It’s November and I’m in the VIP line to a nightclub on Valencia. The scallops of my black club dress hang only a little below my pussy, which I like.
“Aren’t you cold?”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me. The guy I’m with offers me his sports coat but I shake my head. His name is Cory or Ricky or something that ends with a y. He’s this huge, Taiwanese frat boy who managed to get scalped tickets tonight for Gareth Emery. Square jaw, kissable lips, but every time he speaks he sounds like he just inhaled a protein shake blended with equal parts stupidity and White Claw.
After the bouncers scan our tickets and check my purse, Cory/Ricky and I stand in the lobby, waiting to go up to the second floor club. Girls shuffle around the elevators in skintight miniskirts and sleek, hairless legs, examining their hazy reflections in the metal sliding doors as the thick of hairspray and cheap cologne mix uncomfortably in the air. I check for the floor number, but even in four-inch stilettos I can barely see over anyone’s head.
“So, what’s your major?” I can’t believe he’s asking me about college.
“Math.” I feel for the pressed pills in my cleavage, teasing them loose from a tiny baggie under my petal pasties. “You want this now or what?”
“Oh, yeah, how much do I owe you?”
“This is a two-hundred. Is that enough?” He nods. I shrug. “Just CashApp me forty later.” We put a tiny tablet under our tongues, letting the chalky tastelessness melt with our saliva.
“Math, huh.” He sizes me up again with a new look. An appreciative one, like I’m suddenly not some dumb bimbo ABG who he thought would seem cute on his forearm when he was swiping right on Tinder. I both hate and bask in that look, the new expectations and newfound impressions. “No shit. Could have fooled me.”
The elevator comes. When we get to the club, I consider making a beeline for the bar, but I actually want to enjoy the music sober before the roll hits. I guide him to the dance floor and his palms are on my ass immediately. I have an urge to knee him, but I don’t want to kill the good vibes just yet. I shimmy towards a gorgeous, dark-haired girl who’s been giving me eyes since I walked in. She’s in a red skater skirt and her skin is the color of dark ochre. She smells like lilies. She gives me a wink, her lids thick with pink shadow and heart-shaped glitter, and slowly traces the line of my cheek down to my shoulder and collarbone. We dance together. Guys around us watch, eyes glued to our limbs stroking each other’s hips, bumping and grinding to the house dubstep. She whispers in my ear and says I’m pretty, so pretty. I consider kissing her. I imagine the slick, greasy taste of her lip gloss.
“Hey, is that Cam.mie? Cam.mie? Wait, that’s totally Cam.mie.”
I turn. A tall white guy with a shock of purple-brown hair pushes aside people to get to me, his smile bright and beatific.
“Cam…mee-eh?” Cory/Ricky wraps a protective arm around my shoulder. “Camille, you know this guy?”
“No, but—”
“You’re the streamer, Cam.mie, right? I’m Morgan.” He flutters a hand across his chest. “Huge fan. I’ve been a Cam Club member for six months. I almost didn’t recognize you without your pink hair.” Morgan shouts all this as the opening act finishes. There’s a brief, abrupt moment of silence before the crowd chatter and everyone in a thirty-foot radius can hear him. I flush. The girl I’m dancing with has slipped away. “I didn’t know you were a Gareth fan.”
“You stream?” Cory/Ricky looks at me in disbelief. “Like Twitch streaming? What do you stream?”
“Overwatch. Valorant. Even CSGO,” says Morgan. “She’s Top 500 in all of them. Grandmaster and Immortal. Global Elite.”
Cory/Ricky squints. “Grand…what? What does that even mean?”
“It means she could go pro if she wanted to.” This is untrue, but Morgan snorts this out as if it’s fact anyway. “You’re with her and you don’t even know?”
“Look, buddy,” says Cory/Ricky. He curls a fat, flexed arm around me. The veins pop out of his biceps like miniature, hissing garden snakes. “Maybe you should back off.”
I hate this. Dick measuring contests when I just met them. I’m not even sure of this frat boy’s real name.
“It’s fine. Come on. Let’s get a drink.”
Morgan sidesteps in front of me and I nearly trip into his chest. “Can I please, please, pleeease get a picture?”
“Sure.”
Cory/Ricky looks pissed but slumps out of the frame obediently. Morgan whips out his phone. In the bright light of his screen, his face is a waxy, full moon. My brown eyes are barely visible under my fake lashes and eyelid tape, my freckles nonexistent under a doughy cream of foundation. When the camera clicks, he grabs a fistful of my curls, ruining a hunk of the mermaid waves I spent two hours on. He asks if my current hair, a balayage cut that my parents paid for as an early graduation present, is a wig or if my pink one is. I force a giggle. No, they’re both real. I just stopped dyeing my hair pink a few weeks ago.
I wish a truck would hit me right now. My entrails, splattered across the club walls like seaweed.
◆
“So you stream?”
Cory/Ricky’s name is actually Lawrence. I scoped out his ID when he gave it to the bartender.
The beating lights are pastel fuzzy and they drip like swathes of gooey, melted frosting. “Yeah, since high school. A few years now.”
Years of brand name clothes, expensive makeup, rad gaming rigs I could have never afforded otherwise. Years of being the best at the games I played, half a million followers, and entertaining fans who thought I was an FPS goddess and could do no wrong. Years of energy drinks and sleepless nights, propositions and dick pics sent to all my socials, haters calling me slutty and stupid, spreading rumors that I used to be a budget titty streamer. So what if I wear padded bras thicker than the textbooks I never needed to read? It’s not like people were watching me when my chest was as flat as an airport runway.
“Damn, I don’t know anybody that streams. That’s pretty hot.”
I think of how I look off-stream, days of unwash clinging to my skin as I click heads with nacho salt fingers, screaming toxic slurs until my smurf account got unanimously reported by all my noobass teammates. I suck down a rum and coke, then ask the bartender for another. I put it on Lawrence’s tab.
“Whoa, slow down,” he says. His fingers spread across the length of my spine like he’s reaching across an octave of piano keys.
“Let’s dance.” I drain the next drink. Gareth is coming on soon.
My head lolls against the beat. Lawrence holds onto me, his palms on my ass again. My arms are in the air. My legs don’t stop moving. They’re slugs. Happy, clicking slugs. My purple lace thong is showing and I don’t care. The synth runs through me like a typhoon and I turn my head to the flickering lasers, all glitter and rose gold, loving how I must look. Each beat is a droplet of unadulterated ecstasy through my bloodstream. I love this, the brief window of feeling that the sun really is out, the sky really is blue, that the world really does turn for everyone the next day. And Lawrence is really, really, really nice. He keeps asking me if I want water or if I want to go home. His place is a little down that way, if I’m getting tired. I never sleep with gym rats, but I could make an exception for Lawrence. I push past him and find the pink neon sign of the bathroom. He tries to follow, but I lose him in the crowd. I eke past the long line of girls who protest as I shove myself into a just-open stall. The girl who has just emerged from the toilet shoves me back. As revenge, I puke up stomach acid all over her clothes.
◆
I wake up the next day with a mild bruise on my temple. Puked-on girl started screaming as I finished retching, her hands outstretched in two comical, red-painted claws as she charged towards me, bile trickling down her pointy, halter top tits. As I fled towards the exit, my heels hanging from a strap on my wrist, I called an Uber and bumped my head against the swinging lobby doors.
There are six or seven texts from Lawrence calling me a bitch. A cam whore. A slut. A tease. And of course he didn’t pay me for the molly. But I didn’t pay him for the ticket, which was way more expensive. I guess he thought I’d subsidize the cost with streamer girl pussy. Fucking creep. I block him and crawl out of bed, rubbing my temples. My makeup from last night has smeared all over the pillow and Cocoa Puff crumbs dust my sheets like specks of dried poop.
In the kitchen, my housemate, Angela, gives me an aggrieved look. She studies Psychology, which I think is a useless major, but she thinks I’m a useless person, so we’re even.
“Out late again?” Angela sips her afternoon Earl Grey, her curly black hair pulled back with a duckie rhinestone scrunchie. She writes in her planner. Six or seven pastel highlighters are scattered across our thrifted Formica like rays of a pretentious rainbow. I dig around for a canister of instant coffee and doctor my drink with leftover vanilla Soylent.
“If I wanted a mother, I’d ask.”
“You woke me up last night.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realize you slept at ten p.m. like a grandma—”
“It was two in the morning!”
“Whatever. I bet you were up late masturbating and watching hentai anyway.” Angela never invites anyone over and she has no plans, ever. Every time I come back, even if it’s at seven, she throws a snippy fit the next morning: You slammed the door! You didn’t turn off the light in the kitchen! You snorted cocaine off the coffee table! “Why don’t you worry about your own life instead of obsessing over mine? Get friends and touch some grass.”
Angela bites her lip and her eyes shine a bit brighter under her glasses. “So what? You don’t have to judge my life by your standards. Even if—” her fingers fumble, then slip against the fountain pen nib in her grip. Emerald ink bleeds across the webbing between her thumb and index finger, stretching shimmery wet across her veins. “I’m perfectly fine on my own.”
Just as I’m about to speak, she loosens her scrunchie and a willowy tangle of black hair curtains her face. She bumps past me, speeding towards her room, and slams the door. Her Korean boy band poster crumples into a bow on the floor as a silver thumbtack rolls into obscurity behind the couch.
I rifle through the fridge for lunch. The shelves are stacked to the brim with Angela’s groceries, her full name—ANGELA PEI-LIN ZHU—labeled on every bowl, bottle, and Kraft cheese peel. I finally ease out a leftover slice of Digiorno’s on a grease-splotched paper plate in a back corner, behind a tin of pickled vegetables. I’m about to take a bite when I see my name on a sticky note. It’s in Angela’s loopy cursive, the ‘i’ dotted with a paw print sticker.
for your hangover, the note says, in a tiny scrawl. It’s stuck atop a Tupperware box of shrimp fried rice, still lukewarm.
An itch of guilt creeps up my arm. I find some tape and hang the smug, airbrushed Korean boys back on her door and smooth out the creases in their blonde and blue hair. I consider knocking. But she’s just my Craigslist housemate. I only need her to pay rent, not become my dingleberry toenail-painting bestie. And I’m about to be late. I wash my face and re-do my eye makeup as I scarf down the crust. I adjust the pads in my bra and pull on a tight, pajama shirt that I bought specifically for streaming: a sunny-side up egg beams from each tit and a wiggly bacon smiles on my abdomen. When I’m prepped, I boot up my computer. The pink LED lights from my PC tower breathes fluorescent light onto my cheeks as I grab my headphones—salmon pink, with cat ears on the band—a sponsored product from Razer. When I start the stream, hundreds of viewers flood in, then a thousand. Emojis clutter my second screen as the chat zips through, the words whizzing by my eyes like fast traffic.
“Hey Cam Club! Cam.mie here. I actually met a fan yesterday. Shoutout to Morgan—super sick meeting you at Gareth.” I pull my hair back into a ponytail. I let a tiny curl hover over my left cheek to emphasize my right side—the better side—of my face. “Oh, the picture’s on Twitter? Pog, thanks for the tag. ‘Kay, I’m going to set up a poll for the game I’ll play toni—no, no, anything but Fortnite. Yeah, no, that shit’s like a daycare now. I’m never going back to that. Anyway, poll’s up. Go vote, chat.”
◆
I’m buying tampons when I get spotted again. I feel the camera on me before I hear the voice. I clench a smile as I turn.
“Hey, Cam.mie,” says the voice. It’s always a guy who does this. Always. Girls tend to shyly approach me and act like I’m some endangered raccoon that might bite. Guys announce my streamer name like they’ve rehearsed it several times in the mirror, thinking that if they say it enough times I’ll appear like Bloody Mary, ready to wet their dick on command. “Cam.mie, can I get a picture?”
I nod. He brings himself chummy close to my cheek and I catch the cloying scent of alcohol and weed. I’m sick, I have the worst migraine, and I spent twenty minutes on my makeup just so I could get harassed by Zitty McZitterson at a CVS as I buy shitty drugstore tampons. I should have nicked one of Angela’s pads, but I’d rather free bleed than put scented Hello Kitty near my vagina.
“Saw your stream yesterday,” he says. “Hope you’re feeling better. A cold, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, thanks for asking. And it’s minor. No biggie.” I wave my hand. He glances at my chewed-up fingernails and follows the dismissive arcs I make, back and forth, back and forth. His dark eyes scan my face, unblinking, as if trying to etch my features into stone.
“I figured I’d find you in this area, since you mentioned Gareth a few days ago,” he says, after a beat. “You look really hot. You’re way hotter in person, actually.”
“Thanks,” I say. I’m a little squicked by his intensity, but it’s fine. Most people who watch me are socially inept shut-ins, but they mean well. “Always great to meet a fan.”
“Hey, you wanna hang out later?”
“I can’t. I have plans. Thanks for the invite though.” I sniff and head towards the next aisle. He follows me. I grab some Moleskine journals and a handful of some random, colorful pens. They’re for Angela–she hasn’t come out of her room since Sunday.
“Come on.” He smiles and grabs my wrist, the one with the basket. The tampon box slides to the other side and one of the pens clatters onto the speckled linoleum. “I’m having a party later and my friends would love to meet you. They’re all big fans.”
“I really can’t.”
“How about your number?”
“Hey, um.” I cough. My eyes dart around the empty aisles. “I’m really sick and—”
“I’ve followed you since the beginning, when you just started. Even when you had less than a hundred viewers. Every stream, every post.” His voice spirals. I back into the Post-Its and jostle some of the boxes, but his grip is still firm. “Now that you’re Twitch partnered and famous, you can’t even give a fan your goddamn number? You know we fucking made you, right?”
His face is red, his eyes narrowed. His breath, hot on my forehead, sends a delayed smell of sour decay. He’s not tall or big, but his shoulders are still nearly twice the width of mine. His fingernails dig into the paper-thin heart of my wrist.
“Okay. Okay.” I close my eyes. I recite the number and he calls it. My phone rings in my back pocket. He releases me and air floods back into my lungs.
“Feel better soon, Cam.mie,” he says softly. “You don’t look too well. You must really be sick.” Gentle, now. Worried. So sweet that I would have thought that the rise in volume and the anger that struck his voice earlier was a hallucination, but my right wrist throbs. It’s not bruised. It won’t leave a mark. But the heat lingers. He leads me to the cashier and buys my shopping basket, along with some Nyquil and tissues. The cashier makes a clucking noise with her tongue and comments on how cute a couple we are.
He holds onto me just a little longer, outside the store, by the doormat. The doors open and close, open and close. He says something, his grip rooted around my upper arm. A joke. Okay, yes, I laugh. I nod enthusiastically. I coyly flip my hair. His body saunters down the street, fading into the crowd. He’s whistling. Whistling, and the cars all halt to a stop as he crosses the street. The numbered walking lights countdown for him. The rain is hesitant, as if asking for my permission to fully fall, after spending the last few minutes caressing droplets into my hair. It’s a soft, mist-like drizzle. A fog grows in density and moments later, I only see wisps of my stubby fingernails in the haze. I want to sit, catch my breath, but there’s blunted metal spikes in the alcove, next to the window, made to stop homeless people from sleeping in the nook. I don’t know if I can move. The doors open and close, open and close, and people brush past me. My hand disappears as I lay my body down, tentatively, on the spikes. I don’t feel anything at all.
◆
I don’t remember walking back to my apartment.
When I enter the living room, I start sobbing on the carpet. It’s dark. I try to be quiet, but the light flickers on and Angela slips in. She clicks a steaming mug of ginger tea on the coffee table, her hair coiled in a thick braid. An oversized, lumpy brown cardigan sits over her shoulders. At the tender age of twenty, she’s perfectly achieved the look and lifestyle of a sexless old maid nearing retirement.
“What’s wrong with you now?” She scoots down next to me and hovers a palm over my body, briefly, before connecting with my shoulder. Her touch is warm, but her lips are pursed, her eyes flat with obligatory concern. “Lost a few Instagram followers? Didn’t get enough Twitch bits?”
“Fuck off.” I shrug her away and stand up, holding onto the door frame for support, then grab the tampon box and head to the bathroom. When I come out, she’s on the couch. She hands me the Nyquil and tissues from the bag and I hurl them into the trash, unopened, with a slam of the lid. I suppress the urge to shove my whole foot through the boxes.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m fine.” I point at the rest of the bag. “That’s for you. I’m sorry I was such a horrendous bitch earlier.”
“What—” She looks inside the bag once more, warily, as if expecting a pigeon carcass. Her expression softens. “I don’t like Moleskines and I don’t use gel pens.”
“Oh my God. Boo fucking hoo. I’m sorry it’s not 52gsm Tomoe River paper or whatever the fuck you’re in lust with. If you don’t want them, throw them away.”
“I still appreciate the gesture.” She brings the bag into her lap and examines the paper. “And I accept your apology.”
“Great, glad we’re all gucci. I’m going to bed.”
“You should take some medicine before sleeping. You look terrible.”
“Gee, thanks.” I start towards my room, but Angela wheels me away and sets me down on the couch.
“Just…” She looks at me, then sighs. “Just wait here a moment.”
She rustles through the pantry and unearths a cheesecloth of wood chips and leaves, twigs and dried berries. As she steeps them, she measures and washes rice. The faucet runs and runs. The drizzle from earlier begins to stream, in earnest, against the living room window, drumming rhythmically against the roof. I trace my reflection in the glass and feel myself begin to doze off.
When I wake up, there’s a pink comforter on my lap. It smells like Angela—a clean, linen scent—and it’s decorated with the chuckling muzzles of cartoonish beagles. The apartment smells of licorice and smoky bark, sweet oak and ashy fumes. Angela wrings out the cheesecloth and pours an opaque, earthy concoction into her elephant mug, the one she warns me to never use, and hands it to me on the couch.
“You didn’t poison this, did you?”
“You are such a drama queen.” She rolls her eyes and cracks an egg, her name written on the shell in all-caps and red Sharpie. The silky orange yolk plops into a bowl of congee and she scrambles it with purple chopsticks. “Do you want soy sauce? Pork floss?”
“Sure.” I sip the medicine and almost vomit. “I don’t want to be rude, but this tastes like shit.”
“That’s how you know it’s medicine.” She places the bowl of steaming congee in my lap. I’m not hungry, but I take a bite. The soft, slick rice melts on my tongue, like flakes of warm, slippery snow, and the pork floss rolls, salty and sweet, down my throat. Angela cooked it with chicken stock, the kind she makes from scratch every month with fresh bones and claws from the butcher, precious vegetable scraps and roots, pestled and roasted spices. She freezes them in stacked, glass tins and saves them for rainy days or exams week.
“I—” The congee makes my eyes sting a little, but I blink back the tears immediately. “Thanks. You didn’t have to do all this.”
“Just drink.” She rests her face on her palms and gives me a sunny smile. I pinch my nose and drain the mug obediently. She nods her approval. “There’s more for tomorrow.”
I groan and laughter trickles out of her. As she grabs the mug from me, she squeezes my shoulder, and I lean slightly into her scent. “Get some sleep, Camille.”
Angela leads me into my bedroom. She turns on the light and makes a face at my crumbly sheets and desk but says nothing. I sit for a while and listen to her wash dishes and bustle around the living room. Eventually, she heads back to her room. When I know she’s asleep, I head to my computer.
“Hey Cam Club!” I say, but the camera’s off. The computer isn’t even on. “Hey, Cam Club!” I say again, but my voice still cracks. Wobbles. That won’t do, not for tomorrow, when I’m scheduled to stream again. I stare at my reflection in the dark monitor of the screen, the camera watching from its corner perch. My hair’s a rat’s nest. My skin looks blotchy and uneven. A bubble of snot crusts against my nostrils.
I unhook the camera and unscrew the lens cap. Part of me wants to jam my thumbs into the lens, sinking my knuckles deep, deep into the socket until the glass gives. Instead, I unplug it and cradle it in my lap.
“Hey.” My face muscles are moving. “Hi, Cam Club.” My cheeks, raw and sore, pull upwards. But I’m not smiling. My face, contorted, crumples into itself. Tears dribble down my cheeks and over my hands, shining sticky wet as I smear a booger over the camera body. I stand up and it crashes onto the floor. I kick it under my bed, sucking in quiet, shallow breaths. My phone screen lights up on my bed.
I check my messages. The psycho CVS guy texted.
It’s a dick pic.