Fanfiction: Safest Place
EMAIL: iiveraione@aol.com FEEDBACK: I crave it like I crave Sesame Chicken. NOTE: TY TY TY ALI AND JESSICA! IF IT WASN’T FOR YOU I WOULD BE DEAD.
Bottles of cheap hair color littered the unkempt shelves, next to sweet-smelling tubes of plastic flavored lipsticks. Dark eyeliner pencils with perfectly sharpened tips stuck out of a plastic cup like smoky rockets ready to launch. Old and dusty oil beads in a wooden box sparked on the window ledge, sending orbs of rainbow light across the dirty walls of her mom’s bathroom.
In her mom’s bathroom she could think about drowning. Just lay down in that filthy tub and run the water. Let it wash over and wash away and drown her into a dark, peaceful oblivion. By herself and all alone - Faith could be good here. There was make-up to play with and put on and before her mom got home, she could wash it all off. Scrub until her skin was sore just so her mom wouldn’t know that she’d been in her mom’s make-up just for fun. She remembers the last time her mom found out. She got home a little earlier than expected and then she…
She finds the color her mom usually puts on. She can’t read the name. It’s a big word and she’s only thirteen. Her mom doesn’t like it when she uses big words in the house. She tries not to learn them. It’s a dark color. Like a mix of brown and red and it’s pretty. It looks pretty on her mom. It looks pretty on her, too. Isn’t the first time she’s put it on. She pulls off the top, sets it down carefully so it doesn’t fall and get lost, and glides the tip over her lips. She gets a little past the deadline and wipes it off with her thumb. Then she puts the top back on, the familiar metallic click the only sound in the bathroom. Then she puts it carefully back where she got it - so it looks untouched, as if she was never there and never touched it.
She won’t touch the eyeliner. Not since last time. If the eyeliner is not perfectly sharp like it is now then later it won’t be as sharp and it won’t look the same and she’ll get in trouble. And trouble means punishment. And punishment isn’t fun. She looks at herself in the mirror. Her lips are looking nice. The boys at school tell her that. But they’re not too big. Not as big as the other girl’s. The other girl has big, sexy lips, and people call her ‘suck job’. At least the boys. Sometimes she wished she didn’t know what that meant. Girls her age shouldn’t.
She looks at the watch on her wrist she’d stolen from a ‘friend’. She has five minutes until her mom gets home. Or should get home. She usually gets home at that time. She peels away her clothes. A little white t-shirt that doesn’t say anything, although every other kids’ at school does, and a pair of pants with holes and blood stains… there should be grass stains or something, like she knows other kids have. But she doesn’t go out much. Only to run, maybe. She gets beat up a lot at school and her mom punishes her a lot… because she’s just that bad. And she can’t be any more good. Not like the other girls. Her mom tells her that.
Now her training bra and panties - that also have holes in them - are off and she steps into the water she ran only minutes before. It’s not hot. Maybe lukewarm. She didn’t want to run all of the hot water… she needed to save some for her mom, too. She slides onto her back, water rising up to her neck as she lays there, lips bright yet dark and glistening. She remembers to scrub the lipstick off. Reaching for the washrag, she soaks it first and then presses it to her lips. Scrubbing, hard. Hard enough to press her lips sharply into her teeth, but it helps scrub the color off. She knows how long it takes to scrub it off, having timed herself before, and knows how long it takes to wash the red out of the rag with soap.
One minute, two minutes… a half. She pushes the rag underwater, grabs the soap, and repeats the process, only on the cloth this time. She waits until the red is off, or at least to the point where her mom might dismiss it. Then she drops the rag - watching it float on top of the water like a meshy snake skin - only to push it under with a few pokes of the finger. She remembers to remove her watch before it gets wet, although it already has, then sets it on the toilet seat next to the tub.
In her mom’s bathroom, she does think about drowning. Just sliding and sliding until her head is enveloped by water. Shutting her eyes, opening her mouth, her nose… drowning until everything goes black. She knows what it’s like when everything goes black.
And she teases herself with this idea. Sliding her head underwater. Opening her eyes to see the dim light of the bathroom and what the ceiling looks like through the surface. She couldn’t count the tiles… everything was blurry underneath. She also knew how long it took for some people to drown. How long it took to make sure that they drowned. She was told. Maybe a minute for some, probably a minute more. Two minutes, three minutes. She didn’t know how long it’d take her, she didn’t want to find out. She held her head underwater until she couldn’t be underwater anymore. And then she waited some more.
Five, four, three, two… queasy, blurry, heart pounding, stomach hurting, ears burning.
She came up gasping for air, breathing in and out and heavy. Just in time for her mom to walk inside. Faith looked up, her chest still heaving, watching her mom enter and go straight for the sink.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” She asked. There was blood trickling down her mom’s nose and from her bottom lip and from her head. In fact, it was dripping onto the floor. Blood splatters that hit the floor with a water drop sound like the days that went by in Faith’s head, something to ignore and dismiss like her mom did to her when she came home with bruises and blood…
“Nothing. Faith. Were you going through my make-up again? What the hell, Faith! What the fuck did I tell you? Ugh-“
“I didn’t touch your make-up.” She lied. And well. She was a good liar when it counted. Reaching for the edge of the tub, she was about to pull herself up, but her mom grabbed her shoulder and shoved her back down.
“Stay in the bathtub for a couple of minutes. I have some stuff to do in the living room.”
Then her mom left.
Faith never understood what had her mom coming home at night completely beat up. Even if it happened to her once or twice. It seemed natural. Getting beaten and bloody… like something that happened everyday in everyday life. But if that was true, then why did the teacher ask her so many questions when she went to school with a bruise on her eye? Why did her classmates scowl and look sympathetic or make fun of her for it?
Can’t be an explanation for everything. Her dad had told her that, before the men came and took him away. Her mom told her that, too. And so did her friend Kylie, before she fell and twisted and cracked.
In her mom’s bathroom, there didn’t have to be an explanation for everything that happened. No explanation for wanting to drown and no explanation for not being willing to. Maybe that’s the way it was meant to be and the way the world worked. Who knew.
She stepped out of the bathtub, water rolling down her shoulders and naked body and onto the floor, mixing with the blood and stains that she prefer not think about - tears and beer and urine.
She glanced at the make-up. The hair dye and eyeliner and lipstick and cheap perfume that she couldn’t spray, or her mom would smell it. But there was something safe and familiar about the bathroom when her thoughts got so big that she thought her head would explode into a million tiny pieces. Small, safe, warm, wet, dirty, familiar… small. Nothing could go wrong in the bathroom. You bathed and you pissed and you put on make-up.
She placed a finger on the lipstick that she’d used before. One day her mom would notice that it’s considerably lower than she remembered and her finger would point at Faith and she would get punished, like she does and sometimes for no reason, and she would go to school the next day and the teachers would frown and talk and whisper and exchange looks with each other while looking at her all at the same time.
It was funny how her mom’s bathroom was to blame for most of her troubles, yet it was the safest place of all.