Vamps: Human and Paranormal (26 page)

She turned me away from the mirror as she started to apply the makeup.  I kept my eyes shut as she whisked brushes across my face, penciled my eyebrows and worked on my “thin lips.” 

As Mona set to work brushing out my hair and spraying hairspray in fits and starts, another woman, an older Asian lady with deep creases around her eyes started filing my nails.  I told her I didn’t want fake nails and she huffed her disapproval.  She shaped my short nails into ovals and then lacquered them a frightful blood red.

An hour and a half after I walked into the joint Mona finally spun me around to see the finished product.  My breath caught in my throat, making a strangled animal sound.  I lurched forward not believing my eyes, my now huge looking candy apple red lips open in a shocked O.

I looked like Melanie Griffith in
Working Girl,
before the makeover.  Or Peg Bundy from Married with Children.

She’s speechless!”  pronounced Mona, fluffing up the back of my already enormous head of teased and tortured hair.

I wasn’t speechless.  I just didn’t know what to scream about first.  The rat’s nest that used to be my hair, or the clown make-up she’d applied with a putty knife.  I felt tears welling up in my eyes.

“Don’t cry, honey.  I know ... you look gorgeous!”

I was thinking GRUESOME!

I just wanted to run home and take a shower.  Hoped the makeup and hair spray would wash off, eventually.

*****

Moments after I left the reputed beauty salon--my head down, speed-walking through throngs of business suites, whipping past slower cell-phone toting pedestrians--I heard a clap of thunder and was suddenly bombarded by squalls of rain.  I started to run, trying to get back to my apartment, but the rain soaked me instantaneously.  And just then I ran right smack into my ex-boyfriend, Thomas.  The UPS Guy.

The mascara the lady at the salon had caked on me was running in my eyes, making my vision foggy, so I ran straight into his chest, knocking myself backwards and then right on my ass on the rain soaked pavement. 

I was swiping at my eyes when I heard his voice. “Lucy ... is that you?”

My heart stopped.  I recognized Thomas’ voice immediately, and immediately I just wanted to fall over dead.  I squinted through my running mascara and made out his broad-shouldered brown uniform clad body.  Suddenly he leaned down and scooped me up off the sidewalk, hands under my arms.

“Jesus, Lucy.  What the hell happened to you?”  I felt his big paw of a hand touching my hair.  I reached up and realized that my hair was wet yet hadn’t softened up a bit.  A horrifying thought popped into my head--what if this shit doesn’t wash out!

I tried to smile through my degradation.  “I was raped at the beauty salon.”

Thomas’ bark of a laugh was startlingly loud ... a true belly laugh.  I suddenly didn’t see where any of this was funny, suddenly glad we’d broken up, and suddenly seized by the desire to hall off and punch him in his laughing maw.

But I still couldn’t make his face out ... just a fuzzy, smeared mess ... probably just how my face looked.

“Let me walk you to your apartment,”  Thomas said after he stopped laughing.  He took me by the arm and navigated me through the street and into my building, and even though I told him I’d be fine he took me all the way to my door.

Maybe I underestimated him; I thought as he took my keys from me and unlocked my door and opening it.  Maybe he was a decent guy after all.  But then I heard a strange bug-like sound, and then another. 

It sounded like the camera click of a cell phone!

“Did you just take a picture of me?”

“Nah, I’d never do a thing like that.”  Click, click.

“You asshole!”

I heard his big feet padding away down the hall.  “The guys at work will love this.  We’ve got an ex-girlfriend wall of shame.  This will look great!”

“You’re an asshole!”  I screamed at him, shaking my head--why hadn’t I just stayed in bed?  “And you were lousy in bed!”

*****

Chapter 4

Luckily the hairspray washed out on the third wash.  I vowed never to go to a beauty salon again.  It took a good thirty minutes of showering to get everything sticky off me.  And another ten minutes of eye drops to clear my vision.  When I finally looked in the mirror my damp hair was already starting to frizz -- obviously the hairspray was going to leave its mark on me -- and my face was red and splotchy ... but not as red as my eyes.  They were swollen and bloodshot, and I think there were still traces of eyeliner left on my lids.

I decided to drown my sorrows in Pizza.  I called my favorite pizza emporium and ordered a large pepperoni, bacon and chicken pizza for delivery.  I channel surfed until the pizza man rang my door bell.  I knew him, young guy, early twenties--had never given me a second glance.  But unfortunately today he did.

“Hey lady, are you alright?”  He hunkered down and looked hard into my eyes.  “Have you been crying?”

“No, not exactly.”

He sprang back up to his normal height.  “You been hitting the sauce?  Maybe some recreational drugs?  He shook his head as he eyed me up. “Because you look like shit.”

Great, I thought.  Even the pizza delivery guy has an opinion on my looks.

I paid him for the pizza, plucking his tip from cash in my hand and then slammed the door in his face.  I settled into the couch, my hot, insult laden pizza by my side, clicking through channels until I found a repeat of
The Nanny
.  I’d seen the episode about a hundred times, but just the sight of all that big hair made my skin crawl.  I flicked past that and settled on a
Law and Order
rerun.  Nothing like a little murder to make the days foibles melt away.

I was about to take my first bite of pizza when my cell phone rang.  It was Bess.

“I can’t fucking believe it, that asshole!”

“What asshole?”  I said dully.

“You’re ex-asshole, the UPS guy.  Didn’t you get my text message?”

“Nope.  I was just about to...are you talking about Thomas?”  My stomach lurched.

“Just check your text messages.”

I fumbled with my phone and pulled up my text messages.  Scrolling down there was a forward from Bess titled “WHY SHE’S MY X.”  I opened it and Wham! there I was all wet and smeared and grotesque, my hair matted with rain yet still a good six inches tall.

“Son of a bitch!”  I howled.  I looked down to the list of everyone Thomas had sent it too.  As I scrolled down the list I felt my stomach lurch again.  The list kept going and going.  There had to be three, four hundred names there. 

Except mine.

But there were a few names on the list that were familiar: Bess, of course, and three of my male coworkers from Physical Therapy at the hospital.  My head suddenly got so heavy I just let it drop.  I heard Bess on the line calling out to me.  I pulled the phone back up to my ear, “I’m here.”

“I just finished showing a townhouse on your street...well, the good part of your street.  So I’m coming over with some booze.  What are you hungry for?”

“I’ve got pizza,”  I croaked looking over at my still uneaten pizza.  “Maybe some ice cream?”  

“We’ll make Cocksucker milkshakes!”  Bess always called Buttery Nipples, Cocksuckers.  She’d picked it up in a gay bar...liked the brashness of it.

“Hurry,”  I said.  “I’m considering joining the witness relocation program.”

*****

Bess swung through my door ten minutes later, a grocery bag in one hand, a big bag from the liquor store in the other.  She had a maniacal glint in her eye, so the effect was a young  Cruella de Vil.

“I’ve got just the thing to cheer you up!”   she sang as she danced into the room.  Even for Bess this was strange behavior.  I’d only seen her do it once before, on the day her and her lawyer had taken her ex-husband to the cleaners in divorce court.  Turned out that the slug had been cheating with his secretary for months, and Bess had been onto him from the beginning, had hired a private detective and had been documenting his adultery in blazing Technicolor, even in video.

Her ex-husband had left her, had filed for divorce, never knowing that she’d known the entire time.  And when the time came she’d sprung her mountain of evidence on him. 

The most thrilling part for Bess had been that he’d had the audacity to have his mistress come to the courtroom with him.  She’d sat a couple rows back so no one would’ve been the wiser, but when the scads of photos were passed out, and the video was ready to roll, Bess’ lawyer made sure to point her out right before switching on the video. 

That day Bess had danced out of the courtroom, she’d danced down the street to the first bar she encountered. She’d danced with every attractive man in the joint and then danced through shot after shot of buttery nipples.  Finally she’d taken a cab to my place and had danced in my front door just as she was now.

I shook my head and smiled, this had to be good.  “Do you have Thomas’ severed head in one of those bags?”

“Better, Lucy party baby!  Oh, much better!”  Bess cha-cha-ed over to me on the couch, did a spin almost knocking my brains out with her bag from the liquor store, then landed with a gleeful thud on the couch beside me.  

“Have you already been hitting the sauce?”

“Not a drop.  But I am high...high on revenge!”

“Revenge?”  I had a feeling that, given how my day had turned out, that any plan for revenge would end up blowing up in my face. “I’m not so sure--”

“I know, I know,”  Bess cut me off.  “It’s better served cold--and with a kick to the balls--but this is too damn good to wait!”

Bess pulled her cell phone from her Prada bag, flipped open the blood red Razor and thumbed through her files until she suddenly threw her head back and screamed with laughter.  “Knew I’d have a use for this one day.”  she said handing the phone over to me.

There on her screen was a naked picture of Thomas...and his erect three-inch-long penis.  He even had this oh-so-proud-of-himself smile on his face as he leered at the camera.

I threw my hand over my mouth and laughed.  I’d literally forgotten the biggest, or should I say the littlest, reason he’d been so bad in bed.  Then I slid my eyes back to Bess and gave her a hard look.  “And how is it you have this picture?”

She shrugged her shoulders.  “I was bored.  You were done with him.  So when I ran into him at a bar I decided what the hell!  Bad sex is better than no sex...”  She smiled wickedly at me.  “But when I saw that dinky little penis, and that stupid look on his face I knew I’d never be able to sleep with him.  So I acted like I’d just gotten an emergency text-message, snapped the picture while looking aghast from reading the message, and then I split, leaving him alone with his sad little fella.”

“Thank god.  I suddenly started to think you had no morals at all.”

“Honey, I still don’t have any morals, but I do have standards.”

I laughed again.  My stomach was starting to get a stitch in it from laughing too long.  “God, thank you.  That’s just what I needed.”

“Oh no, that’s not the surprise...at least not the best part!”  Bess took the phone back and started some serious texting with both manicured thumbs.  Took about sixty seconds, but then she showed me what she’d done.  She’d pasted her embarrassing picture of Thomas into a text message of its own, and had it ready to send out to every single person that Thomas had sent my photo to.

I smiled.  “You’re evil.”

“Guilty,” she cooed as she leaned into me and giggled girlishly.  “Wanna hit the button?”

I shook my head emphatically no.  “I could never do anything that mean!”  But then I started smiling and “no” turned into “You better believe it!” 

I jabbed my index finger on the send button and voila! It was gone.

*****

They say revenge doesn’t really make you feel better, but as my cell phone and my home phone started ringing over and over again, and Thomas left one after another irate, profanity laced messages on my machine and my voice mail.  He even sent the text “BITCH!” to me. 

I couldn’t help but feel better.

Bess and I ate cold pizza and blended the entire half gallon of ice cream into mouth wateringly good cocksuckers, toasting to the biggest cocksucker of them all.  “To Thomas!”

After we stopped giggling--and Thomas stopped calling--we crashed on the couch and finished off the cocksucker milkshakes watching
The First Wives Club
on the Oxygen Channel.

*****

I had that dream about the hands again, but this time instead of them sifting and churning through soil, they were kneading my flesh.   As if I were lying on the ceiling, watching from above, the hands reached out of the darkness.  I suddenly could feel them too.  The body and face of their owner obscured in shadow, I watched the hands start with my neck, kneading down to my shoulders and then on down my back.  Slow and taunting, sometimes light as a feather, and then a moment later deep and hard, those fingers, those hands rubbed and caressed me.  And just when they were about to start on my butt, that’s when my alarm started squawking like a wounded parrot.