Cursed

by L’Erin Ogle

Gift Habeshaw

Editor’s note: This story contains graphic depictions of sexual violence.

“But why did you get in the car?”

That would be the first question they asked me, if I lived.

Do you believe in curses? Final Destination type shit? Death misses you, there’s a glitch in the Matrix, all that?

I do.

I have gotten in strange cars with strange men twice in my whole life, or every time the opportunity arose. Depends on how you look at it, I guess, and what you call a stranger. I’ve always ridden in cars with men I didn’t know well, but I’m talking about the two important times.

The last one killed me. I’m not much for surprise endings. Besides, are there really surprise endings anymore? Everything that could ever happen to someone has already happened, more than once.

Why’d I get in the car? The first time or the last time?

The second time was because it was cold. Ricky thought I did the last of his blow and we had a regular old screaming match, and then he round housed me. If I had lived longer, the red rose bloom across my left eye would have turned into a violet lily. It would fade, from red to purple to the faintest blue, to the dark shadows of a forgotten person.

Back to the cold. It was the kind of cold where I could feel my leg hair growing, bursting from my skin, thorny like a cactus. Some girls, I’ve been told, have soft, downy hair on their legs, they don’t even bother to shave. Not me. I’m a regular Chewbacca. When I was real down on my luck, I lifted razors from Wal-Mart, got banned from one when caught, but it’s 2017 and nobody gives a fuck anyway. But I was standing there, still sort of stunned from the blow, no car, nowhere to go. All those bridges had been burnt long ago, dynamited right out of fucking existence. The medicinal taste of coke dripped down my throat and my nose ran.

So, when the fat dude in the Caddy pulled up, I thought two things: first, he’s too fat to be dangerous, and second, maybe he’s got some more blow. He was fat enough that I thought he might be one of those desperate types who would be so fuckin grateful any woman would ride in a car with him, he’d be easily controlled, and generous with any mind-altering substance he happened to possess.

Like usual, I was wrong about everything. Even the blow, which I’m more disappointed about than anything. I’d have liked to go out high, the kind of high where everything moves nice and slow, blurry and like it’s not even real. Time goes by, and your heart pounds like a fuckin drum at one of those tribal things, or a heavy metal concert. But you barely feel it. It’s knocking out your chest and you don’t even care. You just want to watch time drift by, seamless and not cluttered up with life.

He didn’t have any blow and he was dangerous, and the worst part of it is I think he meant to rape me but not kill me. When he came, he sagged down and collapsed onto me, and I couldn’t get no air. Maybe my heart and lungs were all banged up from the dope. Made me weak. But it gave out. I died under a fat guy who pinned me down with his big ass body, and the life drained out of me while his dick shriveled and retracted. I’m not sure if he left my body before my last breath. Does it matter?

But really, the second time comes back to the first.

I was twelve, sitting outside the strip mall where TCBY yogurt was. I had on Bermuda shorts and a tank top, loose and wrinkled. I didn’t wear makeup then, or smoke, or do much but wait for my mom to get home from her job cleaning. She always smelled like bleach. I guess it didn’t matter since her hair was always bleached that cheap platinum blonde. Maybe people didn’t know it came from cleaning houses, thought it was from her hair. What I’m trying to say, is that I wasn’t doing nothing wrong.

Maybe I had taken two dollars from my mom’s change drawer, mostly nickels and dimes, two quarters. She always noticed the quarters. I came up to TCBY, thinking about how middle school sucked just as much as elementary school. I tried to get in with the popular girls once, went up to them on the playground, asked if I could be in their group, just like that.

“Can I be in your group?”

Must have been real fucking funny, but no one laughed. “You’re too poor,” Jessica told me.

Still remember that bitch’s name. Ricky always said I had the memory of an elephant, I guess because every time we fought about something, I managed to bring up every misstep he ever took, every time he hit me, called me a name, talked to another girl, any and everything, right down to the time he cheated on a card game to win a dime bag.

There were other girls who were poor who were popular. They weren’t really different than me, but maybe they had something else. I don’t know.

I was thinking about that day, and how after that I was so mean to this kid Shaun, called him Boogerman for the rest of grade school. Meanness catches I guess. Reproduces and spreads through the world.

Anyway, this guy in a van pulled up, and he asked me if I needed a ride. I didn’t, but I said sure anyway, and got in the car. It smelled like old grease, and had fast food wrappers crumpled everywhere. Mostly yellow ones, but I can’t remember from where. Maybe McDonalds, maybe Rally’s, maybe a fuckin gas station, I don’t know. Does it matter?

I don’t know why I got in. I guess because I was bored, or I was always told to be respectful, or whatever. Mostly because no one ever paid attention to me, not unless they had to. I got in, and then he started driving. My house was only a mile but before we got there he tried to give me a wine cooler. Strawberry, already open, but I didn’t have any desire to drink. I was TWELVE.

No thanks, I said. Turn right here, I said. My house is right down there.

He passed it, said ooops. My heart sped up, and the hair on my neck stood up.

“You want to have some fun?” he asked. “Make a little money?”

I got scared. I guess I didn’t know, then, exactly what he meant by that, but I do now. I knew something was wrong. That I was in trouble. I guess I should have listened to all those stranger danger talks at school.

To be real, I used to fantasize about being kidnapped or dying in some awful way. Not because I wanted to die, but I wanted to be missed. I wanted people to be sorry for my loss, to realize I was a real person, that I had some kind of potential.

I was brave enough to be murdered then.

He had to slow down as we approached the next light, cause I jumped out. The car wasn’t stopped but it wasn’t going fast, and I landed on my ankles. They buckled and my knees met the concrete head on. Skinned the hell out of them.

Told my mom I tripped on a curb. Never said anything about it, to anyone.

Didn’t get raped or murdered or any of that.

After that, nothing was no good anymore. Everything got dimmer.

Two years later, I chugged Boone’s Farm, and lost my virginity to a guy at a party, then his friend. When I was lying there, too drunk to even think much about what was happening, I swear I could smell strawberries, like that wine cooler. The next day, the blood in my panties looked like burst strawberries. I didn’t have any friends after that, when everyone heard about that.

I guess I should have known better, but I’d never drank before. And I didn’t know. Sometimes, people will judge you really hard for shit they think you should have known.

There was this guy, I worked for in high school, who told me he didn’t think people had been very kind to me before. I thought that might be the nicest thing anyone said to me, because it was like he saw me, really saw me. I thought that meant something. It didn’t. He used me, too. He just pretended he was upset about it and didn’t mean to.

Things just kept happening like that, and by the time that second car pulled up, I knew everything came full circle. I might have told myself it was for blow or a warm car, but really, I’d been cursed since the first time. Destiny missed me once and came back for me. It had known all along I was better off dead.

And now I’m here, and I don’t have anything to do, but think about where it all went wrong.

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L’Erin Ogle is a writer from Lawrence, Kansas.