Calico (2 page)

I bend down so that we’re eye level with one another. “I’m not. I’m tired. And I think your moral compass is broken. That’s it. That’s all.”

She gives me a wicked grin. Her lips are full and stained bright red from her lipstick, swollen from the pounding they received when I fucked her mouth not too long ago. Those lips are part of the reason why I can’t really give her up. They remind me of someone else’s. “Your moral compass is broken, too, asshole,” she tells me. “You’re no better than me.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. My moral compass works perfectly. I just choose to ignore it. That’s something else entirely.”

Rae seems to think about this. “So, who’s worse, then—me, the woman who knows no better, or you, the man who sins with full knowledge of his actions?”

I return Rae’s awful smile, feeling my insides turn a shade blacker. “Me. I’m the worst. You know this.”

She nods, because she does. “It even said so in High Lite Magazine.”

“High Lite?”

Rae nods. “I bought a copy yesterday. Your face is plastered across the middle two pages like you’re goddamn revolutionary or something.” Her voice is peppered with something that sounds strangely akin to envy. I did an interview with a female journalist who works for High Lite about a month ago. She said she would push for an article about my work, but that I shouldn’t hold my breath. I haven’t been. In fact, I’d forgotten all about it until right here and now.
 

“Were they awful about me?” I ask.
 

Rae nods. “So mean. I can’t imagine what you did to deserve such a harsh editorial.” She can imagine perfectly well, though. She’s seen how I talk to people sometimes. She’s seen how abrasive I can be when rubbed the wrong way. Rae’s mouth pulls up at the corners into an impish smile. “The strap line was, ‘
Callan Cross is a cunt
.”

“Nice. I didn’t know you could say cunt in a magazine.”

Rae shrugs. “They’re sensationalists. They can do whatever they want.”

“What was the tag line?”

Rae puts on her best newsreader voice, which is actually quite impressive. “He’s tall, dark and savagely handsome, and he’s America’s most vitriolic photographer. At twenty-nine, Callan Cross has already conquered the world. Now he’s planning on burning it to the ground, one brutal image at a time.”

“I like the tall, dark and handsome part.”

“They said you were arrogant and potentially delusional.”

“Who gives a fuck what they think about me as a person? What did they say about my work?”

“Incendiary. Wild. Stirring. Transcendental. There were a few other adjectives thrown around, but they got a little fantastical. I stopped reading after a while. I just looked at the pictures instead.”

“They were good, right?” I gave the journo some self-portraits I took of myself last year. My profile was in silhouette, and beneath it tree branches and a cold winter sky were visible in hues of blue and purple, which I transposed onto the image. The writer had asked if I’d created the self-portraits in Photoshop and that’s where the hostilities had begun. I’d told her, no, I had absolutely
not
used Photoshop. I had used an enlarger to blend the two images together, one on top of the other, and everything was done by hand. She’d looked at me blankly, like she couldn’t give two fucks, and I’d known immediately who I was dealing with: another hipster with an Instagram account, throwing a filter on a selfie and calling it art.
 

Infuriating
.
 

“They were pretty dark and twisty,” Rae says. “Normally when you have your photo in a magazine, it’s a good idea for people to be able to see your face. You have such a nice one, after all.”

“Thank you. I don’t care about people seeing my face, though. I want to be faceless altogether.”

Rae scowls. She throws back the covers on the bed and climbs in, kicking my magazines onto the floor. “You
are
delusional,” she informs me. “I’m passing out now. I have an early call. I guess I’ll see you when you get back from your little jaunt down south.”

“You will.” I don’t kiss her goodnight. That’s not the kind of people we are. I continue to search for my dress shoes, banging around, my blood inexplicably fizzing in my veins, until I realize I’m never going to find them. Wherever they are now, they are no longer in my apartment. Once I’ve made my peace with this, I grab my keys and leave. Rae’s fast asleep, will still be asleep by the time I get back, no doubt, but I’m not even close to tired. I’m wired. Edgy. I need to know what that journalist wrote about me.
 

I find a copy of High Lite Magazine at a bodega on 5
th
, and I pay for it with a crumpled ten-dollar bill. I walk around in circles, looping the block while I read it.
 

The journo talks about my work—has very impressive things to say, which I like. She calls me a narcissist, which is a cloak I don’t mind wearing, I guess. It’s mostly true. Towards the middle of the article, she writes about my background. Starts talking about my dead mother. I pointedly did
not
tell her anything about my family, even though she did ask. Toward the end of the piece, she mentions the first picture I ever received recognition for, all those years ago. I’m bubbling over with anger by the time I turn the page and see that she’s printed the fucking thing.
Without my consent.
I’ve spent the last ten years trying to bury that image, and yet there it is in full color, monopolizing half a goddamn page of real estate in one of the countries biggest lifestyle magazines. Every time I see that picture, it feels like I’ve swallowed razor blades and I’m slowly bleeding to death internally.
 

It’s a picture of a girl. Her right eye is swollen and bruised, and her lip is split open. She has blood dried on her chin, and she’s crying. The girl was looking straight at me when I took the picture. She was naked, and she was hurt, and her blood and her tears were real. I should never have shared that picture. It was deeply personal. Deeply painful. It was a silent conversation shared between two damaged teenagers, who had been clinging to each other for survival.
 

I had no right to share the picture with the world, but I did it anyway. I’ve regretted it every single day since.

I really
am
a cunt.

CHAPTER TWO

CORALIE
 

Fight or Flight

NOW

My mother named me after the ocean. She loved the organic weirdness of coral. It was her lifelong dream to travel to Australia and swim in the Great Barrier Reef, so she could see the forests of stony, gnarled tree-like formations all crowded together, stretching out below her as far as the eye could see. She used to show me so many faded pictures in the battered old Encyclopaedia Britannica she kept pushed underneath her side of the bed she shared with my father. Ironically, my mother couldn’t swim, though. She was always talking about learning but she never seemed to get around to it.
 

She died when I was twelve, which put a dampener on her plans for world travel and sea exploration. For six months after her death, I thought my mother had been driving in the rain and had lost control of her car. Turned out she’d driven off Palisade Bridge and ended her life on purpose. My father knew how to push her buttons, had been pushing them for years, and she’d simply reached a point where the promise of the Great Barrier Reef, the promise of seeing me graduate, the promise of growing old and dying in her sleep, hadn’t been enough to justify living through the torment any longer.
 

I’d found a letter addressed to me in my father’s desk, which explained all of this. Up until then, I’d been heartbroken, devastated that my mom had been taken away from me so cruelly. When I’d read through her reasoning, the paper shaking violently in my trembling hands, I’d stopped being heartbroken. I’d stopped crying. I’d started being happy instead, because at least she wasn’t suffering anymore. At least she’d gotten out, and that was something. I didn’t get out until much later.
 

“Sure you don’t want me to come with you? It’s a long flight. At least let me take you to the airport. Traffic’s a nightmare at this time of day.” Ben, my boyfriend, helps me carry my suitcase down the front steps of our house in Palos Verdes. When I left South Carolina, I was heading for Canada. I made it to California and I stopped running, though. Seemed far enough, given that my father staunchly refused to leave the state, and the sunshine made me happy. I let Ben put my bags into the trunk of my car, knowing that he doesn’t really want to come to the airport with me, let alone Port Royal. In fact, I’m sure the prospect of it is making him itch on the inside.
 

“I’m fine, seriously. LAX is thirty minutes away. You should stay here. You have work to do, and besides…I don’t know. I need to do this on my own. Does that make sense?” It doesn’t even really make sense to me—I should be grasping hold of any support being offered to me right now, but I’m not. A deep sense of shame floods me whenever I think about home. I don’t want to take Ben there. I never want him to step foot inside the house where I grew up otherwise he’ll remember it and carry it with him. I’ll know when he’s looking at me that he’s seeing that place and everything I told him that happened there, and I won’t be able to bear it.
 

Ben nods, frowning. “Okay. If you need me, you can call me anytime. You know that, right? I’ll jump on the first plane out of here.”

“I do. Thank you.” I kiss him on the cheek, and he hugs me, patting me lightly on the back. It’s hardly the most romantic of goodbyes.

“Four days. That’s really not so long. I’ll see you soon, Cora.” He stands in the driveway and sees me off, waving. I drive straight down PCH until I hit Hermosa Beach, and then I pull down a side street, open up the car door, shove my fingers down my throat and I make myself throw up.
 

I feel much, much lighter after that. It’s not until I’m on the plane and my heart is slamming against the inside of my chest like a fist against a brick wall that I realize how stupid it was of me to do that. I haven’t made myself throw up in over seven years.
 

Seven years.
 

Bulimia was never about self-image for me. It was about anxiety and control. It took years for me to overcome it. What I just did was stepping into incredibly dangerous territory. The most worrying thing is that I didn’t even think about it. I’m twenty-nine years old now. I have a good job. A beautiful home. A steady boyfriend. I shouldn’t have to be worrying about things like eating disorders, and yet here I am, sitting on a plane, freezing my ass off, wondering whether I’m going to continue to make myself throw up when I’m back in Port Royal.
 

Smokers revert back to a pack a day when they crack. Alcoholics drink the well dry. Maybe I’m going to make myself so ill that I land myself back in hospital again. I don’t feel anything when I think about that. I just feel…
flat
. I only experience a spike of true emotion when I think about driving my rental car down that street in that small town, and seeing those familiar houses with their colonial pillars and their wide sweeping lawns, and their marshy boat launches out the back. That’s when I feel like I’ve completely lost control of my body.
 

“Ma’am? Ma’am, are you okay? Your breathing sounds fast all of a sudden.” The large woman in the seat next to me has kind eyes. They’re full of concern as she stares at me through her circa nineteen-eighty huge horn-rimmed glasses. “I wouldn’t normally say anything, sweetie, but you’ve been fidgeting since we took off. You just don’t seem like you’re havin’ a good time at all. Are you afraid of flying? That what it is?”

I just stare back at her dumbly for a moment before her words filter through to my brain. “Yes. Yeah, I hate flying. I get really anxious.”

The woman nods. She leans in close, beckoning me to do the same. “You want some Klonopin, sweetheart? I always get some for when I’m flying. I have a stash in my purse.”

I’m about to say no, fully intend on doing so, but then I find I’m nodding, holding out my hand, and the woman with the horn-rimmed glasses in the seat next to me is tipping small white pills into my palm. I don’t even know how it happens. “There we go, sweetie. There’s six. You can keep ‘em for next time. Don’t go crazy now, though. Don’t go takin’ ‘em all at once. I don’t want to be responsible for you dyin’ in your sleep now.”
 

“Oh, I’ll be careful. I promise.” If I were going to kill myself, I’d do it the same way my mother did. I’d drive my car off a bridge and have done with it. There would be some kind of symmetry in that, I think. I can’t tell her that, though. I learned a while back that you can’t just say whatever the hell you’re thinking or people will assume you’re mentally disturbed.
 

The woman—her name is Margo—gives me her tiny plane sized bottle of water to drink down my nefariously gained medication, and then she talks to me for thirty minutes about her cats. No children to speak of, Margo has replaced her non-existent progeny with some fur babies that she seems remarkably proud of. I tell her that I’m allergic, and she makes this terrible moaning sound, as though she’s putting herself in my shoes, imagining being without her precious kitties, never able to pet them again, betrayed by her own body.

“You poor, sweet child,” she says. “What about dogs? Can you do dogs?”

I feel like I should object to the term, ‘do dogs,’ because it sounds sexual and I definitely don’t want to have sex with dogs, but in the end I don’t bother. Margo wouldn’t understand, and I don’t particularly want to discuss sex and dogs in the same sentence with her. Instead, I tell her that, yes, I can ‘do dogs’ and that my boyfriend has a German Shepherd. Ben doesn’t have a dog at all, but lying seems to be a smart way to fill the time right now.
 

When we land in Charleston, I’ve made up so much shit about this pretend animal that I’m actually thinking about getting a dog. Margo says goodbye when we’re let off the plane, and I leave her in the dust as I barrel down the hallway, heading for the rentals desk. News of my father’s death came suddenly. I wasn’t expecting it, so I didn’t really have time to book a vehicle. Thankfully, when I get to the desk, they have plenty of options to choose from. Maybe it’s the Klonopin, or maybe it’s the fact that I really don’t want to be here and I was just thinking about driving myself off a bridge, but I decide on the most powerful, ridiculously high end, dangerous car they have—a Porsche Cayman. I’ve never driven anything so ostentatious or blatantly stupid before. I’m genuinely surprised that they even have a car so likely to get wrapped around a lamppost.