The Fairy Tale at the Frat
Sher pushed aside the crumpled linen and sat atop the bare spring top mattress of the unmade bed, looking out the window and half expecting to find someone. She silently envisioned the apparition of a someone strong and heroic, of an anything reminiscent of a prince charming that could pull her away from this beast. She looked deeper still, but saw only the abyss of tree tops below and the blinking light of an aircraft dotting its path across the sky. She turned her gaze onto the red solo cup in her hand, swirled the mirky tan liquid, watering down the concoction as the ice melted. She patted the tawny skirt against her thighs and brushed aside the curly black fly aways against her temple. Rubbing her lips together and sensing the stiffness of their slide, she realized a reapplication of lipgloss was needed.
“You’re making him happy,” she assured herself out loud as she smeared more of the coral color on. “It’s not the way you thought tonight would go, but this is good. This is fine.”
Just then, the room before her shook, again, and again, loosening her grip on the lipgloss, sending it on a trajectory up the side of her cheek. It was the rumble of the beast’s approach. It came to a sudden halt, and his shadow became stagnant against the crack between the baseboard and the floor. A flip in her lower abdomen sent a pulsating feel of unease up through her chest and she swallowed the almost imminent sour taste of sick that tried to come out. She steadied herself against the backboard and strained to maintain her self and her nerves with a firm grip upon the night stand.
“Look at you gettin’ all comfortable in casa de William Wolf.” The beast spoke in an unnaturally cool and familiar way. At nearly seven feet tall, the beast bent at the waist and slightly at one side to enter his bedroom. Once erect again, Sher saw the absurd way he tugged at his purple and gold jersey, trying to hide the abundance of thick and greasy matted fur that emerged passed every part of him that was not clothed.
“Yeah I like your room a lot, Billy. You have so many trophies.” Sher’s voice took on qualities not of her own. The inflection more sing-songy, and the pitch at least one octave higher than what is natural. She tried to wipe the excess lipgloss from her face.
“If you think I’m the shit now, I wish you’d known me in high school. It’s different now we’re in college. It’s like, everyone thinks they’re the shit, you know? But like, they have no idea how not shit they are, but they’re really just shit, you know what I mean?”
“Totally.” Sher wasn’t sure how else to follow up her illuminating response, so she just took another sip from her cup.
“That reminds me! Wanna see me shotgun this tall boy? Franky Fox taught me how earlier.” Hearing Billy say the name Franky lifted Sher with a new glow she’d not yet had while in this room. Her sudden revitalization came simply by being reminded he was downstairs, here in the same place she was. Just then, Billy took the PBR beer can that was dwarfed in his swollen paws, and drew it up to his hyper elongated lower canines that jutted out over his lips to the tip of his nose. Upon impact, a crack pierced the can, sending a rushing mess of foamy liquid in every direction, splashing the piss and yeast smell all over Sher’s navy blue sweater.
“Come on, Billy! I just got this!” Sher had been daydreaming of Franky and was sufficiently distracted before this unwelcome interruption. She wiped herself with a sock that was lying next to her on the bed, pat drying her bare chest. The wet trickled down and saturated her front, the sheer lace bra of crimson red she was wearing now slightly exposed. The beast had become transfixed by this sight, dropping the beer can which clanked across the hardwood floor. He inhaled deeply looking down over his snout at Sher, his breath now quick and staggered, his massive chest rising and falling. A snort escaped, and with a low gravelly voice he uttered, “Did you wear that for me?”
His focus unchanged and his breath faster still, the beast sauntered closer into Sher, positioning himself in between her legs. Sher looked up into the eyes of the beast, a dull unmitigated paralysis of a gaze, the yellow of them widened and their thin black slits unwavering. Sher tried to speak, her mouth slightly parted, waiting for anything to rise up through the caverns of her throat. Nothing. Not even a whimper that could have expressed some kind of hesitation to stop the inevitable from happening. The stillness was abruptly shattered by his pounce, the weight of the beast and the guttural roars escaping his foul hot lips overwhelmed her. He clawed her skirt down her waist, Sher’s now cool and exposed body trembling uncontrollably, but the heat of shame rising steadily in her cheeks. He shredded his pants off with one swift motion, the scent of piss and yeast reminiscent again to Sher.
“Calm down. Franky wants this,” Sher thought as she turned to rest her cheek against the slight scratch of the bunched-up comforter. A contradictory thought of this is not good and you do not need to do this crossed her mind as Billy forced himself inside her. But she pressed her eyes tighter shut, furrowing her brows as she envisioned Franky and the approval she would earn from him. A calming satisfaction eased her tension with this thought, and her eyes relaxed to slightly part open, allowing a single warm tear to trail down the side of her face. She focused her attention on the pale colored floral design embroidered into the mattress top as she was jolted forward and back in a rhythmic motion. A sharp but hushed puff of air escaped her lips as she had the absurd realization that she and Billy owned the same mattress.
Earlier that morning, Sher awoke in her own bedroom, looking through bleary sleep crusted eyes at the pale floral design atop her own mattress. The day began with such promise and excitement; tonight would be Sher’s first real college party, one that Franky Fox would also attend. A list of beauty accoutrements was pinned to her whiteboard, and upon completing her morning rituals, Sher made haste to the mall with a spinach and pineapple breakfast smoothie in hand.
Foundation for her ivory and blemish free skin was the first purchase she’d intended, but not without an expected obtrusion from the mall’s indwelling pot head, Cadence Caterpillar. She thought she’d dodged his advances, but his plump and swollen elongated frame slinked around a corner as if he’d been waiting for her. Emerging from the dark that framed the otherwise brightly lit make up store, he seemed to manifest through billowing gray smoke. He had a rounded electric blue face adorned with forest green puss filled pimples, pulsating with each heavy breath he took. Atop the sides of his forehead were unnervingly long tentacles that curled at their ends, wafting slightly with each brisk step he took towards her.
“Whyyyy are yooooou here?” Cadence’s prolonged you pushed a cloud of smoke into and around her face.
“Not now, Cadence. Please.” Sher waved the smoke away and tried to push passed him, knowing too well she was at his mercy with the four simple words that dripped out of his mouth next: You want some weed? She did. The thought of going to the party that night not only filled her with hope, but also with impending doom. Sher’s only motive for going to the party was for a chance encounter with Franky, but feared her own proclivities would turn the night into something worse. However, the last time she got high, it was as if she was a different person, a person who was capable of saying a cool and casual Hey to a guy like Franky without hesitation. That’s the person she needed to be tonight.
There was an obligatory smoke out in the back of Cadence’s Hyundai Accent. It was a power dynamic Sher had grown accustomed to succumbing to. Cadence passed the expertly rolled joint to Sher after burning its end into a charred glowing cherry.
“Don’t smoke that blunt to the head. I know how stupid yooooou get.” It was an unfortunate understatement as Sher believed herself the epitome of cool whenever she was high, but others would say she was exhausting and insufferable. The belief that she was somehow a better version of herself when she was like this stemmed from an interaction she recently had with Franky. Her memory being that it was charm and wit that had entertained him, but reality being that Franky couldn’t stop laughing at how much food she kept eating.
“Whatever. I can handle my shit.” She sucked hard at the joint, a slight spattering of crackles from the paper as it burned. She let the smoke inside her swell for a beat. Two beats. Three. Then—Kaff! Kaff! The smoke rushed out of her pinched and mottled face.
“Gahd dahm, Sher. Yooooou actually are crazy,” Cadence said with bemusement. After about another half hour of forced laughs and exhaustive deterring of Cadence’s arms and legs up her arm and thigh (and it truly was an exhausting effort, she never could tell just how many arms and legs that guy had), Sher finally made her way back to the mall, this time with a sandwich baggy of sour diesel in tow.
She meandered through the dimly lit halls of the parking structure, her head now swollen with the feeling of weed penetrating her vessels. It seemed to lift her up, but she saw as she passed a reflection of herself that her eyelids hung low, and the unobscured parts of her eyes had been dipped in the devil’s favorite color. The need she earlier had for beauty products was replaced with finding whatever fried food was wafting in the air at that moment. Was it a churro? Or mozzarella sticks? Or a batch of frozen french fries emerging from a bubbling oil bath with shimmering, crispy golden skin?
Success for Sher as her meandering led her upon the food court, and was now in possession of a basket of fried…well, she wasn’t quite sure which of the aforementioned phallic finger foods she ended up with. She dabbed the corners of her mouth with a napkin, pushing the now empty basket away from her, and noticed in her periphery a flickering orange glow from the televisions mounted on the walls. The speakers blared the muffled noise of the broadcast, an assuring string of phrases that elicited immediate reactions from the on screen crowds surrounding the nation’s newest incumbent. Phrases like We’re going to make a lot of, and We’re going to take care of, and The incredible men and women of, and the most damning of all, Believe me.
“This guy is a fucking Cheeto turd, right? A sexual predator. Our president. Awesome.” The words escaped her in a low drawn out way, and they were intended for no one as she stared vacantly with unflinching eyes at the screens above her. She shifted her gaze, her sunken eyelids rising with each passing look to the left, and to the right. She would have liked her words to have been received by someone, but her brown leather purse was the only thing occupying space on the empty tables surrounding her. The closest person in view was a mother distracted by her fussing child, no where near earshot to receive Sher’s poignant criticisms, but would have likely ignored them had she heard them. She had a sudden biting realization. She was alone. A short wave of paranoia pulsed through her. She gathered up her trash, flung her purse over her shoulder, and left the food court to find the beauty products she originally came here for.
She found the ivory cream foundation and a tube of coral tinted lipgloss, and proceeded for the check out line. She felt rolls of the high linger still, a sudden rush of chills traversing from the small of her back and up the length of her spine as she approached the counter. A smile stretched her cheeks as she imagined the compliments she might earn from Franky after seeing her done up with the new make-up. The clerk before her was of green warted skin, shining slightly from the slime that was seeping from his pores. He had a wide face with bulging tan eyes on either side, the eyes split by a thick black pupil that was protected by a thin layer of mucosal membrane. Adorning the ends of his pressed black button up dress shirt were silver lily pad cufflinks, exaggerating his delicate, thinly webbed three fingered hands. The polished oval name tag pinned neatly upon his chest read, Finn Frog.
He looked down his distinct rounded snout, indignantly croaked a rehearsed greeting, but once he actually looked at Sher, the smallest hint of irritation lit up his eyes.
“Oh, it’s you. Woman, weren’t you just in here last week?” He had a prude and stiff demeanor with each flick of the product against the scanner, possibly even a hint of an eye roll as he examined the coral colored gloss she picked out.
“Hey…how’s it going Finn? You know how it is. Gotta keep up shop! The shop…being…my body. Heh heh.” The chills that had traveled up and through her were violently sucked in when she noticed Finn’s pursed lips and inquisitively cocked eyebrow.
“Mmm girl the way you spend it’s like you trying to keep up a whole damn palace.” A
sudden, miserable sense of insecurity defined Sher’s now sunken and clammy state of existence, her palms now moist and her throat now dry. “I mean betch please. You still not fienin’ over that Franky Fox guy, right? Is he cute? Yeah. I’d hit it. But that boy is playin’ you.”
“What? Franky? No he’s sweet. You don’t know him like I do.” Sher’s response ended without conviction and trailed off almost inaudibly.
“Oh! So he’s the one fuckboy god created and said, ‘Nah! I’mma give this one a heart of gold.’ Girl please!” Finn waved his wrist with a violent shake and snapped his webbed fingers in the air, then flatly announced Sher’s total. This prompted her to rummage the contents of her purse, which distracted her from adequately defending Franky, but the need for absolution was brewing inside of her. She handed the cash to Finn, prompting a new bothered question from him. Too distracted by the panic of what the question might be, and too frenzied to acknowledge the question in her head Are you paranoid because you’re high?, Sher began her wild plea for exoneration.
“I know it’s stupid to some people. I know! I spend a lot of money to feel good in front of boys. Yeah, maybe I need to feel better about myself in front of Franky. So what! It helps me, man. Everyone knows they’re inadequate or incompetent in some kind of way, right? It’s like everyone’s got that thought they can’t shake. ‘You’ve done too many things wrong, kid. So either knock it off, or make it work!’”
“Everyone’s got an outlet for that kind of insecurity! I know I’m not the only one. Some drink. Some collect beanie babies. Some gotta drown kittens. At least my release is in the form of a plastic tube full of multi colored goops that mostly don’t offend the people around me. So shit man! Don’t try to put me into your neat little box of stereotypes!” The pinks of her nail beds became a yellowish white as she gripped harder onto the sales counter to steady her shaking fervor.
“Cuz let me tell you this, I at least know this much: I suck just as much as everyone else does! I’m just trying to feel like I suck less, just like everyone else is! I know we’re all just hanging on to the things that make us feel right. And this! This little tube of goop gets the god damn job done!”
Sher drew a sharp breath in through her nose and released forcibly through her mouth with a sort of finality and accomplishment that made her feel proud.
“Girl hush. You know I just gotta ask if you want to apply for the store credit card, but I’mma guess it’s a no again, or…?”
“Oh. Yeah no. Not today thanks.” Sher felt immediate regret for her dramatic outburst, but was quick to assign blame to the weed. What had transpired only slightly destroyed her confidence, and the crushing realization that she isn’t as cool as she thought she was when she smoked led her to the conclusion, Maybe I shouldn’t get high at the party. After a slow, methodical drive home, and a long sobering nap, she awoke with a new energy for the night she’d envisioned as one for her and her Franky.
She arrived at the party exactly two hours passed its intended start time, knowing this to be proper etiquette if she wanted to appear cool. The three story house was of bright golden white, impressively emanating an ethereal glow even at this dark hour. Its facade was endowed with massive thick pillars of the same golden white, and situated against the brick exterior was the typical vestige of greek letters denoting the fraternity that dwelled within: Iota Omicron Iota. She looked up at the acronym, laughing at how such a decadent house can be tainted by the emblazoned sign which appeared to read: LOL. Still staring up and around as she moved forward, Sher crossed the threshold into her first college party.
A tray of lime green jell-o shots nearly floated passed her, and she managed to grab and suck down two before the man parading the tray over his head got lost in the crowd.
“Good start,” she thought to herself, “gelatinous courage should help.”
She shuffled passed a game of beer pong, and shimmied through a tight hallway in which seventeen different conversations were taking place. She looked beyond the length of the hallway to an opening that had cleared into the kitchen. The kitchen counters held a sea of amber and clear liquor bottles, and a tower of red solo cups were buoyed among the sea in the furthest corner. The cups were stacked in precarious form against a cabinet. She stood tippy toed to grab the cup at the top, but in doing so, toppled the remaining cups to the ground. A couple snickered as they watched the scene unfold. Sher was unsuccessfully trying to stack the cups back into their previous form. Despite a heat growing in her cheeks and a sheen of sweat transpiring on her neck, she kept a level of composure, ultimately deciding to kick aside the last few cups she could not add to the stack.
It was while she was pouring herself a drink she noticed Franky on the opposite side of the kitchen. She immediately zig zagged a path to him, keeping her sights locked as to not lose him. She laughed to herself feeling as though she were on the prowl, and it reminded her of the first time she met Franky. Sher was walking home after the last class had ended when Franky snuck up on her. His sudden appearance prompted her to shout, What the hell! Are you some kind of stalker? To which he had responded, Well if I’m stalking you, I guess that makes you my prey? She remembered making some kind of sexual predator joke after he’d called her his prey, but Franky deterred the joke with a sly cunning that all at once had Sher completely entranced.
The inauspicious night of Sher’s first sexual encounter became congruous with Sher’s first love. She was immediately obsessed, and was determined to recreate the ecstasy she felt that night. With a greater determination after reflecting on one of her favorite memories, she “accidentally” bumped into Franky.
“Aw I’m such a klutz! Jeez, look at me, Ya ever had a beer before?” She mock said this pantomiming a developmental delay, quickly regretting the strategy she had chosen.
“What the shit? …Oh! Sher, hey. Ya ever learned to walk before?” He’d mock pantomimed Sher’s pantomime, and the connection elated her.
“That’s funny! It’s funny because it’s like what I said, but with walking instead of drinking, and it’s like obviously I should know how to walk. So that implies I should obviously know how to drink, right?” She looked up at Franky, his attention to her distracted by the berating stimuli all around them, but he’d managed an affirmative Uh huh at whatever she just said.
As he continued to look up and around, Sher kept her focus up at him. He wore his mustard colored beanie pushed back, two slits created to expose his rusted copper orange and black trimmed ears, his slender pointed snout keeping his Rivers Cuomo spectacles aloft against his small snidely eyes, and bushing out beside his tightly fitted jeans was his vulpine brushy tail. Sher squinted her eyes a moment, a fleeting thought of Franky’s orange appearance reminded her of the orange flickering on the screens in the food court from earlier that day. She literally shook her head to dismiss the disgusting comparison, and instead reminisced on just two months ago. It was the last time she’d been alone with Franky, and the last time she gained his affection in the back seat of his car. The intoxication of what it was to bring him pleasure curled her lips, and she longed for the moment it would be them together again.
She pushed her hair up and chest out as she tried to turn on a sexy persona, but the lustful playfulness was short lived by a sudden and overwhelming feeling of shame. It was always in this way, this juxtaposition of yearning and humiliation when it came to Franky. The favors, that he so indifferently called them, that she was always apt to do if not for a sliver of cognizance from this person she’d grown so addicted to pleasing.
“Listen, can you do me a favor?” He inevitably asked after a few silent sips from their drinks.
And there it was. Of course she’d say yes. She was happy to stand by his side and sip silently from her red solo cup, but she’d agreed to his favor if only to not disappoint him, and obediently found herself among the trophied enclosure of the third floor. In the moments before her inevitable favor for the night, Sher paced the bedroom floor, filled with the same moral conflict she battled with before every favor. She thought intently of how Franky would respond if she said she didn’t want to do it, not this time. She grappled with visions of the best and worst case scenarios. Either Franky would go weak at the knees, unable to contain himself before the sight of such brilliance and confidence, and would whisk Sher away into the sunset for their happily ever after. Or, Franky would immediately reject her with disgust, physically remove her from the party, and order an effective disowning of anyone who ever dared befriend her again.
Sher steeled her nerves as she made her way down stairs to talk to Franky. She knew he couldn’t respond like either of her imagined extremes, and decided to hope for the best. She’d found him and was nearly able to tell him her decision, but stopped suddenly when she heard mention of her name in a conversation he was having with Billy. She hid herself behind a potted plant, anxious to overhear what they were saying.
“Dude. Sher is ridiculous. She sucked me off like a thousand years ago, and the bonkers thing about it is she’d do anything to do it again.”
“Holy shit Franky. Sounds like you hit jack pot.”
“No way man, hit it and quit it. I don’t need that kind of crazy. But what I’m trying to tell ya is she does anything I ask her to do for me. Anything. Are ya picking up what I’m putting down, Billy?”
The realization of what Franky was selling dawned on Billy’s face, and their uproarious high fives ensued shortly after Franky explained the cost is but a trifle for the guaranteed good time.
Sher realized she’d listened to their entire exchange without taking a breath, and felt a dizzying relief when she finally drew in a deep breath that shuddered as she exhaled it. She excuse me excuse me’d her way through the crowd and back up stairs as quickly as she could, closing Billy’s door behind her. She took out her phone, opening the notes app to a blank page. The cursor on the empty page blinked…blinked…blinked. A few moments passed as the names of all the favors, the favors for Franky, trickled with hesitation back into her memory. Charlie, Doug, Manny, Keith…she stopped, a short pang of humiliation rising inside her. She started again. Nick, Brandon, Gus, Devin. She looked upon the list that begun to form on the brightly lit screen before her. A feeling of sick began to writhe in the walls of Sher’s stomach as she looked upon the physical manifestation of shame she’d created. Was there some kind of masochistic relief she felt by compartmentalizing these favors? Why was she doing this to herself? And as if she felt an instinctual pull to answer her own question, the literal words Franky Fox escaped her lips.
She set her phone on the night stand as she took a seat upon Billy’s unmade bed. She looked out the window as she swirled the mirky tan liquid in her red solo cup, looking deep into the abyss of trees to find a semblance of something strong and heroic, of an anything like a prince charming that could pull her away from these beasts.