HOW TO DANCE LIKE NO one is watching. Or dance like everyone is watching, pale flesh jiggling as you grind against denim and polyester and lacrosse muscles and twitching dicks. Writhe in your Docs and jerk to the beat beat beat of the hip-hop blast, and let a hand find its way past a thin cotton waistband and stick its finger into your warm and wet. Wrap your arms around the closest body, press lips to neck and nape and groin, laugh along with and louder than, and if it feels good, do it. Put your hands on yourself, and rub and stroke, let yourself moan. Think, look at these faces, my friends, look at their love and look at me shine. Don’t think. Straddle something, a chair or a body, lower your weight onto it, ride ’em cowboy, ride it hard while they pour beer on your head and you raise your face to the stream and your tongue to the sour splash, then, because they call for it, lick it off yourself, and off the body, and off the ground. Note the heat of skin, the fire that courses beneath, the salt of sweat and tears. Slice your palm on the splintered edge of a broken glass and smear yourself with blood. Let the floor fall away and the horizon spin. Suck at flesh and whirl in place and throw your hands up in the air. This is how to party like you just don’t care.
Look at yourself, LACEY HAD said, the first time she laced me into the corset, turned me to the mirror, made me see. It’s like you were born to wear it.
Do you see now, Dex? she had said.
I saw: A girl’s face, made up with drastic colors and lips pursed in mock defiance. Romance-novel cleavage and black lace. Hair with streaks of icy blue and leather cuff bracelets that whispered tie me up, hold me down.
Look at yourself, Lacey had said, but myself was gone.
I thought: I look like someone else, and she is beautiful.
YOU. GIRL. WAKE UP.”
I did what I did best and followed orders, waking up slow and in pain, fuzzy mouth and throbbing head and a cavernous feeling like I hadn’t eaten in days, though the thought of food made every organ want to fling itself from my body into a putrid puddle at my feet. I woke up cursing and squinting, wishing someone would turn out the sun. Weeds beneath me, jeans, shirt damp with dew. Strange shirt; a stranger’s shirt.
An alien landscape: Stretch of overgrown lawn, a drained pool, a fringe of trees. Dingy white siding, broken windows, stained patio, crushed cans of beer.
A man, his foot nudging my thigh, his face in shadow, gold badge glinting in the dawn.
“That’s it. Get up now.”
When he touched me, I screamed.
The effort of it nearly made me pass out again, as did the tilt of the world as he dragged me vertical. Then the noise of his words, security guard and trespassing and, he kept saying, trash, trash, trash, but it wouldn’t come clear, whether he meant the empty cans and the broken glass and the used condoms or simply me.
The party was long over; everyone was gone. They’d left me alone. They’d left me out with the garbage.
Standing set my insides to sloshing. Thinking was hard, like a toddler unsteady on chubby feet.
“Get in,” he said, and there was a door with a sedan attached to it and a leather backseat and the thought of a moving car made me want to die.
“I have my bike,” I said.
He laughed like a dog.
“Are you a cop?” I said. “Am I under arrest?”
“Just give me your address.”
Don’t get into cars with strange men, I thought, and asked if he at least had any candy, and then I was the one laughing.
Maybe I was still drunk.
Lacey would have said: Skip the name, rank, serial number. No identification, no address, no consequences. He would have to dump me by the side of the road, and then I could sleep.
I couldn’t remember the night.
I couldn’t remember enough of the night.
I remembered hands gathering me up, I remembered floating in strange arms, chandeliers overhead and then stars, and laughter that wasn’t mine. I remembered fingers tugging at zippers and lace, a voice saying leave her over there, another saying turn her over so she doesn’t drown in her own puke, all the voices chanting puke puke puke and my trained-seal pride when I performed on command.
I ached everywhere, but hurt nowhere specific. That seemed important.
“Learn to have a little pride in yourself,” the man said after I gave him my address, after he led me through the front yard, pausing to let me vomit up everything left inside. “You keep acting like a whore, people will keep treating you like one.”
He deposited me at the door, which flew open at the bell, like my parents had been waiting. Of course, I thought, slowly, they had been waiting. The sun was up. I’d been missing. I felt like I still was.
The cop was a security guard for the housing development. The development would not be pressing charges. “Next time, though, we won’t be so generous.”