“I’m not drinking this.” Lucy retrieves the bottle of St. Pauli Girl from the desk.
She pads barefoot into the bathroom and there’s a hidden camera in there too. I watch her on video pour out her beer. I hear it splashing into the sink, and when she glances into the mirror her keenly pretty face is a mixture of sad, hurt and angry but mostly sad and hurt. Lucy loved her. Carrie was her first love. In some ways she was Lucy’s last.
“I don’t trust anything you give me, anything you do.” Lucy raises her voice as she turns on the water full blast, washing the beer away.
She looks in the mirror again and her face is so young, so childlike, and her eyes are teary. She’s trying to be brave, to control her volatile emotions, and she splashes water on her face and dries off with a towel. She walks back into the bedroom as I realize that Carrie must have set up a network of motion-sensitive recording devices that she programmed to override each other when someone moved from room to room. I could see what Lucy was doing in the bathroom but I couldn’t see Carrie. Now I can. I’m watching both of them again.
“That was wasteful. It was ungrateful.” Carrie touches the tip of her tongue to the opening of her St. Pauli Girl bottle, lightly tracing the beveled rim.
She stares into a camera and slowly licks her bottom lip. Her eyes are glassy. They’re almost Prussian blue, changing like her moods.
“Please leave,” Lucy says. “I don’t want to fight. We need to end this without a fucking war.”
Carrie bends over to take off her running shoes and socks. “Can you hand me the lotion, please?” Her ankles are unnaturally pale with prominent blue veins, the skin almost translucent like beeswax.
“You’re not showering here. You need to go. I have to get ready for dinner.”
“A dinner I’m not invited to.”
“You know exactly why that is.” Lucy retrieves a camouflage toiletry bag from the top of the dresser.
Rummaging for an unlabeled plastic bottle, she tosses it to her. Carrie snatches it out of the air like a touchdown pass.
“Just keep it. I don’t use it, no way I would.” Lucy returns to her perch on top of the desk. “The long-term side effects of rubbing copper peptides and other metals and minerals into your skin is unknown. In other words fucking untested. Look it up. But what is known is that too much copper is toxic. Look that up too while you’re fucking at it.”
“You sound just like your annoying aunt.” Carrie’s eyes darken, and it continues to jar me when she refers to me as if I’m not the one watching this.
“I don’t,” Lucy says. “Aunt Kay doesn’t say fuck nearly as often as I do. And while I appreciate you mixing up a batch of your bullshit collagen-producing vanishing cream for me …”
“Vanishing cream? Not hardly.” Carrie’s arrogance puffs her up like a Komodo dragon. “It’s a skin regeneration preparation.” She says it condescendingly. “Copper is essential to good health.”
“It also encourages the production of red blood cells, and that’s the last thing you need help with.”
“How touching. You care about me.”
“Right now I don’t give a shit about you. But why the fuck would you rub copper into yourself? Did you ask a physician if someone with your disorder should apply a topical lotion with copper in it? You keep using shit like that and you’ll have blood pudding sluggishly moving through your veins. You’ll drop dead of a stroke.”
“God you’re becoming just like her. Little Kay Junior. Hello Kay Junior.”
“Leave Aunt Kay out of it.”
“It’s really not possible to leave her out of anything, Lucy. Do you think if you weren’t blood kin you might be lovers? Because I could understand it. I could go for her. Definitely. I would try it.” Carrie touches her tongue to the beer bottle, inserts it into the opening. “She’d never go back. I can promise you that.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I’m just speaking the truth. I could make her feel so good. So alive.”
“Shut up!”
Carrie sets down the beer as she unscrews the cap from the lotion, sniffs the fragrance, swooning. “Ohhhh soooo nice. You sure? Not even a little bit in those hard-to-reach places?”
“For the record?” Lucy swipes ChapStick on her lips. “I’m sorry I ever met you.”
“All this because Miss Beauty Queen was running the Yellow Brick Road the same time we were. A coincidence. And you go nuclear.”
“The hell it was a coincidence.”
“It really was. I swear, Lucy.”
“Bullshit!”
“I swear on the Bible I didn’t tell Erin we’d be out there at three o’clock. And voilà.” Carrie snaps her fingers. “She happens to show up.”
“Running out there all by her lonesome and there we are and she joins us. Ignoring me like I wasn’t there. Focused only on you. Right. What a coincidence.”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“Just like she’s happened to show up everywhere else the two of you have fucked each other, Carrie.”
“You want to talk a health threat?”
“You mean you?”
“Jealousy. It’s toxic.”
“How about lying, which is all you ever do. Over and over again.”
“You need to start putting this on every time you go out, even on overcast days in the dead of winter.” The viscous translucent lotion Carrie dribbles into her palm looks like semen. “And you say fuck too much. Vulgarity is inversely proportionate to intelligence and facility with languages. Profuse swearing is generally associated with a low IQ, a limited vocabulary and uncontrollable hostility.”
“Are you listening to me? Because I’m not kidding.” Lucy seems to vibrate with emotion, with fury and pain.
“How about a back rub? I promise you’ll feel better.”
“I’m done with your lying! Your cheating and stealing credit!” Lucy is crying. “Every shitty thing you do! You don’t know what it is to love anybody. You aren’t capable of it!”
Carrie is completely calm no matter what is happening or said, her attention flicking from one concealed camera to another like an exotic reptile reading the air with its forked tongue.
“You’re a cheater-whore!”
“Someday I’ll remind you what you said. And you might wish you hadn’t.” Carrie holds up her hand with a dollop of lotion, smiles brightly.
“I’m scared.” Lucy glares at her, the veins standing out in her neck.
Carrie begins rubbing the lotion on herself, slowly, salaciously on her face, her neck. She clicks her tongue at Lucy as if she’s a dog, waving the bottle of lotion at her as if it’s a bone.
“Come. I’ll put it on you. I’ll rub it in the way you like.” She rapidly rubs her palms together. “I’ll warm my hands and drive my magic potion into your skin. Sort of an improvised nanotechnology.”
“Stay away from me!” Lucy furiously wipes tears with the back of her hand, and suddenly the video stops.
I try to rewind it but I can’t. I can’t replay it. I can’t do anything to it at all.