There was a party, and I wasn’t into it. People I didn’t know, but didn’t necessarily want to know. That kind of thing. It was like a day job, I was watching the clock waiting for it all to end and my friend to drive me home.
I had stolen some expired Codeine from the upstairs bathroom and was looking in the bedrooms when I saw her. She was laying on the bed with the lights on, her eyes wide open. She lifted her head and looked at me, but otherwise stayed where she was.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I’m bored”, she said.
“Me too,” I said. I went in and stood by the window. We talked a little more. I wasn’t interested in her physically. She was pretty enough: auburn hair, green eyes, and a shirt that was knit so that you could see the skin beneath it, except for a white strapless bra thing. We talked a little more about the people we knew at the party, and neither of us knew anyone in common.
“That’s quite a shirt,” I said, growing bored again, and thinking I could spice things up. “Why don’t you take the bra off?”
“It’s a tube top, not a bra, Mr. Fashion,” she said. But to my surprise she slipped it down. I saw the white skin and the freckles, but I couldn’t see her nipples. I looked again, taking a step away from the window, towards the bed, where she had sat up earlier.
She could read the perplexed look on my face. “I had my breasts chopped off last year,” she said, making a chopping motion with her hand, a guilletine coming down. “Cancer. These are fake.” She lifted her shirt and showed them to me. The nipple had no differentiation in color. There was no areola. It was all the same skin with just a little lump surgically implanted to give the impression of a working breast beneath a swimsuit or thin t-shirt.
Boredom and disinterest in people had me feeling superior until she did that. While she sat there with her tube top down and her shirt lifted up, her breasts exposed to me, a stranger, I was reduced to a meaningless idiot with no understanding of the world.