THEY ALL LOVED HER.
Looking at her, my best friend, I couldn’t understand it; eyes rolling back into her skull, Skinner’s green button up hanging over her emaciated shoulders like a quilted blanket, she looked as if she had risen from the thick marshy waters behind us. K was a depressing sight, a strange, mangled outline of the friend I knew back in high school. Now, she stood as I sat, watching the sky in a detached manner, her glazed eyes unblinking, like two pale green egg yolks, covered in a thin, milky film. Her hair was falling over her face, tangling with her tongue inside her half-opened mouth as she swiveled her head from side to side, seemingly trying to take in all of the night sky as she could.
And yet they loved her. I could see it in their eyes that they found something seductive in the quiet deterioration of the body that held K. They felt breathless at the sight of her acne scarred skin, and the roots growing in near the scalp that sprouted poorly dyed banana-yellow hair. What I saw as a repulsive creature that resembled nothing of the girl I once knew, they saw, in some way, a romantic opportunity. In that moment, to my horror, I saw the sickening predatory nature of those two men, of Skinner and his dutiful accomplice. The gleam in their eyes was nothing more than a hunger; their competitive need to love her, to take her in the state that she, disheveled, disturbed, unguarded, radiated from them, and they looked as if they might attack each other with claws and teeth just to best the other and win K. I waited for the bloodshed to begin, but the two men sat brooding, sipping drinks in relative silence aside from the occasional venomous, derogatory joke: “Get a load of his shoes! Man if I was walking in a pair so fucked up I think my feet might fall off.” “Oh, fuck off, don’t act like half the shit off your back isn’t payed for out of my pocket.”
Every so often they spoke directly to K, asking her things, making some kind of vulgar illusion or remark that caused the two to laugh at their own collective cleverness. I began to notice that they spoke as if neither I nor the other man was there, that it was just the pair, K and whichever was speaking. They had ignored me for much of the night, being that I was nothing but K’s quiet friend from high school. In turn, K had practically ignored them, and myself, which didn’t seem to bother the men. In fact, it seemed almost routine.
A flash of light from a disposable camera startled me. Skinner had snapped a photo. K’s hazy figure had appeared illuminated for a moment in its flash, artificial light creating a bell of white around the marsh and the surrounding shrubbery behind which we were sitting. Skinner’s photo had only been of K, hunched and disoriented, pale-skinned and almost green in the low light…Like a creature blanketed in Skinner’s overshirt, not girl, not woman, not human, but a figure, a shivering carcass of a once living being.
Months later, the photo reappeared into my life. I hadn’t seen it before -it had been developed after I left K and the two men, after the last time I spoke to her- and its appearance almost terrified me. Like a phantom, K’s shadowy figure emerging from the marshes of memory greeted me on the cover of a glossy news magazine on the wire shelf of a garishly lit supermarket.
I had known the success of the business she had so naively involved herself in was the work of fantasy. She had talked so surely about the two men’s illegal activities bringing them even more wealth and presents from the universe. I had known that they would be caught; they lived obscenely lavish lives, she driving a BMW with a Coexist sticker on the bumper, their shared home decorated in opulent rococo style. It was so obvious to anybody that the strange, disoriented girl and her two black-and-white-suited housemates were involved in something far bigger and more dangerous than they themselves even knew. So their arrests didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was the roll of her eyes, the hue of her skin, the expression on her thin face.
K hadn’t been detached, disoriented, or disturbed. She wasn’t afraid, stupid, ignorant, or unaware. She simply wasn’t there at all.