Kaye Branch lives in Oregon and Massachusetts.

Lipstick Smears (October 20, 2009. Issue 10.)

At first, Kai assumed the girls’ face was covered in blood as he watched her run into her car. As procedure dictated, he didn’t ask for directions; he just drove her to safety. Then he made his offer.

“I’ll take you anywhere,” he offered, as a formality. She already knew the agreement.

“The dorms,” she sputtered.

Kai smiled and gave what he hoped was a reassuring nod. Then he realized she wasn’t bleeding- it was lipstick. All over her cheeks. She’d gotten vandalized.

“It’s not your fault,” Kai said.

**

Even over three time zones, Ciel knew Jenica’s schedule freakishly well. She knew that Jenica would be in her room, late morning, in bed, but awake. Her timing was perfect- Jenica was alert enough for it to sink in as bright pink letters appeared on her mirror.

“It wasn’t love,” the writing on her mirror read.

Jenica had to touch it. In some ways, it was her mess. When she felt it with her hands, it confirmed that it was lipstick. When had tomboyish, masculine Ciel gotten lipstick?

Jenica replied with one of the dry-erase markers she used for her whiteboard- the pink one. Things just seemed more normal when the colors matched.

“What was it?” she wrote back.

“Corruption of power.”

**

When Kai stopped at the stop sign, he realized that he only had five minutes left until he made it back to the dorms, barring an accident. Traffic had been light, so far, and he could hope.

“It’s all about lies from here on out,” the girl said.

“You don’t have to cover up what he did.”

“He was inside of me. It doesn’t matter. You can’t change the insides.”

**

Lisbeth had seen Lisa’s face only once in his hotel room.

“She’s going back to school,” her husband told her. “Soon.”

Lisa looked her right in the face, as she lay sprawled on her bed, underwear halfway to her ankles. Didn’t Lisa see she was still young and needed protection?           

“The world’s scary,” Lisa said. “And no one can protect you. But there’s redemption.”

Redemption? Lisbeth wasn’t sure if she needed it. All she did was lie down, naked, as per request.

“Thank god we never had girls,” he said, looking up at Lisa.

“Thank god.”

It sounded like a ritual.

**

Mikah kept staring at the sixth-grade class picture of the twelve-year-old girl. She was one of her fans, from when she was still fresh and landed a television show with low ratings but a huge cult following. Twelve was a little young to watch what Mikah had done, pretending to be a sixteen-year-old, but even in the photo she seemed older. Her shirt was baggy and, besides her face, all that was visible. Mikah remembered experimenting with make-up at that age, but the girl obviously wasn’t wearing any. And she was smiling, like you were supposed to in a class photo. Her lips opened just wide enough to reveal that she was wearing braces. Her brown eyes stared off into the distance, a certain weight bearing down on them.

The picture wasn’t the original. Anyone could tell by looking at it. Mikah was running low on colored ink and the quality was so bad it was hardly recognizable as a picture of a girl. She couldn’t get the original; the negatives had doubtlessly been lost in the past seven years. The girl wasn’t twelve anymore, but nineteen.

At twelve she’d watched an entire episode, where Mikah, pretending to be sixteen again, frantically discussed her virginity and the decisions she’d have to make soon about when to have sex. And she’d understood it. She’d never missed an episode.

“Before I saw you, I thought you didn’t make the choice,” she’d said. Out of the same lips that had once almost covered braces and refused lipstick. “I thought men just jumped on you, whenever they wanted.”

It was Kafkaesque. Mikah knew the term well, having been exposed to it many times while acting since it had been introduced to her in her high school English class. Kafka liked to bend reality and create a new version where hope didn’t exist. It wasn’t real. You could close the book at the end. Whatever you took from it was benefit and not your fault. Kafka’s writing never stared you in the face, like that.

**

“I have power,” Jenica, perched over her mirror, wrote back.

Jenica knew that Ciel smirked before she wrote out the next sentence, in that ironic way she’d picked up somewhere in the transition between childhood and adulthood. It was her own take on her mother’s incessant, distinctive laughter.

“If you had power, you’d be a virgin.”

“Where’d you get the lipstick, virgin?”

“I’m not. Haven’t been in a _long_ time. I’ve got lipstick because I’m backstage.”

The word “long” was underscored three times, each strike staring Jenica right in the face. When had it started? When had she lost it, without telling her?

“You’re acting?”

“The last time I wasn’t, I wasn’t a virgin. Welcome to the club, ‘ho.”

**

Kai pulled up as close as he could possibly get.

“You okay getting back in?” he asked.

She looked at him like he was crazy. Why would she trust another man to help her, ever again?

“I got it,” she said, her slangy response a knee-jerk reaction from her pampered childhood.

Kai stayed for a minute, waiting until she got into the dorm. Her eyes kept darting at him. She didn’t think she could trust him-or any other boy- not to come after her.

And that wasn’t going to go away in the morning.

**

Mikah went back to the website, which was part of her family’s reaction to her disappearance. The police wouldn’t do much, considering she was eighteen at the time and had since turned nineteen. They didn’t listen when her parents called to say they were concerned.

The website was more like a memorial than a page for a missing teenager. It was difficult to believe she wasn’t dead. The only line that wouldn’t fit in a eulogy somewhere was the line “less than a thousand dollars on her person”. Wherever she was, she couldn’t afford a decent hotel or meal. She was on the streets and mostly likely alone.

Her mother wrote a letter that was scanned into the website ending with the line “Please return our sweet, pure, innocent daughter to us.”

Mikah didn’t know the girl. She knew the person she’d escaped to, after the collapse of her social life and her avoidance of human contact, in a big city, at the brink of adulthood. Her persona could keep secrets. One that got released was that she didn’t have her virginity when she started high school. And it didn’t seem to be her choice.

All the men in the photos Mikah looked at were suspect. Virtually, the website took any visitors through her childhood. There were few photos of her with other children. More often then not, the photos showed men in their forties or fifties, smiling brightly with their arms around her back. That was the odd thing- most beamed at the camera like women. Effeminate men, Mikah guessed. The type you’d leave your kid with because gay men rarely had children and parents thought it was safe. But you’d never know what happened behind closed doors.

**

Ciel had a pretty good memory of the sign, pretty remarkable considering it only existed for a few days, during the period when she was Elisabeth. When she started fifth grade, with him, he’d given each of them a bin and wrote their names over them in construction paper. On the first day, he made a big deal of presenting them to his students, opening with “I’m sorry I’m not a better artist.”

There was another Elisabeth, who spelled her name with a “z”. He’d messed up and wrote them both using a “z”, making the first initial of her last name the only authentic part of her name. While the other Elizabeth got bright yellow paper, her name was misspelled on a dusty piece of purple paper. He apologized to her, making that his sixth apology that day and the only time he actually had something to apologize for.

Three days later, Elisabeth lost her virginity in her teacher’s hotel room. “Just lay down,” he told her. “Naked.” Elisabeth had never broken a rule except to prove a point and following this one had cost her her purity. But she obeyed, like a good girl.

When she got back into the classroom, the sign repulsed her. Elisabeth took a black marker and slashed through her name. He replaced it, with the correct spelling, two weeks later. His handwriting was worse than ever.

So Ciel replicated it, using old construction paper like before. Her handwriting, with a thick dry-erase marker, looked masculine and powerful.

She invoked her femininity to cross out her name and tear it up.

Ciel won.