by Elle Nash
I turned to the door of her bathroom and pushed it open, glancing down the hall to check for her stirring. The bathroom mirror, covered in toothpaste spittle, hadn’t been cleaned in at least a year. The toilet was rust red inside, the water drained out from not being used. It was dark. The light shone through a small window. You could see dust caked onto everything. The toilet seat, the green countertops, the scale.
I walked over to the medicine cabinet; inside, three or four bottles of Percocet, Valium, and Vicodin. I took a few. Each bottle I moved revealed a ring of clean space underneath it, surrounded by an outer ring of grubby dust. After I grabbed a few tabs, I put each bottle back in its place like a puzzle piece.
On my way back to my bedroom, I grabbed a wine cooler from the kitchen, some pink shit. With the wine in one hand and the pills melting in the warmth of my palm, I threw myself on the bed and lay there for a second before setting everything up methodically on my desk. I closed the bedroom door and turned The Golden Age of Grotesque softly on repeat on the stereo. I watched the light fade out of my window and the window eventually turn black. I touched the sore spots of my body, the new scabs, the bruises Matt had left, the crescent-moon scars on my hip. Jenny’s bite marks on my inner thighs. I spread my fingers over my fat labia, split like a rotting nectarine. My stomach was starting to cramp from the morning after pill.
I smashed my muscle relaxers on the desk with the butt end of a lighter, checked my phone to see if Matt had texted me. Nothing—not even a message from Jenny, or from Sam. I rolled Frankie’s words over and over again in my head, imagined the words on her tongue. I’ll fucking kill you. I felt like a common whore, someone’s unwanted house cat. A home wrecker. If I had not pursued Matt alone, maybe it could have succeeded between the three of us. But my natural inclination was to lie and hide, and it felt good not to deny myself of that. People hide from the things that make them vulnerable while they wait for the right moment, the opportunity to prey. It is instinctual to live in the dark.
I separated the white dust into thin lines and grabbed a plastic straw from an old fast food cup on the floor. I cut the end off and looked inside, syrupy old soda crusted onto it, then sucked a line of powder into my nose. The middle of my face went harsh and dry and then burned softly as my sinuses expanded. I sniffed and waited for the emptiness to set in. I checked my phone again. It was four in the afternoon. Frankie might be making dinner right now, maybe Matt was silently fuming in the living room, if he was thinking of me at all. Sam would be at work. He hadn’t responded to my texts in days. I wondered where Jenny might be.
I had the next two days off, with enough pills and enough Robitussin to bliss out for a while.
I clicked out a message letter by letter, then stared at my phone for a few minutes, deciding whether or not I should send it out. Too fucked up to determine whether the message was vulnerable or embarrassing, I deleted and rewrote it a few times. Another bump of Vicodin melted into the membrane of my nose. I sat back and thought about it more. Decided, fuck it. I addressed the text to Jenny. Then, finally, hit send.
i need you, it read.
come over.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Tom Spanbauer, Elizabeth Ellen, Amanda McNeil, Juliet Escoria, Rae Gouriand, Kirsten Larsen, Peter Derk, Kevin Meyer, Chelsea Laine Wells, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Asha Dore, without whom this book would not exist in its current form. To my co-editor at Witch Craft Magazine, Catch Business, who is the queen witch of proofreading. To my friends and family, who continue to support my writing even if they don’t always “get it.” Thank you to Jessica Martinez for being there through everything, to Bailey McKnight for the memories, and thank you to Kacy Dahl for being a bad Virgo bitch when I needed it most.
Lastly, thank you to my partner in life and crime, my husband.