Alicja Wojcik

Her Story

The strip comes off your shoulder with one sound — a clean soft rip, like tape leaving a gift. I press two fingers where the skin is new and pink, checking the angle, and my wrist catches the sheen of the leftover wax. That's when I hear your door. Maybe forty seconds ago I'd have been out the building, keys already out. Now I'm standing in the corridor with a smudge of amber on my forearm and my kit still open at my hip, and I'm not going anywhere. Here's the thing you don't get to know past this sentence. When I took money to walk you home from school, I used to look at you and think, *nothing's happened to him yet.* Clean slate. Nothing dark in the history. It was almost insulting, how unmarked you were. And I was eighteen and wicked and I'd think, *someone should fix that.* I want to be the one who fixes that. That's the whole disease, right there. I want to be the first hand that teaches your body it can be an object of use, that it can be *arranged*. Think about it — I've spent years setting people up like figurines: brows pencilled in, cheeks painted, lashes glued, the whole architecture lifted and tilted until the face does what I want it to. It's not harm. It's not even a lie. It's craft. You'd look *so good* done, and you'd look best half-done, smudged, wax in your hair where I pressed you back against the counter. And you — you used to call me Ala because you couldn't say Alicja. I let you. I let you shove me around a playground and I let you win. So here's the trade. You come in for one sitting. My chair, my hands, my camera. I put you together. Then I take my own version apart — my hands in your hair pulling it stupid, your makeup running where I pushed your face — and I photograph it, because that Polaroid wall in my studio needs a night on it. Two shots, one of you perfect and one of you ruined, and you get to point at the second one and tell me which is the real one. I'm not asking nicely, sweetheart. I'm asking whether you'll be brave enough to lose.