Work Text:
May 1992
It was prom night in Wind Gap, meaning every teenager would be going home to their parents on shaky legs, pretending not to be wasted. Camille and her friends stood in the middle of the room. These past years, Camille had gotten prettier. Her legs had grown longer. Her face had matured. Mostly, she’d finally started wearing bras that fit, learned to like how they dug into the words inscribed on her skin, reminded her of what she did.
“You know, he’s looking at you,” said Mimi, a smile on her face. Her breath smelled like boozy fruit punch and her mascara was already melting off her face, turning into small, charcoal streaks under her eyes. Despite it being summer in Missouri, it was hotter in the neon-lit gym of Zeke Calhoun’s than it was in the parking lot. Camille took a good look at her. Mimi was a lightweight, and two 99 shooters mixed in with her punch had already gotten her wasted. Camille made a mental note to cut her off if she saw her reach into her overstuffed bra again.
“Hm?” asked Camille, though she knew exactly what she was talking about. It was that feeling that you got as a girl whenever you felt a boy watching you, that feeling that, no matter how much attention you got, never ceased to cause coils of anxiety in your gut. Jackie said they were butterflies; to Camille, they felt more like snakes, cold and slithering and heavy, promising poison. That wasn’t something Camille was averse to, though. “Where?”
Mimi knocked her elbow into Camille, leaning over her. “Those guys over there. You see Chris?”
Chris Armstrong, ZCHS quarterback. He was conventionally good-looking but painfully shy, even though he was one of the most popular players and boys in school. Camille had heard of how viciously he’d gotten hazed by the upperclassmen after hooking up with one of them. When she caught his eye and smiled, he looked away quickly, as if he was a young boy caught looking at pornography by his mother. She was sure it should feel charming — a boy not secure in his own perversions, for once — but it did nothing for Camille but solidify a fact she already knew. He wants to fuck me. Guys were the same with that.
“Think I should go up to him?” asked Camille, coy.
“Are you joking?” Angie jabbed Camille in the side. “Look at him.”
She did. Sharp jawline, ocean-blue eyes, a healthy head of blonde hair. Every time she looked at boys, she felt like she was in some sort of clinical role, like a doctor or a psychiatrist: 6’0, healthy weight, growing well for his age… It was probably from her mother. All the time she spent in hospitals, too.
The dance towards it, the chase towards the ends of nothingness Camille felt, ended in ZCHS’ only disabled bathroom. Camille didn’t feel too bad about it, because the only girl who used it, Sarah Bennett — cerebral palsy, if Camille remembered right — had already been mocked out the door. She hugged her prom dress tight to her, making sure it didn’t ride up. The expensive satin itched.
“Please, let me see you,” said Chris. He kissed down her neck. He wasn’t a virgin, but he certainly wasn’t experienced, either. There was a shakiness and desperation to please that she could tell by. “You’re beautiful, you’re so beautiful.”
His penis was big, but not unbearably so. In, out, in out. There was something mechanical about sex to Camille, something almost like cutting. Even with the most inexperienced of boys, there was still a rhythm to it, a feeling of an end to be achieved.
His hands snaked towards the hem of her dress, breaking her out of her thoughts. “No,” she said, softly but firmly, giving a kiss to his earlobe to soften her denial. “Keep it there.”
His pants were balled down to his ankles. Despite his athleticism, his legs were shaky and thin, like a newborn deer’s. It made a certain feeling of disgust bubble in Camille, so she looked away, looked at his face, scrunched up as if he was concentrating on something important.
“Fuck,” he said, voice breaking. “ Fuck , Camille, I’m in love with you.”
Camille squeezed her eyes shut. When he came, he thanked her.
March 1997
Camille had progressed to bars, at least as much as a female college student could. Frats were only for pre-gaming to her, now, offering free alcohol and sometimes weed if a guy thought she was pretty enough. Or cool enough, she supposed. While she could get laid in seconds there, it was usually bumbling freshmen who came up to her that made her feel more empty than she felt when she started. And more like a creep.
Butch’s on 8th Street offered cheap whiskey and a good mix of townies and Mizzou students. It was a Tuesday, but Camille had done enough to deserve a drink — she’d had to help run a story on frat hazing for The Maneater, and the texts she’d gotten from past-flings had been nasty, to say the least. Honestly, she hadn’t even known a lot of them were in frats, let alone the ones she was contacting ex-pledges for. She never imagined gangly, awkward Jeff Brooks would be a frat boy, let alone a Pike.
The bartender, a pretty older woman who didn’t speak much, nodded her head at Camille.
“Old-fashioned,” she said. “Thanks.”
The woman got to work. Her jeans hugged her ass, plump and soft. She probably didn’t exercise too much, but got enough work in bending over and spraying soda into cheap cups. Probably would go home, open her pink mouth in an O to spoon in strawberry ice cream, maybe wrap her lips around a joint, then doze off.
Things like this made Camille feel a twinge of guilt. For months, all she’d been eating had been rice cakes and unseasoned chicken and granola, and her body had been showing it. Her thoughts had, too, the judgments, the imaginations, only ever directed towards women. The fat of her ass, the way the tightness of her tank top makes her armpit roll into her cleavage…
“Hey, this seat taken?” a guy asked.
Camille looked over. 5’9, probably 30s or 40s, clean-shaven, and blonde hair. Hippie hair. Ripoff Cobain hair. Ripoff Cobain look, too, wearing flannel and washed jeans even in the heat of March — grunge had been commercialized, after all, and the guy looked like he could be a banker.
She smiled. Hollow. Slightly pissed off. “No,” she said with a shrug. “Take it.”
He grinned and slid in, making a small oof before turning over to her. He watched her, saying nothing, as Camille took a sip of the drink placed in front of her. Usually, she was able to play into men’s bumbling about, but she’d had a bad day, and learned they usually weren’t intuitive enough to take offense, anyway.
“You come here often?” he asked with a lopsided grin. He waved over the bartender like she was a dog. “Two more of what she got.”
“Somewhat,” Camille offered. Mystery girl. She wasn’t really sure if she wanted to fuck him yet, but she wasn’t going to close her options. Guys liked a girl who withheld a bit.
The guy smirked. When the bartender slid him his two old-fashioneds, he passed one to her. She gave him a nod of acknowledgement.
“Quiet, aren’t you,” he said, extending a hand. “I get it. Name’s Keith.”
She wanted to be someone else for the night. “Cara,” she said.
“The name’s as beautiful as the face, of course.”
Jesus fucking Christ. “Well, my father wouldn’t agree with that. He wanted Camille.”
The guy squinted his face, turned his mouth into a grimace, doing that side-by-side head sway that was meant to say well, if I think about it… “Eh, I don’t think so. Mille’s a bit harsh. Reminds me of a meal worm.”
As she downed the rest of her old-fashioned and moved onto the second, she felt herself slowly getting tipsy enough to tolerate the guy enough to be able to have him on top of her. “Well, it’s unpleasant when you put it that way.”
“Cara’s sweet,” he said, leaning in. The smile on his face was so unnatural it looked painted on, and his breath smelled of alcohol and tuna salad. “Name’s can tell you a lot about a person.”
“What does mine say, then?” asked Camille.
“That you’re coming home with me.”
It was so bad that she laughed and took another swig of her drink. Then another. Then another. Then another, until it was gone, because she needed it to get through this.
“What’s so funny?”
“You are,” she rasped with a patronizing smile. Keith was like every other man, though, and didn’t seem to see it that way, instead of.
They ended up going back to his apartment in Copperstone and had barely made it to his front door when he pressed her against the wall.
“What would you do, huh?” he asked, licking down her throat. Camille shuddered, and he laughed. “If I took you right here?”
She let him rub his nose against the crook of her neck, let him awkwardly kiss her jugular, suddenly overwhelmed by how much she didn’t want to be here. Still—
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “do whatever.”
He smiled. She’d been trying to think of sex in an abstract way: as the filling of a hole, an undoing of everyone and everything that came before her. It was more important than cumming, than feeling good, than feeling loved, than anything else people waxed poetic about. Honestly, the thought of all that made her sick. Keith didn’t bother with taking off her clothes, only shoving down her jeans halfway and thrusting in with no preamble. It felt like there was a pit being moved around in her guts, her teeth gritting as her hands scrambled at the wall, not wanting to grab onto him, as if it would make her complicit in something.
He finished quickly, but it took Camille a few seconds to realize — there were dots flickering in her vision. She hadn't eaten since the day before. Keith pulled his pants up as Camille stood, motionless, staring at her with an unattractive, sleazy grin.
“You know what your name told me about you, Cara?”
Camille was drunk enough to not remember. She wasn’t a lightweight, but there was a slow, heavy feeling to everything, a sort of internalness she’d only ever felt when Adora gave her sleeping medication. “What?”
“Easy,” he said. Underneath the fluorescent lights, Camille realized just how ugly he was. “What a shame.”
December 2002
“Hey,” a stranger said, a hint of anxiety in his voice.
It was Camille’s last Christmas she’d visit her family at, suckered into it by her mother’s manipulations and her memories of Marian and Allan’s insistence on getting to know her more. She’d gotten to the library, one of her old places of comfort, by the skin of her neck — still, she’d be hearing about how awful of a guest she was the second she got home.
“Oh,” said Camille. The guy was familiar, but she couldn’t really place him. Though male patterned baldness was setting in at the tip of his egglike head, he was still moderately attractive, with big blue eyes that made him seem younger than he probably was. “Hi—”
The man laughed. “You don’t remember me, I—Chris, Chris Armstrong.”
Camille blinked thrice before finally putting the pieces together. “Oh, god, sorry,” she said. “Sorry, it’s been a long day for me. I haven’t seen you in…”
“Ten years,” he said with a smile. He seemed the same — shy, awkward — if not a bit sadder. He motioned to the blocky chair opposite of her. “Can I sit?”
“Sure.”
Apparently, Chris had gotten a career-ruining hamstring injury by his senior year and lost his scholarship to SLU. He floated around community colleges before committing to UCM for a degree in Library Sciences and returning to Wind Gap. Now that Camille had thought about it, she had seen Chris a lot at the library aside an old woman.
“Oh, my mom,” he’d said, smiling. “Yeah. She’s sick.”
After showing the appropriate amount of sympathy, they’d eventually gotten to joking around, and Camille would’ve been lying if she said it hadn’t made her feel better. Sitting with Angie and Mimi in front of their fireplace had only made her realize how acutely wrong everything in her life used to be, and how acutely wrong everything in her life was. It was nice having someone who didn’t know about everything awful she’d done, who had no idea how badly she was doing at her journalism gig, the dreadful GPA she’d graduated with.
“So, you’ve got a boyfriend at home?” asked Chris. While she knew why she was asking, he had a way about him that still gave some innocence to it, that she couldn’t really hate. “I noticed you don’t have a ring on your finger.”
“No,” smiled Camille. She felt a sad, sinking feeling in her stomach.
“Are you joking?” asked Chris. “A girl like you…”
Chris seemed to catch on to her grimace. “Sorry. It’s just… I don’t know. It’s always just… a girl like you, I mean, I would’ve expected to get someone really fast. You’re a catch, really. I know it’s corny.”
Hatred stewed in Camille, sudden and hot. She remembered Adora’s hands, soft and old and smelling of medicinal cream, grasping her face: “how many boys was it, Camille?”
“It’s not,” said Camille. “You know, I’ve never seen your house.”
The dance towards it, the chase towards the ends of nothingness Camille felt, ended in Chris’ linen sheets, the whirring of his mother’s vital signs monitor upstairs loud enough for Camille to hear it in his room. She hadn’t slept with anyone in a while, having too much work to do and enough cigarettes to burn on her skin for it to come to mind.
“You never let me see you,” said Chris, teetering on a whine. He hadn’t gotten better with age. There was still that nervousness and insecurity in him. “Why?”
Everything about it felt too intimate to Camille — being in his house, in his bed, his mouth kissing her cheeks and temple and neck like a lover would, and she felt sick. He raked his hands down her sides, covered by her sweater, breathing over her with a mouth that smelled of mint. Pink lips. Slightly agape. Surrounded by soft, baby-blonde stubble.
“It’s nothing,” said Camille.
In, out, in, out.
“I want to make you cum,” groaned Chris as his hips stuttered. “Please.”
In, out, in, out. Camille closed her eyes. “I did. Keep going.”
It only took a minute for Chris’ body to out, nearly collapsing on top of Camille. He was hot, sweaty, and soft, the muscles he once had in high school now diminished into doughy white plains.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”
When Camille dislodged him from her body so she could go to the bathroom, she threw up all the wine he’d plied her with.