…”This,” she says.

The music wafts back to her.  Connie’s mixtape she made special for Beddy.  “Tight Like Prom Night Mix.”

She dwells on the contradiction in Duffy’s diatribe.  Why would he tell her to eat a dick when he thinks she wouldn’t?

 “I clean my mouth ‘cause froth comes out,” Ms. Phair commiserates.  “Send it up on fire.  Death before dawn.  Send it up on fire.  Death before dawn.”

She squeezes the arms of her chair.  How could Todd do this?  After she’d done practically the whole report for him.  After she gave him years of love in her mind, never doing him wrong.  After she’d pitied him.

She imagines him in his street clothes on tilting polar ice, clubbing baby seals and humping their pulped heads.  Sex and carnage and rancid death.  Humping and pumping.  Pumping and pumping.

Beddy retches into her wastebasket, and then the tears come.  She becomes a confusion of bodily actions, coughing and crying and retching until she exhausts all of them.  She sits up and takes stock of the trauma in her mirror.

No matter.  She heard you only wear a prom dress once anyway, and she needs this one less than once. 

She grabs the fabric scissors from her dresser top and poises them over her breastplate.  Inhales deeply. 

The scissors swoop and shear away the top to her dress, and her breasts tumble out and sparkle with blood.  The scissors move down her torso and over the isthmus where her legs part, taking pubic hair with them before finally scything the dress in two.  The scissors do it all without guidance, by their own volition.  She stands then, boring into the mirror, that pitiless arbiter. 

She takes it all in.

On a good day, and today began as a luminously good day, she would have seen her body as a deluxe-sized hourglass.  Generous breasts.  A firm neck sloping into a slight face mottled with, but not distorted by, rosy freckles that peppered the bridge of her nose and her upper cheeks.  Conspicuous eyebrows several shades darker than her dark red hair, crowning her fertile, startlingly green eyes.  Even on the bad days, when she is loath to be naked in the shower, she is thankful for her eyes.  Sometimes, she can start with them, and let the positive self-regard radiate outward.

Tonight her eyes are the only diversion from her laundry list continuum of self-hatred.  Every feature is tilted to its contrary: her freckles are cancer clouds, her eyebrows peculiarly dark, her skin a cadaverous pale.

She lifts her sagging breasts to her optimal angle and altitude and, holding them in that impossible position, sucks in her breath until her rib muscles cry out.  Then she lets go, giving them up to gravity.  They smack into her upper belly, repulsing her as she watches the ripples in her disturbed pond of flesh.

She probes in the places she wishes her bones were more glaring.  Shoulders.  Elbows.  Knees.  She’d kill for a collarbone.

She follows with her finger the insistent trail of hair running from above her navel to just beneath her cleavage.  Shaven, it irritates and catches on the inside of shirts, so she tries to leave it alone.  The blood loosed by the errant scissors has stained the hair a bolder red.

Looking at herself magnified, laid bare, bright blood running down her chest, the spirulina green eyeshadow streaks on her cheeks, she sees a once-fabulous layer cake in rot.

Duffy was right.  No one wants to eat her.

She decides to call her friend Dallas.  Black and gay, he should know persecution intimately.  Then she remembers he is taking Connie.  Di is there too.  They’re all there.

She eyes the telephone cord coiled noose-like.

Mr. Yeager’s voice comes back to her as salve. “My world is safer than it was,” she says.  She tries to believe it.

She dredges up that toothless old tenet, “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”  But really, she wouldn’t mind giving them the guilt. 

The hardest part would be finding the rope.  Her house is barren of useful tools.  She’d scour the garage and then, if she had to, borrow some from a neighbor.  She’d have to put on some clothes.  And she’d need a good reason why she needed it, and why it needed to be so thick and sturdy.  But when she finally had it, she’d make the knot like she’d practiced on shoelaces, and tie it to her ceiling fan.  Then she’d be ready.

She imagines she would not feel her neck snap.  Life to death would be a seamless transition.  The fan would spin faster and faster until its bolts popped out like tic-tacs against her forehead and its blades sawed through the ceiling, drawing her delicately up through the splintered floorboards of her attic.  Everything would be weightless.  She would grab boxes of memorabilia, as much as she could fit in her arms, and pass through the roof.  The rough furrows in the rope would feel like satin, and the pirouetting fan would carry her like she was nothing and she wouldn’t be a burden and she would comb through her boxes, selecting what she would take with her to Heaven.  What pictures to bring? 

Her father giving the thumbs up to a cardboard cutout of the Dalai Lama.

Her mother glimpsing her for the first time as a newborn in the nurse’s arms. 

A runt Beddy bearhugging the gallon of jelly beans she got for Christmas, tipping from its weight. 

The rest she would cast off into the ant cities below.  She would sort through her mom’s scorned vinyl, selecting Jeff Beck with Rod Stewart, The Band, Jesus Christ Superstar.  If there is a Jesus, and she has ample reason to doubt this, maybe He hasn’t heard it yet.  She would play that for Him, and maybe they could drop acid and listen to The White Album.

“Probably too fat to hang from the ceiling fan anyway.”  She laughs a raked and mirthless laugh.

There must be some familiar voice to cheer her.  Someone to spill to.  She picks up the receiver and thinks. 

Her sister.  No.  Too late in the night.  Might wake the baby. 

Her father.  Bad idea.  Probably interrupt one of him and Gloria’s sex romps.

Her mother.  Sigh.

She dials.

“Sal’s Super.” Youthful girl voice answers.

“Hello, can you put me through to Deirdre?”

“Who?”

“Deirdre.  Your manager.  Can I speak with her?”

“Oh Deeerdrah.  Yeah.  Um hold on.”

“Sal’s Super this is Deirdre.”

“Ma.”

“Is this important?” Ma asks.  “This isn’t important, is it?  If this isn’t important I have to go, Deel.  The credit card machines all decided to stop working at once.  You know how many people pay with credit?  There’s a line out the door.  I have to go.  What do you need?”

She needs her to work Mom-wonders and blow on her cut.

“Judd diarrhea-ed on the floor and uh, I can’t find the cleaning spray,” she fibs.  “I checked the cupboards.”

“Really, Deel?  Hhhhhhhh,” Ma sighs exaggeratedly.  “It’s under the kitchen sink.   It’s always under the sink.  What’s he doing in the house, anyway?  You know he’s having trouble with his new food.”

The tears start again.  “I’m sorry, Ma.”

“Put him outside again.  Make sure he stays there.  I have to go.”

Tears drip onto her hand and run down onto the receiver.  “Um, what about tonight?  It’s my big night.  Aren’t you going to wish me luck?”

“I already did before I left.  Twice would be bad luck.”

Beddy’s knees buckle, and she manages to thud into her chair.

“Right,” she says.  She nods in decorum for a woman who cannot see her.

“I have to go now,” Ma says.

“Ok.  Bye, Ma.”

Dialtone, stretching out like a horizon.  

Maybe it was unfair of her to believe that Ma could suddenly be there.  Second chances can be selfish.

The robot woman greets her again.  “If you would like to make a call, hang up and try again.  If you need help, hang up and dial your operator.”

“Oh, SallyTron 5000, you’re the only one that understands me.”  She laughs less desolately.  A conceding laugh.  “You win, Life!  You are a funny bastard.”

She stands up and shakes her head.  Shakes off the dark thoughts like rain from a slicker. 

She resolves that Todd or no Todd, the dance goes on.  And even if she makes it in time for only one song, she is going to dance to that one song.