Free Whip Smart: A Memoir by Melissa Febos

those most committed to it that its logic was steady. For a long time,the apparent inconsistencies did not concern me. I was too infatuated with my new life.
    The simplest explanation is that this was the brightest time. This was the time when it was all too new to be understood, when its meaning was not yet even suspected, or speculated upon. In that first fall, I was in the manic flight of a change. Luminous with an aura of new, my excitement, the
high
of it, was distinctly reminiscent of countless shifts I had made in the past. I’d brokered deals with myself to exchange a thing that had lost its power and become banal or frightening for a newer version. I had traded and abandoned lovers in this manner, best friends, mood-altering substances. With each there was always this brightest part: the narrow edge between the exhilaration of the new and its descent into corruption, mundanity, or the sort of wildness that is less likely to sweep you off your feet than to crush you. Here the comfort of routine that other people seemed able to sustain was briefly attainable. On this peak, beyond the reach of both what came before and what was sure to follow, I was not only happy; I was also invincible.

Part Two

8

     
     
     
    I STILL HAVE the first photographs taken of me at the dungeon. My building a clientele depended on publicity, I was told, and pictures were needed for the dungeon’s Web site (an impressive spectacle itself). They also ran in the pages of local fetish magazines with our phone number emblazoned below my face. Within my second month of working, before I had even earned enough to purchase my own clothing, Fiona showed up one evening with a bag of cameras and commandeered the Red Room for an hour. At least the cost of her art school education was getting put to use, she claimed, which was more than could be said for most.
    The first photo they published was a full body shot, in profile, with my face turned toward the camera. Propped on a large wooden chest, I have one heeled foot on the floor, the other leg dangling over the edge of the chest. Without stockings, my legs are painfully bare. I would not say this while observing a recent, bare-legged photo of myself, but my self-consciousness of that day returns so clearly to me now that I cannot help seeing the picture through the lens of that memory. I might never have felt so naked before. I hadto borrow clothing, and the tiny hot pants left the bottom of my ass exposed, while the strapless bustier must have been two cup sizes too small. My mother frequently commented back then that my dyed-black Betty Page haircut looked like a wig, and I agree now more than ever. If I did not remember the night so vividly, I might not recognize myself. My hair is natural now, a brown so light that it shocked me after the years of black, my face leaner, and my eyes open in a way that makes those in that old photo impenetrable by comparison, even in their stark innocence. It was in my innocence that I had so much to hide.
    In the grainy version that ran for months in the fetish magazines, you could not make out one detail that I can see now on the disc I have of the whole roll. In the crook of the arm that braces me against the trunk is a shadowy smear. It is of both the mismatched makeup that I used to apply there and the bruise that it was meant to conceal. Perhaps no one noticed on those night shifts my elbow’s mismatched inside or that I carried my purse into the bathroom before many sessions and emerged with a voice an octave deeper and the pupils of someone poised beneath a floodlight. I might have been as good at my hiding as I thought I was. But when I think back, it is more likely that I confused ignorance with apathy. I underestimated the wisdom of my witnesses, who could see the futility of intervention, that my course was inobstructible.
    If the day shift was the office, with its comforting predictability and gossip traded at the watercooler, then the night shift