i've run out of clever subject titles
LAST ONE. This baby is actually slowing down my computer. Oi.
XII
“I’m a Filthy Whore”
Years after my secluded and fiery affair with Purchase and everything that resulted from it-which is a lot, mind you-I live in a Princeton dormitory, attending the college that my father and mother forbade me to go to simply because ‘it wasn’t Yale’. But here I am, majoring in anthropology and psychology (both pertaining to people-ironic for me, isn’t it), finally living a normal life that does not include broken pieces of anything, thumping heartbeats, or redheads.
Actually, I still keep in touch with Samson. He is a backpacker-a tourist, he keeps on telling me to call him, but I insist on backpacker, for the word tourist brings up images of Hawaiian shirts and large cameras and that is not Samson. But at the moment, he is in Thailand, and I am in New Jersey, and we are practically worlds apart. He tells me to keep in contact with him because, as he puts it, being away from me feels like that first car ride.
“What?” I was truly bewildered by this confession the first time he told me so-the night before his trip to New Zealand. “What do you mean, being away from me feels like-”
And he kissed me, to shut me up, which he soon found out was the only way that worked. “It’s not hard. Figure it out.”
The next day while he was on the plane, I thought about it. It was not easy, because my memory disposes of certain details that may be important after a period of time, but I managed to figure it out. For documentation and novel purposes, I repeat the memory as it stands here, for others to sift through, to figure out what in the world Samson was going on about. I promise that it makes sense.
On that day, Samson drove carefully and ideally, as if he had gone through driver’s education a million times just to get everything right. I couldn’t understand why he had put so much blame on driving, as I saw his skills fairly better than mine-he’d never come in close contact with a passing pedestrian, for instance, whereas I had almost run over a man in a wheelchair on my way to school once. This is why I take the school bus now.
But on the corner of 23rd and Pierriot, we came to a red light-and passed it, going steady with our speed limit, but passing it cleanly all the same. The very first thing I did after we ambled across the no-go zone was check for police or angry drivers. Upon finding none, I turned to Samson, making sure I had a very confused look on my face, like the kind that actors and actresses must perfect for the obligatory scene in which one kills another for no reason at all. Why the big deal, you may ask? Taking my personality into account, it really may not seem so, but I am very in tune to driving rules, and am always absolutely apalled when anyone breaks them.
I had thought of Samson taking a dagger out of nowhere (just like the whistle) and stabbing Purchase many times. Apparently this image worked well with my facial features, for when Samson caught sight of me he turned pale instantly.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair to shake it off, “why are you looking at me like that?”
“You just ran a red light,” I screeched, pointing back to the offending corner. “It switched to red seconds before we’d gotten to the light and then you just passed it. Did you even see it? Did you?”
Still pale, I watched him swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing in the passing shade of the side-road trees. “Oh, yeah.”
“Yeah, what? You saw it and you passed it? On purpose? What?”
“See, um, that’s why I hate driving so much,” he mumbled, avoiding eye contact with me-so different than before, but then again, I guessed he wasn’t expecting me to exhibit such an outburst. “I miss red lights a lot. It’s a habit of mine.”
My jaw dropped. “A habit?”
“I mean,” he quickly said, to cover up his mistake, “it’s not a good habit. It’s just, I look more at the road than at the sky, because that’s what I was told to do, years ago in Driver’s Ed, so sometimes I miss lights and I pass the red ones, just because I don’t catch them fast enough.”
That’s so stupid, was the first thing that ran through my mind, but I knew saying so wouldn’t be such a good idea. It was, after all, our first meeting, even though I’d forgotten that long past already. “You could get killed,” I stated firmly, turning away from him and crossing my arms across my chest, “all because your reactions aren’t fast enough. This is why you take the bus, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Well, yeah. I don’t have to worry about it, then.”
We sat in silence from then on, me still angry at how little a thing could potentially damage someone’s life so easily, and he trying to concentrate on the traffic a little more (for my sake only, he confessed later). As we neared Vermont, he asked me where I wanted to be dropped off.
“St. Abernathy’s, if you know where that is,” I replied, understanding fully how one could miss the fact that the poppy-drowned mound was a school and not a sanitarium. “It’s down the road, that big…”
“I know,” he said, and I noticed his tone was a little subdued-in fact, he sounded almost shocked. “Can I ask why?”
“No,” I said, a little scared. He looked a little wary now, as if offering me his hand and a ride was a mistake, and he would now have to suffer awful consequences. (Oh, how little I knew of him then!) “I mean-why are you asking?”
He shook his head, shifting uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. I noticed his grip on the steering wheel had become tighter. “It’s nothing. Weird place, that’s all.”
“I know what you mean.” Really, do I know, I finished silently.
551 Vermont came faster than I expected-and when it was time for me to leave, it was harder than I expected. Here I was, sitting in a nice car with a nice guy who I’d never even met before. What could I have said? Thanks for the ride, and then never see him again, like I was using him? But he was the one who offered! I was still frustrated as we pulled into the miniscule parking lot littered with poppy petals, and when he turned off the ignition and turned to me, I look up at him angrily.
“Um,” he said, retreating back into his own seat. I realized he had been reaching over me to unlock my door. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” was my feeble reply. I could feel my face getting warm, and I knew it was another one of those times that I hated being a soft thinking and delicately made woman. Curse the lesser sex, indeed. “No, it’s not your fault.”
Taking this as approval, he leaned over me once again to unlock my door. For a split second, I smelled eau de businessman: slick oily smoke from bars, a hint of alcohol from too-late nightclubs and expensive cologne to try and cover it all up. But he pulled back quickly, the lock only having been a latch and Samson having been the politest guy ever, and I lost that feeling of infatuation, the feeling of being in the dark.
“Do you need a ride back? I don’t live far from here,” he said, looking out onto the not-really-there grounds of St. Abernathy’s Non-Correctional School for Girls. “Since the bus station is closed, and all.”
“No, I’ll be fine. I have a ride back,” I lied.
He turned to me, looking a little apprehensive. “Then I’ll be seeing you.”
There was no other word for the situation than awkward. Quickly I got out of the car, trying not to kill myself by doing so, as that is how I usually ended up with car doors. “Try not to die,” I called by way of farewell. “You’re a pretty nice guy. It’d be a shame.”
And I shut the door, leaving his words unsaid. I heard them muffled through the window, but that was all. As far as I was concerned-which was really not a lot-that was the last time Samson and I would be in such close quarters. I forgot about him soon enough.
It was the tingly realization that I was finally in the same place as Purchase, breathing her air, stepping on gravel that she herself had walked on, that allowed me the same adrenaline I’d lost minutes before to shoot through my body once more. I went from relaxed and even listless to hyper and jumpy in mere nanoseconds. With amazing speed, I ran from the parking lot to the backfields of St. Abernathy’s-a short run, but it took me a long time to catch my breath.
When I reached the green-not really green, but I am going on the brochures here-I stopped and panted, ashamed at my total lack of physical endurance. My hands on my knees and my head light, I looked around and saw nobody. The dry, yellow fields full of weeds were completely empty. Catching my breath in my throat, I began to panic: was I too late? It was only half past noon, surely Purchase would have waited, or if she had left, I would have seen her in the empty distance. But I saw no one; no matter in which direction I turned to look.
I bit my lip. Was it over already? Had I lost my first and very possibly last chance? The organs within me oozed defeat and rejection; and I slid down to the spiky earth, the cold fence behind me my only support.
Just as I was thinking how much the emo-kid scene became me, I felt something probing the back of my neck. It was cold and sticky, and…it was giggling. I immediately jumped up from my dejected position and looked around frantically, ready to kill (in figurative terms) whatever thing had crept up on me.
“You’re early,” said the attacker. I instantly ruled out insects and mute serial killers, and then turned around, trying to make sight of whoever it was.
“Who’s…?” I mumbled, turning back to the fence.
And in the middle of that little square of dead wildlife, wearing bright colors as if to rub in my face how completely oblivious I could be-there stood Purchase, hands behind her back, (fake red) bangs swinging flirtatiously in her eyes. Once again every inch of my fragile anatomy imploded, and as we stood there looking at each other, I wondered if she could sense that I was hyperventilating on the inside.
With one finger, she beckoned me towards her, a smile spreading slowly across her soft features. She looked almost devilish, almost as if she was calling me over to devour me with her brightly painted lips. But I didn’t care. Let her have her way with me, I thought, and with a burst of pride that was almost rancor I threw open the fence gate.
And just like in the movies, things slowed to a complete stop and the heroine is allowed time to dig deep into her skull, pulling questions out of nowhere, coming to conclusions that no one else can see. What was I expecting on that day? Life, liberty, and/or the pursuit of happiness? A girlfriend, or a lover? Hell, or heaven? Thinking about it now, I know that I wasn’t expecting anything. All I knew was that I wanted Purchase. Where, I don’t know or don’t remember-perhaps in my arms, or standing behind me, breathing down my neck, or in my bed, or in my mind (and she succeeded in that). I opened that gate not because I wanted something I could deal with in my spare time, but because I wanted someone who would tell me what to do when I didn’t know-something that had the potential to break me, because I was tired of being the one who broke things.
(The allowance of thinking time is over, and my movie returns to normal speed. I am waking, it seems…and now I am walking…)
“As I said,” Purchase purred, taking my hand in her cool, bony fingers as I neared her, “you are early, my dear.”
(It did not take me long to learn that Purchase could sensualize anything, if she so put her mind to it. I don’t even think she needed to concentrate-it was an involuntary reaction, second only to breathing. “Darling, pass me that cake,” she would think she was saying, only it would come out in a low, deliberate hiss so that everyone within five feet of her felt the same chills along their spine that everyone else was. As it was then, the word early came out eaaaarly, like the vernacular of a witch, and I wanted to die…just die.)
But her accusation made me dizzy nonetheless. “What do you mean, I’m early?” I asked her, looking at her watch. It was quarter ‘til one. “You said noon, didn’t you?”
She laughed. “Heavens, no.” Squeezing my fingers in her hands, she pulled me towards the back door of the art room. “I specifically wrote down one o’clock. I remember exactly. Maybe it smudged.”
It hadn’t smudged-the handwriting was as clear as day, the ink precise and thin. But I decided to play along. Common sense was outdated, according to my subconscious standards.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said meekly. “So where are we going?”
“In here,” Purchase said smoothly, unlocking the metal door and then pushing it open. “You’ve been in it before. My room.”
Never actually having gone on a real date before, I had no idea how to act. I had a general idea-you don’t get to be seventeen without knowing the basic facts of ‘going together’-but actually living it was a different matter entirely. As soon as we were both in the art room (well, now I had my doubts as to what the room actually was), and the door was securely locked behind us, we stood together, saying nothing, showing everything. I was nervous. She was complacent. I was sweaty. She was perfectly composed.
“Soah,” I mumbled, and then swore. I’d meant to say so, uh, but it came out soah. Like the ebonics version of ‘soar’. It seems as if that day, I’d lost my ability to put together words properly.
Purchase giggled.
I tried once again to speak correctly. “So, um…” That started out well, so I went on, pronouncing every word like I’d learned it yesterday. “Why is this your room?”
“I live here,” she answered, not batting an eyelash.
“Oh yeah?” I didn’t believe her. She was cracking her knuckles now, and averting my eyes. My people skills were at it again.
“Yes, really. I was disowned as a teenager,” Purchase told me, loud and with better diction than I could have ever mustered. “St. Abernathy’s took me in when I was fifteen. Ever since, this has been my home, and I’ve been trying to reform…”
It was like watching a bad documentary. The ligthing was mediocre, the script mild, and the story bland. It was because of my own insensitivity that I refused to believe Purchase’s story; my own ignorance that created this very first rift in our relationship. I just thought she was high, but she was completely and utterly sober. I’d thought she was merely telling a story, but she had chosen to expose her life to me. In short, I am a horrible person. Do not let anyone deny it to you.
“Okay, wait,” I finally cut in, tired of hearing what I thought was complete bullshit. “You’re telling me that you were disowned by your family, so you came crawling to this place, and they took you in, and now you live here? In this room? I thought this was an art room. At least, that’s what they told me…and are you high?”
She smiled, only this time, it was sad. Seeing such a change in Purchase-atmosphere immediately made me feel like a bitch: had I done this? Was I the reason for that sad smile? It hurt me, it really did.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, truly apologetic. I shuffled around to her side, pulled out a stationary metal stool from underneath one of the tables and tugged on her sleeve. When she turned to me, her face was so doe-like-eyes so wide against her frame of red-that the urge to kiss her was nearly overpowering.
But as most things go, I had to resist. “Sit down,” I said to her instead, offering the chair in place of my lips. Thankfully, she accepted this choice and straddled the metal circle, while I went and sat on the one across from it. It wasn’t much of an improvement to our simple little date (my pathetic first, and probably her more experienced zillionth), but at least we were at eye level.
“So keep on going.” I was ashamed for my earlier disbelief. Surely if she had dragged me all the way down here she wouldn’t be telling me lies, was my more thought-out reaction. Surely if the story had been purely mythical, she would be laughing by now.
Before speaking, she reached across the empty space that stretched between our chairs and took my hands-still warm-in hers, still cold. “I have this thing about contact,” she explained to me, running her fingertips over my palm lines. “It drives me crazy if I don’t have any physical connection with the person I’m talking to.”
It explained future mishaps of Purchase grabbing the people she was talking to in public, causing bouts of molestation accusations, but I could not find any prior evidence. I didn’t care, though. Her hands were soft. “Okay.”
So then she continued her story. Abandoned-no, not abandoned, just ‘dropped off’-at the age of fifteen, St. Abernathy’s took her in as a student and an art teacher. She went to school on weekends, with the adults, learned the same things that everyone else her age did but all she was to them was a more advanced delinquent, one who had done something so horrible that she had to be removed from the other masses and put into the congregation of the grown-ups. The reason that Deidre and Sandy (DG #s 1 and 2, she told me, quite amused at my made-up labels for them) knew her was because they smoked together on the weekdays. Or, as Purchase put it-‘sometimes we smoke, and sometimes we do…other things.”
“Do the teachers know about this?” I asked, my voice foreign to my own ears. It had been awhile since I’d spoken.
“Of course they do, but they won’t say anything as long as we don’t cause scenes.” Her face contorted into that same melancholy state and I wanted again to kiss it away. “Last time you came-I caused a scene.” And she laughed.
“Did you get in trouble?”
“Oh, no. I’m not a regular student, so they don’t treat me like one. They just took away my cigarettes.”
And she gestured to her empty cardigan pocket-where she kept her smokes, I guessed.
“They call it a non-correctional facility, but anyone who really steps in this place isn’t fooled,” she breathed, her little girl’s voice sounding like a hush-hush secret. “We’re all different, just like in a normal school, only we’re all out and about, like in a real correctional institute.” Her fingernails began to wander around the inside of my wrist. I imagined my veins popping, blood pouring out everywhere. “Deidre’s in here for drugs. So is Sandy. NyQuil-” That one didn’t have a real name, apparently. “-Is in here for stealing. I’m the worst one of all, though.”
I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry. I tried to look her in the eyes, but I was too scared. So I focused on our intertwined fingers, instead. “Oh yeah?” I murmured, like I already knew that it must have been something dreadful. And in a way, that’s how I felt. But I tried to cover it up, tried in vain to remove my foreshadowing thoughts. “Tell me.”
With deliberate slowness, as if all the frames in our movie for two had been poisoned, she leaned towards me and put her smoking gun, hush-hush lips to my ear. “I’m a filthy whore,” she whispered, and all blood immediately rushed to my head.
XIII
The Naming of Olive
I felt as if I had been obliterated to pieces and no one had bothered to tell me. Here I was, sitting on a stool in what might as well have been state prison, my knuckles white with fear, my pores exploding with sweat, my mind running fast, like a freight train on crack. And I owed it all to this beautiful, poisonous, whore of a woman-who was leaning over me, her pined-after red hair spilling over my face and shoulders, her bombshell lips sliding themselves (on their own volition, yes) across my jawbone and neck, leaving gardenia-dripping promises on my skin, sewing hush-hush secrets deep into my blood vessels.
She pulled away suddenly and I bit my lip hard, biting the urge to ask her to do that again. My hands, which were cold and clammy, were now submerged in her warm ones. The roles had reversed. I now existed to be comforted, and she was there to make sure I didn’t bust into a million pieces (although I was quite sure she would paste me back together).
“You’re a…” I began, my voice hitting an octave I didn’t know was possible.
Laughing, Olive squeezed my hand securely. “You look so shocked. Yes, I am. And they’re trying to fix me here-non-correctional facility, my ass-but I just don’t see how you can fix something like that.”
Everything moved into place, like techtonic plates or a ghost directing a jigsaw puzzle, but there was still one thing I didn’t understand. “But-how were you caught? Or did you turn yourself in?”
She licked her teeth, wiping all traces of lipstick from their white surfaces. It was her way of remembering. “They caught me on the rue de Bellavance…”
The fictitious street in the French-themed nature park, in the city. Quite a pretty place by day, but a haven for who-knows-what kind of people at night. And now I knew. But she wasn’t finished talking.
“…With my main catch. A man in a suit.” She closed her eyes. “If only we’d picked a different place…”
I didn’t want her to think of him. I softly squeezed her hands, and she fixed her attention back on me. “So…”
There was a period of silence. I was trying to sort out of my thoughts: was this man in the suit the same one who I’d seen her with that fateful day against my willow tree, smearing lipstick and tugging ties? Did she love him, and do they still keep in touch? Could she ever love again…why did she start selling herself in the first place? Selling, that was the correct word, wasn’t it? They won’t arrest you in this place unless you’re parading your body for money. But within my own school of the rich, I’d heard different-not to my face, but in bathroom stalls with your feet placed on the door in front of you.
“Did you do it for the money?” I blurted out, then turned away, blushing scarlet. “I mean, I’m just…”
But she laughed, instead. I was getting used to that laugh, the same one that had bewildered me to nothing, when I had first met her. Now it was like birdsong, or a television droning in the background. “Yes, I did. I sold myself, if that’s the correct way to introduce yourself as a whore.” And she winked.
What happened next can only be described as a Corny Moment-whether it be in a movie, a book, on television, or in real life, I am sure all of you know what I mean. It’s those times in fiction, or life, when everything fits together, things make sense, and gears start turning. Wherein the sun came gliding miraculously over the hilltop, I felt…calm. I wanted to kiss her again, this redhead (and at the moment I didn’t care whether the color was fake or not) with the canary-yellow cardigan and the bright blue jeans. I watched my hand begin to slide out of our web, and then up to brush those crazy bangs out of her eyes. Yes, cue the sappy music, folks. And turn up the sun.
But none of the sliding or the brushing or the staring deeply into each other’s eyes until we turned to mush actually happened. What did happen, though, was that Olive was christened. By me.
“Sold yourself,” I repeated, in a whisper.
“Yep. For money and all,” she whispered back.
(And now, the music crescendos…)
My backup reasons for my next action were, in this order: 1) well, she’s a whore anyway, so I’m sure she gets it a lot, 2) I can’t help it, 3) it’s my first date anyway, I might as well break the rules, and 4) who else is possibly going to know?
Who else, indeed.
I asked her, “How would you like to be Purchase, instead?”
She grinned. “Why can’t we just stick with Olive?”
And I replied, in a steadily waning voice, “I hate that name…”
And then I kissed her.
XIV
In Love with an Asylum
After that, everything seemed to fall into place, as if whoever was Up There had taken pity on me and then decided to send me everything I needed to make the rest of my first date non-disastrous. And for the most part, it worked. I could speak in full sentences without slurring words together to form phrases from other dialects, I did not act rude and shameless (or I might have, but being seventeen, I did not consider it rude and shameless), and I kept my urges under control (thank the Lord).
But I had kissed her once, and she had not resisted in any way, shape, or form, so I took this as a good sign. Urges were caged, yes, but that does not mean I let them go once in awhile. Through fields that we made real, because we wished so (dry, yellow grass turned lush green in the blink of an eye), I reenacted scenes from old films, mostly ones in which heroines were kissed.
“Frankly, my dear,” said Purchase cheerfully, watching me strut in the sunset, “I don’t give a…”
And I hated that line, so I kissed her again.
We frolicked. That is the only word to describe what we did. She responded when I called her Purchase, and she called me out with lines of poetry. No flower was left trampled, no careless little bunny rabbit left uncaptured (and, of course, there really were no flowers or bunnies. Imagination does do wonders, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise). Little was spoken between us, except for a few outbursts of thankful clarity, but we spoke. I found it magical. I’d never been high before, but I was willing to bet that it felt like being with Purchase, as cliché as it sounds, because all the tingling, all the buzzing, all the worlds imploding within my head…it sounded about right, if the druglords at my own school were correct in their advertisements.
Dusk fell and we with it, on a mound of raised, soft dirt. I was exhausted, from running and jumping and screaming and blowing dandelions to dust and, above all, Purchase.
She was a nuthouse, an asylum. A book of mental diseases stored into one person, she personified the word crazy with simple gestures and words. But it wasn’t scary crazy, like when you walked into a hospital and you tried not to make eye contact with anybody or like in horror films where the crazy people are always at fault. She was good crazy, in my opinion; her unorthodox formality and brightness making me hum with excitement. Of course she had her bouts of normality, but I knew in the back of my mind that if she had acted like my best friends or any other normal person I knew back then, I would have kept away from her like the plague.
“The end,” sighed Purchase, her hand reaching for mine. She’d let go a few times within the past few hours, and yet it already felt odd and chilly without her fingers intertwined with mine. I felt, strangely enough, like a child that had finally let go of her mother’s hand in a crowded street.
“Already?” I murmured into dark sky. There were no stars that night, which is the detail that sticks out the most in my mind. We were staring at our bottomless galaxy, our endlessly soaring abyss. “So soon?”
“I’m afraid,” said Purchase gravely, her hand turning cold in mine, “that all good things must come to an end.”
And yet we lay there still. Either we were too caught up in the day or each other or the night sky to get up, or we were just really, really tired. Myself, I was aiming for both. Purchase, I think, was falling asleep at even intervals of five minutes, which explained the fact that she would remain silent every time I asked her a question, and then five minutes later she would answer it.
I thought it was one of those intervals, and that she was asleep, when suddenly I turned to see that she propped herself up on her elbows and was blinking sleepily at me.
“Do you have a ride back home?” she asked conversationally, as if she had just woken up and found me lying next to her, not having the faintest idea how I had gotten there.
“Ah, um, yes,” I lied again, cheeks flaring. Thank goodness it was pitch black.
“Mmm, really,” she said. She obviously didn’t believe me. So much for thanking the dark. “I’ll call you a taxi, shall I?”
I watched as she pulled out a sleek pink cell phone (the colour clashed horribly with her hair, and I savored it) from her cardigan pocket and speed-dialed a number. The line rang a couple of times, and when it clicked she asked for a taxicab in front of St. Abernathy’s.
“Oh and,” she said, winking to nobody, “it’s me, Olive.”
That could have meant a few things, and me, being seventeen and in denial of my sexual ignorance, chose to think that she was talking to some guy she’d had an affair with, or a group of guys that she had been hired for. (For all I really knew, it could have been a relative or something. But then why the wink? There were so many catches.) I sunk lower into the dead grass, sighing to myself. Was she mistaking me for a payer? Did she expect money at the end of this date? I hoped not, for various reasons, one being that I wanted a relationship and not a one-night stand, and the other being that I had no money whatsoever.
But when the taxi pulled up and the door opened for me, the only thing Purchase bothered to do was blow me a good-bye kiss (I liked the familiarity, but I did not enjoy the loss of intimacy we had shared over the past several hours). When I was halfway in the cab, though, she came towards me, leaned in close to my ear and said, “I’ll write ya, cutie. Write me back. We’ll talk that way.”
To be honest, I didn’t think she’d write. Or even more truthfully, I didn’t want her to write-what if it caused another scene like the last one, and Christal or my father (not my mother, because she is usually not in touch with such things until they hit her smack in the face) found out the whole story? But she kept her word, and wrote it down, even. In her first letter, written this time on beautiful, gardenia-scented stationary, she gave me two addresses: one for 551 Vermont, and the other for a 263 Ophelia Avenue, which was the street right off of Vermont.
“That,” she wrote in curly script underneath, “is my home address. I go there often, just to make sure that my brother’s doing okay without me. You can send letters to this address, too-nobody will know. I swear on it.”
And, from November 1st - 30th, 2006, this is what I made of National Novel Writing Month.
TO BE CONTINUED?
....
Yes. Promise. :)))
XII
“I’m a Filthy Whore”
Years after my secluded and fiery affair with Purchase and everything that resulted from it-which is a lot, mind you-I live in a Princeton dormitory, attending the college that my father and mother forbade me to go to simply because ‘it wasn’t Yale’. But here I am, majoring in anthropology and psychology (both pertaining to people-ironic for me, isn’t it), finally living a normal life that does not include broken pieces of anything, thumping heartbeats, or redheads.
Actually, I still keep in touch with Samson. He is a backpacker-a tourist, he keeps on telling me to call him, but I insist on backpacker, for the word tourist brings up images of Hawaiian shirts and large cameras and that is not Samson. But at the moment, he is in Thailand, and I am in New Jersey, and we are practically worlds apart. He tells me to keep in contact with him because, as he puts it, being away from me feels like that first car ride.
“What?” I was truly bewildered by this confession the first time he told me so-the night before his trip to New Zealand. “What do you mean, being away from me feels like-”
And he kissed me, to shut me up, which he soon found out was the only way that worked. “It’s not hard. Figure it out.”
The next day while he was on the plane, I thought about it. It was not easy, because my memory disposes of certain details that may be important after a period of time, but I managed to figure it out. For documentation and novel purposes, I repeat the memory as it stands here, for others to sift through, to figure out what in the world Samson was going on about. I promise that it makes sense.
On that day, Samson drove carefully and ideally, as if he had gone through driver’s education a million times just to get everything right. I couldn’t understand why he had put so much blame on driving, as I saw his skills fairly better than mine-he’d never come in close contact with a passing pedestrian, for instance, whereas I had almost run over a man in a wheelchair on my way to school once. This is why I take the school bus now.
But on the corner of 23rd and Pierriot, we came to a red light-and passed it, going steady with our speed limit, but passing it cleanly all the same. The very first thing I did after we ambled across the no-go zone was check for police or angry drivers. Upon finding none, I turned to Samson, making sure I had a very confused look on my face, like the kind that actors and actresses must perfect for the obligatory scene in which one kills another for no reason at all. Why the big deal, you may ask? Taking my personality into account, it really may not seem so, but I am very in tune to driving rules, and am always absolutely apalled when anyone breaks them.
I had thought of Samson taking a dagger out of nowhere (just like the whistle) and stabbing Purchase many times. Apparently this image worked well with my facial features, for when Samson caught sight of me he turned pale instantly.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair to shake it off, “why are you looking at me like that?”
“You just ran a red light,” I screeched, pointing back to the offending corner. “It switched to red seconds before we’d gotten to the light and then you just passed it. Did you even see it? Did you?”
Still pale, I watched him swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing in the passing shade of the side-road trees. “Oh, yeah.”
“Yeah, what? You saw it and you passed it? On purpose? What?”
“See, um, that’s why I hate driving so much,” he mumbled, avoiding eye contact with me-so different than before, but then again, I guessed he wasn’t expecting me to exhibit such an outburst. “I miss red lights a lot. It’s a habit of mine.”
My jaw dropped. “A habit?”
“I mean,” he quickly said, to cover up his mistake, “it’s not a good habit. It’s just, I look more at the road than at the sky, because that’s what I was told to do, years ago in Driver’s Ed, so sometimes I miss lights and I pass the red ones, just because I don’t catch them fast enough.”
That’s so stupid, was the first thing that ran through my mind, but I knew saying so wouldn’t be such a good idea. It was, after all, our first meeting, even though I’d forgotten that long past already. “You could get killed,” I stated firmly, turning away from him and crossing my arms across my chest, “all because your reactions aren’t fast enough. This is why you take the bus, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Well, yeah. I don’t have to worry about it, then.”
We sat in silence from then on, me still angry at how little a thing could potentially damage someone’s life so easily, and he trying to concentrate on the traffic a little more (for my sake only, he confessed later). As we neared Vermont, he asked me where I wanted to be dropped off.
“St. Abernathy’s, if you know where that is,” I replied, understanding fully how one could miss the fact that the poppy-drowned mound was a school and not a sanitarium. “It’s down the road, that big…”
“I know,” he said, and I noticed his tone was a little subdued-in fact, he sounded almost shocked. “Can I ask why?”
“No,” I said, a little scared. He looked a little wary now, as if offering me his hand and a ride was a mistake, and he would now have to suffer awful consequences. (Oh, how little I knew of him then!) “I mean-why are you asking?”
He shook his head, shifting uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. I noticed his grip on the steering wheel had become tighter. “It’s nothing. Weird place, that’s all.”
“I know what you mean.” Really, do I know, I finished silently.
551 Vermont came faster than I expected-and when it was time for me to leave, it was harder than I expected. Here I was, sitting in a nice car with a nice guy who I’d never even met before. What could I have said? Thanks for the ride, and then never see him again, like I was using him? But he was the one who offered! I was still frustrated as we pulled into the miniscule parking lot littered with poppy petals, and when he turned off the ignition and turned to me, I look up at him angrily.
“Um,” he said, retreating back into his own seat. I realized he had been reaching over me to unlock my door. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” was my feeble reply. I could feel my face getting warm, and I knew it was another one of those times that I hated being a soft thinking and delicately made woman. Curse the lesser sex, indeed. “No, it’s not your fault.”
Taking this as approval, he leaned over me once again to unlock my door. For a split second, I smelled eau de businessman: slick oily smoke from bars, a hint of alcohol from too-late nightclubs and expensive cologne to try and cover it all up. But he pulled back quickly, the lock only having been a latch and Samson having been the politest guy ever, and I lost that feeling of infatuation, the feeling of being in the dark.
“Do you need a ride back? I don’t live far from here,” he said, looking out onto the not-really-there grounds of St. Abernathy’s Non-Correctional School for Girls. “Since the bus station is closed, and all.”
“No, I’ll be fine. I have a ride back,” I lied.
He turned to me, looking a little apprehensive. “Then I’ll be seeing you.”
There was no other word for the situation than awkward. Quickly I got out of the car, trying not to kill myself by doing so, as that is how I usually ended up with car doors. “Try not to die,” I called by way of farewell. “You’re a pretty nice guy. It’d be a shame.”
And I shut the door, leaving his words unsaid. I heard them muffled through the window, but that was all. As far as I was concerned-which was really not a lot-that was the last time Samson and I would be in such close quarters. I forgot about him soon enough.
It was the tingly realization that I was finally in the same place as Purchase, breathing her air, stepping on gravel that she herself had walked on, that allowed me the same adrenaline I’d lost minutes before to shoot through my body once more. I went from relaxed and even listless to hyper and jumpy in mere nanoseconds. With amazing speed, I ran from the parking lot to the backfields of St. Abernathy’s-a short run, but it took me a long time to catch my breath.
When I reached the green-not really green, but I am going on the brochures here-I stopped and panted, ashamed at my total lack of physical endurance. My hands on my knees and my head light, I looked around and saw nobody. The dry, yellow fields full of weeds were completely empty. Catching my breath in my throat, I began to panic: was I too late? It was only half past noon, surely Purchase would have waited, or if she had left, I would have seen her in the empty distance. But I saw no one; no matter in which direction I turned to look.
I bit my lip. Was it over already? Had I lost my first and very possibly last chance? The organs within me oozed defeat and rejection; and I slid down to the spiky earth, the cold fence behind me my only support.
Just as I was thinking how much the emo-kid scene became me, I felt something probing the back of my neck. It was cold and sticky, and…it was giggling. I immediately jumped up from my dejected position and looked around frantically, ready to kill (in figurative terms) whatever thing had crept up on me.
“You’re early,” said the attacker. I instantly ruled out insects and mute serial killers, and then turned around, trying to make sight of whoever it was.
“Who’s…?” I mumbled, turning back to the fence.
And in the middle of that little square of dead wildlife, wearing bright colors as if to rub in my face how completely oblivious I could be-there stood Purchase, hands behind her back, (fake red) bangs swinging flirtatiously in her eyes. Once again every inch of my fragile anatomy imploded, and as we stood there looking at each other, I wondered if she could sense that I was hyperventilating on the inside.
With one finger, she beckoned me towards her, a smile spreading slowly across her soft features. She looked almost devilish, almost as if she was calling me over to devour me with her brightly painted lips. But I didn’t care. Let her have her way with me, I thought, and with a burst of pride that was almost rancor I threw open the fence gate.
And just like in the movies, things slowed to a complete stop and the heroine is allowed time to dig deep into her skull, pulling questions out of nowhere, coming to conclusions that no one else can see. What was I expecting on that day? Life, liberty, and/or the pursuit of happiness? A girlfriend, or a lover? Hell, or heaven? Thinking about it now, I know that I wasn’t expecting anything. All I knew was that I wanted Purchase. Where, I don’t know or don’t remember-perhaps in my arms, or standing behind me, breathing down my neck, or in my bed, or in my mind (and she succeeded in that). I opened that gate not because I wanted something I could deal with in my spare time, but because I wanted someone who would tell me what to do when I didn’t know-something that had the potential to break me, because I was tired of being the one who broke things.
(The allowance of thinking time is over, and my movie returns to normal speed. I am waking, it seems…and now I am walking…)
“As I said,” Purchase purred, taking my hand in her cool, bony fingers as I neared her, “you are early, my dear.”
(It did not take me long to learn that Purchase could sensualize anything, if she so put her mind to it. I don’t even think she needed to concentrate-it was an involuntary reaction, second only to breathing. “Darling, pass me that cake,” she would think she was saying, only it would come out in a low, deliberate hiss so that everyone within five feet of her felt the same chills along their spine that everyone else was. As it was then, the word early came out eaaaarly, like the vernacular of a witch, and I wanted to die…just die.)
But her accusation made me dizzy nonetheless. “What do you mean, I’m early?” I asked her, looking at her watch. It was quarter ‘til one. “You said noon, didn’t you?”
She laughed. “Heavens, no.” Squeezing my fingers in her hands, she pulled me towards the back door of the art room. “I specifically wrote down one o’clock. I remember exactly. Maybe it smudged.”
It hadn’t smudged-the handwriting was as clear as day, the ink precise and thin. But I decided to play along. Common sense was outdated, according to my subconscious standards.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said meekly. “So where are we going?”
“In here,” Purchase said smoothly, unlocking the metal door and then pushing it open. “You’ve been in it before. My room.”
Never actually having gone on a real date before, I had no idea how to act. I had a general idea-you don’t get to be seventeen without knowing the basic facts of ‘going together’-but actually living it was a different matter entirely. As soon as we were both in the art room (well, now I had my doubts as to what the room actually was), and the door was securely locked behind us, we stood together, saying nothing, showing everything. I was nervous. She was complacent. I was sweaty. She was perfectly composed.
“Soah,” I mumbled, and then swore. I’d meant to say so, uh, but it came out soah. Like the ebonics version of ‘soar’. It seems as if that day, I’d lost my ability to put together words properly.
Purchase giggled.
I tried once again to speak correctly. “So, um…” That started out well, so I went on, pronouncing every word like I’d learned it yesterday. “Why is this your room?”
“I live here,” she answered, not batting an eyelash.
“Oh yeah?” I didn’t believe her. She was cracking her knuckles now, and averting my eyes. My people skills were at it again.
“Yes, really. I was disowned as a teenager,” Purchase told me, loud and with better diction than I could have ever mustered. “St. Abernathy’s took me in when I was fifteen. Ever since, this has been my home, and I’ve been trying to reform…”
It was like watching a bad documentary. The ligthing was mediocre, the script mild, and the story bland. It was because of my own insensitivity that I refused to believe Purchase’s story; my own ignorance that created this very first rift in our relationship. I just thought she was high, but she was completely and utterly sober. I’d thought she was merely telling a story, but she had chosen to expose her life to me. In short, I am a horrible person. Do not let anyone deny it to you.
“Okay, wait,” I finally cut in, tired of hearing what I thought was complete bullshit. “You’re telling me that you were disowned by your family, so you came crawling to this place, and they took you in, and now you live here? In this room? I thought this was an art room. At least, that’s what they told me…and are you high?”
She smiled, only this time, it was sad. Seeing such a change in Purchase-atmosphere immediately made me feel like a bitch: had I done this? Was I the reason for that sad smile? It hurt me, it really did.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, truly apologetic. I shuffled around to her side, pulled out a stationary metal stool from underneath one of the tables and tugged on her sleeve. When she turned to me, her face was so doe-like-eyes so wide against her frame of red-that the urge to kiss her was nearly overpowering.
But as most things go, I had to resist. “Sit down,” I said to her instead, offering the chair in place of my lips. Thankfully, she accepted this choice and straddled the metal circle, while I went and sat on the one across from it. It wasn’t much of an improvement to our simple little date (my pathetic first, and probably her more experienced zillionth), but at least we were at eye level.
“So keep on going.” I was ashamed for my earlier disbelief. Surely if she had dragged me all the way down here she wouldn’t be telling me lies, was my more thought-out reaction. Surely if the story had been purely mythical, she would be laughing by now.
Before speaking, she reached across the empty space that stretched between our chairs and took my hands-still warm-in hers, still cold. “I have this thing about contact,” she explained to me, running her fingertips over my palm lines. “It drives me crazy if I don’t have any physical connection with the person I’m talking to.”
It explained future mishaps of Purchase grabbing the people she was talking to in public, causing bouts of molestation accusations, but I could not find any prior evidence. I didn’t care, though. Her hands were soft. “Okay.”
So then she continued her story. Abandoned-no, not abandoned, just ‘dropped off’-at the age of fifteen, St. Abernathy’s took her in as a student and an art teacher. She went to school on weekends, with the adults, learned the same things that everyone else her age did but all she was to them was a more advanced delinquent, one who had done something so horrible that she had to be removed from the other masses and put into the congregation of the grown-ups. The reason that Deidre and Sandy (DG #s 1 and 2, she told me, quite amused at my made-up labels for them) knew her was because they smoked together on the weekdays. Or, as Purchase put it-‘sometimes we smoke, and sometimes we do…other things.”
“Do the teachers know about this?” I asked, my voice foreign to my own ears. It had been awhile since I’d spoken.
“Of course they do, but they won’t say anything as long as we don’t cause scenes.” Her face contorted into that same melancholy state and I wanted again to kiss it away. “Last time you came-I caused a scene.” And she laughed.
“Did you get in trouble?”
“Oh, no. I’m not a regular student, so they don’t treat me like one. They just took away my cigarettes.”
And she gestured to her empty cardigan pocket-where she kept her smokes, I guessed.
“They call it a non-correctional facility, but anyone who really steps in this place isn’t fooled,” she breathed, her little girl’s voice sounding like a hush-hush secret. “We’re all different, just like in a normal school, only we’re all out and about, like in a real correctional institute.” Her fingernails began to wander around the inside of my wrist. I imagined my veins popping, blood pouring out everywhere. “Deidre’s in here for drugs. So is Sandy. NyQuil-” That one didn’t have a real name, apparently. “-Is in here for stealing. I’m the worst one of all, though.”
I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry. I tried to look her in the eyes, but I was too scared. So I focused on our intertwined fingers, instead. “Oh yeah?” I murmured, like I already knew that it must have been something dreadful. And in a way, that’s how I felt. But I tried to cover it up, tried in vain to remove my foreshadowing thoughts. “Tell me.”
With deliberate slowness, as if all the frames in our movie for two had been poisoned, she leaned towards me and put her smoking gun, hush-hush lips to my ear. “I’m a filthy whore,” she whispered, and all blood immediately rushed to my head.
XIII
The Naming of Olive
I felt as if I had been obliterated to pieces and no one had bothered to tell me. Here I was, sitting on a stool in what might as well have been state prison, my knuckles white with fear, my pores exploding with sweat, my mind running fast, like a freight train on crack. And I owed it all to this beautiful, poisonous, whore of a woman-who was leaning over me, her pined-after red hair spilling over my face and shoulders, her bombshell lips sliding themselves (on their own volition, yes) across my jawbone and neck, leaving gardenia-dripping promises on my skin, sewing hush-hush secrets deep into my blood vessels.
She pulled away suddenly and I bit my lip hard, biting the urge to ask her to do that again. My hands, which were cold and clammy, were now submerged in her warm ones. The roles had reversed. I now existed to be comforted, and she was there to make sure I didn’t bust into a million pieces (although I was quite sure she would paste me back together).
“You’re a…” I began, my voice hitting an octave I didn’t know was possible.
Laughing, Olive squeezed my hand securely. “You look so shocked. Yes, I am. And they’re trying to fix me here-non-correctional facility, my ass-but I just don’t see how you can fix something like that.”
Everything moved into place, like techtonic plates or a ghost directing a jigsaw puzzle, but there was still one thing I didn’t understand. “But-how were you caught? Or did you turn yourself in?”
She licked her teeth, wiping all traces of lipstick from their white surfaces. It was her way of remembering. “They caught me on the rue de Bellavance…”
The fictitious street in the French-themed nature park, in the city. Quite a pretty place by day, but a haven for who-knows-what kind of people at night. And now I knew. But she wasn’t finished talking.
“…With my main catch. A man in a suit.” She closed her eyes. “If only we’d picked a different place…”
I didn’t want her to think of him. I softly squeezed her hands, and she fixed her attention back on me. “So…”
There was a period of silence. I was trying to sort out of my thoughts: was this man in the suit the same one who I’d seen her with that fateful day against my willow tree, smearing lipstick and tugging ties? Did she love him, and do they still keep in touch? Could she ever love again…why did she start selling herself in the first place? Selling, that was the correct word, wasn’t it? They won’t arrest you in this place unless you’re parading your body for money. But within my own school of the rich, I’d heard different-not to my face, but in bathroom stalls with your feet placed on the door in front of you.
“Did you do it for the money?” I blurted out, then turned away, blushing scarlet. “I mean, I’m just…”
But she laughed, instead. I was getting used to that laugh, the same one that had bewildered me to nothing, when I had first met her. Now it was like birdsong, or a television droning in the background. “Yes, I did. I sold myself, if that’s the correct way to introduce yourself as a whore.” And she winked.
What happened next can only be described as a Corny Moment-whether it be in a movie, a book, on television, or in real life, I am sure all of you know what I mean. It’s those times in fiction, or life, when everything fits together, things make sense, and gears start turning. Wherein the sun came gliding miraculously over the hilltop, I felt…calm. I wanted to kiss her again, this redhead (and at the moment I didn’t care whether the color was fake or not) with the canary-yellow cardigan and the bright blue jeans. I watched my hand begin to slide out of our web, and then up to brush those crazy bangs out of her eyes. Yes, cue the sappy music, folks. And turn up the sun.
But none of the sliding or the brushing or the staring deeply into each other’s eyes until we turned to mush actually happened. What did happen, though, was that Olive was christened. By me.
“Sold yourself,” I repeated, in a whisper.
“Yep. For money and all,” she whispered back.
(And now, the music crescendos…)
My backup reasons for my next action were, in this order: 1) well, she’s a whore anyway, so I’m sure she gets it a lot, 2) I can’t help it, 3) it’s my first date anyway, I might as well break the rules, and 4) who else is possibly going to know?
Who else, indeed.
I asked her, “How would you like to be Purchase, instead?”
She grinned. “Why can’t we just stick with Olive?”
And I replied, in a steadily waning voice, “I hate that name…”
And then I kissed her.
XIV
In Love with an Asylum
After that, everything seemed to fall into place, as if whoever was Up There had taken pity on me and then decided to send me everything I needed to make the rest of my first date non-disastrous. And for the most part, it worked. I could speak in full sentences without slurring words together to form phrases from other dialects, I did not act rude and shameless (or I might have, but being seventeen, I did not consider it rude and shameless), and I kept my urges under control (thank the Lord).
But I had kissed her once, and she had not resisted in any way, shape, or form, so I took this as a good sign. Urges were caged, yes, but that does not mean I let them go once in awhile. Through fields that we made real, because we wished so (dry, yellow grass turned lush green in the blink of an eye), I reenacted scenes from old films, mostly ones in which heroines were kissed.
“Frankly, my dear,” said Purchase cheerfully, watching me strut in the sunset, “I don’t give a…”
And I hated that line, so I kissed her again.
We frolicked. That is the only word to describe what we did. She responded when I called her Purchase, and she called me out with lines of poetry. No flower was left trampled, no careless little bunny rabbit left uncaptured (and, of course, there really were no flowers or bunnies. Imagination does do wonders, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise). Little was spoken between us, except for a few outbursts of thankful clarity, but we spoke. I found it magical. I’d never been high before, but I was willing to bet that it felt like being with Purchase, as cliché as it sounds, because all the tingling, all the buzzing, all the worlds imploding within my head…it sounded about right, if the druglords at my own school were correct in their advertisements.
Dusk fell and we with it, on a mound of raised, soft dirt. I was exhausted, from running and jumping and screaming and blowing dandelions to dust and, above all, Purchase.
She was a nuthouse, an asylum. A book of mental diseases stored into one person, she personified the word crazy with simple gestures and words. But it wasn’t scary crazy, like when you walked into a hospital and you tried not to make eye contact with anybody or like in horror films where the crazy people are always at fault. She was good crazy, in my opinion; her unorthodox formality and brightness making me hum with excitement. Of course she had her bouts of normality, but I knew in the back of my mind that if she had acted like my best friends or any other normal person I knew back then, I would have kept away from her like the plague.
“The end,” sighed Purchase, her hand reaching for mine. She’d let go a few times within the past few hours, and yet it already felt odd and chilly without her fingers intertwined with mine. I felt, strangely enough, like a child that had finally let go of her mother’s hand in a crowded street.
“Already?” I murmured into dark sky. There were no stars that night, which is the detail that sticks out the most in my mind. We were staring at our bottomless galaxy, our endlessly soaring abyss. “So soon?”
“I’m afraid,” said Purchase gravely, her hand turning cold in mine, “that all good things must come to an end.”
And yet we lay there still. Either we were too caught up in the day or each other or the night sky to get up, or we were just really, really tired. Myself, I was aiming for both. Purchase, I think, was falling asleep at even intervals of five minutes, which explained the fact that she would remain silent every time I asked her a question, and then five minutes later she would answer it.
I thought it was one of those intervals, and that she was asleep, when suddenly I turned to see that she propped herself up on her elbows and was blinking sleepily at me.
“Do you have a ride back home?” she asked conversationally, as if she had just woken up and found me lying next to her, not having the faintest idea how I had gotten there.
“Ah, um, yes,” I lied again, cheeks flaring. Thank goodness it was pitch black.
“Mmm, really,” she said. She obviously didn’t believe me. So much for thanking the dark. “I’ll call you a taxi, shall I?”
I watched as she pulled out a sleek pink cell phone (the colour clashed horribly with her hair, and I savored it) from her cardigan pocket and speed-dialed a number. The line rang a couple of times, and when it clicked she asked for a taxicab in front of St. Abernathy’s.
“Oh and,” she said, winking to nobody, “it’s me, Olive.”
That could have meant a few things, and me, being seventeen and in denial of my sexual ignorance, chose to think that she was talking to some guy she’d had an affair with, or a group of guys that she had been hired for. (For all I really knew, it could have been a relative or something. But then why the wink? There were so many catches.) I sunk lower into the dead grass, sighing to myself. Was she mistaking me for a payer? Did she expect money at the end of this date? I hoped not, for various reasons, one being that I wanted a relationship and not a one-night stand, and the other being that I had no money whatsoever.
But when the taxi pulled up and the door opened for me, the only thing Purchase bothered to do was blow me a good-bye kiss (I liked the familiarity, but I did not enjoy the loss of intimacy we had shared over the past several hours). When I was halfway in the cab, though, she came towards me, leaned in close to my ear and said, “I’ll write ya, cutie. Write me back. We’ll talk that way.”
To be honest, I didn’t think she’d write. Or even more truthfully, I didn’t want her to write-what if it caused another scene like the last one, and Christal or my father (not my mother, because she is usually not in touch with such things until they hit her smack in the face) found out the whole story? But she kept her word, and wrote it down, even. In her first letter, written this time on beautiful, gardenia-scented stationary, she gave me two addresses: one for 551 Vermont, and the other for a 263 Ophelia Avenue, which was the street right off of Vermont.
“That,” she wrote in curly script underneath, “is my home address. I go there often, just to make sure that my brother’s doing okay without me. You can send letters to this address, too-nobody will know. I swear on it.”
And, from November 1st - 30th, 2006, this is what I made of National Novel Writing Month.
TO BE CONTINUED?
....
Yes. Promise. :)))