Yeah, so maybe I'm not the most reliable person to tell this story.
There was a time that I was. I used to be a good girl. I had perfect attendance from kindergarten through seventh grade, when I had to take a day off to go to an orthodontist. I was nice and polite and reliable and bookish and quiet, a real hit with parents: I was the one my folks would trot out for show-and-tell with their friends. My teachers always posted my work as publicly as they could; I have no doubt they talked about me in the lunchroom.
All good things, truly. I'd known from an early age that I was destined to be good at school: teachers would grin and roll their eyes with relief when I showed up on the first day of school. I could read their minds:
Ahh. Meredith Hemmings. Thank God; I'll never lack for a girl to be hall monitor!
I was always in the most advanced reading group, the fastest math group, the slowest phys. ed. group. When there were chalkboards to be cleaned or desks to be straightened, there I was.
Then, at some point, I'd met Natalie Cross.
At the time, we were both in the cruel adolescent throes of eighth grade: awkward, knock-kneed little fledglings with bad skin. We still thought boys had cooties then, though not as many as they'd had in elementary school; we were very secret about the stories we'd tell each other, up late at night in her bedroom, talking by flashlight about our pop-group crushes and our dreams of a bright future, surely right around the corner, when we'd be real grown-up seniors with real social lives.
It hadn't really worked out that way, though. Natalie had tried to get popular as soon as we hit ninth grade, and she'd dragged me to a party the next year. She'd watched from a corner as I'd gone wild, dancing crazily and getting wasted, leaving me pale and sick the next morning.
So then I had an attack of my usual, goody-two-shoes guilt. My parents were heartbroken when I told them what I'd done, so I threw myself into church picnics and community service and I doubled down at school, where the teachers all fell right back in love with me.
They fell in love with Natalie too, though. In a different way. Especially one of them, a history teacher I'd never had, and on a horrible winter night she'd invited me over to her house for a girls' night in. I should have known something was up, though, and I still hated myself for letting the whole thing happen. I'd pissed Natalie off by refusing to write yet another AP English essay for her, and after what she'd done to our friend Chloe I should have been more careful.
But I wasn't, and in short order I'd found myself on my knees on her bed, that teacher of hers all the way in me, and I'll be damned if I didn't get off on it. Just like that. Two adolescent years without a man in me, and all my hard-earned self respect, my careful studying and planning for my safe collegiate future, my motivation and dedication and drive: all of it evaporated that night in Nataie's bedroom. He left me used and bruised and sloshing and disgracefully exhilarated, Natalie gave me one of her spare Plan B pills the next morning, and I got woozily on with my day.
But only after writing Natalie's AP paper for her.
That's when I went downhill, and why you probably shouldn't trust me to tell you this story. I got my first detention session, followed by my first suspension for slapping the teacher who'd taken me. I got into fights and started carrying around my brother's pocketknife. I started dabbling in drugs, boys, men, petty crime, alcohol, anything to give me any amount of control over any part of my life. Because I damn sure didn't have it at school, not anymore: I became Natalie's creature, doing all her work, forging dismissal notes from her parents, even taking her SAT for her, at a school in a neighboring town, relying on the situational blindness of a bored proctor to mistake her drivers' license picture for mine.
Of course, on the day, I wasn't my usual self. Natalie's dark hair matched mine well enough, once she paid for a more stylish haircut to match the typically chic Natalie wardrobe. She also found some contacts, my blue eyes going brown for a very jarring effect when I saw myself in the mirror. The contacts meant I had to wear my glasses, which was fine because Natalie's ID pic had some too.
Thank God we didn't need to do anything about my body, though; the driver's license only mentioned height, which was close enough. But Natalie's lithe, skinny body, with its tiny breasts, its long muscles, and its sleek dolphinlike ass, was nothing like mine. Mine had no muscle tone at all, the shamefully slack appearance of a chronic reader. I'd been ditching PE class regularly, after all, since that night in Natalie's bedroom, and even before that I'd been barely able to run even a mile. But, for all my inattention, my body was still that of an eighteen-year-old, and therefore sexy enough for most purposes. I had nice-sized breasts, a meaty ass, and a set of legs that, even if they tapered a little too abruptly, at least looked feminine in a dress.
And I discovered, that day as I earned a very solid score for Natalie on her SAT, that I liked the cool haircut and the trendy clothes. In fact, I liked the attention I got from the boys at that distant high school, and after the SAT I let one of them take me home for lunch, pot, and a blowjob. I even got topless for him, and as I lay slumped on his basement couch, my wits as rubbery as my nipples, I watched that boy play Xbox and thought about how I could get back at Natalie.
* * *
I'd be going to her house for Halloween, natch: her brother's costume parties were a local legend, where only the coolest of the cool could show up. Of course Natalie had always gone, with her darker and even sneakier sister Nicole; they showed up by default, being that they lived there. And I'd always gone as Natalie's friend, as had Chloe until she'd moved away so abruptly earlier in the year. When I asked about her, Natalie just smiled oddly and said she wouldn't be back.
It's a measure of how fucked-up I was in my life that I still hung out with Natalie, despite what she and that goddamn teacher had done to me. But I was starved, that year, for many things, and she seemed to fill a lot of them. Natalie knew many kinds of people; she never worked but always seemed to have money, and she could get me the Big Three: drugs, booze, and cock. I never knew or cared where they came from. All were usually of low quality, but they got the job done; I had no doubt I was consuming Natalie's own various hand-me-downs and castoffs.
"How are you going to slut it up for our party this year, Mere?" she asked me one night as we shared Skinny Greg, one of her brother's college friends. He lay sprawled across her bedroom floor, blissfully naked. "This'll be the first time you've had to put a costume together since your, uh, let's say your 'sexual awakening.'" She grinned, and I hated her: she'd forced me to eat her out, too, as the teacher ravaged me. I hadn't done a good job, though, which she often teased me about. Like now. "You could show up dressed as the mysterious Phantom Cuntlicker. You know, the one who's not really there?" She laughed harshly as she took a drag.
"Fuck you," I advised. It was getting old, this thing she always did. Very old. I flopped back onto the rug and perched my feet up on Greg's unresisting ribcage. "You're dressing as, what, a French whore?" I blew smoke into the air, already stuffy. "At least the French part would make it a costume."
"Did you hear that, Greg?" Natalie purred, her dark eyes flashing. "She just called me a whore." Greg, whose dick Natalie had just sucked, wasn't about to disagree. Her eyes narrowed. "That's cute, Meredith. I think I liked you better before I turned you into a slut." She nodded decisively, then glanced down to check Greg's readiness. "Fuck him, Mere."
It was vintage Natalie, a peremptory command of the kind a Roman empress might give: callous, saucy, and perverted in its sheer exercise of power. There was no reason at all why I should fuck Greg, but of course that was the point: Natalie was a powerful woman, and she liked to exercise that power by ordering me around. That it always worked so well gave me a sense of uncomprehending shame. And so, not having the first clue why I was doing it, I obeyed. I raised my ass off the floor to get my panties off, straddled the boy, lifted his pale slimy cock, and settled onto it with Natalie chuckling wickedly in the background.
She watched the whole thing, of course, offering helpful critiques of my performance. "Pivot your hips more," or "Faster. Can't you see he's getting bored with you?" She got up at one point, sighing petulantly, and kicked me off of him. Get on your feet, Greggy-boy!" she grinned, licking at her fingers and then wiping them harshly across my pussy. I gasped at the temerity of her intrusion. "She's going to stick her ass in the air and you're going to fucking nail it with your spindly little penis. Full-length, none of this little rabbit-thrust bullshit. Use your legs." She swatted my ass, just as she had that one night, with the teacher. "She's not going to break. Fucking pound that little bitch into the floor."
"Dude." He sounded like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. "Isn't she, like, your friend?"
"She's my best friend," Natalie replied solemnly. "So fuck her good, you limp little muppet." She took hold of his cock, aimed it down at me, and waited until he crouched right behind my butt. "And I'm going to put my finger in your ass when you cum. It'll send you both into fucking orbit." Squatting there with my forehead pressed to the rug and my ass to the heavens, I'd rolled my eyes and waited. And so the night had gone, to the brutal soundtrack of slapping flesh and Natalie's cruel laughter.
That was the night I'd gone to the woman with the cards, not really interested in her scam, mind you; just limping in out of the drizzle as I walked home from Natalie's. I'd had my license suspended after the DUI, and now I was on my feet if I wanted to get anywhere. The leaves blew across the sidewalk in front of me.
I was tired and cranky and Greg was still leaking into my underwear; a rash was coming, nothing surer. The little room where the woman sat had been musky with incense, stiflingly hot; I'd broken out into a flop-sweat as soon as I pushed the door open, but the woman sat there in her black velvet robe, totally comfortable.
"Good evening." She looked at me keenly, her eyes an oddly indeterminate shade of violet? Blue? "Natalie."
"No," I said, startled, shaking the rain out of my bob. I made minimum wage cleaning dishes and hostessing at a diner, and every cent of it went into that bob. "I'm Meredith."
"I know that." I assumed the woman was putting on a fake accent, but damned if it didn't sound genuine, a faint borschty lilt of eastern Europe. "You've come to me about Natalie, though." My silence gave the woman her confirmation that she was right, but she seemed confident enough not to need the reassurance. I was already totally shaken, not even remembering the old Meredith, the excellent student who never would have had anything to do with this bullshit. She'd have laughed, paid ten bucks for a tarot reading, and used the experience for a science fair project on the Barnum Effect.
Now I was mesmerized.
She gestured impatiently. "Come, girl, sit. You stink of sex; you must have much to talk about, pretty girl. Tell me," she winked, "of this Natalie..."
* * *
Natalie's brother, who went by the improbable name of Bart, sniggered as he let me in on the early afternoon of Halloween. "Hi Mere," he leered, winking lewdly at me. "Glad you could make it again this year."
