by Alice Bello
“Jesus, Dana. What the hell happened to you?” I felt his big paw of a hand touching my hair. I reached up and realized that my hair was wet yet hadn’t softened up a bit. A horrifying thought popped into my head—what if this shit doesn’t wash out!
I tried to smile through my degradation. “I was molested at the beauty salon.”
Thomas’ bark of a laugh was startlingly loud, and lasted long enough to piss me off.
I didn’t see where any of this was funny. I was glad we’d broken up, and suddenly seized by the desire to haul off and punch him in his laughing maw.
But I still couldn’t make his face out... just a fuzzy, smeared mess... probably just how my face looked.
“Let me walk you to your apartment,” Thomas said after he stopped laughing. He took me by the arm and navigated me down the street and into my building.
Even though I told him I’d be fine, he took me all the way to my door.
Maybe I’d underestimated him; I thought as he took my keys from me and unlocked my door and opened it. Maybe he was a decent guy after all.
But then I heard a strange bug-like sound, and then another.
It sounded like the camera click of a cell phone!
“Did you just take a picture of me?”
“Nah, I’d never do a thing like that.” Click, click.
“You asshole!”
I heard his big feet padding away down the hall. “The guys at work will love this. We’ve got an ex-girlfriend wall of shame. This will look great!”
“You’re an asshole!” I screamed at him again, shaking my head—why hadn’t I just stayed in bed?
“And you were lousy in bed!”
Chapter 4
Luckily, the hairspray washed out on the third wash. I vowed never to go to a beauty salon again. It took a good thirty minutes of showering to get everything sticky off me. And another ten minutes of eye drops to clear my vision. When I finally looked in the mirror my damp hair was already starting to frizz—obviously the hairspray was going to leave its mark on me — and my face was red and splotchy... but not as red as my eyes. They were swollen and bloodshot, and I think there were still traces of eyeliner left on my lids.
I decided to drown my sorrows in pizza. I called my favorite pizza emporium and ordered a large pepperoni, bacon, and chicken pizza for delivery. I channel surfed until the pizza man rang my doorbell. I knew him: young guy, early twenties—had never given me a second glance. But unfortunately, today he did.
“Hey lady, are you alright?” He hunkered down and looked hard into my eyes. “Have you been crying?”
“No, not exactly.”
He sprang back up to his normal height. “You been hitting the sauce? Maybe some recreational drugs?” He shook his head as he eyed me up. “Because you look like shit.”
Great, I thought. Even the pizza delivery guy has an opinion on my looks.
I paid him for the pizza, plucking his tip from the cash in my hand and then slammed the door in his face. I settled into the couch, my hot, insult laden pizza by my side, clicking through channels until I found a repeat of The Nanny.
I’d seen the episode about a hundred times, but just the sight of all that big hair made my skin crawl. I flicked past that and settled on a Law and Order rerun. Nothing like a little murder to make the days foibles melt away.
I was about to take my first bite of pizza when my cell phone rang. It was Bess.
“I can’t fucking believe it, that asshole!”
“What asshole?” I said dully.
“Your ex-asshole, the UPS guy. Didn’t you get my text message?”
“Nope. I was just about to... are you talking about Thomas?” My stomach lurched.
“Just check your text messages.”
I fumbled with my phone and pulled up my text messages. Scrolling down there was a forward from Bess titled “WHY SHE’S MY X.” I opened it and Wham! there I was all wet and smeared and grotesque, my hair matted with rain yet still a good six inches tall.
“Son of a bitch!” I howled. I looked down to the list of everyone Thomas had sent it too. As I scrolled down the list I felt my stomach lurch again. The list kept going and going. There had to be three, four hundred names there.
Except mine.
But there were a few names on the list that were familiar: Bess, of course, and three of my male coworkers from Physical Therapy at the hospital.
My head abruptly got so heavy I just let it drop. I heard Bess on the line calling out to me. I pulled the phone back up to my ear, “I’m here.”
“I just finished showing a townhouse on your street... well, the good part of your street. So I’m coming over with some booze. What are you hungry for?”
“I’ve got pizza,” I croaked looking over at my still uneaten pizza. “Maybe some ice cream?”
“We’ll make Cocksucker milkshakes!” Bess always called a Buttery Nipple a Cocksucker. She’d picked it up in a gay bar... liked the brashness of it.
“Hurry,” I said. “I’m considering joining the witness relocation program.”
~*~
Bess swung through my door ten minutes later, a grocery bag in one hand, a big bag from the liquor store in the other. She had a maniacal glint in her eyes, so the effect was a young Cruella de Vil.
“I’ve got just the thing to cheer you up!” she sang as she danced into the room. Even for Bess this was strange behavior. I’d only seen her do it once before, on the day she and her lawyer had taken her ex-husband to the cleaners in divorce court.
Turned out that the slug had been cheating with his secretary for months, and Bess had been onto him from the beginning, had hired a private detective and had been documenting his adultery in blazing Technicolor—even in video.
Her ex-husband had left her, had filed for divorce, never knowing that she’d known the entire time. And when the time came she’d sprung her mountain of evidence on him.
The most thrilling part for Bess had been that he’d had the audacity to have his mistress come to the courtroom with him. She’d sat a couple rows back so no one would’ve been the wiser, but when the scads of photos were passed out, and the video was ready to roll, Bess’ lawyer made sure to point her out right before switching on the video.
That day Bess had danced out of the courtroom, she’d danced down the street to the first bar she encountered. She’d danced with every attractive man in the joint and then danced through shot after shot of buttery nipples. Finally she’d taken a cab to my place and had danced in my front door just as she was now.
I shook my head and smiled, this had to be good. “Do you have Thomas’ severed head in one of those bags?”
“Better, Dana party-baby! So much better!” Bess cha-cha-ed over to me on the couch, did a spin almost knocking my brains out with her bag from the liquor store, then landed with a gleeful thud on the couch beside me.
“Have you already been hitting the sauce?”
“Not a drop. But I am high... high on revenge!”
“Revenge?” I had a feeling that, given how my day had turned out, that any plan for revenge would end up blowing up in my face. “I’m not so sure—”
“I know, I know,” Bess cut me off. “It’s better served cold—and with a kick to the balls—but this was too damn good to wait!”
Bess pulled her cell phone from her Prada bag, flipped open the hot pink iPhone and thumbed through her files until she threw her head back and screamed with laughter.
“I knew I’d have a use for this one day!” she said, handing the phone over to me.
There on her screen was a naked picture of Thomas... and his erect, four-inch-long penis. He even had this oh-so-proud-of-himself smile on his face as he leered at the camera.
I threw my hand over my mouth and laughed. I’d literally forgotten the biggest, or should I say the littlest, reason he’d been so bad in bed. Then I slid my eyes back to Bess and gave her a hard look. “And how is it you have this picture?”
She shrugged
her shoulders. “I was bored. You were done with him. So when I ran into him at a bar I decided what the hell! Bad sex is better than no sex...”
She smiled wickedly at me. “But when I saw that dinky little penis and that stupid look on his face, I knew I’d never be able to sleep with him. So I acted like I’d just gotten an emergency text-message, snapped the picture while looking aghast from reading the message, and then I split, leaving him alone with his sad little fella.”
“Thank god. I suddenly started to think you had no morals at all.”
“Honey, I still don’t have any morals, but I do have standards.”
I laughed again. My stomach was starting to get a stitch in it from laughing too long. “God, thank you. That’s just what I needed.”
“Oh no, that’s not the surprise... at least not the best part!” Bess took the phone back and started some serious texting with both manicured thumbs. Took about sixty seconds, but then she showed me what she’d done. She’d pasted her embarrassing picture of Thomas into a text message of its own, and had it ready to send out to every single person that Thomas had sent my photo to.
I smiled. “You’re evil.”
“Guilty,” she cooed as she leaned into me and giggled girlishly. “Wanna hit the button?”
I shook my head emphatically no. “I could never do anything that mean!” But then I started smiling and “no” turned into “You better believe it!”
I jabbed my index finger on the send button and voila! It was gone.
~*~
They say revenge doesn’t really make you feel better, but as my cell phone and my home phone started ringing over and over again, and Thomas left one after another irate, profanity laced message on my machine and my voice mail—he even sent the text “BITCH!” to me—I couldn’t help but feel better.
Bess and I ate cold pizza and blended the entire half gallon of ice cream into mouth wateringly good cocksuckers, toasting to the biggest cocksucker of them all.
“To Thomas!”
After we stopped giggling—and Thomas stopped calling—we crashed on the couch and finished off the cocksucker milkshakes watching The First Wives Club on the Oxygen Channel.
~*~
I had that dream about the hands again, but this time instead of them sifting and churning through soil, they were kneading my flesh. As if I were lying on the ceiling, watching from above, the hands reached out of the darkness. I could feel them too.
The body and face of their owner obscured in shadow, I watched the hands start with my neck, kneading down to my shoulders and then on down my back. Slow and taunting, sometimes light as a feather, and then a moment later deep and hard, those fingers, those hands rubbed and caressed me. And just when they were about to start on my butt, that’s when my alarm started squawking like a wounded parrot.
My heart was pounding hard, and my body felt so hot, like fire was surging through my veins. And then the dream started to slip away, and my head started to pound, filling with pain, more pain with every squawk. I rolled over and reached for the alarm clock, but it wasn’t on the stand. I opened my eyes and the light streaming through the window scorched my eyes balls. I shrank from the light like a vampire, tugging my pillow over my head, both to buffer the screeching of the alarm, and the burning glare from the window.
I reached down to the floor and finally found where I’d knocked my alarm clock. I pressed a button and it stopped squawking.
Peace at last.
I rolled back over out of the light and let go of the pillow over my head.
“Alcohol is BAD!” I told my teddy bear, Mr. Muggles.
It may have tasted good last night, but this morning I’d give anything for my head to stop hurting. Somehow the sound of the alarm clock was still echoing in my skull.
And then came a clanging of pans from the kitchen. The sound was like a gun shot through my brain.
I jumped up in bed, scared shitless by the thought that someone was in my apartment... in broad daylight!
I stumbled from my warm bed and grabbed my trusty metal baseball bat from under the bed—you never knew what could happen at night in the city, but I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a gun. I crept out of my room and down the hall to the kitchen. There stood Bess, showered and changed into a fresh suit, a cup of coffee in one hand as she hummed by the sink.
“Hey slugger, forget I slept over?” Her eyes made fun of me as she sipped her coffee.
“The cocksucker milkshakes!” I drew my hand up to my head as my own voice ricocheted through my head now, joining the pots and pans and the remnants of the alarm.
It was getting really loud in my head.
“I was wondering where the hangover came from.”
“Coffee?” Bess tapped a manicured fingernail against the steaming pot nestled in the coffee maker.
“Nah. I think I’m going back to bed and sleeping off this hangover.”
“Cupcake… it’s Monday.”
I drooped all over, from my head to my naked little toes. I had to go back to work today.
“Shit ...”
“Shit, shower, brush your teeth...at least you don’t have to do all the other stuff women have to do to get ready for work.”
This made my head snap upright and my gaze dug right into her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Bess shrugged and took a last gulp of coffee. “Doesn’t mean anything. I just wish I could work somewhere that didn’t have a dress code... and that let me look however I wanted.” Bess dropped her cup in the dishwasher and then brushed her hands, a job well done.
“Well,” she continued. “I still can’t imagine not doing my hair and makeup, but it would be nice to have the option.”
She pecked me on the cheek, and then sashayed out the front door of my apartment and was gone.
I stood there, Bess’ words replaying in my mind.
The stuff other women have to do...
Somewhere that let me look however I wanted...
How bad does she think I look?
I shuffled wearily to the bathroom and peered into the mirror over the sink. Okay, I looked pretty rough today... but I hadn’t had a shower yet, and I had a hangover.
I padded into my bedroom and started pulling my undies, bra, and work clothes out of their drawers. Suddenly my alarm clock sprang to life again, its bleating even louder, pulverizing my brain with every shell shocked squawk.
I dropped to my knees and scrambled to turn the damn thing off. My hands fumbled so much, and my head ached so bad that I finally had to grab the chord and yank it out of the wall.
This wasn’t going to be a good day.
Chapter 5
After a pack of crackers and a cup of black coffee, I started out into the glaring sunlight, stopping long enough to by a pair of shades from the corner newsstand. I always thought the rack of sunglasses to be a strange addition to the stand’s stock, but now, looking over the Pepto-Bismol and the aspirin and the shades—all strategically clumped right together—I saw the shrewd brilliance.
I bought one of the overpriced bottles of aspirin too.
I trudged the rest of the four blocks to the hospital, only taking the shades off when I was securely in the elevator and no light could possibly get to me. When the elevator opened, though, there was all that light again.
It had found me, regardless.
No escape.
I donned the glasses again and swept past the windows, down the hall to the physical therapy department.
To my utter horror, the room exploded into caterwauling applause and frat boy hooting. This dazed me—the aspirin hadn’t taken effect yet—and I staggered a little as I stumbled into the well lit, and completely window filled room.
“Way to go, Dana!”
“You really showed him, huh?”
“I laughed so freaking hard!”
Someone clapped me on the back; another hugged his arm around my neck and kissed the top of my head.
Had I won an award?
“Yeah,” said Danny Crammer, pretend punching me in the arm. “When I got that first picture I was sure we’d never see you again.”
“Picture?” And suddenly I remembered the beauty salon, the rain, the mascara, and Thomas taking the ghastly picture with his cell phone. I felt the blood surge to my face.
I was about to slit my wrists when Danny continued, “Then you turned the tables on the asshole! When I saw how dinky that guy’s equipment was, and that fucking look on his face... I about pissed myself laughing!”
Suddenly I remembered Bess’ embarrassing picture of Thomas, and what she’d done in retaliation.
God bless Bess...
“Yeah, remind me never to piss you off!” Danny said, this time throwing a pretend punch to my jaw.
The guys congratulated me again on my revenge text, and by the time I stowed my bag and went to call my first patient in for rehab, I was feeling a lot better.
~*~
Twenty minutes later a gorgeous blonde woman appeared at the door to physical therapy. Her hair was done, her makeup was flawless—as were her nails. She had on designer high heel shoes, a silk blouse with a plunging neckline and the shortest shirt I’d ever seen not worn by a hooker.
And the cleavage on this chick—one hundred percent fictitious.
For a moment I thought she was a pop princess in search of therapeutic relief for her aching back. New implants that size can easily put a back out of alignment.
I was about to trudge over and ask if I could help her, but she was instantly surrounded by men—not only my fellow coworkers but the three male patients that were rehabbing.
I heard them ask in chorus, “May I help you?”
She smiled and effortlessly mesmerized them all with a little laugh. “Aren’t you the sweetest things? I’m looking for the physical therapy department. I’m supposed to start today.”
“That’s great!” the boys cried in unison again.
This is sad, I told myself. Sure she was pretty, but most of it was smoke and mirrors. Makeup and plastic surgery, and shopping wherever Julia Roberts got her outfits for the first half of Pretty Woman.