Candy’s come to hate her body. I’m over here by the window, having a sex change, and Candy’s watching hobo tv on her phone. She’s got it in her hand, occasionally dumping ideas into it without looking at them first– like you do with promises and the real cost of things.
Candy comes across all big and grown. She’s all I got.
She’s the one running the bots. The trick is covering all the bases with conditionals. Candy’s running a plug-in– banging on source code with algebraic hammers, changing the high faster than the speed of novelty.
On a liquid sunday we’re sitting in her room, letting her ghetto-ass script run through our heads and tell us things that aren’t true. Candy presses another combination on her phone, loose, like her bones don’t work, and I come for five minutes. Because, Candy says, she likes me and says I should have more fun. Because she won’t let herself have any, and she thinks joy looks stupid on your face, which you would think too if you never felt it.
By the time I stop feeling it my mouth is dry, my pants are wet and I think I hurt my back. Candy looks all cool lighting a cigarette, even upside-down from my perspective on the floor, and she smirks. I invoke my safeword and a sheet of ice lays across my spine. I have to call an ephedrine blast to clear the dust out my head. Then I roll over onto my belly, bloated, and look at her just sitting there, laughing.
“Pussy,” she says. “Give up just like that?”
“…gonna kills me…” I can barely squeak it out.
Candy’s hands swim through the air and I don’t see trails. I’m straight. I stand up.
“Go ahead then. Go on.”
She’s sneering at me and I slip an arm into my jacket. It picks up my mood, down-shifts to purple, and pulls up the Minneappolis playlist.
“Laughter is a way of saying, ‘Do that again.’”
I’m not laughing. “I’m not laughing.”
“I know.”
I step out into the living room, and I must be talking to myself because when I see her mom there’s a sudden drop in background noise. She’s just laying there, like she’s off somewhere else, having her own code hammered on.
“Take Me With You” comes up as the elevator doors close and the fact that it’s my life doesn’t make it any less of a movie. This is the scene where I put on my shades, and the script says there’s Candy’s icon, active. I hesitate before poking it. I need her to apologize, but not before I do, and I don’t know why either of those conditions make sense. She’s attached a video to her status, so I watch it. I’m in the lobby, thirty floors down, by the time I watch her load the gun. Leave it to Candy to make a mess. To take the wet, dirty way out. I don’t know why that bitch was my only friend.