Gracie sits in the light only, and in the shadows, she does not exist. Black hair, black dress, leather buckled around her waist, neck, arms, as if to contain something that threatens to creep out, to sprawl. A thin, pulsating strip that the door has missed paints a pink slat down her forehead and chin, down, down, an outline, like the light is forcing her to take shape, to wear the skin of reality.
Both of us are 16, faking 22, and poorly. We get into these parties because Ritchie gets into these parties, and we are Ritchie’s dolls, his ducklings, his light little feather babies. We love Ritchie, and Ritchie loves us, so he sneaks us in here like a parent letting their kid sip the foam off their beer, even though he’s 19, faking 23 only a little more successfully than us.
BDSM community gatherings are exclusive in a place like San Diego. Calicoastculture is too clean for that kind of thing, unless you’re in OB, which we weren’t. We’re in the Inland counties, far from the beach, pretending that we’re just as sandy and sun-kissed as the saltwater bodies down by the coast. We want to be and eat the freckled girls with flowery bathing suits who play volleyball on the weekends and pickleball in the days between. Gracie and I already believe we know the truth of things, strange and solitary, pale and concave, and hoping to find homes in other people, uprooted from the ones in ourselves.
She’s fifty-something, and hosts the party in Santa Luz, a gated community that we have to practically break into, the five of us climbing over fences and hiding from car headlights. Her name is full of consonants, Petra, like it’s meant to stomp down on your tongue, hard, again and again. The door swings open, and she welcomes us, smiling with too many teeth for Ritchie, I got your text, so glad you made it, who laps it up and presses a kiss on the corner of her mouth. They aren’t fucking, and they never will be, but Gracie and I have a bet on it anyway. She shows us around, guiding us through winding, newly painted hallways.
The showrooms: Small, dark rooms, three floors’ worth of them, cheap spotlights rigged to the ceiling. A rented stage made of small tables, with something on top of it. Sometimes it’s a swing, or a sawhorse, or just a plain old table. Sometimes it’s a set of hooks or a slack rope hanging from the ceiling. A row of folding chairs is stacked across from the stage, staggered so you can see past heads, and in the chairs, people.
The kitchen: White and sterile, but drowned in darkness, with the occasional flash of colored light. Nobody is dancing, but it’s lit like they should be. People chat here, the music is quieter, and everybody wants to talk to us. We’re new and look it. On the counter is alcohol, which we drink, letting the punch to our throats assure the discomfort we feel in our bellies, soothe the displacement, let us bleed into the background.
The lounge: Velvet chaises and beanbag chairs. Soaked in the luxury of the house. All of the big events happen here when Petra hosts the exclusive parties. Blackout curtains over the windows, though it wouldn’t make a difference – no lights. People are in here, and they’re doing exactly what you’d think, but maybe not how you’d think it.
Our group tries to sit through a show, but doesn’t make it a long while in before leaving. The room is hot and stifling, and whatever Gracie and I are meant to feel, we are not feeling. Still, before we close the door, I turn back to look one last time at the sandy-blonde woman tied to the table, blood dripping from her lowermost rib where a man has dragged the end of a flathead screwdriver, and I think she looks so beautiful, like a banshee under the light. I even say it to Gracie as we leave. “She’s so beautiful,” I say, and Gracie looks at me with jealousy as we walk to the kitchen.
Ritchie and Maria and Ritchie’s horrible boyfriend go off somewhere, patting Gracie and me on the shoulders like we’re children, which we are, but so are they. Maria is two months younger than I am. They’re our ride home, so we’d best occupy ourselves. Drink a little more. Make conversation. I let Petra touch my hair, play with my curls, while she offers me one of her playthings, a boy twice my age with crooked teeth and lovely eyes.
I look at the boy with the lovely eyes who wants me. I so desperately want to be wanted, but I’m not sure how. Gracie wants me, and I want her, but in the same way a legless man wants a crutch, or a cat wants a canary. It takes so many forms, but none are correct. Somehow, we both ended up too malformed to know what wanting is, even in a room drenched in it; we can’t pick it out, can’t smell it in the air. In the kitchen, we sip vodka like we actually enjoy it, hoping that this isn’t it, that one day we will want all of this, that we haven’t ended our journey of becoming half-formed.
We make it thirty minutes before ducking down a hallway into some side room on the third floor.
Now I sit, staring at the pink light painting Gracie. The leather is suffocating her. She picked that outfit out so carefully, throwing the clothing out on the bed, asking me what I thought of every combination, like she was asking her unenthusiastic boyfriend what dress she should wear to prom. I am not her boyfriend; curled on someone’s bed, staring at her, I am a non-entity.
Her eyes drink in obscenity like I drink sweat from my top lip. We are not meant to be here. We are children at a zoo, staring at the tigers, feeling all the safer for the glass that separates us. The bodies here heave and melt into one another, hairy and worn with age. Gracie sits in the doorway, staring through the window of the time machine. We are in that room now, and have been in there since we were born. We have pins through our nipples and gags in our mouths and hooks through the skin on our backs. Every body in the hall is a person she will become. Every mouth is one she will open.
She drinks it in. Pupils widening, the copper that rings around them thin like a spool of wire, a gravitational epicenter, an event horizon. She turns to look at me, and there’s nothing I could hold onto in the room that would stop me from falling into her.
Victor Groening is a rising senior at DePaul university, studying Film/Television in between shifts at the Writing Center. His work consists of primarily short creative nonfiction and poetry, and was most recently published in Crook & Folly.