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Trophy Girl
Heavily inspired by Gillian Flynn’s “Cool Girl” monologue from “Gone Girl”

Kelsy Elefante

    He was a smart guy; a master of mathematics and the sciences. Erudite, he was in every aspect—brainy, I guess you could call it that. He was a virtuoso at solving equations. Scientific formulas were his gospels. Despite his great academic capabilities, he was not one to snob and look down upon those who were inferior to him. He was a gregarious kind of guy. He was amiable. What fed and nurtured him were confabulations, conversations with strangers he knew. He liked to talk. He liked to run his mouth. He was loud. Sometimes his boisterous manners of speech would vex me, but it was nothing I was incapable of handling. As a matter of fact, that kooky side of his is what captured me in his trance in the first place. He was the jovial social butterfly and I was his silent, meek, reserved trophy girl, his little wooden horse pulled by a string.
    What agonized me truly, on certain occasions, is that my sweet, cute, charming prince would falter. He would forget. By some twisted impulse, he would wander and sail towards the seas of pointless conversations and social gatherings. Vodka became mother’s milk. He basked in the cold rays of strobe lights, and sought shelter in the arms of scantily clad, hollow, vapid women he discovered in rancid, squalid corners of the street—all for a five minute’s taste of euphoria, I presume.
    He had many women—but he was particularly fond of this one though—his favorite affair. Monique was her name. Her hair, voluminous and golden yellow—like sulfur. Her skin was as pale as the bellies of fish sold at the fish markets near our village. Her round eyes, like the brown marbles my sister and I used to play with in childhood. Her body, too, was as tall and curvaceous as the functions he calculated and graphed onto paper. She had plump, rosy lips he so loved to kiss. They did not serve her much use though, for she had little mastery of verbal repertoire. Girlish giggling was her prime method of communication. In actuality, most of the time, she refrained from speaking. She simply smiled and nodded—and of course, had her mouth agape at times.
    Perhaps, that’s why he liked her so much.
    Their affairs were not limited to the four walls of a motel. In some of my afternoons—driving around with nothing but the company of my solitude, I espied them engaging together in endeavors normal, happy couples did. They strolled around parks together. He treated her to cheap, diamond earrings in Tiffany’s, Dior bags, Louboutins. They had dinners together in high-class restaurants—devouring steaks and swilling wine. He often escorted her to her home too. Their goodbyes were interminable. He would tightly grasp onto her dainty hands, and so did she with his. It was evident in their longing stares that they would refuse to part ways.
    He never did that with me. Normally, he would drop me off at an unknown street, kiss me goodbye, fill my ears with empty words and drive away.
    Was I envious?
    Because of his “affairs”, my mornings, afternoons and nights had become desolate. Still, I waited. For him, I became someone I loathed, and for that I pitied myself immensely. Willingly and somehow unwillingly, I had transformed myself into the girls I used to relentlessly criticize. You know, like those teenagers so infatuated with the thrill of “love”? Their grip on reality—distorted by their crazy fantasies born from hackneyed, saccharine tropes presented by run-of-the-mill novels and television shows—written by nutjobs who have ceased to feel a real woman’s touch—Those fools who presume that one (frankly) mediocre makeout session in the bathroom stall of a fast food chain is equivalent to a life sentence to happy church bells, rings, two-story houses and carriages. I participated in my own unethical barters. I exchanged my spirit for a measly glittery, fifteen-minute phantasm.
    With my sweet, cute, charming man, I too, in a way, was sculptured as a miserable housewife from the 1950s—doll-like appearance, rigidly polite, hanging by a thread waiting for her husband to return home and give her a sliver of attention; a tinge of technicolor in her black and white existence.
    He was decent enough and came home, sometimes.
    At three in the morning, I would wake to the tumultuous knocking of a door. I’d find him standing at our doorstep, usually with his clothes tattered and drenched—and there, he had that look on his face, yearning for me. I could sense the silent desperation behind those small, shifty eyes. “I need you.” He would say with his gaze. “You are the only one I seek. There is none as special as you are. You are the one I have chosen to love”.
    I used to be sensible. In the past, I had an air of grace. I lived in propriety. I was untouchable. I was once capable of distinguishing wolves from lambs. The girl five years ago would have had her nose in the air, chided him, slammed the door shut and left him to rot in the soil under the pouring rain, until summer passed and he was no more but decaying bone and flesh.
    Unfortunately, I have lost that quality. Upon seeing his state, my stupidity assumed sovereignty over my impulse, and I was compelled to cradle and nurse him.
    Then, there it would commence. After he wailed softly of his failed sojourns, his battles, his triumphs and I consoled him with every bit of wisdom my body could muster, my sweet, cute, charming prince became himself again. He would hold me in his thin arms and whisper words like nectar in my ears. My cheeks would be drenched in honey. He worshiped me, as if I was Aphrodite herself. In those moments, I was Monique.
    Well, as one knows, moments come and moments go—and how quickly indeed those moments went.
    After a night of satin sheets, he rose from our bed, and without stopping to glance at my corpse, he nonchalantly walked out the door and drove away—“to look for himself” again.
    Why does my sweet, cute charming man treat me this way? Why does he betray me? Why does he not love me? Why does he ignore my pleas? Why is he ignorant? Did I not give enough? Did I not love enough? Was I not enough—for him?
    Perhaps my eyes were too small, my stature was too short, my bosom was too flat, my lips were too thin, my hair was too lifeless, my voice was too cold.
    Or was it because I started to regain my vision—I began to see. I knew he took pride in his secrecy—keeping his whores in a jewelry box, forging connections with the bigwigs of his world, gambling in the dark. He began to have an epiphany—he began to realize that I was much too sharp for his fallacies, and he detested that. He was upset that his trophy girl had left him, took a plane to God knows where (perhaps Paris or Las Vegas) and vanished without a tear-stained goodbye note. He had Monique and all his other affairs, so why on earth was he so distraught?
    He didn’t like that in his done and deceased trophy girl’s place, stood me, a petty, vigilant, witty, cunning inconvenience—that had never occurred to him in the past. He wanted this new girl gone. He wrote mountains and mountains of letters and phoned thousands and thousands of calls begging the old girl to alter her pathways. “Maybe she just had to think.” I heard him reason with himself. “She will come back.”
    He responded this way not because he learned, but because he wanted to win.
    His repulsion towards me was beyond evident. Many nights ago, I overheard him craft his murder. If he didn’t get his trophy girl back, he was eager to reinvent me. He planned to knock me unconscious, take [me] the specimen to his laboratory, slice my head open with a knife, examine every inch of my brain and remodel it. He, too, wanted to do the same with my outward appearance. My hair would be dyed blonde. My pupils would be painted deep brown. My skin would be bleached white as pearls and my lips would be plumped. Instead of a breathing, eccentric, alive girl, he wanted a plastic doll—plastic nose, plastic arms, plastic legs, plastic breasts, plastic sentiments, plastic attitude.
    His prospects did not materialize. For a scientist, he was smart, but not intelligent enough to kill me.
    My sweet, cute charming man, my forever darling, how I have loved you beyond the cosmos themselves. How a life devoid of devotion to you would be death on Earth.
    However, you must remember that the notion of “love being unconditional” is false. There are conditions. There are standards. There are limits.
    There are consequences.

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