In the morning, Samantha is sitting on the end of the futon at my feet, laughing at me.
I blink fuzziness out of my eyes and, upon seeing her dark, willowy figure right in front of me, scramble back so I hit my head against the wall. Samantha breaks into renewed cackles, bent over with the hilarity of me.
She hasn't gotten dressed yet. She sits there hooting with laughter in an oversized white t-shirt and no pants. My early morning mind is foggy with pleasurable dreams and takes her to be, possibly, one of them. If this is a dream . . . can't I reach out and touch her anywhere I want? Can't I kiss her, or maybe shove her to the ground and kick her like I couldn't summon up the boldness to do last night?
But it's not a dream. I can smell last night's smoke on her, and that underlying Samantha smell that makes my stomach go up and down in waves. It's venereal, that smell, something coming from inside of her.
Her hair is up in a bun at the base of her neck and her piercings are all out except for the stud on her nose and, as if to taunt me, my blue stud earring that she inserted above her lip last night. I can imagine the silver back to the earing scraping against her gums with every word she speaks.
"Wh-what are you doing?" I groan.
Samantha hasn't stopped laughing. I am a master comedian, I suppose, on a par with Jerry Seinfeld. I'm best known for my bit, "waking up and slamming my head against a wall". But she was laughing at something else before that. Was I talking in my sleep? Did I drool? I wipe my hand across my mouth: dry.
Samantha shakes her head. Her neck shifts with every note of laughter, vocal chords rippling. Her laugh is like a glass bottle being run over.
"Last night," she cackles, "And I . . .And you . . . A Ha ha!" She looks insane. Samantha leans forward with mirth, her hands curled into uncontrollable claws.
I shrink back further and pull my knees to my chest. "Are you okay?"
"Are you okay?" She lets out one final note of laughter and then, very suddenly, she's done. "Probably got a pretty nasty bruise on that arm, huh?" She sighs and wipes tears of laughter from her eyes. The futon creaks as she slips off of it and ambles over to her duffle bag right at the foot of my unmade bed.
Now that she mentions it, my shoulder starts like a whining toddler poking his mother for attention. Stop it, you, you were fine until she mentioned you. I don't usually bruise, but then again I don't usually get shoved out of my own bed at two in the morning.
Samantha feels no remorse, obviously. What was I expecting? An apology?
When we were younger, I would have run downstairs and told my mother. But I can't even conceive of doing that now. That's what she wants.
I try to recall the calm of yesterday morning, sitting in the woods with Pablo by my side. I take a deep breath. It's fine, everything's fine. She'll leave soon.
But will she? A whole summer -- three months. Twelve weeks. She might have murdered me by then.
She's digging in the duffle bag again, chucking clothes out of it onto the floor like an angry housewife throwing her husband's wardrobe out the window.
"Um, I can clear out a drawer, if you want," I mutter. My voice is croaky and slow with sleep. My mouth tastes chalky.
"You do that," she grunts. She finds what she's looking for, I guess, because she quits littering and pulls her shirt over her head.
It's not my fault that I am witnessing Samantha Novey in her underwear. I happen to be looking at the time that she decides to strip. She obviously could care less. I turn away immediately, but in my mind now is a snapshot of Samantha sitting in the plastic chair in front of my vanity, arms above her head, ribs poking through her skin like the scalloped edge of a seashell all the way up to her thin black bra and down to her slender waist and thighs, all pale, all smooth, all Samantha.
"Where did you go last night?" I ask. Part of me hopes she'll tell me that she said something unforgivable to Rosie that nipped their potential friendship in the bud.
She's silent and I'm silent until I realize she is staring at me in the vanity mirror, her eyes narrowed at Mirror Sal. Seeing myself as a tiny doll person in the mirror world, I realize that I look disgusting and should remove myself from the room immediately. My hair is smushed to one side, leaving my head looking like a poorly pruned hedge. My knees and elbows are ashy and there's crud in the corners of my eyes. I feel my face reddening but I don't leave. Her gaze paralyzes me, even through the buffer of the mirror.
She turns suddenly in the chair, throwing her leg over the side so she can sit like all the guys in class do when they want to look cool. But Samantha does look cool. She always does. Her skinny black jeans stretch at her crotch as she burns her gaze into my eyes. "Listen to me right now," she says. Her voice is low and warning like tremors before an earthquake. "I am not your friend. I do not want to be your friend. You are also not my sister or my mother or my nanny. So I would advise you to keep out of my business unless you want trouble. Do you understand?"
I swear, my heart has stopped beating. My blood freezes in my veins and my skin is hot all over, but slick under a sheen of cold sweat. "I -- I . . ." My throat doesn't seem to be working. She stares at me, the anger in her eyes as palpable as a hurricane. How can a person be so closed? Is there any way in? How do I break her? "I'm sorry," I squeak. "I was just w-wondering . . ."
"I don't care what you were doing," spits the girls who used to love me more than my own mother did. "Quit it."
She turns back around to the mirror and lights up a cigarette. I get out of bed quietly, tiptoeing by her like she might hit me if she remembers I'm in the room. She owns my room now, somehow, my self-proclaimed foe, nemesis, undoing. She's my antichrist. I sigh. Don't be so dramatic. But with the smoke swirling around her like the souls of the damned, she really is like Satan in my eyes, at once evilly, sadistically, violently cruel, and mysteriously, carnally, captivatingly lovely.
---
Dedicated to -Jewels- for literally reading all of my stories throughout the years XD Thank you for always encouraging me and reading along <3
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Breathe Me || Completed
Teen Fiction❝On our last day of third grade, Mrs. Vesper gave us a bit of a goodbye speech. "Good luck in your lives," I remember her saying. "Stay out of trouble. You all have such potential." Then finally, she said, "Now, why don't we all say bye-bye to Twig...
