Trapped in Forever

48 ~ Wellactuallyitsnottonight

When I emerged from the bathroom stall, the rusted hinges creaking as I pressed my fingertips, gleaming with a periwinkle hue that ran down the smooth, curved surfaces of my nails, perfect and beautiful at the bed and then crackling and chipping at the ends of my nail, revealing slivers of pink underneath, against the chilled and grayish metallic surface of the stall door, my fingers brushing against the h of the Ashley was here! written across the door in red Sharpie, with a crooked heart at the end, side by side with the exclamation point, I heard the muffled sounds of footfalls, stifled through the door that separated me and the person, a white stick woman playing the bouncer, shaking her head and saying he wasn’t on the list. I wasn’t absolutely sure, as my own footfalls echoed in my ears, ringing against the empty walls and porcelain concaves of sinks, and drowned out the muffled ones outside, but I was almost certain they were made by worn, loosely tied, black Nikes that kicked the toes up in the air as he slumped against something, a wall, a busboy cart, maybe the empty chair of a table with the leftovers of the meals he prepared still on the golden and black plates, mutilated by forks and knives.

The bitter taste of vomit still lingered in my mouth as I stepped closer toward the sink, pressing the curved rim of the counter into my waist and bracing my hands on either side of my hips, avoiding the lukewarm puddles and droplets of water that slipped from soaked hands as they searched for soap or the course material of a paper towel. Beads of salty sweat clung to the skin around my hairline, dampening a few strands of brunette hair around my forehead, and there were Goosebumps aligning down my arms and I felt cold, but good. I felt like I accomplished something, behind the defaced bathroom stall doors with nothing but my own echoes filling my ears, and realizing that I was actually going somewhere, that for once I had a mission of my own, and it wasn’t about keeping Roxanne away from the dusty substance of chalk or for her to get over Orion and how he was a jerk, obviously, and that he couldn’t handle having someone so unique in his life, or even trying to obtain her dream for her, posthumously, but something of my very own, something that was meant just for me, something I wouldn’t have to donate to her and her black hole of needs. 

I could be beautiful—the kind so many others seemed to be but I wasn’t, like beauty crept through the night, like the Tenth Plague of Egypt, stealing the breath from the firstborn son’s lips and leaving them cold in their beds, and it decided who was worthy of that beauty, of those envious glances and endless attentions and relentless compliments, and who wasn’t, rejecting them in their beds, leaving the ugly, doomed to be a forgotten face in a sea of beautiful, stunning people, brushing off words they had heard a thousand and one times that those ugly, ugly girls wished to hear, wished that for once someone would look at them with that covetous gleam swimming in their pupils, or someone—a boy, actually, with blond hair and hazel eyes and who listened to The Dark Knight soundtracks and cooked in a little kitchen and licked the mixer’s beaters—would turn away from the girl they tried to swipe cigarettes from and angle their heads in her direction as she passed him, oblivious to how he looked at her, like he wanted to grasp onto her hand and whisk her away somewhere quiet and minute, their breaths warming each other’s cheeks. That for once Mikayla and I were both beautiful, not just one, not just her, and I was the smart one, the one they said was logical when they patted my head and said I was growing up too fast, trying to fill my head with memories that didn’t feel like mine. Mikayla didn’t care that she was always being called beautiful, by everyone, by our families, by our parents, like her friends, by the deep voices of boyfriend I heard muffled through the walls while Mom and Dad were out of town.

There was a slight, but slow, and quiet knock on the doorframe as I stood there, in front of the mirror, trying to imagine myself as someone beautiful, someone that businessmen smacked on the rear while they spoke to their wives on their flat cellphones, someone who caught the eyes of even the taken. I wondered, maybe, if I slid my fingers past my lips enough times that my cheekbones would look more pronounced, curved and protruding beneath my skin, or if my cheeks would sink in more, narrowing my face. I wondered if it could make my thighs smaller, creating that tiny gap that so many other beautiful girls owned, inches separating their denim clad thighs apart, and I was suddenly very aware that mine touched, grazing against it each other, branding me.