She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at colouring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans.
A lot of things in the house were broken or forgotten: the kitchen clock stopped, a closet doorknob coming off in my hand. The sparkly mess of flies I’d swept from the corners. It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay.
The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things.
It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as those kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high school.
I’d always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands.
At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgement. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in very crude positions.
Money is ego, and people won’t give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold onto it like a blanket. They don’t realize it makes them slaves. It’s sick.
We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves we hid from them – they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for.
We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them – they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for.
Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you.
Someone’s boyfriend died in a rock-climbing accident in Switzerland: everyone gathered around her, on fire with tragedy. Their dramatic shows up support underpinned with jealousy- bad luck was rare enough to be glamorous.
That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning behind thoughtless impulse.
How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.
The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl’s face– I think Suzanne recognized it. Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife. The particular give of a human body. There was so much to destroy.
How impotent my anger was, a surge with no place to land, and how familiar that was: my feelings strangled inside me, like little half-formed children, bitter and bristling.
No-one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition. Her gaze softening my centre so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning.
I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.
I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.
Pamela was beautiful, it was true, and I felt that submerged attraction to her that everyone felt for the beautiful.