The Fool and the Donkey Track V

TRACK 5 - “For Isadora” - Lewis, Lynsi - The Album

(TW - substance use, one sided relationship, mentions of grooming, internalized ableism)

She’d been at the end of the impulse aisle, between rows of candies and energy drinks. The store’s jingle played overhead for probably the twentieth time over the six hours she’d been there.

A week prior to that night, Lynsi spent the day doubled over, trying to hold back a cascade of wails that wouldn’t stop. Audacity ran on her laptop in front of her; still, she couldn’t stop the wails long enough to continue editing The Castle.

She realized that she was alone. Absolutely, horrifically, pain stakingly alone. No one was coming to save her. There was no knight in shining armor. There were no texts nor notifications. The only sound that filled the air, aside from her at least, was the rhythmic beat of a lousy track.

And Sierra’d been dead for a little over a year now.

Sometimes, it felt like only she still had tears to spare for her long past sister. Mara and Mom had gotten over it and really only ever used Sierra’s death to flaunt their superiority complexes at each other. Granted, everyone was likely mourning in their own way, but it damn sure felt like only Lynsi cared.

She’d clasped her hands in prayer. Please, God, please send me someone. Anyone. I need something more than…

The little beastly voice in the back of her head mocked her for such a lousy request. So she wiped her tears, rolled a joint, and focused entirely on the sound once more.

Lynsi’s grumbling stomach brought her back between the parallel impulse aisles and store jingle.

And she was starving. Near literally starving.

Lynsi hadn’t eaten much of anything, unless one considered booze, bud, and packs of smokes full fledged meals. Even her extra small work uniform was loose on her bony frame.

“Hey.”

Lynsi turned left and faced a female, able bodied cashier.

Gorgeous too. A damn near bombshell. Her stomach was flat, yet her hips were curvy. Her dark hair curved round the crook between her jawline and neck. She had a youthful, wrinkle free face yet the body of a woman. The only “flaw” this girl possessed was a somewhat large nose. Which really was no problem at all, for it complimented her features further.

Her uniform, too, was decorated in motivational buttons and “Just Stay Positive!” stickers.

Lynsi rose an eyebrow. The girl’s face contorted itself into a grin full of mischief and she swung her arms in Lynsi’s direction.

The girl held that peculiar pose for a few seconds.

Did this girl just dab at me?! Lynsi giggled.

They didn’t even know each other and this is how she wanted to introduce herself?

I like you, was the second thought that entered Lynsi’s pot addled mind.

Lynsi swung her arms in the girl’s direction, returning the gesture in kind, despite the stares of oncoming customers.

The girl laughed and straightened her back.

“What’s your name?”

“Lynsi. You?”

“Isadora. How long you’ve been working here, Lynsi?”

“Two years.”

“So you’d say you’re pretty much an expert at this?”

Lynsi didn’t know if she would consider herself an expert, but…sure. She had “experience” on the sales floor.

They spent the last few hours of their shift chatting when they weren’t checking out customers and thanking them for shopping.

Isadora lived in town all her life while Lynsi had moved to the area a year ago. Isadora lived with her mom. Lynsi lived with two roommates and paid rent. Isadora was nineteen, Lynsi was twenty-one.

Isadora had lost her friend group to burgeoning rumors. Lynsi had lost her sister.

It was as though they’d known each other for years, the way they shared facts and history. As though they hadn’t just struck up a conversation a few hours earlier.

Isadora pulled out a few stickers from her blue uniform pocket and plastered them on the handle of Lynsi’s wheelchair.

“So, like,” Isadora gestured at the wheelchair and looked up at Lynsi. “What happened?”

“I was just born this way.”

“Really? What’s that like?”

Lynsi shrugged. “…Normal? I don’t know,”

“Are you able to stand?”

“No. A good portion of wheelchair users can, but not for very long. I’m just not one of those users, you know? It’s a spectrum.”

“Cool, cool,” Isadora nodded. “You know, I couldn’t help but overhear you talking with Jeff. You write songs?”

Lynsi nodded.

“Can I hear them? After we close, I mean?”

Lynsi beamed at that.

* * *

Isadora sat on a bench and stretched out her legs. She pulled a vape out of her pocket and inhaled the fumes. Lynsi pulled out a cigarette from her uniform pocket and lit it, following Isadora’s lead.

“You seem like the kind of person who’s been through a lot,” said Isadora. “I feel like I can tell you anything and you’d just get it.”

Once again, Lynsi shrugged. She didn’t know if it was the energy she exuded or the fact she was a wheelchair user, but people always felt like they could share their stories with her.

In some ways, it led to information Lynsi wished she could forget and, in other ways, it showed her that people were more than the masks they wore.

And Isadora seemed like she needed someone to talk to.

“What do you wanna talk about?”

Isadora twiddled her thumbs in her lap and looked down.

“I just,” she started. “I need to know I’m not, like, crazy. I need to know that there’s someone out there who won’t judge me…and I’m really hoping that’s you.”

Lynsi took a hit of her cigarette. What was it that her mother called it? Active listening?

Time to put on your listening ears, Lynsi. That’s what her mother would say.

“Go on.”

Isadora exhaled.

“Okay, so, like…I’m into men, right? Not boys. Men. I’ve always been into men, older men, for like as long as I could remember. I was into my teachers, my dad’s friends…that’s just how I am, right?”

“Okay?”

“And, so like, a few years ago, I signed up on this dating app. I was sixteen, but I put my age as eighteen. Anyway, I ended up matching with this guy—Drew—and he told me that he was thirty five and I told him that I was eighteen…”

Where was she going with this?

“Turned out, we lived near each other and we wanted to start seeing each other in person. So we did—and it was great. He made me feel like the most special person in the whole fucking world. Like he was my one and only. My actual soulmate. We talked about having a house, me being his wife, him having a job, we shared the fact we both just hated people—hell, we even had a saying: ‘Fuck the world’. It was like our thing. And I…I started developing feelings for him. Like real actual love…and I-I felt bad. So I ended up telling him that I wasn’t eighteen. I was sixteen. Then he looked at me and said he wasn’t thirty five. He was forty five. Still, we loved each other and we were gonna make it work. He promised me that we would make it work,”

Yikes. Lynsi held a poker face and nodded anyway. Isadora clearly needed someone to talk to about this.

“And—and…uh, well, we ended up having sex. And it was fucking amazing. Like the best sex I had ever had in my whole fucking life. Shit, it was the only sex I’d had up to that point. And, no, no, he didn’t fucking rape me. I consented. I wanted it. I really fucking wanted it. But, you know, if I told anyone…he would go to prison. At the same time though, it was like—it was so weird having this huge secret in my life. I ended up telling one of my friends in confidence and I only did that cause I thought she was gonna keep it a secret,”

“She didn’t?”

“No, she fucking didn’t. She ratted me out to the teachers. Police got called. I got interrogated for, like, fucking hours. I told them, no, no, we didn’t have sex. We were just friends. It was no big deal. And then they brought him in for questioning and—and they fucking lied to him. They told him that I told them we had sex when I never fucking said that—so, so he ended up admitting, he admitted to everything. And my mom? My mom was so fucking mad at me. She thought I was stupid. Careless! She wouldn’t talk to me, she wouldn’t even fucking look at me. And I—I wasn’t allowed to see him anymore.”

Lynsi took another long drag her cigarette. What the fuck was she was suppose to say to all that?!

“I’m sorry…I’m really sorry you went through all that.”

“But here’s the thing,” Isadora looked up and pointed at Lynsi. “His family ended up giving me the phone number for the prison he’s in. We’ve been talking on the phone in secret for about…two years now? Three years? I still love him, you know? And I—I feel horrible for everything that happened—but my friends? My friends didn’t give a fuck. They just thought I was crazy. Rumors spread round school—no one would talk to me. I lost…I lost everything. Even after graduation, all I have is him. My one and only. And everybody thinks I’m fucking crazy for still wanting to be with him! Like…like there’s something warped and wrong with my brain. They kept being like: ‘he groomed you!’ But he didn’t! I swear the fuck to god he didn’t. What we have is real love! We really do love each other. If he was really messed up, he wouldn’t still be talking to me now that I’m nineteen. He would’ve dropped me. He never did that though; so—so it has to be real. It has to.”

Lynsi sat in silence for a moment, weighing her options. On one hand, Isadora was officially an adult, right? She was an adult now capable of making her own decisions. On the other hand, this did sound like a textbook case of grooming. Still, Isadora had made it pretty clear that no amount of debate would change her mind on that.

And maybe, in some fucked up way, maybe it was real love? Right? If they were still talking and willing to continue their relationship while he was in prison. And if it wasn’t, well, Isadora needed someone in her corner.

If this was an abusive relationship, the last thing Isadora needed was to be isolated. To have only him in her life. Someone to lean on that wasn’t Drew.

And Isadora was…she was beautiful. She was beautiful and weird and she’d dabbed at Lynsi when most others ignored her and…

Lynsi really needed someone in her corner too. So she reached out to Isadora and placed her hand above Isadora’s curled fingers.

“If this is how you feel, then okay,” she said. “If you really love this guy, I accept that. I accept you.”

Was it a truthful acceptance or one made from loneliness? From a prayer made only weeks prior to this meeting? The things loneliness could drive a person to do and say. To accept even in unacceptable circumstances.

When Lynsi’s Uber showed up, the two girls traded numbers. She already received a meme from Isadora even when she leaned her head against the cushion of her wheelchair and chuckled. They would continue to text through the night.

Lynsi put a childhood favorite, “Like Other Girls” by Atomic Kitten, on repeat on her music player as she envisioned this burgeoning friendship with Isadora.

* * *

Isadora invited Lynsi out to a nearby carnival downtown. It would be fun, she insisted, and they could totally get drunk. When Isadora and the security guy at work, PJ, pulled up in front of Lynsi’s townhouse, Lynsi realized there were no accommodations to help her get into the car.

“No problem!” Isadora hopped out of the passenger seat and squatted down in front of Lynsi. Lynsi tried not to stare at Isadora’s ass and the way it stretched her booty shorts or how her t-shirt somehow fit her waist so damn well.

“Can you get on my back?” Isadora looked back at Lynsi. “I’ll give you a piggy back ride to the backseat. PJ will put your wheelchair in the trunk. Right, PJ?”

Lynsi leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Isadora’s shoulders. Isadora reached back and wrapped her arms around Lynsi’s legs. With a heave, Isadora raised and waddled her way to the backseat. PJ put his Jeep in park and carefully put the wheelchair in the trunk, as Isadora said he would.

Lynsi insisted she could buckle herself in, but thanked Isadora nonetheless for the piggy back ride. She looked to PJ.

“Is it cool if I smoke in here?”

“Yeah, you’re good.”

Isadora headed back to the passenger seat, twisted, and peeked at Lynsi through the metallic bars that attached the cushion to the rest of the body of the seat.

“You’re so fucking cute.” she said. Lynsi lit her cigarette and rolled down the window. “Badass too. Don’t get me wrong. I just wish I was as tiny as you.”

I’m malnourished, Isadora, Lynsi wanted to correct her. What makes me a badass anyway? She held her tongue.

“You’re tiny too,” said Lynsi. “Definitely prettier than me.”

“Noooo, you’re prettier than me!”

“No, you!”

“You!”

“You!”

“You is the pretty one!”

“NO, you is!”

In the few short days they’d started texting, they developed a grammatically incorrect language of their own on a foundation of memes and nonsense. Again, as though they’d already knew each other for lifetimes.

PJ pulled into a parking lot of a local booze store. He looked at Isadora, hands on the wheel. “Two Svedkas? You sure?”

Isadora nodded. Lynsi insisted they’d get Svedkas because it did the job of getting one drunk for less drink consumed—and they wanted to get drunk. PJ slid out of the driver’s seat and closed the door.

“So, uh,” Lynsi began. “Why’s PJ here?”

“Oh,” Isadora twisted in her seat again. “I’m dating him.”

“I thought you were with Drew?”

“I am, it’s just…he’s in prison, you know? And he said it was okay for me to see other guys in the meantime. Don’t worry, PJ knows about Drew.”

“Oh. Well, okay.” This was another thing Lynsi decided she would accept about Isadora. Who was she to judge anyhow? It wasn’t as though she herself wasn’t a hot mess in her own right.

Healthy people didn’t really exist anyway. According to Courtney, everyone was dysfunctional and there was no such thing as healthy relationships.

Besides, Isadora was only with PJ for much of the same reason why Lynsi chose to accept Isadora for every red flag she unashamedly waved. The fear of being alone.

But wasn’t it that same fear that led Sierra into a cycle of highs and lows with Mara and Ellie to the point where she could only cope with the lows through drug use? Wasn’t it that same fear that led to choices that inevitably killed her?

Lynsi decided to take those thoughts and box them away in the castle of her mind.

When PJ came back with the Svedkas, Isadora plugged an aux cord into her phone and selected a song. She turned up the volume. It was “Mr. Blue Sky” by Electric Light Orchestra.

Lynsi closed her eyes briefly and imagined a composer with a baton facing an orchestra before a broadway stage.

When she peeked her eyes back open, Isadora pointed at Lynsi for the lyric: “Hey, you, with the pretty face!”

Lynsi smiled at that. God, Isadora, why did you have to be straight? She took another drag of her cigarette, admiring the way sunset traced shades of twilight orange and complimenting shadows across Isadora’s face.

Lynsi shooed those thoughts away too. Isadora was the first friend she’d had in awhile, she might as well cherish it for as long as it lasted. Hopefully longer than Lynsi’s beastly thoughts said it would.

She knew herself well enough to know she’d somehow ruin the one good thing in her life all because, eventually, her brain would latch onto some obscure interest and obsess over it until it would spill over onto this new relationship.

It had happened with Avatar the Last Airbender, making puppets out of paper bags—for hours on end—, Vocaloid, The NeverEnding Story…among other things.

Hell, according to Mom, Lynsi was obsessed with the Teletubbies as early as four years old and she’d only started to verbalize after years of being a tiny mute. She couldn’t even remember anything about the godforsaken Teletubbies.

I should warn her, Lynsi thought. Eventually. Let Isadora know she had a beast in her brain that was doomed to make this relationship fail, as it always had before.