It Could Have Been Anyone - Her Story
*
"How much longer will you be?" Ben yelled through the door.
"You can't rush perfection!" Alicia answered. Draw an X through the line around her wrist for a stitch, another one, another one, almost finished...
"Can you at least tell me which one you're wearing?"
"I already told you, it's a surprise!" A different, thinner makeup pen, to make an outline around each corner of each X to give them the illusion of depth...
"Honey?" he called. "I thought you were wearing one of the costumes I got, but they're both in here!"
"I never said that!" she replied. "I said I still had to decide, and I decided on something else!"
"But you said we could match!" he jiggled the bathroom doorknob. Good thing she had locked it.
"No, I said it might be nice if we could match! Now leave me alone! I'll be ready when I'm ready!" The thin makeup pen again, making her cheekbones a darker blue...
It was time for the eyes. The white circles around the eyes from her eyebrows to her cheeks were easy. The eyelids themselves would be the hardest part. She used an eyelash plucker to hold her eyelids steady so she could paint them white, one after the other, and then put a black dot in the middle of each, one after the other.
Finally she put the makeup pens down, put the wig on, and studied herself. She was blue everywhere below her panties and above her bra. On her elbows, wrists, collar, cheeks, and legs - basically everywhere that wouldn't be covered by her dress - she had drawn stitches, as if she were Frankenstein's monster sewn together from scraps, or a doll.
She held one eye shut and then the other to check her work on them. She had painted white circles with black outlines around each eye the size of tennis balls, made her eyebrows white as well, and drawn eyelashes on her forehead above the circles. Then she closed her eyes and took a picture of herself with her phone. When her eyes were shut, it was as if the huge, cartoonish white circles were her eyes instead.
She wiggled into her dress very carefully to minimize smudging. Like her skin, it had a patchwork pattern. Unlike her skin, it was four different colors instead of just one: lavender on the left breast, yellow on the right breast and left sleeve, bluish green on the right sleeve and right midsection, and a mix of stripes and spots from the hips down. The dress had pockets, which were hidden by the patchwork pattern.
She shifted her weight and frowned; the skirt was mostly at her knees, but it had a ragged fringe, and she hadn't realized how high some of the fringes ran.
Oh well. It's a costume, after all
.
She stepped back, checked her work out from every angle she could see for one last time, took a deep breath, and called out, "OK, I'm coming." She stepped out of the bathroom and turned right, looking for him in the living room.
"Raggedy Ann?" Ben asked from the bedroom behind her. She heard him and turned, giving him a better look, and he continued, "No, wait... Sally?"
"From
The Nightmare Before Christmas
!" she said nervously. "What do you think?"
"It's cool," he said.
"Thanks. Yours is too," she replied, touching his chest and shoulder armor as she studied it for the first time. She had expected it to be the typical nylon sort of cloth used in cheap Halloween costumes, but it wasn't. Black spandex held together armor that highlighted his pecs, abs, and biceps. The armor plates were rigid plastic of some kind, not cloth padding, and loosely connected. She knew he was lean and wiry, but the armor made him look like a comic book superhero. The bat symbol on his chest helped with that, as did the armored mask.
"I just wanted something a little more unique," she said apologetically. "You know, hand-made."
He scoffed, "You think this isn't unique? Do you know how long it took to 3D print all this?" You know, the utility belt is functional?"
He snapped his fingers. "You can't even see me raising my eyebrows at you because I blacked out my eye holes! Just like in
The Dark Knight
!"
She quirked her lips. "Yes, good job, I'm very impressed by your makeup skill."
She thought he got the message. She took advantage of his silence to get one more barb in. "Anyways, admit it, you just wanted me to dress up as a supervillain to show more skin."
"Hey, that's not fair! I would have been happy if you had gone as Catwoman, Wonder Woman... there are some good Robin costumes you could have worn..." he protested, but he couldn't keep a straight face all the way through that.
"Very funny," she said dryly, one hand on his chest as they spoke. She could almost pretend it was real. She didn't normally like musclebound meatheads, but if it was Ben, it felt different somehow. "Maybe I'll wear a costume in the bedroom with you sometime, but I've always liked this one and I saw a makeup guide I thought I could do really well."
She let him study her for a minute with a nervous smile.
"Mind if I check something?" he asked, and took half a step closer.
"Sure, what?"
He leaned in and gave her his best tender kiss on the lips. Then he laced one hand around her neck, under the wig, gently pulling her to him, and kissed her again, harder, more greedily.
He stepped back, leaving her lips parted, waiting for more. She might have said, "Wow" at that kiss, but he spoke first.
"Nice to know. It's not too smudged."
Alicia's eyes flew open. "Not
too
smudged? It better not be smudged at all!" she pushed past him to the bathroom, turned on the light, checked her makeup. The stitches on her cheeks were indeed smudged.
That jerk
. More blue around the lips, more black to reinforce the stitches and the outline of the lips, one more quick check...
"OK, no more of that until later," she said. She put her hand on his chest as she left the bathroom to keep him a little further away and, she felt guilty admitting, to enjoy his "muscles." She couldn't help smiling when she looked at him. "You might want to clean up too." She wiped her thumb on his lips and showed him a smudge of color.
"Ugh. Sure, I need to use the bathroom anyway."
While he did, she got her purse together and picked out shoes. When he was done, they had the elevator out of their apartment to themselves. He grinned and grabbed her ass at one point, but she swatted his hand away. "You'll smudge it!" she chuckled.
It was a short wait for the Uber. Alicia got in carefully. Her skirt rode up in the process and she hid a smile when she noticed the driver adjusting his mirror.
"So how do you know Gene, anyway?" she asked shortly after they started.
"Well, his younger brother Zach was my best friend growing up, from kindergarten on. I don't even remember not knowing him," Ben began. "Gene's three years older and was always torturing us, or vice versa, it's hard to say at that age. But anyways, I saw less and less of Zach in high school. We grew apart. He got onto the basketball team and I didn't even try out that sort of thing."
"But when I moved down here, my parents told me that Gene had gone to college here and stayed, so I looked him up, and he helped out a ton. I crashed on his couch for a week while I looked for a place of my own. Ever since then we've got together probably more than monthly. Car-pooling home for the holidays, a little actual cooking instead of just eating takeout all week, that sort of thing. We even went on a couple double dates."
"I see," Alicia said. She wondered if it was Sharon, his ex before her, or someone else; he was always cagey talking about her.
"I mean, nothing too interesting. Just very close for a friend of the family, that sort of thing," Ben continued. "I don't know why you haven't met him and Vivian before now, but you'll know a few other people here."
"Well, you invited me to his party last year, didn't you? But I had to work."
"Oh yeah. Sorry. You really missed out," Ben said.
"We had just barely started dating," she said.
"True. Anyways, glad you could make it this time. I think you'll like it."
There wasn't much else to say on the way to Gene's house in the suburbs. "Yeah, I think we'll like it," Ben repeated as they got out of the car. There were skeleton hands reaching out from tree branches and under a bush facing the walkway, a spotlight on the other side of the bush projecting ghosts on the house, and at least two fog machines exuding vapor.
"Okay, wow," Alicia said. She guessed the house would look boring and normal and typically upper-middle-class some other day, but not today. She couldn't even tell what color it was; whatever it would have looked like in the sun or under the wan neutral streetlight was disguised by three spotlights in red, yellow, and orange.
The lurid shadows cast by the spotlights could have come from the bushes or could have come from specters. There were silhouettes in the windows she couldn't quite make out, and dark handprints on the walkway leading to the front door, and fog seeping from several windows.
"Yeah, he goes all out for this," Ben agreed. "Gene worked in theater production in college and for a while after. He got into banking a couple years ago to pay the bills, but I think he uses this sort of thing to indulge his creative side."
Ben led her to the door. It creaked freakishly loudly when he opened it. She reminded herself that you could buy toys for that and the house was a totally normal place, just decorated for the holiday. Probably.
The interior of the house was just as disorienting as the outside. The lighting inside was tinted like the lights outside, but also in greens and purples. In what might have been the living room, they were greeted by a walking skeleton, a wolfman, a demonic clown, a gray alien with an outlandishly bulbous head, and a skinny clownish figure in a top hat. A man and a woman in nondescript black suits and sunglasses were so normal her eyes almost couldn't focus on them.
"Welcome!" someone called. Alicia couldn't tell who until the wolfman squeezed behind the man and woman in suits and approached them.
"Gene?" Ben asked.
"Yes. Wait, don't tell me... Ben?" the wolfman said.
"You got it!"
