Chapter 4: 4

I feel like I should take out a piece of paper, or create a neat new spreadsheet on my laptop.

What would happen if anyone found out what I do?

Neatly, in bullet points:

• I get suspended

• I get kicked out

• I become the local whore and people write stuff on my locker and ask me to show them my tits in the hall.

Well. None of that is completely unfamiliar to me. That's the good news.

I imagine people showing up at my work, those snooty scrunchie girls giggling behind their hands as they watch me dance naked. I imagine Elizabeth or the dean or some other old fuck blackmailing me into fucking her under the desk. I imagine someone "anonymously" tipping off my parents back home, my mom driving down here in hysterics. I start to hyperventilate and have to stop, and I'm still not halfway down the list.

Now, what would happen to her if it came out where she likes to spend her free time?

A big fat nothing, that's what. She's a grown fucking woman, it's natural. Insert the usual million excuses. Or most likely she won't even need one—no one will even bother to ask what she was doing in the club.

And the funny part is, the boys will be the first to lynch me. They always are.

I close my eyes and exhale, slowly. The fight or flight reflex has kicked in, and it's painfully clear which one I'll be doing.

Drop the class. Withdraw from the program, from the school, just... disappear. Return her stupid camera and never come back, never set foot near the place again. Just go on with my life, what do I need this for anyway? It changes nothing. I have my own apartment, I take care of myself, my fucking bills are paid and I don't eat Ramen noodles for all three meals—already more than most people in this school can say.

And anyway, I won't miss it. I've never taken a damn art class in my and somehow I got by.

I'm halfway to the admissions office on the first floor when I grind to a halt. I sink my hands into my hair and groan under my breath.

What the hell am I doing?

Am I really going to run away, just like that? Go from one heinous stripper cliché to an even bigger one? Get comfortable, get used to the money, drop out of school?

All for some asshole who thinks she can lord it over me because she knows something I want to keep secret. She can go to a strip club every night of the week if she wants, no one bats an eyelash. And me, one of the faceless girls who dances for her, who grinds on her lap and shoves my tits in her face—I'm the one who gets to lose my life over it.

Not happening.

I let out a shaky laugh, and a couple of people stare. I still have another class today, Art History, but until then I have a good two and a half hours.

I go outside, into the still-scalding September afternoon. I wander around downtown Montreal with Elizabeth's camera, snapping pictures of random things as I see them: the dazzling Gothic spires of St James United Church on Ste-Catherine, the arched windows and majestic outdoor stairwells on Crescent and Bishop, the turrets on the roofs, the looming mountain you can see from Sherbrooke. And other things: a homeless guy sleeping outside a currency exchange place, a cardboard sign in front of him in both English and French. A massage parlor named Les Caresses squeezed on the top floor of an ancient building above a Subway. A squirrel nibbling on a stale Timbit.

I get used to the camera surprisingly quickly. It's heavy, satisfying to hold, and has that leather-and-metal smell to it that old electronics have. The lens makes a pleasant whirring sound when I zoom in or out with the help of a tiny twisty-wheel, and the shutter gives that click I've only heard on an iPhone camera—so that's how it is, for real.

It's a bit weird and frustrating not to be able to see the pictures, or delete the bad ones. I count the number of shots I have left, down from twenty-four. By the time I run out, I'm due back in class in fifteen minutes.

I put the camera away and run the rest of the way back to the main building, the heavy camera-bag bouncing off my hip and hitting me in the butt. Somehow I don't mind in the slightest.

The art history class couldn't be more different from the workshops. It's in a huge auditorium filled with about eighty people. The teacher is the same one I had last semester for Art History Of the Middle Ages: I wanted to avoid her but nothing else was available. She's an old, mean bastard who assigns paper after paper and loves to spring pop quizzes when you least expect. And she's also a real pain about attendance. More than three absences, you lose one point. For each one.

But right now I couldn't care less. I daydream through the class, suffused with a weird energy unlike anything I've felt in a long time. Maybe it's the jolt of adrenaline. Maybe it's my afternoon with Elizabeth's camera. I've pretty much drifted off into my own world when I notice the girl next to me staring at the notebook on the desk in front of me, scowling.

Flustered, I look down and realize I've been doodling all along: a girl, more like a wispy, shadowy silhouette, but clearly naked, hands over her breasts, hips swaying, head thrown back and leaning against a stripper pole. Long, twisty vines snake upward from the darkness between her thighs, up her belly, around her thighs, sprouting coiled branches and narrow, jagged-edged leaves.

Blood rushes to my face, and I cover the notebook with my forearm—a gesture I've perfected to an art form since middle school.

She scoffs and goes back to taking notes.

I sit there, my heart pounding, the giddy feeling torn to shreds. Instead, a different sort of thought creeps into my head like the black vines on my drawing: I look at Prof. Grey up front at the lectern, and envision her in the peanut gallery, drooling on my legs as I dance. Her bony, spotty hands groping for my breasts. I imagine the girl next to me sneering whore while pretending to sneeze, because she already knows that a surprise is waiting for me at my locker at the end of class.

Underneath my hoodie, my skin crawls.

Something needs to be done. Today, first thing before work, I'll stop at the ghetto hair salon a block from my apartment and buy myself a wig. The craziest wig imaginable, waist-length platinum curls, or a black dominatrix bob, something so different no one would recognize me.

And I'll give the stupid camera back, I think, not without a shiver of regret.

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