No more parties

    After the tenth glass of vodka tonic, everything still looked the same. The place wasn’t nicer or more fun just because of that and the people in it just looked like normal people, just guys flocking around a compressed space, looking to have sexual intercourse with other men. That was the reality Ronald had chosen for himself that night and he had chosen that same reality some other times, when he felt especially horny but also very lonely. One of those parties usually cheered him up.

 However, that one had all the indications of a dud. He had been there for a whole hour and it had felt like four times that or even more. That was never a good indication of how much a place was fun or a party was entertaining. That’s why he started asking for those vodka tonics from the moment he arrived. The guy at the booze table wouldn’t even take a good look at him, he would just pour the liquids fast and try to keep the line moving or maybe he was making room for someone special.

 As for Ronnie, he did try to check out some of the other guys but they didn’t seem to care for his presence at all. Actually, some of them just seemed to not even acknowledge his existence. However, that was better than what others did: look at him straight in the eye, with the same expression they would use when glancing at a bag of decomposing garbage. They looked at his black socks, all the way up to his messy hair, and just made that ugly look that said more than a group of worse and even more than a good assortment of insults.

 He saw that look many times that night; even after he had been sitting down watching some guys play a dancing game. It looked fun and he would have liked to participate, but to his surprise, there were many guys coming in such a party in large groups. The four guys playing the dancing game seemed very friendly with one another, probably friends from college or something of the sort. So he kept to himself by the wall, downing his vodka, hoping the alcohol would help him have a bit of fun.

 Well, he never got drunk. After several glasses, he felt exactly the same way. He even went down to the rooms, the one’s with all the action. But there was nothing for him there. They were all filled to the top with men that would make a swimsuit model blush and cry. He tried to get into it but no one even wanted to touch him by accident. So he went back to the booze table and asked for one last glass of vodka tonic. He downed it slowly, watching people still getting in. Once he ran out of alcohol, he walked right to the entrance and asked for his things back. Leaving made sense.

 The guy tending to the reception seemed to be too important, as he ignored Ronald for a while. When he finally decided to pay attention to him, Ronald basically ripped the bag from his hands. He didn’t even looked at his face, not wanting to have anything else to do with that place. In a matter of moments, Ronald dressed up and ran down to the entrance of the building. He was about to call a taxi but he finally decided not to do that, as he felt he needed some time to think and walking seemed like a nice idea.

 That was probably the alcohol thinking because the area was not the safest one in the city. It wasn’t a pit of despair either, but let’s just say that people didn’t really walked around there at night just to be safe. Ronald didn’t mind, as he knew he was a fast walker and that was always important in cases one could be mugged. So he just closed up his jacket real good, checked he had everything with him and then he just walked out into the cold of the night. He could hear the music from the upstairs.

 In minutes, he was away from all of that. He was away from those bodies that had claimed the throne over anyone else, those bodies that had rendered everyone else useless and undeserving. He had all the images still in his head but he wanted to stop feeling like such a piece of trash. It was hard because being rejected like that, in such a blatant way, was always very hard on him. It wasn’t his first time in that rodeo and it certainly wasn’t something he was keen on repeating over and over in his life.

 He passed a small grocery store that, in order to sell beer and cigarettes to young people like him was still open so late at night. He laughed to himself, because it wasn’t really that late. He had stayed in the party for about two hours, between the moment he had entered to the moment he had left. And the party could last up to ten hours. So it was kind of fun. He decided to enter the grocery store and buy some chewing gum to mask his horrible vodka breath and to buy something to eat.

 When he got to the register, he paid for a pack of mint gum, two bags of chips (one lemon flavored and the other chicken flavored), a bottle of ice tea and chocolate bar in case he felt too cold. He got everything in one of those very cheap plastic bags and continued on his walk, heading home but not really having any rush to get anywhere. He wanted to eat his chips and just think, think about why it got to him so bad. Think about why he had let them get to him and his brain. Yeah, he was an average guy but somehow that had became something similar to a heresy or sometimes even worse.

 The hypocrites. Those were the worst. The ones that always praise you for being such an authentic and real guy and then just side with the new gods because it suits them best. Those fuckers don’t deserve to be paid attention by anyone; they would sell their mothers if it meant they could get to play with those they admire. It’s sad and pathetic and frankly extremely annoying, and that’s what made Ron leave the damn party and just have a nice walk home, however long it could take him.

 He was glad to see some street dogs wandering around. Some of them accompanied him for a big part of his walk, until they were apparently lured to the other side of a street by the smell of food. Actually, the smell of fried food also opened up Ronald’s appetite. The bags of chips and the ice tea had already been consumed and he was still very hungry. He knew he had some leftovers at home that his mother had kept for him, so he could already picture them on a plate, warm and cozy and he ate all of it.

 Walking faster was not really a possibility because the distance was quite big. He could get home but it would take time and getting tired before reaching the middle of the route would not be the smartest thing to do. So he just kept on walking, looking around for muggers or worse, and forgetting very slowly what had happened to him at the party. He would think about it from time to time, but he would actively decide to think about something else, because torture himself didn’t make any sense.

 It took him two hours to get home. His feet were destroyed when he opened the door carefully, in order not to make noise. He thought about eating the food but decided he was more tired than hungry. Besides, he could eat it all in the morning, as breakfast. He took off his shoes and entered his room slowly. He removed all of his clothes and then just entered the bed, which was very cold but kind of cozy anyway. He thought one last time about those men and their bodies and in a hush voice he just said, “Fuck them”.

 The day after, Ronald had a very fun family day with his parents. It wasn’t that they made something special but rather that he realized that there were things that he needed at one moment of his life and there were other things he liked to do or have when he was recuperating from a very annoying event.

 He quickly forgot about the party, the booze, the men in it and even the music. The fact that he decided to block all of that from his life had something to do with it. He just wanted to be happy and those parties were not being fun anymore. They had run their course in his life and now he needed to move on.

Self-made woman

   Sam had always being a very confident person. She wasn’t he most beautiful girl in the world or the most athletic or anything like that. She was just an average girl that never really had a problem with her own body. When she was at school, she saw many people being bullied because of how they looked or how they dressed or things like that. But the bullies never got to her because she simply did not believe anything they said. Maybe it was the way she was raised or maybe she had been born with a very thick skin. The point was no one could take her down.

 As she got older, she decided to try a little bit of everything. She did theatre and always went to a summer camp not far from home. She would also love to help recycle and clean the parks of her city. She earned some money by walking her neighbors’ dogs and she had at least five pen pals from all over the world. Sam lived to be active and to feel she was doing something. She even approached the kids at school that were bullied and tried to help them by giving them more things to do. Sometimes, she succeeded.

 After graduating high school, she entered a proper acting academy where she was always one of the most advanced students in the class. She got the directions of the teacher very fast and knew how to connect with a character in a matter of minutes. She became that person fro a while. It was amazing to see her as all those characters, no matter if they were men or women, young or old or foreigner. She always knew exactly how to do it.

 The school lasted for years year and by the third year her parents announced to her that they had financial problems and that they wouldn’t be able to give her money for transportation and food for her third year and that they had no money for her fourth and last year in the academy. For a moment, she was very worried. It was the first time in her life that Sam didn’t really know what to do right away. She spent a whole night without sleep thinking of solutions.

 However, the solution came to her the next day. Her acting school was part of a larger university, so when she went to class she always walked by a big board where people would pin down what they were looking for. She checked the board to see if there were any jobs she could take part time in order to help her parents pay for her stuff or pay it herself in any case. She read many little papers looking for something good and a blue one got her attention.

 Sam had never cared about what people said about her. She had never really had second thoughts about what she wore; how her body was build or the things she had to do to get somewhere. She was a fighter and very hands on kind of a person. So after class, she went straight to the classroom written in the blue paper. They were looking for men and women that would pose for the art students.

 It was in an area of the university she rarely went to. Outside, there were about three people waiting. When the door opened, a woman asked her name and physical data. She wrote those down in a sheet of paper on a clipboard and then closed the door after one of the people that had been waiting had entered the room. Sam could only see one other person inside with the woman: a middle-aged bald man who probably was the teacher for that class.

 She waited for an hour until the other two people had passed. Apparently the “audition”, or whatever it was, could be very exhaustive. When they finally let her in, they immediately asked for her to remove all clothes and to step up in a square that was about thirty centimeters tall. She did exactly that, feeling a little scared at first. The woman, who was probably an assistant, was doing some kind of sketch on her clipboard. The man just turned around Sam, looking at every single inch of her body.

 Suddenly, he asked Sam to pose in three different ways. He showed her three different paintings and she had to imitate the positions of the models in them. Sam wasn’t very into painting as such but she knew those pictures were rather classical. So she immediately knew there not going to do anything very modern in that class or at least not from the first day.

 After the first ten minutes, she was very comfortable posing as a goddess shooting an arrow at a centaur and then being seductive, half covering herself with a very silky and transparent tissue the teacher provided for her. They were there for more than an hour until the assistant told her she could grab her clothes and dress. They told her they would call her in order to know if she had gotten the job. She asked if she could know how much they paid and the mentioned the number. It was a very good one.

 She got the job and worked there for her whole third year. She had to arrive to some early classes, which was awful because of the cold, but the teacher was always kind enough to bring a portable heater for her not to freeze. Then she would go to her classes and sometimes she would come back late in order to pose for the advanced students.

 Sam didn’t really tell many people about her job. She certainly didn’t tell his parents. They were happy enough seeing their daughter knew how to move around in the world. And only a couple of friends knew. They even went once and told her how odd it was that no one really saw her but instead saw her body as if it was some other person. It was very strange.

 That year, se won a lot of money. With that and a job she got the following summer, she was able to pay her last year of acting school. She kept modeling during that year but she didn’t do as many hours because the audition part of her life had begun and she really had to be looking for all the parts possible. Once she graduated, she began to do so more actively, landing roles in plays and even movies.

 Her breakout role was the one of the heroine of a post-apocalyptic story involving zombies. She signed on for one movie but two more were made. After that, she did more elaborate stuff like a costume drama that happened in Africa and another where she was a woman that had a very awful disease that was deemed incurable for many years. For that one she received the most praise and Sam was even considered for many awards. It was the best time of her life because she got to travel a lot.

 When she turned 28, she got the role of a woman trying to save millions from genocide in a war that people didn’t even talked about. Sam researched the role and actively pursued it for many months until they chose her over many better-known actresses. She was careful about every aspect of the role and was able to do her best performance ever. That year was a whirlwind for her as everyone praised her work and called her a “revelation” and things of the sort.

 She began being nominated for many awards. Every time it happened she would call the director of the film, a woman called Flora, and they would chat for hours about it. However, something happened that would sour their happiness for a while. Someone had gone through Sam’s past and had found the portraits she had posed for and some pictures too, as she modeled for the photography students too. The tabloids had a field day and everyone else started to talk solely about that and not the movie.

 Sam apologized to Flora but the woman told her never to do that. She hadn’t done anything wrong and it was nothing that would affect her forever. She encouraged Sam to be herself and confront the issue as herself and as no one else. And so she did. She released a statement and even made a video that went viral, when she explained how she had always trusted herself and wanted everyone to feel the same way.

 She showed everyone that she was not ashamed but rather proud of being a woman that did not have to hide or feel bad because others wanted her to feel like that. She had made a life by her own hand and she was also proud of that. In her video, she invited every woman to be comfortable in their skin, take nudes pictures or just looking themselves at the mirror and accepting who they were because everyone is one of a kind.

 Many attacked for the way she saw the world, mostly men. But she had decided she would never care about what destructive people thought. She knew most people were not like that, she knew they would all see what she meant, where she was coming from.

 Her chances of having a great career were never harmed after that. She eventually won an Academy Award and went on to pose for magazines naked, in order to prove that they couldn’t take her down or shame her. Sam was there to stay.

True image

  Julie’s walk was very confident and full of energy. Every step she took towards the pool area in the cruise, made her noticeable to every single person on the boat. She was wearing a blue bikini with a large hat and sandals with quite a heel and she was pulling it off in the best way possible. All men had their eyes on her and all women wanted to be as confident as she was.

 Following Julie, however, was her brother Kevin. It was an absolute contrast because Kevin wasn’t dressed at all for a swimming pool; he just looked like one of those people that go to awesome place but don’t do that much. Well, that precisely was Kevin because he didn’t even wanted to come at first but he had being pressured by his parents to accompany his sister. The trip was her gift for finishing high school with great marks and she had been joined by some friends in the cruise. So the suffering was double for Kevin.

 Which was silly because he was older than him. He should have gotten over the whole high school thing but he actually hadn’t.. His experiences there had been so traumatic that he didn’t even liked to be around Julia when her friends were with her. He quietly went away, most likely to his room or he just wandered around the ship, which was large enough.

 For the swimming pool, he was wearing these big, long, baggy trunks that looked two sizes larger than him, not flip flops but actual shoes and big white t-shirt. Besides, his face was covered in white, like a ghost. When they got to some free chairs by the pool, Julia removed her sunglasses and look at her brother, a bit disappointed. He was covering himself with his towel and looking at everyone a bit scared.

 She told him to come near and helped him with the mask of sunscreen he had put on his face,. She made him look a little bit more normal. Julia told him she should enjoy the pool and the sun for once and that nothing was never as bad as he imagined it. “Everything is in your head”, she often told him.

 Kevin always ignored that phrase because he thought it was a very silly thing to say. His fears, for him, were extremely real and they weren’t only in his head. He could hear and see people mocking him all around, always, and he wasn’t as strong as Julia to take it all and just don’t mind or to be able to fight it back. Kevin had always been very shy and had even been bullied in school, so it was normal that even as an adult he was still afraid. But the thing was he had never attempted to defeat his demons and that’s what worried Julia.

 She took a last look at him and then removed sandals, glasses and a nice watch a friend had given her as a present for her most recent birthday. Then she walked to the other side of the pool, were several people her age greeted her. There were boys and girls and Kevin could recognize most of them from the first two days of the cruise. She had gone out almost every night to the disco they had there and he had been falling asleep really early as there were no TV sets in any of the rooms, for some reason.

 Maybe the people that had built the cruise ship thought that it was enough to put all these fun things to do for people to be happy and not need a TV but Kevin certainly disagreed with that. He really felt miserable and wished the week was over faster.

 Some girl passed in front of him and looked at him for a second. Her look was the one of someone who sees something gross by the road or something like that. Very affected by it, he decided to stand up, check for the room keys in his pocket and go back there. Julia wouldn’t mind and he certainly didn’t want to stay there. So he just left.

 When he arrived in his room, he was sweating heavily because of the clothes he was wearing and decided to shower in order to refresh a bit. He left the clothes all over the floor and just entered the bathroom and tried not to think about anything as he felt the cold water running over his body. He didn’t use soap or anything like that, he just enjoyed the cool shower that seemed like sitting on the rain. It was one of the few things he liked about the cruise.

 When he got closed the water, he remembered he had left the towel on the bed and the cleaning lady hadn’t come in yet. So he shook off some of the water and stepped out naked. For a moment, he didn’t realize it but he was looking at his own body naked. Then he remembered the bathroom door had a full body mirror behind it and he was surprised by it.

 Kevin had always hated mirrors. He had never liked mirrors because they made him look at him and he had passed years trying not to do that. He had been called so many names because of his ears, his body, the way he was smarter than other in school… And besides all of that, he had always thought he was fat and ugly and just didn’t wanted to be made to look at himself.

 But when he stepped out of the shower, he just froze there and saw his own body, after a long time.  Somehow, it was different that he remembered it. He got nearer and, unconsciously, started examining his skin, his face, his chest, his arms, his penis, his legs and feet. Everything.

 He took a long time watching his own body and he was fascinated because he realized he had never done that. Then, feeling like awakening from a strange dream, he opened the door and grabbed the trunks he had been wearing. He put them over his body in front of the mirror and realized how ridiculous it was to wear something so big on him. He was skinny but he certainly wasn’t an XL man.

 Kevin dropped the trunks on the ground and just kept looking at himself. He finally shed a single tear and said, in very hushed voice, “If only someone…” But didn’t finish the phrase because he had no idea how to finish it. He thought about how he wanted to be like his sister, who was strong and didn’t care what people said about her. She was strong and he felt so weak. But he also realized he wanted to do something about it. The mirror had helped him see that.

 So he grabbed some of the money his parents had given him, got dressed with the clothes he had before and went to one of the many stores on board. He didn’t like to try on clothes or to be around people that loved fashion but it was necessary for him to do it. So he approached a saleswoman and asked where he could find some trunks. She directed her to the right spot and even joined him. He was embarrassed to have her next to him but just took a deep breath and pretended she wasn’t there. He looked for a color he liked and then a size he thought would work and just bought it, without trying it on.

 He went back to his room almost running, got naked in the bathroom and put on the new trunks. The difference was huge. On the mirror, he could even see his butt and a pair of legs that weren’t so bad. He just needed a bit more sun because he looked pale and sick. But the trunks worked great and he smiled at his own image when he saw himself on the mirror.

 Some minutes later, he was sweating heavily again. But it wasn’t because of the sun but because of how nervous he was. He had decided to get out of his room in only his flip-flops and his new trunks. He had his towel on one hand and the room keys in the other and nothing else. He was shaking a bit but kept walking looking at his feet or very high in front of him. He did so slowly not to stumble against anyone.

 He found an empty deck chair not so close to the poll and decided to sit there. He had put on some sunscreen before leaving the room so he just laid there, a bit nervous and tensioned but certain that would help. He fell asleep for a while until his sister came and woke him up. She was angry at him because he had left her things unattended but a friend had noticed so nothing had happened. She asked his brother what was he doing.

-  ¿What does it look like?

 And she just smiled. She kissed him on the cheek and told him to be careful with the sun. She was going to leave for the games area but she would look for him later. He told her he needed to get more tanned, so he would be there for a while. Amused, she left with her friends.

 Kevin saw her walk away and realized he had taken a huge step out of his shell. Right then though, he saw two guys with ridiculously chiseled bodies but instead of feeling less, he laughed. And he just closed his eyes again and turn around, to do the back.