Fiction: Sicko

By Amy DeBellis

 

 

“I alwayssss knew astrology was bullshit,” the girl is slurring. I can smell the stomach-turning scent of straight tequila seeping from all her pores. She sways as she speaks. Her eyes are so wet and soft they’re practically dripping down her face. “Supposedly I’m, like, a Gemini?” She snorts. “But I’m the complete opposite of a typical Gemini. I’m not a social butterfly. I’m more like a social…caterpillar.”

“But caterpillars turn into butterflies,” a man standing with us in the hallway puts in, as though he can’t help himself. His girlfriend grits her teeth and yanks on his arm. I can almost read her thoughts: It’s not worth interacting with this weirdo just to use the bathroom. Let’s find another one. 

As though most Brooklyn walk-ups have more than one bathroom. 

“A social worm, then,” the drunk girl says, turning her more-liquid-than-liquid eyes to the man, who is now physically being pulled away by his girlfriend. “A worrrrrm.” Once he’s gone, she fixates on the only person left in the hallway outside the bathroom: me. For a second her gaze hardens. “What’s your sign?”

“Uh, Leo,” I say, not because it’s true—or maybe it is, I have no idea—but because it’s the first sign that pops into my head.  

“A Leo,” she says, somehow managing to slur even this word that doesn’t contain any S’s, and cocks her head as though examining me. “Interesting.” 

I will myself not to blush as I stumble over my reply: “Good interesting or bad interesting?”

She grins. Her canines are startlingly sharp. “Bad,” she hisses, “very bad,” and at that moment, the bathroom door finally opens. She pushes past the man who emerges and a moment later I hear her emptying the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl. 

Yet somehow, when she returns, she has not become any less interesting to me (good interesting). I keep thinking about those canines, which look as though she’s filed them to points. Bizarrely, the idea of her standing in the mirror and doing this sends a surge of electricity through my groin.  

“I think astrology is bullshit too,” I offer, and she snickers as though, despite the turbid screen of her drunkenness, she can see exactly who and what I am—

loser weirdo virgin freak 

—the way every girl can. But then she shrugs and says, “That’s a relief.” She’s slurring less. “But I have to ask you something else…” She sidles closer and I automatically home in on her face: mascara globbed onto her eyelashes, glitter spread over her cheekbones like dust from ancient stars. Her blue eyes are bright and fervid. “Are you as horny as me?”

Despite the fact that she still smells like tequila and now a little like vomit, despite the fact that I know nothing about her other than her astrological sign (which apparently doesn’t even apply), I can feel my body responding. My body is saying YES, UNEQUIVOCALLY AND ABSOLUTELY YES, DANIEL!!!

But Daniel (me) is the one who has to reply. I manage, in a dry sort of rasp, “Probably.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You don’t know?”

“I can’t honestly answer that without knowing how horny you are, if we’re to do a comparison,” I say, feeling like I’m back in my freshman Philosophy class. Listening to the words coming out of my mouth, I feel like a creep, but then I remind myself that she started this whole “horny” conversation. 

And she’s not even that drunk anymore. Is she? She seems steadier; she must be sobering up.

“You talk so…old-fashioned,” she says slowly.  

“Oh—oh yeah. It’s cause I grew up watching really old movies and TV shows. My parents didn’t let me watch cable TV until I was fourteen. So instead of SpongeBob I grew up on, like, The Honeymooners, Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, I Love Lucy…” Why am I listing them out? “Stuff like that.”

Her gaze is politely blank. A little ditty begins playing in my head: A loser, a weirdo, a virgin, a freak! An incel, a failure, a fuckup, a creep! It even rhymes. At least it’s not the first time I’ve messed up a chance with a hot girl. I’m used to it by now; even my height and symmetrical features and positive canthal tilt can’t make up for my crippling social inadequacy. 

So, I turned away and stop when her hand closes around my arm.

“Hey, hey. Did I say you could go?” 

I turn back to her. 

“I think it’s cute that you’re not like other guys.” Is there a hint of contempt in those last few words? —But no, she’s smiling again, I must have imagined it. I realize that she doesn’t mean it in a bad way. As in: I’m nothing like the Chads with 200-plus body counts that she’s undoubtedly used to, and she’s probably sick of their shit, their posturing, their muscles bulging but their minds slack and feeble from never going to a philosophy class once in their lives—

I ask: “So…on a scale of one to ten…how horny?”

I tilt my head, smirk like I’ve seen in the videos.

And she responds like a flower opening to the sun. She stands on her tiptoes and whispers into my ear, and the heat from her breath sends shivers over every single inch of my skin: “Oh we are way, way past ten at this point, baby.”

 

At my place, the lights are low. The music is low. Everything is low except for my pulse, and hers—lying on the bed, I can feel our hearts thudding against each other like two battling animals. We kiss until I think my lips might bruise. This is way further than I’ve ever gotten with a girl before, in all my twenty-two years, and my hands tremble the slightest bit as I take her shirt off.

Melissa—I learned her name on the Uber ride back to my place—is not wearing a bra. Her breasts are perfect; her waist is perfect; everything about her is perfect. I kiss down her chest, trying without words to impart my gratitude to her for choosing me, but then the next second I remember that girls don’t like that, that I need to act confident and collected as though I’ve done this a dozen times before…

Something odd, though: she’s sighing and moaning and arching her back as she pushes her nipple into my mouth, but it sounds like the professional porn I sometimes watch. Not the amateur porn, which I honestly prefer, which sounds more real somehow—no, Melissa’s moans sound rehearsed. I even think I see her roll her eyes at one point. 

I consider asking her if she wants to stop. But she’s not telling me to stop. 

And anyway, I don’t want to stop. My hands trace over her jeans. 

“Hang on a sec,” she says, smiling, suddenly bashful. “Can you wear these?” 

She pulls away and leans over the end of the bed, rummages around in her oversized purse and presents me with a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. “Don’t worry, they’re not prescription.”

I slide them on, blinking. “So, these are…role-play glasses?”

She sticks her tongue out at me, looking somewhat relieved that I’ve agreed to the glasses without argument. “They’re just fake glasses, bozo. I got them from the costume shop for like two dollars.”

“Okay, so you like guys with glasses! That’s cool. Uh, sorry for my 20/20 vision.” I laugh.  

She laughs too. “And…can you wear this as well?” She rummages around in her purse some more and comes out with a saggy, slightly stained white tank top. 

“Sure,” I say, as though this is not at all weird. It could be worse, I think. She could want to suck on my feet, or something. 

I put the tank top on. It’s big on me, like it was meant to accommodate a beer belly. 

Without speaking she reaches for her purse again—it must be a clown-purse at this point—and yanks out a bunch of denim that she unfolds into…overalls. 

She slides off her jeans and underwear, tossing them emotionlessly onto the floor, and my heart starts pounding at what feels like double-time. She catches me looking, grins—sharp canines ferine in the low red light from my lamp—then begins pulling the overalls on. 

I can immediately tell that these aren’t fashionable overalls designed for adult women. Despite being almost tight on her, especially through the hips, they don’t cling to her curves; instead they are boxy, shapeless. Nor are they faded at intentional, flattering areas. They’re faded pretty much everywhere. The cumulative effect is of something old and almost…handmade. In fact, it looks like sections have been ripped apart and stitched back together, with patches of slightly different-colored denim added at the seams, as though—

Calm down you complete blockhead it’s just a kink, who gives a shit if she likes glasses and tank tops and hand-sewing her own overalls, what’s your fucking problem like do you really want to sit here with your dick in your hand and give her a fashion once-over, you’re about to get laid for the first time in your life you loser so don’t fuck it up don’t fuck it up DON’T FUCK IT UP

—as though she’s taken apart a very old pair of overalls, ones that fit her a long, long time ago, and made them larger. 

“You going to pull a person out of that purse next?” I joke, trying to get rid of the lump of ice that has formed in my stomach. The fake glasses start to slide down my sweaty nose. I push them back up. 

“Nah.” Melissa grins up at me. “I like my sex one-on-one.”

And that word—sex—lights up a billion neurons in my brain; it shoots back through a million years of evolution. I fall onto her and kiss her so deeply that I feel like we’re about to meld into one person. 

“I have a question,” I say finally, against her lips.

“Yeah?”

I try to make my voice low and suggestive. “How am I meant to fuck you through these?” I brush my fingers against the crotch of the overalls. Even through the thick denim, I can feel the heat coming from her. 

“Oh.” She giggles, not sounding surprised at all. “Easy! They unsnap. Like this—”

She snaps the panel open. She’s so wet she’s already leaked all over the denim, and without thinking I touch my fingers to that wetness and put them in my mouth.

I thought women liked that—at least, that’s what I always read, always heard—but she frowns and sighs. 

“No,” she says impatiently. “Don’t—it’s not like that.” 

“No?” I freeze with my dripping fingers halfway out of my mouth.

She grins again and pulls my face closer to hers. I’m staring into the deep pools of her eyes, not blue but a febrile red in this light, as she whispers, “There’s some, uh, dialogue instruction that we need. For me to get…ready.”

“You seem pretty ready as it is,” I say, showing her my shining fingers. 

Wrong move. Melissa’s face hardens like it did in the line outside the bathroom, just before she asked me what my astrological sign was. “Just because my body is ready doesn’t mean I am.” Her voice is steely, her eyes burning like dying coals, and I nod. Okay, fair.

“It’s simple. I won’t torture you too much longer. Just say, in the deepest voice you can…” She draws in a breath, as though preparing herself for something. 

I don’t even take offense to her implication that my voice isn’t deep enough. I wait, anticipation surging within me. I expect her to say You’ve been a bad girl.

I expect her to say You’ve been a VERY bad girl.

I expect her to say Are you ready to be punished?

I do not expect her to say, in a hideously deep voice that should not be coming out of her throat:

“So, how old are you now, Melissa?” 

My brain stutters. Glitches. 

Freezes into ice. 

“Say it in a really deep voice, like that,” she instructs, but something has descended over my vision like a grate, blurring and scattering everything. I scramble off her. My dick is suddenly wilting; all the blood seems to be rushing back up to my head, and I stumble back, off the bed—

“Hey, hey, where are you going?”  

“What is this?” I manage thickly. “What’s this—” I pluck at the tank top and only now do I register that it is just as ancient as the overalls, the cotton thinned and fraying at the hem. I strip it off and throw it on the bed beside her. I snatch the glasses off my face and throw them onto the bed, too, so hard they bounce to the floor.

“What’s your problem,” Melissa says flatly. She glances down at my flaccid dick, raises her eyebrows. “What, you need a pill or something? Can’t get it up, huh?” 

I should be angry, but anger doesn’t come. I’m still too full of cold horror. “I could get it up fine until you whipped out the freaky little-kid overalls!”

Shit shit shit, what if I’m wrong, what if I just made her think something horrible by saying little-kid—

But I’m not wrong. Her nostrils flare. Then she screams. “Why can’t you even do this one thing?” She grabs the tank top from the bed and hurls it back at me. I don’t bother trying to catch it; it falls onto the floor. “Why can’t you do this one thing for me? I could tell you were a pathetic virgin, and still, you can’t—you won’t—”

“I don’t owe you anything,” I say, my voice shaking, but she acts like she doesn’t hear me. 

“You’re just like every fucking guy! You thought you could just take a drunk girl home and do anything to her, anything at all, and nobody would be any the wiser—”

“What? No, I didn’t,” I say, stung by the unfairness of this. “First of all, you weren’t that drunk, at least not after you threw up in the bathroom at the party—”

“Even better! A drunk, puking girl!”

“—and I didn’t try to do anything at all to you, that’s complete bullshit, you were the one who wanted me to re-enact your freaky Electra complex, and that’s way out of my comfort zone—”

“Oh, all of a sudden, he has comfort zones! And it’s Oedipal, moron! What the hell is an Electra complex?!”

“The Electra complex is the female equivalent of the Oedipal complex,” I say in a quieter tone, feeling absurd, and she nods, and for a second we’re civilized rational humans relating to one another on a logical and equitable playing field or whatever but then the next second the blood starts roaring again and she bellows, “Fuck you! You’re just like every other man on the planet. You’re a—” Her voice lowers and she swallows audibly. “You’re a sicko. You can’t get it up for a woman when she’s willing, oh no, but I bet one day, one day, you’ll get it up eventually, for—for—”

Her voice breaks like a snapped bone; she can’t finish. 

God knows what’s waiting at the tail end of that sentence.

She leaps off the bed, still in the overalls. She strips them off, and now she is totally naked in the blood-colored light, but I’ve never been less turned on. I can’t stop thinking about those fake glasses and that stained, fraying tank top. I can’t stop thinking about the deep voice I was meant to emulate. 

I can’t stop thinking about how old she might have been.

Melissa pulls her clothes back on. The glitter on her cheeks catches the light like tears. She folds the overalls and the tank top, actually folds them, and carefully picks the fake glasses up from the floor. She puts all of these things delicately, almost reverently, back in her purse.

Then she stands and storms out. The door slams behind her. 

My knees folded of their own accord and I sink down onto the edge of the bed. My head falls into my hands. My heart is pounding like a war drum. I close my eyes, willing the avalanche of events that just came down on me to be a mirage, a hallucination, a dream—

How old are you now, Melissa?

I stand up, limbs jerky. I walk around the other side of the bed to the bathroom, with the hazy idea of taking a shower to wash away all the ugliness of the last hour—

—and stop when I see something glinting on the ground. Right where Melissa’s purse was. 

I kneel. I watch the metal throw off scarlet light. My vision swims; my mouth dries up and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth—but in another corner of my brain I’m not surprised at all. It really was a clown-purse. Anything and everything could have been inside it. And was.  

I think about touching the gun, but I don’t. Instead, I call the cops. As I wait for them to come, I scroll through my social media feeds. I watch all the hot models and influencers I follow replace one another in a steady stream. I wonder how many of them still have old pairs of overalls, or tiny socks, or ragged ponytail holders. Whose memories are a locked box that can only be opened with a gun.

 

 

 

 

 

Amy DeBellis is the author of the novels All Our Tomorrows, Methuselah, and The Widening Gyre. Socials: Instagram: @amykatherrrine and X: @amykdebellis