She hangs up. Stands up and shakes her head. Shakes off the dark thoughts like rain from a slicker.
Todd or no Todd, the dance goes on. And even if she makes it in time for only one song, she is going to dance to that one song.
She throws open her door and marches down the hall to the single upstairs bathroom. Turns on the water in the shower and steps in before it gets hot. Even under cool water, the cuts sting brilliantly.
There isn’t much time before Formal will end, but she is used to taking quick showers since Ma turned the water heater down for the dubious solution “to save money.” Quickly she massages in shampoo, expunging the last evidence of Mrs. Antatola’s sculpting of her hair. Rinses. Sticks her face into the soothing stream. Holds it there, luxuriating in the hot water unfurling over her head, weighing down her hair, roaring over her ears. If she could live right here, without having to breathe, or without her body temperature dipping, it would be perfect.
Reluctantly she comes up for air. She soaps up her body, wincing at the sponge’s tactile glide over the cuts. The soap alights inside them, and then her body is humming.
Quick come the torrid flashes of Todd in the women’s locker room, acting out her revered former fantasy. The shower drops in temperature. She cursorily rinses the soap from her body and shuts off the water.
She steps out and dries off with one towel from the rack, massaging her wet hair at the temples, repeating, “I am not a tale of woe. I am the fucking afterglow.” The other towel from the rack she wraps around her body. She walks down the hall, throws open her closet and quickly rummages through it. There’s nothing suitable for Formal.
No. She was going to wear that dress, and so that’s the dress she’s going to wear. She walks over to where it lays draped around the legs of the chair like a shucked skin. Lifting it up, stretching it out in her arms, it looks twice the dress it was.
Suddenly she is intimidated. How to make it whole again?
Duct tape. That’s it. She’s capable with a needle and thread but no whiz, and certainly not fast enough to do it in the time provided. Duct tape is perfect.
She dashes to the hall closet and rummages through a few drawers before she finds it. Carrying it back to her room, she tells it, “All right. People are always talking up your virtues. So, can you save this dress? This night? Do you have it in you?”
She throws the tape roll onto her bed and sheds her towel. Grabs a pair of panties from her dresser and slips them on. Lifts the dress up again from the floor. Draping it around her body, she pinches the off-the-shoulder sleeves so it won’t slide down. It yawns open accusingly.
She eyes the tape on the bed, thinking this task would be better expedited with an extra arm. Then, failing that, hugging her elbows to her sides to hold the dress in precarious place, peeling off a strip of tape long enough to attach, touching it down along the beginning of the neckline, compressing it against the bodice with her left hand and pulling taut the strip running from the roll with her right, letting off more length while still anchoring the first side, releasing the tape to bunch the dress in the center, lowering the entire wet tape edge gently across the bisection, smoothing it up to the roll and anchoring the strip again and ripping the roll away, she puts the first poor man’s suture into her dress.
This logjam of muscular actions cramps both the top of her right hand and deep in the crook of her neck. But the dress stays up without her elbows’ assistance, and she massages the cramp from her neck. From there it is a matter of laying strip after tape strip down across the entire bisection until the job is done.
Surveying her handiwork in the mirror, it’s as bad as she thought it would look. A jerry rig of the worst kind.
But if she wears it backwards…
She slips her arms out and spins it around on her body, and instantly feels the puff of the empty bust at her back. As tight as she had spread the tape, it wasn’t tight enough for this switch. And the back that is now the front is restrictive, with cold zipper teeth grating against her chest. So she spins it around again.
She sighs. So much for the mess trailing behind her like a shameful tail.
But looking at the mirror, she thinks again. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? The disorder? The symbolism of going in the dress they made her destroy. The streaked eyeshadow as the evidence of tears they provoked. She looks terrible because of the terrible things they did to her, and now she’s going to shove it back in their stupid faces.
As long as the dress monstrosity doesn’t come apart and expose her bodily to her whole school, that’s all that matters.
She grabs the comb from her dresser top and carves her hair straight back. She likes the vague stigmatic menace this look gives her. Wet and slicked, her hair’s a red that’s almost black. Styled like this, it evokes the motorcycle ganglords, the mob enforcers, the other anti-establishment pirates and rebels – their pop culture portrayals, really – people incomparably tougher than she. People who would head-butt you soon as look at you. Look at my hair, it says. My hair says don’t fuck with me.
She’s reminded of the convict photos Dad liked to cut from the newspaper. When she stayed with him he’d leave them out for her on his kitchen table with a sticky note attached. Sometimes he’d send them to Ma’s house in an envelope. There they’d be, exhausted but confident, totally remorseless. “He doesn’t look like he did anything wrong, right?” the note would quip. Of course, they looked like they did plenty wrong. They just didn’t care.
She grabs a tall aerosol can from the dresser top and douses its contents over her hair, solidifying it into a valkyrie helmet.
It’s not enough to say her world is safer than it was. That makes it sound like the world did her charity. Takes it out of her hands. She is harder than the current world is, and not the reverse. Come to think of it, the afterglow is too soft of a spirit compound.
“I am a diamond. I went into the furnace as coal and came out the other side.”