I thrashed my arms at my knees until my forearms burned numb. I ripped the scabs off of my body. Robitussin would be good right now, I thought. But instead I did what I always did, which was make things worse. I grabbed the phone, quickly put the battery back in and slid the cover on. I called back, but got only an answering machine.
“I just don’t understand why,” I said, and hung up.
I wiped snot on my shirt and tried to clean my face. I thought about closure. If he hated me, this meant it was all over. It meant no more waiting. It meant no more purgatory. I was free to leave, to get the fuck out of Colorado Springs without him shaping my life for the first time in months.
It was finally over.
I walked back into Wal-Mart to buy three bottles of cough syrup.
Back home, I was busy massaging my fucked-up face, naked in bed, when my scratched-up phone rang. It was from Matt and Frankie’s house.
“Lilith,” the voice said. “This is Frances.”
My breath stopped and I waited, holding my stomach in my hands. The voice was the same business-like voice she used the first time we met. All the walls, everything I’d ever done to try and get to her, I failed. I had failed to make her love me, the way I’d failed to make anyone love me.
She must have come home from her overnight and found out about me staying the night. I ran through a list of the things I brought over, wondered if I had left any evidence of myself behind. I immediately guessed that Matt’s call was him saving his own skin. She’d put him up to it, calling me names, telling me to stay away.
“You are a disgusting slut, okay?” she said. I nodded my head although she could not see it. Her voice was so flat, as if she were reading from a textbook. It echoed from the phone. The whole time she was putting up with me for the sake of her boyfriend, and now she had her chance to say what she’d wanted to all along. “If you ever come near my family again, I will fucking kill you.”
The voice disappeared after that.
I stumbled into the hallway to get a glass of water, my mom drinking Seven and Seven in the living room. I peeked my head around to see if she was awake, which she was, barely. Maury Povich was playing on the TV. I walked quietly through the living room and entered her bedroom. I noticed the unmade bed, the dank smell, the smell of a body that smokes cigarettes and how nicotine sweats out of her pores into the sheets. In the corner, files tossed here and there on a desk, a vanity full of dusty jewelry boxes of unworn, expensive pieces. A couple of empty orange medicine bottles sat overturned on the nightstand next to an empty bottle of rosé.
I turned to the door of her bathroom and pushed it open, glancing down the hall to check for her stirring. The bathroom mirror, covered in toothpaste spittle, hadn’t been cleaned in at least a year. The toilet was rust red inside, the water drained out from not being used. It was dark. The light shone through a small window. You could see dust caked onto everything. The toilet seat, the green countertops, the scale.
I walked over to the medicine cabinet; inside, three or four bottles of Percocet, Valium, and Vicodin. I took a few. Each bottle I moved revealed a ring of clean space underneath it, surrounded by an outer ring of grubby dust. After I grabbed a few tabs, I put each bottle back in its place like a puzzle piece.
On my way back to my bedroom, I grabbed a wine cooler from the kitchen, some pink shit. With the wine in one hand and the pills melting in the warmth of my palm, I threw myself on the bed and lay there for a second before setting everything up methodically on my desk. I closed the bedroom door and turned The Golden Age of Grotesque softly on repeat on the stereo. I watched the light fade out of my window and the window eventually turn black. I touched the sore spots of my body, the new scabs, the bruises Matt had left, the crescent-moon scars on my hip. Jenny’s bite marks on my inner thighs. I spread my fingers over my fat labia, split like a rotting nectarine. My stomach was starting to cramp from the morning after pill.
I smashed my muscle relaxers on the desk with the butt end of a lighter, checked my phone to see if Matt had texted me. Nothing—not even a message from Jenny, or from Sam. I rolled Frankie’s words over and over again in my head, imagined the words on her tongue. I’ll fucking kill you. I felt like a common whore, someone’s unwanted house cat. A home wrecker. If I had not pursued Matt alone, maybe it could have succeeded between the three of us. But my natural inclination was to lie and hide, and it felt good not to deny myself of that. People hide from the things that make them vulnerable while they wait for the right moment, the opportunity to prey. It is instinctual to live in the dark.
I separated the white dust into thin lines and grabbed a plastic straw from an old fast food cup on the floor. I cut the end off and
