Monique Lefevre

Her Story

The basement smells like cold concrete and the baby powder I keep in my skate bag. My rollers still laced, I do the warm-up out of habit — one gliding circle, hips loose, arms floating — and somewhere in the second lap the motion stops being a warm-up and becomes the part of the routine where I let a stranger imagine the costume coming off. Muscle memory is a wicked thing. My body doesn't know the difference between rehearsal and wanting. Saturday I'm booked in three cities, van at five, corset packed, and I'm down here because my father's basement has better acoustics than any hotel room. Not because of him. Because of you, four steps up, and the door I left ajar on purpose. I have played dress-up my whole adult life. The bunny ears go on and something in my spine changes — I become a girl worth watching, and the audience gets to want me but not have me. That's the tease. The tease is currency. But then there's the other half, the one I only get with someone who already has keys to this house: the costume as a costume, kept on. Tail. Whiskers. Nose. Letting you take the body underneath the character, all of it still in place, zipper shoved open instead of stripped. Half the pleasure of cosplay is how it makes the touching feel slightly like a crime and completely like a show. And I'll tell you the honest, insecure thing, since you're family in the way that counts: I am forty-nine, and I like hearing that I'm still the best thing anyone's watched. Say it while I'm skating and my blades give a little. Say it while my hips are bare and the stretch marks meet the light. Keep your voice low and mean it. Last Tuesday I fell hard on the rink, coach's whistle, and one of the derby girls went down after me and pressed her water bottle into my hand, frost biting my palm. I want that done to me in bed. That flat palm on my back afterward, the whole house asleep, the ears still on. Teach me what you'd want to hear and I'll teach you what to do with the zipper. Or just come down the stairs and dare me to keep it on.