The Me in the Mirror

‘So, tell me about yourself, Megan. Do you have any hobbies? Are you interested in anything? Apart from videography, of course.’ I forced a tight smile over gritted teeth as Ross grinned lopsidedly at me, as if we were sharing an inside joke. We weren’t. I’d met the man barely ten minutes ago when he waved me over at the small table-for-two inside a lavish restaurant –the walls lined with artwork over the fuzzy, maroon wallpaper, yellow chandeliers hanging from the ceiling casting shadows like spiderwebs that shifted across Ross’ face as he moved. Truthfully, I’d have been fine with a restaurant that wasn’t so extravagant, and the prices of even a single appetiser weren’t enough to make me go bankrupt.

‘Uh, not really,’ I chuckled meekly, trying to gauge if he understood the message. ‘I’m a student at university, of course, and I paint on the side, whenever I have the time.’ I tried to think of the last time I’d produced a painting. With work and classes, my time had been tight.

‘Right, of course. Painting’s cool. You ever think about, like, selling your paintings? You could take a video and post it to Instagram, or something…’ He trailed off, his blue eyes wistfully listless, running a hand through his wavy blond hair. I shifted uncomfortably in place.

‘No, never thought about it. I don’t really use social media much anymore.’ Not after everything went down in high school. I’d hoped it hadn’t followed me to university, and to the dating scene, but clearly it had. My cheeks felt hot, and I wanted to leave. ‘Excuse me. I need to use the bathroom.’ I clutched my back close to my body as I slowly stood up, neatly tucking my chair in behind me and scanning the restaurant for a toilet I could escape to. This was how most dates went –It’d start out well, until he’d mention something about high school, and the video. It had only been out in the world for a couple of hours before I saw it and got it taken down, but it was too late. The damage had been done. It was like it had seeped into me, become a part of me, oozing out of me and working its way into every date I had been on since.

I waited until I was in the bathroom to open my purse. I kept an emergency bucket-hat tucked inside, along with hair-ties and hair pins to change up my appearance if I needed to. I’d done it before –hiding out in the bathroom while my date waited for me to return, before scurrying off with my hat clutched low over my eyes, my hair pinned behind my ears, praying he wouldn’t notice me. But maybe it was too early. It had barely been ten minutes into the date –we hadn’t even ordered yet. Was it too heartless to leave this early?

I stared at my reflection in the grubby mirror, leaned over the basin, gently smudging a rogue lipstick stain back into my lips. I’d spent over an hour on my makeup, like always. I’d stressed over what dress I wanted to wear –I ended up with a baby-blue dress with a faint floral imprint I’d bought second-hand. Its spaghetti straps limply looped over my shoulders, the end swaying gently by my ankles. The mirror was small and circular, pinned to the brick wall with foggy grime creeping in from the outsides and a small crack splintering through the glass. I stared at myself, squinting, trying to focus on my face, but somehow my eyes seemed blurry. My lipstick –I had chosen a pale pink –looked a bright red in the mirror, which matched my shimmering, red dress that tightly hugged my body. My features looked the same, yet somehow distorted –like the girl in the mirror wasn’t me at all, but a dupe. A doppelganger. I stepped back, my mind poisoned by confusion. But I stumbled, by feet unsteady beneath me, and that’s when I realised I was wearing tall, black heels that laced around my ankles. What? I hadn’t been wearing those when I came in. My eyes caught the dress that I had seen in the mirror –a shiny red dress that was so tight I felt I couldn’t expand my lungs completely. It jutted painfully into my upper thighs, and wouldn’t budge when I tried to tug it down. My mind raced as I tried to grasp what was going on. I’d never seen these clothes before. They weren’t the type of clothing I’d usually wear, ever. Had I been mistaken? Maybe I’d put it on and then forgot about it. I’d just have to return to the table. Ross would notice a difference in me. I took a shaky step out of the bathroom, my ankle wobbling beneath me, as if it was taunting me with a sprain, and I’d wished I’d worn the pale pink flats I usually wore to dates.

‘Took your time in there,’ Ross remarked as I sat down. ‘What were you doing?’ There was a hint of accusation to his voice that made me flinch.

‘Using the bathroom,’ I said coldly. ‘None of your business.’

‘Okay, jeez, Megan, calm down. It was just a joke.’ Ross slumped back in his chair, folding his arms across his torso like a pouting child. Had something changed? He looked the same, but there was definitely something, an inexplicable urge telling me something was different. Ross glanced up at me, adjusting his chocolate brown hair with one hand, the other grabbing a menu.

‘Does my dress look… different to you?’ I asked hesitantly. Ross’ eyes raked over me, and I cringed internally.

‘What? No. I mean, I’ve never seen you wear it before, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘No, I mean, was I wearing it before I went into the bathroom?’

Ross’ eyes crinkled in confusion.

‘Yeah? Look, Megan, this is getting weird. Why are you asking this?’ A fleck of spit sprayed from the corner of his mouth with a strange, American drawl I hadn’t noticed before.

‘Nothing,’ I said quietly, my confusion suffocated with a strange irritation I hadn’t felt before –a burning resentment that I could hardly contain. I was usually a placid person –years of therapy in high school had done that to me. But now it seemed like I was bursting with emotions, barely able to keep them in.

‘You look gorgeous,’ Ross changed the subject, but the compliment felt overused, and did little to stifle my confusion.

For the first time in who-knows how long, I entered my university without so much as a muttered remark behind a hand, a giggle, or a distasteful sidelong glance. Instead, the air hummed with a different kind of energy –one I wasn’t quite used to.

‘Going out tonight, Megan?’ Liz, a tall, blonde girl with expressive fake eyelashes and a pierced belly button poking out from beneath her crop top asked, approaching me casually. I felt my posture stiffen, but I didn’t slow my stride. ‘The group’s going to hit a house party. You should come. Ross will be there.’ She smiled suggestively at me, and I forced one back.

The date with Ross had been a bit of a flop, but I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. Ross was weirded out about what I had said, and honestly, I was too. I was sure I hadn’t been wearing that dress and those shoes to the restaurant, had I? And I was sure Ross had blond hair. But no matter how vividly blond it was in my mind, in reality, it was a chocolate brown.

‘Not tonight, I don’t think.’ I said tentatively.

‘What?’ Liz sounded genuinely shocked. ‘Why not? You know it’s not the same without you. You make-or-break the night.’

That didn’t sound anything like me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a house party. Probably never. People always eyed me the wrong way after high school.

‘We’ll see,’ I said slowly. Why was Liz even talking to me? We’d had a fall-out in high school, and the only few words she’d uttered to me since then were disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself. But I ran with it.

I was expecting to feel that skin-crawling sensation I always got when men’s eyes raked over my body, especially with the skin-tight dress I was wearing with a slit up the side. The music was blaring and nobody even noticed my entrance with the group of friends I swore I’d never known. I had to figure out some of their names by hearing them in conversation, but somehow they knew a lot about me. I was one of them.

My head pounded with the music inside the house, but somehow I enjoyed the thrill.

‘How about a drink with me, Megan?’ A man I’d never met before slid up beside me. I hesitated, but he pressed on. ‘Just one drink.’

‘Sure, why not?’ I said, and he handed me a small cup. We talked, screaming above the blaring music. We laughed and shared stories, sipping from the cups, and he eventually left, but I realised something.

He didn’t once mention the video. In fact, no one had. I’d felt different, looked different, and been treated differently since that last night at the restaurant. What had changed?

 Men danced with me some more and suddenly I was alone from my group, but for some reason I wasn’t anxious. A plastic cup was shoved into my hand and burning liquid slid down my throat, again and again. My hair was a wild mess and I could feel my makeup running with my perspiration but I didn’t stop. Adrenaline masked as happiness coursed through me. I’d never done this before but it almost felt routine –so much as even a glass of wine could leave me feeling tipsy just days prior, but now I was able to down shots like they were water.

‘Another shot, Megan?’ The line had been said to me too many times to count. And I felt myself nodding along, against my better judgement.

I’d never done this before, but it felt like I had. I suddenly hated my old self for being so boring –how could I have stayed home all night, studying? I felt guilty, but I pushed the feeling away. This was the life I wanted to be living. Whatever had changed in me at the restaurant, I hoped it never changed back.

I awoke with a stiff neck in an unfamiliar house. My head was pounding –like a jackhammer was raging in my skull. My limbs felt dull and weak and my body felt like it was weighed down by cement.

I stumbled to my feet, licking my chapped lips, my tongue feeling like sandpaper in my mouth. A wave of nausea triggered black dots to bounce across my vision, and I clutched the edge of the sofa until they subsided. My stomach lurched, and I fought to hold back vomit.

‘Where am I?’ I muttered, and someone groaned nearby.

‘Shut up,’ a man rolled over on the floor, pressing a pillow to his face. There was a puddle of vomit beside him.

I’d never done this before. I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to leave, or help clean up? I caught sight of myself in a mirror, and almost gasped at how dishevelled I looked.

My phone was still in my pocket. I opened it and tried to call one of the girls I had been with last night –Liz. She picked up after a moment and I frantically pressed my phone to my ear.

‘What is it, Megan?’ I almost hung up after hearing her I-can’t-be-bothered-with-you-right-now tone.

‘Hi, uh, Liz. I’m still at the house from last night. Can you pick me up please?’ There was a pause from the other end.

‘Seriously? You can’t find your own way home?’

‘Well, I can, I guess, it’s just a long walk, and I don’t have any money on –’ Liz cut me off.

‘Great! Talk to you later.’

I stood, stunned, as the call abruptly ended. Had she really just left me at a stranger’s house, hungover?

I rubbed my head, straining to clear the headache pulsing inside my skull. I didn’t feel mad, for some strange reason, I felt as if I already knew that was going to happen. Like it had happened before.

On an impulse, I turned to the man sprawled out on the grimy carpet.

‘Do you know me?’ I asked, and he groaned again.

‘Seriously? Yeah, Megan, I know you, damn it.’ His voice was thick with agitation but I pressed on.

‘Do you know about the video?’ The words felt funny in my mouth, like it was the first time I’d uttered them.

‘What? No –what video? Look, I’m really not in the mood for this right now. Either clean up, or get out.’

His words were harsh but I couldn’t hear them over the pounding in my head. My mind swam as I tried to figure out what it meant. Things had been different after what happened at the restaurant. Nothing tangible, but just inexplicably different. It was possible he’d just never know what had happened back in high school. I’d never seen him before. But it seemed like everyone knew these days.

‘Sorry,’ I grumbled, stumbling through red plastic cups that were littered across the floor and another vomit stain on the carpet.

Outside, the air was cool on my face. The sun was bright overhead and wind tickled my unruly hair. I didn’t know where to go. I was directionless. I’d cross the road, I thought. Get my mind in order. But as I stepped off the pavement, a car blared its horn at me, and I jolted back. The driver screamed, ‘careful, lady,’ at me, and suddenly my fingers were out in front of me, flipping him off. I gasped and returned them to my sides, staring down at my hands as if they didn’t belong to me. Because they didn’t, I realised. They weren’t mine. This wasn’t the world I grew up in. This was someplace different. A utopian world where the video had never been taken, and my life had never been ruined. I thought about last night. I’d been happy, carefree and not at all self-conscious. I wasn’t objectified the way I was used to. This was the world I wanted to stay in. The world in the mirror at the restaurant. The me on the other side.

I lumbered home, my feet aching, my head throbbing, forced to pause every hundred metres, crouching down on the pavement until waves of rippling nausea subsided. Or didn’t, and I’d be left sprawling with my head pressed against the grainy rock, my stomach churning. I’d never had to do this in my other life. If I was ever in trouble, I had friends who would drop whatever they were doing to come and help me. Nothing like Liz or whoever else I was with last night, their names clearly not even significant enough to me to stick in my mind.

Maybe I should’ve gone back. No more parties, no more fake friends, no more showing myself off in shimmering dresses and not feeling men’s eyes rake over me with she’s just like the video playing on their lips. I wanted to stay. But I knew I didn’t belong.

I stumbled back into the restaurant, sparsely populated at this time of day. A waiter saw me enter but let me stagger to the bathroom without saying anything. I crouched over the sink, staring at myself in the mirror. The same crack still splintered from the corner, shrouded in grime. And when I stared deep in my reflection, someone familiar stared back.

‘You’re me,’ I remarked, and her lips twisted to form the same words. ‘But I never had to deal with what you did.’ Her eyes followed me empathetically. Of course she was empathetic.

‘I want to go back. I want to leave.’ I told her. She stared at me, her eyes steely. My hair fell untamed around my shoulders, like a lion’s mane, my lipstick was smeared, my mascara in the creases of my skin, while hers was perfect. My voice was strained with desperation. If I couldn’t go back, I’d be stuck with the anger, the impulsiveness, the bad decisions that I was already suffocating under the weight of their consequences.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘You went through so much. But it’s changed you.’ I paused, taking a breath. ‘It was horrible, but you came out better.’ The one video, one fatal mistake out in the world long enough for everyone to see it. It had ruined my life. It had destroyed everything I’d worked so hard to build.

But in the ruins, something beautiful flourished. Better than anything that had been there before.

I wasn’t going to let it go.

‘Take me back.’ I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, everything had flipped. I wasn’t staring at my old self anymore. I was staring at me, in a party dress with a slit going too-high up my leg, my golden-brown hair knotted and matted around my shoulders, my eyes wide with dark gouges beneath them where the hangover had made me look like I was insane.

I was staring at me, in a world where one thing had been different.

I was staring at me, the person who hadn’t lived through the same hardships. The person I’d wished to be so many times but had rejected when I had the chance.

I was staring at me.

The me in the mirror.