SERAPHINA
The first day, I am fearful.
The second day, after Xavier has gradually exposed me to little bits of light, I can actually sit in the Motel room he’s brought me to and open my eyes without crying. The curtains are still drawn tightly shut, but he opens the door in increasing intervals until I tell him to stop.
The third day, I can have the curtains open for small stretches of time.
I still can’t believe I am out, rescued, the girl in the tower now removed. I feel… odd. Empty. Terrified. It’s not that I miss Ignacio, but I kind of do, at the same time. I miss the familiarity of his visits, the predictability of his torture. At least when he hurt me, I could brace myself because I expected it. Every time I choked on him, every time he put his hands around my neck and squeezed, I knew exactly how many seconds it would be until he let go, until he finished, until I had to swallow like a good girl and then scuttle off to the shower. I knew when to eat—once a day, so my clothes would fit—and I knew what to say, and where to kneel, and when to open my mouth and stick my tongue out.
Now, I don’t know anything. I don’t know how to choose something to wear from the plastic bags of clothes Xavier has somehow acquired during the long stretches when I sleep sitting up in the closet. I like it in there; it feels safe, and warm, like a mother’s womb probably feels. I am the helpless fawn, falling over herself, trying to stand steady and failing. I don’t even know how to exist in this strange new world, full of unbearable light and mind-numbing noise. The food smells different. The sheets feel odd. Everything is wrong.
I eat little mouthfuls of things, the feeling of fullness from this strange new food a strange and tiring sensation. Ignacio likes me small, my hips prominent, my breasts pubescent. He has kept me trapped inside a child-sized body, even as I grew into a woman. And now Xavier sits across from me in the kitchen he calls tiny but I find spacious and looming, watching me as I try to eat—sometimes three times in one day! I feel sick from the constant food. I prefer it in the closet, where it is cool and dark and I float atop a stack of pillows and blankets, suspended between realities. If I could live in the closet for the rest of my life, my hands pressed against the thin walls, I surely would.
The fourth day, everything changes again.
Because suddenly, we have to leave. It isn’t safe anymore. Xavier is pacing, he is on the phone, he is methodically packing things in bags that he takes out to his truck, one by one, until all that’s left is me, and the food in the refrigerator. He comes back in one last time, closing the door behind him with a finality that has every nerve in my body on edge, waiting to react. He’s going to kill me, now. No he’s not. Yes, he is!
“Phina,” Xavier says to me, a pair of scissors in one hand, a rectangular package in the other. “Before we go. I have to cut your hair off.”
I instinctively grab at the long braid draped over my shoulder.
Xavier’s eyes are kind, even as he holds the scissors at his side like a weapon. He told me that he used a scalpel to stab Ignacio. What will he do to me?
“No,” I whisper. “No!”
“I’m so sorry,” he says, setting the rectangular package down and taking something from the back pocket of his jeans. A smaller rectangle, this one is flat, and stamped with the word PASSPORT. He flips it open to a page and holds it in front of me. It’s a girl with dark brown hair, almost black, that falls to her shoulders in a blunt line.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Who is this?”
He takes the passport back, pocketing it as he gestures toward the bathroom. “It’s about to be you,” he says.
In the bathroom, there is a mirror. I have done everything I can to avoid this mirror—another thing to add to the list of things that terrify me. My own reflection.
Xavier stands behind me, a foot taller than me at least, and I marvel for the first time at the way we look together. Like a painting, like a dream—a tiny pale girl, wearing a braid for a crown, and the angel who visits her in that same dream.
I stare down into the basin as Xavier busies himself behind me. He sets up a towel under my feet, several plastic ziplock bags next to the sink. “We can’t leave anything behind,” he says. “Especially not your hair. They’ll be onto us like lightning.”
I saw lightning once, when I was a girl and the windows still opened. I don’t want anything to be on me like lightning. I stare at my toes, at the basin, at the dirt in the cracks between the glossy powder-blue tiles I’m standing on.
“Are you okay?” Xavier asks. I nod tightly, unable to look up. Suddenly, I feel him freeze behind me. He knows.
“You’ve never seen yourself in the mirror,” he says.
I shake my head tightly. Never. Never, ever. I’ve seen myself in the back of a dull spoon, in the reflection of Ignacio’s reading glasses, but those were so fleeting, so small. No, I have never seen myself.
“Seraphina,” Xavier says, his voice low, insistent. He uses a single finger to tip my chin up. I close my eyes. I don’t know why I’m so scared.
He’s closer. I can feel the heat between our bodies, my back melting into his chest, his bare arms brushing against mine. “I-I can’t,” I stammer.
“Yes, you can,” he says. “You are beautiful, Phina. You deserve to know that. Look.”
Tears pooling in my eyes, I finally risk a glance. It’s so strange. My eyes are so blue. My pupils are much bigger than Xavier’s or even Ignacio’s, even though they both have dark brown eyes that merge into black pupils. I have a thin ring of blue that the black almost entirely consumes. I look demonic.
“My pupils—” I say. I can’t look at the rest of me, not yet. I’d rather have the cattle prod burned into my skin than study my flaws. And I can hardly bear to look at my hair, knowing it will be destroyed momentarily.
“Your eyes are like that because of the dark,” Xavier says quickly. “They’ve never had to adjust. I bet you can see everything when it’s dark, can’t you? While the rest of us are stumbling around blind.”
I nod. I can see perfectly in the dark. It’s the light that blots everything out.
“I dreamed about you,” I blurt out, meeting his eyes in the mirror. Isn’t that absolutely impossible? He’s standing behind me, his breath warm on my ear, but I can look into his eyes as he looks back into mine in the mirror. And isn’t it impossible that I dreamed of him before I ever knew him? Xavier responds by reaching around and pulling my hair back off my face, running a warm finger down the scar near my temple, the spot that impacted the ground when I fell from the tower. It was the first time Ignacio had turned from loving father figure to something terrible, a horrific monster who wanted to hold me down and split me in half while I screamed. I was just a girl, and in my panic had thought it better to leap out of the window than stay for any more of the pain. Blood running down my thighs, tears blurring my vision, and he laughed at me, told me I was a foolish girl, that I’d never jump.
I woke up in the tower days later, my head bandaged heavily, my eye swollen shut, and new boards nailed over the windows. That was the last time I ever saw the sun, or the moon, or the stars. That was the day I went from a girl in a tower to something much worse.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Xavier asks.
“Remember what?”
“When you fell. When you were a girl. That was the first time Ignacio had me work for him.”
My eyebrows shoot up in disbelief. “You’re the one who fixed me when I fell.”
He nods. There’s so much sadness in his eyes. I can’t bear it. I look away, finding my own eyes, and there’s just as much pain there. Everything hurts in this cruel world, whether you’re in a tower or with the prince who rescued you, as he tries to convince you to remove a part of yourself.
I don’t want to cut off my hair.
I’ve spent the better part of my life tending to this hair. Brushing. Braiding. Wrapping like a plaited crown piled on top of my head. When I was a little girl, I used to play with my hair for comfort, and pretend it was my mother. I still do that now. It’s so long, that it’s easy for me to run my fingers through it and imagine it’s somebody else’s touch.
“I didn’t know,” Xavier says, his eyes suddenly watery, his voice thick. “Seraphina, I am so sorry. That first time I was there… he wouldn’t tell me your name. He held a gun to my head while I stitched you up and checked you over. And then, when I’d gotten away and was putting together a plan to come back for you—”
His fingers come to rest on my shoulder, squeezing me almost to the point of pain. “He told me you had died,” Xavier finishes. “And me, fucking idiot that I was, I believed him.”
I’m crying, too. The grief in his words pierces my very soul, right down to the core; somebody cared about me, once. Somebody wanted to rescue me from Ignacio.
“I have carried you with me for ten years,” Xavier says, poking his chest with a rigid finger, “in here. I thought about you every day. I still think about you every day.”
I run my finger down my thick braid, remembering exactly how much Ignacio used to love using my hair for his pleasure, for my discipline. My hair is like this because Ignacio decided it. Because, until four days ago, I was his little fuck doll, his stolen prize, his dirty secret hidden away in the dark.
Suddenly, it’s as if I can feel every hair follicle on my head, the weight of this impossibly long braid, the way he used to pull it so hard pieces would come out in his fingers as he forced me back onto him.
“Cut it all off,” I say, my voice sounding like it belongs to somebody else, the meek edge gone. It’s as if I have been possessed. The hair that was my security blanket is now the weighted chain that will drag me to the bottom of the ocean if I don’t get it off.
Xavier opens his mouth to say something, but he must have heard the edge in my voice, because he takes the scissors from the counter, and with three agonizing cuts, he’s placing my braid on the counter in front of me.
I look at myself. I’ve never seen myself to know if I always had that hard glint of determination in my eyes, but I know inside of me that it wasn’t there a moment ago. I reach up to run my fingernails through my scalp. I feel light. So impossibly light, as if I could just hold my breath and float away on the breeze.
He colors my hair next, first wetting it as I lean into the sink, and then massaging dark goo into my scalp that smells horrific. My skin burns and my eyes water from the smell, but I bear the time patiently. I am a girl who is used to waiting, used to pain and discomfort. This is my default mode. I am most comfortable when I am held in the predictability of unpleasant things. We don’t talk. We’ve both taken our shirts off for this part, to avoid getting any of the dye on them, and so Xavier is bare chested, his dark skin in start contrast to the ivory sports bra I’m wearing, not to mention my pallid skin. The room heats up considerably when Xavier starts to apply the dye to my roots. I would say it’s the chemicals, but it is definitely because we are now both half-naked in a small enclosed space where we are constantly brushing up against each other by necessity. My cheeks burn, two red circles in a pale white face, as I remember all the times Ignacio would be behind me, all the times when I would close my eyes and pretend it was the mysterious angel from my dreams pushing into me instead.
Xavier. It’s been him all along. And now that I know, I can barely look him in the eye without a deep warmth spreading across my womb, almost painful in its intensity. My nipples stiffen to hard peaks under the thin bra Xavier bought for me and helped me put on earlier, a purely platonic gesture, but one that I’m now imagining in all different sorts of ways. There is no padding in this bra, and my nipples are clear as day, jutting out like tiny bullets on my chest.
I notice Xavier glance at me a couple of times, almost furtively. Can he read my mind? He doesn’t need to, I guess. He can feel it, like ripples of heat between us. I want to be this close to him for the foreseeable future.
Finally, the black goo is washed out of my hair and dried off with a towel. Xavier motions for me to stand, pointing in the mirror at the new Seraphina, the one with the dark hair and the new voice. I look into my reflection and see a stranger.
“How does that feel?” he asks. He looks worried. I smile. I look at my face; at the way my nearly black hair frames it. “Different,” I reply, my eyes wide in wonder. “Good.”
Xavier grins so wide, his face looks like it might shatter. His teeth are beautiful, his eyes crinkled at the edges from the force of his smile. His joy hits me in the chest like a heavy blow, and my knees go weak.
“Whoa,” he says, catching me before I sink to the floor in a heap. If my long hair was anchoring me to the ground, now I feel like I barely exist. It’s a heady feeling, like lust. Braced against the counter, I turn my body to face his. I tuck my hair behind my shoulders and look Xavier right in the eyes. He’s got that worried look again, and he tries to leave the room. I’ve already anticipated his move, though, and I sidestep so my back is against the closed bathroom door, the whole room a dizzying mix of pheromones and peroxide.
“What are you doing?” he asks uneasily. I reach for the waistband of his jeans, pulling him toward me. He follows the movement of my insistent tug—to a point. But he freezes shy of our bodies touching, placing his arms on the wall on either side of my head. I’m caged in by him, but it’s not like being trapped in a tower; it’s like being consumed by a fire than burns so damn good.
I’m breathing heavily, the feeling inside my chest dizzying. There’s a fine sheen of sweat gathering on Xavier’s chest. He looks afraid.
I stand on my tiptoes, curling a hand around his neck. Our lips barely graze, but it’s like being slapped across the face, like seeing stars. I know Xavier feels it, too, because he jerks his head away.
Without my hair weighing me down, I am a new person. Meek, subservient Seraphina is gone now, her fate braided into the long plait of hair that sits on the counter, dead. I am another Seraphina now.
Seraphina means fiery, and I am burning up inside.
Xavier tries to grasp the door handle. I don’t let him. I am small, but I am fast. And apparently, insistent as well.
“Phina,” he protests.
“Xavier,” I reply.
I unclasp the bra he bought for me, letting it slide off my shoulders and onto the floor, forgotten. In the past four days I have broken myself open, spilled my dirty soul onto the floor, showed Xavier Bishop all of my secrets… and now I want to show him this. I take his large hand and place it on my left breast, shivering as his rough palms scratch my soft skin. Underneath my jeans, my underwear is drenched. Whoever thought something as innocent as a haircut could cause such a raging desire to be unleashed?
“We can’t,” he breathes, tipping his head forward so our foreheads are touching.
I unbutton my jeans and slide them down my legs, kicking them off onto the floor so that I am completely naked.
“Says who?” I challenge him. I want to kiss him. More than anything in the world, I want to kiss him. I take the hand that’s still on my breast and guide it between my legs, into the warm wetness that’s appeared just now, just for him.
“Oh, fuck,” Xavier mutters, sliding his finger through my slick folds. He pulls away, though, putting his hand on my shoulder and stepping back to create the illusion of distance between us.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says urgently, his dark eyes searching mine. “You understand? Whatever he made you do, it was wrong, and it was sick, and you don’t ever have to feel like you have to give me that, Phina. I’ll do anything to keep you safe. You don’t need to do this with me.”
I sag against the door, throbbing and empty and light-headed with need.
“You don’t want me,” I say, looking down at the floor. “It’s okay. I understand.”