The Fairest In The Land

My tongue was a hunk of Velcro clinging to a wool sweater when I woke up. My latest regret—a frat boy clad in a Dr. Feelgood costume—flopped over, his breath a stew of gas station burritos and bargain-basement tequila. He shook me hard, rousing me from my sex-romp slumber. My eyes were blurry, but I could have sworn I saw a tequila-soaked worm crawl from his lips as he slurred, “Bree, you gotta get outta here. My girl is coming by in an hour. Go on, leave.”

The digital clock flashed in red at 4:15 AM. Certainly not the first time someone had ordered me to vacate the premises at an ungodly hour, but this one was a roundhouse kick to the ovaries. I honestly thought Link and I had real promise. We had Business Law together and after exchanging numbers, our phones were a flurry of stupid animal memes and, ahem, “pictures,” that required a fast thumb and a cleared cache. I was his date to Sigma Epsilon's annual Halloween Bash. “Bring someone Whoreable,” their banner screamed in jagged letters. Our conversation was witty and rife with sexual innuendo. He said we were a perfect pair—or that I had a perfect pair, I can’t remember which. He ended up setting a new record for peeling off my Halloween naughty nurse costume: 37 minutes and 12 seconds. He was a smooth-tongued devil, or maybe I was just a slut with horrifically low standards, but nonetheless we did the deed, accompanied by that vintage synth-pop song, "Sex (I'm a...)."

I pulled the sticky, sweaty sheets over my body and felt like throwing up. “Your girl? You have a girlfriend? Then what am I doing here with you?”

He sneered, his mouth a frayed electric wire twitching nonstop. “ Bree, we fucked. It isn’t any deeper than that. Make sure you leave through the kitchen, we’ve got some narcs at this house. Gotta take a piss, see you in B-Law.”

I ground my teeth until they were a slurry of blood and bone, ripped the leopard print thong off my body and shoved it under his pillow where “his girl” would discover his dirty little secret; an exchange of bodily fluids with a side Ho he’d treated like yesterday's garbage.

I swiped one of the asshole’s sweatshirts, threw it over my costume, and stumbled through the long walk of shame back to the dorms. It was an unusually frigid night. Twenty-two degrees. My fingers were frozen sausage links and my toes were blue and numb. Tears froze from my eyes midstream. Bree, you’re nothing but a dog that eats its own vomit, when will you ever fucking learn? You’re going to freeze to death sans underwear—the cops laughing their asses off over your iced over Chewbacca. Then, the tequila hit my gut and I didn’t just throw up; I was a spewing Mount Vesuvius. I panicked. What if I barfed up a lung or kidney or wrecked my liver for good? Then everything went blurry, even my name. Was it Tree? Lee? Pee? Yeah—that’s what I needed to do. I squatted right there on the sidewalk and let loose with a warm stream of piss. I stumbled on, growing dizzier with each step, my urine gone awry sloshing in my shoes. I looked up for a second only to be blinded by a nuclear glare. Reeling and confused, I was a mole in the dark trying to figure out which way was up until I collapsed on the cement, twitching uncontrollably, near death and castigating myself for not getting that Brazilian wax sooner.

The sound of squealing brakes and a violent car door slam rattled my fur-coated teeth. I gazed up into the eyes of a person looming over me. At least, I thought it was a person. She looked more like the hybrid of a gorilla and a bulldog with a severe underbite. It shouted, “Oh my God, are you okay?” She didn’t wait for my answer; she tossed me over her shoulder and threw me into the passenger seat as if I were no heavier than a five-pound bag of potatoes.

I wasn’t in a car. I was riding in a landfill on wheels. Even in my near-death, drunken state, I couldn’t help but notice all the empty Big Mac boxes, crushed Big Gulp cups, candy wrappers, and brown, half-eaten fruit spewed across the floor like Satan’s vomit. I stared at her. Good God, she was ugly. But I bet guys didn’t send her unsolicited dick pics or dropkick her from their beds at 4 in the morning and make her feel like three -day -old dog shit. I wanted to burn her clean out of existence until there wasn’t any marrow left in her bones. “You know, maybe if you didn’t shove all this crap down your throat, you wouldn’t look the way you do.”

A twinge of guilt poked its head out the hole in which I kept it. Pretending it was a whack-a-mole, I smashed guilt’s brain into mush by focusing on the hybrid freak’s smile. Her teeth looked like they were designed by a schizophrenic who survived on a diet of magic mushrooms and meth.

“You know, maybe if you dug down deep and started seeing yourself as a person of value rather than as a set of tits and ass, you wouldn’t be doing the regretful booty call back to the dorms. Babe, you’re so wasted you can’t even pour the number one out of your shoes.”

I had always been an angry, nasty drunk. That evening was no different. I ran my finger across a red Bible lying on the front seat and let loose with a vitriol that scorched my own throat. “Well, you’re so goddamn ugly that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John would gouge their own eyes out rather than look at that steaming pile of shit you call a face.”

I instantly regretted it. She smiled again, making me feel like an unflushed turd stinking up a bathroom. “Yeah, maybe so, but you know who wouldn’t? Jesus wouldn’t. He’d kiss this biohazard of a face and tell me that he’s crazy about me.”

Man, did she grind my gears. “You’re one of those religious nuts, aren’t you?”

“Not at all,” she said, a little too calmly for my liking. “I’m just a fat slob who knows that there’s more to this life than this life. I can wait out the insults. You’re not telling me anything I haven’t already heard. You’re just a monkey flinging shit because you hate your life and that, my dear, makes me kind of sad.”

That thing was calling me pathetic? That biological mistake of a human being wasn’t even worthy of scrubbing the dried jizz from my Victoria’s Secret underwear. I prepped for a diss that would shut her mouth for eternity when Gorilla Girl hit a pothole at seventy miles per hour. The contents of my stomach splashed all over her dashboard: a foul-smelling kaleidoscope of pea-soup green and something brown and bubbly.

She rolled the windows down and spoke after a long silence. “You know something, Hammer Queen?”

Humiliated, I whispered, “The name’s Bree.”

She clenched her teeth. “It’s not been nice meeting you, Bree. I’m Emma, and I didn’t ask to be a participant in your shit-show of a life. You reupholstered my seats in your biological waste and you have the nerve to insult me for my looks. I get it, though; I really do. I’m a Dodge Dart with a wheezy muffler and chipped paint. You, you’re a BMW with an engine that sings like a bird. Me? I’m a rusted hunk of metal stalled out on the freeway waiting for a wrecker to haul me away. I’m ugly. And I can laugh about it. But you walk into a room and have every male envisioning you naked on all fours, or every girl wanting to slit your throat for being the fairest in the land. I bet it’s not as good as it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

I couldn’t look at her. My God, I couldn’t even breathe. My shame was a black hole, so immense that not even light could escape. I buried my face in my hands, feeling lower than the scum line on a frat house toilet. Emma, to her credit, didn’t gloat. She sat there completely at ease in her skin—skin that I had found revolting, but now saw for what it actually was: a fortress that had taken bullets for me.

“Please, Emma, just kill me for being a mean drunk! Like, take out a knife and start hacking away, just don’t touch my face. Or push me out of the car and let the tires squash my body until I’m flat and have to be peeled off the road. I deserve it. I really do.”

Emma snorted. “Give me a freaking break. I’m not that fragile. Don’t you think that someone as hideous-looking as me would have developed a very thick hide by now? It takes a lot more to hurt my feelings than the idiotic ramblings of a drunk. On a scale of one to ten, your insults are a three at best. I’ve heard way nastier than yours.”

Only a three! I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel insulted by her casual dismantlement of my bitchiness. Instead, I asked where we were going.

“To the coin-operated car wash, of course. You’re going to get hosed down in this twenty-degree weather. I’m sandblasting all the pee and puke from your clothes, and I don’t care if you turn purple and your toes rot off, we’re snuffing out that stuff. Next, I'll hose the inside of the car, evicting your stench. If you survive that, you can pass out on my floor. Your RA catches you like this, you’re expelled.”

I won’t bother telling you how painful and necessary that baptism by car wash was. Bruised from head to toe, every last vestige of grime and filth was blasted off me, leaving me to walk in what Emma would call a "newness of life." I watched as the slime attached to my body swirled down the industrial drain. I waved it goodbye and forbade it from ever re-entering the premises again. It gurgled a protest, but I walked away and left it to die.

Back at her apartment, wrapped in an oversized down comforter with a steaming mug of cocoa in my hands, I finally opened my mouth and told Emma my story, her eyes never leaving my face.

“Mom bounced right before my fifth birthday. That was fourteen years ago and I haven’t heard a word since. Dad took to his bed and morphed into a 500-pound walrus. He watches TV all day, imprisoned on a mattress that can barely support his heft. He doesn’t give a crap about me; he’d rather wallow in his own filth than be a father. He caught me and a boyfriend knocking boots on the sofa, and rather than get pissed like most normal parents, he said, ‘You better not get pregnant because I’m not raising any kids.’ He wouldn’t give a shit if I shacked up with my fifty-year-old English comp professor.” I paused, thankful that at least he didn’t demand that I wipe his boulder-sized ass, and continued. “When I was seven, Dad dumped me at Vacation Bible School. The only good thing about it was the peanut butter cookies and red Kool-Aid, but by the end of the week, I’d invited Jesus to live inside me. But he’s since been evicted because of my ho-ish ways.”

Emma stared at me with an intensity that frightened me. She gripped my shoulders, her long red talons piercing my flesh like spikes in a log. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’re magnifying Christ's suffering all over again, dragging his bludgeoned body from the cross, thinking you have the power to stop his flow of grace! He died ONE time for all your sins! So quit dragging them up, because he’s face-palming, wondering what the heck you’re talking about since they’re dead and buried. Climb off that cross, babe, because someone else needs the wood. God’s crazy about you, Bree. But he’s not going to push through that throng of fuck-boys and force himself on you. The ball's in your court.”

Over the next year, Emma became my fortress, and I became her shadow. We spent the next twelve months navigating the campus as an impossible pair—the broken-down Dodge Dart and the high-performance BMW, surviving on cold drive-thru fries, late-night theological debates about pre-destination, free will and a fierce, unspoken loyalty that didn't give a damn what the world thought of us. She taught me how to live inside my own skin without treating it like a currency, and I finally stopped looking for my worth and my identity in the beds of boys who didn't even care to know my name. We were unkillable, a two-woman army holding the line against our own messy lives.

But I paused for a moment when Emma told me that God had revealed to her that she’d die young. “It won’t be like that song, where people are slamming my fat, dead ass down in a bed of roses while I float away peacefully on a raft. But I’m okay with that. How could I not be? I’m getting a new body, Bree. God owes me, after he designed me to look like a Boston terrier with a perm.”

I smartassed back to her. “Come on, Em, quit being such a drama queen. You and I are growing old together, roomies at the nursing home, drooling and wearing our thongs backwards.”

She snorted and shook her head. “My goodness Bree, do I ever love you. I’d do anything for you, absolutely anything.”

Six months later, the world finally caught up with us. We were sharing a frozen yogurt in the student union, laughing our guts out about the way our Econ professor would surreptitiously pass little fluffies without realizing that they smelled worse than overly ripe cabbage. After our laughter died down, I told her that Douchebag Extraordinaire, Dr. Feelgood, wouldn’t stop texting me about how wrong he was on that Halloween night and that he was in love with me. Emma’s eyes bulged in shock, her mouth opening to deliver a spectacular, testicle-crushing tirade. But the words never came.

A heavy, metallic slam echoed from the front entrance—the sound of the double doors being kicked so hard the glass rattled. The normal hum of conversations and laughter vanished suddenly, leaving a suffocating silence. Emma’s eyes pivoted to the corner of the room while I froze, my phone pinging on repeat.

Panicked bodies stampeded toward the exit, a twisted knot of limbs and terror. The backs of my knees were on fire, and my legs were a leaden weight, useless and immovable. I saw the shooter charge through the doors, his tactical military gear a dull blur in the blinding sun overhead.

Emma grabbed my hand and did not hesitate—she threw her massive fortress of a body over mine, her breath surprisingly steady. The air departed from my lungs in a rasp-filled rattle as I felt the distinct, wet thuds vibrating through her spine. She didn’t groan. She just locked her fingers into the fabric of my sweatshirt and held the line.

As the sirens wailed in the distance, the weight of her body grew cold and heavier. I crawled out from underneath her. She was gone, but she was also smiling.

“Climb off that cross, babe,” I whispered.

She’d finally gotten her new body, and for the first time in her life, she was the fairest in the land.

BIO: Jill Williams is a Georgia based writer. Her work explores the intersection of the profane and the holy. She has been published or has work forthcoming in EXPAT PRESS, DON'TSUBMIT, CITYWIDE LUNCH, BULL, SOME WORDS, CLOSE TO THE BONE, and others.

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