Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

The body is a currency everyone can understand.

for a long time, I’d felt there was an indefinite quality to my face, like it was a blurred outline that some other girl could fill just as well.

I had been bred for the easy life. And because I was pretty and white and had once known what it was like to be rich, I felt entitled to it, as if I were recapturing what was once mine, rather than taking what I didn’t deserve.

I can still feel my feet on the ground, and hear the words coming out of my mouth, but other than that I’ve gone; everything is happening on the outside, and I’m just watching, empty as a shell. (I’ve since come to understand, from the court-appointed therapist, that this is called dissociation.)

But didn’t you know? Didn’t you guess? I honestly didn’t. That’s the thing about money. It insulates you from certain truths. If ignorance is bliss, then it’s also the greatest luxury money can buy.

It is immoral to be rich; if being rich means having more money than you need, more money than you know what to do with, who do you think is paying that price?

“I think true beauty is about being real,” she says. “Authenticity. That’s the most beautiful thing in the world

I often had violent ideations like this, I didn’t know why, though my therapist now says that it probably helped me feel a kind of control in situations where I had none. I’m not so sure. I think I just found them entertaining.

it wasn’t until I got my phone back and held its cool, rectangular body—o beloved icon!—in my palm that I began to feel calmed.

On the one hand, I was a little appalled. I looked like a slut, the way I was arching my back, my eyes half-lidded and lascivious. On the other hand, it didn’t matter, because people were Liking

Ur like the Malala of female masturbation.

Woman power, but we—the models—were always called girls. That’s what they were really after: womanhood slipped over girls’ bodies.

Almost everyone I knew was, or had been, the founder of some dubious enterprise; it made doing nothing sound a lot better.

“What’re you hoes talking about?” she asked with juvenile bravado. “How Gemma should get a buzz.” “Oh my god, that’d be maje,” Blake said, turning to look at me appreciatively. The world tilted slightly. There was a strange clamoring in my head. “Wait, what’d you just say?” “That you should get a buzz cut.”

I had been on intimate terms with Egyptian cotton sheets, custom-made Italian sofas, and antique rugs, but I never had any idea of their cost. The price of things only becomes striking when you can no longer afford them.

I was telling myself that it was okay, it was worth it, no big deal, a few hours of my life, whatever. And it wasn’t even a few hours of my life, it was a few hours of my body’s life, which was separate from me. I’d been training for this, after all; every girl has. Why else do they teach us to hate our bodies, to treat them as expensive machines? Then it’s easy to do whatever you have to do, since you’re not really involved; everything’s happening on the outside, but inside you’re completely untouched.

Pretending, or believing I was pretending, gave me a false sense of security and control and so I leaned into it, and when hatless Cowboy Hat came back in, his pneumatic system fully functioning now, I didn’t even flinch. I watched it all on a tiny TV screen at the end of a hallway, and the hallway kept stretching on and on forever until the scene was the size of a postage stamp.

it was with this observation that I fully recognized that my body (not me) was naked but for a pair of leather underwear that said Fuck the Patriarchy on the ass, only it wasn’t my body anymore, it was somebody else’s, somebody I recognized but could not place.

Pretending I was someone else was what had gotten me into this mess, but it was also what would get me out of it. I realized then that everybody was pretending, all the time, but that for most people, for the people we call “normal,” the pretending part eventually falls away and the act simply becomes their life. It’s exactly what Anna thought right before she threw herself onto those train tracks. I wasn’t about to be so foolish.