I wanted to be a different person. I wasn’t the girl I’d been in Jersey. I wasn’t Shay’s girl anymore, the kind who followed a foot behind if the wrong people were watching and said Yes, whatever you want when the answer was No fucking way; I hadn’t been Daddy’s girl, not in a long time, and my mother had a new kid to screw up. I was Kurt’s girl, and I needed that to mean something. So maybe I was the one who crossed the space between us and smeared her pastel gloss, but the way I remember it, she was already there, and our lips and then our tongues and then the rest of us came together like it had been the plan from the beginning.
You’re probably picturing something porny, exploding feather-pillow fights and pizza delivery girls who want a taste of your pepperoni. It felt like porn, which made it interesting. It felt filthy, literally, rolling around in the dirt, our hair tangled with twigs, our flesh matted with gravel and moss, both of us panting and sweating and moaning, two wild girls raised by wolves.
So that’s how it started: by accident, but also not. We made a plan to meet the next day, same time, same place, same bottle of vodka—only this time she showed up with Craig Ellison in tow, Mr. Hot and Boring, as she introduced him. He’d heard about the action and wanted in on it.
“Just to watch,” he said, and that first time, it was all he did.
THEM
DEX’S MOTHER KNEW SHE SHOULD be afraid for her daughter. This, she’d been told, was the tragedy of birthing a girl. To live in fear—it was the fate of any parent, maybe, but the special provenance of a mother to a daughter, one woman raising another, knowing too well what could happen. This was what lurked inside the luckiest delivery rooms, the ones whose balloons screamed It’s a girl!: pink cigars and flowered onesies and fear.
So she’d been told.
Now she was supposed to be more afraid than ever. Now they were all more afraid than ever, the mothers of Battle Creek, because whatever illusions they’d had about their children and their home and the inevitability that the future would unfold as uneventfully as the past had been punctured by the bullet that Ellison boy blew through his brainstem. And Dex’s mother had been afraid, that first night. She and Jimmy had stood in their daughter’s doorway, watching her sleep, dipping a toe in the unimaginable. They’d counted her breaths, the easy rise and fall of her chest, and Dex’s mother felt her own lungs sighing in time with her daughter’s, breathing for her the way she had when her daughter was a newborn, when she’d sat by the bassinet, fingertips resting lightly on infant chest, because only by feeling the rhythm of breath and the flutter of heartbeat, one moment after the next, could she reassure herself that the baby was still alive.
They’d resolved everything would be different, after the tragedy. Nothing was different, of course, because it wasn’t their tragedy, and Dex’s mother had little patience for the mothers of Battle Creek who seemed unable to comprehend this basic fact. Boys weren’t supposed to be vulnerable; it overturned the natural order of things, a boy falling prey to pain. That was a girl’s purview. So maybe it was understandable that they groped for other answers, these mothers, still twittering all these months later about what had “really” happened, about demonic influences and Satanic cults, about heavy metal and blood sacrifice, but it infuriated her, all these ginned-up monsters under the bed, as if that would recuse them from worrying about anything that mattered, overdoses and car crashes and AIDS and, especially in the case of those mothers of sons who thought only daughters should be worried for, accidentally raising little proto-rapists who thought wining and dining a girl meant getting her drunk enough that she’d swallow a mouthful of ejaculate without complaint. Dex’s mother hadn’t known the Ellison boy, but she’d known plenty of boys like him. There had always been boys like him. And she knew whatever trouble he’d gotten into, if there had been trouble, he’d probably brought it on himself. All these mothers, so concerned about the terrible things that could happen to their children—so unwilling to think about the things their children might make happen. Maybe this was why Dex’s mother never had managed to muster up much fear for her daughter. Her daughter wasn’t the type to make things happen.
Dex’s mother was well aware that she embarrassed her daughter. But her daughter couldn’t know how much she embarrassed her mother. How she, too, often dreamed of some other, prettier, happier daughter, imagined showing her off to an admiring world, gaze at my lovely creation and marvel at what I have wrought.
You created a child; you nursed her, bathed her, wiped her, loved her, kept her alive until she grew up; then she grew up. Ugly and sullen and wanting nothing more than to be a motherless child.