“I’ll wait,” I say. “I’ll wait till later. I don’t look fat, do I?”
And China says, “Stop it,” like she’s genuinely pissed. She says she wishes she had my hair, what a head of it I have, so good smelling for a smoker. Also my ankles. Look at those ankles. She’d cut them off right now. My hair and my ankles. Right now. Give her a knife. China has hair like Annie Lennox’s. We weren’t on speaking terms when she wore it like Joey Ramone. We were never friends at Holy Trinity, but I’d see her in the halls, before she dropped out. Spiders dangling from her ears. Mel called her a poseur, said she wasn’t really into the music, she just had the look. Tall and rail thin and pale as death. The kind of girl who looks like she should be walking down a dirt road in a music video, one where the sky is gray and the earth is gray and there’s nothing for miles but this girl walking in a torn dress toward you, dark lips curving into a smile, her hands splayed open at her sides like Christ’s. It was only after I dropped out of Holy Trinity and switched to this alternative school that we became friends. Locked eyes in Literature, which is taught by this guy who looks like Eraserhead and lets you do projects on things like just reading Hesse.
“Do you think Batstone’s mad at us for skipping?” I ask her.
“He doesn’t care. Anyway, I hardly ever skip these days. I need to finish and get the hell out of here.” She really does. China was two years ahead of me at Holy Trinity, so she must be, like, twenty. “So long as we don’t miss next week,” she says.
We have a presentation on Haiti next week.
“You can’t shaft me next week,” she says.
“I won’t.” It’s true, I skip a lot. There are stretches of days when I just can’t bring myself to leave my room, to be seen.
She grabs a Matinée 100 from my purse. She’s in no hurry to go home, she says, because she’s trying to avoid Montana. She asks me to show her the trick I have of lighting a match with one hand. It’s easy—you just fold it over the edge of the matchbook and press it down with your thumb just below the strike pad. But I’m happy to have something she wants me to show her.
Then she says, “So tell me about this Internet guy. What’s his name?”
I tell her a bit about Blake. How I met him on AOL a few weeks ago. How his handle is The Cosmic Dancer, which is a reference to Shiva, the Hindu deity. I don’t tell her that he’s forty-seven and a quadriplegic but I do tell her that he lives near L.A. and that he’s a fan of Goth/industrial/dark wave and the films of Lynch and von Trier. I tell her how we talk about what movies we would be in if we could live in any movie (for me Prospero’s Books or Exotica; for him Naked or Nowhere), and what would be the soundtrack for the movie of our lives, and what it would be like to live in Duras’s Vietnam. I don’t tell her that lately we’ve been talking more and more about how I’m going to be the miracle for getting him hard again. Or how he’ll get stoned and tell me all about his elaborate lucid dreams of us fucking in India. Where the mere sight of me in a sari or sometimes it’s just a necklace of bones and teeth gets him so hard that he gets up out of his wheelchair and just walks toward me and we fuck on a flower-strewn altar with all these little Indian women watching. I tell her again that he’s been asking for a full-body shot and that I’ve been putting him off. But I know from past experience that I won’t be able to put him off forever, that it’s only a matter of time.
“Is he cute?” she asks.
I think of the pictures he sent me the other day. One before the accident and one after. I looked at them once and never again.
“He looks like Morrissey, I guess.” It’s not that much of a stretch. Morrissey is balding, sort of.
“Morrissey’s not looking so good these days,” she says. “So you’re sending him one back?”
“I’m still trying to decide,” I tell her. I show her the pictures taken thus far. The one my mother’s boyfriend took of me in the forest leaning against a dead oak, gazing wistfully to the left. The one I took of myself in the bathtub full of strategically petaled water. The ones Mel took of me in the living room under my mother’s print of Monet’s Water Lilies, my upper half eclipsed by my mother’s cat seated on the armrest, my lower half artfully padded with Indian cushions. “I don’t understand what’s wrong with any of these,” Mel said after we were done. “You look beautiful in all of them.”
China flips through the photos now, frowning. “You’re a little blurry in these. Also you look sort of mad.”
“Do I look fat though?”
“You look mad.”
“How mad?”
“Like, pissed. Seriously pissed.” She flicks through the pictures again. “In this one, you look scared.”