Morning After

By some miracle, his apartment was only a fifteen-minute walk from where they met last night. Her bike was parked behind the building, which was old and run-down and had peeling paint and was just on the edge of the bad part of town.

The bike didn’t have any gearshifts. It was bought secondhand because that was better for the planet and those who worked in sweatshops. It was also all she could afford. The bike click, click, clicked with her pedaling, there was probably something important that needed to be fixed. She would do that later.

The sun was just starting to rise, making the sky blush at how early it was.

The apartment she biked away from wouldn’t have anyone awake in it for a few hours, probably. When the man whose bed she shared last night did wake up, he would be alone. He would go into his kitchen to see that she had taken the last English muffin he had. He would see that she had run the coffee maker but left no coffee for him. He would look through his phone and see that he didn’t have her number or name.

This theft, this silence, this mystery.

This was her contribution.

The bike jolted at each bump in the sidewalk; this bike wasn’t made to last much longer than a few trips around the block.

The trees in the neighborhood whizzed past her, the neat little houses with their paint chosen from a preapproved selection of colors. Nothing too bright, nothing too bland, just the perfect range of whatever would be a popular house color for the next few years or so.

It was too early for there to be cars on the road in this sleepy neighborhood, it was just her.

Soon she made it to the park. She turned her bike onto the grass, and the bike quickly lost all sense of cooperation and collapsed to the ground. She untangled her legs from the metal frame and stood to wipe the grass stain from her knee. It didn’t come off.

She sat under a tree and watched the sky, waiting for anything more than a sunrise.

Her shirt smelled like last night’s sweat and the beer she spilled on herself. She used her fingers to comb the tangles out of her hair.

Last night when he saw her, he asked her what her name was. She said she didn’t just give information out like that on the first date.

“Oh, so this is a date?” He was probably at least twice her age and his smile was the kind that people brought pictures of to their dental surgeons: too perfect.

“Absolutely not.” Her laugh was a few chuckles too many and the tone too measured, but he didn’t notice.

This laugh, this flirtation, this feigned interest.

This was her contribution.

There was a pond in the middle of the park, filled with ducks and geese. They swam in circles around each other, following the waterfowl in front of them. Each one honk, honk, honked at the bird in front of it, commanding it to move faster.

She looked down at her legs sticking out from her shorts. After they’d gone to bed and were both struggling to fall asleep next to a stranger, he told her that’s why he noticed her. “You were the only girl there wearing shorts. All the other girls had dresses or skirts. Just with that one little thing, you were so different.” It took her a long time to fall asleep after that.

This casual outfit, this cool-girl vibe, this pretend relaxation.

This was her contribution.

It was still too early for the park to be populated.

She lifted her shirt and looked at her ribcage. Littered across her body were blotches of purple and yellow and faint green. On her left side, she can see a familiar shape. One, two, three, four fingers, and a thumb. She put her hand on it and her hand is too small to fill the shape. It was too dark last night for him to have noticed.

She inhaled and licked her lips. Last night, he had gone in for a kiss and furrowed his brows when she turned away. “Let’s just take off our clothes instead.” So they did.

This young body, this lack of protest, this willingness to go further.

This was her contribution.

Her heart started racing thinking about the feel of his dry hands on her skin. His leathery neck. The hairline that pulled back above the temples. But he wasn’t anything new.

The sun was now a reasonable height above the horizon and the first young families were coming to the park. She got back on her bike and headed in the direction of the bad part of town. The paint on the houses became more mismatched with more peeling. There were more and more people outside of their homes than in the nice part of town, where everyone was either still sleeping or already at work.

She was back at the building where she had met him last night; it looked even more beat-up and run-down in daylight. Inside, there was the drip, drip, drip of the coffee maker. Two girls were in the kitchen, making themselves breakfast.

Upstairs, there was a bedroom immediately to the left of the staircase. She pushed open the door and saw that it was empty. The bed was unmade and the sheets, even from a distance, smelled dirty. The nightstand had little piles of paper all over it, crumpled and wrinkled and some torn in the corners. She added her messily folded bills to it.

Seventy-five dollars.

This was her contribution.

She turned out of the bedroom and went into her own. It was a shared room; there were two other mattresses beside her own, both empty. She curled into hers and pulled the covers over her small body. After a moment or two, her breath made her face hot. She let the warmth of silence envelope her body.