Manicure

By Laura Gordon

TINA is a college sophomore. She wears jeans and a tank top. She can laugh and cry about her situation.

In a dorm room. There is a bed with disheveled blankets, a chair, a desk with books and about 5 bottles of nail polish, one bottle of nail polish remover, and cotton balls. Tina’s sits on the edge of her bed. She moves around a lot. She’s as comfortable on the ground as she is on her bed.

You could say that I, Tina Stern, am an addict. I’m not a coke head or anything. It’s only been a few months. I don’t even know if that’s long enough to say I’m addicted. (Pause) To nail polish. (Holds up her hands, fingernails to audience.) Base coat, top coat, and of course the remover. As for the color? It depends on the season. Lights in the summer, darks in the winter. No matter what polish color, the base and top coat are always clear, keeping the color locked in like a picture frame. They smell different, though. Base coat gets you more stoned. I started sniffing, or (dramatically serious voice) “abusing inhalants,” back in April. I was wearing this milky pink color the first time I sniffed. It was a long breath, like when you come up after your head’s been under water for too long. Except with sniffing, you’re not really gasping for air. You’re escaping it.

I’ve never had a crazy Spring break. In March I went to visit my grandma in Florida. Luckily school started right when I got home, so everyone would get to see my tan. Like Brad Marks. He’s in Deek. Delta Kappa Epsilon. It’s pretty big here. Cute boys, lots of athletes.

I met Brad at Deek’s “Screw Midterms” party a few weeks before Spring Break. He’s two years older than me. I guess it’s not as big of a deal for Juniors and Freshmen to hook up as it was back in high school. In college you can pretty much make out with anyone you want.

So we hung out a few more times, and I even slept over one night. We still didn’t have sex. He wasn’t really pushing me, and I figured we might as well take it slow. He was cute, popular, sweet. It could go somewhere. And then we left for Spring Break.

The problem with vacations is that you start to fantasize a lot. You spend a lot of time in cars, airports, just thinking about stuff. And I thought about Brad. The more I thought about him, the more I began developing this little fantasy. He’d take me to his formal, we’d go on actual dates. That kind of stuff. I was planning on having sex with him when we got back.

So we’re back to school and Deek was having this party. I’m all ready to go. Tan, manicured, the works. My girls and I took a bunch of shots in my room before we left. We re-applied our eyeliner because when you’re drunk it never seems like you have enough on. Grace poked her eye and it started tearing up, but she was okay, so we left.

We’re on our way, and we have our arms linked, belting Disney songs at the top of our lungs. Our hair is sticking to our lip gloss and all our breath smelled like raspberry vodka mixed with Dentyne Ice gum. Carrie asks me if I’ll fuck Brad tonight. I told her to fuck off because we actually had feelings for each other, unlike her and the guy she was screwing. She started slapping me, being like (in a sing-song voice) “Carrie’s fucking Bra-ad, will it be good or ba-ad?” I wanted to kill her, but I was just too drunk and excited.

We get there and it’s already pretty big. It smelled like shit, beer, condoms and pizza. Pretty much the usual for a frat house. Good thing we pregamed. People were playing beer pong downstairs. I didn’t see Brad, so I started sashaying around with my cup of Kool-Aid and grain alcohol, trying my best not to look like I was on the prowl.

Then I felt a hand on my waist. I licked my lips and teeth, making sure the punch was off, and turned around to face him. It wasn’t Brad. It was Chris. A senior. He kissed me on my cheek, about an inch away from my lips. He was like, (imitating Chris) “what’s up beautiful?”

I didn’t want Brad to see me with another guy, so I told him I had to find my friend and ran upstairs to the bathroom to touch up my lip gloss. The light was dead. There wasn’t any toilet paper, and there was puke all over the bath tub. I held my cell phone up to the mirror to make sure my face looked okay.

Brad’s bedroom was right around the corner, which I remembered from the last time I was there. I knocked on the door just to check. I heard some shuffling and he was like (imitating Brad) “just come in dude.”

I opened up the door and there he was. (Pause) With Mary Sachs in his lap. Skirt unbuttoned. No bra. Straddling him.

I had about two seconds to figure out what the fuck to do, and he’s like (imitating Brad) “Tina what’s up?” all surprised. I just turned around, got out of there. Fast. I ran downstairs, kinda stumbling over everything. I was about to grab Grace to leave, you know? I just wanted to go back, when Chris ran right into me again.

(Imitating Chris) “Oh, sorry babe.” Eyes kinda going all over the place. He was plastered. He asked where I was going. I was on the verge of crying or punching someone, so I just got impulsive. And my skin and my head were burning up, so I said (Pause) “Let’s go to your room.”

I guess it was because I was tan. Plus, I spent so long shaving my legs so my knees weren’t stubbly. I just wanted someone to touch them. I didn’t really think of making Brad jealous or mad at that point. It was just for me.

I wasn’t planning on letting him fuck me either. He just did. I kept my eyes open, staring over his shoulder as he was sweating all over me. It’s not that I’m a slut. I hadn’t even let Brad put his hands down my pants. That night was just, weird. Something I just did. Didn’t make me feel good or bad. Something that happened to my body, like sprinting or taking a shot. It took five or six minutes, and then I went downstairs and got Grace. When we walked out of the house, I started laughing real hard. She was laughing too, and we were squeezing each other’s hands and skipping. I ran out of breath and I tried to tell her what happened but I just started sobbing. She sat with me on the sidewalk pavement, and I put my head in her lap. People walked by and she held her sweatshirt over me so no one would know I was crying.

The next morning I woke up with one text message on my phone. It said “Slut.” From Brad. Not “sorry” or anything. Grace told me that he was a dickhead and it didn’t matter. Carrie said he probably liked me and Mary Sachs was just being aggressive.

That’s when people started looking at me. You know, I’m not the prettiest girl at all, and it was never like the whole room used to pause when I walked in. But now people were staring, hands going up to block their mouths. Chris would still come up and hug me, give me that kiss right next to my lips. But he never brought up that night, and I started to notice he was giving that kiss to a bunch of girls. Brad wouldn’t even acknowledge me. Funny, I didn’t hear anyone call Mary Sachs a slut.

(Reaches for nail polish remover and cotton balls, begins to take polish off finger nails and toes) So the nail polish thing. Bet is seems kind of random. You see, I was holding it together. Having the whole, “who cares what they think, it’s just gossip,” mentality. I’d been keeping my head up. And then one night two boys I knew asked me to suck their dicks ‘cause they’d known me longer than I had known Chris. Well that made me feel fucking amazing. Plus, there was a chip in my nail polish. My ring finger on my left hand. (Holds it up.) And it was just bugging me all night.

So I go back to my room, kind of wasted, and my room mate’s god knows where. I pull out my nail polish remover and a cotton ball and start taking off that one finger. But then the fingers that were holding the cotton ball started to smudge too. So now three fingers on my right hand have polish missing. Then I realize that I’m in this hot little room that smells like nail polish remover. I’m starting to feel a little dizzy, and a little at peace, for once. So I take that cotton ball, and I hold it real close to my nose and just breathe in. I feel much better.

So I soak it nice and wet with the polish remover and I take another sniff. On the websites they call it huffing. My eyes and nose get a little runny, but my skin gets the chills, and I lean my head back against my bed, feeling warm.

The thing with slut is that it’s like your nails. It just stays on you, can’t use remover to get it off. And you’ve gotta just let it grow out, until you can clip it off bit by bit. But my nail’s growing pretty fucking slow. And I just can’t shake off this slut thing. (Sniffs cotton ball and leans against bed or chair). All I can do is keep putting on the base coat then the polish then the top coat. Breathe them all in. Just keep covering the shit up, you know? Until eventually I get a fresh clear one that’s hard as a nail.

LIGHTS OUT / THE END