Of What Little Girls Are Made

Her First Half

Jackleen is fifteen and three-hundred sixty-one days. She walks home from school, staying close to the side of the building with the big dark windows so she can glance in them and see behind her. Sometimes she looks in the windows and sees two girls walking behind her, dressed in polo shirts and pleated skirts and knee socks just like she has, and it makes her walk faster, because other times all she sees in the mirrored windows is:

Jackleen has her mother’s cheekbones, high and wide, and her mother’s thick eyebrows, which she has not yet learned to manage. Jackleen has her mother’s voice, which is too high-pitched and sounds like a small hurt animal, especially when:

Lloyd, the husband of Jackleen’s mother, which she supposes makes him her step-father, pulls back hard on the hair of Jackleen’s mother, which is blond and thin and hangs straight down just like Jackleen’s hair does. Jackleen’s mother, Jackie, for whom Jackleen herself is named, had been walking up the stairs as he pulled, walking up and out of an argument she wouldn’t win, and Jackie falls back and down the stairs. There, Lloyd says. That kid needs a driver’s license like I need another hole in my head. Jackleen stays quiet because, with her cheek bones and her hair and her voice, she is Jackie. She is her mother sobbing and bleeding. Jackleen is as much a victim now as she is when:

Amy Lynn’s voice comes from behind Jackleen before she’s glanced behind her in the big dark windows. Your mother is a whore, it hisses, and Jackleen barely cringes. She’s heard it before. Why’d your father leave, Amy Lynn asks, and Jackleen knows that she doesn’t need to answer, because Amy Lynn will answer. Three days ago Amy Lynn said, Did he leave her for a guy? Is your dad a fag? and Meena laughs with her, and Amy Lynn pulls hard on Jackleen’s hair. Today Amy Lynn says, Was your dad a freak? Did he have three heads? Or four asses? Are you a freak too, freak? and Meena laughs with her, and Amy Lynn pulls hard on Jackleen’s hair. Jackleen doesn’t fall down like her mother but in the mirrored windows she sees her mother’s face, and she holds back her mother’s hurt animal sounds as she keeps on walking until:

When Jackleen gets home from school, she flips through papers on the table, looking for the mail. She’s fine, she doesn’t even feel the sore spot on her scalp where Amy Lynn pulls so regularly, when she finds her own birth certificate, whose date says that she can get her driver’s license in exactly four days, provided she has a copy of the birth certificate and a parent’s permission. The birth certificate also lists the name of Jackleen’s father, a name which she is certain she has seen before, though her father’s identity has long been kept a secret. After a moment, she thinks she might know where she has heard the name before. She turns on Lloyd’s computer, against penalty of figurative death and perhaps literal dismemberment, and into a search engine, she types:

Her father’s name turns up many results, all articles relating to the brutal slaying of a single mother and her two daughters. Jackleen reads the first article, and then the next, and then the next, without listening for the rumble of Lloyd’s return from work. Her father’s name is not listed among the victims, or the friends of the victims, but as the perpetrator. A picture accompanies the fourth article, a mug shot of the man with the name that appears on her birth certificate, and Jackleen looks hard into the blue eyes that stare out of the picture. The front door opens, and Jackleen shuts the computer down fast. Hi, her mother's voice calls, but Jackleen can’t look away from the blackened computer screen, which, despite the loss of power, still showcase in Jackleen’s reflection the same blue eyes staring back at her.

Well, she says. This changes everything.

Her Second Half

Jackleen turned sixteen earlier this week, and she doesn’t look in the mirrored windows on the way home from school. Today, when she hears Amy Lynn’s voice, she doesn’t slow down. Hey, Amy Lynn says. Going home to wax your eyebrows?

Before Amy Lynn has had time to grab for Jackleen’s hair, Jackleen has turned around and clenched her fist, and it is with this fist that Jackleen’s hand connects with Amy Lynn’s left cheek hard. The fist connects with so much force that Amy Lynn loses her balance and lies on the ground. Meena doesn’t laugh, and Jackleen brings her right foot back and then forward into Amy Lynn’s stomach. Her foot sinks into the stomach, which feels softer than it looks so Jackleen steps and kicks again, this time in Amy Lynn’s face. The blood dripping from Amy Lynn’s nose has covered her face and Jackleen’s shoe by the fourth kick.

Jackleen glances up into the mirrored windows. She doesn’t see her mother’s cheekbones. She doesn’t see her mother’s eyebrows. She doesn’t see her mother’s hair. Staring at her, calm and blue, are her father’s eyes.

She bends over next to Amy Lynn, who is now making her own hurt animal noises. With Amy Lynn’s plaid skirt, Jackleen wipes the blood off her own shoe.

Yes, actually, Jackleen says, looking with her father’s eyes into Amy Lyn’s squinted ones. I am going home to wax my eyebrows.

End of a Love Song

The love song starts like this:

When they are fourteen, she tells her friends and herself that she loves him, despite his skinniness, despite the jeans that are too tight at the ankle, despite the shirt—too cheap, and the wrong color too—he’s tucked in with no belt, and despite or maybe because of his monstrosity of a nose, with long and wide nostrils that face out, and with which he holds up his crooked glasses. His hair always needs to be cut, and even when he doesn’t bother to shave, it doesn’t cover the ugly splotches of pimples across his jaw line.

Even so, she comes to think of him as her inverse reflection: she is chubby, but her reflection looks back at her as morbidly and irreversibly obese, and she’s loud and awkward, with ex-step-families all over the country. His thinness, his sarcastic silence, his apathy, his calculated success and all-American family—they all make her hate the side of the mirror on which she is trapped. I’m doomed, she thinks, in the teenage style, and when she breathes in deep the smell of the bitter black tea he nurses, she shivers because she loves him. You drink too much tea, she says. He rolls his eyes at her, and tells her not to be so dramatic.

When they are seventeen, they’ve already dated and broken up—his decision, not hers—and she’s puked into sinks (several) thinking about him kissing other girls (several). He’s forgotten that she once loved him, or maybe he never knew, and she keeps on writing bad poetry about how she misses him. Stop being so dramatic, her friends tell her with italic inflection on different syllables each time they repeat it, but she can’t internalize their words because they’ve turned into the refrain of a catchy song. She continues to sing the verses, which sound like this:

When they are nineteen, they’ve gone to college, and he’s casually apologized for “breaking her heart” (stop being so dramatic, says the chorus), and she’s begun to sleep with men just to remind herself that they aren’t him. She writes bad poetry and mourns the loss of her innocence, while taking “great joy” in multiple orgasms produced mostly by men whose last names she does not know.

You love someone else, one man tells her. I don’t love anyone, she lies. Another man says, we don’t love each other, do we? She turns toward him, naked on his bed, and rolls her eyes. I’m only sleeping with you to forget someone else, she tells him. And to herself, she says, stop being so dramatic.

When they are twenty-two, and she still tells people that she’ll be twenty-one next summer because she’s afraid of getting old, she calls him every month or so to check in. I thought of you today when I saw your mother at the store, she tells him. Did you, he says. Yes, she lies. She hears him roll his eyes and sip his tea.

When they are twenty-five, she moves in with his cousin, whom she has dated for four months and who hits her and regularly sleeps with other women while denying it to everyone but her, when he’s drunk. She sees the one she’s always thought about at family functions, where he looks disapprovingly at the finger marks, getting red now, on the arm his cousin has just grabbed. Stop being so dramatic, she means to say, and he knows, so he rolls his eyes and sips his tea, the smell of which makes her shiver like a love-struck teenager.

When they are twenty-six, it’s over with his cousin, with whom she still sleeps, but she accepts an invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of their relative, who (along with the rest of the family) thinks they are still together. I’m going to run a marathon, she announces, awkwardly, and the one she’s always thought about looks skeptical because she’s gotten even fatter in the last twelve years than she was when she first thought she loved him. I’m training already, she says, and he doesn’t believe her, but it might be the first true thing she’s said to him in years. I’m a different person now, she says, but she thinks, that’s debatable.

They go to a bar that night, with several of the cousins. The one that she’s lived with gets drunk enough to pass out in a booth tucked away in the corner, and the one she’s always thought about looks at her over a drink. Not tea, she says. Not tea, he says. They’re a little drunk, and after all these years, they finally hold eye contact.

Someone drives them home, but neither of them remembers later who it was. Thirty people, at least, sleep in extra bedrooms and on couches at this uncle’s house, whose name she never knew in the first place. There’s one unclaimed couch left when they get back from the bar, and she sits on it between the cousin, who hasn’t woken up since they pulled out of the parking garage, and the man she’s said that she loved since he was a boy. He turns the television on and keeps it low. He slides the remote to her over the couch cushion and says, you choose, with that throaty sound in his throat she knows, from years of trying to forget about him, means sex.

Slowly, their fingers find each other. (Stop being so dramatic.) His hands feel cold, and she doesn’t like it.

Stop, she says, but she doesn’t finish the refrain. And after twelve years, two months, and ten days, the song, abruptly, has reached its end.

Where She Needs to Be

Run faster, she tells herself, out loud, and her body begins to take her to where she needs to be.

Second-hand Heartbreak; or Kind of a Liability

When you go to the bus station or the train station or the airport, there’s a woman sitting there always, with frizzy hair and smelly clothes and a broken heart, which would be cliché if it weren‘t so true. She hums to herself and talks to Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany or something, and you look away, embarrassed for her.

In her melodies, which you can’t recognize as any particular song you’ve ever heard, she tells you her story. The story is this:

When she was a girl, she was a Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany, even if now she can’t remember which it was. She was blond and perky and turned guys down like she was sending away those black-clothed men with Bibles that knock on suburban doors. It was miraculous, really, how she stayed way up there above everyone else, and it was even more miraculous that she one day believed a guy named Matt or Mike or Mitch when he told her that he loved her, that he only wanted to be with her, that he wasn’t with anyone else. I’m kind of a liability, she said, meaning that she was a virgin, but he kissed her on the mouth and then in other places, and when she breathed in and out and he was there, it was a miracle. And more miraculous that she opened up her legs for the very first time to him, and he filled her up and emptied her out and filled her up again, and by the time he went away for good, his baby was growing inside her.

He’d been gone two months before the heartbreak got really bad, and her internal organs got all mixed up and her heart started pumping some kind of poison, instead of it staying in the liver where it belonged. To make a sad story short, her heart shot that bile right into her belly, and it found its way through all sorts of membranes to that baby. That baby died, which was just as well, because if it couldn’t survive a little second-hand heartbreak, it had no business being born in the first place.

The baby melted out of her, but she kept on talking to it, calling it Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany or whatever blond and perky and well-liked name she’d thought of that week until, pretty soon, people thought she was crazy just for loving some man who’d said he loved her and for feeling kind of bad about the heartbreak that dissolved the little thing growing in her. But still she sits always, waiting for the bus or the train or the airplane that might bring back the people that she loves, or that at least she thought once loved her. And sometimes, when it’s really noisy in one of those places, she likes the quiet.

It’s always so quiet when the sounds are loudest.

You stop to listen.

When she hums at the bus station or the train station or the airport, this is the story she’s humming.

After that, after that first time you listen, she’s finally told her story to someone; or rather, someone has finally listened to her song. And now, even though you’re stuck in that seat waiting for whoknowswho to come back, she’s gone.

Dead Girl

Wake up, he says. He looks down into the long wooden box. She lies still.

I know you can hear me, he says. She opens her eyes and sighs.

See, you’re still there, he says. She sits up.

Well, he says, aren’t you going to say anything?

No, she says.

Just a little something, he says.

No, she says.

We can spend some time together, he says.

Well, she says. Maybe.

So let’s go, he says. She starts to climb out of the box.

What should we do, she says.

What, he says.

What should we do, she says.

But you’re dead, he says. Why can’t you just stay dead?

Hey, she says, closing her eyes again. I’m not the one talking to a dead girl.

But Not We Can't

When they decide to have the party, neither one of them thinks that maybe it will rain and everyone will have to stay inside. But it does rain, and so Jolie and Mack and their guests pack into the house, and it smells stuffy like wet wool and yeasty like beer.

Nothing happens until much later, even though Mack invited Hannah, whom Jolie knew he’d slept with the year before, and Hannah planned to stay over since she’d driven from so far, along with the other guests that drank too much to find their car keys. Of course Jolie complains, especially after another and another martini, the fruity kind but with more vodka than sugar. But these complaints are more flirty than vicious, seeing as how they are made to Nick, a young twenty-something guy who just joined the force with Mack and who didn’t talk much, especially to her.

But your eyes are so pretty, she tells him, running into him by the bar cart where she shakes herself another martini. She leans in close, but nothing is still happening.

Later, even later than her leaning into his pretty blue eyes, Jolie is falling over, trying to sleep under the folding table they set up inside for the food, long gone. I’m not respectable enough to be standing up here talking to you, she means to say, but it comes out as a moan, and Nick catches her and keeps her up talking to him. To let her sober up, Nick reminds himself, eyeing Mack, who fell asleep on the couch. And didn’t Mack say they were divorcing anyway, he reasons, eyeing Jolie, who fell again into his pretty blue eyes.

And when she pulls him through the dining room, where they step over Hannah and one of the other police officers (single, at least, she notes, even through her stumbling) sharing a thin blanket on the floor, and into the office, where she sits him in the office chair and sits in his lap while she insists on checking her sister’s email, since she is impressed that she can remember the password, even if she can barely pronounce her sister’s name.

See, she says, turning toward him, leaning into his pretty blue eyes, and in the dark with only the glowing of the computer screen to light up the room and with Hannah (that slut) lying outside the doorway, Nick looks like Mack, with his strong shoulders and law enforcement crew cut, which is enough of a reason to lean far enough into his eyes to kiss him, and suddenly it is forty minutes later and her lips are still on his, only now his hand is up inside her shirt and her fingers are tracing the zipper of his pants.

The chair creaks loudly.

The floor, they say and slide onto the carpet Mack had installed a few months ago, and instead of closing the door they whisper shhh to each other, and when she says things like, That feels good, or Don’t stop, or Pretty pretty eyes, he can’t hear her but he smiles at her anyway. And soon her dress is up at her waist and his face is buried between her legs and she tells him no, that it’s going to make her beg him to fuck her, but he sucks the words out of her, and when he crawls up her to kiss her sticky-sweet on the mouth she says, Fuck me. I’ve never, he tells her, and she doesn’t really believe him, because she can feel him up against her. He reaches down to guide him into her.

We shouldn’t, she says.

But you didn’t say we can’t, he says.

But we shouldn’t, she says.

But not we can’t, he says, as he pushes inside her, and he still looks like Mack but the weight of Nick’s chest is heavier and his hair is coarser and it scratches her. More rug burn on my front than on my back, she says, but he only smiles at her and concentrates on lasting longer, which doesn’t work because it’s coming, he’s coming, but at least he’s pulled out. Hi, she says. Hi, he says. Her stomach is wet and sticky.

Jolie sleeps on the floor of the office, and Nick sleeps on the floor of the living room, next to the couch where Mack had passed out. Mack is the first one up, and Jolie wakes up smelling the coffee he’s made, which she will drink but not he. She walks into the laundry room, right outside the office, and pulls on one of her husband’s t-shirts and a pair of his boxers from the dryer, taking off the dress right there in the open. She puts it, not thinking, into the dryer with the clean clothes.

When she walks into the kitchen and her husband is standing there, he says, you didn’t sleep in the bed. Neither did you, she says, and she crawls under the blanket he’d slept under on the couch, right above where Nick is sleeping.

Hannah comes into the kitchen then, with the other officer, and talks loudly (that slut), and Nick wakes up and sits up, leaning against the couch where she is not sleeping but thinking that she’d like to. He reaches back and tickles her feet. She pulls her legs away. I’ll move if you want to sit up here, she says, and he gets up and sits next to her but they don’t look at each other.

When Nick goes to leave, she offers to move Hannah’s car, which blocks Nick’s in the driveway. You remember how much of last night, he says. Everything, I think, she says. Well, I’ll see you around, he says. Thanks for coming, she says. And he drives away, and she goes back inside to drink her husband’s coffee.

Birthday

She takes the bus back home, which she's never done before, so she's nervous about that in addition to being weak from the thing she's just had cleaned out of her belly.

The bus smells like urine, and she thinks that she might fall asleep, but every time the bus rocks around a turn or slides to a stop with a hydrolic hiss, her insides lurch. So much lurching, she thinks, for being so empty. She stays awake and even gets off at the right stop before she climbs all those stairs up to the apartment and falls down on the bed.

He comes to get her hours later, because it's her birthday, and she's dressed up and put on make-up, and not even just a little mascara and lip gloss. She's got her game face on tonight.

He takes her to some dark restaurant and requests a booth scrunched into the corner, which she sort of likes because it feels cozy and safe. What's wrong, he asks her, and she cocks her head to the side. What, she says. You look like shit, he says, and she almost tells him that she's saved them, that she sacrificed for them. We made a mistake, she'd told him. We fucked up, he corrected her.

She lets the hair fall in front of her face so he doesn't have to look at her, and they talk a little bit about how work was, what he did that day.

Listen, I brought you here for a reason, he tells her. She looks up at him without moving her hair, but he doesn't wish her another great year. I saw her again, he tells her. We made a mistake, he says.

You fucked up, she thinks, but she keeps it behind her hair. So, she says, what will happen.

He waves away the waitress who comes and starts to ask if everything's okay with their food.

I have to be with her, he tells her. I can't just leave her.

He can't just leave her.

And I can't let her take care of it by herself, he tells her. I wouldn't want her to do that.

She doesn't look at him anymore, just brushes the hair completely out of her face, and she slides up out of the booth and pulls her purse, which almost gets stuck but hits his water glass, which spills and shatters on the floor, and she walks out of the section of the restaurant and into the lobby, and the floor is moving under her feet as she walks but she doesn't fall down, and when she pushes the glass doors open in the front of the restaurant and runs outside into the fluorescent parking lot lights which blind her, she slips and falls hard on the ground.

That hurt, she says.