Jude pushed herself up from the edge of the tub and crossed unsteadily to the sink, where she turned on the hot water. She rinsed the cloth with liquid soap and scrubbed it with her fingernails until the water ran clear, trying not to glance at herself in the mirror, though not because she disliked her body.
The opposite, rather.
She was aware that most of the girls her age, the ones she ever bothered to talk to, suffered intense body-image issues and eating disorders that haunted and consumed them. Jude had never known what to say to them, though she had tried to feel what they did, thinking it would be a useful emotion or psychosis to access. Her own body was a product of conditioning that Bruce Lee would not have scoffed at, and the genetic gift of a Thai mother and Irish father speckled with Israeli blood. She was long and lean with fine yellow skin and small breasts with large brown nipples that paralyzed men and boys without fail. Her stomach was flat and hard, though not yet the washboard she coveted. Thousands upon thousands of pushups had brought out the shadow of definition in her arms and shoulders, and although she considered her ass to be on the smallish side, it was tight and curved and fit perfectly in the palm of the pool boy’s hand, or so it had when she was twelve and shaped like a wisp of smoke and he was still unafraid to touch and pet and wrestle with her.
The pool boy was four years older than Jude, but small. He was just a whisper of bone and muscle. He had a pretty pink mouth and green eyes, long blond hair and the perfect sharp ears of an elf, and he seemed always to be tan, regardless of season. He was sweet and playful and Jude supposed she had suffered a temporary crush on him, and she used to hang around the pool in her red racing bikini and watch him while he worked. And sometimes she was able to lure him into the pool when he was done cleaning it, provided her father was not around. The pool boy was afraid of him, and rightly so. Jude’s father had terrorized him often. But when her father was away on business, Jude and the pool boy wrestled and chased each other underwater, skin bright and flashing, and sometimes the pool boy retreated from her with a bulge in his swimsuit and a look on his face that she found fascinating. Jude was strong even at twelve. And one day, without meaning to, she held the pool boy under the surface too long, she held him down until he struggled and freaked out, and only when he scratched open her arms with his fingernails did she realize what she was doing. When she released him, the pool boy withdrew from her, pale and gasping, and ever after had avoided her.
Jude knew why she had done it.
Her father had thrown her into the swimming pool when she was five and not yet a confident swimmer. He stood watching from the pool’s edge as she panicked and thrashed and finally went under. Her father had allowed her to drown, then revived her, and she was never sure if his intention was to teach her not to fear death or to remind her that he had the power of life over her. She had decided that it was both of these, and became wary of him. But aside from offering advice with math and soccer, her father left her alone until she was nine, when he drove her up the coast and made her hike through the woods in the dark until they reached the beach. He armed her with a knife and compass, then abandoned her there, telling her she had one hour to find her way back to the highway. He promised her that if it took her longer than an hour, the car would be gone.
And not long after her tenth birthday, he began teaching her to be a pickpocket. He allowed her to practice on him for exactly one day, in the relatively intimate space of his closet at home, before taking her for a ride on BART during the afternoon commute so she could try the real thing. He selected easy targets for her at first, then ever more challenging ones. The worst of these had been a burly, sweating man in a rumpled suit and tie with needle-bright eyes, who scratched at his arms and kept swiveling his head left and right. Jude had failed to come away with even a pack of cigarettes, but neither had she been caught with her hand in the twitching man’s pocket. And when she returned with empty hands to her father’s side, he gave a shiver of a smile and touched her face with one hand, and though she couldn’t yet verbalize it, she comprehended that he was telling her to choose her targets with care, that the burly man had been a junkie day trader of some kind, chemically altered and paranoid and therefore not a suitable mark.
Her father was pathologically reserved with praise and affection. He touched her so rarely that Jude could number on one hand the times he had kissed her forehead or patted her knee. But when he wanted her to understand something important, he touched her face. He took her cheek and jaw in the hollow of his hand and the world fell away. So when she was thirteen, Jude had been surprised and curious to discover that the sudden proximity of her body made him uncomfortable. She first assumed this had to do with her resemblance to her mother and the natural spin of echoes and nostalgia that entailed, then she read Nabokov and understood.
And since then she watched herself through her father’s eyes.
Jude looked into the mirror through his eyes and tried to grasp what it was about the curves and angles of her body that made her father uneasy. She stared at herself through the pool boy’s eyes, through the eyes of men she passed on the street, studying her body for its strengths and weaknesses and trying to see precisely what these men saw, to access the rush of desire they felt when confronted with her flesh. She tried to conjure their secret, violent thoughts, staring at herself until she grew dizzy and her image wavered and she thought she might fall into the mirror and drown.
But this was not the mirror in her bedroom, where it was safe to sink below the surface. She could not afford the chance that the image of herself naked and bruised in a strange bathroom would make her feel small, because when her four minutes expired she was going to kill the man in the next room, and she was afraid that if she felt small she might be unable to. Jude had to kill him not because he had so ravaged her with his hands and mouth that she bled, not because he had abruptly shoved her from the bed and told her in a soft cold voice that her pussy tasted of rot and to go wash herself, but because she knew he wasn’t finished with her.
Drugged and disoriented though she had been, she had noticed the pink cell phone on the mantle, the rollerblades in the corner. The red cowboy boots on an end table, the baseball glove in a box, the tiny black T-shirt nailed to a wall. These were trophies of past kills. And there was a faint smell in his kitchen that made her think of maggots.
She calculated that two minutes remained.
The washcloth was white again. Jude turned away from the sink and gathered the remains of her clothes, the plaid skirt and thin white tank top. She had chosen not to wear a bra today, a move she made breezily in the rosy light of her room a half day ago that now felt like a lifetime stuck in amber, and while she remembered being satisfied this morning by how snugly the cotton tank fit her, she was less thrilled about it now. And as she pulled it over her head, she could smell him. She shrugged this away and concentrated on the task of fastening her skirt at her hips. She only wished she were wearing her shoes. Jude felt more vulnerable when barefoot, which she supposed qualified as irony. She hazily remembered kicking off her shoes upon entering the apartment, and knew she had done so because she was aware that men preferred that she appear small. A vaguely defined business associate of her father’s had seized her and lifted her up once, without warning, in their kitchen when she was fifteen, his hands gripping her firmly and touching more of her chest than she liked, and he remarked that it was like holding a doll. His face had flushed brightly as he released her.