hiss at her.

  Because she’s a literal cat, she hisses back.

  In the Lyft on the way to Jax’s, I make some notes on my iPhone for “Genius.” I like how María Elena made a point to distinguish talent from genius. She was furious that Juan Antonio used the word “talent,” spitting it out like a slur. I feel the same way. Being talented is like being good at grammar. So you’ve mastered the tools arbitrarily determined by the stuffy white men in power. Mazel.

  But genius. Genius is something else entirely. Genius is tapping into the collective unconscious. Genius is confronting uncomfortable truths. Genius is elusive and subversive. It’s fucking the rules up against a wall.

  As we near Koreatown, I remove an Adderall from the mini blue Altoid tin I keep them in. I’m running low from the last handful Pilar gave me. It’s okay, I tell myself, there’s always more. As I place the blue miracle pill on my tongue, the driver eyes me suspiciously in the rearview mirror and I quickly avert my eyes. “Mmmm, minty,” I mutter.

  I open up Instagram and see a post from some idiots I went to high school with, smiling like freaks in front of Michelangelo’s David. They look so happy and proud of themselves you’d think they invented sculpture. I think about those frumpy idiots Vicky and Cristina. I can’t believe María Elena wanted to kiss one of them.