Maidenhead

Elijah took the camera away from his face. ‘I think we got enough,’ he said.

‘She needs more,’ Gayl said, forcing me to focus. ‘This one needs more.’

Gayl stopped swaying. I was able to look at her face. It was beat-up and startling. We looked in each other’s eyes.

Gayl lifted her arm back in the air.

‘Do it,’ I heard coming out of my mouth. I was revolting.

Gayl smiled. I smiled. She opened her fist. She turned her hand around so I could see her cracked and raised knuckles. I lifted my chin up in the air. I could take her backwards slap. My whole world was changing.

‘This is it.’

The backwards blow made me split right in half. I saw the world how it was meant to be seen: broken and freaked, full of masters and slaves. Elijah and Gayl came from circumstances of hardship and I came from circumstances of ease. The knowledge of hardship is not as easily passed on as the knowledge of ease. Gayl had smacked me awake and the whole world could see.

Suddenly, I felt her arms around me. Hair and dread was all over my face. A body of sun came into the room through a crack in the drapes.

‘Get this for the end,’ I heard Gayl whisper to Elijah. She was hugging me, smoothing my hair. ‘I know this is different, E., but get this for the end.’

>

Our reconciliation would come across in the film: the snuff film of my consciousness.

LEE: God. I want to hold her. Fucking hell. It’s illegal. This is child porn.

GAYL: Child porn? Yeah? People do this all over the world.

LEE: You call yourself an artist?

GAYL: I am an artist.

LEE: You make child porn.

GAYL: Nah, come on, Lee. Use your brain. This is not child porn. You know it’s not that. Myra isn’t working. She sixteen. She knows she’s onstage.

LEE: She’s seventeen. So what?

GAYL: I make liberation porn. All my actors get that. They come to me for that. They follow me for that. You get it? It’s the opposite of child porn.

LEE: The opposite. What’s the fucking opposite of child porn?

GAYL: You just saw it. And check out all my work, lady: www.hotkentuckizianporn.com

§

My father staggered when he saw me. He went from dull eyes to abnormally sparked.

‘I’m fine.’ I stood at the doorway to the kitchen, hand up to fend him off. ‘I’m totally fine.’

A woman with a mop in her arms stared too. It was Anna from Indonesia. Younger than my mother, no folds on her face.

‘Myra, I will go to the police, and if you think I won’t ...’

My father didn’t even know why he was saying the police, but my punched-out jaw and slapped cheeks must have made it seem to make sense. ‘Your face, Myra. Oh my god. What happened to you?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said again, softer. ‘My face heals quickly, remember? I promise that it’s fine.’

My father didn’t go down to the basement. He climbed up the stairs to my parents’ old room. I was still and so was Anna until we heard a door shut.