Trapped in Forever

42 ~ Reese was Here

A/N: This chapter might be sensitive for some people. It deals more with the bulimia part of the novel. If anyone feel like this is too unrealistic or if you yourself have been in a similar situation and are shaking your head at how this goes, please tell me. I want to handle this situation right and if I'm not, I'd really like for someone to tell me.

A dark brunette stand of hair, coiled into a twisted, three inch curl that hid behind the back of my ear, purposely neglected by the stylist as she gripped the handfuls of my brunette hair, tugging at the roots and probably reddening my scalp, and wrapped it into a delicate bun, thirty minutes just to make it look casual, like a last minute decision before you ran out the door, slipped out from behind my ear as I bended over, a Styrofoam cup clutched in my hand, slowly being weighed down by the lukewarm water that drained from the water cooler, the remaining water inside bubbling, ripples drifting out from the center and floating toward the transparent, plastic rim of the container, condensation gathering on the exterior. Behind me, where the backdrop stood propped against the wall, and where a photographer stood, hunched over faintly, with a black camera held to his eye, I heard someone repetitively shouting, “Tilt your chin up, Tracey. Up.”

A white flash gleamed against the trickling beads of condensation clinging desperately to the water cooler, a few streaking down the rounded sides in a clean, wet strip like raindrops rolling off of the glass of a window, and I glanced over my shoulder as I stood up, watching as Tracey finally tilted her chin up, a little bit, angling it more to the side than actually holding it high. She wore a pair of dark denim skinny jeans that constricted against her calves before burying into the material of her cowgirl boots that extended halfway up her shin, and a checkered hot pink shirt, the first two buttons undone and the peak of a white tank top exposing against her skin. She had ebony black hair that the fan, humming loudly in my ears, the white extension cord snaking across the concrete flooring, blew behind her cheekbones, and she grinned, revealing too white teeth that made her look like the poster child for childhood braces, probably earning approval from my father miles away, a surgical glove pointing a thumb up in the air, the sheen of someone’s saliva gleaming against the aqua-blueness.

I was just lifting the Styrofoam cup up to my lips, already parting, the thickness of the lip-gloss sure to leave a creased, peach pinked stain on the rim of the white cup, the water slowly slipping down the side of the cup, when I saw her out of the corner of my eye, a flash of dark blond hair slipping into a corridor. Instantly I thought of the package of Tic-Tac mints buried away in my sock drawer, as if anyone could tell just by looking at them what they were for—why she had laid them on the countertop beside me, the mints rattling inside, almost poignantly somehow—instead of that I wanted to get rid of my morning breath without actually brushing my teeth.

Somehow, through the muffled conversations that drifted back and forth from lips and ears behind me—“There, yeah, okay, hold it.” Or “Tracey, for crying out loud, look up!”—and the snapping sounds of the lens flashing against the backdrop, capturing that moment, Tracey’s chin tilted slightly in the air, forever, I could have sworn that I heard the clicking of her heels pressing into the grayness of the concrete as she disappeared from my sight, straightened dirty blond locks following behind her like the cape of a superhero, if superheroes ever carried mints in their back pockets, rattling with meaning with each step. I wondered, as I placed the Styrofoam cup down on top of the bottle of the water cooler, if she still kept a package of mints with her, if she stored package after package of Tic-Tacs, Altoids, and Excel kept in the back of her closet.

I wondered, as I slowly felt the click of my own heels—which were not as tall or as thin as Veronica’s, as when they tried to have me wear them I wobbled back and forth, my arms constantly extended outward, like statues of Jesus nailed to the cross—over top of the concrete, thick beneath my feet, if she were going to do what I thought she was going to do, what I was sure she was going to do. If she would lean over the oval, porcelain surface of the toilet, the lid propped up, and repeat the words she said to me back to herself, that they all did, that they had do, and then that raucous sounded would ring out against the tiles aligning halfway up the walls, her fingers already reaching for the rattling package of mints. But maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was heading toward the restrooms to pin back her hair, to check for something in between her white, glimmering teeth, or reapply her mascara, or maybe just to pee. But the thought of the mints, vanilla coated Tic-Tacs colliding in their transparent, rectangular box, kept invading my mind and telling me that that wasn’t true.