You knew a girl back in high school, the same one that everyone knew, eyes that looked like a cat, pitch black french bob - cut just a little too short, and the kind of spiked boots that must have had a real name but to you and everyone else were just “goth.” Were you two friends? It’s hard to say. Back then spiked chokers and half shaved heads might as well have been the physical attributes of a completely different species. You had a college fund, loving parents, and an entire life to look forward to after age 20. You weren’t like her. Nevertheless, throughout all four years, you kept her around. Partially because of her hair, partially because she knew how to drive, but mostly because she’d do things with you that no one else would at the time. 

She taught you how to smoke and how to drink, like REALLY drink. Scotch and bourbon, vodka straight from the nozzle. Learning to drink early, it felt like being a part of some exclusive club, one that only she could invite you to. Together, you figured out the best routes to walk at the local Safeway and which liquors were small enough to fit into your jacket pocket. It turned out that it was really easy to steal aromatic bitters, so you’d often drink that together. This of course was a frequently harrowing experience, that on your 15th birthday left you on your hands and knees puking into a bush outside the local Elks Lodge. But it didn’t really matter because you were drinking and more so you were drinking with her. 

Years later you’ll be sitting in the basement of a baptist church trying to explain why you’re there. The words won’t come out, you’re not so sure yourself. The guy next to you will attempt to comfort you - he doesn’t drink as much as you do, besides he never knew her. What does he know? That night he spills one of those canned Jack and Cokes all over the tattered leather jacket she gave you so many summers ago. He’s apologizing and even starting to cry, but that doesn’t stop you from chucking your can straight at his nose. You never return to that church. From the chest down the jacket makes you look like her.

The summer you got the jacket was the same summer that you got into Rites of Spring, also her fault. The first time you two had sex it was to For Want Of. She had her fingers down your throat when you came inside of her and when she pulled them out they were covered in blood. You were sputtering and gagging on the ground, she’s asking you what’s wrong - she was scared - she’s angry, Guy Picciotto is screaming “And then I choked… And then I drowned… And then I choked…” When you wake up in the morning the two of you are sprawled out on top of one another, wearing each other’s clothes. 

Do you like it when people hurt you?

On the last day of senior year, the two of you skipped graduation and took a trip across the country to the ocean. Entire states were forgotten at the bottom of a beer can and your car smelled so strongly of cigarettes and weed that it was by some divine grace that you avoided being pulled over the whole trip. She fucked you the whole way down of course, and not just shitty road head or anything like that but real visceral sex. She pounded the vomit out of you at the Cabazon Dinosaurs, ripped out bloody clumps of your hair at the Beer Can House. The two of you fucked publically in the backseat of the car at The Bonnie and Clyde Museum, she gave the length of your chest a zig-zagging scar at the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. 

When you finally made it to the coast the two of you were so exhausted and beaten up that you checked into the first motel you could swerve your way into. You took a particularly awful shower at the communal bathroom, the water smelled like rotten eggs and didn’t reach above lukewarm. She was waiting for you at the door when you returned, in nothing but a bathrobe she pulled you inside, she led you to the bed where she mounted you and softly ran her hands up your stomach, over your chest, and onto the edges of your neck. Her fingers pressed against the rim of your throat, your body sprawled out on an unwashed queen, her breath was hot against your face when she asked you if you were ready for her to kill you. Your heart felt like it was going to beat out of its chest and you wanted to tell her yes, that you’d been waiting for this day for the last 18 years of your life, that to die by her hands had been foretold as the best, no, only ending to your short and pathetic life. Something stopped you. You managed to choke out that you’d like to see the water first, you’d driven all this way after all. 

You drove her out to a set of cliffs overlooking the Pacific. It was past midnight and the water stretched out into a deep nothingness, darkness with no curvature. She got out of the car first, she asked to borrow your leather jacket, it was windier on the cliffside. You watched her from the driver's seat as she made her way to the edge of all the land that had yet to have existed. She sat down and hung her feet off the rim, you could feel the height in your toes. She beckoned for you to come join her, her teeth glowing bright white in the moonlight. You don’t remember walking over to sit beside her but you did, her mouth curled into a smile as she cocked her head to the right and pointed directly downward. She told you to jump. And then went back to staring at the waves. You imagined pushing her and watching her body disappear into the shadows below. You imagined falling and seeing the flash of her moonstruck face just as your body begins to crumple. You do neither, you simply sat in silence with her for the next hour and then drove her back to the hotel. In the morning the two of you began your drive home and played road games the whole way back. You both leave town that summer, each in a separate direction.

You’re puking at the Elks Lodge again, she’s laughing as she helps your shaking body unfold itself out of the recently fertilized boxwood. You ask her what’s so funny and she says, “It’s just nice to have someone around.”  You’re shivering now so she takes off her jacket and wraps it around you. It’s her dads, she tells you she likes how it looks on you - says it makes your shoulders look broader. Someday your shoulders will fill the jacket out and it will look like yours. Every horrible thing they said would happen will come true, your body will become something that you fail to recognize and your heart will contort in ways you didn’t think were possible. She holds your wrist, stroking the spot where you can see the vein. She breathes in, “Can I ask you something?” 

“When I look into your eyes, I see nothing but myself reflected back.”

“What do you see when you look into mine?” 

On her 20th birthday she was strangled to death just outside of Reno, her body left to rot in the desert. At the funeral her friends and family all told half-true, half-complete stories about her, breaking into tears before they ever got to the point. Nobody however talked about the time during Junior year when she groped you in the gym bleachers, her hands grasping against your sweaty tank-top, how it stuck to your skin. Neither did you.

Later, when you’re both 24, she marries a lawyer. He’s ten years older than her and loves The Eagles. She stops cutting her hair, it’s blonde now, maybe it always was. The boots are gone and she doesn’t drink. Within a year she’s pregnant. You and your friends mock her dramatic transformation, you call her a poser bitch and eagerly tell them about every single time the two of you had sex, but not about the first time, or the second time or really anytime that actually existed. The longer you talk the louder the room becomes, the stories become dirtier, more violent, your friends howl with laughter and delight. This is the day that you become one of them forever.

The next time the two of you see each other, it will be at a High School reunion. She catches your eye from across the room, a faint look of recognition. She holds out her hand to shake yours but you can’t reach it. You’re in the bathroom with her, on your knees again, grasping onto her thigh, screaming “FORGIVE ME FOR I HAVE BECOME A PHANTOM.” Her eyes barely shift, but after a minute she grabs your breasts and slams you into the wall so hard your head bleeds. Towering over you, a single glob of saliva drools down from the tip of her tongue onto the thirsty pink flesh of your own. And then the door opens and another woman enters. She lets go of you, screams at you to get away from her, you’re dragged out to the front of the building where her husband beats you so hard that you will never see 20/20 again. That night you burn the jacket in your front yard. You’re beaming through your own broken teeth.

At age 43 she dies once again. A heart attack, I guess it ran in the family. So unsexy, you remember thinking. You’re sitting with your best friend Matt at the beach, you just left the wake and he’s holding your hand for maybe the first time ever. “You loved her didn’t you?” he says. You gaze at a far off mooring buoy, thrashing among the waves. It wants you to come closer.