I have so many questions and I don’t know which way to turn. But I do know who to ask.
I corner Anna after class and we go to the cafeteria. Lunch is over and it’s almost empty. We sit at a table that’s far away from everyone else. I want to tell her everything, but I know if I do, it’ll sound insane, like the ravings of a lunatic.
Instead, I tell her I’ve been having these really intense dreams.
‘About Marcus,’ she says.
Not a question, a statement. How could she know?
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘About Marcus.’
Anna claps her hands together and giggles, giddy as a child at Christmas.
‘I want to hear all the juicy details,’ she says. ‘Don’t leave anything out.’
‘Have you ever felt so turned on that you thought you were going insane? That you were losing your grip on reality and might never get it back?’
‘In my dreams?’ Anna asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Or any time.’
‘In reality,’ she says.
I nod.
Without saying a word, she draws up a large hinged silver bangle decorated with ornate swirls that hangs down on her left wrist. Underneath it, there is a ring of deep patterned livid bruises, like a fossilized imprint woven into her skin, almost as if the pattern on the bangle has been branded onto her wrist.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she says, tracing her fingers lightly across the grooves, as if in a trance.
It looks grotesque. And painful.
She has such pretty, delicate wrists. They look swollen and deformed.
‘What happened?’ And I try not to sound shocked, but it’s hard not to.
‘They tied me up,’ she says, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world. As if she expects me to know.
‘Who’s they?’
And Anna tells me everything. She tells me all of her unbidden secrets. She tells me things about her that I’d never have guessed.
She tells me about the website she models for.
‘It pays really well,’ she says. ‘All my tuition, all my bills.’
The reason why the money’s so good, she says, is because the site ‘caters to a very select group of people’.
‘What kind of people?’
‘People who know what they like,’ she says. ‘People who want to see a particular type of girl in specific kinds of situations. Pretty, willing young girls restrained, tied, chained, disciplined and kept.’
I try to imagine who those people are, what they do and why they would want to see something like that. I look at Anna’s wrists and imagine what she could possibly get out of it, other than severe bruising.
I wonder if she self-harms, or if she used to, like the cutters I knew at high school. Those weird intense loner girls from good families who were so screwed up about their bodies and everything else that they harm themselves even further, beyond repair, inside and out.
And I wonder if this is what cutters do when they outgrow their teenage obsessions and move on to adult ones. I can’t imagine any other reasons why someone would submit themselves to that. For all the college tuition in the world.
‘It’s not about the money,’ Anna says, almost as an afterthought, as if she heard what I was thinking. And I almost believe her.
I look at her wrist again and then notice two large yellowing bruises on her upper arm. She’s wearing a sleeveless blouse, so she couldn’t hide them even if she wanted to. And I don’t think she does.
Did those come from the same place, I say.
‘These?’ she says, stroking them lovingly with her index finger.
‘No,’ she smiles, as if recalling some pleasant memory. ‘Fuck bruises. You know?’
I don’t, but I can probably make an educated guess.
Anna tells me she has a boyfriend. Actually, she tells me she has many boyfriends, other than Marcus, and they all provide something different, they all satisfy a different part of her. But this one guy, he likes to treat her rough and leave his mark for others to know where he’s been. And that’s fine with her too.
‘I love to feel them on my body,’ she says. ‘As long as I can see them and feel them, I remember how they got there. I remember how he put his hands on me. How he fucked me. And I like to watch them fade. From red to black to green to gold. And when they fade away to nothing, I know it’s time to hook up with him again.’
Out of all her boyfriends, she thinks she likes him the best of all, because he’s the only one who thinks the way that she thinks. Who believes, like her, that ‘sex and violence are two sides of the same coin’ – who not only believes it, but acts upon it.
‘You know how at school they tell you they’re going to teach you about the birds and the bees?’ Anna says. ‘Well, they don’t tell you everything, not the whole truth. They only tell you part of it. Only the stuff they want you to know. About the birds. All the fairytale stuff about courtship and mating rituals and raising children. They don’t tell you about the bees.’