Games Girls Play
I.
They’ve tried before at Emma’s house (burnt popcorn fogging the kitchen, one cracked hexagonal bathroom tile half-covered with a little pink trash can, her mother’s front teeth splotched red from the nervous habit of chewing Heat Wave off her lips), but it didn’t work for maybe two reasons: 1. They called for Lexi Brightwood, that Brownie who disappeared from the backseat of her mother’s Ford Taurus inside of the Sudzy car wash last year, whose voice can be heard in the swishswishswish of the big brushes by her mother who listens from a lawn chair outside, whose missing posters haunt passersby from Pizza Hut doors and light poles, who is technically still ONLY missing and so cannot hear their call to the ACTUAL dead, and 2. Hanna wasn’t 13 yet, and that’s the real key, but now, Hanna, whose real name is Harriet and hates that, is 13, and they’re all coming over to her house (with the flusher you have to hold down to make sure the toilet bowl empties, her brother’s snake coiled under its sun lamp and its breakfast of one perfect white mouse, her mother’s hands stinking of onions for hours after pulling them off her slice of Veggie Lover’s that she orders with the onions because her daughter likes them), and Rachel, who draws pictures that never look as good as they do in her mind but who’s ok with that because no one can see just how good it is up there, will cut the spirit board shape from the pizza box, then Michele, who learned to read off of bumper stickers from inside her mom’s prize pink Mary Kay Cadillac in traffic on the beltway, will draw the letters with a sharpie she keeps in her purse, all so that Evelyn — a girl so untouched by death (not even that of a beloved goldfish or a grandma with skin like corrugated cardboard) that she looks for it everywhere — can light the wick of the candle she stole from the mall and ask the questions they’ve agreed on as a group, lit up, crowding the board — a landscape of barely concealed gore, the geography of them, elbows and braids and nervous spit, and cruelty in the way a hunt often is, and what is this if not a hunt?
II.
A slumber party of 13-year-old girls is a doorway, as in you forgot what you were going to say when you came through it, but they’ve summoned you here with earnest cardboard and a mall candle, the flame growing tall on its cheap wick, and they’re awaiting your reply.
“WHO ARE YOU?”
Your great-grandmother was born with pointed toes and goat-slit eyes from which the world was only horizon.
Your grandfather could whisper the warts away from the hands of travelers from as many as three counties away, who each paid three months’ sum, which he then split between three wallets.
Your mother worked nights, slip-stitched moth holes, and rolled her gingerbread dough roughly between her palms before flattening it on the pan, her life and love lines stamped there for you to eat up later.
Who are you? Well, you were still figuring that out, but you carried everyone you ever met with you, remembered old boyfriend’s birthdays years later, kept braided BFF bracelets from long-ago summer camps. Rounded your vowels like your mom and her mom — their stories packed into the empty pink sockets in the back of your mouth, soothing as cloves.
“HOW DID YOU DIE?”
You had imagined it happening in big ways — a plane crash on your honeymoon?
A rare bacterium in your tomato plant’s soil?
A man with shifting eyes?
How do you tell them it was a Tuesday, in socks with a cartoon dog dancing on your ankles, on steep basement stairs, clasping the dirty whites to your chest, and a rescue tabby cat called Crime slinking between your legs like velvet on sewing needles?
Your heart whoooooshed through your stomach, down your intricate highways, in one final thrill until it dulled, dulled … dulled to nothing.
Lifetimes of meaning often end in nothing, and that’s the truth.
“WHERE DID YOU GO?”
They are the shore, with dawn and dusk, and sand, the boardwalk and boys, and ice cream melting down their small hands and wrists in between the beads in their BFF bracelets, and all they can hear is laughing and music and each other,
only
behind that are waves crashing, the gentlest reminder that something rests on the other side
but
you are an island out in the sea, really only a cave, and your cave laps the water, relentlessly, and beyond that is orange light, a plastic jack o’ lantern’s neon glow, and all you can hear are those waves, and a sea bird who never lands,
only
behind that are echoes of girls daring each other to ask you if you’re a good ghost or a bad ghost.
“ARE YOU A GOOD GHOST OR A BAD GHOST?”
They have bedtimes to look forward to and back-to-school fashion shows for their dads
and mosquito bites in the crooks of their arms and plansto go to McDonald’s tomorrow and
to a movie after that, the one that looks kind of scary. And you are happy for them!
Really! You swear! If you could, you’d probably bronze their first pentagram necklaces,
and beat the shit out of the boy who asked the curly haired one out as a dare. And you’d tell them
no, it doesn’t really get better so much as it gets … different. And you’d hope that curiosity was enough to pull them through just the next few years.
But.
If all it took–
If all you had to do was
pinch the fat from their bones,
roll it roughly between your palms, leaving
your love line and life line behind in their dough.
To eat them up
if you could just do it again, try,
you would.
You would pick them apart
and swallow them, slow.
