Roxanne doesn’t bother to lock the door as she exits her apartment. Nothing to steal. A compact green purse, exactly the dimensions of her phone plus a centimeter of padding, hangs from a thin strap thrown over her shoulder. She can mash her unimportant sunglasses and her cutest vape in there too. The walk to the café disappears in the blink of an eye now that it happens every day at the same time.
“Mmhmm,” she nods as the barista gestures towards the espresso machine, preempting her usual order. The card sandwiched in the back of her phone case triggers a beep. Roxanne chooses “20%,” the leftmost option, then slinks to the counter, awaiting her shallow cup.
Every day, the same little round table and endearingly wobbly chair welcome her back. Nobody else ever takes them. She stretches, her tailbone a fulcrum, legs out, back back, before sipping the identical-to-every-other espresso. It never gets any better but it triggers in her an impulse to work. “Work” has deteriorated into hopeless digital begging. A cold blue website glows from her phone, announcing zero followups and zero leads, let alone a job interview. No red bubble materializes to signal good news. Roxanne looks into her cup’s residue; it spreads out aimlessly, randomly, in a way that reminds her of herself.
Arching back up she catches herself in the mirror, looking hunched and bony, almost serpentine — surely unfeminine, the thought crosses her mind until the ponytailed programmer’s gaze flits across her view, reminding her that her own flesh still courses with life and blood and thus attracts predators. This guy is such a creep, she thinks with her tongue pressing into the back of her clenched teeth. He’s there as often as she is but he radiates employment, which somehow stifles her willingness to get up and tell him to fuck off or at least turn the other way. According to numbers in a banking database, she is less than him, so today, she just leers. His eyes dart back to his giant screen. It’s more afraid of you than you are of it, she recalls her dad remarking about a snake on a hike. The greasy programmer’s elbows bend out in some perfect, researched, ergonomic angle, his spine an unbending pole, his wrists padded. His masters’ masters rake in value by the minute and he gets to enjoy a drip of their ichors.
He is disgusting and yet he desires her in perfect, ironic opposition to every job-offer-gatekeeper. I could do that, whatever “that” is — Roxanne cannot imagine that this gelatinous man is so much smarter, so much more capable than she is while looking like that and acting like that. Her phone buzzes her out of her omnidirectional revulsion. She grabs it a little too quickly but then slams it back on its face without finishing reading the whole notification; the word “OVERDUE” tells her enough. She spurts an exhale and then leaves the café in another huff. The elbowed slime attempts to outthink her by drinking in a flash of her through a mirror but she was already glaring straight into it. The panic in his eyes energizes her as she bursts through the door.
The slight heels in Roxanne’s shoes induce a little tension in her calf, lengthening and firming up her legs. By holding her purse’s strap up with a thumb near her clavicle, she improves her posture. Her shoulders slide back and in towards each other, causing her chin to tuck ever-so-slightly and her breasts to sit on her ribs rather than hang off them. In order to pick up her pace, her hips need to sway a little more. At full walking speed she is no longer a serpent; she is a woman and mistakable for nothing else.
“I’m not an idiot,” she utters subvocally. It’s the first internal thought of the day that breaches the membrane of her voicebox.
I’m not an idiot and I shouldn’t be broke—
Her thoughts dive back under the vocal surface and she truncates this one before the word “anymore” can come.
Roxanne flings open her apartment door and spits her built-up disgust into the kitchen sink. The glob, so similar to the man whose gaze it represents, lies in the sink, taunting her, resisting gravity’s pull towards the drain, defiant yet so shameful. Roxanne chooses not to pity the mucus in case it would cause her to pity the mucuslike man who ogled her for free.
For free!
It doesn’t have to be that way!
Roxanne always looks great in her bathroom mirror, wrapped in a cocoon of peeling walls and questionable powders, but today she looks amazing. Her hair lilts songlike and the crack of her lips casts a hooked line. She tilts her head forward but keeps her eyes fixed so that the bottom of her irises just barely kiss her lower lids, roundness within roundness softening her image. She twists her neck a sixteenth of a rotation, first anticlockwise then clockwise. Clockwise looks better because of the whorl of her hair. Without breaking eye-contact with herself, she reaches for her phone and lines up a mirror selfie. It comes out perfect. Even she cannot detect the usual little-girl terror in her own eyes.
She knows she will have to undergo an annoying and degrading logistical setup to take the next step but she pushes it off so as not to ruin the moment. A hesitation screams from within. She slays it. She unbuttons her blouse and lets it fall to the floor. Rather than hiding the towers of bathroom products, too domestic and too real for a photoshoot, she exits the bathroom and reappraises herself in the long mirror tilted against the wall across from her bed. From this angle, from a slight downward tilt, she looks long and leggy. She experiments with the positioning of her phone in her right hand and unhooks her bra with her left. Four transmissions separate her from the image of herself she perceives: eye to phone to mirror to phone to eye. Her left hand pulls her skirt so that she can step out of it. Momentum carries her all the way: she wiggles her underwear to the ground and flicks it out of frame with her foot. Even her pubic hair seems to curl into the late-morning light.
Roxanne stands, taut with momentary confidence, in front of the mirror, more beautiful and more delicate than anything the slimy bottom half of men deserve to ever see, knowing nonetheless that they will pay. They will pay for what they have done; they will pay for what they will do; they will pay her specifically — not specifically, I guess; a million other girls, too — for what she is about to do. She swallows the image of a million terrible, short, pimply, balding, and weak men masturbating in shame, financial shame, refocusing on the legitimate, timeless beauty of her own form, a symphony of curvatures, unattainable except by a considerable sum, enough to get her back on track, enough to slow the “OVERDUE” notifications, enough to ask for some milk in the espresso and tip 30%, the rightmost option, enough to stop doing this thing she hasn’t even quite yet done but is in the process of doing.
Roxanne snaps a series of pictures of herself, naked, tall, tongue-pressed-to-roof-of-mouth, twenty-one years old, alone, broke, desirable as validated by horrible strangers, sexy as long as no one asks her how she feels.
She falls backwards onto her bed with her knees bent and feet on the floor. Her phone is suspended above her in two hands and her elbows point outwards as she picks the five — no, three — best, pictures. She chooses zero. Before getting back up she bites the bullet and sprints through a labyrinth of disclaimers and signup procedures, getting her account ready to receive messages and, more importantly, money from strangers. She chooses a screenname and verifies her age. She types a meaningless and unfactual biography. All her energy is dedicated to pushing thoughts and feelings away. When she bounces back up, ready to try again, the sun has transited just so, so that the light coming through the window flatters her pale figure even more than before. Her tear ducts activate, despite the coldness for which she yearns, glistening her eyes with an otherwordly sheen that makes her even more beautiful than before, someone might think, she thinks, and the shadows cast by her breasts come out even more striking.
For all the difficulty of signup and setup, it is surprisingly easy to upload pictures. She organizes eight into an “album” and then presses a big blue button with a shaking thumb. She collapses onto her bed weeping. Roxanne heaves and heaves, each sob more painful than the last, missing the red bubbles that come in, seemingly instantaneously, notifying her of recent activity.