Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

I told her how I didn’t get the job I wanted, had to move in with my best friend, Paige, and her boyfriend. How I hadn’t told my mother when she’d come for graduation. How I’d let her think I had that other job the whole time, made it seem like Paige and I were renting some two-bedroom place together. Not that I was crashing with her because I had no other options.

Emmy and I had gone about halfway through the bottle. I couldn’t remember how it started, what she had asked, what had prompted it, but somehow I was in the middle of it, just in the middle already, and I kept on going. I was telling her about the shower. How, that first week at Paige’s place, I’d been taking a shower when I’d heard the click of the lock popping, the turn of the handle, the chill of cold air. How I’d called, “Hello?” and peered around the shower curtain but had seen nothing but fog and the cracked door.

Paige had already begun working, down in the Financial District. Aaron had gotten a grant for his Ph.D. and spent some mornings working from home. There we were, the picture of early-twenties success. There we were.

I told Emmy how I’d pushed the door closed again, locked it, and checked it by pulling – and it hadn’t budged. How I’d gotten dressed and then stood with my hair dripping wet, just outside Paige and Aaron’s closed bedroom door.

I’d knocked, and Aaron had called, “Come in!”

He had his earbuds in, and he pulled one out as I stood in his doorway.

“Did you open the door?” I’d asked.

“Did I what?” He was sitting at his desk in front of the computer, and he looked me over, confused.

“The bathroom?” I cleared my throat. “Did you need something?”

“No,” he said, his voice rising in question. “Do you need something?”

I’d shaken my head, confused, and closed his door again.

How my things started going missing only to turn up someplace new. How I’d have to ask, Have you seen my toothbrush; my packet of birth control pills; my black strapless bra, only to have them turn up in the bathroom cabinet; the coat closet; Paige’s drawer. Her wrinkled nose as she held up my bra, wondering at the path that had led it there, the hand that had put it there. Were you looking for something, Leah?

I told Emmy how I’d wake in the middle of the night, still on my right side, as I always slept, and find the comforter pulled back, kicked to the floor, the cold itself waking me in the dead of night – and no one there.

How I could not say to Paige, “Your boyfriend is scaring me.” Not when I’d known him for almost a year. Not when I was relying on her generosity. Not when I had no proof. It was a gut feeling, nothing more.

How, the day before I’d met Emmy, Aaron and Paige had been going out to some function for her work, some trendy restaurant for an awards banquet, and he’d mixed us all drinks before they left. And something had happened to me. I’d sat on the pulled-out couch, watching television, and my head had gone woozy and my stomach sick, and I’d put down the cup, noticed a blue debris in the bottom, mixed in. Like pulp but grainy. How I’d run to the bathroom, feeling something desperately wrong but not sure what it was. How I had opened the medicine cabinet, looking for something for my stomach or my head, unsure which – when I’d seen the vial in his name. The pills for his back, some muscle relaxant. The color of the tablets. My drink. I’d held on to the counter as my legs gave out, as my mind was almost, almost clear. .

“Whoa there, you okay?” Losing focus, confused by the scent of him as he’d caught me under the arms, the proximity of his voice. “Whatcha doing in here, Leah?” I’d seen his face in the mirror, and that was when I’d known – something was wrong. I’d twisted around, because wasn’t he supposed to be out? But his grip had tightened, and I couldn’t form any thought in response, my mind scrambling to keep up.

He placed a hand over my mouth, and my body tensed.

“Shh,” he’d said, “you’re not feeling well.” His hand on my mouth felt rough, unfamiliar. A boundary he had breached, from which there would be no going back.

My hands had clawed at his forearm, too slow, too ineffective, and I’d felt myself slip further away, the room fragmenting, the edges spinning.

He’d laughed and tightened his hold. “I’m helping you. You’re drunk. You’re hurting yourself. Stop fighting.”

I remember thinking it seemed so primitive to scream. So destructive and embarrassing and life-changing. The last words I remembered clearly, over the sound of running water in the bathtub, the very last thing: “Be quiet, Leah.”

And then nothing.

The next morning I’d awakened in my bed, like always, bolting upright in a panic, gasping for breath. My lungs burned, my ribs ached, the ends of my hair were slightly damp, and my head pounded in an odd, detached way. The apartment was dark and quiet. I rolled out of bed, my stomach recoiling, and I found myself back in the bathroom, leaning over the toilet, coughing and coughing. I sat on the cold floor before pulling myself upright, searching through the medicine cabinet – and finding nothing. Searching my skin – a bruise here, a faint scratch there – and then through the images in my mind, fighting for the thing that I could not remember – a gap of time, a thing forever lost to me.

Sometimes, in the months that followed, I would wake to the feeling of water flooding my lungs, coating my throat, a pain in my ribs as they seized from the pressure. Sometimes I would dream of things that I couldn’t be sure of – and then Emmy’s hand would be on my shoulder, shaking me awake.

I remember thinking: This does not happen to people like me.

Not girls who stayed in, dressed in pajamas, sleeping on pullout couches at their best friend’s apartment.

“He drugged me,” I told Emmy. “He drugged me, and I left.” The only thing I was sure of, the only thing I had done.

She poured me some more vodka. Held it up in a toast that could’ve meant good riddance, or to fresh starts, or any of the thousands of meaningless things people might have said. But she said nothing at all, and the vodka burned a path straight down, and she crawled across the floor to pour me another shot, sat beside me this time, her back against the wall. The first of many vodka-filled evenings, of me and her talking in foggy dreamlike states because we had no television. I felt her arm against mine as we tipped our heads back, and in that moment – the warmth of the vodka in my stomach, my arms, my legs – I was hers.

But here’s the thing I thought later, after we had gone our separate ways, when I’d find myself sitting across from a source who could not speak the thing they wanted to tell – the thing I could see in their expression, the clenching of their back teeth, the subtle tightening of the shoulders. For Emmy to see it in me, to recognize the things I didn’t say – she must have experienced something like it herself. The way her mouth had flattened into a straight line, and she’d nodded once, and there was nothing more to say.

When Paige showed up at our place three weeks later, saying she was in the area, it wasn’t the fact that Aaron was with her that leveled me. Wasn’t even the fact that he came inside. It was the fact that he smiled right at me, didn’t act contrite or embarrassed or anything at all. As if he knew I would never say anything, that I had nothing to go on, that I didn’t even know –he smiled because he knew he had won.

I’m not sure what I was most taken by with Emmy. The fact that she had the knife in her hand and used it? That I wished to do the same? Or the fact that she didn’t cut deeper? I was drawn to both the impulse and the restraint.