A Brand New Goth Girl

[16]

Rosie soon joined me and again settled on my bed. She still looked like she wanted to curl up and sleep, but she sat up attentively and gazed at all my decorations. All the art of someone else’s life and design. Why did my benefactor twist such confusion and uncertainty in her mind? Why did my crush even begin to think that she might have used to be a gay man when that was absolutely impossible?

Well, it wasn’t literally impossible. I mean… The problem could be me. Maybe someone used the light on me, or my benefactor did something a second time. But in that case, I had no reason to trust anything inside my head. The stray notion that someone created Taylor out of Beatrice just to refashion Beatrice again, whizzed by like an apocalyptic asteroid orbit. Who am I if not the firmament that holds my memories together?

Too much to attempt to deal with at this point. Rosie broadly surveyed my room from over by the door to where the art spilled out towards my closet. I suspected she would recognize the OnlyFans stickers and placards that Beatrice proudly featured. The Marvel stuff, less so. Although, I felt momentarily confused with myself since Rosa wasn’t the type of person to be in online adult website circles. Granted, it was often difficult to ascertain one way or the other on this campus. Classmates who projected the most puritanical, Sunday warrior impressions often had the seediest browser histories. Rosie did sometimes titter, cover her face, and blush when even the most vaguely mature subjects were approached.

This version of Rosa seemed uncomfortable in her own skin. I could understand the way she sat and how she checked her clothes and her body. I recognized her quiet shock in all the slender details, but it felt like cruel mockery. The Rosie I knew had never been uncomfortable about any aspect of being a girl. I had to set that aside.

She asked about the artwork. I couldn’t claim it for myself, but I reminded her that I was an artist before. Rosie smiled politely, but with no spark of recognition. How much more could I take?

All of it. I had to take all of it. It didn’t matter what I felt. Rosie didn’t deserve to be yelled at for something she couldn’t control. She didn’t deserve a cold shoulder or one that felt misplaced. No matter how I felt about her, I needed to approach her on her level. For now. That meant accepting what she believed to be true as actually true. Rosalie transformed from the school quarterback. Even if it felt as ridiculous as a dainty, cute actress in some historical television romance show I never watched being created from Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Imagining her as an action movie hunk brought a stray giggle to my lips which I unfortunately had to explain. The best I could think of was to deflect the focus from her and instead shift my imagining to if one of the PE instructors went from a weightlifter to a slim gymnast. She had a particular instructor in mind and immediately fretted about their actual fate. Change the subject.

I picked up my sketch for the project and offered her this: “You inspired me.” She often did. They were long gone now but somewhere in my archives, I sketched Rosie from memory on a windy day and when we actually had a threat of frost overnight. Both works beamed joyous delight that I didn’t need to imagine. I couldn’t offer her either creation, but I let her see my sketch.

She handled it carefully and peered at it with uncertainty, as though she were finding some cryptic, abstract rendering that she wasn’t quite certain how to interpret. Her eyes traced all over before narrowing with her mouth tightening. Just in time, I clarified that it was for an assignment. Her hands were poised to rip, but she lowered them and shoved the notebook as far away from her as possible.

“So, I helped you out with your project?”

I emphasized this, revealing that I was stuck in quite a funk and unable to draw anything until I saw Rosie sleeping. Always my inspiration. I took back the notebook, and she looked down at herself.

“If they give you back the assignment after it’s done, I would appreciate it if you burned it for me. You can scan it. And you can keep a copy for yourself or your professor can. But I want to see that destroyed.”

Like in the video we watched but without vanity. I tried to tell myself that was just her imaginary pain talking. That didn’t stop it from leaving me with real heartbreak. But I agreed that the final drawing could be used as an effigy for everything she thought she hated about herself.

OnlyFans came up, and that actually provided an emotional reprieve. We both felt uncomfortable discussing it, but it was an amusing variety of discomfort. I read her some of Beatrice‘s thoughtful poetry.

It tended to ramble about a sea in the sky and ways we might fly if unbound from gravity. A glorious fair to take place in the air with sky lions and fanciful feats. These lightened the mood quite nicely. Of course, Beatrice’s art would speak more truly than mine. I appreciated her waxing poetic at length about how much better humanity would care for the sea if we had to live there, but I sadly doubted her thesis considering the land had some regard but not enough.

I sifted through the drafts of works that she hadn’t posted yet. Several edits had been made and still needed to be made. Not to focus on her flaws, but it brought ease to know that not everything emerged from her fully formed and perfect, like a bursting Athena. One particular poem occupied a page that she hadn’t touched since it was composed. Just one edit. I thought at first that it was really old, but the creation date was actually today, about an hour before everything happened. She named it “The City”.

Here is only the City

The City is everywhere

The City is all you’ll see

The City is all has been

The City is all will be

You live in the City

You die in the City

The City will never let you go

Just as He made it

The City is everything

Here is no escape

Here is nothing else

Here never was

And here will ever be

Nothing but the City.

I raised a concerned eyebrow and opted not to read that particular one to Rosie. I also found the amount I was receiving from the website after processing fees. It wasn’t a mind-blowing amount, but it was far more than I could ever imagine someone I'd never met paying for the… opportunity to see me scantily clad or…more. If Trisha set one up then that wouldn’t be quite so far-fetched. But I wasn’t anything particularly special. I wasn’t a star. Beatrice was just a girl. A girl who I appreciated almost as much as Rosie. And I was her.

That didn’t degrade her or venerate me. There just didn’t seem to be anything life-altering about my naked body. Some of the outfits, as I glimpsed in Beatrice’s archives, had a fashionable, distinctive, and alluring quality. It was a presentation that I could get behind. Compared to my meager ass and bare pussy, which everyone was apparently thirsty for. Several minutes of hunting passed in silence before I heard gentle snores coming from my bed. Rosie fell asleep again.

This time, she had at least managed to carefully tuck herself beneath the covers and find a head position that didn’t look like she was going to be suffering come morning. She positioned herself to the side with plenty of space left for me. Clearly, she didn’t want to go back to her room. I didn’t know who her roommates were, but this unstable reality could have shuffled her in with unfamiliar people.

I set my satchel off to the side. No one had bothered me about hauling around a mini bag that was basically only good enough for a single bottle and my disguised cargo. Norah remained with the others near Kasey. When she finally returned, she looked practically as exhausted as Rosie seemed to be. I offered her what encouragement I could as we quietly chatted about how much of a mess everything had become. She reminisced about things I was never a part of, chats that only existed inside her head, about a version of Beatrice who never lived.

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I thought about asking her if she remembered Beatrice writing a poem or something like it before she went on our intersecting walks, but it wasn’t long before Norah dimmed the lights and started stretching out on her bed with the fresh accompaniment of all her lovely plants. She urged me to continue working and not concern myself with the brightness of my light. A facemask went over her eyes for emphasis, along with headphones that didn’t bleed sound.

My sketching felt annoyingly loud, especially when I changed mediums and needed to scan what I had. The cacophony practically felt like an interior avalanche. My work with the lines always felt like it lost something in translation, but it allowed me to manipulate fragments of art like swatches of fabric spread across the chaotic ends of my creation. When I was finally at the stage of having something worthy to give my professor in the morning, I’d detailed and shaded Rosie like a comic book goddess with the feral tempest of the bed pulling her in several directions. The original sketch went aside while I saved several versions for backup and emailed one in the preferred format to my professor. I’d still bring the original just in case.

Stretching from my chair felt weird and yet perfectly familiar. Another shower seemed unnecessary until morning, but I did wash up again by the sink with a damp towel. And I brought the light with me. What could I possibly program it with? Make Rosie right? It accepted that, but it felt too vague to even attempt to use.

Instill Rosalie Eden Beck essence. The device again permitted this notion from me. But what if too much of who she was somehow led to breaking her? I was being ridiculous but also achingly cautious. All I had to do was find the right words to express what would fix this and then shine them on this important person. My words felt so insubstantial, tangled, and lost compared to the boundless truth that Beatrice just released on a whim.

I tried. I got so close, and I felt so sure that I would have it. The light was aimed at her in my mind and briefly in reality. But I put it away, back in the bag of secrets. As I drifted off though, with so many thoughts about what I might’ve done, I saw floating, shimmering energy, like golden dust in the air linking the two of us. Without breathing it off, the warm presence wafted from me, through the air, and over to her. But it only happened in my mind’s eye before I drifted off to sleep. A documentary of airplanes with non-rigid wings filled my dreams as some BBC narrator expressed the peculiarity of migrating jets, as people were paid money to be swallowed up by these beasts and regurgitated across the land. Morning came all too soon.

It was a stilted and uncomfortable morning, so basically like every single one I ever had. Kasey remained in her room. My bedmate gave me hope when she arose with her legs carefully crossed and her easy body language. That couldn’t last, but I appreciated the moments when this relentless mind control briefly lost its hold. She sat there like the remarkable young woman I fell in love with. I stole a moment to imagine gently brushing her hair.

Since Kasey was out of commission, breakfast at the cafeteria seemed like the best idea. I took a quick shower to gloss over all the mundane and fancy qualities of Beatrice‘s body, even though it all still struck me as remarkable. The timing of breakfast wasn’t really good for anyone else, so that left me on my own.

The early morning filled itself with lingering fog as I slipped on a random, silver windbreaker and headed out. Aside from some unmistakable signs, there wasn’t much to declare that this morning was different than any other that came before. The restroom differences could’ve been shrugged off as strange remodeling choices.

The general mood felt vaguely hung over. Everyone sleeping in because they could. Did things feel more docile than normal? This wasn’t usually a crazy place. Blame the religion or just the character of things. Cressman didn’t have protests about one thing or another. Everyone just went about their day. Would having basically all-girls change any of that?

Last evening, I saw plenty of conflict between the uncertainty of what the administration intended to do and the declarations in the benefactor’s parchment. Anyone who expected a girl-only space to be full of sunshine, rainbows, and Kumbaya clearly only had abstract ideas about humanity. People will always be in conflict, no matter how they define one another. Remove one variable, and others come to the forefront. Things would be perfect, if not for them. Once they are gone… Things would be perfect now if not for those over there. And all the way down until even an individual cannot be content in themselves.

That wouldn’t make for a very crowd-pleasing exploration on Beatrice‘s page, but it suited my mood to share with myself. I hadn’t really checked on the ass-tastic stuff I shot around yesterday‘s shower for feedback and blue balls.

The foggy haze helped calm my breathing. The chilling moisture practically made me shiver. Walking alone unsettled me, but at least I shifted the flashlight from the satchel over to my backpack. It wasn’t within easy reach though.

“Good morning…”

A sharp and singular voice cut through the stillness. Not harsh, but oddly like someone had a speaker and microphone built into them. One would’ve expected me to jump and yell out, but I just slowed my pace and glanced around curiously. On the sidewalk across the street stood a man with his hand up and a casual smile on his face.

He wore a suit all in black, including his tie and shirt. The fit looked a bit awkward, as though it were something rescued from a secondhand store. Despite the ruffled pants and uneven sleeves, he didn’t appear too out of sorts. I held up a hand in response and thought about whether I could reach the zipper on my back. One of only three men I’d seen in recent memory, and my first thought was to blast him with light. I took a long, careful breath as he cautiously approached.

Before I could ask what he wanted, he added, “Just looking around, I noticed you've got something on you. Do you mind?”

I absolutely did mind, and I had no idea what he was doing or why he was getting closer. But he carefully closed the distance before the words I wanted to wield came out. Though not tall, he still managed to loom over me. He looked deeply into my eyes and mimed a hand near my chin without touching me. Despite being free from his touch, I still felt clutched in his thrall. He shut his eyes and took a long breath right in front of my face.

With a whisper, he commented, “There it is. A most delicious presence. Doesn’t that feel better?“

I just wanted to run, but I couldn’t move a muscle. He circled around me, glancing at my bag without touching anything. “Do you know what that was?” I had no clue, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. The strange man laughed lightly, as though he could hear what I was thinking.

“…Souls. The presence of trapped, living souls wafting off like fumes of dry ice from a special little crystal. Do be careful in the future. Wouldn’t want you to lose yourself in something like that. Make sure you’re on the side of the angels.” He gave a slight nod of his head and then turned to walk away. I still found myself frozen in uncertainty. Had that encounter actually happened? When the enchanted stiffness finally left me, I couldn’t see him anywhere or track a trace of where he might’ve gone.

I did my best to parse his words even though they were flitting out of my thoughts as though they were the fading, once-defined details of a dream. Some thing on me. I delicious presence. Soul crystal. Angels. I wished that Rosie was here beside me even though… Even though. She was Derrick.

I had to scrutinize the realization and turn it around in my head. I didn’t know Rosalie aside from meeting her in the common room last evening. All the fair and heartfelt details of a crush and a fond friendship were gone. But they had never been there in the first place. Right? Had that strange man taken away my dearest recollections or simply cleared an illusion from my eyes?