Damned

By my second week alone, I was sleeping through the days and wandering sans apparel all night. I'd been naked in almost every room, wandered all the hallways and steam tunnels, entered every space with an unlocked door; however, I had yet to venture outside. Beyond the windows, snow fell, layering over everything and bouncing the moonlight inside. Now, the buildings themselves felt like too much clothing. At this point I slept naked. I walked and ate and read naked so often that the thrill had evaporated. Even while reading Forever Amber with my tits out... I'd lost that special forbidden feeling. The only way to renew it would be to go out-of-doors and stand unclothed under the stars or masked in the falling snowflakes, leaving my bare footprints in the drifts.

Other girls I know, they shoplifted to generate this same prepubescent high. Other girls told lies or cut themselves with razors.

No, it's not fair, but one minute you can be wading through clean snow, your feet sinking ankle-deep into the perfect wastelands of snowdrifts which surround a private girls' school near Locarno, and mere days later you can be slogging through the morass of countless discarded fingernail clippings, cast forever into fiery Hell.

That Christmas break which I spent alone, as I first stepped out of the residence hall, entering the snowy night, my skin felt the touch of every snowflake. The cold air made my hair stand up from the roots the way my nipples stood erect, every follicle on my arms and legs becoming a tiny clitoris, and every cell of me awake and alert at rigid attention. Walking, I held my arms straight out in front of myself, mimicking the way ancient Egyptian mummies walk when rising from their stony tombs in old horror films. My hands turned palms-down, my fingers dangled the way Frankenstein's monster shambles when brought to life in black-and-white Universal movies. This was my fallback excuse: that I was sleepwalking. My parasomniac defense. So I walked, step by step, farther into the falling snow, into the darkness as cold as chocolate ice cream, my arms outstretched in the manner of sleepwalking cartoon characters, only naked. Pelted with ice crystals and pretending to be asleep, but more awake than I had ever felt. Every hair and cell of me alert, aching, afraid. Alive.

All of me felt the thrill of being touched at that same instant. You see, I wanted to be discovered. I wanted to be seen at the very height of my prepubescent power, my tits-out, bare-fanny, legally off-limits kiddie-porn Lolita power.

If a guard found me, I'd merely pretend to be ashamed. By then I had a long history of feeling mortified and embarrassed. Reverting back to such feelings would be like second nature. As a guard approached and grabbed my wrist, or threw a blanket over my shoulders to protect my childhood modesty, I'd simply pretend hysterics and insist I had no idea where I was or how I'd come to be there. I'd reject all responsibility for my own actions... play the innocent victim. Over the past two weeks of solitude, something within me had changed, but I could still fake being shocked and fragile and demure.

No, this is not how I came to die. As I've mentioned before I died from smoking an overdose of marijuana. I did not freeze to death.

Nor did a lustful, groping security guard catch me. Darn it.

Arms extended like a somnambulist, I marched around the school grounds, collecting snowflakes in my hair until my feet felt quite numb. Then, fearing frostbite and permanent disfigurement, I sprinted back to the door of my residence hall. As I grasped the steel handle with my damp hands, my fingers and palms froze to the metal. I pulled, but the doors had automatically locked the moment they'd first swung shut, leaving me naked, my hands fixed—frozen— to the handles of a door which wouldn't open, unable to run for help, unable to return to my safe bed, the deadly night piling up around me, ice crystal by ice crystal.

And, yes, I might be a dreamy, romantic, preadolescent girl, but I can recognize a metaphor when one batters me over the head: a young budding lass perched frozen on the threshold between sheltering girlhood and the frigid wasteland of her impending sexual maturation, only a sacrificial layer of her tender, virginal skin holding her captive, blah, blah, blah....