Twenty Five

"I'll pick you up for breakfast around eight-thirty." There was a grave tone to Mark's voice; all the warmth of the preceding days had vanished.

The door opened and Mark was gone. Andrea heard him try the knob before his footsteps faded away. She reached to turn on the light over the night stand and looked at her watch lying by the phone. It was two in the morning. Andrea switched off the lamp again, pulled the covers around her and turned over.

She didn't sleep more than an hour the rest of the night and when she did, the events of the day wove themselves into an unsettling dream.

Everyone she knew passed by while she stood naked and shivering in her booth at the art show. When someone pointed to her work, Andrea turned to look at the paintings. They were all sexually explicit scenes of her with men, raw and tasteless in sharp detail. Andrea ran from the art show and found herself outside the house where she had grown up. The door was locked. She saw her family inside, but she dared not ring the doorbell and let them see her disgrace. She tried the windows and doors to no avail. Even Buddy was disturbed by her appearance and barked incessantly as she hid in the bushes, not knowing where to turn.

Andrea awoke in the cold gloomy motel room to the sound of someone trying to start a car engine outside her window. She stretched and yawned, breathing in the sickening stale air she'd barely noticed the night before. When she turned the switch on the lamp, the bulb blew out. Andrea pulled herself from the bed and opened the drapes to let in the daylight. A thick layer of clouds in the eastern sky obscured the sun. Andrea walked to the bathroom and washed her face at the sink, then looked in the mirror. The dark circles under her eyes would be impossible to cover, but Andrea's appearance was of little importance: she wouldn't be able to look Mark in the eyes anyway.