Tell Me I'm Worthless(6)

“Who’s Ila?” he asks.

“Ah, um. My ex.” It’s not the truth.

People are smoking inside, but I need cold air in my lungs and on my face, so I push my way through the kitchen and out into the garden. Jon and Sasha are there, both smoking straights, talking to a girl I haven’t seen before. Immediately my alarm bells ring. They’re probably trying to get her to be a unicorn. I found their shared Tinder once: J + S looking for female third who enjoys good food good drinks and good company. I don’t care what people do, obviously, but I know Jon can get weird and freak people out. He’s not dangerous or anything. He has a bit of an edgy sense of humour. Sometimes he makes jokes that land badly about the holocaust, and strangers can get pissed off. Plus, there’s the knife thing. He likes knives. He told me this, once. We’d been joking but suddenly he got all serious. “Is it like, weird,” he said, “to like holding a knife to a girl? To get off on it? Not hurt her or anything, obviously I do it with, ah, consent, but. I’m worried.” I told him it wasn’t weird at all. Afterwards, he got out a knife, and, laughing, held it first to Sasha’s throat, caressing her nervous smile with his other hand, then to my throat. The blade was cold against my Adam’s Apple. He pressed it in, too hard. Just for a moment. He didn’t mean anything by it, but I panicked. I couldn’t stop thinking about… about Ila, standing over me. I’m never even sure if I do remember that, or if somebody just told me what happened.

I have a scar on my forehead, which I cover with a fringe. Most people don’t see it.

Jon didn’t know that I’d freak out. And he apologised, later. Said he’d never do it again, honest.

The girl they’re talking to is tall, and her hair is impossibly shiny. There’s a jewelled piercing in her nose and another on her lip. I slip in, between her and Jon and Sasha, as a buffer. The girl smiles at me. “Hi there,” she says. “God…” she stops for a moment, looking at my face intensely, then says, “Sorry, I just had to do that.” She steps back, scanning me up and down. “You’re stunning,” she smiles. I don’t really know what to say, so I tell her she is very beautiful. I give her a smile that appears shy but that we both know really isn’t. I don’t really allow myself to get close to people on an emotional level because my insides are all riddled with maggots, which is very frightening for people to see, especially up close, especially when they are, you know, inside you, in more ways than one. But I try to fuck well. And I try to be charming, partly because I’m scared that if I go too far into being drawn-off and distant it’ll seem like I’m a fuckboy, like, a man, or like I’m treating people like a man treats women, and I’m very scared to be seen like that. That’s why I always sit down to pee in public bathrooms, because people might see my feet under the stall standing up. And I don’t talk too much, because men talk too much, with too much confidence. So, there’s a thin line between being careful but not distant. Or at least, there is a line between being distant and seeming distant.

Me and the girl find our way back inside. More specifically, she grabs my hand and pulls me back into the house, back amongst the tangled limbs of the party. The building has been gutted and refitted to be fit for students, but the shell of it is old. Old enough to be haunted or, if not, perhaps whatever was on this site before was haunted. Sometimes the ghosts from old buildings stay around to see what comes next. Every spot on the planet has something in its past that is worth haunting about. Or if, miraculously, it does not, then there’s always the future, which holds far worse for everyone. It haunts backwards. Things from the future, pushing back into the now because they are so utterly traumatic that they can’t stay within the limits of the time, they have to be happening now, around you. To you. There’s a type of storm coming.

The girl shouts over the music that her name is Sabi. I offer her some of the drugs, and she doesn’t ask what they are, she just takes a bump from her key, and then, just as I’ve stashed the drugs away, she kisses me, out of nowhere. I nearly fall back against the people behind me.

I haven’t even been here long but I try to find Jon, at least, to say that I’m leaving. He sees me, and sees Sabi holding my hand, and grins. “Get it,” he says. I roll my eyes.

The bus journey back is a blur of making out on the seats, and boys shouting, but not at me, not at us, we’re safe.

Now I’m in my apartment, and I’m trying very hard to climb inside this girl, suddenly, trying to push into the space in which she is. I want to be safe, in there, in the warmth of someone else. When we left the party I’d asked Sabi if we could go to hers instead, but she said she lives with her parents so that wasn’t really possible. Now we’re lying in my bed. She has her head on my chest, and she’s staring out into the abyss of my bedroom.

“Can you… take that down?” she asks, motioning vaguely towards the poster opposite.

“Why?”

“That guy… he’s, like, racist,” she mumbles.

She’s right. Shit, I didn’t even think how it might look, having the poster of him up there. Shit.

When someone calls you racist, thinks the thing inside the poster, what they are saying is “Hmm, you actually have a point, and I don’t know how to answer it.” The spirit in the poster is angry at this accusation. It wants to lash out. It pulses, in the picture, wanting to tear at the fabric of reality. I can feel it already, across the room.