CH.12: She wanted to be away from that house. The walk home is the last thing the framework has to carry. December. The bathroom floor. One phone call she could not stop herself from making.
She wanted to be away from that house. She wanted nothing to do with it anymore. She walked.
The cold hit her immediately, clean and indifferent, cutting through the coat and reaching the fishnet beneath it within the first stride. Both openings were still leaking slowly against the satin edges of the panel, the warmth of it cooling against her inner thighs with each step. The smell rose with her body heat as she moved, faint at first and then more specific, the sharper note of piss in the mesh above her waist layering over the musk lower down, carrying upward through the collar of her coat into the December air around her.
A woman passed her on the pavement and turned her head slightly without breaking stride. Amanda noted the turn and kept walking.
Two men outside a coffee shop tracked her as she passed. Not with the usual attention her proportions produced. Something less legible than that. She kept her pace steady and her eyes forward and did not file it anywhere.
The street moved slightly at the edges. Sounds arrived at the wrong intervals. The arithmetic she had been running since October was running now and producing nothing. Just numbers. Just noise.
She kept walking because stopping required something she no longer had.
When her legs stopped, they stopped without consulting her. She went down onto the kerb without ceremony, without a sound. She sat on the concrete in December and did not assess the cold and did not note the smell and did not register the quality of the light. She called a cab because it was the next thing. That was all it was.
The cab arrived. She got in.
The driver glanced at her in the mirror and asked if she was okay. She gave her address. Looked out the window. The four pills were in her pocket. She did not take one. She watched the city move past in the wrong direction and could not have told anyone what she saw.
The driver said nothing further. She was grateful for that. She held onto the gratitude because it was simple and required nothing from her.
The cab stopped in front of her building, its engine rumbling softly as Amanda handed over a crumpled bill. She did not say thank you. Her voice was locked somewhere she could not reach, buried under the weight of the day and everything the day had been built on top of. The sun was still high, harsh and indifferent, the way December sun was, all light and no warmth. She trudged to the door and climbed the stairs to her apartment.
She closed the door behind her and stood with her back against the wood in the silence. The air inside was stale and unmoving. She breathed in and the smell hit her, faint at first, just a hint beneath the cold she had brought in with her. But as she moved further into the apartment it grew stronger, more suffocating, rising from her skin and her hair and the fishnet beneath her clothes, the shed following her home and filling the small rooms with everything she had spent the last hour being.
The weight of it pulled her toward the bathroom. She did not think. She did not put her bag down or look around. She flicked on the light, the dim bulb casting its unflattering glow across the peeling tiles, and turned the shower knob hard, letting the water pound against the basin while she began to strip.
The bodystocking clung to her skin as she peeled it away, each movement slow and deliberate, her mind blank and her hands still moving, pulling at the damp fabric until it finally came free. She caught her reflection in the mirror. Red eyes. Sunken cheeks. Hair matted against her temples from the sweat the session had produced. She looked at the face in the mirror for a moment and did not recognise the specific quality of what was looking back.
The smell was sharper now, filling the small bathroom. She stepped into the shower and let the water rush over her. Hot. Scalding. Almost too much. She stood under it with her arms hanging at her sides and did not move.
Her hands eventually started. Scrubbing her arms first, then her legs, her stomach, anywhere the smell might still be living in her skin. She scrubbed until her skin turned pink and kept scrubbing, the roughness of the sponge biting into her flesh, and it did not matter because no amount of it was reaching what she was trying to reach. She could still feel their hands. She could still hear the shed.
She reached down between her legs. The slickness still there made her stomach turn hard and fast. She scrubbed harder, the soap suds tinged pink where her nails broke the skin, and tilted her head back and let the water run between her thighs and did not feel clean. Her other hand moved to her backside, trembling, repeating the motion. The water ran and ran and the smell faded from the air and did not fade from inside her head where the shed was still happening, where it would keep happening, where Chris's voice was still at its unhurried baseline saying good girl and the cameras were still running their red lights blinking and Mark had stood over her and she had kept her face turned toward him and had not looked away.
She had not looked away.
The soap smelled of lavender. Soft and clean and entirely removed from the cold concrete floor and the overhead light and the drain at the centre and the professional voices discussing colour grading while she lay face down on the wet mattress unable to move.
When she finally stopped she leaned against the tile wall with the water still running down her body, her chest rising and falling in shallow uneven pulls. The images would not stop. The shed. The bench. Rich's floor. The hallway phone. The guitar case. Her mother's three unanswered messages. The frozen ground between the shed and the side door of the house, four pills in her pocket instead of five, walking without deliberation because deliberation required a framework she no longer had.
She pressed her forehead against the cold tile and held it there.
The images of who she'd become would simply not go away.
The days between the shed and Christmas had a quality she had no name for. Not the withdrawal. She knew the withdrawal. She had lived inside it enough times to recognise every landmark. This was something underneath that. Something the pills could not reach regardless of the interval or the dose. Four pills. She took them when she had to and felt the warmth arrive and settle and watched it fail to reach whatever had shifted in the shed and did not try to name what that was.
She did not go to the market. She did not answer her phone. She did not open her mother's messages. She ate when her body demanded it and slept when it stopped being possible not to and woke up in the dark with the shed already present and lay there until the light came through the curtains and got up because lying down had stopped helping.
The guitar case sat in the corner where it had sat since October. She looked at it on the twenty-third for a long time. She did not open it. She put her coat on and walked to the corner store and bought bread and came back and ate half of it standing over the sink and did not taste it and stood at the window and looked at the street below and did not see it.
She took the last pill that evening.
She knew what was coming. She had been here before. The sweating started by midnight. The muscle ache spreading up her back through the small hours. By morning she was on the bathroom floor and her body was doing what it did and she breathed through it the way her father had shown her when she was ten, the technique he had used for pain and cold and exhaustion, the technique that had never failed her before.
It failed her now.
She dialled Rich's number. He did not pick up.
She thought about calling Chris. She held the prepaid phone for approximately four minutes and set it down.
She lay on the bathroom floor and did not call anyone else. She breathed and it was not enough and she kept breathing anyway because there was nothing else to do.
By late afternoon on the twenty-fourth she lay on the bathroom floor in her cotton shorts and sports bra with the phone beside her and watched the light change through the gap under the door and did not move and did not sleep and did not eat and the withdrawal ran its course through her without asking permission and without apology.
The phone was in her hand before she had decided to pick it up.
Her mother answered on the second ring.
Her voice was the voice Amanda had been hearing since before she had words for voices. Warm and immediate and carrying the particular quality of someone for whom Christmas was still a real thing that happened to real people, who had been planning it for weeks, who had three unanswered messages in her inbox and had chosen not to push because she had always known when to give Amanda space and had been hoping for three weeks that she had read this one correctly.
She talked. The dinner. The turkey her father had already argued about twice. Amanda's brother coming up from the city with his girlfriend. The snow they were expecting. Whether Amanda was eating properly. Whether she was sleeping. Whether the programme had been too much this semester. Whether she should come home for a few extra days and not just the twenty-fifth. She talked for forty-five seconds. Perhaps fifty. Amanda lay on the bathroom floor in her cotton shorts and sports bra and held the phone against her ear and felt the warmth of that voice from very far away, the way sound carries across a distance too large to cross, present and real and entirely unreachable, and this time nothing steadied.
Her mother paused.
The pause of someone who has just registered the silence on the other end.
"Amanda?"
The word left her before anything could stop it.
"Mommy... Help."
##_//##** Epilogue **##_//##
It had taken fourteen months. A rehabilitation programme her parents had found and paid for without being asked twice. A year's deferral from the pre-med programme, granted without incident. She had written the letter herself, precise and accurate, omitting the specific cause on the grounds that the cause was covered by an NDA she had signed at a desk in a basement on Eastbrook Lane after stepping to the left side of it because it had been positioned to be approached from the right.
She had returned to the programme. She had completed it. She had gone on to specialise in urology. Her colleagues found this unremarkable. She had never told any of them why she understood the lower urinary tract and the pelvic floor and the specific neurological architecture of involuntary response with a precision that went somewhat beyond what the textbooks alone would have allowed.
She still did not see men the same way. She had stopped expecting to. The ones who tracked her in the hallway between appointments, whose eyes ran the same route they always ran, face to chest to waist, who recalibrated when she snapped on the gloves, she noted them the way she had always noted things. Catalogued them. Filed them in a place that had no name and required no action. Not yet.
Some of those men eventually found themselves referred to her examination room for bladder control issues, pelvic dysfunction, or prostate concerns. They arrived full of the usual bravado, unprepared for the vulnerability of lying exposed on her table with legs elevated and their most private parts completely bare under her clinical lights. She worked with slow teasing hands. She documented every twitch and involuntary leak with the same detached efficiency she brought to every chart. She remained thorough within protocol, yet precise in the ways the textbooks had never taught her. Her patients left her examination room quieter than they entered it. She noted that consistently and filed it without comment.
She had been rebuilt from different materials than the ones she started with. Slower. Denser. Load-bearing in places the original construction had never needed to be. The instrument that remained was not the one her parents had produced and was not the one that had been taken apart and was not trying to be either of those things anymore.