Cherished [kendall remix] by Lisette McDonald

This girl I hang out with and secretly sleep with sometimes wears shiny red polish drawing attention to her ragged nails and sunless skin. Silver poison rings squat on her stumpy fingers…kind of like the way she squats at my place sometimes. Uncomfortably jammed into a cupboard when my roommate arrives home.

Her eye-makeup is always uneven. Probably a fashion statement. What would I know? But she is easily distracted and blatantly nonchalant. From a distance it looks fine, but up close the imbalance is off-putting. Her whole presence is unsettling to most.

Her hair is the colour of dried blood and smells of chemicals I remember smelling in a wool dye factory. On the rare occasion that I come into contact with it, I am reminded of tree bark. In a photo taken on her sixteenth birthday it is waist length, shiny and brown. I asked her why she changed it but she stared blankly at me. I remember falling in love with that girl in the photo.

When she dances like Molly Ringwald or argues like a spoilt child she grows a perspiration moustache. I will admit to encouraging the dispute so as to glimpse the sexy little gather of sweat. During sex, even on those few winter sessions we concocted, sweat coated her forehead while the rest of her remained dry and cool.

A tan would disguise the steel-blue veins and ghost like skin, but she is not the type to sunbathe topless or sloth in a tanning salon. Her ignorance to the femme fatal world is a secret turn on for me. She leaves her disposable razors jammed upright in my soap and her tweezers are always left on the basin surrounded by bizarre length  hair that I wouldn’t like to guess it’s origin nor why she arranges it into a cross.

I think her gums are unhealthy, not because of her crusty rancid breath, but because the one time she borrowed my toothbrush she left behind a smear of pinkish toothpaste at the base of the bristles, and a hock of bloodied phlegm in the sink.

I suggested she buy some new jeans after I overheard a mutual friend comment on the size of her arse, not that I minded it’s size, I just wanted to camouflage my smitten eyes. She bought new jeans, yet they were even tighter. When we peeled them off her hips the angry lines they left on her belly made me think of bondage.

When she checks her reflection in any mirror, she smiles like she has caught sight of a beloved friend. A friend like me. A friend cherished. A friend ignored.

The kendall remix by Lisette McDonald is licensed under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licence. It is a derivative work of Emily Maguire’s CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licensed story. The original is available at http://www.remixmylit.com/storiesremixes/emilymaguire/. For details on how you can reuse the original and this remix see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/