The old maroon landline on the kitchen wall quivers, as if exhausted from all the morning activity.
Dull rings are muffled by Mae's bedroom door, the white noise behind a looping video on her phone. How many times she's played the video, Mae can't be sure—enough to know each shadow, each beat, the precise moment the camera swings—but still she watches it again.
The scene opens after that hefty football player named Jayden has settled into place, thick knees on concrete, stomach protruding. His face was contorted in exaggerated exertion but that's not apparent from the footage, which cuts him off from the shoulders up, news clip style. On one side of the frame is Ethan in profile, lit from below by underwater lights, and across from his muscles (which are already in motion, in motion throughout) a feminine figure slumps on the ledge. Her head sways atop her neck for a few long seconds until it tips back to rest on Jayden's robust thighs. Mae recognizes the minidress and the necklace and the bend of bony elbows, yet this body can't belong to her because it can't belong to anybody. It exists within her phone, locked between metal slivers by the same glue that, in the flesh, fuses together two slips of plastic. The girl in the swimming pool lives within a screen and not in this bedroom. Her garish skin cannot cover the muscle and bone belonging to Mae Jennifer Brady, who is a sixteen-year-old human sitting cross-legged on a floral duvet in a room she painted herself. Mae presses one finger into her opposite arm. No resemblance.
The clip lasts one minute and nineteen seconds. Ethan grips Mae's thighs and pries them apart as he pulls her into the shallow end. Her body does not cause a splash; it slinks awkwardly into the water, white dress bunching up around thighs.
Does Mae remember? She does not remember.
Jayden's massive hands—paws controlled by no visible head—continue their ape-like fumbling, forearms around underarms, hefting her upper body above water. The tip of her chin remains visible within the frame, hair matted against her chest and neck like violent tentacles rising from cloth. (Her face was not deemed important enough to record.) Ethan dives swiftly under the water to pull pink panties off, emerging with a burst as he lifts up her dress. The fabric is difficult, it clings to water, so Ethan keeps pushing it up higher, until an assist by Jayden successfully pulls the dress over her head and out of frame. Bare breasts bobbing in the night spur Jasper's camera to pan toward the nakedness. The sight polarizes the audience, those unrecognizable shadows shifting behind the action all this time. Half the kids run off and the rest form a tighter semicircle around exposed flesh, like middle-schoolers at a holiday dance. Some boy seizes a limp hand and waves it around ghoulishly.
Then, a crash from the kitchen. Mae pauses the video and goes to investigate. Socks against linoleum, Courtney stares at a patch of old wallpaper where the phone used to be.
“Did you...?”
“It wouldn't stop ringing.” Courtney is out of breath. The silenced contraption rests on the table, top layer of wallpaper still adhering to its base, surrounded by cords and index cards. “Those are for you.” It had been a long morning of answering calls in the brusque yet friendly tone cultivated by a lifetime of service jobs, a series of have-a-nice-days and lilted promises to pass on requests. Courtney had of course only recorded positive sentiments, hanging up on the untraceable voices that hissed “whore” and worse. After the second anonymous threat to come by and give Mae more of what she wanted, Courtney stopped picking up the phone, until she finally unplugged it in a fit of flying cords and curses.
“For me?” Mae reads the message on top: So glad you're home safe and soond. No, that word is sound. Safe and sound.
Courtney spots the phone in her daughter's hand. “How many times have you watched it?”
“Watched what?” Mae asks innocently but it's too late. Courtney has taken the cell and slipped it into a pocket of her oversized robe. As it vanishes behind terrycloth so does Mae's strength.
“That's not fair! You can't punish me when I didn't do anything wrong!” It's no use arguing with someone who has just ripped a phone out of a wall. All Mae can do is wail. “You hate me! The world hates me and you hate me, too!” A satisfying door slam. She crawls back into bed and stops fighting the sleep that has been following her all morning, a darkness kept at bay til now by a tiny bright screen.
The images begin to play as soon as her eyes close. Two breasts bobbing in the dark, attached to a pale torso and little stick arms, until figures begin to crack. Arms unhinge from shoulder sockets. Backlit water rises and swallows hips, a belly, ribcages, until all that remains are fat and nipples, staring like a pair of vacant eyes, floating.