Down the Drain

by Julia Fox

I feel miniature too, but not in an insignificant way. I feel small in a way that feels exciting, like I have yet to be discovered.

I fear my brain has already rotted.

I hear my mom say mean things about my grandma and Beth, about how they are mentally ill and that’s why he is too. I wonder if that means I’m going to get sick too. One day Beth casually tells Grandma a story that her therapist told her. Grandma looks up from her paper, her mood quickly shifts, and her eyes narrow toward Beth. “Call her up and fire her.”

I guess there was some argument over finances that led to Nathan being found guilty of murdering the director of Fire Dancer. His severed body parts were discovered in a suitcase on a random street in Queens. As you can imagine, this put a big delay in the completion of the movie, being that both the producer and the director were permanently out of commission. A few years later, we would receive an invitation in the mail to attend the premier of Fire Dancer at the Tribeca Film Festival. We said fuck it and went to see it. They cut out my part.

I don’t understand why these men are lamenting about getting older. It’s not like they’re given expiration dates, the same way women are.

I’m a virgin. I’m not ready to have sex. Plus, I didn’t shave down there.

Johnny is a true New Yorker, an Italian American from the Bronx. He grew up on the streets. His dad used to beat him and his mom was bipolar.

We are twelve years old but my dad says we are worse than the girls in the movie Thirteen. He laughs and thinks it’s funny.

We call ourselves the Stoned Monroes and we almost immediately start bringing out the worst in each other.

The more damage he does, the more money I take.

“I feel like you guys are mad at me,” Tara whines. “Oh my God, never,” I say. “We are totally suicidal too. Don’t even worry.”

Miraculously, we all graduate middle school. Mostly because the administration doesn’t want us there another year.

She’s wearing JLo’s fragrance.

“He needs to get through his chemo and with the way you behave, you’ll send him to his grave early.”

As soon as school is out, I desperately call my mom and beg her to let me come home. “No, Julia. You wanted to do this and now you have to see it through.”

The only thing we have in common is that we all chain-smoke cigarettes, but they don’t do it in a rebellious way. They do it in a chic way.

I notice all my identifiable information is wrong. My birth year is not 1992, I am definitely not five-nine, and I certainly weigh more than 110 pounds. I crumple the loose papers and shove them deep in the trash before Ace and Trish can notice how little my parents know about me.

“He’s just like his dad,” she whispers to me after he snaps at her, and I can’t help but feel sorry for her.

As I think about Ace’s outbursts, a wave of sympathy washes over me. I realize that he’s also a victim of his upbringing. He can’t help being violent. It’s all we know.

I begin to wonder if he can see me right now. What if when his soul rose to heaven, he caught a glimpse of me at this gay club with my tits out, taking pictures with a coked-up drag queen, surrounded by porn magazines. He was a holy man of strong principles and beliefs. I wonder if he will forgive me. But mostly, I wonder if I’ll be able to forgive myself.

Despite being in her fifties with jagged teeth and hepatitis C, her beauty still lingers.

I take another drag and exhale the smoke through the tube, feeling a strange mix of discomfort and detachment wash over me.

I watch in silence as he unbuttons his jacket, revealing an opulent watch and an impeccably tailored suit that scream generational wealth.

My eyes remain fixed as I watch my blood get sucked back into the syringe. It looks so pretty as it swirls around in there for a brief instant before he pushes it all back inside me.

I get upstairs and take my time walking down the long corridor, carefully examining the endless rows of portraits of old white men. This place is the antithesis of sexy.

I go to the bathroom to pee. When I pull down my pants, I find something strange on my panties. It looks like a ball of wax with veins running through it. I examine it closely and flick it into the toilet. As I flush, it dawns on me that I just had a miscarriage.

I put the ring on and he kisses my hand all the way up my arm and into the nape of my neck à la Gomez from The Addams Family.

“Drugs will give you wings to fly, but it’ll take away the sky.”

I order two hundred hissing cockroaches from Madagascar and convince my old friend Serena to release them in the club in exchange for a hundred bucks.

‘You are so beautiful to me, like the song I’ll sing you while we’re driving in the Lincoln Town Car. I’ll look into your eyes and get hypnotized. I imagine I’m a lounge singer singing true and sincere like they used to, but my voice will crack because I’ll cry but I’ll try to hide it, like a man should. Because the love I have for you is so strong my body doesn’t know any other ways of feeling when I see you. And I’ll sing “You Are So Beautiful to Me” again, and I’ll stop because unlike the lounge singer, so pure and true, I’ll be high and my eyes will close and we’ll drive into a house or a river but I’ll be so happy because I’m dying with you.’ ”

Once I put on the earrings, I realize I don’t actually feel better. However, I’m no longer mad at Harmony.

I lean in to kiss him for a photo. He’s gentle, I’m more aggressive. I feel him get an erection through the comforter and we make love. It’s short and unsuccessful, but it’s so meaningful to me. “You’re the only girl I’ve ever gotten a boner for,” he says proudly.

“How do I know y’all ain’t the police?” he asks. I pull up my Playboy spread on my phone that just came out—and flaunt it in his face. “Would a cop be in Playboy?” I ask smugly.

“I’ll throw them in for free, but y’all gotta do it here in front of me.” “I can’t believe you think I’m a cop, I’m actually flattered,” Harmony says. “Trust me, we both can’t hold down a job,” I say.

I’ve been driving on the fine line between ultimate freedom and complete and utter loneliness.

He nods out as I zone out, thinking about how much this promise I made with God is going to cost me and if it was really worth it.

We laugh, ignoring our recklessness, disregarding the fact that we tore this city in half with our love.

I think about how the night before Ace turned himself in we stayed up watching Adam Sandler movies. Now I’m going to be in a movie with Adam Sandler.

She never felt like she was good enough. So she got boob jobs and lipo, and once her mom got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Katharine ran up her credit card on mountains of Chanel bags. But none of that could fill the void that not being loved properly had left her with.

I would be lying if I said there weren’t times when Gianna and I were lying in bed together, smoking weed, watching reality TV, and laughing our asses off that I didn’t look over at her and wonder if she was the one. And I knew she felt the same way.

Over time she even miraculously warms up to Andrew. Except when she tells him that he’s the K-Fed to my Britney.

I obsessively wonder if she saw my texts before she passed. I pray that she did and that she knew how much I loved her.

I irrationally start thinking that maybe I should go back to A.A. and try to find another Gianna.

He reassures me that she knows how much I love her and encourages me to live my life and not be boring, because she will be living through me. I crack a smile. That sounds like her, and that’s all I need to hear.

I push Andrew away completely, lashing out at him and blaming him for her death. I can’t shake the feeling that if I hadn’t fallen in love with him, I probably would have been with her that night and maybe even been able to save her. But Andrew reminds me that if I hadn’t fallen in love with him, I might not be here either.

It becomes clear that we really don’t like each other as much as we thought we did.

What happens next changes everything for me. The due date is February 6: Gianna’s birthday.

In this dream, I plead with her, “Please be reborn as my baby!” But she just laughs and says, “Ugh, I don’t want to come back as a boy!”

I can’t help but feel like I was so close to achieving my ultimate dream scenario. It feels like I played the lottery and got every number right except the very last one, instantly crushing any faith I had in life.

I feel like a defective cow.