“Oh my god, yes!” she said. “You so need this. Go dance. Give him your number. Live a little, girl!”
So it was her encouragement, coupled with an undeniable, swelling sense of reckless abandon, that urged me to stand up and make my way over to this stranger. It felt good to know that he wanted me. I didn’t want to know his name; I didn’t want to make bullshit small talk about our lives. I just grabbed him by the hand and pulled him onto the dance floor, throwing my arms up in the air and swaying my hips to the music. I knew I looked good—I’d had a stylist clean up the hatchet job I’d done to my hair, and that, coupled with my new asymmetrical, sweeping-bangs bob, actually made me appear more sophisticated than I ever had before. I’d put on heavy makeup, as was becoming my habit, even when I went to the gym. I’d worn a light green, flowered sundress that had been a little tight on me a few months ago but now hung loosely on my frame. I closed my eyes, feeling the heat of his body so close to mine, smelling the sour scent of beer on his breath. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t even care when he put his hand on my back and pulled me against him.
I thought I would instantly rebel at this kind of touch, that I would shove him off of me, but instead, I did nothing. I felt nothing. As we danced, I hovered above my body, watching as I leaned in and whispered in the guy’s ear. “Wanna get out of here?” I asked, and he nodded.
I watched as I led him out to the dark alley on the side of the building. I watched as I pushed him up against the brick wall and kissed him, letting my hands roam down his sides, lifted his T-shirt, and unbuttoned the top of his jeans.
“Damn, you’re hot,” he muttered.
“Shut up,” I heard myself respond, and it was someone else saying the words, someone else unzipping his zipper and rummaging around in his boxers, until she got down on her knees and took him into her mouth.
“Holy shit,” he groaned, and I watched as this other girl—the girl who wasn’t me—switched to stroking him with her hand. A few seconds later, it was over. After he caught his breath, he zipped up and stood there awkwardly for a moment, not really looking at me. “Sooo,” he said, smoothing his hand over his beard. “Can I buy you a drink?”
I didn’t speak. Instead, I simply spun around and headed back into the bar on my own, not caring whether he followed. I saw Heather on the dance floor, where she was gyrating against a broad-shouldered, hipster-looking black guy with round glasses and skinny-legged jeans. I went to join them.
“Hey!” she said. “Where’d you go?”
“I was living a little!” I said, still overcome by a buzzing, detached sense of power, similar to how I felt when I went to a party and ate nothing while everyone around me gorged. It was a heady rush, and I knew that, once it was gone, I’d want it again.
“Ha!” Heather shouted. “I told you! You feel better, right?”
I nodded, and we continued to dance. Again, I closed my eyes, moving my body to the music, letting the bass and drums and guitar pulse through me until my head throbbed and my mind went blank. This was who I was now, a girl who danced with strangers and unzipped their pants in a filthy alley outside a bar. A girl in charge of every minute of her own life—a girl who would own a situation before it owned her.
I held on to this new mind-set every night for the rest of July, after Heather had left and I started going out to the bars on my own. I visited a few of the ones downtown, but more often I frequented the busy casinos in Ferndale and Lynden, since the influx of out-of-towners there gave me a better chance at the anonymity I craved. I stopped drinking anything except water, because being drunk reminded me too much of that night. I honed in on a different guy each time I went out, never asking for his name or telling him mine, never making more than a few minutes of conversation before dancing with him, and then leading him to a stall in the bathroom or outside in the alley. I never let any of them take the lead—I would pin their hands above their heads, or behind their backs and whisper, “Don’t say a word,” in their ears. That was usually enough to get them to comply, but if they tried to touch me anyway, to slip up my skirt, pull down my panties, or turn me around and bend me over, I shoved them away and took off. I ran to my car and went somewhere else to look for someone new. There was no lack of males willing to let me do this. I doubted they went home and cried about how some girl had taken advantage of them. It was so different for men—the more women they slept with, the more accolades they were given. A man who has sex with a different girl each night is considered a stud, a woman who does the same thing, a whore. I was just living up to what I’d turned myself into the moment Tyler had rubbed his erection against me on the dance floor and I’d done nothing to push him away.
“Honey, please don’t go out tonight,” my mom said one morning in late September, the day after my twenty-fourth birthday, which I’d insisted to my parents that I didn’t want to do anything to celebrate or acknowledge. We were sitting on the couch in the family room, where I had my laptop open, studying, and she was reading a book. “You can’t keep living like this.”
“Like what?” I asked, popping the sugar-free mint gum I had in my mouth between my molars. My breath was terrible lately, and I knew it had to do with how little I was eating. My thigh gap was back, my rib cage showed through my pale skin, and I fit into the jeans I’d worn when I was fifteen. Part of me felt angry with myself for so easily slipping back into the behavior patterns that had almost killed me, but another, darker corner in my mind experienced shimmers of self-satisfaction when my stomach growled or I was dizzied by hunger. Suffering felt familiar—it felt like something I deserved.
“Like Tyler didn’t rape you,” she said, dropping her book on the coffee table in front of us.
“Can we please stop having the same fucking conversation?” I snapped my laptop shut, ready to head upstairs to the solitary comfort of my bedroom, but she grabbed my arm before I could.
“Don’t swear at me.”
“I didn’t. I swore near you.”
We held each other’s gaze, waiting to see who would look away first. When she blinked and released her hold on me, I felt like I’d won, but then, she started to cry.
“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” she said. She wrung her hands together in her lap, and I noticed that her usually lovely, manicured nails were bitten to the quick. “You’re not eating. You barely speak to us. You’re gone all the time. We know you’re hurting, Amber, and if you’d just slow down a minute, you’d see we’d do anything to help.”