How did I fall?
You were a kid. Kids fall. End of story, okay?
She’s still staring at my forehead. “Quite the mark it likes to leave.” She reaches out with a hand and strokes my cheek. Shocking, her sudden touch, but I don’t pull away. Maybe she’s the spa manager or something. She’s assessing my skin to divine the depth of my need for self-care. I close my eyes. Her touch feels strange. Soft and slightly sticky. My heart begins to beat more quickly. I feel her reach up and trace my scar. My eyes fly open. She’s smiling at me, and so are the people in black. Their black veils have been pulled aside like curtains so I see their twin faces. One male, one female. Both impossibly exquisite. I remember the childhood dolls I found in the basement box. Staring at me with their glassy eyes.
“Quite the mark,” the male twin agrees.
“Quite,” the female twin murmurs. Their voices are low and deep and rich.
They gaze reverentially at my forehead, which feels like it’s on fire now. I swallow more red stars. I should say something. What are you staring at? But I’m speechless before their luminous faces. Dazzled by how fucking beautiful they are. Maybe they’re managers too. They seem more like owners than managers somehow with their black veils. They look, in fact, a little like the goth twins I slept with in college. Christine and Sebastian Whyte. I met them one afternoon when I was skipping my French literature class, trying to have a cigarette in the campus shade. They were smoking and reading Kafka side by side. Christine, the letters; Sebastian, The Trial. As I tried to spark up my lighter, they watched me with their black-lined green eyes. Hi, they said. Hi, I said. They were my first loves, my best friends. It was Christine who got me the Disney job. She worked there playing Snow White, for whom she was a dead ringer. Not because she loved it. No, she was doing it to fuck shit up, she said. Mess with the Mouse from the inside. You’re pretty, Christine said to me, as if it were a curse. In that Disney-does-exotic way, isn’t she, Brother? That’s what she called Sebastian: Brother. He worked at Disney too, playing all the princes. Also supposedly to fuck shit up. I slept with Christine first, and then later, Sebastian, and then Christine again, but then she found she just couldn’t anymore after she’d learned I’d been with Sebastian. You’re tainted now, she told me, confronting me in the park in her Snow White costume. You’re tainted in my eyes forever. I stood there contrite and sweating in my Jasmine costume, feeling like a whore in a cheap, spangled bra. I looked into her eyes where I was tainted. They were a green I’d never seen before and have never seen since. Sebastian’s were like that too. These twins in black, they have eyes just like that.
“Fortuitous, isn’t it?” they whisper to me now. “Your coming here tonight.” Still staring in a way that makes me burn with shame. That makes me almost whisper, Am I really tainted, Christine? Am I tainted forever?
“Definitely.” The woman in red smiles. “After all, self-care is really our only escape from the Abyss, is it not? I know your mother would agree.”
“You really knew my mother?”
“Oh, intimately,” she says. “Very intimately.”
The twins smile now too. Did they know her? Can I imagine my mother having a cigarette with these doll people who so resemble my teen lovers? Clinking flutes with the woman in red?
“And you. We know so much about you, Daughter of Noelle,” offers the male twin. I feel his voice in my vertebrae. He reaches out and strokes my cheek.
“So much,” echoes the female twin, reaching out to stroke my other cheek. I stare at the woman in red, while these two gloved hands caress either side of my face. Cold silk against my burning skin. Inside me, a black box, locked tight, rattles.
“She told you about me?” I whisper.
They look at each other. “You could say that, couldn’t you?” the female twin asks the male.
“Oh, you absolutely could.” He smiles. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”
What did she tell you?
“We’re very happy to have you, Daughter,” the male twin says, eyes still on my forehead. Gloved hand still stroking my face.
“Très heureux,” the female twin agrees, also still stroking my face. So many soft silk fingers. Must be a communal assessment of some kind. They must take assessments very seriously here. I should probably tell them I can’t afford this sort of spa. Can’t afford any spa ever again, thanks to Mother. But their pale eyes and silk hands on me are like a bit of a dreamy drug.