When I looked at myself in the mirror the next morning, there were bruises on each side of my face. One circled my left eye, the ring looking dark and awful. Another was splotchy, blotting my right check in these wonderfully shaped polka dots. I started to think more about the boy and how I wished I had more power. I lifted my chin and looked at my neck. Somehow, the scratches were deeper and looked more painful than I remember experiencing and I started to wish that people could cut their nails more often. I didn’t have any make-up, never had the need to invest in any form of concealer, and I wished that I could be more feminine, even just for that minute. I knew I had to leave, I had to mail the letter as soon as possible, but when I left my apartment, images started to bounce through my brain, even though I remember it being very dark and cloudy, and I remember how I kept keeping my eyes half-closed throughout most of the night.

I was lying there, on a bed that wasn’t my own, that was harder and didn’t like to soak in human flesh, and I was looking at the ceiling wondering if it would be easier to hang from it now that I was swimming around. I imagined myself hanging by my neck, not by a rope, but by a hand, and I wondered who owned that hand, that rough, thick hand, full of muscle and covered in hair. When the girl finally came through the door, she leaned her back in a corner, against the ropes, and slid down until she hit the floor. She put her face in her hands and started to ask me muffled question after question.

“Why is it,” she started, “that everything is so much easier for you. You don’t care about anyone, do you?”

I laughed a little, trying to keep my eyes on the ceiling and responded, “I don’t.”

“So why do people like you?” She started to whimper a little, her throat was turning red, I could hear that in her voice.

“People like me,” I paused because I wasn’t sure why, but I knew I had to be certain in this situation, “because they don’t really like themselves so they want me to like them.”

“Is that really true?”

“I like to think so.”

“Do you think I don’t like myself?”

“No, you don’t like yourself.”

“Do you like yourself?”

“100% of the time,” I said this with a smile and I could feel her gaze on me and I could feel the burn in her face because she believed me.

“You probably shouldn’t be here.”

“Probably not.”

“He’ll be home soon. He’ll want you here. Probably expects it.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Why’s that? Why is that…?” She stopped, looked around her apartment, then at her hands, “Because he knows.”

“What does he know?”

“He knows everything about me. He knows my face – my eyes, my nose, my mouth. He knows when I’m angry and when I’m sad and he knows that when I’m happy…I…”

“You…?”

“I don’t even know when I’m happy, but he does.”

“Is that why you’re with him? Because he knows all of these things about you?”

She stood up, came over to the bed, and sat with her legs cross towards me. I kept my eyes up, knew that if I looked at her, I might see tears and I never really liked it when girls cried, mainly because I never knew what to say.

“It’s not okay,” I tried to whisper to her.

Then she took her hands and put them around my cheeks and brought my face towards hers and I thought how incredibly forward she was being and I hadn’t expected that. We rolled and I kept myself ahead of her, dragging my calm face from corner to corner until there was no more room to move. As her hands wrapped around my waist, I heard a door click and some heavy footsteps and I knew what was going to happen, I could see it. Then I felt something floating downwards from the ceiling, and it was all of these feathers, just floating downwards, every color you could imagine, not able to get out the window. I felt a deep desire to collect them all, put them in a duffel bag and run away, but I let them fall and hit the floor with a chime. She must not have heard the door click, but at one moment she finally noticed him and she flipped me over, straddled her legs across my stomach and began to claw at me, throwing some fists from right to left. I tried not to cover my face because I knew the whole situation was my fault and she had to protect herself. She took her fingers, her long nails, and began to claw at my neck, scratching every surface and wishing to remove all evidence of me.

When I left, he was sitting by the door, smoking a cigarette and giving me this awfully toothy smile. He looked at me for a second, up a down and calculating my worth, and I gave him another look that told him he should add more numbers to his equation. He put his hand out, in it an envelope, the addresses already written and the stamps already licked. I took it in my hands, felt the weight of it and gave him a nod. I could feel his stare as I left completely and even going down the stairs, out of the reach of his eye, I could still feel that terribly creepy smile being tattooed on my spine where I couldn’t really notice.

The walk home was dark and the cuts on my neck were starting to sting from the cold air, but I tried my best to wrap my own hands around it, trying to place value on those new, deep marks.