Night Routine
It was certainly something she meant to keep secret, this late-night luxuriating in front of her mid-century vanity. (image credit: Norman Rockwell)
It was certainly something she meant to keep secret, this late-night luxuriating in front of her mid-century vanity.
Just minutes before, after she lifted her plush comforter up and off her tan, hairless legs, Vera planted both her feet onto the cool wood and squinted at the array of sleeping girls on her floor, searching through the dark for a scintilla of movement. As she stepped around floral sleeping bags and tousled, scattered blankets, Vera barely made a sound; the only noises punctuating the moonlit breeze were her painted toes as they repeatedly became unstuck from the waxed floor. It was an almost-invisible sound, nothing substantial enough to be registered by the dozen sleeping girls, but Alma wasn’t sleeping.
Alma was wide awake in the far left corner of Vera’s attic bedroom, scrunched up like a dead mouse. With her back against Vera’s reading nook, Alma shivered just barely, the parted window above her spilling in air far too cold for mid-August. She had made a conscious decision not to place her pillow directly beside another girl’s head or torso or feet because she didn’t even know these girls, not really, but that decision left her with thousands of goosebumps and the inability to find enough comfort to fall asleep, even for a second. With her grandmother’s knitted blanket tucked over her head, she peered through its gaps, watching Vera step cautiously around her best friends and her lucky acquaintances, occasionally bending down for a closer, more scrutinizing look.
Alma undoubtedly fell into the latter category, only having been invited by Vera’s mother out of pity—something Vera herself confirmed in last week’s study hall when she thrust a green paper invite at Alma, saying, “My mom thought this would be good for you, so.” She didn’t quite look Alma in the eyes, conveniently leaving out why her mother insisted on an invite (or why Vera was acknowledging her for the first time in years), and walked cooly back to her posse with their glossy lips and whiter skin.
The two girls had briefly been friends, once upon a time in early, awkward middle school, and it wasn’t all that interesting how the fall-out happened—Vera grew into the girl she was always destined to be, what with her ex-model mother and her upper-class father whose feet never liked to touch the ground, always flying from New York to France, and Alma stayed… average. As Vera learned to curl her long lashes and her mother taught her how to shave (even her arms, which Alma had called “crazy,” awarding her a week of Vera’s infamous silent treatment), their peers couldn’t help but stare up at Vera like the moon had floated down to earth, landing in their sixth-grade classroom. Meanwhile, Alma had seemed to shrink, becoming her smaller, darker shadow, the side of the moon no one ever sees.
As Vera navigated the limbs askew on her floor, she moved closer towards Alma’s corner by the nook, though she still hovered near the middle of the room. (Alma realized it was nearly the size of her family’s entire first floor.) She prepared to be silently interrogated by the taller girl, steeling her body against the draft, but Vera must have forgotten she was even there because her black, wandering eyes skipped right over her. She had stopped at the legs of either Maria or Liz, whichever one wore a wide, blue headband, and gave a final, cursory glance out at the clump of girls. Vera was seemingly satisfied in her perceived lone awakeness, her tensed shoulders dropping a couple inches before she traipsed over to her vanity, carefully pulling out its matching bench.
Alma’s knitted blanket laid a soft, pastel netting atop her eyes, which slightly obscured her vision, but she was still able to make out Vera at her vanity, examining herself. From Alma’s corner, she could see the miniature skyline comprised of Vera’s perfume bottles, stacks of various creams and sprays; a silvery chain draped over the mirror’s corner; the winding ribbons of the bench’s dark wood, its crafted legs bursting with embossed petals and leaves, around which Vera wrapped her bare feet; the back of her uncannily smooth head, not a flyaway to be seen; her impressively long hair with its loose, gleaming ringlets; Vera’s focused, enthralled face within.
She was hypnosis itself, both the glass spectacle and its bewitched spectator.
Vera tilted her head from side to side languidly, moving with even more care than she had maneuvering around her room and all its limp bodies. She observed her razor-sharp jaw and soft, sloping nose from every nuanced angle, moving slowly yet mechanically, like a solar-powered dancing toy on downers. As Alma watched Vera watching herself, she wondered what she was witnessing and, more importantly, what was going through Vera’s mind, if anything: Is she looking for hairs to pluck? Is she thinking about being sixteen? Does she want a nose job? Is this her night routine?
Vera had been contained when she first sat down in front of her large mirror, taking herself in with restraint, like the deliberate savoring of a coveted dessert. But she soon dove in towards the silvery glass, leaning into herself with her elbows on the wooden surface and her nose nearly touching the mirror, almost with the excitement and eagerness a teenager exudes before a kiss.
She moved with more fervor, beginning to pose for herself (and for Alma, unknowingly), purposefully pursing her lips and popping out her joints to accentuate a thinness here, a hollowness there. Each movement seemed to energize her, her head gaining the ability to swivel and tilt back, her hands now entering the performance, sliding up to her lips and spreading them open, her teeth nearly glimmering.
Alma squeezed her eyes shut, trying to will her body outside of the room. Is she… Alma began to wonder, but she didn’t dare finish the thought. She just really, really wished she hadn’t been awake at all. At first, for a moment, she felt like she was being let in on a secret, maybe even one that might make her feel better about herself or fear Vera less, but now she couldn’t stop shivering with dread. Even her jaw was quivering—but if Alma’s teeth were to chatter, Vera would know she was awake, so she bit down on the enamel hard, deciding to watch anyway.
Vera’s hands left her lips, beginning to glide up her round cheekbones, up her plucked temples, and into her moussed hair as she presented her glowing mirror the left side of her face. Maintaining unbroken eye contact with herself, she parted her lips further, shifted her pointy elbows five centimeters to the front, and stopped as though she had become stone. Her eyes had been bright yet dull the whole time, empty yet wide in the way that one becomes so captivated, they lose the ability to blink, the ability to see clearly. Vera’s eyes twitched—something was wrong. Something had broken her trance.
Instinctively, Alma froze too, her shivering even taking a pause. She stared unflinchingly at Vera’s black eyes, waiting for her to finally blink.
She didn’t, but slowly, with the same composure she illustrated initially, her avidity all gone, her hands descended, falling near her hairline. Her long fingers had been loose as she posed, lax and free to slide up this curve and down that dip, but they now looked stiffer, sharper, full of potential.
Her knuckles rose like ten cats on their haunches, and Alma didn’t realize at first, but Vera was pressing down, digging her nails straight into her perfect hairline, piercing the layers of skin with her pink French tips.
Alma finally understood when the blood started to trickle down Vera’s face, the near-black streaks dripping like rain onto her lashes, her cheeks, her lace tank top. Alma forgot about being stealthy, her hand clamping over her open mouth. Her eyes widened at the sound, her body stiller than a prey animal as she waited for Vera to spin around and lunge at her. She could see it now, Vera’s feline nails shredding her skin, tearing out chunks of her hair, telling her she’d always been ugly, that her whole family is embrujada, doomed to die like dogs, unnoticed for hours on the side of the road. As Alma fought to control her rapid breathing, the seconds passed, and Vera hadn’t yet attacked, not even showing any signs of having heard Alma. She watched the blood begin to bloom across the whites of Vera’s still-unblinking eyes, now solely observing her out of fear.
With a loud, defeated sigh, the first sound from anyone’s mouth since eleven p.m., the bloody girl tugged hard on her skin, tearing off her forehead, her eyelids, then the freckles across her nose, the angles of her lips, and finally, her chin.
Alma’s other hand flew to her face, all her fingers spread out and pressing down, trying to keep her screams inside and her vision concealed. She bit down on the skin of her left palm as tears spilled silently, her teeth now drawing her own blood as she deemed Vera possessed. Not having stepped inside a church or participated in prayer since her father’s funeral, Alma wished she had her rosary back home on her nightstand, scrambling to recite a prayer in her head, hoping her silent pleas could be heard for miles—just not by the girl six feet away.
Alma only saw darkness as she pressed harder onto her shut eyes, imagining that, when she opened them back up, Vera would be there, faceless and open-mouthed and drenched in that heavy, iron scent, peering down at Alma because she finally remembered the only girl she forgot to inspect.
The moments passed, and Alma couldn’t feel Vera’s heat looming above her, so she parted her fingers, immediately nauseous at the sight: Vera’s skin hung from her raw, seeping face like a sheet mask just barely hanging on. Everything was covered in blood, from her chestnut vanity surface to her smooth, manicured hands, and everything was so dark, it could have maybe passed as ink if Vera’s face was still on her face.
Despite everything, it was still quiet in the attic bedroom, though there was now the steady metronome of Vera’s blood dripping onto her vanity and her floor.
Vera’s stillness had returned. Alma’s chest rose and fell wildly as she waited for Vera’s next move, but she just faced her mutilated self in the mirror, her palms wide open against the vanity’s surface. Through the sheen of dark blood, bits of her white sclera peaked through, catching the light of the moon. The muscles of her face appeared to be pulsing, and strands of Vera’s hair clung to the shiny, wet mass of red, beating tissue.
Alma’s gaze reluctantly shifted, grazing over the lumps of sleeping girls that she could see, desperate for another to have woken and witnessed the same horror as she. From her corner, it seemed Alma was alone in waiting for Vera to collapse, to become just another sleeping girl on the floor, until she noticed an open eye half-hidden by a hand. The girl with the wide headband—Maria or Liz, she still wasn’t sure—who laid closest to Vera’s bench, just an arm’s length away, stared at Alma with her one, visible eye. There was nothing to do but blink at each other, blink away their tears, blink to defy their otherwise paralyzed bodies.
Alma felt faint relief as she concentrated on the girl’s green iris, distracting herself with unanswerable questions about what she had or hadn’t seen. She tried to imagine the event from her point of view, so close to Vera’s desecrated vanity and the backs of her legs, but a sudden creak reclaimed the girls’ attention.
As the blood spilled from the vanity onto the floor, inching towards the other girl’s blanket, they couldn’t help but stare up at Vera, just like they always had. Something seemed to spark in her, her spine somehow straightening, her crimson, oozing head somehow lifting. In the same yet entirely changed night, she began to turn her bleeding face from side to side, repeating her languid dance from before, coming alive once more.
wonderful story!
This was amazing! Really unpredictable and the pacing was great!! :)