Chapter ten:

 

 

I grab my zip-up hoodie, and I’m pulling it on and zipping it as she raises her hand to hit my door again, so I yank it open to stop her. She looks startled and nearly falls inside my apartment, but it’s only for a split second and then her startled face is replaced with her pissed-off face again.

“What?” I ask, realizing immediately that that was rude of me.

She’s never knocked on my door before. In fact, no one other than my parole officer has knocked on my door before.

This woman might need my help.

Maybe her john hurt her, or her pimp stole her money.

Or maybe she just needs a cup of fucking sugar for all I know.

“I’m sorry,” I start again. “Hi, how can I help you?” I say with a smile.

‘Manners, Ethan, manners are everything.’ That’s what my mom used to say.

The prostitute lifts her hand and slaps me across the face. And now it’s my turn to be startled. It’s not necessarily that the physical act itself hurts me, because the emotional one hurts way more. I don’t know this crazy bitch. Yet she’s at my door, hammering away on my red chipped paint and slapping me across the face like she knows me.

I scowl. “What’s your prob—”

She slaps me again, mid-sentence. “Listen here, you little pervert. I know you listen in, and we both know there’s nothing I can do about that, but if you ever make a fucking peep while I’m with a client again, I swear to God”—and she makes a cross sign over her chest and points to the ceiling—“I will fucking kill you. Do you hear me?”

There’s three things I realize in that moment. And I shake my head as I realize them.

One.

This woman is not as attractive as I first thought she was. Firstly, her blond hair isn’t even real. It’s a bottle-blond bleached color with bits of fake hair clipped in to make it look thicker. But she’s not fooling anyone because it just looks tacky and gross. Her teeth are also gross, and I can tell from her extremely bad breath that she smokes like a hundred cigarettes a day, maybe more. Her body isn’t lithe like I first thought either—it’s skinny. And trust me, there’s a difference between the two. Her skin isn’t pale like snow; it’s gray like the dead. Her eyes aren’t any color at all. They’re just a mix of gray and brown and they don’t even glow like Carrie’s do. They’re just dead like her skin.

Two.

Manners don’t always get you everywhere.

And three.

The crying walls are uncomfortably silent when a prostitute knocks on your door and starts screaming and shouting at you.

She spits at my feet and storms away, heading back out into the night to find her next—what did she call them?—client? And then the crying behind the doors and windows starts up again.

I go back inside, closing my door behind me. A couple of minutes later I head back to my door, open it, and then I’m on my hands and knees with bleach and a sponge cleaning up her spit, that probably has who knows what kind of germs in it because she’s a dirty skank that sucks cock for a living!

And I will never bring my Carrie back here. Never!

When the spot she just soiled is clean, I head back inside for the third time tonight, locking my door behind me. I look through my peephole as I hear someone coming up the stairs, and I see that it’s her again. She flips my door the bird when she walks past, and then she climbs the stairs to her apartment with her client trailing behind her, his gaze on the sashaying of her flat ass.

“Good luck to you, buddy,” I say.

But I don’t really wish him any luck. If he’s stupid enough to leave his beautiful wife and kids at home, to come out and fuck a dead-eyed, gray-skinned, bone-thin, ugly prostitute with bad breath, that’s on his head, not mine.

I finish making my soup and I sit in my living room eating it, listening to the thump, thump, thump coming from upstairs. She’s really noisy tonight; her groans of fake satisfaction are leaking through her floorboards and seeping through my ceiling. I think she’s doing it on purpose, trying to rile me up to do something.

I ignore it.

And I ignore her.

And I think of Carrie instead.

And that makes me smile again.

My belly is full of soup that makes sense, and my heart is full of love, and that makes sense too. Love it better than hate. And for the first time in a really long time, I have an abundance of hope.

Carrie broke my heart when she left, when she disappeared without saying goodbye. I never understood what it was that I did that made her go away.

My counselor, Mr. fucking Jeffrey, says it’s because of what I did, and that’s why she went away. But I know that’s not it. He doesn’t understand.

He says that I’ve blocked it all out, that it was too traumatic for me to cope with. That’s what the courts said too. And apparently that’s what happens when something really traumatic happens to a person. When the mind can’t cope…it shuts that memory away. The human body is a glorious thing, and it will do anything to survive. Shutting out memories is just one of the ways it does that.

And I believe Mr. fucking Jeffrey. It’s not that I don’t, because I do. I’ve read up on it in the library. There was even a book called “Trauma and How to Deal With It,” so I know he’s not just bullshitting me. I know he’s for real with what he’s saying. But I just know that I’d know.

Ya know?

I think back to Carrie—how she was back then. I didn’t see her for a month, and when I did, she was different. Suddenly—or maybe not if I was paying attention at all (and I call myself a friend!) —her home life wasn’t just about having cracked paint and lice in her hair.

It was more.

It was less.

It was all of the above.

It was dirty, but much worse than dirty windows.

It was the sort of dirty that could never be washed away, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

The first day I saw after her month-long vanishing trick, her dad hit her across the face and I had wanted to vomit.

And so I did.

I puked in my mouth and then I swallowed it back down.

And I’ll never forget the taste of the acid, burning in my throat. Just like I’ll never forget the look on her face as he dragged her away.

Her lip dripping with blood.

She never asked me to stop him.

She never asked for help.

She just let him take her.

I thought she’d given up.

But she hadn’t.

She was just accepting what could not be changed, what had to be, until it didn’t have to be that way anymore. I didn’t know then that she was already forming a plan.

The taste of acid stayed with me well into the evening, so much so that I couldn’t even eat my food. My mom was worried because I never left my dinner. I was a good boy. I was grateful. I ate my dinner and I did my homework on time and I was respectful and polite, and I prayed to God before bed every night. But that night was different.

And so my mom knew something was wrong, she just didn’t know how deep the wrongness had gone. How much it had seeped inside of me. It was like blinking and seeing the world in its rightful state.

Carrie’s dad was a bad man.

Carrie would make me just as bad soon enough.

But it was worth it.

She was worth it.