Authors: Rachael Wade
PROLOGUE
INSPIRED BY “YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL” BY LANA DEL REY
Mom rushes over to me with the long, satin black gloves and a smile that radiates like blinding white sunlight. To her, it’s Christmas morning. Those black gloves are like some sort of weird good luck charm to her or something. She made me wear them three times already. Once to the Robinsons’ wedding, once to Miss Shelly’s funeral, and once to a formal fundraising ball my dad’s company threw a few months ago. Tonight will mark the fourth occasion I’ve worn them.
She squeals a bit, and I can see she’s unable to tone down her giddiness. Her blonde, flawless do falls neatly over her shoulders. Her lip liner blends smoothly with her perky pink gloss and the smoky effect she’s applied to her eyes is alluring. Each of her lashes is separated with thick black mascara, curled just around the tips to add a final dash of glamor to the look. She’s a modern Nancy Sinatra. I don’t know if she’ll ever escape the 1960s. I sit on the round vanity stool and look up at her as she smiles down at me, and I wonder why I agreed to this, other than to make her happy.
Well, that’s reason enough.
There’s not a whole lot of happy zooming around this house lately, especially when dad comes home. The scene always starts the same. He walks through the front door with one of those classic honey-I’m-home moments, only his expression is bored and cold, and mom scuttles to meet him, twirling to show him how done up she is for his arrival before asking him whether he’d prefer whiskey or wine with dinner. He always says whiskey. I don’t know why she even gives him a choice. Within seconds, she takes his coat, asks him about his day, and follows him to the dining room table, where he takes his seat and busies himself with his cell phone. She rambles and tries to get his attention, but fails miserably, then proceeds to serve him his meal. It’s then that he looks up and acknowledges I’m at the table, but he doesn’t have much to say to me.
Like my mother, I’m a prop. A piece to a set that is his seemingly perfect life. My purpose is limited. Every now and then, though, my mom catches his eye. It’s times like those that she finds that elusive thing called happiness and catches and seals it tight in a little container. I swear, when my father looks at her and likes what he sees, her hands ball up into excited fists and her whole body scrunches inward as if she’s suppressing a 13-year-old’s girlish enthusiasm. It’s no secret my father’s love is tainted. If my mother looks beautiful at that moment, her reward is affection. My father misses all the things that make her beautiful the other 364 days of the year, apparently.
It’s twisted and delusional and makes me see blood red, but it’s how he works, and she’s somehow fallen into his toxic web over the years, believing his lies and accepting his conditional love.
Sometime after these tiresome, wordless dinners, my mom puts on a fresh pot of coffee and serves my dad a large slice of whatever she baked that day, while I retreat to my room for homework. My father has never hit my mother. He doesn’t need fists. His words do all the work. I hear those words often, after I leave the dinner table for my bedroom. I hear it all, but I never say a word.
“You can’t honestly accompany me to drinks at the lounge tonight looking like that, Elena,” my father fumed last night at the dining table. I watched from the end of the hall, taking in the weight of my mother’s pain. It was all in her eyes. “Do you know how that reflects on me?”
“Darling, I thought this would please you. I bought a new dress and I just had my hair done—”
“You look like a clown, woman. You’ll make me a fucking laughing stock.” He moved abruptly from the table, throwing his napkin down. “Now fix that goddamn makeup and make yourself presentable. I can’t even look at you.” He headed for the living room and I remained in the hall, watching my mother. She sat very still at the table, her head down, hands perched neatly on her lap. A tear escaped, then another, but she suddenly steeled herself and wiped them away, smoothing out her features before she stood and collected the dinner plates.
Last night’s scene is a common one, but it’s one that never gets any easier to witness.
Tonight is my high school prom, which explains my mom’s unusual bout of happiness. It’s exploding from her tonight, complete with sparklers and firecrackers. It also explains those black gloves she’s so eager to slip onto my hands right now.
“Left,” she instructs, paying careful attention to each finger, working out each wrinkle as she goes. “Perfect! Right.” I relinquish my right hand and sigh, wishing some of her glee would rub off on me. The last thing I want to do is go to prom. Especially with Rick Huntington, captain of the football team. But I’m going to go, because dad insists, and mom…well, mom’s happiness depends on it right now.
So I watch as she slips on the black gloves, and I picture all of the things I’d rather be doing than getting dressed to go to prom. Spending a cozy night in with my French indie dramas and a tub of ice cream would be nice. Or dancing like a lunatic with Tee, my best friend, while we drink her dad’s beer would be great. It’s our usual Saturday night ritual. He’s a surgeon and he’s never home, so I usually grab an overnight bag and hightail it around the block to her place, where we binge on junk food, beer, and 90s alternative until the sun comes up.
“Remember what I taught you,” mom says as she finishes off the gloves. “You’re never too young to learn this lesson.”
“I know, mom,” I say dryly, letting her spin me in the stool to face the vanity mirror. We look at one another in the glass. “Beauty is our power.”
“That’s right, honey. No matter what the world tells you, no matter what it says about being intelligent and all that, the real truth will always remain: beauty and money make this planet go round. You can get by without money. You can fool people, even. But beauty is a hard act to pull. It takes real effort. A lot of the time it’s all mirrors and smoke screens. But look like me,” she tilts a hip and plants a hand on her waist, “and you’ll always be useful in the eyes of society.”
“Beauty doesn’t buy happiness, mom.”
“Well, now, you’re too young to know anything about that, aren’t you?” She sticks me with that sickly sweet smile and taps the edges of my blonde curls. “One day you’ll see, Elise. The world likes to tell us not to be judgmental. To be kind and tolerant, loving and forgiving. But what they want and what they’re actually willing to do are two very different things.” Her smile droops a bit on one side, and her eyes glaze with something that stings my heart to see. “At the core, the world is shallow. They want physical beauty, even if it’s only skin deep. You have a heart in this world? A soul?” She places a hand on the back of the stool and leans in over me, holding my gaze in the mirror. “It counts for nothing. You remember that.” Rising back to full height, she slips behind me and begins to fluff my hair, launching into some frilly chatter about hair products and perfume. I hear her, but her voice is hollow. Each syllable breaks and distances itself from me. I stare at myself in the mirror as she works on my curls, until her voice is a dead lull, and I drop my gaze to my gloved arms resting in my lap. I focus on their color. Black.
I connect with something there, and realize their color reminds me of a small, shallow pit I feel beginning to bloom in my stomach. I’m not sure where exactly it came from or when the seed was planted. I only have the suspicion that somewhere, at one point in time or another, it all began with my mom’s little life lesson: Beauty is power. And if you don’t have it, the world doesn’t want you. And who didn’t need to be wanted?
CHAPTER 1
ELISE
23 YEARS OLD
It’s five o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m screwing my boss’s brother. It’s not the first time. He’s bald and his name is Tim, and I know he’s engaged to be married next summer. I vaguely wonder if his fiancée knows about the things he does with me, or if she knows about me at all. I doubt it.
He’s sliding in and out of me slowly, relishing each push and pull, and frankly, it bores me. But he’s giving me something I crave and it has absolutely nothing to do with physical pleasure. Sure, I enjoy sex just as much as any man does. Especially when I’m attracted to a man, which in this case I’m not, but my mind usually loves it more than my body does.
Especially when it involves Tim.
It’s men like him who give me the greatest mental high. The ones who actually love to cheat. They somehow think they’re so smooth, think they’re getting away with it—and for a while, they often do—so when they’re screwing me, they have this rebellious air about them, as if they wish someone would walk in and catch them with their dicks in the cookie jar. They’re half out of their minds with lust, and they’re only out for themselves. Obviously, it’s quite fucked up that this somehow nourishes me, but it’s what I know, and it’s what I need.
Tim’s looking down at me, with that lost, untamed sparkle in his eyes that I know so well. He’s not really looking at me; he’s looking at my shell. And as his waist begins to pump harder, I too become lost. Lost in the heady look in his eyes, like for just a few short minutes, I am his whole world. Nothing matters to him in that moment except using my body, his visual of my shell, to get him to where he wants to be. He’s relying on me for that, and if I yanked it away from him right this moment, he’d be a crazed, dazed, desperate man. That power sends me soaring, and then the plummeting begins.
This is the best part. It’s like a roller coaster. It all begins with that look of his. I ascend, higher and higher, knowing his climax is looming as I rush to the top. Then, as my moans follow in a trail of his own, we both teeter at the top, our bodies enraptured in dizzy anticipation. A few more jerks of his waist and we’re tipped over the edge, sent spiraling down in a fiery blaze, our shouts overpowering the sound of the coaster’s rickety rattle, until finally, we reach the good stuff.
Once I hit the bottom of the track, I plunge head first into a free fall, straight into an ominous abyss. It confuses me because it’s equally dark and light, just as beautiful as it is dangerous. All is cool and still there. So peaceful I could cry. And I often do, which sometimes baffles the men I’m with. Or freaks them out, one or the other. The bottomless void continues to drag me down, farther and farther, and at this point, I’m begging to be swallowed up. And this is where the sobs usually become heavier. Because I can’t sink any further. The hole won’t drag me down anymore. I hit a wall, and it infuriates me. As if the abyss can read my very thoughts, it cuts the string that was pulling me into it and watches as I begin to float back up, forcing me to ascend back to the place I do not want to be.
I don’t want to leave the abyss, I want to drown in it and soak up that peaceful feeling. I want to live there. But I can’t, and it’s time to go home.
Tim grunts above me as he finishes and then rolls off of me, immediately getting up to walk to the bathroom and dispose of the condom. In my massive quest for euphoria, that is the only thing I always do right—insist on protection, every time. I don’t care if it pisses the guy off, ruins the moment, or whatever the hell. I just don’t. I might disregard my dignity and tons of other important shit, but one thing I won’t consider compromising is my physical health. Not if I can help it.
I ponder that—my dignity—as Tim fumbles around in the bathroom. It’s something I think about often. The whole town seems to think I’m in short supply of it, because I sleep around. What they don’t realize, though, is I’ve found my own sort of dignity. It just doesn’t match up to their standards. I find self-respect in owning up to what I am and not bullshitting anyone about it. Honesty is self-respect in my book. Granted, I’m deceptive. But if you flat-out asked me if I’ve deceived you, I’d never bullshit you about it. That’s gotta count for something.
“Give me ten more minutes and I’ll be ready for round two,” Tim says as he steps out of the bathroom, lingering in the doorway. The blinds are drawn and I squint at the clock to get a better look at the time.
“No can do,” I say, stepping out of bed and slipping on my jeans. I didn’t wear underwear here. I stand there topless in front of him, letting him drool over my tits. Sometimes I think he likes that more than actually having his hands on them. “I work at six. Gotta go.”
He stirs from the bathroom doorway and makes a move toward me, but I raise my hands. “Don’t, Tim. I can’t be late for my shift.” He stills and grits his teeth, obviously annoyed. I reach down to grab my tank top and roll my eyes. What’s he got to be annoyed at? I just gave him exactly what he wanted, just the way he liked it.
“Tell Jay to cut you a break tonight,” he says. “You know he will.” I detect a hint of whininess in his tone and I’m immediately turned off. I couldn’t fuck him again now even if I tried.
“No. This is my job and I won’t screw it up.”
He suddenly laughs, and the sound grates on my nerves so badly that it takes everything in me not to run out the front door sans top and shoes. “You screw everything else, what’s the difference?”
In a flash, I feel my body leap forward so fast, I’m not sure where the slap across his cheek begins and where it ends. It just happens, and it feels fucking great. “This was the last time. We’re done.”
“Oh come on, Elise.” He rubs at his cheek, not the least bit surprised by my retaliation. “You know what I meant. You never play by the rules. Excuse me for finding it humorous that you’re concerned about a good attendance record all of a sudden.” He waves his hands out to the side like he’s trying to get me to see some sense. But I only see red.