confused and wracked with self-doubt

[gwynn]

Who: Megan
What: “When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.”
Where: Howl Barrow, &tc
When: Starting Ruudary 18th, covers about a week
Notes: Closed narrative.
Warnings: Sexual assault, rape culture, victim blaming, slut shaming, drug use, disordered eating... also I'm gross, sorry.

“Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. [...] It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.” - White Oleander

Megan has never had time to break down, stopping for even a second on the street was asking for death. She has never been allowed to be that girl, even if, by all rights, she should have had the privilege of it -- knowing as she does that that still means it could have been worse. Everything could have been worse and she's had a lot of people offer to do a lot of things for her that they wouldn't have done if she were a different person, she knows that, yes, but -- the world doesn't lay down every time some mutant girl has a crisis. Even under her parents' roof, she was never that girl; when things happened, they never knew, or at least never noticed. (Like they didn't notice when she stopped eating, except they did, but they said nothing, they thought it was just a phase -- like all girls are supposed to go through this.)

So, no. She's not going to process this. In her mind, there is nothing to process -- she fucked up and did something ill-advised, like usual, and now she's paying for it, exactly like everyone has always told her she will (should). It is very easy to plaster a smile on your face when you spend most of your time on pills. It's a lot easier for her to pretend nothing is wrong and that she's no one, in a swell of bodies pressed against each other, all of them out of their minds. When someone offers her a bump, she takes it. Then two, then three. After that and about a dozen shots, things start blurring together, like pulling a blanket over her head and pretending everything else doesn't exist.

It's not like it's unusual for her to be in a dirty club bathroom at 1 o'clock in the morning, digging the remnants of half-digested pills out of vomit, because that's a waste of a good twenty shekels, which she has, but she's so used to saving up lunch money and scrounging in payphones for change that it's a hard habit to break, this thinking like you've not got any money. Telling her mom she's going to the library and coming back two days later with an empty bottle of oxies. The look on the face of the school counselor who had clearly already written her off as another vomiting, laxative using, hypersexual, drug using statistic, some Barbie-shredded self-esteem by-product, some sad teenage girl. Tell us which magazine did this to you.

It's much easier to point a finger at other women than at the boys in the halls or the men in cars who follow her down the street and tell her to smile. Men who set up impossible standards and then blame you for falling short. Boys who make you need them, then leave you to die a little or a lot.

Somewhere in there, she can't stop thinking about what she ought to have done differently, that she ought to have known better. She ought to have listened when he talked about his roommates' alleged jealousy; ought to have known better than to put men first, again. She knows better than to trust men -- her mother was too late in warning her, Megan was twelve the first time a man followed her down the block and wouldn't go away, and she, too afraid to go home and show him where she lived, had circled the neighbourhood twice, dodging his questions but never telling him to fuck off because good girls don't. Her mother never understood that New York is not Abergylid.

It's always her mother's voice in her head when this happens. Well of course something's going to happen if you go out dressed like a slut. It's not like this is her first rodeo. Fifteen years old, sitting in the dining room at three o'clock in the morning, looking upstairs at the door to her parents' room and willing one of them to wake up, to ask what happened, is she okay -- and knowing what they'd say in real life. What did you do?

There are endless ways she can turn this around so that it's always her fault. She should feel angry that she's been hurt but instead she just feels sick that someone else got hurt over her, and it makes her she feel like she ought to go round apologising to everyone she sees.

She hasn't gone back to work because she can't stomach the idea, right now, of being dependent on more men, but it quickly becomes apparent to her that that's the way it's always going to be. Men have money and power and she has nothing. Men have all the connections -- she is always appealing to some man to get in the door, to get a drink, to get the pills she needs to take anymore to feel halfway human. This is her only value: she has always been Some Guy's Girlfriend. Six-inch heels and a sequined halter dress are calculated business tools, not something she strictly wears because she wants to, and right now she just hates it, all of it. This isn't fun, it's just feeling out the edges of the prison cell life built for her.

The thought of going home with anyone makes her start sweating, but the thought of being alone is worse. She cringes the whole time and keeps downing beers until she falls asleep halfway through. She doesn't know where she is when she wakes up and she panics, grabs her pants, and barely gets them on before she vanishes halfway across the city somewhere she doesn't recognise. She left one of her shoes somewhere else. She'll just have to get it later, or never. Replace them maybe.

She sits down on the curb outside some bar and checks her CiD, flipping through her messages and finding the usual she'd expect. Where'd you go, are you holding, call me back, you wanna come over. Under normal circumstances she'd go through and answer them all, one by one -- it's always good to have people wanting you around -- but this time she stares at the screen blearily for five minutes before she hits 'delete all'.

She is aware that something is deeply wrong and that something has to give, she can't go on doing this forever because she will die, but in staring at her contact list, she can't think of a single name who would genuinely give a shit about what she thinks of as her bullshit non-problems. Waah, I'm sad. As if that matters. As if she isn't lucky to have a roof over her head and food to not-eat, as if she isn't acutely aware of how much worse it could be, as if on the scale of horrible bullshit that happens in Baedal, being sad is at the very bottom of the list.

So she calls nobody.