Girls On Film
Girls on Film
By Trinity Balboa
Anita is supposed to be nice, kind, demure. She’s supposed to sit with her arms crossed and back straight, let the light shine off her choppy blonde hair like a halo. She’s supposed to be quiet, not to speak unless spoken to, smile instead of talk.
Right now, Anita wants to punch Joan’s teeth in.
She knows she can’t. They’re in a restaurant at the moment, far too brightly lit, not at all like the dirty type of restaurant back home in Los Angeles where this sort of stuff was supposed to happen. Blood spills don’t look good on oriental carpeting. If she caused a fight here, she’d be making a scene.
Part of her doesn’t care. She came from Los Angeles, she’ll bring Los Angeles here, give Joan a taste of home. She oughta be reminded anyway, the way she’s acting.
She’d picked up this boy off the street without a second thought. She likes his look, she’d said, but Anita knows it’s crap. She likes the attention, the type of attention he can give her that Anita can’t. He’s the opposite of her, the restaurant embodied, with patches on his leather jacket that Anita knows he didn’t make himself and perfectly manufactured messy hair. Joan’s hair was cut by Anita in a Seven-Eleven bathroom, her black locks clogging the ceramic sink. His was cut with silver scissors.
Joanie’s not supposed to be with someone like that. Joanie’s authentic, Joanie poured alcohol on Anita’s old skating wounds night after night without a grimace.
Most of all, Joanie can take a punch.
Which is why she finally does it. It takes some effort, her small frame is no match against the wide oak table, but when she’s finally able to grab onto the cotton of Joan’s collar it feels good under her fingertips. Her bruised knees knock against the hard wood, but the satisfaction of knowing her nails are making holes in a shirt she loves is worth it. And the punch hurts, crushing into her fist, but when it hits it feels like she’s back home.
The reaction is immediate, too. Joan’s dark brown eyes go wide and her nose starts to drip deep red against her pale skin just like she imagined it. She stumbles back, chair hitting the ground hard. “What the hell, Nita?”
Joan’s voice pitches high when she’s pissed off, and Anita loves it. It shows emotion, she thinks, crack’s Joan’s cold shell. Somehow, it spurs her on, makes it easier to climb over the table and drop down to the floor again. Joan’s so close now, she can see all the imperfections she knows so well- her slightly deviated septum, the freckle under her left eye, her crooked teeth. Anita suddenly wishes she was the only one who knew about that. She decidedly lands another punch there, right against her lips, partially hoping to correct those crooked teeth forever.
Joan’s supposed to make a move now, Anita thinks, fight back, but she’s just sitting there holding her lip. Blooding is leaking from her nose now like a faucet, sure to stain the carpeting. Anita doesn’t want to think about the carpeting anymore.
There’s a couple painstaking seconds of silence before Joan finally does something. It comes quick- Joan’s barely a blur of movement before Anita feels her head hit the ground, hard. She lands inches from the ornate table leg, in fact, it's a miracle she didn’t brain herself right then and there. From this vantage point, all she can see is the rough underbelly of the table, the unfinished edges, the gum stains. There’s a familiar weight resting on her stomach and she doesn’t even have to look up to know what it is.
Joan’s straddled her, nice and comfortable, and she’s looking down at Anita with such concern that it almost hurts. Blood drips slowly down Joan’s face and hits Anita’s stomach, pooling in the wrinkles of her faded California peaches shirt. The shirt that was a gift from Joan.
This is not how it's supposed to go, it’s not supposed to be some petty girl fight, it’s supposed to be pure unbridled rage. Somehow, though, Anita can’t find it in her to buck her off.
“What the hell are you doing, Anita?”
Joan barks it at her, and there’s words after it too, but all of it just fades off in the abysses of her mind. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, after all.
It’s a couple hours later when Anita finally finds her again. It wasn’t hard to figure out where she was staying, it wasn’t hard to figure out she was staying alone either. What was hard was picking herself back up off the linoleum tile floor of the restaurant bathroom that she’d been shoved into to ‘put herself together’.
She wasn’t truly sure if she’d really put herself back together yet. She’d sat on the ceramic sink and craned her neck around to see the back of her head, so far around that the mat of blood on her blonde hair became obvious. And she’d put her head under the faucet until the water ran clear and the shoulders of her shirt became drenched through, but as far as she knew, it still could be there.
It didn’t really matter though. Joan could put her back together, easy as that, and as soon as she found her, all would be right again. So, she got up off the bathroom floor and went out to the motel where she knew Joan was staying.
The problem now lies in the fact that Joan’s behind the door of a cheap motel, and Anita’s on the other side.
It’s stupid, she thinks, she could kick it down if she tried hard enough. But for some reason she’s exhausted, frayed at the seams, and the only reaction she can muster to finding the door locked is a sigh.
“Joan?” She cries, leaning her forehead so close to the door that it almost feels comfortable. “Joanie, it’s Anita, I’m sorry, you know that?”
The worst part is that there’s no response. Anita’s voice is practically echoing back off the peeling plaster walls back to her and the only response is the scuff of her worn sneakers against the dingy carpeting.
It’s infuriating. Somehow, in all of the madness she managed to forget to even knock, so that’s what she does next. She bangs her bruised knuckles into the wooden door. It stings, but she knows that if Joanie just opened the door, it would be worth it. But there’s nothing.
“Joanie?” She asks again, to no particular person, just the shut door. Her voice is barely audible above a whisper, but it’s all she can manage.
It was never supposed to be like this. Joanie and Anita were supposed to be together to the end, the glimmer twins, Joan the Richards to her Jagger. She just couldn’t help it sometimes- when she saw Joan with other people it felt like someone had taken a lighter to her heart. It wasn’t Joanie’s fault, and she knew that deep down, but she had to take it out on someone, didn’t she? And Joanie could take a punch. Anita loved that Joanie could take a punch.
Anita doesn’t deserve this either, though. Anita can’t take a hit, not like Joanie, especially with no one there to protect her. Joan’s supposed to be the one who cleaned up her skating wounds, night after night, and now it feels like she’s taking salt to them.
Anita’s nearing her wit’s end, now. She doesn’t like to cry, the red splotches that rise up on her cheeks don’t look good on her complexion, but she can’t seem to help it right now. At least, if she’s crying, there’s no one in the entire goddamn terrible motel that’s gonna see her, not even Joan.
She slides down the door and hits the ground with a thump. Her back smarts against the flat surface, and the back of her head starts to ache again when she leans into the wood, but none of the pain is comparable to what she’s feeling inside, she thinks. It’s hard, but she manages to raise her hand once more, and pounds on the door one last time.
Her voice is so rough and defeated when it comes out that it doesn’t even sound like her own. “Joanie, open the goddamn door please.”
All that happens is that the lights lining the ceiling flicker, and then suddenly, there’s something.
There’s a beat, and the weight sweeps out from behind Anita. She breathes in time with a loud creak, and the door opens, and all at once, there’s Joanie looking down at her.
“What are you doing on the ground? Come on, up with you,” She says, with a smirk that Anita’s never been so happy to see in her life. Joanie is sporting a black eye and a split lip as a result of Anita’s temper, but somehow, in this moment, a black eye has never looked as good on anyone else as it has on Joanie.
She reaches up a shaky hand and places it in Joan’s, calloused and coarse, but to Anita it feels just as comforting as the first time they did this.
Once they’re face to face, it’s a little harder to keep it straight. Joan’s so close that she feels like she can’t breathe without breathing in Joan herself, the perfume she wears, the smell of the soap that she’d used to mop up the blood. “Joanie-”
Joanie smiles with those cute crooked teeth that Anita always adored, and she nods. “I know, Nita, I know.”
She can’t find it in her to express all she wants to say, but somehow Joan knows, she always knows, Joan knows her better than herself.
They stay there like that for a while, standing in the doorframe. It’s a whole minute before Joan finally pulls her in, shuts the door behind her. Joan even goes to brush her hair behind her ear, like she’s always meant to do, but she finds it thick and matted with blood again and she furrows her brow.
Anita worries for a second that she’s done something wrong again, that Joan’s finally gone and turned against her, but Joan just shakes her head and starts speaking in that simple, tender voice of hers. “God, I did a number on you, huh? Let’s clean this up.”
Anita wants to laugh, soft and insane, because it’s nothing in comparison to what she’s done to her. But she lets her lead her back to the bathroom without a fight at all. She even lets Joan sit her on the sink, lets her clean up her wounds, again and again, without a grimace.