Samantha Friedrich ran an equestrian Instagram account with 10,000 followers when she was twelve. By fifteen, she was Sam, and the posts were memes. And by seventeen, when Aimee met her, she used the account to promote her music career. She was Sammi then.
*
“Look who’s here,” Jonathan jutted his chin toward the front door. In a wine-red lace gown, a crown atop a black wig, Sammi strutted into the swarm of low-effort costumes with a tiny backpack on one shoulder.
“You invited her?” Aimee asked. She raised her elbows off the kitchen island to get a look.
“No. But I put it on my Snapchat story,” Jonathan said, exhaling dab pen vapor and handing it off to Aimee before throwing his arms up in uncharacteristic zeal. “Let’s gooooooo,” he cheered. “Sammi fuckin’ Friedrich is here!”
Aimee, and everyone else at the party, knew this enthusiasm was ironic. Sammi was a joke. The links to her songs were circulated around their high school, with the implied direction being to find some fresh thing to make fun of. Her mediocre musical theater voice set to mismatched silky synth R&B beats, lyrics that crossed Hoodie Allen with SZA. You didn’t have to know about music to tell the elements made no sense. But the best part, what made it impossible not to criticize, was how serious she was. Videos of her singing in her bedroom, making earnest, strained facial expressions amassed hundreds of likes. Fire, people commented, with an excessive amount of heart-eye emojis. Tongue-out selfies with her long face and close-set eyes captioned dont ask for a shoutout when im famous were screenshotted and texted. This bitch, they all said. Fuckin’ delusional.
Whether Sammi understood this or not was unclear.
“Heyyyyy,” Sammi said, curving Jonathan’s hug for a clap-up instead. She was taller than him, even in the flat sneakers she wore, and broader, too. She took one downward glance at Aimee. “You guys wanna smoke?”
It did not matter who offered, or even necessarily what it was—you said yes. That was what this particular group of kids in an affluent suburb in Broward County, Florida, had to share with each other. Not sports, not extracurriculars, not creative pursuits. Sammi, of course, was different. She was not in any group, existing on the outskirts of several, almost like she wasn’t a teenager at all.
“It’s handmade,” Sammi said, packing the bowl on the sandy patio table. The mosquitoes were out, entering through the tears in the mesh screen. “Be careful with it.”
You weren’t supposed to care about things breaking. You weren’t supposed to care about your Halloween costume, either, or publicly share your passion. Aimee knew this. Jonathan did, too.
“Alright,” he said, eyes pointed to the glass sliding door inside the party, angel wings and plastic vampire fangs ditched on every surface.
Aimee saw nothing for her in there. She’d experienced this exact night a hundred times before. Curiosity flickered like a dim light somewhere inside her.
“Where’d you get this piece?” she said, admiring the orange strokes.
“A friend from Denver sent me one. He blows the glass himself. And the designs are based on auras he encounters,” Sammi smiled. “Look closely,” she circled her phone flashlight. “What do you see?”
“Orange,” Aimee said, dumbly.
“And?”
“A little bit of gold. Some green, too.”
“Very light green,” Sammi said in a softer voice. “Like peridot.”
“Yeah,” Aimee said. She didn’t know what peridot was.
“Well, that’s my aura. According to Neeko, at least.” Sammi smiled again, shaking her head with feigned, cute embarrassment. “He said I’m a free spirit. Highly creative.” She paused. “He wants to sleep with me.”
All of it—the connection to a mysterious person outside of Florida, the sophisticated smoking method, not a wet blunt or a dirty bowl—fascinated Aimee. She asked more questions. Endless, cascading. Every one of Sammi’s responses elicited more until, finally, she hammered to the core. How are you unbothered by everyone making fun of you? Why don’t you change?
“I like you,” Sammi finally said, words like a rescue breath to Aimee’s chest.
She didn’t even think to return it. What would it matter? Sammi had chosen her. Aimee never made choices.
*
From that Monday on, Sammi picked Aimee up at six-forty-five every morning for school. She’d stand in the driveway and wait for the red Ford Taurus to pull in beside the mailbox.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” Aimee asked the first time.
“I wouldn’t do it if I minded,” Sammi said definitively, like she’d only say this once.
She knew of a shortcut to school, which was not actually quicker, but because it involved US-27, she could drive fast and avoid school zones. The road this early was empty, with nothing but land and power poles on either side.
“You could go forever,” Sammi said. She meant you could get as far north as Indiana. But this is how she talked, grand and romantic. It worked on Aimee. More than worked. She wanted it to pass through her like osmosis.
“No school today,” Sammi said the next week as Aimee slid into the passenger seat. “It’s going to be beautiful outside today. Sunny. 70. No rain. We can’t be stuck inside for that.”
When Aimee and her friends cut class, it was not for any defensible reason. They just sort of shrugged and climbed the chain-link fence by the football field, dropping their backpacks before their feet.
Sammi brought them to the park. The one where everyone had their childhood birthday parties, where you took your puppy, where you lost your virginity in the car.
“I have a spot,” Sammi said. Of course she did.
She pulled a tie-dye tapestry out of her trunk. Aimee trailed behind her between the parting of two shrubs, following Sammi’s direction to take their shoes off and feel the dewy grass that sunk near the lake. They walked for what could have been half a mile until they reached a place where the trees were so grown they blocked the light.
“Here,” Sammi said, pausing her long strides to admire. The air was cooler here, the earth’s colors cast in blue light. Ahead of them was a wide circle of tree roots with a center marked by stacked rocks. A yarn hammock hung between the thickest trunks.
Aimee was stunned.
“You did this? Yourself?”
Sammi nodded. “Three years ago.”
“I haven’t shown anyone,” Sammi continued, fanning the tapestry to the ground and patting the space next to her for Aimee to sit. “I wanted to take you here, though. Because you’re Aimee.” Aimee fought the squirm of her body, the urge to dart her eyes away from Sammi’s maudlin gaze. Whatever hesitation she felt was wrong, a discomfort she had to endure until such intimacy was slippery, easy.
“I love it here,” she said.
Sammi didn’t hear her. Or maybe she did, but her expression didn’t change, and she spoke like bumping into the back of Aimee’s words.
“We’re similar, you and me. We have souls that other people don’t understand. Because they’re dead inside, and we’re light. Light beings.”
Aimee imagined the scene from above, the tops of their heads and matching postures. She didn’t want to be one of the dead ones. Perhaps Sammi saw something that Aimee missed. Perhaps she was remarkable and just needed someone else to say it.
“We have a special connection,” Sammi said. A fact, one that warranted a seal. She planted her lips on Aimee’s for seconds before pursing and pulling back. Her breath smelled like basil.
*
The rope was introduced one of the mornings Sammi declared they had something better to do than school. Paint, maybe. Or, meditate.
Her bedroom was a reservoir of every adolescent interest she’d had. She’d lived here, in this two-story townhome, since her parents’ divorce when she was seven. Her father lived not far away in an assisted living facility for reasons Sammi did not elaborate on, and her mother, for most of the month, resided at her boyfriend’s house four hours south in Key West. She returned for one weekend a month, mostly to restock. There were multiples of every item, all Kirkland brand. Their favorite was the jarred peaches in the pantry, slices drenched in a non-fructose syrup, thick and slimy like goldfish.
“What’s this?” Aimee asked. The rope was in a ball on Sammi’s desk, next to The Crystal Bible and Eastern Body Western Mind.
Sammi had been feeding her crested gecko. She plopped him back in the terrarium when she saw what Aimee was pointing to, knowing better than to lift or touch without permission.
“I swear I didn’t mean to leave that out,” Sammi said, lying. She rarely lied, but when she did, it was so poorly delivered that it seemed intentional. Somehow honest.
“Jesse was over last night,” Sammi continued. “We use that—rope—sometimes.”
Aimee’s stomach twisted. She wasn’t jealous, exactly, of Jesse, Sammi’s twenty-four-year-old boyfriend, also a Soundcloud musician, but it was threatening to remember she was not the only person who circled Sammi. What if Aimee fell out of orbit? Where would she go?
“It’s not just like a sex toy,” Sammi said, sensing fear. “It’s called Shibari. Japanese bondage art. Sometimes we don’t even have sex, we just play with making different ties. It feels good. Like a deep stretch.”
“You make the ties? Or he does?”
“We both do.”
“So you take turns.”
“Yes.”
“And do you have a preference? For tying or being tied?”
“Tying. But I let Jesse do it because it makes him feel like a man. And when he feels like a man…” Sammi widened her eyes, dipped her chin.
“He’s happier?”
“He fucks better.”
*
At home, Aimee fantasized. Driving up US-27, her neck stuck out of the window, stopping only when they needed gas. They could pass through Tennessee, decide on a middle-of-nowhere town to settle, and in years that would fly by, work up to owning a farm, where everything they’d eat would be grown, and pigs, affectionate ones, who she’d name after musicians whose records she’d own—Leonard, Joni, Bob—would run to her feet in the morning. She would be a painter, a poet, a person who observed, a person who was observed, also, by men like Neeko, men who’d assess her aura while she lay naked and wild, who’d tell her she was lavender before sex and magenta after, her spirit sensitive like a mood ring.
“You’re smiling,” her mother noticed from the kitchen table. Aimee was putting away the clean utensils. Her father was drying the scooping the cups with a dish rag.
Aimee’s cheeks flushed as if she were caught.
“It’s good,” her mother said, her voice taking up the too-sweet pitch that sounded to Aimee like pure condescension, “to see you’re getting a little lighter. Teenage years, they can be so dark. So heavy. The changing body,” she paused, gesturing curves with her hands. Aimee winced. “The self-esteem. The constant competition and peer feedback,” her voice trailed off, and Aimee’s attention ended.
Her mother was a psychologist, a respected specialist in adolescent anxiety disorders, but her understanding halted at Aimee. She suspected this haunted her mother more than it did herself, this failure to bond that could be traced as far back as infancy, when her mother reported feelings of distance toward her baby who wouldn’t latch, who cried incessantly through the night. Did have some early instinct that Aimee was doomed to stunt, that she’d have better success treating her clients than her daughter?
Aimee didn’t go there. She was back at the farm, the purpose. What about Chicago? They’d be close, ish, if they took US-27 all the way.
“The friends you make at this age can be especially influential,” her mother said, and Aimee started to listen again. “You know I don’t like to control you, dictate your life. But I will say,” she paused, raising her chin with her glasses down her nose, “I am happy to see you’ve found out on your own that those kids weren’t good for you. It just takes some patience to find people who make you feel more like yourself.” Her mother smiled. “What’s her name again? Your new friend?”
“Sammi,” Aimee said. She emulated how Sammi said her name at the park when she’d declared their connection special: tenderly, like pronouncing it in cursive.
“Uh-huh,” her mother nodded. “Well, I’d love to meet her, should you two ever pick our house over hers.”
*
“I talked to Jesse,” Sammi said. “He said I can tie you.”
Aimee’s head went floating. How did she know Aimee wanted this before Aimee even knew? It had only been a few days since she saw the rope on Sammi’s desk, but her thoughts of it were so frequent it had felt like longer, enough time to have cemented as a symbol in her mind. Of what, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she wouldn’t be the one to bring it up again.
“You asked him that?” Aimee said, her voice accidentally eager.
Sammi was twisting honey-colored wax between her palms. The real stuff, she’d said, acquired by her father’s medical card. Aimee had only been introduced to this form of THC concentrate from Sammi, and already it was the only kind she wanted. The long snake strands Sammi heated with a butane torch over a deep glass piece—another handmade one, by Neeko—cremated Aimee’s chest and left her so high she had to close her eyes to talk.
“Yeah,” Sammi said. “I told him you would love it, and it’s not like cheating, because it’s not sex, and he knows, anyway. He knows how I feel about you.”
*
Aimee kneeled on the floor beside the bed and closed her eyes. She heard the working end of the rope slide through Sammi’s grip. It was, like all of Sammi’s equipment, of the highest quality, kept in pristine condition. Undyed jute, she’d explained. Can be washed, if necessary, but must be straightened and hung to dry properly.
“This one,” Sammi spoke with focus, “is called Takate Kote. I’ve practiced it a lot.”
Aimee nodded. She wore a sports bra and a pair of Sammi’s cotton shorts with an equestrian camp logo faded at the thigh.
“Your only job in this is to trust me,” Sammi said. “Trust that I won’t hurt you, that I’ll stop if you want me to. So we need a safe word,” she said. “Whatever you want.”
Aimee blinked her eyes open, seeing first the jar of sliced peaches beside them.
“Peach,” she said, knowing it’d be the only time. Sammi smiled, perhaps also aware.
“You start with your forearms behind your back,” she said, grazing Aimee’s shoulders. “Opposite hand to opposite elbow, if you can reach.”
Aimee’s forearms stacked effortlessly.
“Beautiful,” Sammi praised, tying the first knot in the center of where Aimee’s arms met. The stretch intensified, her chest opening like French doors. A windy exhale left her dry mouth.
Walking on her knees, Sammi wrapped the rope twice below Aimee’s collarbones, humming as Aimee flinched. Meat she never noticed—her pectorals—squeezed like fruit, releasing fibrous juice. The second knot came between her shoulder blades, one that felt, based on the dance Sammi’s fingers did on her back, more elaborate than the first.
“How does it feel?”
Words had not connected to the sensations, only visuals. She opened her eyes to Sammi resting on her heels in front of her. She said nothing.
“Good,” Sammi said, her voice melodic.
With faint pressure, she wound the rope underneath Aimee’s breasts. She tied more knots along her spine, strengthening a centralized point of resistance. Sweat built at Aimee’s temples and the bend of her knees as her body registered the circumstances: she could not, at this point, get out of this. Her legs grew restless. There was no saliva to swallow. She thought of peach.
Sammi cupped her palm on Aimee’s waist. Her touch felt like cooling mint, a bite so acute she even smelled it. Danger dissolved to bliss, surrender. The compression evoked the warm blanket feeling of a pain pill and the elation of an upper. She wasn’t escaping; she was submerging. Aimee’s neck fell to the side.
The tie was completed after a taut pull through the gap between arm and rib, a loop like a cuff over each bicep, and an X-cross made on her back.
Sammi sighed in equal parts exhaustion and satisfaction.
“Now, you stay,” Sammi said. Aimee heard the jar twist and instinctively opened her mouth. A sweet, tart peach slice landed on her tongue. The memory of its flavor kept her salivating for the whole hour she remained tied on the floor.
*
For months, Aimee got tied without much asking.
I’m so sore from last time, she would say, I need a really deep stretch, or, Today was so stressful, I can’t take a full breath, and Sammi would smile knowingly, pleased to offer the cure.
And the ties became more advanced. Sammi experimented: a harness that made a V-shape up Aimee’s thighs, a bind that lifted her right foot to her spine, with her left elbow bent and pointed upward, held by the rope that stretched from inside her mouth across her deltoid and tied at her palm. Sometimes the intensity pushed Aimee to tears.
“Breathe,” Sammi cued her. Inhales were shallow when she was reclined and twisted at the waist, a double column knot beneath her belly button. “Through your nose. Into your stomach. Chest. Out through your mouth.”
She watched the air struggle to rise in the parts of Aimee’s body she named one by one until her ribs relented and made room.
“Good,” Sammi said. “Chest. Mouth.”
In some ways, these were the most pleasurable moments, sloping down from the apex together through direction and repetition.
After the untying, Aimee curled beside Sammi on top of the comforter. Her cheek squished against Sammi’s firm thigh. She took rabid breaths, inhaling her pomegranate moisturizer and the scent under it, oil from her pores. Sammi’s inflamed fingers were rubbed raw at the top knuckle where the rope looped. She combed the cool strands of hair splayed in front of her. They didn’t speak.
It seemed like they’d discovered a language.
But eventually, Sammi’s energy did as it was designed to do: switch, redirect. Graduation was weeks away. Aimee’s requests were met with reluctance.
“You have so many marks,” Sammi said one afternoon, pointing to the indentations like scales on her skin. They were back from school, where Aimee tucked her fingers in the sleeve of her sweatshirt and traced over the patterns on her forearms.
“You don’t like them?” Aimee asked, her voice crushed like ice molars.
“It’s not that,” Sammi said. “It’s just, don’t you think we should take a break?”
Break. A fork pierced Aimee’s throat. She wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t plead.
*
Sammi still did the ties, but they were empty, heartless, performed out of obligation. She’d have Aimee lay on her stomach for a basic ankle-to-wrist tie that took her no more than five minutes, then left her with her eyes at floor level while she worked on her music. There was a producer she was DMing with who had a studio in Denver. It’s all happening, Sammi would say, pulling Tarot cards to confirm. Recognition was coming. Transformation and rebirth already beginning.
Aimee preferred to be glued to the floor. She found the looseness of life to be unbearable. What pants would Sammi say to wear? How much should she eat?
She made adjustments: compression socks under her jeans, arms glued to her sides when she walked, imposed narrowing of her free-associating mind. It was not enough. The movement of the day was a kind of violence. Only Sammi created solace.
*
When Sammi left, it was like Aimee’s gas was hissing but no fire could catch. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She asked Sammi.
“Please,” she said on the phone. She was in the corner of her closet, the tightest space she could find. Thick wool gloves covered her fingers, which tingled constantly without them. “Tell me what I should do.”
“Find something that moves you,” Sammi said. It was the first time they’d spoken that Sammi didn’t sound distracted, with five minutes to spare before she had to do something new and cool that Aimee knew nothing about.
“What moves me?” Aimee asked.
Sammi cleared her throat. She’d never done that before, this tick. She was thinking of a lie.
“Everything, Aimee,” Sammi said. “You’re like me, remember? We have so much life in us.”
*
Sammi’s Instagram account turned into a catalog of tattoos she’d done. Hand pokes at first, then, in a few months, machine ones. Masterpieces on thighs, down stomachs. She kept her name. She inked it across some stranger’s throat.