by Rose Shababy
~~~***~~~
THE BLUE EFFECT
Episode One: Paper Dolls
By
ROSE SHABABY
~~~***~~~
Copyright 2014 Rose Shababy
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Acknowledgements
There are a number of people who deserve thanks for helping me get from page one to The End, including all the folks in the Spokane Fiction Writer’s Group who have supported and encouraged me for years, and various friends and family.
There are some individuals that I’d particularly like to single out for their dedicated friendship, support and expertise.
Selina Shehan, for her work on my website, and for giving each of my characters a face.
My boys, Quinton and Leeland, for always thinking I have the chops to pull this off.
A big thanks to my beta readers, Sharon and Steve, for their input and enthusiasm.
Mary Malone, for being a fantastic new breakout editor and a good friend.
Grandma Dottie, who I miss every day. She always supported me and told me over and over for my entire life, “Rosie, you’re so smart. You can do anything you want.” And she meant it.
My mom, Doreen Shababy, who has always encouraged me to follow my bliss and inspired me through her own accomplishments.
Jennifer Malone Wright, not only a fellow writer but my closest friend. For years, she has been my advisor, sounding board, think tank, marketing guru, and inspiration. She is one of the hardest working gals I know and I admire her more than she can ever know.
And finally, my husband, Michael Fellin, for putting up with my OCD and mood swings, the hours spent holed up in my basement office leaving him to deal with household chores, abandoning him for writer’s groups, bouncing ideas off of him, used him for comic relief in my blog. He’s always been supportive and encouraging and there just isn’t a nicer guy out there. I love you, you smug bastard.
This book is dedicated to all the supersheroes who have always known that girls can do anything.
Beauty Queen
Frustrated to the core at her status in life,
She’s somewhere in between
a low class whore and a beauty queen
not budging; begrudging this drudgery
Washing dishes ‘til her nails crack
mopping ‘til her back’s a wreck
waiting for her smile to break
her tears leave messy make-up tracks.
Pushing on and on and on and ON!
She pretends she’s someone famous-
Something more than just a waitress-
And wonders if her life is preordained
And believes that she’s the one to blame.
She knows she’s fucked it up,
Those wasted days;
Years gone by in a blurry haze.
She “has potential” (what a joke)
And she gags on it until she chokes.
“We had high hopes for her career,”
blah blah blah BLAH in her ear.
She sees the disappointment in their eyes
When they look at her remembering.
Seeing what she might have been,
Caged by all their memories.
She’s left her dreams upon the shore
Forgotten about the world and more:
The people she could meet.
The many hats that she could wear,
So much life; such rich and creamy icing.
The books, the brains, the beauty!
Incredible and terrible; almost, barely palpable
The Mother Teresa’s of the world,
and Hannibal Lecter’s in the swirl.
The poets and cowboys and radio hosts,
The dancers, the swingers, the roasts and the toasts,
the fruit and the meat,
all waiting for HER.
Still… she’s frozen and scared,
a ballerina too tall
awkward, ungainly, as she constantly falls.
Frustrated to the core at her status in life
and still she lingers on…
somewhere in between,
a ten dollar whore and a beauty queen.
-R.S.
~~~***~~~
THE BLUE EFFECT
EPISODE ONE: PAPER DOLLS
I parked in my car far up on a distant hill, and watched as the night crept up on the city like a feral cat stealing its supper off a back porch. I liked the darkness. Sometimes, the black was peaceful and empty like a small town at midnight. Other times it rattled my nerves like hail on a window pane until my insides seemed to quiver. Either way, it matched the way I felt inside whenever I looked at other people.
It didn’t matter the person. When I looked in their eyes, I didn’t see anything I could recognize. Every person I met seemed to exist on survival mode, their real personality hidden behind the stress of living. I saw the same thing when I looked in the mirror, only worse. I saw dead eyes, masked by the pretty face that looked back.
“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” I often quipped in a whiskey and cigarette voice to the faceless line of men in my life. I would speak the words as I tossed my fiery mane over my shoulder in a more than passable imitation of Jessica Rabbit. It helped that I had more curves than a Nascar track, the same fiery hair, creamy skin and sultry, heavy-lidded eyes of a pin-up girl.
I saw nothing familiar in the image of the mirror-me. I felt certain that my only real prettiness existed on the outside. Inside, I felt as lifeless as a paper doll, as two-dimensional as the cartoon I resembled. A garish imitation of life. I wondered if others were able to see past my shell and recognize the dullness I felt inside.
I avoided relationships because of it. Sure, a never ending line of men came and went in my life but they hardly counted. Those men never looked beyond the shell of me anyway, making it easy to hide from them. I didn’t sleep alone most nights, and yet I would lie side by side with a man feeling like I existed in solitary confinement.
I told myself I didn’t mind being alone, although I knew it to be a lie. If it were true, I wouldn’t be driven night after night to go out and search for some kind of connection, shallow as it ended up being each time.
This was definitely one of those nights.
I’d been fired from another dead-end, go nowhere fast-food job. I’d gone through at least a couple dozen since my mom, in her usual drunken stupor, kicked me out on my sixteenth birthday. Now, I was twenty-five going on fifty, and waiting for a miracle or death to save me from myself.
The geography of the job might have changed, but the story was no different: some ball sack of a manager hired me on the spot, his eyes interviewing my body, and my bitterness would grow.
“Tell me about yourself, Blue,” he’d say as his eyes travelled down the length of my body. I’d give him some shitty, rote answer and he’d offer me the job with a leer and hopeful fantasies.
I’d take the offer, hating him the whole time. Not really a good way to start any job. Each day I worked brought about an increased bitterness, and it showed in my performance.
Eventually I’d start showing up late, calling in sick, and doing everything I could to dump my shifts on other people. The rat-bastard that hired me eventually fired me when he realized he wasn’t getting laid.
I was fully aware of my self-s
abotage, but it sent me spiraling into a darker place every time I got fired. I’d asked myself each time why I expected anything different, why I expected me to be different. Those men were the same. I was the same. Nothing could change any of that.
I needed to lose myself in a pissed-faced fog and the arms of a nameless hook-up.
I also needed a wing-man.
As the sun started to sink into the horizon, I grabbed my cellphone and called my only “friend,” Delilah. My feelings toward her were ambivalent at best, but we were similar creatures, damaged paper dolls torn and creased from being played with too much. She tried to mask it with a bold, aggressive personality, but it didn’t matter. Delilah existed in the same fucked-up, washed-out state that I did. The big difference between us was that I knew it.
She answered after the first ring. “Blue! What’s up, bitch?”
“Del. Let’s go clubbing tonight.”
“Hell yeah we’re gonna. Meet you at your place?”
“Come early. We’ll spark up before we go.”
I hung up and took one last look over the city. The sun had set completely and the lights had winked on, one by one, until the entire city was lit up with a strange, mechanical beauty. New York may have been the city that never sleeps, but the phrase applied to Seattle too, and I was grateful.
I knew I would find a welcome distraction nestled in some dark corner.
****
“How the hell did you get out of work?” Delilah choked out as she passed me the joint. With deliberate slowness, she exhaled, releasing a long, steady stream of smoke rings. Throbbing music from a Top Forty station pulsed away in the background from a boom box on the floor, each song resembling the one before it. The bass thrummed through my body until my ribcage vibrated.
I drew on the joint for several long moments. “Got fired.”
“Again?”
I shrugged. What could I say? I sank back into my bed and stared at the ceiling as the tension drained from my body. The razor’s edge I’d been treading all day melted away and the muscles I hadn’t realized were clenched began to relax. Had my jaw ached like that all day?
“What are you wearing tonight?” Delilah pulled some clothes out of a bag. “I bought a sick little black dress the other day.”
Who cares? I thought as I took another drag. Even when I dressed like I gave a shit, people looked right through me. Does it really matter what I wear? “You think it’ll matter? When was the last time we had to wait in line to get into the clubs, let alone pay?” I opened my eyes and looked at her.
Delilah gave me a Grinch-like grin as she took the joint from me. “You’re right. But I still like to see you all pimped out. Let me pick your outfit,” she begged. She opened my closet and began flipping through the hanging clothes.
I smirked at the irony. She wanted to dress me up? Like a doll? “Whatever,” I told her. It made sense for her to treat me like the paper doll I just so happened to be.
“You’re awful quiet today,” she called, her head completely submerged inside the closet.
“What can I say? I just need to unwind.”
“That mouth breather you worked for really did a number on you, huh?”
“Whatever. Fuck him.” I didn’t want to talk about it and decided to try to steer Delilah in a different conversational direction. “Where do you want to go tonight?”
“It’s Eighties night at the Noc Noc. What’s better than the decade of excess?”
I gave her a fake smile. “Yeah. That sounds like exactly what I need.” I took another drag of the joint, fully intent on getting as mindless as possible.
“And I’ve figured out what you’re wearing.” She held out her hand for mine and hauled me off the bed. “Come on, I’m gonna tease the shit out of your hair.”
Delilah did her dirty worst. By the time she finished, my red hair flamed out around my head in a teased mane I knew I’d have to wash at least twice before it would lay straight again. She tied a glimmering purple scarf into a huge bow on one side of my head. My face glittered and sparkled. She dressed me in a sleeveless sweatshirt with an open neckline that hung off one shoulder so low it was a miracle my tits didn’t fall out. She finished the look with silvery hot pants and stiletto fuck-me pumps. I looked like I belonged in Flashdance, slinking all over a stripper pole.
She’d given me the ultimate mask. No man would be able to see through the veneer of sex I wore, and her little black dress dripped with the same lewd vibe.
We decided to take a cab downtown, and if I had any doubt about my sex appeal, it was erased by the lascivious glances of the cabbie as he peered at us through his rearview mirror every chance he got. I stared out the window as Delilah chattered away about shit I didn’t care about. The closer we got to downtown Seattle, the more traffic clogged the roads and the more people trekked up and down the sidewalks. I watched them, trying to find someone who looked like me.
Men in tailored business suits hurried by as they talked importantly on their cell phones. Women, with impeccable makeup and slick cocktail dresses, drifted by on the arms of men in sports jackets and loafers. Couples walked hand in hand with their heads cocked intimately toward each other. Gaggles of teenage girls trotted along, uniformed in tight jeans and Uggs, talking animatedly as they swung their shopping bags back and forth. Groups of gangster types slouched down the street with casual indifference, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they were actual gang-bangers or posers. These were the only people I could relate to. No one was a bigger poser than me.
I posed as a real girl every single day.
The cab stopped at a red light, and I watched a withered old man in a torn and dirty overcoat scurry from one person to another with his hand held out. Frayed shoelaces trailed behind him across the pavement. I could see him mutter a few words each time and most of the people walked around him with only a glance of distaste, if they bothered to look at him at all. He took it all in with no expression on his face. I recognized the look. I knew he felt as bleak as me.
I pulled a ten dollar bill out of the little bag hanging from my wrist and rolled down the window, waving it at him. He scurried over and grabbed it as fast as he could, as if he were afraid I would change my mind. He didn’t move fast enough for me to avoid catching the whiff of stale beer and urine that oozed from his pores.
“God bless,” he mumbled with no real emotion.
What does God have to do with anything? I wondered. Yes, this pathetic man was the closest I’d come yet to finding someone who looked like me.
“Whew!” Delilah wrinkled her nose as the smell emanating from him wafted through the cab. She gave me a dirty look. “What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t you know if you give them money, it just makes them beg more?”
I shrugged as the cab accelerated. I didn’t normally go out of my way to give money to bums, but I was in a strange mood. I didn’t care what happened to the old guy, I only gave him money because I wanted to see his response. I wanted to catch him in the act of surviving, his life stuck on autopilot, so I would know that it wasn’t just me.
“Are you even listening?” Delilah clicked her fingernails on the door handle.
I glanced at her to find her staring at me with a cross expression.
“Sorry.” I tried to adopt an expression of interest. At least, I hoped that’s what it looked like.
“You’re even weirder than usual tonight.”
“I know.” I flipped my hair back and sighed. “I’m a total yak scrote. I guess getting fired again bothered me more than I thought. I’ll be better, I swear. Once we get to the club and I get a drink or two in me, I’ll be fine.” I knew the words coming out of my mouth were a lie, but it was the expected script. I lifted the corners of my mouth, hoping it resembled a smile more than a grimace. I thought about telling her it was more than that; that I felt as though I teetered on the edge of … what? My sanity? Some great epiphany? Either way, I knew something was going to happen, and I knew it was going to happen
soon.
How I knew was a mystery, but I almost vibrated with tension, like a live wire twisting on the ground looking for a victim to strike. I imagined telling Delilah how I felt, but when I pictured the blank look on her face, or worse, the laughter, I kept my mouth shut.
“I hope so. Don’t be a buzz kill tonight.” She laughed for no reason as the cab pulled up to the curb in front of the Noc Noc Club. She hopped out and leaned over to look at me. “Come on! Let’s get fucked up.”
I’M NOBODY! WHO ARE YOU? ARE YOU NOBODY TOO?
Even on a Tuesday, the club had a line waiting to get in. We didn’t get in line however. Instead, we walked straight up to the front door. The bouncer at the entrance looked us up and down and motioned us in with a finger.
The bass of the music jumped in my chest even before I walked through the door.
“You spin me right round, baby right round like a record, baby right round round round.” I bobbed my head to the Dead or Alive song and had to admit I kind of liked Eighties night. The hypnotic beat played across my body and I couldn’t wait to get lost in the rhythm. I realized I wasn’t the only one as I looked out across the floor.
The dance floor was packed, full of sweaty young bodies. They gyrated in time to the music, like symbiotic organisms pushing and pulling against each other. The tables and bar were surrounded with valley girls and men in sunglasses at night, leaning toward each other as they spoke. The girls played with their hair and the men stood tall with their chest puffed out, both sexes lost in the mating habits of the club scene.
“I’m gonna get a drink,” Delilah told me, almost yelling so I could hear her. “Do you want one?”
Hell yeah, anything to forget today. “Damn right I do. I can’t wait to erase this shitty day. I’ll come with you.” We shouldered our way through the crowd until we reached the bar.