Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

She would regret being invisible if she woke up in a box tomorrow.

Jude lived with her parents in Pacific Heights, sixteen blocks from school. And though she left the house promptly at 7:00 each morning, she so rarely arrived at Sacred Heart it was unlikely that anyone would notice if she disappeared for a week. She still wore the uniform most days, because it prevented her mother from getting agitated. When her mother became agitated she tended to go overboard with her medication, a too generous cocktail of amphetamines and painkillers that pushed her into episodes of such extreme paranoia that she once nailed shut the door to her bedroom and burrowed into her walk-in closet with a hammer and small axe and tried to dig a tunnel to a neighboring room that existed only in her head.

Jude wore the uniform because it soothed her mother.

The sight of Jude in the familiar outfit gave her mother the temporary illusion that the inside of her head was in order. And because her mother was a near bottomless source of guilt for her, Jude wore the uniform.

But she would have worn it anyway, because it was so practical.

By the time she entered middle school, Jude had discovered that if she moved her hips just so and let the tiny blue-and-black skirt flutter at her thighs, the men and boys in her immediate vicinity became hushed, compliant. She crossed her legs and sneezed and the man nearest her trembled and handed her a tissue. She crouched on the sidewalk to dig through her purse with her knees pressed together and hair blowing in her mouth and her butt just touching the heels of her black Mary Janes, and even the stoned hustlers and street artists stopped to ask if she were lost. She twisted her white shirttails into a bow that exposed an inch of bare belly and a college boy would buy her a coffee. And if she tugged her socks up over her knees, cab drivers offered her cigarettes and took her wherever she wanted to go.

She would give anything to be in the back of a yellow cab right now. She would ask the driver to take her to the one place that felt like church to her, the ruined baths just up the hill from Ocean Beach. She would close her eyes as they sailed through the sunset, and thank God she wasn’t on her feet, because she was so sore, so raw inside. The soft pink hidden flesh in what her mother perversely referred to as her special prize felt as if it had been flayed with a chunk of glass.

Again she looked at the washcloth, the smear of red against white.

This was not menstrual blood.

Jude had the altered internal clock of a long-distance runner and rarely had a regular period. She ran nearly seventy miles per week through the rain and mist in the Presidio, and trained with weights and worked out every other day with a tae-kwon-do master class, and this regimen combined with birth control pills and the amphetamines she skimmed from her mother’s cave had pretty much cancelled her cycle. This was the blood of trauma, and now it struck her that she would never forgive herself if she left even a drop of it behind.

Jude pushed herself up from the edge of the tub and crossed unsteadily to the sink, where she turned on the hot water. She rinsed the cloth with liquid soap and scrubbed it with her fingernails until the water ran clear, trying not to glance at herself in the mirror, though not because she disliked her body.

The opposite, rather.

She was aware that most of the girls her age, the ones she ever bothered to talk to, suffered intense body-image issues and eating disorders that haunted and consumed them. Jude had never known what to say to them, though she had tried to feel what they did, thinking it would be a useful emotion or psychosis to access. Her own body was a product of conditioning that Bruce Lee would not have scoffed at, and the genetic gift of a Thai mother and Irish father speckled with Israeli blood. She was long and lean with fine yellow skin and small breasts with large brown nipples that paralyzed men and boys without fail. Her stomach was flat and hard, though not yet the washboard she coveted. Thousands upon thousands of pushups had brought out the shadow of definition in her arms and shoulders, and although she considered her ass to be on the smallish side, it was tight and curved and fit perfectly in the palm of the pool boy’s hand, or so it had when she was twelve and shaped like a wisp of smoke and he was still unafraid to touch and pet and wrestle with her.

The pool boy was four years older than Jude, but small. He was just a whisper of bone and muscle. He had a pretty pink mouth and green eyes, long blond hair and the perfect sharp ears of an elf, and he seemed always to be tan, regardless of season. He was sweet and playful and Jude supposed she had suffered a temporary crush on him, and she used to hang around the pool in her red racing bikini and watch him while he worked. And sometimes she was able to lure him into the pool when he was done cleaning it, provided her father was not around. The pool boy was afraid of him, and rightly so. Jude’s father had terrorized him often. But when her father was away on business, Jude and the pool boy wrestled and chased each other underwater, skin bright and flashing, and sometimes the pool boy retreated from her with a bulge in his swimsuit and a look on his face that she found fascinating. Jude was strong even at twelve. And one day, without meaning to, she held the pool boy under the surface too long, she held him down until he struggled and freaked out, and only when he scratched open her arms with his fingernails did she realize what she was doing. When she released him, the pool boy withdrew from her, pale and gasping, and ever after had avoided her.

Jude knew why she had done it.

Her father had thrown her into the swimming pool when she was five and not yet a confident swimmer. He stood watching from the pool’s edge as she panicked and thrashed and finally went under. Her father had allowed her to drown, then revived her, and she was never sure if his intention was to teach her not to fear death or to remind her that he had the power of life over her. She had decided that it was both of these, and became wary of him. But aside from offering advice with math and soccer, her father left her alone until she was nine, when he drove her up the coast and made her hike through the woods in the dark until they reached the beach. He armed her with a knife and compass, then abandoned her there, telling her she had one hour to find her way back to the highway. He promised her that if it took her longer than an hour, the car would be gone.

And not long after her tenth birthday, he began teaching her to be a pickpocket. He allowed her to practice on him for exactly one day, in the relatively intimate space of his closet at home, before taking her for a ride on BART during the afternoon commute so she could try the real thing. He selected easy targets for her at first, then ever more challenging ones. The worst of these had been a burly, sweating man in a rumpled suit and tie with needle-bright eyes, who scratched at his arms and kept swiveling his head left and right. Jude had failed to come away with even a pack of cigarettes, but neither had she been caught with her hand in the twitching man’s pocket. And when she returned with empty hands to her father’s side, he gave a shiver of a smile and touched her face with one hand, and though she couldn’t yet verbalize it, she comprehended that he was telling her to choose her targets with care, that the burly man had been a junkie day trader of some kind, chemically altered and paranoid and therefore not a suitable mark.

Her father was pathologically reserved with praise and affection. He touched her so rarely that Jude could number on one hand the times he had kissed her forehead or patted her knee. But when he wanted her to understand something important, he touched her face. He took her cheek and jaw in the hollow of his hand and the world fell away. So when she was thirteen, Jude had been surprised and curious to discover that the sudden proximity of her body made him uncomfortable. She first assumed this had to do with her resemblance to her mother and the natural spin of echoes and nostalgia that entailed, then she read Nabokov and understood.