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I want to say,
Like Mabel never did, no matter badly you wanted her to, how badly you broke her, and I bet that kills you a little every day.
I want to say,
If I was dying in the desert and you shoved your dick in my mouth, I’d bite it off and drink your blood until I was glutted with your rich life and you were the dried-up husk of a person, not the other way around.
Instead I nod, and smile, and say, “Heard.”
seven
Gloria Walton
When the Dolces are gone, I lean against June Bug and try to think of what to do next. I’m unmoored, the strings that tied me to every single thing in this town snapping one by one. The late November air is cold and damp around me, a perfect evening for hiding at home, watching movies on the couch with my family, all of us playfully fighting over the best blankets and stealing the bowl of air-popped popcorn from each other.
But even if things were good between us, I wouldn’t be able to keep my mind off my fate. I wouldn’t be able to keep my eyes from straying to the recliner every other minute, the pain fresh every time my brother still wasn’t there, and I’d have to remember all over again that he never would be. And then I’d think about the post he made before he jumped, and what it all meant. I’d start to miss the way he talked during the movie and always spoiled what was coming by guessing every twist ahead of time, and how I’d give anything just to have him there, gloating that he got a whole bowl of popcorn to himself—with butter.
What would Jackie do?
Well, for one, she wouldn’t have run her mouth and gotten fired, so she’d still be at work. She wouldn’t be condemned to a fate worse than social death, so her family would welcome her home. She was a lady like no other, the type Mom wants me to be, who kept her mouth closed and kept quiet, suffered in silence,endured.She lost so much more than me, and if she could go on, so can I.
I can’t face going home and explaining why I’m early or what my new status means, so I slide in behind the wheel and take off, heading south instead of north this time. Mom will be devastated that I got fired, and more devastated that I’m the pariah now. Those paychecks paid for all our cheer expenses, my dance ones, and everything we did with friends—eating out, going to movies, entrance fees to everything else we did to show that we belonged, that we weren’t worried about money any more than the girls who tossed Daddy’s credit card on the counter without a second thought. I won’t be invited to those things anymore, unless I’m the entertainment, a free use girl on a table for anyone to fuck.
I shudder and press my foot down on the gas.
My sisters will be invited. They’ll turn away when they see my shame, pretend they don’t know me.
Fuck them. I stayed for years, took the worst of it, and in the end, they’re no more loyal to me than the already-popular girls who were strangers to us when we were lifted onto the throne with no explanation of our worthiness, leaving them to wonder why we were more deserving than the juniors and seniors who were there before us. Eleanor dumped a drink on me like I was a loser they’d throw in the dumpster next week. Everleigh laughed when Rylan said I was diseased.
I turn east, and a minute later, I’m pulling up outside the little tattoo parlor owned by a family of gangsters so sexy it’s not even fair. I shut off the engine and pat June Bug’s hood on my way around her. The Dolces will probably come for her next, but I can’t let myself think about it. That may be the day they finally break me.
Today, I’m untethered, I’m devastated, but I’m not broken. I’m not a victim.
Inside, a handful of gangsters sit slumped in chairs around a coffee table where binders full of tattoo ideas andartwork lay open. More pictures paper the walls, some generic tattoos people asked for, some stunning works of art drawn by the two boys who work here. The gangsters all fall silent when the door settles closed behind me, sizing me up like a pack of wolves eyeing an antelope that got separated from the herd.
“Uh, hi,” I say, shifting nervously on my feet and glancing at the two curtains pulled around the tables where they work on people. I’m comforted by the buzz of the needle behind them. “Any of the Norths here?”
“I am,” says a sweet voice behind me. I turn to see a skinny brunette who looks fourteen or fifteen sitting behind the tiny counter next to the door.
“You work here?” I ask, trying not to sound incredulous—or like I’m concerned for her safety, since she’s alone with a group of guys who look like they’d be hard pressed to find a moral between the lot of them.
“I mean, nottechnically,” she says, setting down a fat, battered paperback. She grins and pushes her glasses up her nose. “But Dad’s out, and my brothers are busy, so it’s just me if you’re looking for a North.”
“Did you draw that?” I ask, nodding at an open sketchbook where a very gothic drawing of a woman in a disintegrating wedding dress is taking form.
“Yeah,” she says, scrutinizing it. “I can’t quite get it how I want. I’m re-reading for details.”
I shrug. “I can relate.”
“You draw?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I relate to the character.”
“You know her?”
I shrug again, glancing at the guys. Mom always says boys don’t like girls who are smarter or more successful than them, so I play along with the whole “not a lot going on upstairs” thing while I’m under her roof. Not that she’d want me to impress abunch of gangsters anyway. Next year, when I’m at Yale, no one will bat an eye at someone for having read the classics.
It’s not like had anything better to do when we told everyone we had plans because really we didn’t have money to go wherever they were going.
