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.
16 February 2008
09 February 2008
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.
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.
03 February 2008
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.
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