That afternoon, I cleaned out my car and left the windows open to air it out. I was soaked in sweat by the time I’d finished and took advantage of the quiet apartment to take a leisurely shower.
When I jumped out of the shower, I was startled by Jasmine busting in the room. I hastily wrapped a thick towel around me and stared at her as she plopped down onto the toilet.
She looked at me coolly, daring me to say anything. Jasmine, while not close to me in any sense of the word, knew things. Things like how much I guarded my privacy and how I was an avoider of conflict. Often, she took advantage of both of those things at the same time, like she was doing at that moment.
“You have another bathroom.” It was said quietly, as I always spoke around her. The apartment boasted three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Luckily, I’d been given the master bedroom, which came with its own en suite bathroom. It was luck more than anything else, after living in this apartment for three years and being the only remaining roommate from the original group that had first moved in here years earlier.
“Yeah, Carly’s in there. She’s sick.” Jasmine stared at me with eyes too big for her face, but the look she held was sharp, conniving. To say we didn’t get along would be like saying that grass is green. It was obvious to Carly, to any one of Jasmine’s boys that she paraded in and out of the house. I didn’t hate her, but she seemed to hold some kind of contempt for me.
I stood there, inches from her as she used the toilet. We stared at each other while the water dripped from my face onto my chest. We were at a standstill. She would expect me to leave the bathroom, but I decided I didn’t want to.
“Carly said you had a date this morning.”
My eyes narrowed. Annoyance. Carly, while sweet and unassuming, had a big mouth. Instead of answering Jasmine, I pinned her with a stare.
Jasmine finished up and stood up, pulling her shorts back up. She smiled at me, an unfriendly smile. Her blonde hair fell around her shoulders like she’d just come from a salon. It was the kind of hair that people envied. Blonde, soft, full of body. Luckily, I felt nothing but annoyance for her. She was a rash that wouldn’t go away; itching at my skin with her stares and words.
“Was he cute?” she asked as she washed her hands, using too much of my soap and splashing water all over the mirror.
“I don’t know.” It was honest. He wasn’t a man you’d see in any model magazine. He was tall, in shape, with piercing eyes and a quick tongue. His hair was too long and he didn’t seem to like colors that weren’t black, but he still called to me on a deeper level. A level that was unnerving and, let’s just be honest, annoying. As I mentioned, I felt annoyance often. It was the other emotions that were tricky, slipping through my fingers like oil.
“What’s his name?”
I picked up the hand towel after she finished drying her hands and wiped up around the sink and the mirror, roughly, to show just how annoyed I was with her. Not like that did me any good. If nothing, it seemed to widen her malicious grin, her pearly whites sparkling with gleeful animosity.
Instead of answering, I carefully pushed her out of my bathroom and then continued pushing until she was out of the bedroom completely. She resisted a little, but she was no match for me with her skinny legs and little body fat.
“Why are you so weird?” she asked right before I calmly closed the door in her face.
I hesitated a moment. “Why do you care?”
She narrowed her eyes a moment, as if considering my question. “I don’t,” she finally answered, before spinning around and moving down the hall.
It probably should have hurt my feelings, but since I didn’t have any, I felt the usual – indifference.
Carly had moved in shortly before Jasmine, but they both hadn’t been here a full year yet. Carly and I got along a bit better than Jasmine and I did, but I still felt nothing about it one way or another. Years of bouncing around foster homes had enabled me to not care about making a connection to anyone. And the fake connections I cultivated myself had caused the scars on my body.
I wrapped the towel tighter around me and grabbed a second towel for my hair. And then I sat at my desk and booted up my laptop.
I checked my bank account first before I started paying my bills. My waitressing job paid most of the bills, but I was fortunate to have my rent and schooling paid for with grants and scholarships, as I had emancipated from the foster care system when I was eighteen. I had one more year of college left before I would be on my own, but I had a well-padded savings account from my settlement with Morris Jensen.
I suppose I should feel like that money was tainted, dirty, and came at the cost of permanent scarring. My lawyer had kindly mentioned the money would more than cover any plastic surgery I desired, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care where the money came from. I’d been forced into shock from the experience, so far into shock that most of the experience was still out of focus in my memory. A therapist had suggested I never came out of shock. She’d warned that the moment I came out of shock, when I fully grasped the entire situation, it would be traumatic and I would have a hard time coping.
I know that’s partially why I took comfort in my lack of emotion. The longer I existed without being ruled by emotions, the safer I was from what I had subconsciously buried in my memory.
As far as Morris Jensen, I didn’t specifically remember anything. I knew what the doctors and police officers had told me. They’d asked me, when they’d caught him, about the bullet in his stomach. But I didn’t remember the entire event. I remembered flashes. I remembered the dark, the screaming. I remembered tires squealing, the radio blaring. I remembered the crack I’d heard when my head had bounced onto the asphalt, the smell of oil and fear. Most of all, I remembered the smell of my own fear, tinged with blood and sweat. And if I closed my eyes and concentrated, I remembered the moments after, when I’d been completely changed.