The plan was we would film her fucking the doll. Blake asked how I knew she still did it that way, and I didn’t know, not for sure, but I was willing to bet that when she really needed to get off this was how she did it. He didn’t ask why I hadn’t told him that I’d been friends with her; he probably thought all girls were friends, in a way, at some point. What I think about is how much she must have wanted it that night, enough to do it while I was there, just behind the door. When I need to come fast this is what I imagine. Not a boy. Not Blake. Just her hips, her face, the little sound she made when she came, the terror in her smile when she knew she’d been caught.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing, what it means. How can he? He only thinks five minutes ahead. That’s why he needs me: to think through how to use the video I’d shot. Why to shoot it in the first place. I knew when her parents were going to be out of town and that she would be staying home alone—they’d been leaving her alone overnight since she was thirteen. She’s a good girl. They trust her. And Blake trusts me.
In the videos her room looks the same. I can still remember how it smelled—like furniture polish and fabric softener and lavender candles. She even has the same bedspread, white with purple flowers. In the first video she’s sitting on it, her back against the pillows, a book open against her thighs. A glass of water beside the bed. She reads and then just goes to sleep, lights out, nothing. We turned off the camera, climbed down the tree we’d used to get to her balcony. You better not be fucking with me about all that shit, Blake said in the car, slamming his door. This better fucking happen. I told him that I wasn’t, that it would. He stared at me and I stared back. We could have had an argument but we didn’t. We stayed up half the night, not kissing or messing around, just lying side by side on his bed watching beheading videos.
Does she know you know? he asked. About what she does? I was almost asleep. I didn’t answer. Zee, he said. I pretended I was dreaming and muttered something he couldn’t understand. He sighed and shut his laptop, turned out the light.
In the final video she’s reading again, but this time she’s on her stomach, her head propped on her hand. Thirty seconds into the film she starts rubbing her hips against the quilt, just barely at first, her ass quivering beneath her nightgown. She does this for a while, reading and doing the thing with the blanket, and then she puts the book down and reaches under the side of the bed, her legs parted so there’s just a glimpse of what’s between them. When she rises she has the doll in her hand. Something in me clenches. It hurts. She stuffs the doll beneath her hips and lowers her head and I’m holding the phone very hard in my hand, right in front of my face, but I’m not looking at the screen, I’m looking directly at her. She doesn’t even turn out the light. She thinks she’s free, that no one will bother her. No one has ever really bothered this girl. And that’s when I’m really sorry for her, because it’s so stupid and so sweet and so sad. Blake laughs in disbelief and I shut him up, wishing he hadn’t come. It goes on for eight minutes and thirty-two seconds. You can barely see the doll beneath her but because you already know it’s there the doll seems more visible than it really is. Its blond braid struggling from beneath Veronica’s pumping hips. When she’s done she just lies there, her head turned to the window. I zoom in as much as I can and the screen fills with a grainy close-up of her lips crushed against the pillow. Then she slowly sits up, a loop of hair sticking out from her head; she puts the doll back under the bed and reaches for the lamp.
We upload the video straight from the phone, no computer. We send it to the law firms her parents work for. We send it to the school principal. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, RedTube, 4Chan. VERONICA MINKLEN’S FIRST FUCK. We wipe the phone with bleach when we’re done, then we throw the phone into a canal. There’s nothing of us in that video except the sound of our breathing and Blake saying Holy shit and some shushed laughter that doesn’t really sound like us at all. It’s laughter that comes from everywhere, from nowhere. You’ve heard it. At some point it’s had your name all over it.
After we shot the last video we had sex. I didn’t tell him I was a virgin and when he got inside me I bit his shoulder to keep from screaming. When the burning feeling stopped there was nothing to replace it, just him going on and on above me, his eyes squeezed shut. I turned my head to look at the window, to see if the blinds were closed, and for a moment I saw Veronica right there, in the bed with us, smiling. I made a noise and Blake said Did you come?
She can’t see the car from her room. She wouldn’t recognize it if she could, and she wouldn’t recognize me, with my hand covering most of my face, in the dark beneath the trees. It feels like it’s taking him a very long time to do this simple thing and I just want it all to be over with. I don’t hate her. I don’t particularly want her to die. But he despises her. She is pretty and very smart and she didn’t want to go out with him and sometimes it’s as simple as that. In a few minutes, when the doorbell rings, she’ll see the note he is pushing beneath her door. She’ll go to her computer and type in the URL we’ve given her. There’s nothing she can do. Everyone, including her, will know that she is trash because we will have made her trash. There is no one in the house to stop her from doing what she’s going to do next. Blake thinks it’s just a joke, that Veronica will freak out for about a week and then get over it. But I know the pride inside her, what a virgin she is to any real pain. I know she’ll do it. We were friends, after all.
THE SHUT-IN
THERE WAS no car in the driveway. No television noise, no lights behind the curtains. I never saw anyone go in or out. But the house wasn’t empty. You can always tell. The pressure of living, no matter how small, pushes out from a place. Did it know I was there, as soon as I arrived? Did it watch for me as I watched for it? I was quiet, too; I hardly moved, at home. I didn’t have enough furniture to fill the two tiny bedrooms. I ate on the couch, a paper plate on my knees. I was twenty-two. It was my first time living alone.
I stood in the Walmart for a long time trying to decide about a backpack, what color it should be. I fingered the blues, the greens, the purples. What did a color say about you? I imagined myself with each one but walked out with the cheapest black bag they had.
People will happily not talk to you in college. And not on purpose, not because they had already talked to you and not liked what you said, not because not talking to you was part of a plan, as it always was in high school, but because you were an adult and you were paying for everything and you had responsibilities beyond making friends and enemies. At the college there were plenty of people with black backpacks just like mine. It didn’t mean anything. I sat like a rock at the back of my classes, surrounded on all sides by a line no one ever crossed. It was hard for me to understand anything the teachers said because I was so aware of this phenomenon. Nobody knew me. Nobody was going to know me. Would it crush me? I wondered. Did I want to be crushed?
I took a piece of paper from my bag and wrote the shut-in a note: Hi, I am your neighbor I live across the street. I noticed you don’t go out very much. Well since I am new here neither do I. If you need something you can write me a note. I will put this under your door and hope you will not consider it trespassing. Sincerely Lee Cross.
I folded the paper in half, then in half again. I held it in my lap and smiled.
There was no real grass in the shut-in’s yard, just brown weeds pulped up in the dirt. In the gaps of a dead hedge junk clung to the walls of the house: plastic patio furniture, an old sink, empty black planters. I opened the screen door and stared at the plywood behind it, my fingers stroking the loose bronze knob. There was nothing coming from inside the house, no light or sound at all, but I was quiet, listening, and after a while I felt it: that tingling in your gut that tells you that you are not alone. I knelt, pushing the paper beneath the door; it whispered across the floor. I panicked for a moment, huddled on the step, the screen against my side, worried the note might say something I didn’t remember writing. But it was too la
te. I pressed my hands against my eyes.
The next day I got some food at the gas station near the bus stop. There were plastic sleeves of donuts at the front counter, two for a dollar, and I picked up a couple, wondering what the shut-in ate. It could have stocked up a long time ago on something, canned food or frozen things. Or maybe it got stuff delivered and I hadn’t been around long enough to see anything arrive. Maybe the shut-in ate nothing at all anymore, I thought, though I knew that wasn’t possible, unless it wanted to die, was dying right now. I ate only packaged foods. Canned ravioli was best, but it was expensive. The check I lived off of was broken down into other checks, to pay bills, and the little cash I withdrew seemed to turn immediately into loose change. My hands always smelled like quarters. If you never left the house you probably never touched money at all, I thought, it would lose some of its power, you would almost forget it existed. It was probably like that with a lot of things. I picked out two more packages of the donuts and paid.
What is your favorite color? I always choose black but it isn’t my favorite. I don’t know what my favorite is.
I took the donuts to the shut-in. I knocked on the screen door, soft at first, so that the metal barely trembled. Hello, I said, almost to myself. No sound came from inside. Hey, I said. It’s me. Your neighbor. I stopped knocking, set the donuts down on the step. Hey, I said again, louder. I’m a nice person, I thought. Nice enough. I dropped my fist and listened. A breeze made my hair feel like bugs crawling over my face; I scratched my forehead. There was a sound, suddenly—some part of the house, creaking. Footsteps. No thumping, no shuffle—its steps were slow but clear—no cane, then, no wheelchair. I could hear it bend down for the letter, its fingers on the paper. Would I be ready, if it opened the door? I tapped on the plywood. It tapped back, slow, echoing me. You can hear? I said. It tapped. You can see? It tapped again. You got my note? Tap-tap. Its breath was uneven, harsh, like there was something stuck in its lungs. I brought you some donuts, I said. Can I bring them in? I knew it was too much to ask, so soon, but I couldn’t help it. The shut-in was silent. I waited. It waited with me.
Is it okay if I come here sometimes? I said finally. Like this? To talk?
Tap, the shut-in went. Tap-tap.
I went to class. The teacher said Essays are due today. I looked down at my desk. I didn’t remember anything about a paper, how long it was supposed to be, what it was supposed to be about. I pulled some notes out of my notebook, clipped them together, and passed them to the front. My heart was racing and I rubbed my chest, sweating. Transparencies flashed on the overhead projector, full of thick black lines, and neither the lines nor the words the teacher said about them made any sense. I pulled my sleeves over my hands, put the dirty hems to my mouth, breathed. It’s funny how some spaces make you feel terror and others make you feel safe. That classroom got to me. Sometimes my own house got to me. But the shut-in couldn’t leave its house, could it? No matter what it felt. Or, it could, but it didn’t. So it must feel safe, in that case. Maybe it was the only place it felt safe and that’s why it didn’t leave. I watched the projector. I breathed through my sleeves. Then the hour was over and everyone jumped up as if, like me, they couldn’t wait to leave. I hurried with them; that felt good. No one was paying any attention to me, no one was thinking Oh, that person is doing something we aren’t doing. I was part of the mass funneling through the doorway, someone’s bag stroking my shoulder, someone else’s shoelaces tapping my foot. We squeezed through the door and then fanned out and out until the mass thinned and I was alone again. I stopped in front of a vending machine and felt in my pocket for change. I got a Twix. It was so loud in the halls. Sometimes it seemed like everyone was talking at once. Schools are like that. They make you think the wrong things; most people are probably not talking at any given moment. There is probably more silence than anything else in the world. And yet you’d think, in this school, no, everyone is talking, everyone is going somewhere, the mass goes on and on.
I went straight to the shut-in and sat by the door, legs crossed on a mat so old and dirty it was almost a part of the concrete. The package of donuts was gone. I took a Twix out of its wrapper. The shut-in stepped, stopped, breathed. Knowing I was there. I was part of a mass today, I said. The shut-in was quiet. I didn’t say anything about forgetting to write the paper. Or about what I’d thought about rooms. I finished the chocolate, savoring each bite. The sky got darker in steps, as if the sun were walking down a staircase. I watched my knees change color. When they were black I stood up. The shut-in hadn’t moved. And I was filled, for the second time that day, with wonder.
I wrote to it every day. There’s something wrong with me, too. You can’t see with my clothes on. I wouldn’t show you. I mean, because it’s private. But I could tell you about it. If you wanted to know. It’s very rare. I am very rare.
What was it missing? An arm? An eye? Part of its face? Perhaps it had been burned, deformed, broken up in some way. Its possible beauty didn’t occur to me. I don’t think there are any beautiful people who stay inside all day. If you stop seeing other people, you stop knowing what makes people think you look nice or not. You have to know: Are people looking at me, or away? And if they look at me, what does that look mean? I wondered if the shut-in ever thought about what I was like. Maybe I was attractive, in a way that other people hadn’t noticed before. Maybe my voice was soothing, what I said interesting. Maybe my handwriting was intelligent. If you didn’t think it was at least possible to be liked, you would never look anyone in the face, you would never pick up the phone, you would never leave your house. I had thought for a long time that I was just waiting for something to happen to me, and that that was the point of living. To become a part of something else.
We could talk about moms and dads. But it had been a long time since I had had parents; and it must have been the same for the shut-in, nothing I’d seen or heard suggested parents, and so why bring them up? Inevitably the question would be: What did they think of you? I know what my parents thought of me. Revulsion is a huge feeling. And when it is directed at you, many moments in a row, it is exhausting. We could talk about being exhausted. You would think the shut-in would sound tired when it moved across the floor, but it never seemed that way. There was the energy of a question in its step, the flowing upward or outward toward something, an expectation. I think that was what excited me most: the sense of our energies meeting somewhere through the door, just beyond us. The way two hands feel before they touch. When you aren’t touched a lot you can feel the closeness of things very acutely. And I felt this thing more than I thought I had ever felt anything in my life.
What about loving something? Have you ever done that?
I went to school the next day but didn’t go to class. I sat instead in the lounge with a little bag of chips, trying to imagine that people were moving in fast-forward, like in time-lapse videos, where everything blurs together. The mass came to me, moved through me, around me, past me. You could do nothing. You could do anything. I ate one chip every five minutes and when the bag was empty I left.
The shut-in’s front door was splitting, just like mine across the street. I often rubbed my palm against it, feeling how flimsy it was, with these long pieces peeling up from the bottom. Anyone could come in, I thought. If they really wanted to.
Do you think you could come to the window? I said, my lips almost on the wood. Could you? So I can see?
I heard it shift its weight, then pause. I paused, too, wondering if I had gone too far. Then it moved, receding, disappearing—and I stepped off the porch and into the dirt beneath the picture window, skinning behind the dead hedge. I put my fingers against the crumbling frame and stood on tiptoe to look and there was nothing for a while, just shadow, and then—a shape, a face, something terrible, a monster edging into view from behind the heavy curtains. I jerked back, mouth open, before realizing it was a mask I was looking at, not the shut-in’s face. A pig mask, red-cheeked and grinning, snout pressed agai
nst the milky glass. I put my hand up to it. Was the shut-in old? Young? It was impossible to tell. But maybe not young. It seemed like something that had been around for a long time; there was something fixed about it, the way ghosts or trees or signs are fixed, to a certain place, and other things grow around them.
Hi, I said, scratching the glass like I would a dog’s belly. Hi, hi.
It just looked at me. I felt how naked my face was, how it clung to my skull. Did it like how I looked? How well could it even see me, through the tiny holes in the mask, the dirty glass? Did it care? The shut-in turned its head to the side, slow, deliberate, like it was listening to something far away. All I heard were cars on distant roads, a sprinkler, someone yelling at a dog. Finally the mask turned back to me, as if to say Yes, we are alone. Hi, I said again, smiling. Hi, I see you, and it cocked its head, one pig-ear folded. I tried not to make my face do anything, to just let it be, and eventually it relaxed, loosening, floating, until I forgot what face even meant. And there was that sense again, of wonder, of how the shut-in’s curiosity and my curiosity were rising to meet each other, its focus entirely on me, as mine was on it. And we were just bathing in that feeling and letting it build, the possibilities, until eventually I felt a sort of lessening, like we’d got full of each other, and so I smiled and said into the window Thank you, thank you, I’ll come later, goodbye, and it put its own hand—stuck in a pilled gray glove—up to meet mine, and pressed.
When were you the most happy? Or are you happiest right now?
I took the nine o’clock bus to school. I held my backpack on my lap, my chin grazing the top strap. Someone came on and I waited for them to pass but they didn’t; they stopped, they sat down. I moved as far as I could against the window. I could feel them looking at me, at the top of my head. Smiling, maybe. I felt shorter than everyone else, even though I am a normal size, because I never looked up when someone was staring. Hey, the person said. You go to Riverside, right? I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t said anything since I moved here, except when I talked to the shut-in. I could pretend that was my disease. Not being able to speak. Or to hear. Or to see. I squeezed my backpack, the corner of a notebook digging into my arm. I think we have a class together, the person said. I thought of sitting on the shut-in’s step. Telling it about this moment. Someone talked to me, I would say. Looked at me in that way. Do you know what I mean? The way a person looks at you sometimes, wanting to know what you are. I felt the energy from the stranger’s body overlapping mine, a black wave eating a lighter one, though the person didn’t touch me. The bus stopped. The person waited for me to stand when they stood; I stayed still. I was an insect, bent completely over my backpack, breathing into its thick mesh. The stranger went; I stayed. I rode the bus home. The mass I had been a part of was broken; I had been cut off. That was okay. I had never really belonged to it, or even understood what it was.
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