I was getting ready for bed when my roommate knocked vengefully on my door. My pants were legless on the floor. I had a glass of water and an audio porn on my phone.

Vin asked through the door if I would go with her to a carjacking-themed party. She said, “My sister got carjacked and is having a party.” I heard the cat thump up against the door like it had fallen dead.

My roommate’s cat was shy, but she liked to poke into my room and, once she had my attention, run away cutely. This was what my roommate was doing. When I didn’t answer, she said, “Fine, I’m going by myself but I’m wearing your dress so it feels like we’re there together.”

So I was at the carjacking party in the basement of Vin’s childhood home, because I was annoyed by, scared of, and obsessed with my roommate, who lived in a world where everyone else was obsessed with her, and who flirted around icily getting herself in all sorts of trouble which I was resentful about. From the couch, through many heads and bodies, we watched a woman in a denim thong pretend to wash a cardboard car. I thought the whole thing was unerotic, but still I stored it in a pit in my head for masturbatory material.

Vin was talking to Drew, a lopsided smiler. He was always around the back of chem class looking at her. Vin’s black hair leaked onto my shoulder as she talked and I wondered if she had made me come only so she’d seem charming in comparison. Her legs were tucking up under her, pressing her calf into an air bubble I wanted to pop.

My thoughts turned to my audio porn, which I had played many times, about running into a man in the woods. He turns into a werewolf. I wondered how they made all those sound effects: clod of shoes on dense dirt, wind-shaken trees, and of course the transformation, so good it sounded volcanic, the whole organ of skin turning and shuddering. All this probably in a foam-wadded basement with some vaseline. I ran the noise back over and over until Vin spoke. She required my help. Her sister had stolen her top and hid it in her “small, disgusting room.”

“My sister thinks I won’t go in there because it’s disgusting. She keeps it disgusting on purpose I think. But I will go in there. The more disgusting it is, the more I want to go in there.”

Drew smiled still. Probably he liked her dour, girlish way. This annoyed me, which made me feel girlish, which annoyed me more. The light hollowed out his eyes, but his teeth shone. The denim-thonged woman let out a moan over the music. His eyes twitched to her, to us as we walked away through the crowd.

Vin’s jobless older sister lived in her childhood room upstairs. The parents lived across the hall. The parents were not to be seen tonight. The older sister was less pretty, but she had prettier hands, a healthy, translucent nail rounding out each tapered finger like a letter opener. The older sister also had nicer, rounder lips, and it was often said of the sisters that, were the two of them born into one body, she would be the very ideal of beauty.

As I walked meekly behind Vin, I wanted to put up some semblance of a fight. I said, “So did you just come here for the top?”

Vin opened her palm to tell me hold on.

At the top of the stairs, in a bubble of quiet, her lips edged by purple light, she leaned into me: “I just wanted to get away from that guy. He may or may not be my friend’s rapist. But also I need my top.”

This changed things. Together, we rushed down the hallway. I felt like I’d been invited to a popular girl’s sleepover. I was once invited to a sleepover by a beautiful annoyed girl who had stolen a sexy DVD from her mom’s bedroom. We sat, three girls in a row, watching a man penetrate a woman on a kitchen floor.

I seem to befriend girls only once they have become beautiful and annoyed. I’d see Vin around our high school, but she wasn’t a part of my life until a few years ago when we started at the local college. By this time, Vin had drawn her splendid, scrappy features into a nervous harmony. 

As we watched the man advance his cock into the woman, this other beautiful annoyed girl of my childhood had asked us if we’d ever thought about doing this with someone. Someone said softly: Mr. Pace. Everyone screamed. Not Mr. Pace! The beautiful annoyed girl said: May, you have to have someone. But the closest I got to thinking about a boy at that age was when Mr. Pace called me into his office to tell me how good a soccer player I was and a wave of sugar gushed over me and I dreamed that night he was washing my hair because I was incapacitated.

I sat on the bed and watched Vin pick through her sister’s things. The room looked carved out the side of the house, made of incut corridors and remainders of other rooms. Messes in each corner: makeup, clothes, menstrual products, bottles, sticker sheets, dirty plates, wigs. To fill the silence with embarrassing and personal topics that might make us laugh, I asked, “Did you ever crush on a teacher?”

“No,” she said from behind a corridor. “But teachers have always liked me.”

“You never liked anyone back?”

Her shirt rode up her back as she rocked on her heels to toss back tops that weren’t hers.

“What about Mr. Pace,” I tried.

“This bitch,” she tittered. “This bitch.”

The music, so drowning earlier, I couldn’t hear anymore. I looked out the window. There were some people holding on, inside their homes, late in the night. In Vin’s neighborhood, without lighted homes, you couldn’t tell between the sky and the street.

“Where did the music go?” I said.

“It’s like,” she was saying. “Just tell me if you wanted my top.” She smiled widely. “There’s nothing wrong with you wanting my top. That is not the problem. And it would not have been a problem. You know?”

I thought she wanted me to laugh, so I did. We laughed a little. I thought I knew what top it was. It was like a wife beater but with thinner straps, more space for the chest, more wifely.

“Is it the wife beater that’s more wifely,” I said.

“Yeah,” Vin said. “You always know what I’m talking about.”

Her shoulder blades opened and closed against the straps of my dress.

“So,” I said, “you don’t know whether he’s your friend’s rapist.”

“No.”

If Drew hadn’t moved, he was on the couch downstairs. If he had never taken his eyes off us, he’d be looking up, through two ceilings. If I looked down, his face would be gleaming between my shoes.

“Invalid Polly,” Vin said, holding shirts that approached the wife beater but weren’t quite. “She will never learn to do anything for herself.”

“Who’s the friend?”

She stared.

“What?”

“You like him.”

“I liked him.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling a smile like she was pinching me with it. “You liked him. I understand.” She picked a tremendously long hair off a tube of mascara. “He’s cute. But that’s fucking embarrassing. Not my friend’s rapist.”

“But you don’t know whether he’s your friend’s rapist.”

“Well I can’t tell if he actually raped her or not cause she’s into that nonconsensual stuff.”

I pictured Drew and Vin diagramming it on a piece of paper. I’ll enter through this window, leap onto this side of the bed, he might say, and at this juncture you should scream.

I said, “It should be pretty clear, no? The point is you consent?”

She frowned at me as though I were unfamiliar with consent.

As she slotted her arms through the arm holes of shirts, she seemed bored, or sad, or drunk. I pulled up my shirt and leaned into the wall to cool my bare back. I pushed my hands into the indents of my hips. Suddenly her black eyes burst at me.

“I liked him too,” she said.

“Well, of course,” I said. “I only liked him because you liked him.”

You had to really force her into understanding you. I liked this.

I liked that Vin would never dare touch me or even think about touching a girl. She made her friendships with women holy and untouchable in this way. I felt holy and untouchable. I felt unholy for how much I wanted to touch.

She slept in my bed once. We were back from a party like this one. I lay in a way I hoped said, I hope you touch me but only if you want to. Of course, it’s not possible to lay in a way that says this, so I just lay there, watching the back of her neck.

◆

There was a knock on the door. A hand came in, then an arm. We became still. A wind came in the door, then a face, which was white and completely blank. I felt something terrible was going to happen to us and I couldn’t breathe.

“Who,” Vin said. “Oh.”

“I was wondering where you went,” Drew said. He was wearing a white paper mask. He had a voice that flirted, manicured. I didn’t trust him. I fixed a distrustful gaze on him.

“Well, did you find the shirt?” he said through invisible lips.

“No,” Vin said. “What’s with the mask?”

“I’m a carjacker,” he said. “This girl put it on me and was like, you’re at the carjacking party, you’re a carjacker.” He shrugged, as if he hadn’t enjoyed it.

As he spoke, the wind put its hand up my shirt. It was a very loose shirt. It was the shirt I would have worn to listen to the porn and to sleep. I was reminded once more of how I’d let myself go unpleasured.

“That’s hilaaaarious,” Vin said.

“Be honest were you scared,” Drew said.

“No,” Vin said.

He cocked his head. “May was scared.”

I was touched he remembered my name. I said, “No I wasn’t.”

“You totally were,” Drew said. “You were looking at me and then out into this dark, dark hallway, you were so scared.”

I said, “I like being scared.”

“What about being scared do you like,” he asked.

“I like scary movies, I like strangers, I like the dark, I like wolves, werewolves, I like masked strangers.”

“She’s joshing you,” Vin said peevishly. She moved herself to a corner of the room that faced Drew.

He had a long pink neck under his mask. His hands were inoffensive—hands that one might imagine moving appropriately over one’s body.

“Something about the anonymity,” I said. “The chase.”

“May, you need to stop with the audio porn.” Vin rose from a pile of clothes. Clothes fell from her lap, her hands, her shoulder where they were slung; she seemed naked by the end.

She was jealous. Let me have one thing, I said to her with my eyes. One night. You get all the other nights. Also, how do you know about my audio porn?

Drew said, “The chase, huh?”

“Oh my god!” Vin’s voice arched up. “I’m leaving.” She lingered by the door. She asked me with her eyes if I would come. I would not come. She disappeared down the hall.

I can’t believe you would leave me alone with your friend’s rapist, I decided to say later.

“Tell me more about this audio porn,” Drew said. He was coming into the room. He was tipping into laughter.

I said, “I’m in the dark and I run into a masked stranger that turns into a werewolf and I’m about to get CARJACKED.”

He laughed, finally. This did not relax me as I had hoped. I sat up.

“Hold on a minute,” he said.

I got up from the bed. My hipbone clicked. He heard it, maybe.

“I want to talk to you. We’ve barely talked.”

“That’s kind of the point,” I said, and ran out of the room.

◆

My feet pounded the century-old floor.

This was a family home, you could feel it. This was a family’s older family’s older family’s home. Each family swelling, leaving a life in the house, dying.

I’d lived in apartments all my life, so this kind of house freaked me out. Such houses should stand alone, like in a mountain. There they could fall into noble shambles, surrounded by cold mountain air. Huddled together on the city limit, they were sad, selfsame. People and deer alike would stop on the sidewalk and stare at you before going on their way.

I ran and called Vin’s name. “Can’t believe you,” I said, more to myself. I could not decide if I wanted to get caught. I could not decide whether I should proudly displace my unquenched horniness onto Vin’s friend’s rapist. I was never proudly making any sexual decisions.

I went downstairs to the party.

The music was now muscular, deep. The bass phlegmed in my throat. There were so many dark-haired girls. Such as Polly, Vin’s sister, with a microphone. People danced toward her, looked at her. “Don’t drive too far east,” she shouted. “Or a fugly man will come up to you with a gun at a stoplight and ask you to suck on it like a dick.”

“Fuck him!” her friends screamed.

So this was a performance of sorts, with Polly as host. I hadn’t bothered to find out the details of Polly’s carjacking because everyone else was the same kind of unbothered. Carjacking party? Of course, they were thinking, I’d thought. You haven’t been to a carjacking party? I didn’t know if Polly was embellishing her story, but I couldn’t think of anything now but her head out the window like a dog, bouncing on the barrel of a gun. I might have laughed hysterically at this if I hadn’t seen the white mask in the corner of the basement.

His eyes spasmed around the room until he saw me.

I turned and pushed through the bodies.

Vin had said something about a second basement. Where were the stairs? Why was there a second basement?

I cursed Vin’s home once more.

I saw the stairs.

I turned around but couldn’t see Drew anymore because a couple had squeezed out of the crowd and started to make out wetly.

Then I saw it again, the white mask, red eyes, closer.

If this was foreplay, how much was he buying into it, how much was for real, what would he do if I was caught, and what would he do if I ran away? I considered that it would be nice to be held, to be touched urgently. I also enjoyed that I could tell Vin, watch her pretend not to be jealous.

I ran toward the stairs.

The mask turned smoothly on its neck.

It followed me as I leapt over a spilled drink, swung over the railing, and ran down the stairs to the second basement.

◆

So this was where Vin’s family kept everything one might keep in a basement. Two couches, one missing its seat, like someone had given up dragging them where they should have gone. Two fridges guarded a dark corridor. A bike rusted a fungal blue. The seat looked like it would hurt my crotch. And there it was, on the handlebars, draped: Vin’s wife beater.

I considered balling up the wife beater, pocketing it in my low-rise jeans, and running into Vin. She would ask how it went with Drew. I would pull my shirt up. I would access my front pocket. 

I would coolly hand her the wife beater.

It was the perfect wife beater.

Drew was nowhere. Maybe he hadn’t seen me go downstairs. I pulled my shirt up over my head. I let the air cool my stomach. I put on the wife beater.

I felt great. The shirt hung off me correctly. My arms felt lean, strong by my sides. I felt like I could do yardwork. I could pick up people at bars. I balled my own shirt into my pocket. I had always wanted to be lean and strong, to move my hands appropriately, with authority, over a body that would curl up like a roly poly where it was touched. I thought, quickly, of Mr. Pace’s forearms. The swell of Vin’s shoulders.

I heard feet coming down the stairs. I snapped awake. High on my new body, I raced past the two fridges down the corridor. I was fit. I was a buck, my muscles working well-oiled. At the sight of a stranger I would stop-stare-turn my head.

I turned and slammed into an enormous body that sent the smell of sweat and laundry into my head as it was flung backward with the rest of me.

The body was not enormous. In fact it was quite thin and wearing mohair, miraculously. The mask had slid up the head. Brown bits of hair stuck out where the eyes should have been. The eyes, naked, examined me.

Drew said, “Why’d you change?”

He looked small. He looked so confused. He looked like he wanted desperately to be whoever I wanted him to be, and to get a little reward for it, but didn’t know how. I wanted to punch his small confused face. I could see where his cheeks rent around his skull. I wanted to take his face in my hands and punch those spots.

I was always arriving late to my feelings. Just as I remembered how horny I was only after I got to the party, I only now felt how angry I was that Vin had forced me here. I was angry it was her shirt that made me feel so good. I was angry I couldn’t punch this man with my delusional arms but that he could probably kill me with his very nice hands. All the while he looked at me with that tiny face. I was so angry I could cry. At the end of the hall, a laundry machine was going to town on many shoes, or that’s what it sounded like. This was not a sound you could cry to. The laundry machine seemed to recognize this.

“Do I fuck you now,” Drew asked despondently.

I felt a solidarity with the laundry machine, persisting as it did in the second basement of a century-old house soon to be in the hands of two women who, put together, were the most beautiful, annoyed, and unemployed woman there ever was.

◆

“Yes, we had sex,” I said.

“No you didn’t,” Vin said.

I smiled dazzlingly at her. We were in Vin’s lifted truck. I never understood why anyone would need a truck this lifted.

She swerved us down the empty street as I enjoyed my astigmatism. Light shot straight out like a star, had a fit, died in the dark. The carjacking party had jacked itself dead. Everyone left feeling unsure if the party had been good or bad but that they had cleansed themselves of something.

“You’re jealous,” I said.

“Give me back my shirt,” she said.

“We didn’t actually have sex,” I said. “Why would you believe that? Me?” I fingered the corner of my shirt. “Well, actually,” I said. “You know, I’m not sure whether he raped me or not.”

“You wish he raped you,” she said. “My shirt.”

“So who,” I made a show of reaching over my head and pulling off the shirt, “is that friend,” grunting like a man taking off a shirt, “anyway?”

She didn’t reply. The wind landed with a cold thrill on my skin which was covered only by an itty bitty bra. The truck pussyfooted onto the highway, thereafter gaining a sheepish confidence.

“Thank you,” Vin said, screwing up the shirt in her hand. “I can’t believe Polly was the one that got carjacked. She always gets catcalled too. I never get catcalled. Can you believe that?”

I honestly couldn’t. “I’ll carjack you,” I said.

“You would, too.”

“I could, too. Give me back my dress.”

“I’m driving,” Vin explained.

“I’m carjacking you,” I explained back.

The strap of my dress hung from her shoulder. Two fingers would coax it down easy.

“You’re not doing a very good job,” she said.

I clicked off my seatbelt. I drew nearer. Then it occurred to me and I had a bone-dread feeling and the sky seemed to dilate over us. The seatbelt alarm started a pathetic drone.

“So it wasn’t your friend, was it,” I said, “who didn’t know whether or not Drew raped them. It was you.”

Vin’s black eyes seemed to force the car relentlessly forward.

“Because yeah, that does mean he raped you.”

With the lightest touch, my finger slid down her shoulder.

“I’m carjacking you,” I said.

I knew she was concocting a sentence that would reassert herself, pretend she was unfazed, she could care less about me and Drew, go do whatever nonconsensual shit you want with him.

“You should scream now,” I said.

Then I saw it: she was afraid. Her face was like a lost child’s.

I hadn’t meant to make her afraid.

She turned to me. She said, “I’m glad you’re not a man because you’d be such a fuckboy twink.”

◆

We always had to go the wrong way down the one-way street to park, because we had to turn the absurdly lifted truck between two walls into a little lot, and one wall jutted further out than the other, and it was better to turn from the other wall. Vin said I hate parking here I hate it so much as she reversed. The rats were out and starving. We heard their bitter feet.

I said, “Can’t believe you left me alone with your friend’s RAPIST.”

Vin was silent as she struggled to back into the parking space.

We heard it at the same time. A man said, “Good girl.”

Vin moved to turn off the truck.

“Don’t turn off the truck,” I hissed. She looked at me. Her hand was approaching the locked door. I touched her hand with more force than I meant. She withdrew her hand and cradled it and shot me a look that made me feel like my heart was falling off the side of a building. Vin, I’m not carjacking you anymore.

“Good girl,” the man said. “You can do it. Good girl.” He stood near Vin’s side of the truck, facing us through the glass. Vin pulled forward, her eyes wide, then maneuvered back into the space.

I thought of incompletely beautiful Polly, taking the barrel into her mouth. I remembered I was in an itty bitty bra.

Something barked, under the truck.

I thought: Rat!

It was a dog. It was small, brown, and half-starved. It was trying sincerely to do something, something special and private that would remain obscure to me forever. I tried to decide if I should put my shirt back on or if it would call attention to my itty bitty bra. I tried to measure out the strides it would take to bring us past the man to our apartment door.

“Good girl,” the man said. “Get out from under there.”

Vin and I joined eyes. Oh, we thought. The dog. The man was maybe a sex slayer stalking the night but we had failed to consider that perhaps his geriatric dog had to be let out to pee at dawn.

Dog was too small to run over.

We crawled out. The light from the alley slung a white cast on my bare stomach. Vin locked the truck. Locked it again. The dog had freed itself from under the truck. But the man kept standing and looking at us.

Vin lurched forward and walked past the man. I followed.

The man had turned to look. He would not stop looking.

Can you believe, in this wretched moment, I was looking at her shoulders, the straps of her dress?

The door to our apartment was almost here.

The door was her body away.