“Labyrinth” by Jan Edwards Hemming
When I think of Girl #3, I think of the tiny scars I carry: the word whore; my disdain for pugs; accusations of poisoning oatmeal. I don’t do shots anymore. When people ask why, I usually say I’m too old for that, but what I mean is Because the last time I did shots, cops came. If someone rolled a montage of photos of us, I’d have stills of my head slammed into granite, the skin behind her ear broken with the butt end of an iPhone, keys screaming across a room—and, after all that, the two of us fucking for hours. There’s something romantic about the admiration of tragedy.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This story begins a long time ago.
Let me try again.
As a child I watched Labyrinth over and over. I, like a coming-out character trope, worshiped Jennifer Connelly. Of course I stared open-mouthed; of course I wanted to run my hands through her hair. But there was something more to the crush. When she spoke to Jareth, her green eyes steeled, I mouthed along with her the words that left her perfect lips: For my will is as strong as yours, my kingdom as great… You have no power over me. I wondered what it felt like to be that sure. Perhaps somewhere, as far away and secret as the goblin king’s castle, there was a version of me like that.
When I was nine, we moved houses. In our new neighborhood lived two ladies in a house around the corner. One day my mom was parking her minivan when they strolled by, waved as they trotted past with the dogs, shaggy Shih Tzus on matching leashes. My mother turned the wheel, smiled at them, and sang, Disgusting, through her teeth.
I didn’t understand, but I did.
When I was sixteen, I kissed Girl #1 in her driveway after returning from the movies. The month before we had been at the same condo complex at the beach with our families. One day we’d been in her kitchen eating peaches. They were the best peaches I’d ever tasted: inexplicably sweet, the juice dripping down our chins when we bit into them. She laughed. I wanted to lick it up and lay her back on the cold white granite counter and watch her nipples harden when I didn’t stop at her mouth.
That night in the car, when our lips parted, she put her hand on my face and stared without speaking.
The next day we had lunch with her boyfriend, who often took us for drives in his Land Rover. Sometimes we went to the park and got high in the backseat. Sometimes we all kissed, even though I also had a boyfriend. Sometimes I wanted her boyfriend and my boyfriend to cease to exist. I wanted to straddle her lap in the back of that Discovery and explore her every inch. I didn’t want the feeling of the pills we stole from our parents. I wanted to be stoned by her.
Sometimes, when we were alone in her room, she’d draw on me in highlighter and lie next to me in bed, neon glowing along my veins. I’d face her and stare into her eyes like in a movie. She’d stare back into mine in the black light, her fingers a feather on my lips.
They were the best peaches I’d ever tasted: inexplicably sweet, the juice dripping down our chins when we bit into them.
I can still smell her hands: the teenage summer telltale of astringent and sunscreen. We never
talked about what it meant.
When she switched schools, I took three baths each day so I could masturbate unbothered
while I thought of her mouth, which had only ever been on my mouth, but I pictured it on all the parts of me that were softest and wettest. My want was a literal pulse between my legs as I lay in the water, the downward flick of my middle finger splashing persistently and quietly, until I imagined her tongue circling where my hand was. I bit my lip to keep quiet.
I carried this story on my body, the crease between my legs so swollen and tender it hurt to wear jeans.
I found a boyfriend; after him, I found another.
I walked with Girl #1 on my mind and kept her a secret in my gut.
In college there was a girl down the hall in my dorm. (She doesn’t get a number; this is just a moment.) She was the first out lesbian I ever knew, with short-cropped hair and chipped black nail polish and a tongue ring. She worked with me in the library. When I came to relieve her Sunday afternoon shift, I wanted her to take my hand and lead me back into the stacks.
I wanted her to want me. I went to Wal-Mart and bought a five-pack of Hanes “wife beater” tank tops. I wore my boyfriend’s khaki cargos and basketball shorts. I hoped the girl would see the changes. I didn’t know how else to behave.
One evening she stopped by my room to ask if I wanted to go to the dining hall with her for dinner. In the narrow doorway, she stood a foot from me, and two futures hung in the air between us. I had a strong urge to feel her tongue in my mouth. I wondered how to have sex with a girl.
On Valentine’s Day she covered my library shift so I could go to dinner with my boyfriend. I wore a pink lace thong and thought of her while I fucked him. I wondered if I could will her to think of me, too.
Fast forward to twenty-four: I packed up, went north for grad school.
In New York, I met Girl #2, who shared my Southern roots and depression. She lived in the tiniest apartment that smelled both sweet and solvent. I’d know that scent anywhere: it is the redolence of a ghost.
One September night we sat on the hardwood floor and drank two bottles of cheap wine. We read every poem we’d ever written aloud to each other, my head in her lap on the futon, her hand on my hair. I had never felt so full.
One night while we cooked, she asked, Is it warm in here? and cracked a window. I pretended I hadn’t heard, hadn’t been hoping she’d take off her sweater.
I wrote poems that were like prayers, each word a code for something more: kitchen for Let
her love me; gold for Let me kneel between her legs.
At a party we shared a joint on a windowsill. We kissed on the train. Back in her room, we removed each other’s clothes without our lips ever coming apart. We slept entwined like the limbs of ancient oaks. It was the end of what I thought love was.
She picked another girl, said I wouldn’t come out. I cried, naked in her bed, said, I will, I will, I swear I’ll call my mom right now. But she chose and wrote a poem about the moment; she called my body a question mark on her bed. I was: so crooked and curved with grief.
I couldn’t stop making lists. Every step I took I cataloged: thoughts, events, dreams, movies, the things I had imagined. My college roommate, the girl who’d lived down the hall, my
best friend. I walked the streets and pictured Girl #2’s blue coat and the way her hand had felt in mine when I held it under the workshop table, and it was everything; but she was right: I didn’t know how I’d ever tell my mother.
Back in her room, we removed each other’s clothes without our lips ever coming apart.
I tried to imagine myself with a man, in the forever or short-term sense. I fucked a few more and tried to love them, but once one was above me, my eyes closed, I found my hand cupping a phantom, my tongue out, dying to taste the soft skin of an imagined breast.
I tried, I really did, but when it rained I could only think of Girl #2’s red hair and love like a thunderstorm. I kept her letters in a box collecting dust. How long would that love last? How long would it take to mend the holes?
Then: I cut my hair and donned a black lace tank and lipstick, took a cab to my gay friends’ apartment, said, I want to meet a girl tonight. I was still so sad, but I had something to prove. They took me to Stonewall to dance.
In the dark a woman put her hand on my shoulder, said, I saw you and I followed you. Isn’t that romantic? Her green eyes held mine like magnets. I thought I saw a wedding ring. I was worried but enticed. I gave her my number.
Girl #3—the green-eyed girl—and I couldn’t stop. Kissing. Fucking. Lying. Hurting. But I loved her hands. I had never come harder. I worshiped her body and craved her taste: pennies and oyster salt. I loved dancing with her in an empty room. She bought me dinner and left me notes on my bed. She said she loved me. I believe she loved me.
After a year, I moved with Girl #3 to Los Angeles, despite all of what happened.
My mother texted on Easter: I’m getting rid of the baby clothes, the Noah’s Ark things, since you won’t have any use for them. I held my phone, stood among boxes, and packed for California.
I liked the name Noah for a boy.
In California things were worse. I thought if I kept trying, it might work. I could love Girl #3 into love, into believing I wasn’t what she thought I was—and she could hurt me into being who she wanted me to be, and I could hurt her into realizing she was wrong, and we could stay in that fucked up place we called symbiosis, and then I would be gay enough. I could finally prove it to both her and to my mother.
But our love was combustible, and I shook and heaved in bedrooms and wallowed in the ashen blooms of what was left of me.
Let me try it this way:
You are sixteen and it’s late summer and you’re with Girl #1, who is your friend but maybe more. Her mother hasn’t died yet and so she’s still happy, still yours for a little while. Your mom still lets you have sleepovers and go to the movies without suspecting anything is wrong. You, however, secretly know something is wrong because people in your town use words like “bull dyke” and “fucking faggot” to describe people who do the kinds of things you do with her: touch each other’s faces in the dark, trace lips and brows with fingers, sneak sniffs of perfume from her soft neck, feel the uncontrollable urge to lay your cheek against her smooth brown shoulder, or slip her bikini bottom below her tan line and touch your tongue to where the skin is white.
You are with her in Gadzooks (remember that store?) and you have purchased a t-shirt from a band with a dead singer and are considering holding her hand because there is explicit merchandise in this store and it makes you feel brave. As you walk out of the store and look over your shoulder at her, she’s smiling and the thin skin at the corners of her eyes crinkles and your stomach flips and somewhere, in another world, you stop and kiss her. But in this one, you turn back around, hands to yourself, and then he is there, across the maroon tiling, near the fountain. The Boy. Your boyfriend. No, your ex. Recent. You see his close-cut hair and full lips. His long fingers slip into his pockets; there is his hemp necklace; there are his white teeth. Your ears buzz and your face gets hot. You need to move worse than you’ve ever needed to move, but your limbs have suddenly grown rooted to the floor.
Now you do grab her hand, but not because you are brave. Your mouth hinges open, just slightly. Words form but are stuck inside your brain; they are pulled back like ankles sucked into wet sand. You are both moored and dizzy. You mouth his name and point with your eyes and turn back into the store, folding yourself on the gray carpet beneath the crowded clothing racks and dim fluorescent lights, trying hard to breathe past the lump that seems to be filling your throat. Your heart pounds. It laps and breaks and you stay where you are, legs sinking deeper into the surf. But you are also elsewhere: in the cause of the feeling, in the moment where something went to shit. (You don’t know it yet but you are having a panic attack. You won’t have a word for this until you are much older and in therapy and finally prescribed medication for this thing that happens to you.)
The Boy has a pretty face but you’re scared of it, not in the way you’re scared to hold the girl’s hand but in a way that fills your whole chest with hysterical dread. Because you are no longer on the floor of this kitschy store but at a party in the corner of a classmate’s bedroom, your shoulder knocking against an open armoire. You are backing up from the bed and you are
I shook and heaved in bedrooms and wallowed in the ashen blooms of what was left of me.
naked and saying, Please no. His right hand pulls back in a fist. He’s never hit you but he really looks like he will. He is speaking in a low voice, softly but with venom. He is calling you a fucking cock tease. He is calling you a slut. He is smiling a little and that might be the scariest thing. He is telling you that you owe him this because he just made you cum with his mouth. But you had your wisdom teeth out two days ago and he knows that you can hardly fit a fork in your mouth. Yesterday the mashed potatoes you were trying to eat smeared on your lips and he wiped them gently away with a finger. You’re wondering now if he was thinking then about shoving himself into you, hinging you open. You tongue the holes behind your back teeth and you feel dirty and exposed. You wish you were at least wearing your bathing suit and move your arms to cover your chest. You say, Please, once more, just in case.
You watch his hand fall as if in slow motion. You flinch but he’s only reaching down to untie his swim trunks. With the other hand he pulls you forward and pushes your head down. You are crying. You are nodding. You are on your knees. He is in your mouth and your jaw screams.
On either floor, you are trying to tell yourself it wasn’t all bad. You wanted to kiss him. You had been swimming and in the house the air conditioner was cold on your wet skin and your nipples were hard and you will never forget the first time you felt a tongue between your legs. You were on painkillers and felt like you were floating.
You wonder how long he has wanted to hurt you.
Before that moment anything having to do with sex felt fun. You read the Kama Sutra with your friends in Books-A-Million. You took Cosmo quizzes and dreamed of desire. You have even given a blowjob before and felt courageous and adult. You liked the control you had, the way you could wield your mouth as a kind of power totem. From this point on, though, something will be different.
Girl #1 asks if you are okay. Is he gone? you ask. She nods and squeezes your hand, pulling you to your feet.
Your parents would call your reaction in the mall dramatic, but deep down, you know you are right to be afraid. Since you broke up with him, The Boy has been stalking you. He and his friends send you horrible messages on AIM. You stare at the computer (there’s the feeling again) and your hands shake while you type stop it and fuck you and leave me alone. He does not stop; of course he does not stop. Behind the screen you imagine him laughing, a low, frightening chuckle in his black eyes.
You are afraid enough to print the pages and take them to your father, a lawyer. You say you think maybe you need a restraining order against The Boy. You hang your head and your father reads them. He says, In a court of law, they’ll say you provoked him. He hands the papers back to you. Later, a friend will see the boy drive past your house, up and down your street, in the night. Much later, he will leave a note, written on the back of a gas station receipt from the town where he lives, on your car, which you don’t drive anymore. It says simply, I’m watching you. Your mother sends a photo of the note to you at college and you would know his writing anywhere. Now, your younger sister sleeps in your old room. Now, she drives this car. This time, your father can do something. He buys blackout shades for the windows.
You find the printed pages when your mom mails a box of your high school things. It’s been almost twenty years but the feeling still comes. Your mouth waters and there’s the sound of waves pounding in your ears. You know that, physically, you are on the floor of your apartment in L.A., but in your head you hear “Anna Begins” and you see his red Taurus and also it’s suddenly summer and your wet swimsuit is on the floor and you can taste the tang of margaritas. Your breath is stuck in your throat. You realize that until this moment when you read back the words—you are a cum-guzzling whore; you are worthless; he will burn down your house with you inside it—you thought you maybe made it up. But here is this paper: this dated evidence. You are frozen to the floor, sobbing.
Before that moment anything having to do with sex felt fun.
You look for them again as you write this essay. You want to prove that you aren’t crazy. But you can’t find them and there it is again: the room is too warm and your chest is tight. Remember how much he loved your mouth.
You have a vague memory of throwing them away, trying to rid yourself of things that do not serve you.
Remember, you provoked him.
You rifle through every box. They are not there.
Remember, you swallowed.
You are frantic. Why would you throw them away?
Remember, you are a whore.
Every year The Boy sends you Facebook friend requests and tries to follow your Instagram account. Each time you are sixteen again. Each time you are painfully aware of your mouth.
Girl #1 lives in Texas and you have not really kept in touch. She wore Abercrombie 8 perfume. It smelled soft like the beach and you wanted to drown in her. Sometimes you consider that had it been her mouth between your legs, you never would have been in this situation at all.
The smells you remember from him are shitty weed and sour cum. You picked a fleck of pot from your tongue. You wiped your cheek.
This is how it works: eight months in, Girl #3 sits on your chest screaming, You’re fucking him, aren’t you? in reference to one of your best friends. She tells you that if you want to act like a whore, she’ll treat you like one. When she grabs you and pushes you onto the bed and rams her fingers between your flailing legs and spits, Is that how you like it? Is that how you let him fuck you? Are you thinking of him right now? through gritted teeth, you are just sixteen again: Back in the living room of your childhood home, handing your dad a stack of printed papers. Back in the corner of your best friend’s bedroom. Back in the restaurant where your mother took you to confront you about what she read in your diary—you stupidly wrote about the assault but you made it sound sexy because you couldn’t write the truth; back in the booth where the spinach and artichoke dip turned to chalk in your mouth as your mother told you, Good girls don’t give blow jobs, said, If you’re going to act like a little slut, people are going to call you one.
She wore Abercrombie 8 perfume. It smelled soft like the beach and you wanted to drown in her.
In some alternate universe, in each of those moments, you find a way to speak the words you’ve harbored since childhood, since Labyrinth: You have no power over me. You shout it to The Boy and your parents and Girl #3—or perhaps you never date Girl #3 at all, because you long ago found your voice.
But in real life, you cannot speak because Girl #3 has one hand wrapped around your throat, and the chorus of you fucking whore you fucking whore you fucking whore and the chaos of kicking limbs is so, so loud that you cannot even remember the line. You only buck and bite and leave a perfect crown of teeth marks on her upper thigh.
Finally, it is over, and while you lie panting and crying in the dark, you hear the echo of the only thing you know and have always known:
The you is me, and this—all of it—is my fault.
Let me try again.
