Other People's Clothes by Calla Henkel

Author:Calla Henkel [Henkel, Calla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

11

The hangover lasted the full weekend. My slippers made thwapping noises through sticky patches on the parquet. Hailey had counted the money three times while sitting cross-legged in bed, we’d made enough for rent and then some. Only on Monday afternoon did we feel strong enough to start cleaning. I scrubbed the cigarettes petrified in prosecco on the floor with steel wool while Hailey mopped. Our Nokia bricks had been bleeting and buzzing on and off, and we’d gotten at least two dozen Facebook messages.

“When is the next Beatrice party?”

“Why wasn’t I invited?”

“Have u found a black swtr?”

We responded to nothing. Hailey said building suspense was important. I scrambled to my phone, every time hoping it was Holiday, a fact that Hailey somehow knew.

“So I googled your bald girlfriend,” Hailey said later that evening, while sautéing mushrooms.

I coughed, “How did you—?”

“You told me her last name, Roberson.

“Either she’s a serial killer or a complete loser, she doesn’t even have a Facebook page. And you said she’s a music person? Doubt it. The only thing I could dig up were sound-mixing credits on an extremely indie film.”

“Hailey, that doesn’t matter.”

“It should,” she called as I left the kitchen, irked.

We weren’t sure what Beatrice had seen or how closely she was surveilling us. Hailey had bought a pair of binoculars at a secondhand shop and took to watching our street while eating cereal from the box, spotting several blow jobs in cars, but no Beatrice. Hailey had written a thorough diary entry, but we hadn’t left the apartment for longer than a grocery run, so there was no way for Beatrice to inspect any of it. But we assumed she must be watching us on Facebook, and discussed the need to watermark our images so everything was traceable. We settled on a Helvetica B, in the right-hand corner of each image.

I had shot twenty or so that felt worthy of the B. Our criteria were that they needed to capture the aura of the party, and also have punctum. We’d both been forced to read Roland Barthes freshman year and we sat together under the duvet in full photo 101 reenactment, arguing over the accident that pricked—the point in an image that draws you in. With the photo of Celia on the table, arms stretched out—we both agreed, the punctum was the T-shirt, wet with Otto’s blood, that lay at her feet. With the photo of Sam standing at the door, the line a shadowed mass behind her—Hailey argued the punctum was the way the flash reflected off her glass, I argued it was the way her head was cocked as if she were still keeping watch over the line even while posing. And with the photo of Hailey leaning against the roulette table—Hailey insisted the punctum was the way her leg pointed toward the body of a girl in the foreground, creating a triangle between the two. But I knew it was the obvious hunger to be photographed that seeped from her eyes.

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