Tutu Skirt

Daddy got me this tutu skirt with truffles (or were they called ruffles?) today but they’ve been itchy ever since. Don’t get it dirty, he made me memorise, we still have to return it. I repeat it every once in a while in my head so that I don’t forget. The party looks sweet. Daddy tells me he hasn’t seen any of them since high school. I haven’t seen any of them at all. The curls on her head look like cotton candy and this other guy must have stolen Santa’s beard. Her nails give off a transparent green gummy bear colour. I start to chew my own, but daddy slaps my hand away.

I wander off, weaving in and out of huddled flocks of people until I find myself squatting in front of a pair of polished leather shoes, staring into my reflected silhouette. It’s the same sort of reflection you’ll get if you look closely into daddy’s brown eyes. Then I feel hands around my waist, pulling me up. I relax, thinking it’s daddy coming to get me, but in midair I realise that the rigid grip around the nook of my underarms is unfamiliar. It is a tentative but assertive and controlling grip, as if these pair of hands had not held up a living thing in their life.

‘Well hello there, little lady.’ I turn around to see a face with a scar cutting through his left eyebrow like a lawn mower. It runs down his cheek, just missing the eye by inches. Sweat glistens off his forehead, reflecting light like a glossy magazine. His coarse, purple lips creases as he chews the end of a cigarette. He smokes in an ugly, rough way; clouds of smoke instead of tendrils emerge from each exhale. The cigarette lingers between his teeth until the dull glow almost kisses his lips before he spits it out and smudges it to ash on the nearby trash can. The stagnant air can be seen in the oppressive cigarette smoke that hung like the torn sail of a pirate ship, dulling the shimmer of the chandeliers above. He lifts me onto a stiff, outstretched arm and picks up on the conversation:

‘I’m virtually extinct in Middleton High now, and that’s the way I like it, but they’ve been thinking of hanging my name on a dorm door. Why would I want a high school dorm named after me? Hell, I can’t even tell whether that's praise or punishment. I shiver at the thought of my last name interweaved between teenage slang and gossip. You know, like ‘they made out in the Faegers?’ Or ‘Fridays at Faegers tonight!’. High school is the last place I want to be immortal in. But I guess that’s what I get for skipping college and becoming a successful Brigadier, you know what I mean?’

Murmurs of some vague compliment or agreement reverberates through the group and satisfied, he takes it as an approval to extend his speech.

‘You know, no offense but when I first arrived here, I could barely recognize any of yall. As if you were all dressed in khaki uniforms and your faces indistinguishable from each other. It was all so mediocre—not that I expected much—a mixture of suits and dresses and manicures and wrinkles and sprouting white hair. Like you, Jessica,’ He gestures at a slender woman who would’ve appeared malnourished and weak if it had not been her upright posture, a slight upwards tilt of her chin, and a habit of looking at someone over their glasses with raised eyebrows. The overhead spotlight accentuates her features and makes her seem like a solitary statue with hollowed out cheekbones and shadows that pooled in the nook of her collarbone. He continued: ‘If you told me you were Miranda, I would not have doubted it a second, you know what I mean?’

The pause, coupled with the raised pitch indicating a question at the end of the sentence, triggers the second round of murmurs and nods. They drone on like cicadas on a summer night. I remember hunting down a cicada with daddy, thinking I could solve all human suffering by killing their annoying croaking voices. But I soon learned that cicadas are made immortal by their numbers. If you targeted and killed one, the rest still croaked on, indifferent but powerful. There was no way to kill them all.

———

Even with the millions of truffles on my tutu dress for protection, I can still feel the hard chill of his watch as I sit on his forearm. I begin to fidget uncomfortably as he his outstretched arm to balance me. I kick my dangling feet until he—still rambling on headlessly—finally takes that as a sign to lower me down. All of a sudden, I feel something tug onto me. 

‘Listen, little lady, I—’

His watch gets caught in my truffles. I begin to flop in his arms like a fish on a line, twisting and turning to slip out from the clasp of his gold watch. But as I slide down his blazer, my cheek grazing against the cool coat buttons, I hear the gauze tear the way daddy used to tear our towels in half so that we could have two separate ones: look, magic! One for me, and one for you!

I freeze, completely electrified. I feel an infectious red flush spread across my face. We still have to return it.

‘WE STILL HAVE TO RETURN IT!’ Wide-eyed, I stare at the shattered fabric of my dress stuck on the watch and run off with truffles rippling behind me like fairy wings. I wonder if this is what Cinderella felt when she left her crystal shoe on the staircase. I run for daddy and realise that the nasty man with the watch has followed along. I hide behind daddy’s borrowed suit. 

‘Return what? Why, Richard, I thought your business was flourishing…’ He said, picking at the truffles that stuck on his watch and grinding the rough fabric between his fingers. I watch the fabric tumble and tear apart and explode into threads in his palm.

The ride home was horrible, but I fancy that the nasty man with the watch might feel sorry for me and get me a brand new tutu skirt, one we wouldn’t have to return. I tell daddy so, but I think he pretended not to hear me.