This particular morning brought a fine rain to the edges of its dawn, a mist so delicate and light that it almost seemed to disappear the minute it was hit by the sun’s first feeble attempts at breaking dawn. It was a mist that landed on the skin and was felt for only a fraction of a second; not enough to cause anyone to think of opening an umbrella, but just enough to remind a person of the physical world, to pull a girl out of the shadowed trails of her own mind and make her look up at the sky and squint in order to identify what had distracted her – the drops so diaphanous as to resemble the peculiar sensation of remembering that you forgot something you were supposed to remember. 

This particular girl was not rolling over in bed, as most girls would be doing at five forty-five on a Sunday morning, but was ambling down a sidewalk, no purse or jacket in sight, a half burnt cigarette dangling from between her lips, to which she would occasionally bring two fingers adorned with chipped blue nail polish, with which she would pull out the cigarette to blow out the smoke, deftly flick it so that the ashes would fling to the ground (not even glancing at how the flickers ignited and burned out like an insect coming into contact with a too-hot bulb) while she licked her lips, and then return it to her newly glistening mouth. It was a mesmerizing act to watch, and she knew it.

If one were to see her in that moment, it would be difficult to know on what to focus: would you keep your eyes on the way the tip of her cigarette burned an angry orangey-red for a few seconds and then cooled off to an ashen grey? Would you look at the way her lips parted to let out the smoke? Perhaps your eyes would stray to other features, like the subtle rise and fall of her chest under the conspicuously low cut of her dress, or the way her legs strode leisurely forward, and then back, forward, and then back, almost as if she knew how good they looked beneath the shortness of the dress. They may be drawn to the sway of her hips, to how closely molded the black dress was to them. A shyer person would look away, but even without the element of sight one would still hear the distinct sound of her footsteps, encased as her feet were in boots that made her even more noticeable than she already was. And maybe, if your mind were not prone to the pleasurable thoughts such a sight can elicit, you would wonder what color her eyes were, and why they were sheathed under a pair of sunglasses so dark as to block out even the brightest of lights. You might wonder what her name was, and there would be no way for you to know that it was Madison, and that as she let out another puff of smoke she wished that she’d had the sense to grab her clutch before scrambling out of Henry’s apartment, if only so that she could pull another cigarette out when the one pursed between her lips burned out.

There would be no way for you to know that she wasn’t supposed to be wandering around the city at this ungodly hour: she was supposed to be in Henry’s bed, sleeping, with his sheets wrapped around her and his fingers entwined with hers. The night before she’d been preparing to go out to the Jive Hive to see her two best friends’ queercore band perform, but Henry had texted her, and she’d gone to him, as usual. Ben and Alex had been angry, but they hadn’t tried to stop her: they’d already known her answer would have been no. And she wouldn’t be regretting that decision this morning – she’d still be in Henry’s bed – if his wife hadn’t returned from her business trip in the middle of the fucking night. He had been coming back from the bathroom when he’d heard her keys jangling right outside the door. It had given him enough time to run into the bedroom, shake her awake, and tell her to leave. She’d been tempted to refuse. She’d been tempted to stay there in his bed, naked, and watch with rueful glee to see just what he would do as his wife walked into the room. (Would he pretend he couldn’t see her and tell his wife that she must be crazy if she was seeing imaginary people? Would he scream and call the police in hysterics to alert them to a stranger who broke into his apartment, took off her clothes, and climbed into his bed? Would he jump out the window?) But she couldn’t, of course, because he looked so pathetic. He’d been standing there with nothing on but socks – a terrible look for any man, no matter how handsome he was – and a twisted look of anxious panic on his face. She would have laughed at him, but in the space of a moment he was pulling her out of the bed by her arm and throwing her clothes at her, telling her in an urgent whisper to be quiet and to be quick.  She was. She always was.

Even behind the darkness of her glasses she could spot the people who stared at her as she passed them by. At this time of day they were sparse, but every now and she would pass some college boys who were stumbling back home after a drunken night they would not remember, but claim was awesome anyway, service workers either hurrying to a long day at work or from a tedious night of it, and those people that fall somewhere between being homeless and being hustlers. It didn’t matter who they were, though. Their gazes would fall on her and slide down her frame without even the decency of pretending that they were looking at something else. It was a gaze she’d had to deal with ever since she was fourteen and had stopped being a flat beanpole, and after a few years of fighting what she’d originally thought of as a most unfortunate deformity, she’d come to embrace her body in a way that made her mother shake her head and say, “A little too much, if you ask me.” 

Madison held a certain ambivalence towards the looks: at times they made her feel powerful, made her feel alive, made her smile. But sometimes, like that morning, they made her feel exposed, made her feel tired, made her push her sunglasses a little further up the bridge of her nose. Sometimes they made her wish that she could simply vanish, and as she spotted a man slow down and start walking toward her, she made the wish again. She averted her gaze, even though she knew he couldn’t see her eyes, and started walking a little faster. 

“He-ey, honey.” 

Damn it. She hadn’t walked fast enough. Now he was sidling up in front of her, blocking her path. 

“What’s your name?”

He was  hunched over, with greasy blond hair that hung in strings from his head. He had bad breath that wafted over her face from behind a few missing teeth. She decided to ignore both him and the sudden goose bumps she got and used her shoulder to shove him aside and move on. 

“Aw, come on, honey.” He had to run to catch up to her increased pace, and then he turned around in front of her and started jogging backwards. “Don’t be like that, sugar. Hot little thing like you, I’m sure we could find something fun to do together.”

She paced herself: she stopped walking, took her cigarette from between her lips, let a final puff of smoke out into his face, dropped it to the ground, then crushed it into the concrete with the heel of her shoe and said, “Go fuck yourself.”

He laughed at her. “Ooo, you like the dirty talk, eh? I can give ya a little dirty talk, if that’s what you wanna hear.” He took a step closer to her so that his face was right up next to hers and whispered, “You want to be my bitch? I bet I can make those fine lips yours squeal if I fuck you hard enough.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, curled her lips into a sneer and didn’t move her face an inch, even though her mind was screaming mayday and his foul breath was enough to make her want to turn around and throw up. She was not going to do what this bastard expected of her.

“Listen, motherfucker, I’ll break your neck if you don’t get the fuck out of my way.”

“Get out of your way,” he parroted in a higher pitched voice, mimicking her own. “Get out of your way. You know, I like the way you talk. You got such a pretty little accent, pretty little girl.” That was when he grabbed her arm and pulled her hand roughly toward his belt. That was enough. In an instant she wrenched herself away from him, balled her right hand into a fist, and launched it at his face with a satisfying “cruuunch.”

 His reaction was immediate: he stumbled backwards, his face crumpled into a mask of pain, he doubled over and his hands flew to his now bleeding nose. “You bitch!” Little spittles of blood landed on the ground when he screamed.

“That’s right,” she answered as she stepped around him, “I hope you show a little more fucking courtesy to the next ‘hot little thing’ you meet, you useless piece of shit.” She flung the last word over her shoulder as she walked away from him. She had to count her steps slowly in her head so that she wouldn’t run. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. She did this until she reached a corner and turned it, and then she finally acted the way she felt. She let out a little whimper and shook out her right hand, which was still smarting from the punch she’d thrown; she took deep breaths through her mouth to steady the wild beating of her heart, which she could feel against her eardrums; she leaned against the wall that was behind her and kept her eyes closed until she wasn’t shaking anymore. 

After a few minutes she opened her eyes again. The rain was getting more insistent, no longer a soft spray of droplets but now fat globs of water that splashed onto their targets. Her hair was starting to get heavier with the water and her dress was starting to stick to her skin, as opposed to just following the contours of her body. She had to laugh at herself. A shit morning was turning into a shit day. She sighed, ran her hand through her hair to squeeze out its increasing dampness and looked around her. To her right were steps that led up to a door on which the words “Jack’s Bakery” were stamped.  She wasn’t sure if she was in the mood for pastries and tarts at that moment; a dark bar would have been more to her liking. Right then a drop splattered onto her forehead. She sighed again and shrugged. “All right,” she muttered under her breath, “I’ll take what I can get.”