She Already Knows What She Wants. Each Day When She Passes by the Showroom Window of The

1

One

The days pass in a flurry of activity. There are contracts to sign, lawyers’ offices to visit. She examines the heavy sheaf of white paper with Dallas, with the lawyer, by herself, sitting alone on the couch at home and running her hands over it, black type staining the tips of her fingers as she reads. Her breast augmentation has been written into her contract. A perk, they call it. And she will have a car. The interior will smell of unlined leather, her own perfume. She knows this. The keys will shine silver in the palm of her hand like the bodies of small-boned fish. She will hang a white rabbit’s foot from her keychain and , a tangle of metallic silver beads from the rearview mirror. Luck.

She already knows what she wants. Each day when she passes by the showroom window of the Corvette dealership, her gaze is automatically drawn to the cool gleam of white metal, the silver emblem on the front proclaiming Corvette. It acts on her like a magnet. And when she drives by at night, the car glows in the front window like a slice of moon—a , pale, phosphorescent light illuminating the pavement. She wants that light, wants to bathe her body in it till it gleams white as the dust of ground-up bones, blemish free.

And speaking of blemishes, soon her small breasts will be gone for good. They stand tiny and upright, like new pears. Defenseless. She cups them in her hands the night before the surgery, turning to the side in the mirror to further inspect them. Her flesh is tender and smooth beneath her fingers. Her nipples harden under her palms. She can’t help but wonder if they will continue to do so after the surgery. After she is sliced open and rearranged. Transformed. She has heard rumors. Loss of sensation. She can’t believe that tomorrow, it will be as if these small breasts never existed. Erased. She will be wiped clean and rebuilt. She wonders if she’ll remember what they looked like in the first place. If she’ll regret it. If she’ll miss them.

“I’ll miss them,” Dallas says softly, reading her mind and coming up behind her, slipping tanned arms around Sharlene’s small waist—m. Made even smaller with cocaine and relentless anxiety. Worry. Dallas buries her face in Sharlene’s hair and begins kissing her neck. But Sharlene can’t relax. She’s too nervous. “Baby, what’s wrong?”Dallas pulls back, turning Sharlene around to face her. Dallas’s brow is creased in a series of deep, horizontal wrinkles, and Sharlene reaches up to stroke them away with the palm of her hand. At the touch of her hand, Dallas closes her eyes.

“I’m scared,” Sharlene says, stroking Dallas’s hair for a moment before turning around to face the sink. She picks up her toothbrush and covers it with toothpaste. “Actually, I’m beyond scared. Weren’t you?”Dallas laughs, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. Her eyes in the mirror are hard.

“Yeah, I was scared, but George went with me.”She picks up a bottle of hairspray and drenches the sides of her hair, using the moisture to slick back the unruly strands. “I’m not going to lie to you, baby. It’ll hurt. A lot. But, when it’s over, and you’ve healed up, you won’t be able to remember what it was like. That’s the strangest part, I guess.” Dallas pus the bottle down, places both hands on Sharlene’s shoulders. “Let’s go to bed,” she says, a smile turning up the corners of her lips. “You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

Nothing is more frightening to Sharlene than the bright lights of the operating room. But then there is the reassuring prick of the needle in her arm, its tip glinting sharply silver in the bright light.

“This will set you free . . .”

The anesthesiologist’s face bends close to her own. She can feel his breath on her forehead as he leans over her. He smells both sharply medicinal—li, ke drain cleaner—a, nd cloyingly candysweet. She remembers the cotton candy she used to buy when her mother took her to the circus: p. Pink spun sugar, lighter than air;, how it melted away, leaving nothing but the memory on her tongue, and a surprisingly bitter taste. The brightly colored ring, the garish, grinning pack of clowns.

She didn’t like clowns, would hide her face in her mothers lap when they came to amuse her. She was frightened of their white faces and red lips, the rainbow wigs that covered—she was sure—bare skulls. There’s something of death in there . . . She could never quite put it into words, her revulsion mixed with the stale smell of popcorn that permeated the Big Top.

Sharlene, honey? Don’t you like the clowns? Look, baby, see how funny!

Her skin is bleached white, vaporized, her bones arranged on the operating table like some sort of elegant skeletal sculpture. Macabre modern art.

“She’s going out . . .”

The room spins away as she goes under, and the white-masked figures bend over her silent body, shards of silver in their gloved hands, shiny with stretched plastic, palms snowy with talcum.

Then the little mermaid drank the magic draught, and it seemed as if a two-edged sword went through her delicate body: she fell into a swoon, and lay like one dead.

When she wakes, the room is blurry. She blinks once, then rapidly. She is in the hall, the walls painted a dim green, the color of bile. She is moving. She can hear the wheels of the bed rolling beneath her as she moves, flat on her back. Dallas’s face leans over her, grabs her hand through the aluminum safety bars that are pulled up to protect her from sudden movement. She looks worried, Sharlene thinks, opening her mouth to speak. Her mouth is so dry. What she wouldn’dt give for a bottle of water. She can almost imagine it in her hand, how cold the plastic would be against her palm from its stint in the refrigerator, how it would slide down her throat like ice.

But before she can speak, the pain slams into her chest. She tries to scream, but the only sound that comes from her open mouth is a desperate squeak, her eyes wide, tears squeezing out from the corners.

Oh my God . . .

When the sun arose and shone over the sea, she recovered, and felt a sharp pain; every step she took was as the witch had said it would be, she felt as if treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives.

She tries to sob, but even that is too much effort, too dangerous to consider. She wonders how she will ever get up from this bed, this sea of cool whiteness enveloping her. There is a mass of bandages wound around her torso splotched here and there with rivulets of bright red blood. The blood terrifies her. She imagines a crimson sea of it running out of her wounds, soaking the crisp sheets on the bed, dripping down to the floor in great red drops.

“Nurse? NURSE! Can you give her something for the pain for God’s sake?”

A cool hand on her brow, wet with hot sweat, an injection of clearliquid, then, merciful sleep as she passes out once again.

When she wakes for the second time, she is in the recovery room, white curtains dividing her from the other patients. But she hears them anyway. A woman in the bed next to her quietly sobs, her breathing choked and rasping. The saccharine voice of the nurse rising over her tears.

“Dear, you did realize there would be some discomfort after the procedure. . .” The woman cries louder. “Just think,” the nurse says, her tone eminently reasonable, “of how good your new nose will look after you’ve healed!”Despite the pain, Sharlene’s lips curve into a slow smile.

For the first week or so, she can barely move. Dallas takes her to and from the bathroom, bandages her chest and cleans the fine web of stitches under each arm. There is hot soup that is poured into her mouth, , one small spoonful at a time. Most of the time, she lies on the couch wrapped in a blanket, dozing in and out of sleep, the bottle of painkillers within arms length along with a glass of orange juice Dallas has left for her.

One day she wakes, and the pain has miraculously vanished. She stands up and stretches, arms overhead for the first time without pain. She takes a long, hot shower, scrubbing her skin vigorously before toweling off. She examines her new body in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. The image reflected in the glass is shocking.

Now that her breasts are large, her waist appears even smaller, more defined, her hips gracefully rounded, curving out in a perfect hourglass. Her breasts themselves are round and heavy—but not too full. Milky. There is some light bruising left, but she is sure she can cover it with make-up. Actually, she rather likes the contrast of the purple bruises against her pale skin—d, ark petals of blooming on her chest with , their inky, ominous centers. Marked. She lifts up one arm to examine her scars, but finds only a faint, pink crease staining her white skin. I did it, she thinks, lowering her arm and turning around to examine the rear view, the supple curves of her buttocks like two scoops of vanilla ice-cream.

I’m finished.

They shop in the exclusive boutiques of Beverly Hills., Dallas clucksing her tongue as Sharlene counts out seemingly endless stacks of hundred dollar bills, handing the soft folded paper over to the salesgirls, their pink manicured fingers closing around the money still warm from Sharlene’s hands.

“Don’t spend your whole advance, Shar.”Dallas’s voice is a sharp hiss in the exquisite silence of the boutique, its interior furnished in varying degrees of beige and tan. “You won’t have anything left to show for it!” Sharlene turns to face her, dropping a blouse she was in the process of holding up to herself in the mirror. She knows that she is living a Hollywood starlet’s lifestyle on a porn star’s budget. But she doesn’t care. Someone, she thinks to herself. Someone will have to pay.

“Listen,” she says, rolling her wide, blue eyes in exasperation, “I’ll spend what I want. I can always make more.” She walks over to a rack of dresses, begins pulling out brightly colored silks in crimson, turquoise, and cream. A stunning white silk pantsuit is snatched off a rack and tucked under her arm. As she moves towards the dressing room, she turns back to face Dallas, her expression hardening.

“And by the way.”Her voice is a slow touch, a purr as she moves closer, touching her lover’s face briefly with her fingertips while skillfully balancing an armful of imported silk. “Don’t call me Sharlene anymore.

My name is Sierra.”

George Jamison Speaks

She was a goldmine. They don’t come around often, but every once in awhile a girl walks in the office and I get that tingle down my spine. My cock gets hard and I break out in a sweat. That girl had the ambition of a missile. Not jailbait, but innocent. Naïve, almost. Unaffected. Or maybe she was a better actress than anyone ever gave her credit for.

She was probably yanking my chain from the beginning, but I didn’t give a damn. That was the thing with Sierra, she could keep you waiting for hours on the set, not return calls, treat you like you were just some servant there to do her laundry and amuse her, but you always forgave her. Always. Somehow, when she turned that smile on you, the world fell away and you didn’t care about anything. And I thought, if I could capture that on film, that quality, the whole goddamn world would fall in love with her.

And they did.

The surgery? It’s standard. If we sign a girl who’s not augmented, I’d say about 99% of the time the surgery is written into her contract. It pays for itself, believe me. For Sierra, it was the finishing touch. Icing, that’s all it was. She had everything else. The body, the hair. Platinum blonde. There’s nothing like a platinum blonde. It sells. It just looks, I don’t know, cleaner, more expensive. And that face. She won the genetics lottery with that face, I’ll tell you.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Sierra could be a complete bitch until she got her way, but most of the time, especially in the beginning, she was soft. You wanted to put your arms around her and protect her. Hug her. She really brought that out in people. She called me Daddy George—and I let her. The little girl voice, the bangs. She would stand in front of me looking up under that sheaf of blonde hair, one foot tucked behind the other, teeth sinking into her lower lip.

She had that something. It’s indefinable. You can’t explain it, but you know it when you see it. Monroe had it. Garbo. That’s where I got the idea to put Sierra in the fairy tale remakes. That was six months after we signed her. Well, she looked so young, so innocent that I thought, great, let’s capitalize on it. Exploit that innocence, because its so much more powerful watching it break down, corrupting it. And what’s more innocent than a fairy tale?

That’s why the series was so successful. Who isn’t interested in the corruption of youthful naiveté ? Everyone. And if you say that you aren’t, that it’s disgusting and exploitative, that you don’t want to watch, that you’re turning it off, you don’t care—it doesn’t matter.

We know you’re lying.

Two

When she pulls up to the location in her new convertible, she feels like a million bucks. The speakers of her new car are powerful, and she leans her head back against the seat for a moment, the guitars reverberating through her body , before turning the ignition off in the middle of the song.

It’s understood that Hollywood sells Californication . . .

She slams the door shut, pressing the tiny black button hanging from her keychain, activating the alarm. She runs her hands over the smooth, vinyl top, shaking her head in disbelief before walking inside. Her new breasts, snug inside a tight white T-shirt bounce jauntily as she walks.

Inside the studio she is all smiles, teeth like lightening as she passes the cameraman, the crew, and the other actors, swinging her hips from side to side. She has her own dressing room now. It’s only an extra room in the back of the building that had previously been used for storage, but still. It’s all hers.

George did have it redone according to her specifications, with a long counter for her to sit at and apply her make-up. Actually, he’s redone it twice. The first time, it was all wrong. Now, rows of bright bulbs circle the mirror, illuminating her skin like multiple camera flashes. And there’s nothing she likes better than looking in the mirror, falling into that slick silver. She can look into its glassy depths for hours, mesmerized by the slope of her bare shoulders, the liner applied to her eyelids, a careful dusting of kohl. She walks over to a full-length mirror framed in gold, running her hands from her neck to her hips. “What merchandise!,” she murmurs, turning around to inspect the rear view, “and, boy, how it sells!”

The walls have been painted a soft ivory, and a large bouquet of white lilies stands on the counter along with a bottle of Chardonnay, and two long-stemmed wine glasses. She likes lilies:, their sweet, cloyingly morbid scent is comforting to her, their star shaped petals promising the uninterrupted sleep of death and silence, a muffled suffocation she thinks of as a kind of rest. An ivory loveseat nestled in the corner, a tall standing lamp with a white, silk shade blooming over it. Throw pillows , covered in warm, subtle shades of white and beige velvet , are tossed casually onto the soft material. Under her feet is a leopard rug that travels the length of the room. She drags the ball of one foot against the plush fur.

This is her first major production for Vixen , and she is nervous as she leans into the mirror, expertly shading and blending the paint into a seamless matte finish. Her skin glows with health, her body evenly tanned again. She can hear the crew setting up on the soundstage, the high pitched whine of sawing wood, the low mumblings of cracked jokes. She knows, without opening in the door, that they are assembling the set for the prince’s castle—, a scene which will not be shot until later in the day. And her heart begins to pound as she remembers how his gold curls fall over impassive blue eyes.