Rae scowls. She throws back the covers on the bed and climbs in, kicking my magazines onto the floor. “You are delusional,” she informs me. “I’m passing out now. I have an early call. I guess I’ll see you when you get back from your little jaunt down south.”
“You will.” I don’t kiss her goodnight. That’s not the kind of people we are. I continue to search for my dress shoes, banging around, my blood inexplicably fizzing in my veins, until I realize I’m never going to find them. Wherever they are now, they are no longer in my apartment. Once I’ve made my peace with this, I grab my keys and leave. Rae’s fast asleep, will still be asleep by the time I get back, no doubt, but I’m not even close to tired. I’m wired. Edgy. I need to know what that journalist wrote about me.
I find a copy of High Lite Magazine at a bodega on 5th, and I pay for it with a crumpled ten-dollar bill. I walk around in circles, looping the block while I read it.
The journo talks about my work—has very impressive things to say, which I like. She calls me a narcissist, which is a cloak I don’t mind wearing, I guess. It’s mostly true. Towards the middle of the article, she writes about my background. Starts talking about my dead mother. I pointedly did not tell her anything about my family, even though she did ask. Toward the end of the piece, she mentions the first picture I ever received recognition for, all those years ago. I’m bubbling over with anger by the time I turn the page and see that she’s printed the fucking thing. Without my consent. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to bury that image, and yet there it is in full color, monopolizing half a goddamn page of real estate in one of the countries biggest lifestyle magazines. Every time I see that picture, it feels like I’ve swallowed razor blades and I’m slowly bleeding to death internally.
It’s a picture of a girl. Her right eye is swollen and bruised, and her lip is split open. She has blood dried on her chin, and she’s crying. The girl was looking straight at me when I took the picture. She was naked, and she was hurt, and her blood and her tears were real. I should never have shared that picture. It was deeply personal. Deeply painful. It was a silent conversation shared between two damaged teenagers, who had been clinging to each other for survival.
I had no right to share the picture with the world, but I did it anyway. I’ve regretted it every single day since.
I really am a cunt.
CHAPTER TWO
CORALIE
Fight or Flight
NOW
My mother named me after the ocean. She loved the organic weirdness of coral. It was her lifelong dream to travel to Australia and swim in the Great Barrier Reef, so she could see the forests of stony, gnarled tree-like formations all crowded together, stretching out below her as far as the eye could see. She used to show me so many faded pictures in the battered old Encyclopaedia Britannica she kept pushed underneath her side of the bed she shared with my father. Ironically, my mother couldn’t swim, though. She was always talking about learning but she never seemed to get around to it.
She died when I was twelve, which put a dampener on her plans for world travel and sea exploration. For six months after her death, I thought my mother had been driving in the rain and had lost control of her car. Turned out she’d driven off Palisade Bridge and ended her life on purpose. My father knew how to push her buttons, had been pushing them for years, and she’d simply reached a point where the promise of the Great Barrier Reef, the promise of seeing me graduate, the promise of growing old and dying in her sleep, hadn’t been enough to justify living through the torment any longer.
I’d found a letter addressed to me in my father’s desk, which explained all of this. Up until then, I’d been heartbroken, devastated that my mom had been taken away from me so cruelly. When I’d read through her reasoning, the paper shaking violently in my trembling hands, I’d stopped being heartbroken. I’d stopped crying. I’d started being happy instead, because at least she wasn’t suffering anymore. At least she’d gotten out, and that was something. I didn’t get out until much later.