Chapter 26: Dirty Hair Chronicles

26. Dirty Hair Chronicles

With the muddled mush my mind had become, I had somehow forgotten showering. There were moments when I feared that I would soon descend into a slothful subsistence, not unlike that of Mad Maggie, but it was always easier to just to climb into bed and try to find some sleep, rather than worry about it, Finally I caught sight of the way my blonde hair had turned a shiny dark brown of built-up grease and resolved that I would take a shower that night before bed.

The time right before lights out was always quiet. We were encouraged to remain in our rooms, quieting ourselves with homework and/or contemplating our redemption from the horrific sins that led to our being incarcerated. But we were allowed to move about doing domestics necessities, such as laundry, or showering. The corridor was empty when I stepped out of my room, wrapped only in a towel. There was no need to hide from the cameras since my mission was legitimate. I even made a point of ignoring them, of pretending that I didn’t know about their rotating gaze, and the possibility that Jeremy was watching  and leching about my near nakedness.

In the hallway I passed Grace, our token Asian-American resident, wrapped in a pink fluffy bathrobe, scurrying back towards her room. I nodded in her direction and for some reason didn’t think anything of the sound of water running or the thick fog clouding the room as I walked right into the big shower room.

Immediately I knew that the girl with her back to me, naked was Erika. I froze. Along her thighs were bruises and a large bruise darkened her left hip blackish purple. Small cuts laced the back of her legs. She running her hands down her thighs, pushing off the soapy water. Her blonde hair had darkened some with the wet, but was still blonde, blonder than mine was in its current greasy stage. Slowly she turned to face me and I could see large bruises on each of her boobs.

Her eyes widened as she saw me standing against the other wall of the showers, under the not-running shower heads. “What the fuck are you looking at, dyke?” she growled. But that was all she said before she was on me. My head smacked hard against the tile wall at my back and I slid down the wall, my towel falling away. I was trying to raise me hands to protect my face, but she was already slapping it as she straddled me where I lay half-slumped against the wall.

The room was spinning and as I felt the dirty shower water soak through the towel and up my back. More curses including, “Nigger-loving whore,” were being thrown. I hoped that someone would hear her, particularly with the use of the N-word, and come to rescue me, but there was no one. I wanted to close my eyes, but I fought it, uncertain what I might do to defend myself, but knowing that closing my eyes would leave me totally defenseless. I was suddenly very aware of her skin against mine, the smoothness of inner thighs squeezing tight into the hairy surface of my outer thights. I looked down there and briefly saw that her vagina was shaved, which made no sense since none of us were allowed to have razors. But what if she had one at that moment and was ready to attack with that?

Then her hands came around my throat. She was really ready to kill me right there in the shower, and the world was starting to go dim as she managed to cut off breath with the squeezing of my throat and the pressure of her naked body pushing against me. In the back of my throat I tasted saltwater. Not the musty, soapy water of the shower, but saltwater, like that of the ocean, and without the fishy odor of the beach, but more of the pure saltwater from out in the sea.

The image-feeling that had swept over me when I had touched the pendent with the etching of Eos came back to me, unable to breathe and being held under the water. Something else came up through me, and with a struggle I was able to raise right hand to the slick wet skin of Erika’s chest, sliding it up to her sternum. Part of me thought perhaps I could squeeze a bruised boob and inflict enough pain to make her stop. But something entirely different surged through me, a rush of power like I had felt that night in James’s room and again the fourth floor. Then, almost as if it were happening in slow motion to someone else unconnected to myself, Erika was flying across the room, landing on the floor at the opposite wall.

I sat up, gasping for breath, staring at her as she stared back at me, her eyes now wide with fear more than anger. I could have pounced on her and returned the beating that she had been inflicting on me just seconds before, but instead I leaped to my feet, grabbed my soaking wet towel and raced out the bathroom door. Lungs working hard to bring air back into my body and fighting the dizziness of my banged up skull I raced through the hallway, naked, not bothering to try to get the towel around me. Cameras be damned.

In my room I dropped the towel to the floor and collapsed on my back onto my bed. Not safe. There was no lock on the door. But the room spun and I couldn’t get up, even knowing that Erika might at any moment appear at my door, ready to finish me off. Everything then simply went black.

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The darkness was still everything when I opened my eyes, but then on the ceiling I saw the flash of shadow branches, car lights passing on the highway that ran along the river. The flash triggered an image of naked Erika flying across the shower room and hitting the other side. It couldn’t be real. And what if I had killed her? Would anyone know it was me? My head hurt. My whole body hurt, but more than anything else it was my head.

With that awareness came the feeling that there was someone near me, watching me. I could hear the gentle breathing, but more than anything else it was feeling the presence of someone else in the room. I was too frightened to look at first. After all, what if it was Erika sitting there, waiting for me to wake up so that I would be conscious when she finished me off? Playing dead had been a tried and true defense throughout the animal kingdom for thousands of years.

But I couldn’t just lie there so I did finally have to turn my head. It was Phyla, sitting in my desk chair wearing pink pajamas. In the light from under the door I could see her brown eyes shining, watching me. “What time is it?” I asked in a coarse whisper.

She looked down and I knew that she had the watch on the macramé cord in her hand. “About a quarter til four, in the morning.”

I nodded and thought for a moment. “I thought you were mad at me.”

“I am. But that doesn’t mean I am going to let you die from a concussion. I made a promise a long time ago. Being mad at you and the things you’ve been doing doesn’t change that.”

“Okay,” I answered. Slowly I ran my hands down the sides of my body, over top of the sheet that was covering me. Underneath I was still naked, and the bed felt a bit damp under my back. “So, did you see me naked?” I remembered that even though we had fooled around topless on two different occasions, she had never seen anything of me from the waist down.

“Yes, and you made enough commotion stumbling in here that you’re lucky half the corridor didn’t come out to see you. But yeah, I saw you.”

“Okay.” I paused for a moment. “So now you know how hairy I am, down there.”

I felt her smile. “We all are here. Remember?”

I bit my lower lip a bit, still trying to figure out what secrets I should be sharing with whom, and realizing that I didn’t have any reason to protect Erika. “Erika’s not. She has a razor. Somehow.”

“Is that who beat you up? Erika?”

“Yeah, but I got her good. I pushed and she went, she went like flying across the room, and I have no idea how I did that.”

“You remembered, at least a bit of something. It’s really the same thing as what you did when Garish was threatening Mad Maggie. It takes more force to move an embodied person, but same thing.”

“Is she? Alive?”

“As far as I know. After I got you covered up so you wouldn’t freeze, I went down and checked the shower. There was some blood along one wall, but no one was in there. So she must’ve been alive enough to run away. Did she have the razor?”

“No. I didn’t see it, but I saw her you-know-what when she tackled me and it was all smooth, and her legs too. And …”

“And?”

“And I don’t know what. She tried to strangle me.”

I could feel her smile in the darkness as she whispered, “I suspect you scared her enough that she won’t be trying that again.”

I considered what she said and then replied, “But she might try to sneak in here with that razor of her some night when I’m asleep.”

“Then you’ll just have to remember more.”

“Like what?”

“Like how not to let that happen.”

“And you won’t help with that?”

“I can’t. It’s your power. I’m just a delinquent elf who …”

A silence fell between us, but it felt good, comfortable. I rolled over and snaked an arm out from under the sheet she had pulled over me and reached for her ear. When one of the flashes had happened from a car going by I had seen that her points were there. Now I just wanted to feel their warm soft curve.

“No,” she said, catching my wrist before I got it to her ear. “We’re not doing that.”

“But …” I wanted to tell her how much I wanted her, needed her, even if I didn’t understand the depth of that feeling myself.

“That’s something else you have to remember, and … we have things that need to be worked out. So think about it.” She stood to leave.

“So why are you here? Now.” I asked, rolling back over on my side and pulling the sheet up tight to my neck.

“To make sure you’re okay after a possible concussion. I still honor my promise. You need to remember yours.” And then she totally surprised me by leaning in quickly and kissing me lightly on the lips.

Before I got respond, or pull her in for a deeper kiss she was up and moving to the door. “You can’t tell me anything more about who this Gesama me was before? Just something,” I pleaded.

She turned back to me quickly. I couldn’t see if she was smiling or not as her face was just a silhouette as she said, “You used to be a brunette.”

 I watched as she looked down at her watch which I now realized had a glow-in-the-dark dial, focusing on the second hand before slipping quickly out the door. It clicked quietly behind her.

Wondering if she liked me better as a brunette, I reminded myself that I had other things to think about, more important things. For one thing, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to feel about that surge of power that came through me when I pushed Erika away, and at the same time felt awash in helplessness. I slid a hand down over my stomach into my hair, touching myself for a little before falling back to sleep. Even if I was being shut out there was something comforting in learning that some vague promise had been made between me and Phyla. I cried a little as I masturbated, some deep part of me feeling how much I loved her, even if I couldn’t remember all that I was supposed to be remembering.

And, it looked like I was going to have dirty hair for another day.