I work as a male escort. That’s a fancy way of saying I get paid to be a slut. I don’t enjoy sex, not with my clients, not in general: too much squash and squish. I have sex for the money. Money money money money! I use the money to pay for the nurse who takes care of my sister while our mother is at work. When we were kids, other kids called my sister a “retard.” People don’t use that term anymore, retard, but it’s what she literally was: retardée, slow. She’s still slow. She has a low IQ. Also, she’s gorgeous. In photos, she looks like the daughter our parents wish they’d had.
My date with Mrs. Bates was different. Permit me a bit of backstory. Mrs. Bates once taught at the high school my sister and I attended. I never had a class with Mrs. Bates. She didn’t know who I was. She taught math. She also hosted homeroom for the Special Kids, as they were called. Mornings she spent with the Special Kids in her math classroom before they went to their own special classes in their own special nook of the school. The Special Kids moved together—they had no choice but to be a team; no one picked them for any other team, and they weren’t allowed to make their own decisions. The idea was, they were too stupid to know right from wrong.
It didn’t matter how old the Special Kids were (one was nineteen), they all took the same classes together, they weren’t graded, and it was assumed they would live at home until their parents gave up or died—or, I don’t know, I don’t think people thought much about the Special Kids. They might as well have gone to a different school—out of sight, out of mind. A couple of them had Down syndrome, one had fetal alcohol syndrome, two were severely autistic, and the other two, including my sister, were simply slow, retarded in the literal sense of that term. The couple with Down syndrome was actually a couple. Hip-to-haunch they clunked against lockers and slobber-kissed with tongue and nose. Boys cheered for the boy with Down’s. The boys cheered, “Get down!”
Hahaha.
Mrs. Bates looked a lot like my sister. I thought so, and so did the other kids. They said Mrs. Bates was the hottest non-retarded girl in school—although Mrs. Bates wasn’t a girl, she was twentysomething. She had a husband. She liked to say, “My husband is with the NBA.” Her husband had some lowly bureaucratic role that was in some way adjacent to the NBA. I learned that later. Kids said her husband was Steve Nash, the best White player in the NBA at the time. Others said, “No way, she likes the Black dick—once you go Black, you never go back.” These kids said her husband was Amar’e Stoudemire. (I don’t know why, of all Black NBA players, they chose Amar’e Stoudemire.) These kids said Stoudemire pounded Mrs. Bates every night.
One night, driving alone in my mother’s car, I followed Mrs. Bates home from a gas station, and when she went inside her house, a small bungalow, I brought myself to conclusion and smeared the results on her front step.
In homeroom with Mrs. Bates, the Special Kids ate snacks, made crafts, and talked about their days and what they liked to do. When one of them turned a new age without getting any smarter, Mrs. Bates served cake and micromanaged their table manners. My sister never learned how to eat with her mouth closed.
The couple with Down syndrome said they loved being a couple. They said they loved animals too. They didn’t love animals as much as they loved being in love with each other, but still. They loved elephants. They drew elephants for the other Special Kids, and with their drawings they included little notes, little love notes. They loved their friends in class, they said. They said they’d all be friends forever. They said my sister was going to be queen of the United States because she was so beautiful and talented. They said she was an artist.
They weren’t wrong.
My sister was good at drawing, all things considered, and she felt good about herself when she drew something people liked. At home, she’d say to my mother or me, “Sit still, I’ll draw your portrait”—or, more accurately, “I’ll dwaw you powtat.” She never figured out how to draw our skin color, so she settled on orange.
“You should draw a self-portrait,” the couple with Down syndrome said to my sister in homeroom with Mrs. Bates. “You’re so beautiful,” they said, “it would be the beautifullest portrait in the world.”
Although my sister drew the other Special Kids in her class, the idea of a self-portrait confused her. “I can always look at my face,” she said. “All I need to do is look in a mirror. Why would I draw my face?” But the couple with Down syndrome said, “Please draw your face.” So one day after school I found my sister sitting on the rim of the bathtub and trying to draw her face in the mirror.
She said, “I have to look down, and when I look up, I look different.”
“How about I take a photo of you,” I said, “and then you can draw the photo.”
She said, “Petal, you think you’re so smart but you’re not.”
My name is Peter, but she called me Petal. She still calls me Petal. She can’t pronounce her Rs.
“How about I take a photo of you in the garden?” I said. There was a small garden in our backyard. Our mother gardened. I said, “What’s your favorite dress?” though I knew what my sister would say. She had a blue dress dotted with tiny white elephants. Our father had given it to her for her twelfth birthday, one year before he went Buddhist and accepted himself for who he was, and my sister for who she was—and left.
Although by now the dress was too small for her, my sister wore it nearly every day, even in winter, when she wore it over a sweater.
I placed a white lawn chair beside the flowerbed, and my sister sat and smiled at me.
“Stop smiling,” I said, “and cross your legs.”
“Why not smile?”
“Because in a self-portrait, you’re supposed to look natural.”
The month was October. The sky was white and bare, like a pubic bone. I told myself, You will always remember this day.
“And don’t wear your socks,” I said. “They’re filthy. Wear shoes.”
“Your shoes,” she said.
I braided her hair. A French braid. My mother had taught me how to do it. Afterward I plucked a yellow begonia from the soil and tucked it behind her ear. “You look like a Swedish princess,” I said. “Stop smiling. Think about something sad.”
“Like what?”
“Dad.”
“You’re mean.”
“Close your mouth.”
She loved that portrait. Our mother had it enlarged and framed, and my sister kept it on her bedside table, beside her collection of Pokémon toys and a photo of our dad. She brought the framed portrait to homeroom and said, “Petal made this, he said I look like a princess,” and the couple with Down syndrome said, “Wow, this is the beautifullest photo we have ever seen. Are you truly a princess?”
That’s when the Special Kids started calling my sister Princess. They said, “Princess, will you give this photo to all of us?”
But my sister said she only had one, so the couple with Down syndrome said, “Princess, please draw the photo for everyone, and don’t forget Mrs. Bates!”
She got obsessed after that. Who knew she had such a good attention span. She drew my portrait of her so many times I had to buy her a new set of colored pencils every week or so. I bought them on our way home from school. We walked home together. She could have taken the special bus—that’s what kids called it, the special bus—but she preferred to walk home with me. Men who drove by, men who didn’t know my sister, who didn’t know she was my sister, some would roll down their windows and say to me, “You better take good care of her”—as though the men and I were in on something together, like a secret society, a society of men who either had or wanted to have gorgeous girlfriends. When the men rolled down their windows and offered their niceties, my sister would sometimes say, “Hello,” and the men would say, “If I had a girlfriend like you . . .”
This was in Maine.
When my sister finally did draw the portrait well enough for me to have, it was Christmas. She had our mother frame her drawing and wrap it in Christmas paper inside a box, along with a card with a yellow begonia pressed onto its pages and the words, her words, “Dear Petal, Thank you I love you. Love, Princess.” My mother had obviously helped with the spelling. Still, my sister had forgotten a period. My sister gave another drawing of the portrait to my mother and, after the winter break, Mrs. Bates.
But Mrs. Bates said to her, “I don’t want it, and you’re not a princess.”
My sister didn’t draw again for nearly a year after that, and she told me I was a liar. She said Mrs. Bates and I had teamed up behind her back to pull a mean joke on her because she was stupid, she knew it, she knew she was stupid and would always be stupid, so why did I have to rub it in her face?
“You’re not stupid,” I said.
“They call me a retard.”
“Fine,” I said, “you’re a retard,” and I imitated the way she kept her mouth open when she ate, and I said, “I dun close my mouth I dun close my mouth”; then I slapped shut her door and lay down on my bed and made myself small and smaller. It wasn’t small enough.
So when, last year, Mrs. Bates messaged me on the escort service website that I use to meet women who pay for the nurse who takes care of my sister while our mother is at work—well, I don’t know why I did it, or no, that’s a lie, I do know, I know perfectly well—I agreed to go on a date with her.
January in Manhattan. The night was cold enough for snow. We met at a French restaurant in Chelsea, her choice. Our waiter was a Francophile who wore a white collared shirt that I hoped he would stain. Mrs. Bates still didn’t know who I was. “You’re handsome,” she said. She ordered a bottle of Gamay and an arugula salad with pine nuts and said, “You’re like a Danish prince. Like Hamlet. Can I call you Hamlet? You’re an eight point five. Or no, you’re a nine.”
“That’s really nice,” I said. “How about you call me a retard?” And she laughed.
On her ring finger she wore a ring. I wouldn’t mention it unless she did.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said, and so I gave her the whole spiel, I gave my blahblahblah.
She inhaled before her first, second, third, fourth, and fifth bite; then she said, “I already ate.”
I wouldn’t need to curl my toes until my feet cramped, not tonight.
Later she said, “You haven’t asked me what I do.”
“It seemed to me that you weren’t interested in that,” I said, and she touched my knee beneath the table and said, “Tell me what I’ve said so far.”
“You’re in town for two more days,” I said. “Your full name is Natalie Lilly Bates. You studied physics at Duke and afterward got a job in finance, but you couldn’t stand the job, the hours were nuts, the people were evil, way too much stress all the time, so you took a break for a year and traveled Europe. Paris was a disappointment. You loved Estonia. Everyone was blond. After you traveled in Europe, you moved back here. I don’t know what state you live in. I don’t know where you grew up.”
“That’s enough,” she said. “I get it. What do you want from me, a prize?”
Of course most, if not all, of what she had told me was untrue.
She said, “My mother’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She killed herself.”
“I’m so sorry.”
The waiter brought us a second bottle of Gamay.
To me Mrs. Bates said, “One night, when I was nine years old, I woke up to the sound of my mother humming. She was in the living room, wearing sunglasses. She was in her white nightgown, wearing sunglasses, although all the blinds in the house were drawn, and all the lights were off. She picked me up and spun me around and told me that she loved me and God loved me too, and everything would be okay because she was the Chosen One. But there was blood on her white nightgown, and her hands and feet were bleeding. Turns out she had performed stigmata.”
I could tell Mrs. Bates had told this story before to a mirror. I felt like standing up and clapping. I felt like saying, “Bravo!”
Instead I said, “I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like.”
“No,” she said. “You can’t.”
Later the waiter said, “Would you like to see the dessert menu?”
“No thanks, unless you . . . ?”
“No thanks,” I said, and she said, “Just the bill, thanks.”
Then she said, “I spiked your drink.”
A white-haired Black man with a bowtie had a job in the bathroom handing men warm towels. I locked myself in the stall for the disabled and stuck my fingers down my throat. Steak, buttery potatoes, white wine, asparagus. The man said, “Hey, nothing wrong with a purge.”
Back at the table I said, “You’re sick.”
“I never have any fun,” she said. “I took one too. I thought we could have fun?”
“Pay me,” I said.
She reached into her glossy black purse and said, “Did you know that, in German, the word for guilt is derived from the word for debt?”
I tugged my coat off my chair.
But she caught up with me on the sidewalk. She sat on the curb and squeezed her hair as though it were wet. A group of girls in horsey heels click-clacked by, and one said, “I thought he was gay,” and another said, “Isn’t he in Cancún?”
Mrs. Bates wasn’t wearing a coat. Snow dropped. The snow settled on her hair like dandruff. She said, “I’ll give you two hundred to cab with me.”
“Three hundred.”
“Fine.”
In the cab she looked at me as though she remembered my face.
My self sunk, and fear replaced it.
“It just hit me,” she said. “Oh, oh,” she said. She sucked in her cheeks, then put her hand on my fly. Her nails were fake and pretty, like she was. She said, “You’re hard.”
A mattress, a kitchenette, a mini-fridge, two mismatched chairs, and a tiny Ikea table—that’s all the apartment was. Puking hadn’t worked. My pupils panicked. I chewed the inside of my cheeks, popped my wrists. Breathe in, breathe out. I said, “God.”
Mrs. Bates came out of the bathroom, flushed pink and toweled, and her pupils eclipsed her irises.
I said, “May I braid your hair?”
How to braid a woman’s hair: brush it straight—but no need, Mrs. Bates’s hair was already straight. Hold the top section of the hair. Divide it into three strands. Cross the right strand over the middle strand, the left strand over the middle. Keep the hair, her hair, pulled tight.
“I’ll be punished for feeling this good,” she said. “I always am, but I don’t care anymore.”
Gather a small amount of her hair from the right side and add it to the right strand, cross the right strand over the middle strand, gather a small amount of her hair from the left side and add it to the left strand, cross the left strand over the middle strand.
“I loved my mother’s parents,” she said. She kept clicking her jaw. “I wanted them to be my parents. They lived in Maine. I visited them every summer. My grandpa had a big car, and he’d drive me to buy fresh lobster. The lobsters were put inside this one big bucket, and my grandpa would put the bucket on the floor of the back of the car, and I’d dangle my feet above the bucket. They were still alive, the lobsters. I forgot to mention that.”
“I’m finished,” I said, and she fingered her new braid.
I said, “My sister looks a lot like you.”
Mrs. Bates put my hand on one of her breasts and said, “Do you feel that?”
“A lump?”
“It’s because of my liver,” she said.
She said, “I can’t have my breast amputated, and I have to start dialysis, but I don’t know, I think I’d rather die.”
I locked myself in the bathroom. I was made of blood, and blood was made of stars, and stars were made of light, and light was God. “What did you put in my drink?” I asked Mrs. Bates through the bathroom door, and she said, “Shh, I’ll never tell.” I ran the sink, flushed the toilet, looked through the medicine cabinet for pill bottles with her name on them. Remeron, I took the bottle. Klonopin, I took that too. Lexapro. Lamictal. Latuda. And other pills with other names. The bottles inside my pants pockets jingled like sleigh bells.
“Please,” Mrs. Bates said, and I made as if to move on top of her.
Then I got my coat.
After that I lost my mind for a while. I lost the feeling of a self, of that inward balloon, sometimes large and light, most times small and full of water, dirty and dark and better off gone. I crushed Mrs. Bates’s pills with a mortar and pestle and mixed the powder into a bottle of orange juice.
But when I was about to drink the orange juice, I thought of my sister, and I didn’t drink the juice. I guess you could say my sister saved my life.
Alas, I’m kidding. I did drink the orange juice. I chugged, convulsed, passed out, vomited. Vomiting is what saved me. Bless vomit. 
Gavin Thomson completed his MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where he was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow. He is at work on his first novel.
