Free Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton

energy. His silhouette in the moonlight was darker than his buddy’s. His shadow was longer on the ground, too.
    The evil guy said, in a lowered voice, “If you show ’em to us, we’ll let you girls get back to your party.”
    I offered to show him my underwear, but nothing else. You can’t even touch it, I said. I wanted them to go away, and this was the quickest way. We made a deal, and I presented from under my long skirt a pair of dark pink satin underwear that had small ruffled fringes around the seams. Small white polkadots, too, that glowed in the dark. I’d just got them at the mall a few weeks before. They’d looked so cute in the store, but now the dots took on this sickly appearance, as if the panties had measles.
    He took the underwear from me and rubbed the back of his hand on them. We all sat quietly, waiting to see what he’d do next. He spat in them, a big loogie, not just spittle, then rubbed it around and handed them back.
    “Put ’em on,” he said firmly.
    I pulled them halfway on, thinking he’d never know, but he told me to lift up my skirt to make sure they were pulled all the way up. He brushed his paw against my crotch to make sure the spit was touching it. I was so pissed, but totally quiet. After all, I could take a shower when we got back.
    The next day on the phone, in hushed tones behind locked bedroom doors, we talked about how twisted those guys were, how disgusting and perverted and pathetic men could be, and how desperate they must have been. There was no real issue of whether or not I was all right, because he hadn’t hurt me. I just kept thinking about how slimy the spit was, and I tried not to picture it—brown and dark yellow, like men’s loogies are when they smoke. I pictured my underwear out in the road where I’d tossed them from the car window. I saw them being driven over by car after car. I thought, if I ever saw that underwear on the rack at a department store I’d rush to the bathroom. Worst of all, I pictured the guy home alone afterwards, thinking of my crotch and getting busy in his loser armchair.
    It’s not that I was afraid to watch horror movies after that, but we just got out of the habit because we were always sneaking out to get drunk instead of staying home in our pajamas like a bunch of pussies. Sleeping bags are like cocoons—teenage girls are the pupae. We lay around in warm sacks awaiting metamorphosis so we could buy bras with bigger cup sizes.
    As an older teenager, I thought back to the slumber party days and wished we’d done more things at home that we’d seen in the movies, like have pillow fights in our lingerie. But we didn’t even have lingerie. Did polka-dotted pink panties count? I didn’t think so. I didn’t understand what steps I’d missed. We went straight from watching gory movies to getting bored with gory movies to getting drunk or high because we were bored. But now that I wanted the innocence back, I couldn’t get it. Pillow fights were fake and stupid. Flipping through yearbooks was fine, but it wasn’t a Friday night activity. Mostly, I just wanted to hang with my girlfriends, smoke weed, and not be harassed.
    Now when I watch Slumber Party Massacre or The Last Slumber Party, and I see girls chewing gum with their tits bobbing up and down beneath their cropped T-shirts while wearing their whitest, cleanest panties, I trip out on how they seem so carefree and cheerful while getting their lives interrupted by men who can’t control themselves. I think of a reverse chrysalis— like they’re kids who come out of a paradisiacal state only to enter their own personal hell. I didn’t like being ensnared, but now I appreciate watching it happen on screen—I feel pleasantly satisfied knowing the girls’ fates ahead of time, almost as if I’m the killer. I know that he wants the same thing I do, to see girls at their cutest.

TILES
    Did you ever see that picture of the mouse with a human ear stitched onto its back? The