I don’t remember her name. She told me a while ago, I’m sure. Maybe I wasn’t fully listening. Maybe the sound of her name fell out of my ears. Ping-ponging around the cartilage and zipping out. I want to ask her to say it, but then she’ll get the wrong idea about me. I should not be the guy that forgets a girl’s name. But I am. So I don’t ask. It might be too late for me to ask.
The speaker pulses on beat next to us. Someone’s drink has been set on top of it, and the red solo cup is dancing its way toward the edge, a buzzing centimeter at a time. “Think you want to go upstairs?” She shouts over the music, looking up at me. Her face paint is luminescent in the UV darkness. It’s like a free-floating mask appearing to have no owner. A red imposter grin drawn across her lips, impishly exaggerated. Eyes looking out through two blue diamonds. The cherry circle for the nose.
It all makes me wonder if there really is a girl underneath it all.
“What?” I shout. Though I had heard her.
“Want to go upstairs?” She is bumped by the tail of a dragon costume. “It’s getting crowded down here.”
She’s right. The basement has become a shifting mass of bodies shuffling along the carpet. Bouncing to the baseline, sprawling out onto the couches, or even on top of each other. Heathens, mom would say. No respect for themselves. I nod.
“Let’s go up then.” She grabs my hand and lets me follow her up the stairs, away from the noise. I get the impulse to ask for her name, but it seems pointless if she is not facing me. She opens the door at the top of the stairs, and my eyes stutter at the sudden white light. When they stop, I can’t tell if the kitchen before me has been painted yellow or white. As if my sight had suddenly become oversaturated in the purple of the UV. It happens briefly, as my corneas finally adjust, and the world’s colors are back to normal. Was it a warning? A fail safe to keep my wandering head in the basement. In the dark where I belong. I open my mouth, hoping to get her to come back down with me, but she continues up a second set of stairs just off the kitchen. My hand is still linked with hers. The ball of her wrist barely poking out of the tulle fastened to her sleeve.
“Why a clown?” I ask. “What made you pick that?”
“No other good costumes.”
Upstairs, a long hallway greets us with its doors ajar. She picks the first bedroom to our right. My guess is that it’s the master bedroom. Besides the giant bed giving this away, the corner of the room houses a wooden wine rack. The shadows of the top bottles spill onto the bottom ones.
“They must be alcoholics,” she remarks, sitting on the edge of the bed. “See anything good for us?”
I skim the labels, all written in the type of script that no soul can decipher. I pull out one with gold lettering on red paper. No son of mine will ever drink that poison. The voice is so clear, yet watery. As if conjuring up from the air behind me so it is just heard by me. Not anyone else. And I ignore it.
I pick up two glasses from the rack and bring them over to her. I hand her the bottle to pour, in case she thought I would want to put something in her drink. Not that I would. She uncorks the reusable stopper and out slides the ribbon of red. Poison. I quickly sit down next to her, resisting the urge to press my fingers over my hurrying heart. I feel as if something in the ground below us is preparing to grab a hold of my ankles and pull me straight through the earth. I still drink and she does too.
“I can take the makeup off if you want,” she explains through the imposter grin. The white paint across her face looks duller than it had downstairs. Like the blood has been completely drawn from it. I nod, and she steps into the bathroom. The sink inside shushes to life.
I place my hands flat over my knees. There is a mirror across from me, but I don’t let myself glance up at it. I am worried about what I might see reflected back at me. I imagine the silhouette of mom’s hand pressing down on my shoulder, waiting for me to notice. To explain what I am doing in this room. Convince it that this boy before the mirror is not the same one it knows. As if I could convince myself in the first place.
She’s out of the bathroom now, holding a stained paper towel. She sits back down. The ghost of the paint is still faintly present, particularly the blue diamonds around her eyes. Faded and grayish like a watercolor portrait. She’s washed most of the red off, but the pink line of the fake smile has remained attached to her lips. Under her chin, she missed a spot of white paint. I want to touch my thumb to it, wipe it off for her. I feel like if I try that, I might cry.
She’s just that beautiful.
I look down. My hands are now tightly gripping my knees. She leans in close enough that I can feel the strings of breath on my neck. Her lips find the bone of my jawline. That’s all men are good for. They think with one thing only. The lips go away, but I am still stuck staring at my hands. I wonder if these are the hands that actually belong to me, because I can’t seem to move them at all. I hear the rustling of her costume, and I know for sure she is taking it off.
I begin to see my hands working at the buttons of my own costume. But it’s not me doing it. In fact, I cannot feel my hands at all. Someone from somewhere else must have hijacked them. And I am observing them as if from inside the little window of a camera. Everything is distant and small. Numb.
I’m now looking at her face, but I no longer see the traces of the paint on her skin. The world is blinking off. I think I must be above her. She whispers, but my ears are underwater. Down to the deep. She lifts her head, and places her lips on mine. Though I don’t feel it. You’re perverted. I can’t see her anymore. I am blinking in and out of space, with no discernible image or feeling. Just the sense that my mind and my body are untethered from one another. I am drifting toward the edge, a buzzing centimeter at a time. Perverted.
She is back in my vision. Slowly from an indistinct blur of shape, back to clear again. The numb dissipates. I feel as if I had fallen through into a scene I don’t remember watching. That I have missed something crucial that I can never recover.
She has her hand in my hair, stroking my scalp with warm fingers. “What happened? Did I lose you?”
I am looking at her. She is unrecognizable.