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On January 26th of my sophomore year of college, my mother calls twice: once for the basics—how are your classes, I know you practically live in Cooper Hall; how is the new sorority going, oh and darling, please tell me your room is clean—and the next, immediately after we initially hang up, is to tell me that I am not defined by what happened a year ago today. That I should not think about it, or dwell on it, or drink. That I should spend my day surrounded by friends and laughter. That she is truly sorry for bringing it up but she just wants me to know that I am strong and I have won, that Daddy agrees despite his silence, and she hopes that her calling doesn’t bring the dark thoughts. It isn’t a part of me anymore.
Phone in hand, I look at my wrist. White lines now mark where year-old red slits once oozed and ached. The kitchen knife and I locked in the bathroom. The apartment door clicking, my roommates walking in, am I home? The tucked knife in my shoes, I creep into pajamas and wrap my old clothes around my arm. Zuleyka’s eyes widen as if I am a ghost—I wish I was a ghost—when the blood escapes the clothes and splatters on the floor.
You’re right, Mother. It is not a part. It is all of me.
From beneath the covered ramp outside Cooper, I watch the light rain distort the glowing moon, its flawed face quivering like ripples in a white sheet do to a projected film. Today is my eighteenth birthday and I have forgotten an umbrella. I hug myself in a black and gray sundress, shoulders only hidden beneath my thick curls. My roommates are across campus watching a film that was scheduled to be shown on the lawn, picture stretched across the exterior of the book store, but because of the rain, they are waiting for me to slip in through the side door of the auditorium and join them in a cushioned seat instead of a blanket on the grass.
If I’m fast enough, I’ll dodge droplets and won’t miss too much of the film. I tighten the straps on my backpack. The door behind me opens. I turn to lock eyes with Christopher Ponce.
He places his bag on the ledge to his right, a brick half-wall that borders the ramp on which I stand, and he smiles. “Where are you headed, birthday girl?”
I plead my case and Christopher Ponce nods, sitting on the ledge. He makes himself comfortable and crosses his legs. Atop his backpack is a copy of American Psycho.
Last week’s class session is the first time I see him. He doesn’t show up on the first day of class, but he and Dr. M. previously know each other so she assures the rest of us that our new arrival is brilliant. By nature, I am immediately curious and he does not disappoint. Christopher Ponce sits in the back and plays games with us all night, listening intently to a classmate’s theory on the message of Atwood’s “Happy Endings” just so, after the newborn idea is presented to all, he can raise his hand and jab the theory in its young heart, proudly announcing that he enjoys and will continue playing, for the rest of the semester, “the Devil’s advocate.”
My high school honors mentality not yet stale, freshman me eagerly having read the assigned stories and raising her hand proudly, I aim to speak clearly despite my slight lisp and participate in the class discussion. And that night Christopher Ponce fights the devil, biting his tongue and allowing me to speak freely, and he listens closely enough to my name to find me online.
A chat room between us; introductions made. Two years his junior, I wonder why this put-together poet has chosen to waste his lucrative speech on me and not the pretty blonde sorority girl who sits in the front, but he types on and explains that he wants to be my friend. He hopes that I don’t think, from last week’s impression, that he is a dick.
Sitting on the ledge, Christopher Ponce wears an ivory bowtie over his button-down and crosses his purple dress shoes. He is the best dressed man I have ever seen in real life. He is always professional, but today it’s as if he is dressed for a celebration.
In the online archives, I confess that purple is my favorite color. I tell him that the next time we meet for class, it will be my birthday. Eighteen. Christopher Ponce hasn’t forgotten.
“My roommates are waiting for me,” I say. “I really have to go.”
“If you were really going to leave, Stephanie, you would have done it already.”
For my 19th birthday my best friend, Allavie, gives me a pillow case with a black and white picture of the Mad Tea Party. In the spring, she was the only person who knew how to handle my flashbacks. When the silhouettes of men across the sidewalk would change into him as we walked on campus, Allavie would hold me and help reassure my mind that it was not Christopher Ponce; that we were all right.
I’m curious as to why she’s chosen this gift. It will be a constant reminder of everything I currently wish to forget. The reason I moved off campus with her. The reason I sought out a sorority pin.
It is the last scene I wish to see before falling asleep. It is bound to cause more nightmares but still, I can’t stop staring at the sketch on the pillowcase. Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the March Hare are seated at the table, pinky fingers and cups up in the air. The white sheet of paper slipped into the Hatter’s brim reads “10/6.” My hands start to shake and I know my mind is about to rewind.
Ponce and I are walking to the parking garage by my old dorm after our evening class lets out, my face fully primped and his suit freshly pressed, hanging in the backseat of Aphrodite, his gold Mercedes. He is holding my hand.
It’s October 6th, the night of the USF Homecoming Ball. We are going with my roommates and older sister, who also attends the university. Kristen is a year and 3 weeks my senior and usually is quick to befriend my previous boyfriends, but Christopher Ponce won’t allow me to call him my boyfriend. I can tell by the way she stands with her arms folded in the corner that Kristen is very glad he isn’t, but she never admits why. Perhaps because he is older. Maybe she’s scared because he’s so smooth and smart. I know I am.
As he pulls the gray Burberry suit out, I notice that the dress shirt he’s selected is black. He closes the door and looks at my fallen face.
“Alice,” he says with a laugh, “you think I really forgot that your dress is red?”
Beneath the black silk he exposes a red dress shirt, a black vest, and the ivory bowtie to inflict, in me, a sigh of relief.
We abandon the car and approach the building. We have an hour to drink and take pictures. I hope we take tons of pictures.
“What did I tell you?” he asks.
I open the door with my electronic key. “That you’re mad.” I’ve repeated the phrase of warning he first used when he decided on our names in the beginning of our friendship, after the late birthday gift—an empty Patron handle and black skull shisha holder, a home-made hookah we smoked outside under willows in the dark—but before our first boundary-crossing kiss.
Alice, the curious one, and the deceptive Mad Hatter. Since then, in his vocabulary, Stephanie does not exist.
I hope that she is hiding in the shadows, somewhere deep in the rabbit hole; that she really does exist after all and is just waiting to emerge and announce that it’s all been a dream.
Shudder, stop screaming; stare at the ceiling.
It’s only a nightmare, now go back to bed. I’m going to buy you a dream-catcher.
“Never have I ever gotten a tattoo.”
I’m sitting in the living room of the sorority house for my pledge class slumber party. Forty of us will be initiated tomorrow into a lifetime of sisterhood and I am praying to a God I warily believe in that the older sisters will perform some sort of witchcraft on me so I’ll wake up the next day being perfect, beautiful, and tan. My pledge sisters and I are snuggled up in blankets with our hands up, displaying extended fingers. The first person to put down all 10 fingers is the loser, the consequence for living an eventful life.
The girls who have dared to permanently paint their bodies with flowers and Latin scripture blush and curl a thumb into their palms. I’ve never gotten a tattoo so I don’t have to put a finger down. I used to want one, I dreamt of it often, but my parents shot me down and I lacked the spine to defy them.
“Calamity is the touchstone of a brave mind.” I found it inside a fortune cookie I picked up on oriental day at the dining hall. Somewhere between the crack of the cookie and the gasp that escaped from my throat, I fell in love. It was my entire journey summed up in eight words, the mantra of my gift and my curse. I pictured it scribbled in tiny script below my bra line, a secret to most but an anthem to me. I saved my money. Found the ideal font. I invited my parents to go with me and melted into my chair at the kitchen table when they shook their heads.
“You know how we feel about tattoos,” Mom began.
“And your grandmother would die,” Dad added. “Absolutely die.”
Unacceptable, especially in this family.
“But it’s not just about that,” said Mom. She’s wearing that delicate face, the one most adults put on before sliding into an explanation that’s bound to crush another.
“That quote, Stephanie, it’s not going to help you forget. It’s like tattooing him on your body.”
But Mother, I wished to say, it’s like his initials are tattooed into my eyelids. I see the curl and collapse of his mouth, his glowing fangs. The grip marks are doused in Vaseline. I have the clearest sickest image of his legs around my neck, the sound of struggle, and weight of being pressed. De-pressed. I haven’t worked the same since. There’s a crazy tweak in my brain, a multi-charged atom bomb that pulls and links each thought to that night.
This is what happens to me, what my mind does. It searches for him, turning over ever barrel and file in an effort to dig him up, but when he’s found, I am sucked down the rabbit hole. Topsy turby, the triggers—money, dress shoes, a classroom, a hotboxed car—tumble down the hole with me. They liquidize when we reach the bottom, splashing and swirling; spilling into one another so I have to drown inside of myself, in spite of myself, in order for anything to make sense.
I’m smoking with the girls, right? A random lot off campus will do, since we can’t smoke at the sorority house. Smoke swirls around the car. I hope security doesn’t make rounds tonight.
We’re talking about final papers and how life was in the fall, and then the fall for me becomes the trees outside my freshman dorm at the university. How I stormed out on a Wednesday afternoon after listening to him read his old poetry. Christopher Ponce leaned against the wall, back pressed against the corner, legs extended on a chair. In old files, he dug for something to turn in for a class assignment and read the way his old lovers laughed or how he used to lure them in, so I sniffled in the kitchen. Realized those poems were outdated and weren’t about me. And he got up and said, “Don’t cry, Alice” and then we slow danced in the kitchen.
He is the first to do this. After him, two others will caress and rock me in the kitchen this way. But in a sense, it will be so much different. Their eyes will be blue. Perhaps they will change to brown, Christopher Ponce brown, in certain light. Some nights Ponce jolt me out of sleep and the blue eyed boys will kiss my neck or rub my back until I’m breathing normally again.
Am I the first?
Doubt it.
I grabbed my backpack and flew out the door. I was flying, crying, stomping past the sad excuse of Floridian autumn trees, and then there was his hand on my shoulder. He turned me around and we locked glassy eyes.
“I don’t chase people,” he said, “so don’t ever expect me to do this again. But tell me why you are crying. Why are you crying?”
Smoke rings. Are we packing another? “And that’s what makes it so hard, you know,” I hear myself say. I’m speaking? A monologue? Since when?
“I can’t find the connection. I can’t seem to wrap my head around how someone who claimed to love me so much, who shook my father’s hand, who slept in my bed every night, would eventually be the Monster with his hands around my throat.”
You should see the look on people’s faces when they experience their first flashback. They look at me like I’ve been reborn in front of their eyes, locked and frozen in time. Most commonly, they forget to breathe for a moment, and then they sink into their seat. Then they deeply exhale to make up for lost time.
It’s like for every breath Christopher Ponce stole from me that night, I get one back. I steal it from them.
“You might feel your face itch,” Laura says. It’s a warning I’m not afraid of. Numb me. It hurts too much.
The first time we commit this sin is the Friday after it happens. Laura is dying for someone to join her in freebasing, a “recreational” tactic with which she has recently become fascinated, and of course I am instantly hypnotized. We sit in my Mustang, seats reclined, listening to girl music and roasting blue Roxys on aluminum foil. My hands are too unsteady to hold the foil on my own, so she does that and holds the flame underneath for me so that when the pill begins to smoke, all I have to focus on is holding it in as long as I can, only taking in quick spurts of air to keep from turning truly blue as I become a ghost. I feel perfect. When I exhale, nothing comes out. I don’t need love, when I’m a ghost.
After the second pill, I throw up. Every time. We smoke cigarettes in the January cold and walk laps around the lake behind her dorm building, fountain splashing.
“Stephanie, do you really want to die?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “There is no future. I can’t see myself at 30, with kids. It’s like it’s not meant to happen. I just wish I could watch everyone else from up there, but I’m not stupid enough to think that’s what will happen.”
She looks down at her cigarette before throwing it in the grass. “Do you want to go back in and do one more?”
“I thought we were saving it for tomorrow,” I reply.
“We’ll just get more tomorrow. I’m done with class after 3:30.”
I ponder this, but my brain only has one answer. We spend over a thousand dollars over the next two months on blues and other drugs, for in-between.
This is what the rape counselors and therapists claim:
99% of rapes contain alcohol.
A rape victim typically results to two courses of action post-incident:
celibacy and coldness
a state of promiscuity in which they become submissive at the mating call of anybody who seems safe enough to leech to, just for a moment, just to be touched without pain.
I chose option b, of course, but only if under the influence. Sober and sex repelled each other. Christopher Ponce was the last through sober eyes. We both were sober.
The only excuse is madness.
Most people are raped by an acquaintance.
“Are you a serial killer?” I ask, to which he laughs. This is not the first time I’ve asked this question. We’re sitting in Aphrodite in a parking lot on campus and Christopher Ponce just makes me nervous. I stiffly sit in the passenger’s seat, hands folded over my legs. I still don’t understand him and why he is so insistent on being my friend, on getting me high, and on showing me good music.
The car reeks of gasoline. It’s outside, and in here. He opens his center console. “If I was trying to kill you,” he says, “would I show you these?”
A thick black nightstick and two knives: one hooked and the other, a butterfly.
Victims typically don’t fight back due to the “gift of fear,” following the intuition to surrender in an attempt to prevent any further violence. One of my counselors commends me for my intuition and gives me a book to read on the theory.
Every 1 in 4 collegiate women will be sexually assaulted before graduation, which makes me angriest because I picture myself standing in a photograph amongst three other women, perhaps some of my sisters at a formal or on a boardwalk in the sunset, and I have this inky red X slashed across my chest and nobody knows a damn thing.
Because I need a fix, because the sky above campus swirls and screams red and I need blues, I make the call and run to Mazza’s to get them on my own. Before Laura left for her week-long trip to Italy, if you would have asked if it was addiction I would have had you convinced—had myself convinced—easily that it was, Laura’s word, recreational. Me and the Mustang and Laura’s Roxys on the foil, blue science toasted brown and deadly, crunchy; smoke I inhaled and swallowed, smoke we never saw again. Just for fun.
Mazza is the answer. I met him first semester but didn’t know about this side of him until he learned I was using with Laura. He pulls me in and I sit on the bed, hungry with need, and habit has us passing the foil back and forth, smoke sucked and lost. His mouth suctions to mine once we are high and my paper arms fold at his touch. And when the color fades, I run before he comes and I sob in my bed that night for Laura and her gelato, Laura and her museums, Laura and her plane ticket and the way the truth crashed when she landed.
Imagine you are screeching thrashing pushing slashing tearing pleading kicking ending avalanching and you cannot scream.
There is no past, there is no past tense; there is only present, now now, and there is no “over,” only under; under his weight as he stands before you, your head dangling off the bed and that pretty hair spilling on the carpet, you cry as he crams his cock into your mouth and just when it becomes too much he bends himself over, his legs still straight, and all of him is in there at this point, swishing around in the thick mucus that charges up from your throat and leaks out your locked jaw and down your forehead and mascara eyes then through your hairline to the split ends on the carpet, and his face is in between your kicking legs, despite your jerking back, despite the flashes of white light and more and more mucus, despite your arms which flail and slap his spine above, he takes a look between your legs—at what he has just made sore and rammed from behind, at what will deliver your children into the world, at what makes you a woman—and he sinks himself in, and bites.
Sleep through the whole night and paint on your face in the morning. Study for midterms and stop this shit, whatever you’re pulling, because you’re making everyone around you absolutely sick.
Some nights I am perfectly capable of washing my face at night, smearing the black stream of old makeup on my cheeks and into the sink, without hearing the laugh of Christopher Ponce. More often, I am not so lucky.
With my face smudged in black, I fall back.
It’s January. We are sitting on the bed, my heart leaping out of my chest for the window. I have layers and layers to put on: black and grey striped underwear, a shirt and sweater under my coat, and winter flats. I dress slowly, watching a vein tremor in his neck. He is a psycho.
“When you get to your car,” he says, “turn on the light, look in the mirror, and see what you look like because it is hilarious. Then text me.”
I do as I am told. I climb out the window, just as I have come in. Just as I had entered the room and asked for the 40 dollars he owed me—the money that I had driven there to receive, with hope I could score and buy some alcohol for before the Gasparilla parade—and found out that he had no cash, only a check, and could I please take him to the bank tomorrow to get the check cashed?
My car is parked by the empty lot down the street from his house. I climb in and turn on the light, and there’s the mirror. There I am.
This is not my skin and these are not my bones. These are not my smudged eyes and this is not my hair of phlegm. These are not my marks. These are not my fault.
With my eyes peeled to the reflection that is when, for the first time—since no one could see me or hear me, or yell at me and squeeze me tighter—that is when I start wailing.
The sun creeps its way through the crevices between the blinds. A strand of hair swoops backwards across my neck, landing on the pillow beneath me as I roll over. It hits me like a hammer to the chest, a big iron club that would thunk a villain on the head in an old cartoon. Facial muscles contracting, I look at my hands, my wrists—one bleeding; the other, jealous—and I feel my face for signs of nonexistent bruises.
Class at 11. I have a lot to do.
I don’t think to wash my hair. I keep it safe from droplets in a shower cap, coveting its filth from the night before. The water scorches my back and soap scum clings to my pores, as if to thicken my skin.
Off to my bedroom, limbs heavy. I pick out the red dress, three quarter-sleeved and dainty, and adorn my wrists with big black bracelets. I brush and slick my hair in a black headband. I paint cat-eyes on.
The car engine purrs, sending me a short distance to class. And the lecture is dreary, but who could blame me for thinking so? The world spins on. It is a normal day for professors and bicycle riding students.
I am walking around inside-out.
The girl sitting next to me glances between the black bracelets during lecture. I want to turn away from her but I can’t move a muscle. Too heavy. I let her have a look at all that is red.
I drive to where Monster is doing community service and pick him up. I loop the same slow song. I’m such an animal, and baby honestly, these teeth won’t let you go.
We’re close to the bank when he notices my carvings. Of course he scolds me like a child, as he always had. Says later that there are better ways to deal with things.
I wait for him to exit the building by breathing deeply alone in my car.
He slips the money in the cup holders as if we are now even. Fair and square. Like I should be satisfied.
I hear my voice out loud before I notice I’m speaking: “You know I’m never seeing you again, right?” and there’s the door slam.
I make it back in time to attend my 2 P.M. theatre class. There is no greater need for pretending than this day, this class.
But I stare straight ahead, lifeless, fingers coiling the red fabric of my dress. Some, like Allavie, will notice while others indifferently live on. That’s how it happens, you know. They are either ignorant or eventually learn to let it go.
And who can blame them, or do anything but envy them?
